Coronavirus - the new strain XVIII
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Seanm
pfm Member
Country’s No 1 Remainiac here, happily channeling far right border rhetoric:
https://twitter.com/iandunt/status/1394546359060123651?s=21
Never trust a liberal.
He’s right on the public-shaming though.
https://twitter.com/iandunt/status/1394546359060123651?s=21
Never trust a liberal.
He’s right on the public-shaming though.
farfromthesun
pfm Member
If you click on his profile you can see who he is.
You obviously haven't read the thread.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
Let's go back to the BAME angle
Bolton population is 20% BAME, 8% Asian Indian but, conversely, Sefton is overwhelmingly white British. I'm not hearing Seftonians (if that's a word) being accused of vaccine hesitancy, visiting India when they shouldn't have etc etc. Covid is driven by poverty and the number of daily contacts with others and it's amplified in the home, at least during times of other restrictions.
I have asked before about this without response. Why do you consider that someone that has largely mastered the relevant scientific facts (i.e. a scientific expert) on a scientific topic would need to have faith? Is it perhaps that you don't consider there to be a fundamental difference between the basis of scientific knowledge and the basis of faith? Or perhaps that the scientific knowledge on the relevant fundamental factors is insufficient to the extent of being inapplicable? Or something else? I am not intending to have a go at you just interested in the reason for your persistence in dismissing conflicting factual information introduced by others rather than trying to adopt them to evolve your own understanding in a way that would seem more rational.
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
I’ll rephrase my answer because this is an important point raised. Is the question here that it’s the social behaviour of particular social or ethnic groups in particular geographical locations driving the increased prevalence of the so-called Indian strain or is the strain inherently biologically more transmissible? Increasing evidence suggests the strain is of itself more transmissible. Which means that this will not only become the dominant strain nationally but it will get to its future victims more readily.
The key indicator that will alter government policy will be hospital admissions and if they go up then Johnson will have to face down the Steve Bakers and Lord Mullets- a task more complicated by the fact that he’s already lashed himself to the mast of The Irreversible.
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Seanm
pfm Member
But Richard Murphy is *of* the faith, I feel it only fair to warn you
.Murphy is correct here on the politics of all this IMO but in fairness to Deej that is an extremely wide-ranging thread and goes well beyond Murphy’s own area of expertise, which is tax economics. His take on the likelihood of another big wave, which is what Deej is referring to here I suspect, has no more authority from expertise than anyone else’s.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
He'll have a pretty good grip on the maths and modelling (which is fairly straightforward as these things go but only as good as the inputs), with a background like his.
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
It will be in the interests of the CRG/ Wetherspoons phalanx and their mouthpieces to point the finger at minorities while claiming its fine for ‘the rest of us’ to embrace the pub. The Daily Mail is stuffed with ‘Freedom Day’-
- Britons flood back to pubs and bars on Freedom Monday as restrictions lifted in England for indoor hospitality
- One pair clinked glasses of bubbly in The Ivy in London, as they marked 'Freedom Day' in England in style
- One man in Birmingham was pictured with a drink in each hand as he prepared to eat a full-English breakfast
- Others skipped food altogether and opted for 'liquid breakfast', as Britons rejoiced reopening of indoor areas
gavreid
Pretty Words...
Absolutely. I think Sefton is a curious one though - why Formby of all places? There's loads of suburban commuter towns like this around the place...
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
A recurrent theme in the pandemic is that this disease can sprout anywhere - it’s a biologically driven phenomenon and countries that did well initially can get hammered in the next round (Sweden?) yet there’s so much investment in pointing the finger elsewhere, particularly when the national finger pointer is hosting some of the worst recorded deaths and economic damage.
Much of the reporting by the BBC and others in India, I actually find offensive. The prying cameras and hand wringing at mass funeral pyres ( a fact of life in India) or at the Ganges was a repeat of the obsession with coffins in Italy last year. It’s always ‘over there’. They’re burning corpses while we’re all goin’ down the pub.
Seanm
pfm Member
Not denigrating Murphy here at all, but he doesn't even claim to have looked at the maths: he explicitly says that he's trusting the scientists over the government on the basis of past form. Which is sensible up to a point (there have been scientific failings; there's little indication that the scientists and the government are actually at odds here) but it has nothing to do with expert knowledge.
I think a lot of the discussion around Covid tends towards a faith in the transferability of expertise. I don't think you need to be an expert on *anything* to discuss Covid or to have an opinion on what the government should be doing. But it's not at all uncommon to find GPs and psychologists pronouncing on epidemiology or genomics as if their background gave them authority. I'm almost with Gove on this one: I haven't had enough of experts, but I've certainly had enough of experts claiming personal authority on things outside their field. This isn't aimed at Murphy, who is really talking about something else here.
I briefly skimmed the recent SAGE meeting and there seemed to be a fair amount of factual information rather than faith in it about the variants of concern. Not complete obviously but enough to seemingly explain the substantial difference between the outbreak here and the one in Bolton. If the outbreak in Bolton continues to grow and other areas popup and continue to grow then that is the start of a new wave of infections based around more infectious variants. If it peaks and declines without spreading widely (which happened here with a less infectious variant) then we might be OK until the autumn. At the moment the former is looking more likely from what I can glean from browsing rather than studying the information in SAGE and the government statistics. We will find out over the next few weeks.
About the only thing one can say with certainty is that the current data didn't support an easing of the rules yesterday with respect to containing the epidemic. Other concerns were responsible for the change. It also didn't indicate with certainty that a new wave of infections was beginning due to a combination of easing lockdown and more infectious variants overcoming the effect of continuing vaccination. We will have to wait and see but will be doing so from a riskier position.
Seanm
pfm Member
That's all fair enough, but doesn't address Deej's point or my own, which is that Richard Murphy's position wasn't based on expertise, and nor did he claim it was. It wasn't really an appropriate platform to rehearse your Faith/Evidence cosmology.
Seems important to me at the moment to keep expertise in its place and to register its necessary limits.
If one is able to distinguish between facts and opinions and able to grasp the basic principles involved of how the virus spreads, evolves and dies then one becomes able to predict and check outcomes for oneself. This is at the heart of how and why science works so well. When established it is independent of people whether experts or believers in ones own or competing faiths. Expertise is required to build scientific knowledge but not to use it. That only requires learning and understanding it.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
The problem with this argument is two-fold. Firstly the rightwing nature that I've commented on before. It is a divisive tool used to choose the 'expert' opinion that you agree with and to disregard the rest. The second is around field and expertise. The truth is that anyone with a PhD in a mathematical discipline or a science involving modelling and data analysis will have little difficulty in understanding the spread of covid. This is a very diverse range of expertise and, furthermore, people are used to working in large, multidisciplinary teams these days. It doesn't mean that they will know the exact ins and outs of the models being used because only the people involved in those projects know that, but they will know more than enough to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Seanm
pfm Member
It's less a question of using it than wielding its authority. Murphy was not doing that - he expressly said that he was making assumptions, based on past behaviour - but you seemed to be doing it on his behalf, in order to dismiss Deej's not unreasonable inquiry as to the basis of Murphy's authority.
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
I dont know who he is nor do i care. And it isnt about "faith in vaccines" -
We still do not have sufficient data understand if the current range of vaccines work against the new variant. When I say "work" this means a whole range of things, for example:
- preventing or reducing transmissibility
- preventing or reducing illness thus lowering hospital admissions and preventing death
There is some early lab data which suggests our existing vaccines may have some impact on the newer so called Indian variant, but there is nowhere near enough real life data to see the actual outcome in preventing or lowering the severity of illness. We will eventually get the data.
Seanm
pfm Member
A lot of the expert opinion I'm seeing is making far greater claims for itself than might reasonably follow from the capacity to sort the wheat from the chaff. And it's obviously not right wing to question experts when they assume too much authority for themselves, or when others do so on their behalf.
Very early days for the Indian variant, some of it will be purely random right now. In a few weeks it will be everywhere and will 'level out' distribution wise.
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