Corona Virus

[Strokes]

11 minutes ago, Lionator said:

I don't have an opinion whether this is right or wrong, but this is a great interview. 

 

As somebody posted on here yesterday, the fact that Sweden are taking this approach is teaching us so much more about this disease that it is likely to consequentially save lives regardless.  

That looks really interesting, I’ll watch that later. Thanks

[Lionator]

7 minutes ago, l444ry said:

 

When this first started, John Ashton was quite outspoken and was quickly outed as a 'lefty' plant who hates the government.

 

Yet he's been proven correct in all of his predictions. Which means to say that he's not been correct due to him being a 'lefty', he's been proven correct because he knows what he's talking about through years of experience within this field. And yet with all of this experience he was dismissed, purely because he was a 'lefty'. His political allegiance is irrelevant. And this is why it's exceptionally dangerous to prioritise politics over science. We need to get out of our political echo chambers and be far more open minded after this. Nature will always out trump humanity. 

[Sampson]

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales

Weekly death figures are out on the ONS for week ending 10th April.

There were 18,516 deaths that week (highest on record since they started doing weekly tallys 20 years ago).

The average for this week over the past 5 years is 9,826 as reference. So it's basically doubled from what you'd usually expect for the 2nd week of April. 

6,213 were related to COVID-19 - around 1,000 of which happened outside the hospital, so likely haven't been included in the official death count yet.

The remaining 3,500 or so excess deaths are thought to be indirect deaths as a result of the lockdown/people not being treated for other conditions..

Heartbreaking.

Edited 21 April 2020 by Sampson

[Kopfkino]

10 hours ago, Strokes said:

Probably best to just avoid twitter and Facebook type places and it’s much more difficult to be manipulated. It’s funny how there are never any left wing/remain bots reported 🤔

I still have absolutely no idea how hashtags work and to what their point is.

But where else can I go to get a hard on over conspiracist bollocks? 

[Kopfkino]

36 minutes ago, Lionator said:

I don't have an opinion whether this is right or wrong, but this is a great interview. 

 

As somebody posted on here yesterday, the fact that Sweden are taking this approach is teaching us so much more about this disease that it is likely to consequentially save lives regardless.  

I watched it at the time. He seemed too bullish to me in criticising other countries, it's really important to be clear that different solutions will work for different countries. I'm not personally fully convinced of the value of this level of lockdown (qualitatively thinking through the tradeoffs) we endure but it became politically impossible to do anything else. 

 

But also he was bang on in highlighting that its weird that the Imperial model has become biblical. 

Edited 21 April 2020 by Kopfkino

[reynard]

12 hours ago, Kopfkino said:

 

It sort of helps to remember that Murdoch and The Times' horse for ages was Michael Give whereas the Barclay brothers was Boris. The Telegraph suddenly produces a deluge of Boris will be our saviour stuff and the ST goes with what it did. Not that I know if that really affects it but my point is it's overly simplistic to just label it Tory supporting. 

 

It was also dogshit journalism, proper modern gotcha bollocks that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny even without privileged information. As if Boris not being at a meeting on the 24th January mattered. 

It may be slightly over simplistic but The Times is definitely more in the Tory camp than not. It is obviously not as far right as The Daily Mail or Express but I don't think it has an agenda for a hatchet job on Boris. If it were the Guardian that would be a potentially different story.

Does it matter that he missed a meeting? Probably not but it is the impression it leaves at a time of national crisis that matters.

[Costock_Fox]

52 minutes ago, Countryfox said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s a clearer view than I got mate, nice pic.

[Dahnsouff]

2 minutes ago, reynard said:

It may be slightly over simplistic but The Times is definitely more in the Tory camp than not. It is obviously not as far right as The Daily Mail or Express but I don't think it has an agenda for a hatchet job on Boris. If it were the Guardian that would be a potentially different story.

Does it matter that he missed a meeting? Probably not but it is the impression it leaves at a time of national crisis that matters.

I understand the optics of Boris missing the meeting, but we don`t have a president. Surely we should be far more concerned if Matt Hancock missed it?

[reynard]

31 minutes ago, Sampson said:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales

Weekly death figures are out on the ONS for week ending 10th April.

There were 18,516 deaths that week (highest on record since they started doing weekly tallys 20 years ago).

The average for this week over the past 5 years is 9,826 as reference. So it's basically doubled from what you'd usually expect for the 2nd week of April. 

6,213 were related to COVID-19 - around 1,000 of which happened outside the hospital, so likely haven't been included in the official death count yet.

The remaining 3,500 or so excess deaths are thought to be indirect deaths as a result of the lockdown/people not being treated for other conditions..

Heartbreaking.

This is by far the most important statistic. Clearly showing the overall impact of the virus on the death rate and will surely be one of the most important factors in deciding on lifting the lockdown. Around 450 people a day die from one form of cancer or another. If that number is greatly increased through the lack of treatment the numbers will make the corona virus deaths look small in comparison.

[reynard]

7 minutes ago, Dahnsouff said:

I understand the optics of Boris missing the meeting, but we don`t have a president. Surely we should be far more concerned if Matt Hancock missed it?

I would normally agree with you. But this government is very much a government led by a personality. Boris is the figure head and there appears to be a degree of rudderless decision making in his abscence, though that may be papertalk.

 

 

On a much smaller scale it is a bit like saying it wouldn't have mattered if Churchill had basically dissappeared from view for a few weeks in WW2. Boris is the leader of the country so what he does/doesn't do/is perceived to do or not do, does matter to people at this time.

Edited 21 April 2020 by reynard

[Strokes]

39 minutes ago, Kopfkino said:

I watched it at the time. He seemed too bullish to me in criticising other countries, it's really important to be clear that different solutions will work for different countries. I'm not personally fully convinced of the value of this level of lockdown (qualitatively thinking through the tradeoffs) we endure but it became politically impossible to do anything else. 

 

But also he was bang on in highlighting that its weird that the Imperial model has become biblical. 

What do you mean exactly by imperial mode?

I totally agree that different countries need different solutions, because there are so many variables at play, as to how the virus spreads and how healthcare systems cope.

Comparing countries vis a vis on single things like death rates has never been particularly useful.

[Dahnsouff]

Just now, reynard said:

I would normally agree with you. But this government is very much a government led by a personality. Boris is the figure head and there appears to be a degree of rudderless decision making in his abscence, though that may be papertalk.

Got to be honest I'm not impressed with Hancock.

 

On a much smaller scale it is a bit like saying it wouldn't have mattered if Churchill had basically dissappeared from view for a few weeks in WW2. Boris is the leader of the country so what he does/doesn't do/is perceived to do or not do, does matter to people at this time.

Sadly, this is the case for politics at large. 

I am typically Tory voting (I have no shame, MAY is my MP) but I do not like the cult of personality and would prefer my politics to be grey and colourless, less shock and awe.

On the topic of Hancock, he is the designated figured for Health and is of the most import for such meetings, it is only our and the media's portrayal of MPs as celebrities that gets us into this misconception.

[martyn]

12 hours ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

Worth mentioning that the Department of Health and Social Care appear to used a marketing firm which created over 100 fake NHS staff twitter accounts to ‘promoted’ herd immunity. 
 

It’s no little surprise that the re-hiring of the election winning campaign team has occurred for the purpose of communications in relation to the crisis. 
 

 

It's a convincing enough read, although would rather it have been broken by somebody far less radical than Mr O'Connell.

 

Only way this becomes concerning for the govt in any way however, is if Mr O'Connell can actually provide the proof that the sock puppet accounts link back to an employee at the DHSC as he claims they do. That is the smoking gun.

 

That NHS Susan account is hilariously badly enough put together (ridiculous display of wokeness, a photo with a "Mia" name tag for goodness sake), that without that proof, it's easy enough to brush off as done by pranksters.

 

 

Edited 21 April 2020 by martyn

[BKLFox]

1 hour ago, Voll Blau said:

What an absolute crock.

 

It's not the job of journalists to keep morale up, it's their duty to report facts and to ask the questions that need answering. And it's besides the point in any case because they're reporting all the positive stuff going on around the country in terms of fundraising, volunteering, remarkable recoveries and the human spirit in all this anyway. If you're not seeing that aspect of journalism at the minute, then you're definitely not looking very far.

Is it? The article is about pulling together.
Mate i'm not looking for someone to blow smoke up my arse & only write about sugar & spice & all things nice, I've been in the trenches so to speak & trust me negativity flows through the ranks like any good virus does which saps Strength, Energy, Wills & Morale & i'd imagine if you are unlucky enough to get this & be admitted to hospital they are 4 things you are going to need.

Yes there are good news stories doing the rounds of course there are & don't we all get a boost from these, but i wager most headlines are regurgitating the same story over & over & over, you know them, i know them, everybody knows them - PPE, Ventilators, testing blah blah, do we honestly think that no one is trying their hardest to do something about the main issues every minute of every single day or do you think the papers are keeping the powers that be straight by bringing it up 5 times a day?

Plus who are these 'credible sources' & 'experts' that they get their juicey bit of gossip from anyway, again i'd wager that 99% of them are no better than 'credible sources' that report on shitty transfers & just like the football 'experts' they have an opinion because they played the game it does not make them an expert in all things football.
If i didn't have integrity i'd provide a story for a fist full of dollers.

 

On reporting facts: How come no paper has reported on the fact that if we did wake up 1 dark & gloomy morning in February & found ourselves in lockdown what would have happend to peoples jobs from that day on, no bailout plan had been set no idea if your going to be paid etc again i've said before its not a case of picking a figure out the air, they needed time to go through the sums to ensure the UK economy would cope.

&
No 1 has mentioned the floods that were battering most of the UK at the time, where on earth would all of those poor families have gone, you bet ya sweet 1s the papers would have had a field day with that - Boris locks down the country only for *m people to be abandoned without shelter, water, food, electricty, basic human rights! You know it i know it.

&

Look at the increased number in domestic violence, abuse & suicides, this is now when the suns out & people can get out for exercise, not the darker rainy months when we would have been stuck in 24/7

There would have been riots due to the uncertainty.

 

I'm not saying there shouldn't be questions asked but as the link mentions during the daily press conferences the same questions come up time & again or there's an effort to trick the presenters with a question so deep in numbers, timeframes, rumour or hearsay, a question the journalist has conjured up over a 24hr period since the last conference which is expected to be answered in full by a presenter that may not cover that questions field in a 2 minute window only for the media to rub their hands & say gotcha & report that the Government don't know what their doing - achives nothing in the greater scheme.
 

 

[davieG]

1 hour ago, Voll Blau said:

What an absolute crock.

 

It's not the job of journalists to keep morale up, it's their duty to report facts and to ask the questions that need answering. And it's besides the point in any case because they're reporting all the positive stuff going on around the country in terms of fundraising, volunteering, remarkable recoveries and the human spirit in all this anyway. If you're not seeing that aspect of journalism at the minute, then you're definitely not looking very far.

Problem is most of it is not facts. It's mostly opinion interspersed with an occasional fact to make it look authentic.

[Leeds Fox]

1 hour ago, Lionator said:

I don't have an opinion whether this is right or wrong, but this is a great interview. 

 

As somebody posted on here yesterday, the fact that Sweden are taking this approach is teaching us so much more about this disease that it is likely to consequentially save lives regardless.  

It was a great interview, from both of them to be fair. 
 

Key points I took was that lowering the restrictions is likely to bring another spike, it was something they always should have known. So maybe they did have a knee jerk reaction and went too harsh rather than ride a steady curve. 
 

On the other hand, were they buying time to allow the NHS to cope? 
 

Clearly each argument has it’s pros and cons. 
 

One big mistake that Boris made was stating that ‘many loved ones will be lost’. This surely forced his hand to go ahead with the strict lockdown. 

[st albans fox]

45 minutes ago, reynard said:

It may be slightly over simplistic but The Times is definitely more in the Tory camp than not. It is obviously not as far right as The Daily Mail or Express but I don't think it has an agenda for a hatchet job on Boris. If it were the Guardian that would be a potentially different story.

Does it matter that he missed a meeting? Probably not but it is the impression it leaves at a time of national crisis that matters.

Was it a crisis late jan/early feb ?

 

was it even a crisis late feb? 
 

I don’t recall too many saying it was a crisis back then - people expected it to be dealt with via contact tracing etc. Of course if you are arguing that by missing the meetings he wasn’t able to contribute to it not becoming a crisis then that a different debate but given what we know about the scientific guidance they were receiving then I wouldn’t expect anything to have changed.  And those responsible in the cabinet and civil service should really have been able to deal with it without his input. 
 

this doesn’t seem to be an administration that is very open to listening to too many viewpoints ......of course doing that can leave you impotent as you become unable to decide anything ! 

[Kopfkino]

47 minutes ago, reynard said:

It may be slightly over simplistic but The Times is definitely more in the Tory camp than not. It is obviously not as far right as The Daily Mail or Express but I don't think it has an agenda for a hatchet job on Boris. If it were the Guardian that would be a potentially different story.

Does it matter that he missed a meeting? Probably not but it is the impression it leaves at a time of national crisis that matters.

But the point was there's different camps within that camp and Murdoch and The Sunday Times in particular was always Gove > Johnson. It wasn't an attack on the party, it was directly at Boris and also Hancock, who if reports are to be believed doesn't have the best relationship with Gove. 

[st albans fox]

6 minutes ago, Leeds Fox said:

It was a great interview, from both of them to be fair. 
 

Key points I took was that lowering the restrictions is likely to bring another spike, it was something they always should have known. So maybe they did have a knee jerk reaction and went too harsh rather than ride a steady curve. 
 

On the other hand, were they buying time to allow the NHS to cope? 
 

Clearly each argument has it’s pros and cons. 
 

One big mistake that Boris made was stating that ‘many loved ones will be lost’. This surely forced his hand to go ahead with the strict lockdown. 

Locking down when we did almost saw the revamped NHS overwhelmed ..... any further delay to lockdown would have been too late.  Look at what merkel said the other day re the difference between R1 and R1.3 

 

 

[Lionator]

1 hour ago, Kopfkino said:

I watched it at the time. He seemed too bullish to me in criticising other countries, it's really important to be clear that different solutions will work for different countries. I'm not personally fully convinced of the value of this level of lockdown (qualitatively thinking through the tradeoffs) we endure but it became politically impossible to do anything else. 

 

But also he was bang on in highlighting that its weird that the Imperial model has become biblical. 

I’d like to know if he has any evidence to support his theory that half of the population will have contracted covid-19. He seems very bullish like you said. But he’s not a conspiracy theorist, he’s a extremely successful epidemiologist. There’s a Swedish study which came out in the past few days explaining that 11-12% of the Stockholm population had antibodies a few weeks ago and that this now will be over a third (see attached tweet). There is also increasing evidence that the fatality rate for this is a lot lower than anticipated a few weeks back, like in the German study that came out a couple of weeks ago and that we’re massively undercounting cases. This doesn’t mean that the lockdown was a bad decision scientifically, hospitals were overwhelmed and would’ve been very quickly if we hadn’t taken those actions, leading to more deaths. I do however think it bodes well for the duration of how

long this will last though. We could get to a situation where we don’t even need a vaccine in the next 12-18 months if some sort of medium term immunity can be established as everyone (enough to gain immunity) will have been exposed to the virus. 

 

[l444ry]

20 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

Was it a crisis late jan/early feb ?

 

was it even a crisis late feb? 
 

I don’t recall too many saying it was a crisis back then - people expected it to be dealt with via contact tracing etc. Of course if you are arguing that by missing the meetings he wasn’t able to contribute to it not becoming a crisis then that a different debate but given what we know about the scientific guidance they were receiving then I wouldn’t expect anything to have changed.  And those responsible in the cabinet and civil service should really have been able to deal with it without his input. 
 

this doesn’t seem to be an administration that is very open to listening to too many viewpoints ......of course doing that can leave you impotent as you become unable to decide anything ! 

On 30th January The WHO declared the virus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and advised all countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread of 2019-nCoV infection, and to share full data with WHO. (WHO Report No 10)

[Leicester_Loyal]

Government tells us information, they get told they should have kept their mouth shut. They don't tell us information, they get told they should be honest and transparent.

 

Catch 22 it seems...

[foxfanazer]

Starting to struggle with it all a bit now. Not living in Leicester and haven't been back since Christmas so really starting to miss my family. Its more the uncertainty of not knowing when it will be that is affecting me 

 

Obviously in the grand scheme of things it isn't the most important worry but it is starting to get me down a fair bit

[Sampson]

12 minutes ago, Lionator said:

I’d like to know if he has any evidence to support his theory that half of the population will have contracted covid-19. He seems very bullish like you said. But he’s not a conspiracy theorist, he’s a extremely successful epidemiologist. There’s a Swedish study which came out in the past few days explaining that 11-12% of the Stockholm population had antibodies a few weeks ago and that this now will be over a third (see attached tweet). There is also increasing evidence that the fatality rate for this is a lot lower than anticipated a few weeks back, like in the German study that came out a couple of weeks ago and that we’re massively undercounting cases. This doesn’t mean that the lockdown was a bad decision scientifically, hospitals were overwhelmed and would’ve been very quickly if we hadn’t taken those actions, leading to more deaths. I do however think it bodes well for the duration of how

long this will last though. We could get to a situation where we don’t even need a vaccine in the next 12-18 months if some sort of medium term immunity can be established as everyone (enough to gain immunity) will have been exposed to the virus. 

 

I don't know his evidence and I'm obvioualy no epidemiologist but can't antibody tests only work 28 days after you caught the virus?

 

He may have just calculated the 50% based on that study showing 11% already having it 4 weeks ago. 

 

I agree that information around the death rate  the past couple of weeks is promising. The Imperial London report used a death rate of 0.9% I believe, but it now seems more likely it's somewhere between 0.1-0.5%.

Edited 21 April 2020 by Sampson

[Sampson]

8 minutes ago, foxfanazer said:

Starting to struggle with it all a bit now. Not living in Leicester and haven't been back since Christmas so really starting to miss my family. Its more the uncertainty of not knowing when it will be that is affecting me 

 

Obviously in the grand scheme of things it isn't the most important worry but it is starting to get me down a fair bit

Don't feel bad for feeling like the reasons getting you down are trivial.

 

We all miss our family and friends we aren't able to see right now and I'm sure we've all had days through this when we're feeling lonely and the fact no one knows when this will end is a big reason for this.

 

Don't ever feel like it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things to miss your family. I think if anything all this will just make us all appreciate the time we spend with our family and friends a lot more and realise that these are in fact the most important things in our lives and we sometimes forget our jobs or our hobbies aren't as important as we make them out to be day to day.