Generic Virus Thread

[Straggler]

14 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

He's the Prime Minister, how hard can it possibly be for him to get a suit that fits?

Trying to get a suit fitted for a pile of mashed potato on legs can't be easy.

[chrisp65]

24 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

He's the Prime Minister, how hard can it possibly be for him to get a suit that fits?

I’m guessing there could be some difference between what he’s categorically personally promised his measurements are, and what actually turned up.

Also, that’s probably a special tender sent out to a single supplier of toffee apples to invent a new world beating suit.

 

[PaulC]

16 hours ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

But aren’t the number of tests increasing too? Hence the higher numbers. 

Yes one of the reasons but not the only reason. I imagine the tests haven’t increased much in the last few weeks but the new cases are rising alarmingly 

[bickster]

2 hours ago, Davkaus said:

"School's are perfectly safe, to demonstrate that, I'll stand in an empty classroom"

... and play aeroplanes

[bickster]

45 minutes ago, PaulC said:

Yes one of the reasons but not the only reason. I imagine the tests haven’t increased much in the last few weeks but the new cases are rising alarmingly 

Yet they don't know if the R is between 0.9 and 1.1 

Cases are going up by much more than 0.1% which makes the above statement utter bollocks as usual

[OutByEaster?]

2 hours ago, ml1dch said:

He's the Prime Minister, how hard can it possibly be for him to get a suit that fits?

If he had a suit that fits, or a proper haircut, he'd be quite obviously just a self serving, devious, immoral, politician with a premeditated plan to milk the country for his own benefit. 

As it is, he's the funny looking man in charge, he makes you smile, so he can't be doing anything bad - like a baby fox that's just eaten your baby daughter, "Awww, I know he's evil, but look at that cute little face."

 

[blandy]

58 minutes ago, bickster said:

Yet they don't know if the R is between 0.9 and 1.1 

Cases are going up by much more than 0.1% which makes the above statement utter bollocks as usual

R of 1.1 means 100 people with it infect 110 others - 10% increase, not 0.1%.

 

[Chindie]

They don't care about the R number anymore.

It's less important than Commercial Lettings (Holdings) Ltd's share price.

[PaulC]

Yes recent changes in transmission are not reflected in the current R rate. 

[Genie]

Are today’s numbers out yet? I’m wondering if the 3,000 was a blip

[choffer]

Found this encouraging (on one level) but was left pondering if Doctor Kendrick is an outlier or to be trusted: 

Quote

COVID – why terminology really, really matters

403 Replies

4th September 2020

COVID – why terminology really, really matters

[And the consequences of getting it horribly wrong]

When is a case not a case?

Since the start of the COVID pandemic I have watched almost everyone get mission critical things wrong. In some ways this is not surprising. Medical terminology is horribly imprecise, and often poorly understood. In calmer times such things are only of interest to research geeks like me. Were they talking about CVD, or CHD?

However, right now, it really, really, matters. Specifically, with regards to the term COVID ‘cases.’

Every day we are informed of a worrying rise in COVID cases in country after country, region after region, city after city. Portugal, France, Leicester, Bolton. Panic, lockdown, quarantine. In France the number of reported cases is now as high as it was at the peak of the epidemic. Over 5,000, on the first of September.

 

[bickster]

58 minutes ago, blandy said:

R of 1.1 means 100 people with it infect 110 others - 10% increase, not 0.1%.

 

Hmm yes, my Brain fart. Point still valid though, rate is rising at much more than 10% even

[LondonLax]

25 minutes ago, choffer said:

Found this encouraging (on one level) but was left pondering if Doctor Kendrick is an outlier or to be trusted: 

 

Essentially it is true, there are a lot more asymptomatic cases out there that was first realised. As Trump would say, ‘the more you test the more cases you find!’. 

For the vast majority of the population it is not a deadly disease but for the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes, it has been nasty. 

If an accurate mortality rate was known from the start would countries have locked down based on that information? I’m not so sure.  

[chrisp65]

15 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

Essentially it is true, there are a lot more asymptomatic cases out there that was first realised. As Trump would say, ‘the more you test the more cases you find!’. 

For the vast majority of the population it is not a deadly disease but for the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes, it has been nasty. 

If an accurate mortality rate was known from the start would countries have locked down based on that information? I’m not so sure.  

They may have considered trying to lockdown differently, but how would you lockdown some sections of society and not others? You can’t seal off care homes if younger people are cooking and cleaning and caring. You can’t stop people under the age of 57 entering hospital wards, when most of the staff would be younger than that.

In a way, even with that information, nothing changes. Do you put a cost to the economy above the loss of tens of thousands of lives? Are we working for the machine, or is the machine working for us?

Personally, I’d rather have my mum around for another year, and lose Pret. Alternative sandwich options will rise from the ashes. Others have seen that differently since the very start.

[LondonLax]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

They may have considered trying to lockdown differently, but how would you lockdown some sections of society and not others? You can’t seal off care homes if younger people are cooking and cleaning and caring. You can’t stop people under the age of 57 entering hospital wards, when most of the staff would be younger than that.

In a way, even with that information, nothing changes. Do you put a cost to the economy above the loss of tens of thousands of lives? Are we working for the machine, or is the machine working for us?

Personally, I’d rather have my mum around for another year, and lose Pret. Alternative sandwich options will rise from the ashes. Others have seen that differently since the very start.

Of course, on a personal level we all want our loved ones to stay alive as long as possible no matter what the material cost. 

However, decisions for society are not made on the basis of prolonging every life no matter what the cost. 

Having a better understanding of the actual risk of the disease would likely have lead to different decisions being made. 

[mjmooney]

Old people. They would have died anyway. 

[chrisp65]

1 minute ago, LondonLax said:

Of course, on a personal level we all want our loved ones to stay alive as long as possible no matter what the material cost. 

However, decisions for society are not made on the basis of prolonging every life no matter what the cost. 

Having a better understanding of the actual risk of the disease would likely have lead to different decisions being made. 

41, 551 personal levels in 6 months.

[LondonLax]

Just now, chrisp65 said:

41, 551 personal levels in 6 months.

Yes, however as noted in the article above we are now finding out the mortality rate is similar to the flu. The question then becomes should society lockdown every flu season to protect the thousands that are killed by that virus or are we selfish to plow on through each winter regardless?

I am not trying to be some sort of virus denier but there are genuine discussions to be had. I actually think in the years to come people will treat flu season more seriously and take special precautions that we wouldn’t have in previous years. Probably not a ‘lockdown’ but things like social distancing, mask wearing and hand washing  will likely become regular winter habits for a number of years. 

[Davkaus]

20 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

In a way, even with that information, nothing changes. Do you put a cost to the economy above the loss of tens of thousands of lives? Are we working for the machine, or is the machine working for us?

 

Ask this guy  

Quote

Odey said the combined costs - estimated at around £350 billion - was too high for a spend on preventative action, suggesting that a figure of £12.5 billion was more appropriate, even if the death toll rocketed to 500,000 people.

 

[blandy]

10 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

41, 551 personal levels in 6 months.

Not making a judgement either way, but stats are interesting things. Especially when mixed with emotions.

There are something like 700,000+ people born each year in the UK. A broadly similar number die each year maybe 600,000.

Changing subject for a moment, when safety engineers do analysis (say in aerospace) there's something called an ALARP argument - "as low as reasonably practicable" - this essentially means that there needs to be a focus on risk commensurate with consequence severity. If the severity of a hazard occurring is high (plane crash, everyone dies), then a weighting is put on reducing that risk to ALARP - a lot  of time, effort, cost, back-up systems etc. is put into mitigating that risk. But if the severity is much more minor - "passenger suffers broken arm from luggage falling from overhead locker" - then the same level of cost time and effort etc. is not expended on mitigating that hazard. And there are actual cost calculations based on the value of life, of a specified injury and so on which are used to quantify what is ALARP and what is not ALARP.

The reason I mention all that is because 41, 551 dead people is a grim number - "that's everyone in Villa park on a saturday killed by deadly corollafungus".

I guess that Doctor's blog article is making the point that the measures taken are way over the top for the risk - he's implying that due to error the ALARP kind of steps taken - the huge cost of lockdown etc. are way over the top. If his figures and argument are right, then it would seem his conclusion is right, too.

A few months back a few people were wondering if the excess death rate, which was then high, wouldn't later in the year drop to below normal because the poor souls in care homes were being (horrible word) "reaped" early. And it has indeed spent the last whatever 6 weeks below average.

So it looks like the errors made in dealing with the covi were much more around the care home scenario, which was (and we said it at the time) a monstrous mishandling and neglect of people and dereliction of duty of care and maybe some of the restrictions put in place are/were over the top. Or maybe the winter will show that, no, they were necessary all along, and just put in place too late in the UK (that's pretty much a fact).

Interesting times.