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Coronavirus - the new strain X

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tiggers said:
Good article here about testing fiasco and the likely outcome over the next few months.... if you want to be comforted by some news I suggest you don't read it. Bear in mind it's a Sky News article and they tend to be less critical of the government than most.... so .... well it's not good.

Why has the UK run out of testing capacity? The three fateful decisions behind our stumbling system
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Excellent article explaining both the mechanics behind the deficit and the reasoning behind the decisions. Heads will roll.
 
tiggers said:
Good article here about testing fiasco and the likely outcome over the next few months.... if you want to be comforted by some news I suggest you don't read it. Bear in mind it's a Sky News article and they tend to be less critical of the government than most.... so .... well it's not good.

Why has the UK run out of testing capacity? The three fateful decisions behind our stumbling system
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Test and trace as a strategy has been abandoned just like in March. For it to be effective you have to catch all of the outbreaks and within about 48 hours:

"Behavioural structures, such as the "rule of six", are the most important thing, they say - the first barrier against COVID-19. Test and trace, they now say, is the second line of defence."

Incidentally, Russia is in Europe (with a smaller GDP than the UK), and they've tested twice as many people as any other European nation.
 
gavreid said:
Test and trace as a strategy has been abandoned just like in March. For it to be effective you have to catch all of the outbreaks and within about 48 hours:

"Behavioural structures, such as the "rule of six", are the most important thing, they say - the first barrier against COVID-19. Test and trace, they now say, is the second line of defence."

Incidentally, Russia is in Europe (with a smaller GDP than the UK), and they've tested twice as many people as any other European nation.
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When I went to school, I was told that Russia was in Asia and was in fact the biggest country in Asia.
 
Here's another side effect - stroke victims suffering with entirely avoidable disabilites. Some of these strokes will be a result of covid infection but most just routine and just to say that rehabilitation services were already on the point of collapse, when I had mine community care was cut from 16 weeks to just 6, most (but not all as was once believed) of the recovery occurs in the first six months.

https://www.theguardian.com/society...aves-thousands-of-uk-stroke-patients-disabled
 
thebigfredc said:
When I went to school, I was told that Russia was in Asia and was in fact the biggest country in Asia.
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It spans the continents to be precise - the Urals is normally taken as the boundary. The point is the numbers are manageable if the facilities are there.
 
thebigfredc said:
Excellent article explaining both the mechanics behind the deficit and the reasoning behind the decisions. Heads will roll.
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Disagree. It traces the failure to two reasonable decisions - to prioritise care homes and to open schools - and one questionable assumption, that the timing of the surge in cases would follow the usual pattern of winter flu. Then it regurgitates the standard government lines about student staff going back to university and jumpy parents.

It does not mention that the premature surge was largely engineered by encouraging people into the office and into restaurants (desperate short termism) and it doesn’t address the problems with Deloitte’s management of Pillar 2, which seem to be at the heart of all this, and grow out of the firm’s refusal of transparency and accountability, which itself grows out of the government decision in March to insist on privatisation and centralisation - decisions which were dogmatic at best and at worst actually corrupt.

In other words it glosses over systemic and individual failures. It’s exculpatory bulls**t.
 
i wasn't using the article to exonerate the government - quite the opposite - it makes clear that the government have been behind the key decisions.
 
thebigfredc said:
i wasn't using the article to exonerate the government - quite the opposite - it makes clear that the government have been behind the key decisions.
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It doesn’t identify the key decisions or the key problems. It instead focuses on decisions that most reasonable people would see as reasonable - decisions that would almost certainly have been the right ones were it not for all the other very bad and ongoing decisions that are not mentioned. It’s a kind of soft exoneration and if I were in government I’d be absolutely delighted with it.

Not having a go at you, by the way, it’s a very reasonable-sounding article and unless you’d already been following the Deloitte saga you’d have no reason to question it.
 
The layout of that sky page, with its font and wide line spacing, reminds me of the Janet and John books from which I learned to read.
 
My arthritis is bad this morning. I need some stronger painkillers but both my treatments have been suspended due to covid. I'm lucky I guess, I could be one of those poor buggers with cancer who's treatment has also been suspended. Some will die before they get the treatment they need. What a terrifying thought.
 
A few weeks ago there was a flurry of posts along the lines of, "Yeah, but imagine how much worse it would have been under Corbyn" or, less contentiously, "No government could have done much better in the circumstances".

In my reply, I pointed out that Corbyn would have taken his role as a public servant more seriously than Johnson, and that he would have listened to international experts more, since he is no believer in English exceptionalism. At the time I mentioned there was a clip of Corbyn accusing the government of complacency a week before lockdown was finally imposed but I couldn't find it. Well, finally it's resurfaced in my Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1239257257466122247

The comments underneath from the usual right-wing morons have not aged well. I wonder if a single one of them has the humility to accept that Corbyn was right to be concerned.

I remember this period vividly, as it was permeated with a sense of disorientation and dread; I recall several conversations with my partner where neither of us could believe how slowly the government was responding. To understand why this is so crucial, checkout Led By Donkeys' timeline of the crisis:

https://timeline-of-failure.com/

One of the entries for March 16 (the day after the Corbyn clip) states that: At least 25,000 lives could have been saved if the government had introduced lockdown just a week earlier, says Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the government's pandemic scientific advisors.

This makes complete sense, given the nature of exponential growth.

Counterfactual history is a tricky business, but there is good evidence that a Labour government, led by Corbyn, would have saved more than 20000 lives.
 
From the mouth of Rees-Mogg

"We all have an obligation to try and stop the dangerous disease spreading, but the issue of testing is one where we have gone from a disease that nobody knew about a few months ago to one where nearly a quarter of a million people a day can be tested.

And the prime minister is expecting that to go up to half a million people a day by the end of October.

And instead of this endless carping, saying it is difficult to get them, we should actually celebrate the phenomenal success of the British nation in getting up to a quarter of a million tests of a disease that nobody knew about until earlier in the year."

FFS!!!
 
How many people will it take to do half a million tests a day? That's a huge undertaking. It wouldn't surprise me if only one out of five or so samples was tested, the rest binned and given a negative result. That would fit in with the herd immunity that I feel were being pushed into.
 
Chops54 said:
How many people will it take to do half a million tests a day? That's a huge undertaking. It wouldn't surprise me if only one out of five or so samples was tested, the rest binned and given a negative result. That would fit in with the herd immunity that I feel were being pushed into.
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Interesting discussion on More or Less this week. Even if only 10% of tests give false results, that's going to be a huge amount of incorrect results per day if we did get up to 0.5m per day.

No test will be 100% perfect and the quick tests envisaged by Johnson are likely to be less accurate than the swab test. The 'moonshot' is a fantasy. Only those with little numerical or scientific expertise (Rees-Mogg I'm looking at you) could think it was not.

Early on in the novel coronavirus outbreak, doctors started reporting cases of people who had coronavirus which had been missed by swab tests – also known as “false negatives”. We don’t know for sure how often these false negatives occur in the UK, but evidence from China suggests up to 30 out of every 100 people with coronavirus might test negative.

Stephen
 
Chops54 said:
How many people will it take to do half a million tests a day?
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The idea that it is a test more like a pregnancy test. No external processing needed.

This does not exist as yet.

That doesn't bother Johnson, making stuff up.

See also 'alternative arrangements' for the Irish border which the Tories now admit is at least 3 years away (they said it would be ready in a year in 2016.)

Stephen
 
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