UKH

Balanced, informed, pragmatic.

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/issue-1519/news?fbclid=IwAR2uZUhbGVdYwnXhEhDy...

A long but entirely worthwhile read, and the first thing to get a covid related chortle out of me since the photos of Cummings legging it from No 10.  

Only one disagreement with the article - it says a virus’ only purpose is to reproduce.  Nothing in life has more or less apparent “purpose” than anything else, but viruses serve many functions beyond their own reproduction - for example they’re a major driver of evolution both through selective pressure and potentially through transplanting genetic material between different species, they lend a helping hand to Malthusian solutions (case in point?), and they keep scientists on their toes when it comes to defining what is and isn’t “life”.   A distant relatives to HIV now inactivated and incorporated into all mammalian genomes appears to have granted animal life the necessary tools to carry a child inside the body without an egg to separate the genetically foreign child from its mother - these tools being immune suppression and a particularly crazy multicellular structure used to build an exchange membrane.   Who knows what other functions viruses fulfil or will go on to fulfil that are currently unknown to us.

Oh all right, but what have viruses ever done for US?

It makes a fair point but you can't really compare Covid-19 deaths to normal background deaths and say 'look how few it has killed, those others didn't make the news'. Background deaths have reached a steady state where yearly fluctuation is a few percent. Covid-19 is in the early stages of exponential growth.

To use an extreme example, at one point in 1347 the black death had killed fewer in England than being run over by a horse and cart, so what was all the fuss about? You can't compare steady-state to exponential. It's potential deaths that matters. I think the article does get that though.

I would like to see a source for the claim of 7000 dying due to being in lockdown.

8% of our DNA apparently.

But apart from 8% of our DNA, what have viruses ever down for us?

About 20,000 people die of accidents a year.  If they spend more time in the house, there will be more domestic accidents - but also less workplace, social and road traffic accidents.  So deaths from stair falls, house fires, trips, gardening injuries may well go up quite a lot because of lockdown.  7,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable.  But will it kill *more* people through accidents in the house than it saves from accidents behind the house?  You’d need a crystal ball to know, as there’s no corpus of data on people in the modern life confined like this.

OK fair one. I can see why they're throwing the kitchen sink at the virus though. Even if household accident will kill more than the virus there is one crucial point: household accidents aren't contagious. There is a massive difference between linear risks and multiplicative risks.

People keep spouting numbers like this and numbers of normal flu deaths. 20k deaths from accidents spread over 12 months in a country of 65 million people is s very small number. 

With the virus we have over 5k of deaths in a month give or take a few days and the number of deaths per day is going up significantly every few days. 

Apparently they are trucking bodies out of parts of Italy, I have never heard of them trucking bodies away after a spate of accidents caused by excessive DIY on a wet Bank holiday weekend. 

Bang on, the human brain isn't wired to understand the exponential function! 

Good read. 

Yup.

Yup.

The Private Eye article makes this case clear.y. The reason I was giving the numbers is because Red Rover said he was interested in their claim that 7,000 people might die from near term effects of lockdown   The article itself set this clearly against deaths on a scale of 200,000 in the immediate future if we didn't do lockdown.  

I agree entirely.  I've been very clear on where I stand on this form before deaths started to happen in the UK, and that is that the government's earlier strategy would have led to an unmitigated disaster.  

Actually, come to think of it, aren't viruses supposed to be one of the reasons for sexual reproduction? We reproduce to produce new genomes that will resist existing viruses. Or is that bacteria?

Yes, that is good. Thanks

They (phage) are pretty good at killing various bacteria,

But... apart from being a major driver of evolution.....  lending a helping hand to Malthusian solutions.... keeping scientists on their toes.... 8% of our DNA.... and killing bacteria.......

...... What have viruses ever done for us?

I don't think he's arguing against lockdown is he?  My reading was that yes - there are some negative consequences from lockdown but it's a lot worse if you don't so that was the only choice.  He then goes on to say that the opportunity to reduce the negative effects either way was missed when contact tracing was stopped.

Ahh sorry, I thought you were claiming that its not going to be as bad as DIY accidents. 

My apologies. 

Agreed. It just annoyed me that all the way through this people were saying 'condition X has killed more' when X is at a steady state and Covid-19 is early exponential. As time went on the condition X used as a yardstick became more and more serious. I was just ranting sorry!

How did I miss that in my ode to the virus? What a twort.

I’m not sure if this is related to your link but I thought this was interesting about school closures not necessarily working. 
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52180783

Great stuff, thanks, Frank

I liked these 3 quotations from the article best. I'm not commenting if they're true or not - they just rung a bell with me:

"The big flaw in the herd immunity plan came from the ridiculous idea that 60-70 percent of the UK population are fit and healthy."

"Humans can resist everything apart from temptation."

"High-risk, anti-social health behaviour is normalised in the UK."

Thank you.  Enjoyed that.  One bit I liked was: "Around a third of drugs are taken properly, a third are taken sporadically, and a third are stored in the cupboard under the sink in case of a Soviet invasion."

My wife works in a pharmacy and says that often when people die their relatives bring in a bin bag of unused prescription medicines that they’ve been dutifully collecting from the doctors month after month. 

To be fair, it's not just the patient's fault. I only take one pill a day and I often forget; and when my mum, who had mild dementia, was discharged from hospital she was given a regime of drugs that would have taken a 3d chess grandmaster to follow. 'This one in the morning, this one in the afternoon, these two with meals, this one before meals, this one with a drink..'.

Fair point. 

I've been spending too much time on UKC. I read the first part of this sentence and my brain completed it as "...ever done on grit?"

well ?

must be a few choice route names out there - have we done that thread ?

Am I being completely dim but what the hell is MD?

Dr Phil Hammond MD (Medical Doctor)

I'm still in shock that Private Eye has gone online!