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villakram

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7 minutes ago, andym said:

Interesting image to go with the announcement, almost like a campaign poster... 

IMO the way he has gone about things, even the way he presents himself and speaks, have definitely been with one eye on his future. Hancock was doing the same, but then the whole testing target thing backfired on him. Sunak has managed to avoid anything like that so far.

I wonder how long before Boris's current blind faith supporters realise his incompetence will also drag them down, and look to someone else.

Xmas color scheme...

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As a power point slide, it’s kind of different league to that stripey green waffle one that Johnson launched.

The stripey one had to be explained and then re explained and then defended.

I think that one is fairly clear, plus the use of the same shade of pink as the film Drive is a nice homage by the graphics dude.

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Okay, now I'm confused - he's either said 80% until the end of July and then 60% until October or he's said 80% until October - I'm not sure which it is. There seem to be conflicting reports depending on where I read it.

Can anyone confirm?

 

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9 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

Okay, now I'm confused - he's either said 80% until the end of July and then 60% until October or he's said 80% until October - I'm not sure which it is. There seem to be conflicting reports depending on where I read it.

Can anyone confirm?

It appears to be 80% from the government until the end of July, and then 60% from the government and 20% from the employer until the end of October. I don't know what options there are if the employer can't pay the difference.

Edited by HanoiVillan
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Looks like it's 60% after July.

Our friends at the BBC have this story as their number one news story at the moment, it's a long-is piece laying out the Chancellors plans.

See if you can guess how many times the number 60 appears in it?

 

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There will also be variation between types of employer.

So I’m guessing places they are still saying can’t open or only partially open such as restaurants and football teams will still be full furlough. An architectural practise that can work from home with the building industry back up and running, less so.

 

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1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

It appears to be 80% from the government until the end of July, and then 60% from the government and 20% from the employer until the end of October. I don't know what options there are if the employer can't pay the difference.

When the original scheme was announced, it was 80% from the government and 20% from the employer - but very few employers have taken that option up.

 

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2 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

Our friends at the BBC have this story as their number one news story at the moment

I’ve got a fiver on Laura asking this evening how long Furlough will be extended.

 

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8 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

It appears to be 80% from the government until the end of July, and then 60% from the government and 20% from the employer until the end of October. I don't know what options there are if the employer can't pay the difference.

Surely that should be 60% from government and 40% from the employer from July. I think this some people just getting 80% of their wages, soon potentially to be 60% of their wages with the employer not making up the difference is becoming acceptable when it shouldn't be. 

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50 minutes ago, markavfc40 said:

Sunak is a very polished performer and at least comes across as being competent which would make him a huge upgrade on the current PM

Ive got a friend who works in the treasury and he says they all rate him very highly, and reckon he'll be a future leader

Guess it all depends on how middle England sees him

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3 minutes ago, Mozzavfc said:

Ive got a friend who works in the treasury and he says they all rate him very highly, and reckon he'll be a future leader

Guess it all depends on how middle England sees him

At the moment they appear to love him, based on his favourability ratings. 

However I'm guessing the test of that popularity comes when the message he's passing on stops being "I'm going to give you all free money so you don't lose you jobs" and changes to "I'm going to take away all your free money so you will lose your jobs".

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14 minutes ago, markavfc40 said:

Surely that should be 60% from government and 40% from the employer from July. I think this some people just getting 80% of their wages, soon potentially to be 60% of their wages with the employer not making up the difference is becoming acceptable when it shouldn't be. 

Yes, you're absolutely right, and I wasn't meaning to justify it.

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A blog post that I have found useful, explaining how the term 'herd immunity' is being misused, and why the government's initial plan would have been a disaster:

EDIT: It's quite long (which I think is necessary to follow fully the comments), so I've put it in spoiler tags
 

Spoiler

 

'What is herd immunity?

Herd immunity is a fundamental concept in infectious disease epidemiology that has always been applied to vaccination programs. Herd immunity occurs when so many people in the population are immune to a disease that were a case of the disease to arise in the population, it would not be able to infect anyone else and so would die out before it could become an epidemic. Herd immunity is linked to the concept of the Basic Reproduction Number, R0. R0 tells us the number of cases that will be generated from a single case of a disease, so for example if R0 is 2 then every person who has the disease will infect 2 other people. Common basic reproduction numbers range from 1.3 (influenza) to about 18 (measles). The basic reproduction number of COVID-19 is probably 4.5, and definitely above 3.

There is a simple relationship between the basic reproduction number and the proportion of the population that need to be vaccinated to ensure herd immunity. This proportion, p, is related to the basic reproduction number by the formula p=1/(1-1/R0). For smallpox (R0~5) we need 80% of the population to be vaccinated to stop it spreading; for measles (R0~18) it is safest to aim for 95%. The reason this works is because the fundamental driver of disease transmission is contact with vulnerable people. If the disease has a basic reproduction number of 5, each case would normally infect 5 people; but if 4 of every 5 people the infected person meets are immune, then the person will only likely infect 1 person before they recover or die (or get isolated). For more infectious diseases we need to massively increase the number of people who are immune in order to ensure that the infection doesn’t spread.

If we vaccinate the correct proportion of the population, then when the first case of a disease enters the population, it’s chances of meeting an infectable person will be so low that it won’t spread – effectively by vaccinating 1-1/R0 people we have reduced its effective reproduction number to 1, at which point each case will only produce 1 new case, and the virus will not spread fast enough to matter. This is the essence of herd immunity, but note that the theory applies when we vaccinate a population before a case enters the population.

What is Johnson Immunity?

There is a related concept to the basic reproduction number, the effective reproduction number Rt, which tells us how infectious the virus currently is. This is tells us how many people each case is infecting at the current state of the epidemic. Obviously as the proportion of the population who have been infected and recovered (and become immune) increases, Rt must drop, since the chance that they will have contact with an infectious person goes down. Eventually the proportion of the population infected will become so large that Rt will hit 1, meaning that now each case is only infecting another case. The idea of Johnson Immunity was that we would allow the virus to spread among only the low-risk population until it naturally reached the proportion of the population required to achieve an Rt value of 1. Then, the virus would be stifled and the epidemic would begin to die. If the required proportion to achieve Rt=1 is low enough, and we can shield vulnerable people, then we can allow the virus to spread until it burns out. This idea is related to the classic charts we see of influenza season, where the number of new infections grows to a certain point and then begins to go down again, even in the absence of a vaccine.

This idea is reckless, stupid and dangerous for several reasons. The first and most serious reason it is dangerous is that the number of daily new infections will rise as we head towards Rt=1, and by the time we reach the point where, say, 60% of the population is infected, the number of daily cases will be huge. At this point Rt=1, so each case is only infecting 1 other case. But if we have 100,000 daily new cases at this point, then the following generation of infections will spawn 100,000 new infections, and so on. If, for example, the virus has an R0 of 2, and takes 5 days to infect the next generation, then the number of new cases doubles every 5 days. After a month we have 64 cases, after two months we have 4100 cases, and so on. By the time we get to 30 million cases, we’ll likely be seeing 100,000 cases in one generation. So yes, now the virus is going to start to slow its spread, but the following generation will still generate 100,000 cases, and the generation after that 90,000, and so on. This is an incredible burden on the health system, and even if death rates are very low – say 0.01% – we are still going to be seeing a huge mortality rate.

The second reason this idea is reckless and stupid is that it is basically allowing the disease to follow its natural course, and for any disease with an R0 above about 1.5, this means it will infect the entire population even after it has achieved its Rt of 1. This happens because the number of daily cases at this point is so large that even if each case only infects 1 additional case, the disease will still spread at a horrific rate. There is an equation, called the final size equation, which links R0 to the proportion of the population that will be infected by the disease by the time it has run its course, and basically for any R0 above 2 the final size equation tells us it will infect the entire population (100% of people) if left unchecked. In practice this means that yes, after a certain period of time the number of new cases will reach a peak and begin to go down, but by the time it finishes its downward path it will have infected the entire population.'

Why does he think they made such a huge mistake?

'Other misconceptions in the policy

The government stated that its Johnson Immunity threshold was about 60% of the population. From this we can infer that they thought the R0 of this disease was about 2.5. However, the actual R0 of this disease is probably bigger than 4. This means that the government was working from some very optimistic – and ultimately wrong – assumptions about the virus, which would have been catastrophic had they seen this policy through.

Another terrible mistake the government made was to assume that rates of hospitalization for this disease would be the same as for standard pneumonia, a mistake that was apparently made by the Imperial College modeling team whose work they seem to primarily rely upon. This mistake was tragic, because there was lots of evidence coming out of China that this disease did not behave like classic pneumonia, but for some reason the British ignored Chinese data. They only changed their modeling when they were presented with Italian data on the proportion of serious cases. This is an incredibly bad mistake, and I can only see one reason for it – they either didn’t know, or didn’t care about, the situation in China. Given how bad this disease is, this is an incredible dereliction of duty. I think this may have happened because the Imperial College team have no Chinese members or connections to China, which is really a very good example of how important diversity is when you’re doing policy.'

More (and the comments are worth reading as well) here: https://faustusnotes.com/2020/05/08/why-the-uk-governments-herd-immunity-strategy-for-coronavirus-was-so-incredibly-stupid/

 

 

Edited by HanoiVillan
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4 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

Matt Hancock doing the rounds today and when pressed on PPE says deaths amongst those with in the NHS no higher as a percentage than deaths of those in general population. Saying this is unheard of during a pandemic. Failed to mention though that the vast majority of those who have died in general population will be 70+ with underlying health conditions so not comparable to your average NHS worker who has died.

Spouting misleading nonsense to whitewash over dire failings. He is vermin. 

I bet the bar steward had that ugly pink tie on that he wears at every appearance on TV. He is a smug bellend and hopefully will be the first to go once the inquest starts.

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55 minutes ago, Mozzavfc said:

 

Guess it all depends on how middle England sees him

He's very brown, isn't he?

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see this country as being ready to have a PM that's not white.

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There's a horrible story on the Beeb about a lady who worked at Victoria station that died after getting spat on by someone who claimed to have covid.  It could just be a coincidence of course but her colleague fell ill with it too and was also spat on by the same prick.  What the **** is wrong with people?

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24 minutes ago, Villarocker said:

smug bellend

So I saw this and, I don't know why, I immediately thought, I wonder what Jeremy Hunt is up to these days and, you'll never guess.

The media seem to have picked up on his comments in the Commons yesterday blaming scientific advisors for government failings like no-one on here ever thought would happen. 

Quote

The former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has said lives could have been saved if the UK had ramped up coronavirus testing sooner, as he attacked “one of the biggest failures of scientific advice to ministers in our lifetimes”.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Hunt said it was clear there had been a “major blindspot” in the approach taken in Europe and America

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-uk-government-guidance-tests-sage-jeremy-hunt-a9509111.html

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