UKH

Why are some people apparently so keen to dismiss the ongoing threat of covid-19 to our society and to the lives of many of its, mainly elderly, members?

It seems very strange that a still-widespread virus that has demonstrably and irrefutably killed tens of thousands of people in the UK in just a few short months should be subject to dismissal verging on denial of its very existence, let alone its ongoing potential to kill a great many more of our loved ones.

Is that attitude really due only to a carefully-crafted media fabrication by self-interested loonies with economic chips in the game? Or is there some aspect of human psychology that causes ordinarily cautious people suddenly to become reckless with other people's lives?

The number of people I see selectively quoting or forwarding selectively quoted statistics in order to paint a very particular picture of infection and mortality rates so as to make it appear that the threat is overhyped is simply staggering. Could they really all be paid shills working for self-interested parties?

Good question.  I wish I knew the answer.

In the early days there were also some very carefully crafted "thoughtful" opinion pieces (and forum posts here) on saving the economy vs deaths that were highly emotive if you analysed the words in them, and that used the emotive angle to plaster over some gaping logical flaws and missing information (still largely unknown even now) needed to validate their predicates.  Some of the posts on here came from newly registered accounts and were to my mind clearly propaganda pieces from the alt-right; the threads were rapidly deleted.  Nevertheless a lot of poster were drawn in to discussion without any suspicion that the whole thing was a set up from a paid shill with an agenda.  There's a press agency in New Zealand that was found to be behind some of the early, "grass roots" anti-lockdown pieces over there; likewise a lot of "grassroots" anti-lockdown protests in the states were traced back to one individual.

Quite a few of them I think are unpaid and unaware that their actions are carefully guided by the self-interested parties.   One of them - having tried to build an argument around some deliberately misleading data [1] told me I should educate myself about how academic publications work, which rather amused me.  A relative of mine has been a campaigns manager at a well known charity; they organise something of a pyramid / cell-structure of volunteers who all mobilise in letter writing campaigns for whatever issue is going to draw the most cash in to pay the executive salaries (okay; I'm cynical here).  I think the alt-right have something similar, along with social networks that make sure the fervour is up, and that are a bit more cell-like in their structure than the charitable networks, meaning that the people at the bottom are not so aware they're being guided.  I imagine it exploits the sort of people who talk about how great Atlas Shrugged was whilst presenting to have read it through. 

[1] It was a bioarxiv "pre-print" - I use inverted commas at it clearly was never intended to go to peer-review - nothing but navel gazing and carping one using some cherry picked covid data from a sole author who normally studies fish migration.  Great way to give a DOI and sheen of legitimacy to a shill piece however.  It was far from the only such example used to set up agenda driven discussions on this forum.

I think its simpler than that.  People will tend to believe whatever suits their own agenda.

I think the problem is with information, news and the media as with Brexit, Trump etc etc. People are confused about what is going on based on what they see vs what is being reported in all the channels they connect with. The number of people who don't even understand what they can do which varies so much by country, within different countries in the UK and even by region/ town seems to be almost everyone! 

People's experiences are so varied whether they are older and at risk, younger and missing opportunities, furloughed, working in key roles and those that can work from home. Almost all the news I see in the mainstream is sensationalist e.g. overcrowding, social distancing and is causing much more hysteria than is really warranted. This is where the China/ Russia style governments have a massive advantage and western society is really going to struggle to handle and retain any kind of freedom they've come to enjoy. Who knows what will happen next year?

I think due to the Government defining those at risk due to age and underlying issues it has made everyone else believe it's just a common cold to them. The virus is sadly spreading because of this selfish belief.   

Because people are naturally evaluate and weigh evidence against their existing beliefs and give greater weight and less scrutiny to the evidence which supports the outcome they want.

We are also pretty poor at comprehending large scale threats. The one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic thing.

I'm not sure it even needs to be an agenda as such, just that people lean towards believing what they want or hope. Most people want everything to go back to normal and are hoping it will all be over soon, so they'll buy into anyone/any article promising it. Thus people will forward a wishy washy article supporting their hopes rather than a scientific article destroying them.

I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand something that is a hardcore flu, but I'm not going to hide away fearing for my life. If my number's, it's up.

I'll just keep on doing the basics to avoid catching it and passing it on.

I’m not sure people are dismissing it. The young are largely at a very reduced risk and life quite simply goes on.
 

We all still want the essentials such as food on our table and the other non essentials such as access to Internet forums and these all require people to produce them, pay for them etc. 
 

If everyone who wanted us all to stay at home to protect others are prepared to go without gardens, open spaces, a wide selection of food, online delivery for all manner of products then maybe people may be more inclined to stay at home but arguably many of the very people who want to be protected still want all of the above. 

In reply to GerM:

Whst I think you’re missing here is the distinction between the number of deaths and the rate of deaths.  Strong measures were needed because the *rate* of hospitalisation sand deaths was about to totally overwhelm the NHS.  We need the NHS, it underpins everything. 

Also, the number of deaths isn’t that big because of the strong measures.  Without them it could have been ten times higher in the space of two months.  

People prefer to believe in a reality that they like rather than one they don't. Therefore, many of them opt to believe in a reality that they like rather than that one that is, err, real.

Covid is just a stark demonstration on a human, all-too-human, truth that's been with us for a long time already. 

Because there is a concerted effort to spread FUD, possibly by state actors, and it's working beautifully. 

Who wants everyone to stay at home? The stay-at-home lockdown was a very blunt tool that was necessary to end the exponential growth we had during March. No one I've spoken to wants to go back there, nor do they think it's necessary. 

Feck Covid . The fear and hype of Covid has done more damage than Covid itself.

Maybe people don't believe a word the scaremongering ShiteHawks in government say  and definitely not  what  the Biased Broadcasters say !  

It's obvious, surely - it's because they're on the right to far right, and they find that the idea of something that has to be fought collectively threatens their world view, so they prefer to deny.

jcm

Assertions like this, opinions masquerading as fact without any supporting evidence, are precisely the problem that John describes. 

Not to people who've died from Covid or their close ones.

I'd argue the opposite the young people who are socialising with friends their own age have balanced the risk to them personally. And if you look at the risk groups for suicide etc.. these young folk shouldn't be locked up at home they need to be out meeting people. 

Conversely the pensioner or bame origin person clipping your heels in the super market queue have assessed the risk badly. 

I know a healthy 40 yr old mum(in uk) who hasn't left the house since March. The media has multiplied all their germ phobias to an extreme level. We posted her kids birthday presents and they were quarantined for 2 weeks in the garage. They really aren't in a good place just now 

I know, its the best hoax since the holocaust innit. 

I think it's selfishness; most folk are not old, overweight or ill already, they construct justifications to throw the minority to the wolves.

What about the lazy and overweight driving their oversized diesel Chelsea tractor knowing they are polluting the streets for the young relatively healthy cyclist or pedestrian? (Yeah I know rubbish comparison). 

Ps. I'm not suggesting we should ignore covid, but it's been many months now and for all the obvious reasons some normal activity must resume, albeit with slight modifications. 

You could flip this question the other way around - why are some people so keen to use the threat of CV-19 to restrict and oppress society even when we are at a stage when infection rates are low and hospital admissions and deaths from CV are now buried in the noise below a lot of other illnesses? The number of people dying each day now is roughly equivalent to the number of people dying in car accidents, people kill other people in car accidents, why are we not banning cars?  I think some people of a particular mindset are quite enjoying seeing people have to suffer / lose their jobs for some sort of "collective good", and are minded to keep the fear rhetoric going as long as possible.

I wouldn't say that I dismiss Covid, but I do think that we've blown it out of proportion. There are far greater threats facing humanity - runaway climate, collapse of ecosystems, antibiotic resistance. These all have the potential to make Covid look like less than a common cold yet our pre-occupation with Covid means that these issues are being ignored.

I for one don't understand the fear that surrounds this disease, people are giving up smoking and dieting as if they weren't dying of these things before. It just makes no sense to me how humanity can take one threat so seriously while, at best willfully ignoring, or at worst actively contributing to others. So although I think it should be taken seriously I'm at an absolute loss as to why it's now acceptable to fly planes under capacity, have only one person per vehicle and increase the use of single use plastics (i.e gloves and masks). Just saving ourselves from Covid won't necessarily save us.

The issue is mostly one of capacity. A number of hospitals were close to being overwhelmed; widespread circulation of the virus in the community increases the risk of this happening again.

If you think about the number of ventilated ICU beds available per head of population and compare that to, say, the number of runners available on a busy day at the popular end of Stanage, do you really still want to go climbing when there's only enough gear for one runner for every 5 routes? Still fancy a day out?

b

I don’t know personally anyone who is keen to “oppress society” nor have I seen that keenness from any leadership. 

I have a clear view on why hospital admissions and deaths are so low, and of how quickly they would rise back to the point of overwhelming the NHS if we dropped all risk control measures.  Arguing against risk control measures because virus levels are low is not logical.  They’re low because of the control measures.  

It is possible to have more risk control measures and less restriction on society, but for that to work everyone has to buy in to the risk control measures rather than a very restricted take on liberty.  A lot of people aren’t buying in to masks...  I’m particularly interested in the new set of non-invasive spit based covid tests getting approved in the USA; this would make it possible to do much more regular testing in key settings for example.  I think pubs are going to have to close soon as well when the schools and universities return.  

I sort of agree - the fear of what would happen if we didn’t control the virus has done more damage than the virus did when we controlled the virus, but it’s done less damage than the virus probably would have if we’d not controlled it.

We were afraid of one possible future and so we avoided it; as a result we live in a different future - but we need to be mindful and indeed fearful that the bad future is still just a hope, skip and sneeze away. 

As I've quite often made my decision to go soloing at stanage it might be a bad analogy. I'm not saying we should ignore it I just don't get why we see it as so much more important than the other issues facing us. I guess the best way to look at it is to ask why we did nothing to stop it occuring in the first place. We can't keep ignoring issues until they occur.

Largely it is being pushed I think more by ideological libertarians than people with narrow economic interest (it's Britain, there's money to be made in a Tory lead crisis by the well connected) but it is finding a receptive audience, I think the resentment felt by lots of people over a summer of restrictions and impositions has made us receptive and memories are short. Also there's the economic disaster still simmering just below the surface largely out of sight so far but very real, some are more aware of it than others again making people receptive to the idea we're 'doing too much to save people who will die anyway'.

jk

Indeed you could but I'd argue it would be disingenuous. I don't want to see anyone oppressed or needlessly restricted but if we really want the freedom we enjoyed to socialise, work and travel as we've done before the reliable and available route back to that is creating an environment in which it is safe (for all, not just those at low risk) to do so by dramatically reducing the incidence of the virus. The time to do that is now while there is relatively little of it about, while the weather is good, while memories are fresh. The time not to do it is in the middle of flu season after Christmas when it's killing our loved ones again in their thousands.

We've imposed and live with countless restrictions on vehicle/road design and use to get those numbers down precisely because it was unacceptable how many were dying on the roads. Poor example.

Opening that sentence with 'I think' seems a little grandiose given what follows. Nobody is enjoying watching others lose their livelihoods and suffer whichever side of the economic ideological divide they sit.

jk

You describe a situation similar to the first 3 weeks in March, albeit we didn't know infection rate.... do you remember what happened next?

Exactly.

Was really annoyed when I went to the wall on Friday. I'm cautious.... I'm no spring chick, plus because of my work and family situation. There was a sizeable 'don't give a toss' contingent at the climbing wall, basically making other people risk decisions for them, congregating in large groups around walkways ect. This just results in more cautious people feeling uncomfortable and less likely to be doing more normal things. Utterly selfish.

For a variety of reasons ranging from just a different view of society to having seen their job or welath wiped out and a natural fear for the future.

Whilst we might not like contrarian views, it is also a healthy sign that there are open and outward dissenting voices. After all we do not want to become a boring inward looking society in which nothing is questioned and there are no dissenting voices.Even if some of the views are plain stupid and irresponsible.

Possibly due to an apparent lack of sincerity on the part of some people's advocacy for economically-crippling lockdown measures. Certainly in the US, having epidemiologists who were otherwise strident advocates for extreme lockdown, then come out in favour of mass BLM protests, would not have done much to build trust in restrictions being sober, impartial, and apolitical guidelines.

Equally, universal measures so broadly applied do open themselves up to question. Accusations of incipient murder when you pass within 1.9m of someone on a sunny day in a park, versus total silence about supermarket workers spending all day in close confines with shoppers at the height of the epidemic, does point towards skewed perspectives and a justifiable perception that perhaps people are getting this all wrong.

Plenty of areas of the UK could, and arguably should, be free to get on with life as near to normal as possible. Plenty of countries have done just that with minimal repercussions. Tubes and busses would be fair targets for complete shut-down as they would appear to be covid breeding grounds, while summer beaches could be considered the opposite. Yet the media is noisy about the later but somewhat sanguine about the former.

The media throughout has been using high-end estimates. Scare-stories sell papers. None of that is to say lockdown shouldn't have happened and that some measures going forward are also necessary. But the over-egging of the cases, and some blatantly partisan coverage that seems more interested in using the pandemic to settle political scores, can only serve to undermine belief in the news. Some people have clearly thought the pandemic can win them political points, even if some dishonesty is involved. There are costs to that and you can see from this thread alone that its possible to take very different readings of the risks depending on your personal circumstances. Truth is, we likely won't know for a year or two more what the reality was.

Its not really though is it, infection rates, hospital admissions and deaths are all now being monitored.

A few things…

I have come across people who think (or at least say they think) it is all fake. Which I find weird given the vast amount of information out there on the virus. Not just science, but personal accounts, media reports, etc, etc from all over the world. Like are our “big business overlords” really going to bother going to every single country (Brazi, India, America, New Zealand, Europe, Russia) just to spread propaganda about a fake virus?

However people like their own pet beliefs and latch onto anything that gives them credence. A common theme is the media/politicians lie to us, which they do, but they don’t lie about everything. Also Science has its own biases (which it shouldn’t but it does) and the rush to publish can result in some dodgy research but by and large it serves us well.

I have heard people say “follow the money” but I prefer to follow the data and compare and contrast opposing views to get a full idea of what is being said. Just because politicians lie it doesn’t mean that when they say we are hitting a recession that it is false; Just because the media don’t always report correctly it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a massive explosion in Beruit and just because a scientific study claims a given drug works based on a P-hacked study of 12 people it doesn’t mean that our theories of physics and biology are all rubbish.

Whenever I come across something that seems too good to be true or conflicts with my world view I will see if I can falsify it but I have to be open to the possibility that I am wrong

Exactly - on both sides of the fence !

Yes, the Mainstream Media have done a great job !

https://www.effiedeans.com/2020/08/the-broadcast-media-has-disgraced-itself...

Which areas?

Which countries in Europe have done that?

Yes, and that has allowed a significant loosening of restrictions, but my point is the situation can change very quickly.

What point are you trying to make here? You can do most things now, albeit with some modifications. Is this too 'restrictive' and 'oppressive' for you? Try to remember it's only a few months ago we recorded 50K plus excess deaths.

Well that does explain a lot. You get your opinions from rabid right wing Unionists with some fairly bigoted views on a whole range of issues.

Here's your guy weighing in on the US and race

https://www.effiedeans.com/2019/10/the-american-disease-part-five-race.html 

He's very keen on Brexit and Bojo but doesn't seem to have any realisation that these 2 things are most likely to break his very precious Union.

Much of Southeast Asia, with the alternative take being that this (https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-s...) may be the next most plausible reason for their low rates of infection and contamination. I haven't looked at the situation in Africa but that lack of news from there about covid is also interesting.

Either way, the patterns of infection appear far from universal and we would have expected countries with very low capacity and low lockdowns to be decimated by now. Likewise for state-to-state practices in the US. But there seems to be a substantial degree of independence between spread/deaths and the types of measures being encouraged. 

If you're poor you're unlikely to be working from home and if you're poor you're unlikely to be working without the tube/bus. There's a reason the tube and busses weren't completely shut off, if you're not poor you can only eat because poor people had to go out to work. In London particularly it's not just the poor heavily reliant on public transport but the commuter density was dramatically reduced by the furlough scheme and white collar home-working.

jk

It's been well publicised that 'under cover of the pandemic pre-occupation' - governments, notably Trump & Bolsonaro, have been pushing through new laws - unfavorable to the environment

Indeed. Even from the perspective of dealing with this virus alone - we need a different methodology. It's not the 1st and won't be the last, and we can't lockdown economy & society every time a new threat appears. Even if you believe this will all be resolved when the vaccine rolls-out, the lapse of time is unacceptable given the frequency of new threats.

Quote: New species of human viruses are still being identified, at a rate of three or four per year.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7149643/

I didn't have to read far before getting to this obvious bollock:

"It therefore kills people who don’t work. If we had quarantined everyone over 65 and prevented them from having contact with anyone under 65, we would have saved nearly all the lives of people who died from Covid and we would not have wrecked the economy."

People, particularly the most vulnerable do not live in bubbles, if there is covid everywhere in volume (the consequence of the policy being proposed) it inevitably gets to those who will die of it en masse. We saw that happen even with the relatively low prevalence in March. It takes a very short memory to forget the dearth of precautionary testing, PPE and training which lead to these cross-contamination (between low and high risk) problems being all but impossible to solve.

It's not even true that the 'lock up the oldies and pretend it's not happening' plan would have saved the economic damage, many older folk are the most senior figures in business, they serve us in our grocery shops and unpaid they fill the childcare void the state neglects. As the death rate soared this spring the public and business lead government on introducing control measures which reduced economic activity. Nobody likes putting their friends and family at risk, we choose and chose not to even if the government might have preferred otherwise.

jk

behavioural fatigue?

I’m not saying the lockdown was a good or bad tool but there are still a number of people who would rather people say at home or away from other areas to protect local populations. I’m thinking of particularly rural areas in my example but I’m sure there are others.

The virus is spreading - because thats what viruses do - not because of anyone's belief. But, right now the evidence of it's spread is from increased testing, ie. is it really spreading more than earlier - or is this just the knowledge gained from the testing ?

But from the perspective of selfishness, it may also be considered the *least* selfish action to help the spread - amongst robust younger people, now in summer months while there is no resulting death. The faster it spreads the closer we approach herd immunity - *which will protect the aged and vulnerable*

Who is this 'we' ? If this group was not persuaded by government, from where came it? It can only otherwise have come from media. Please name me the most trustworthy news sources so I can analyse them.

There needs to be about 70% infection to achieve herd immunity......and we don't know how long an infected person is immune. Forgetting the latter, getting to 70% infection would involve kill many vulnerable people, not protecting them.

Yes, I understand that. Though it always blew my mind when I lived there how many people chose to use public transport. Walking/running/cycling, even from outer zones, was almost as quick.

The point is, we are making financial/hard-ship calls to justify the use of the premier means of super-spreading covid19, while relatively insignificant acts were treated as virtual crimes against humanity.

There's clearly a huge amount of wiggle room in what constitutes 'safe' and the cost-benefit trade-offs to be made. Coming down on someone for having an opposing viewpoint, and claiming moral and intellectual superiority when doing so, seems to me to be a greater example of selfishness than those being accused.

It would be interesting to get more data on outbreak clusters. As you say, there has been a focus on beaches, and also on illegal raves. Have these resulted in local outbreaks? I don't know but I've not read of any links.

While arguably now too old for raves (the day after? the week after!), I totally understand why and, to be frank, if I was still under 35, I'd be hunting them out. 

I think most reasonable people (i.e. like me!) try to balance out the risks of both acquiring C19 or passing it on. We make personal choices / checks & balances, e.g. I haven't sat in at a cafe or bar since March, or used public transport, but eagerly await the re-opening of my wall. Will I risk C19 for a sandwich? No. A drink indorrs with friends when I can do that in an open green space? No. Climb? Yes, I want to retain (regain) for fitness and cannot manage anything resembling a wall at home or near to home. The whole pubs opening while walls remain closed has got me puzzled / angry. Any data on wall spread clusters out of England or elsewhere??

Trump and Bolsonaro were  stripping environmental protections well before Covid-19. They don't need any 'under cover of pandemic' measures to push their pro-business low regulation agendas. 

We were a sizeable fraction of the British public. We chose to reduce or restrict our social interactions, to work from home and send staff home, to avoid crowds, to stockpile bogroll... We are not all alike of course, plenty did the complete opposite but the British public and the British government ended up significantly out of step in March, we were not by any stretch wholly persuaded of the merit in sacrificing our older relatives, friends and employees for our economic activity.

I don't understand what you mean regarding news sources. I'm recounting my perspective on the conversations and calculations which went on across Britain in March as we modified our behaviour ahead of government restrictions.

jk

Yes, I'm of a similar mindset. It doesn't help that, while we pay lip-service to good health and sunshine apparently correlating to positive covid outcomes, the media has hyped every case of the fit-and-healthy being struck down, and every young person likewise afflicted, as evidence our risks are universally shared and one size fits all. Meanwhile at the height of the crisis we were specifically stopped from accessing the greatest source of vitamin-D available.

Couple that with the 'don't buy masks' advice becoming 'everyone must buy masks', WHO's ongoing claims that there was no person-to-person transmission, followed by social media giants decreeing that talk contrary to WHO edicts was now a bannable offence, and I can fully see why people start thinking its all just bullshit, especially when someone starts ranting at them because they have zero tolerance for any scepticism. 

As it happens, I suspect the advice not to buy masks came from a good place (and a tough decision based on available evidence), and the WHO advice (and the social media rule likewise) had some logical basis. But again, there's very much two sides to the story.  The censoriousness of some people, as if they hold the incontrovertible truth, seems so wide of the mark and far from convincing. 

Prof Levitt (https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013), for example, doesn't seem to be a headcase and it should be perfectly possible for highly intelligent people like him, with relevant expertise, to have a seat at the table. Though the way some people discuss covid you'd be forgiven for thinking his ilk are not far removed from Nazi-sympathisers

Don't overlook (a) it is not a single homogeneous group and (b) many different factors come into play when it comes to influence. Similarly. 'the media' does not present a single uniform front. Different parts of print/tv/radio/online/social media present very different outlooks. 

You could it you prefer conspiracy theories to observable facts. Who are the people that want to restrict and oppress society for no reason?

Also, from what I've read of oppressive regimes, asking people to wear some fabric over their nose and mouth in enclosed public spaces, giving them a load of money when they can't go to work and subsidising their restaurant meals don't exactly seem like classic repressive actions. 

You don't seem to be aware, or are going to some lengths to avoid mentioning, just how much b*llox is being talked by conspiracy theorists online. It is they who drag healtyh scepticism into the mud... it seems that you just don't want to see that, rather than you can't.

I get the issue you are referring to but in terms of causation you've got the cart before the horse.

No, I'm definitely aware of it - I've heard more than enough about how Bill Gates is behind it all. But I don't see much point in reading them as they're irrelevant nonsense, so have no problem ignoring them.

My issue is, any criticism of excessive safeguarding seems to often be dismissed as a step into covid flat-earthism. That seems to be a bigger concern than the conspiracies themselves as it pushes us towards a hard-line response and diminishes nuance. That's unlikely to help compliance and can only make discussions about the secondary impacts of lockdown (family break-up, suicide, depression, lost education, potential for generational drops in social mobility, missed operations/treatments/scans) more difficult. 

There's all kinds of bollocks on the internet, but I don't find conspiracies to be an existential threat. Even the anti-mask protestors should be able to make their point if BLM protestors are allowed to form en-masse.

Sorry but the idea that the media have been telling us everyone is at the same risk is absolute nonsense...in fact it is so ridiculous I can't believe you are claiming this.

As for vitamin D I presume the government weighed up the advantages of 'lockdown' to the disadvantages of people missing out on vitamin D

.....and you were not stopped from going outside in the sunshine for enough time to get a vitamin D top up even at the height of the lockdown.

Although his early contribution on why exponential phase wasn’t likely was disturbingly naive to the point it’s hard to conceive him being that wrong by accident.

He presented the limiting factor as people only having a fixed set of contacts.  But, when R is much less than the number of those contacts, when the disease spreads more slowly than people visits those contacts and when the contacts are well connected across the nation (“six degrees”), the “attack surface” through which the virus can spread expands quadratically with time at a rate far faster than the exponential phase of the virus - it essentially gets everywhere (spatially speaking) in small numbers very quickly then spreads exponentially into the whole population until it runs out of steam.

Doubly so when you have thousands of randomly distributed (spatially) importation events...

Yet he's not infallible https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/1297656228668153856

No-one, but there are plenty of people who do have a reason, either for personal, political or monetary gain - some people are doing really quite nicely out of CV, and you dont need to be a conspiracy theorist to spot it.

Any change in the status quo will create relative winners and losers but it is a big jump from observing that, post-change, some have done better than others in the new circumstances to thinking they, or some of them must have conspired to create or exaggerate the change. 

I don’t know; can’t you just imagine the board of Zoom sat around congratulating themselves on successfully achieving a worldwide paradigm shift in just 2 months?  They’d be top of my conspiracy board on this...  Makes more sense than anything I’ve seen actually suggested...  (said to a downbeat piano solo of the X-files theme).

Absolutely. The old correlation vs causality mistake in a whole new guise.

LOL. The "not dead" ones maybe, as we get to the approx 60-70% spread required.

Obviously the "the robust younger people' won't spread into the older and/or more vulnerable.  And we'll take the unavoidable deaths of "robust younger people" as just one of those things ...

I never said that the people doing well were the cause, I was just implying they are happy to jump on the bandwagon and see the new status quo continue - look at the content of any current TV advert break.

It seems like you are happy to ridicule people who do not agree with you and as I am not interested in partaking in an echo chamber I will bid you farewell. 

Your 16:43 post explicitly says “but there are plenty of people who do have a reason [to restrict and oppress society], either for personal, political or monetary gain” (the square brackets contain the relevant part of the message you were directly replying to).

So, please forgive us readers if we thought you were clearly saying some people were deliberately trying to oppress society for their gain.  If I misunderstand please feel free to help me better interpret your 16:43 post.

As for jumping in the bandwagon - I’d call it making the most of a bad situation.  I’d hope every individual and business does that - that’s how the bills still get paid.  It’s exactly what I’m doing with my business - now is an excellent time to push automation, and whilst I want covid to f—k right off, in the mean time I’ll do what I can to keep creating employment for others and give myself an income.

I'd be interested in learning which posts you perceived as being ridiculing. Seems to me more like the discussion uncovered some uncomfortable realities, whereupon your interest in continuing waned somewhat.

Congratulations on having fallen for it yourself. Only thing I suggest: next time you see a twitter thread that mentions Covid or masks and has a tonne of replies complaining about their freedoms being taken away and what not, see how many bot accounts you can spot. Easy to see, account registered in the past month or so, name having a few more random digits than normal, no meaningful content on the account other than said tweets.

So, who is running these bots? 

Bonus: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/twitter-bots-are-sprea...

I wonder how many of the links said bots had been spreading around you have posted here yourself.

The number of people I see selectively quoting or forwarding selectively quoted statistics in order to paint a very particular picture of infection and mortality rates so as to overhype the threat is simply staggering. Could they really all be paid shills working for self-interested parties?

Yes. Are you one of them ?

Is that the best retort you can manage? Worthy of a 12-year old.

Thats a change of story ! You make it sound like Sweden - 'we' took it on ourselves to do these things. No, the government ordered lockdown, and the media hyped the fear. The public response followed.

Ditto. The 'British' public were said (unlike the Swedes) to be irresponsible - and therefore needed the law laying down. The public response followed.

This is why you have a responsibility to inform us of ONE most reliable media source. Which you appear unable to do. There is none ! What you are pushing comes from the offstage powers wish to control everything without ever having the spotlight on them.

You may as well own up now - to save me the trouble, after all I might get it wrong  

Which makes my point quite nicely - it will almost certainly be OK for you, but you aren't the only person potentially affected. Rather the behaviour of many, particularly younger people who are unlikely to be severely affected by Covid, defines the ability of the NHS to manage. 

I don't disagree with your points about the rest of the package - financial, educational, longer term health etc - but unfashionable as it is to say so, the primary issue for me remains not having the situation seen in Northern Italy and New York where the apparatus of healthcare is utterly swamped, which leads to a very acute and severe risk to a vast swathe of society, including some younger people. 

b

Obviously! 

In what sort of world would a government allow that to happen, having seen it all play out already? What kind of pillock could see what happened in those places where control was lost (so they had to then go into massively harsh lockdown, obviously) and think "I don't understand what everyone's going on about - it's a hoax". UUHH??

Maybe my memeory if tainted but as I remember it, in the UK the government were pressured into lockdown, be it by the public or the media, take you pick. My office shut down pre lockdown and I had modified my behaviour pre lockdown. 

I was mostly influeneced by my wife's work collegue who is from Northern Italy and the first hand tales of his friends working in hospitals there were pretty shocking.

The government (and their media outlets) said the British public were irresponsible. They needed someone to blame that wasn't their poor response, missed COBRAS meetings, lack of PPE, lack of testing, dire communications of the restrictions etc.....

Just a quick heads up, their isn't "ONE" media source to rule them all. I would recommend taking a view based on a board selection of media and being aware of the prism through which it is presented.

A reminder on why some in science got masks wrong.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-face-mask-debate-reveals-a-scientific-doubl...

And why masks work

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-s...

There was talk upthread of fatality rates being below 1%. We don't know that for sure yet and it only applies when health system responses are good and hospitals don't get overwhelmed. Actual fatality rates in the hard hit countries seem to be all over 1%. Also add on a similar number who live, but are severely affected for months. At 0.6% fatality and 70% needed for herd immunity the UK could have lost well over 200,000 lives (compare and remember NHS capacity at full stretch like it was in March for 20% of that number) and  a similar large number suffering severe longterm effects.

Humans are very good at recognising fast moving close threats and very bad at dealing with long term slow moving threats that are a long way away. It keeps us alive. No point in focusing on global warming if we are all going to die of CV. Of course we shouldn’t ignore global warming, but right now, it’s lower on the list. 
 

The same happened in March, the same people who are saying it’s not a problem are the same people who said it wasn’t a problem back then and now that only 0.06% of the population have died, they have a point (of course if you ignore the mitigation we’ve put in place). And the same people were saying it’s only the very elderly and already sick that are at risk, again that appears to be true. 
 

Also figures from France and Spain are showing cases are rising but the deaths aren’t following. I suspect this was happening in January here and then all of a sudden it hits critical mass and explodes into the care homes and hospitals. So will watch what happens over the next 6 weeks in Europe. We appear to have a handle on it here. 

If you ignore the mitigation.... How can you ignore that if you are going to look at the amount of deaths?!!

The %age of people necessary to reach herd immunity isn’t a fixed value. It’s close to 1 - 1/R. Originally R was around 3 so about 70% is correct. However with an R of around 0.8 we can eliminate it without immunity using existing measures. If we relax measures even to an R of 1.25, partial herd immunity kicks in at 20%.

Are you saying that 0.06 % of the population isn't that much? It's interesting when you compare it to, say, deaths from acts of terrorism since, for the sake of argument, 2001. How many deaths connected to terrorism have we had in 19 years in the UK? Maybe 100? Probably a bit less than that. But we've securitised large sections of public life (PREVENT agenda), changed laws significantly, used it justify military interventions in third countries and so on.

It’s the argument they’re using. Only 0.06% have died. They’re wilfully ignoring the mitigation. Unfortunately there’s no arguing with them about that part as they don’t want to understand it. 

It’s interesting when you compare apples with apples. 

Flu? 

The thing about terrorism is when a bomb goes off, we don’t all lockdown the country and pull the curtains. 

Yes, it's the most transparent case of editing reality to fit how you want it to be I've ever seen. It's just like climate change denial - the evidence is clear, the argument is over, the world is how it is, and we know it for sure. "Ignoring mitigation", "only 0.06%, that's not a lot" - these assumptions are so incredibly stupid and wrong, the mind boggles that anyone could have such feeble powers of reasoning. Embarrassing! 

Nope, we expect the police to shoot people dead or we change laws to allow people to be held without charge for significantly longer, or we bomb towns in Syria. That's not to mention how it changed less important things in most of our lives - no liquids on planes for example. All of which are pretty significant policy changes - maybe the right ones perhaps - but big changes either way.

But your point seems to be not so many people have died of Covid so the restriction to try and stop it are excessive. I'm just saying that if 40 - 60 000 people had died from terrorists attacks I'm sure we would have seen significantly more social change that we've seen since March.

There’s an issue with the 1% figure. Many countries were only testing sick people. Even now we only test for antibodies and they seem to disappear after 12 or so weeks. 
 

Anyone who had this asymptomatically in February or even January will not show up. 
 

France and Spain currently have big increases in cases, but not in deaths. 

There’s a big piece missing from this jigsaw. 

We always shoot people dead. That’s not new and it’s not a terrorism thing. Seriously. 
 

Maybe we shouldn’t have traffic police monitoring and stopping people who speed. 
 

It’s not even remotely relevant to the discussion. 

Read what I wrote again and the subsequent posts. 

You seem to have a slightly odd notion that there might be one single definitive source. This is quite clearly impossible. There are many possible responses to the pandemic from government, from the media, from scientists and from lay people, and for each response there are further multiple responses. There is no single right way or wrong way to deal with the situation. Some responses are clearly bonkers, and some require careful attention. It's up to you to determine which you consider worth your attention, but realise that everyone else will be making up their own mind, and their interpretations of what they see or hear or read may be different to yours. 

I'm not aware of changing my story, you'll have to explain where and in what way. IIRC you live in France, were you here in March or were you observing through a filter? The public mood and personal/business action in the UK definitely lead the government by some time, if you'll recall this was a government implementing an, as it turned out unpopular herd immunity strategy as hospital admissions and deaths soared.

It was a mixed bag, I haven't pretended otherwise. Sensational stories of irresponsible behaviour sold rags and provided a tame government in disarray with a figleaf but the mood of the nation was against living with covid killing people and many of us were making choices and modifying behaviour to reduce risk well before the government imposed restrictions.

Again, I'm recounting my experience and that of people I know directly and live around, of the decisions being made in early March significantly ahead of government. Significantly before 'lockdown' I was working from home, following the scant available data working out where best to be for access to a maternity ward (and back-up options) as routine services teetered on the brink of losing staff and capability to the wave of covid clearly coming. Weeks earlier I'd sat down to discuss whether to postpone or insure or press on with my very early Feb wedding, whether it would likely be wise and safe to do so. I miscalculated slightly. Find your own media references to tell whatever story you want to believe.

Could you translate that, I'm lost.

The idea I'm promoting is the need to dramatically reduce the amount of virus in our community while we have the opportunity in order to avoid another brush with disaster through the school return then holiday/flu season and to restore some economic and social normality in the medium term. This differs from the current 'hold R at 1 and hope' strategy in that medium to long term it reduces risk and boosts our ability to recover economically whether or not medical technology delivers. Short term it requires more (very temporary) restriction and sacrifice.

jk

The numbers are not certain but the lower limit is clearly a lot higher than the 0.1% in hard hit western nations (some here have claimed 0.1%). 5 US states already have defined covid deaths over 0.1% (1000/ million). For the highest, NY at 0.17% the estimated population exposure is around 20%. So case fatality there is around 0.85%.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/28/upshot/coronavirus-herd-immu...

It's standard schoolyard reasoning. By ruling out the impossible and leaving the implicit suggestion that all other options are equally plausible, it's possible to argue a case for believing the unreasonable.

You could argue that the govt had a plan to deal with the pandemic and it got hijacked by social media etc. The plan was subverted by this.Just because the media went on a bandwagon and other organisation undertook their own measures does not mean they were right from a broader countrywide perspective.

As an example my daughters company were ahead of the game as they had their own pandemic plan, but it doe not mean it was right for everybody else.

The drive from the media effectively closed down schools for example, when that was not the national pandemic plan. The education of our countrys young has suffered as a result of this error.It was a por decision looking back.

Presumably in order to maintain the R at that level we need to maintain the social distancing, restrictions on gatherings and other conditions that keep the R level so low. 

Which kind of defeats the point of trying to get herd immunity.

Complete bonkers ! If the virus is spreading but killing no-one thats great. There are many such viruses in the envrionment - we are largely immune naturally - and where otherwise - then this is what we should be working on.

If you are serious about viral threat spread the gospel of dietary reform on BigFood. 2025 is too late

If you can't give me one or two or perhaps three reliable sources, then nothing is reliable. If jk is right that the public obeyed ahead of government edict - then it was the result of media control.

No-sooner I stuck my neck out here after lockdown set-in, you all wanted to know my history and larger motivations. Thats all I want from you who back the narrative. What is the political backing and trend - do you even know - which supports this ? Where is it leading ? because in chess the next move is often a trap.

The fear of a fairly unremarkable virus is leading us towards a vaccination campaign, which in itself will be a violation of rights if obligatory. But that will be nothing compared to the tracking which accompanies it. Open your eyes - there is growing respect for Russia & China - but does that mean you would wish their style of democracy ?

The powers that lead this campaign know that there will never be full accord to adopt all their 'desirable' measures for the new normal - big brother is already muscling up! 

Our world, in particular in the US and Brazil.

CB

Because every week in a normal year we have 14,000 people die.  Mostly the people who die are the elderly and over 70.    (Heart attacks, cancers, dementia, lung diseases and so on).  They account for most deaths)

  So far from Covid-19 related deaths (now currently put down as covid deaths if they've had the illness within the last month before dying.  So theoretically if you got knocked down by a car and died 3 weeks later it would be put down as a Covid - 19 death).  But never mind.

So far we've had just over 40,000 Covid related deaths in the last 6 or so months.  These are not necessarily excess deaths.  Most of the victims are the older, mostly over 70 and it is well documented that most of these deaths were by people with 'underlying' health issues', which means they probably suffering from cancers, dementia, lung diseases and so on.  Put another way,  These people got to the age when people start dying anyway from various causes.  But Covid - 19 finished them off.  (By the way I'm 70).

At the moment we are down to less than 100 deaths per day from Covid-19 related deaths.  As I said above, this includes anyone whose had covid-19 within  the last month even if that didn't kill em off.  We are down to around 1000 infections per day.

We have a population of over a 60,000,000.

As several retired senior doctors/medical professionals  have said before, that if this had happened when they started working in the 60s  & 70s  we probably wouldn't have noticed.

I know this will upset a lot of  younger posters, but by the time you start to get to  70 years of age you are going to die.  I'll probably die before you.  There is nothing at all you can do to avoid dying.  You have a chance of living a little longer though if you avoid cancers, dementia, lung diseases and so on. - but there are no guarantees.

But here we are, with the highest debt ever - two trillion I think.  You are going to have to pay it all back with tax (I'll be dead ).  You face growing unemployment as many businesses will continue to go under in the coming months.  And so the public debt will grow.  Couple this with a world wide recession and you have little to look forward to.

So while you wander to your social distanced pub or fancy a bit of shopping on Saturday, whilst wearing a face mask,  just remember less than 100 people died today from Covid 19.  Most of these were like me = over 70.  Wearing your face mask won't make any difference to me - I'm going to die sooner than you,  and almost all of the people who die from Covid - 19 tomorrow, were going to die anyway.

And before you say, its not worth the risk by not taking precautions, I wonder why many people drive their cars without seat belts on, or how many of you make and receive calls from your mobile whilst driving or break the speed limit and so on?  Risky?  And then there's those of us - I'm one - who have done lots of solo climbing and still do it  Risky? I won't mention smoking or  vaping.  I do it.  I've seen others do it.  We know the risk.  But we still do it.  Last year at least two people  fell over Malham Cove and died.  Yesterday there dozens and dozens of people wandering around the top, attempting to get a coveted selfie, or look to see how far down it was.  They too still took the risk and no one has erected a fence or safety net.  I think I even saw someone soling.

Cheer up!   You won't die yet.

Good question. The two principal theories for the origin of sars2 are animal-human interactions incl factory farming, and bio-lab manufacture for gain of function testing.

So why aren't there greater efforts to shut down factory farming - which alone, and regardless of sars2 - is a known source of human-virus contagion ?

Why have the BSL-4 labs not been immediately shut down to prevent any further viral leaks ?

The possibility that sars2 was weaponised is most certainly a threat that I don't easily dismiss. Natural immunity depends on progressive exposure to the virus world as it evolves, but if some innovation challenges us with a step-change threat - then that really IS a danger.

We can be grateful that sars2 is largely dealt with by natural immunity. But must not 'dismiss the ongoing threat' from the labs producing and leaking a 20% mortality virus.  

So contrary to your take I doubt many of those are due to someone who has covid then being hit by a car or any other non covid reason.

Your analysis is shit because you've failed to understand the impact of covid. When people get covid, they don't just drop dead a bit earlier than they would otherwise, which is the scenario your analysis considers. Some of them start to struggle to breath, get shit scared that they're going to die, and call an ambulance. When someone in the office has covid, no one else will go anywhere near them because the don't want to get sick themselves, and they don't want to pass it on to loved ones who are at higher risk. The impact is what effect covid cases have on society - particularly the health service and economy - not just deaths.

If you could retrain people who catch a bad case of covid to just sit at home and die quietly without bothering anyone, and for everyone who's around to covid-positive colleagues, friends, fellow theatre-goers and train travellers not to give a shit then your analysis wouldn't be completely stupid. Unfortunately, you haven't understood the problem.

Think about it again, but think more clearly this time.

Then they go to hospital and produce a high viral load and become very contagious, and medical staff loose an hour each way in and out of their ward with changing and disinfection procedures, and some of them still catch the disease and suffer or die anyway.

The issue of viral load during infections vs severity of illness doesn't seem to be settled but otherwise healthy, younger medical professionals have been catching it and suffering badly since the very beginning.  

What? That requires more explanation! 

Closing schools has definitely had a negative impact, no one doubts that, but on basis are you claiming that it was an error? The same basis as Toby Young?

One person's reliable source is another person's leftist/rightist propaganda. I read the Guardian, the Independent, the BBC and CNN. For some people, they are dreadful liberal lefty rags, and they prefer to put their faith in Facebook, Twitter and the Daily Express. There is no such thing as 'media control'. Different arms of the media argue in very different directions. 

I'd be interested to know why you think there is growing respect for Russia and China. From where I sit, there is little or no respect for their systems of government. 

And who or what are those powers? 

You could perhaps argue that, but I think you'd have to work hard to find a great of evidence of such a plan, given the utter balls-up that was made in the initial stages. I'm not sure a workable plan would have had the PM going to hospitals and assuring everyone that he had been shaking hands with all and sundry. 

He's right that the govt. appeared to have a clear plan, much of the govt. talk at the time was of encouraging the development of herd immunity. If it was social media that hijacked that plan then we all have a lot to thank social media for.

...be mentally ill. Boris Johnson, the man with the plan. Oh wait, sorry, the man in ICU with covid-19.

Like what? Wearing masks in public?

There has been an analysis of this basically saying that the plan was not upto scratch in terms of addressing the rise of social media and how this impacts pandemic planning.Basically the plan did not consider the impact of social media and that affected the messaging for the plan.

I am sure this was also highlighted in a HofC enquiry recently.

Hardly ground breaking.

Well keeping the schools open was, let us be clear, part of the pandemic plan( irrespective of your views on Toby Young). It was recognised as being critical back when the national plan was put into place.And I doubt Toby Young was a twinkle in their eyes.Going back to March yI can recollect, and I am sure you can, Whitty wanting to keep the schools open.

You can in a way see it now with face coverings in schools. Members of Sage saying that children are basically asymptomatic so in a nutshell why on earth do they need to wear masks.

Erm, *exactly* because they are asymptomatic!? Do you know what asymptomatic means?

Argue it with the guy from Sage on Radio 4.

That doesn't address the point. You claimed that "the govt had a plan to deal with the pandemic and it got hijacked by social media etc. The plan was subverted by this."

But there was no appropriate plan. Johnson boasted about shaking hands with covid patients and then ended up in ICU. So there wasn't a plan, was there, regardless of the impact of social media. You're just throwing in a red herring.

Just in case you're struggling to remember the events, I'll repeat, Johnson boasted about shaking hands with covid patients and then ended up in ICU.

There is no defence.

And I asked you on what basis you believe closing school was an error. You haven't addressed the point.

Almost everything you have written there is wrong. 

There are multiple measures of Covid deaths in the UK, with different advantages/disadvantages: any cause within 28 days of a positive test; any cause within 60 days of a positive test; death certificate mentions Covid and excess deaths against long term trends. 

Although most deaths in the UK are of older people in normal circumstances, and most older people have one or more chronic health conditions. Looking on the ONS site, the average 80 year old man, having survived to 80, could expect to have another 9 years. Basically, and rather counterintuitively, life expectancy goes up with age because you have already taken the people who died early out of the average calculation. There was a good feature on this a few weeks ago on R4's More or Less with an insurance actuary covering this exact point. It simply isn't correct to suggest that a significant proportion of the people who are recorded as Covid deaths under the 28 day measure actually died from something else and this proves that Covid deaths are being over-reported because:

1.  even for the fairly extreme example of an 80 year old man, he could otherwise have expected to live for another 100 months on average.

2. if many of these deaths were from other causes we wouldn't see a large excess of deaths over the seasonal average. 60,000 IIRC, even more than 41,000 on the 28 day measure. Unless you believe there is a hidden mass killer stalking the land unnoticed under cover of Covid.

3. not everybody gets tested (especially early in the outbreak) and there is quite a high false negative rate so there will be people who died of Covid that never had a positive test and don't count in the 28 day figure.

4. if somebody has a positive Covid test, but dies of Covid, 29 or more days later, their death isn't counted under the 28 day measure.

"by the time you start to get to  70 years of age you are going to die.  I'll probably die before you.  There is nothing at all you can do to avoid dying.  You have a chance of living a little longer though if you avoid cancers, dementia, lung diseases and so on. - but there are no guarantees."

Yes, you'll die some time and probably before me as I'm only 54 but for a 70 year old man, average life expectancy is 86 so it might be worth you trying to make it past this autumn by avoiding excessive exposure to those risks. And even if you aren't concerned about your own early death, I'd rather you didn't catch Covid then cough over my Mum.

There was a national pan for pandemics and has been for quite a few years.You are confusing this with Johnson's actions..

The issue over schools was that it was recognised that as part of the plan it was important  to keep education open for the obvious reasons.

I have no axe to grind over whether it was right or wrong.

Apparently it was quite a good plan for the flu!

And it might have a great plan if it was a different pandemic. It might have been good in this pandemic. We have no idea!

That's strange because you just said it was wrong and didn't give any reasons.

There are outline plans for all sorts of contingencies, including pandemic. None of these plans contain detailed instructions to the PM telling him where he should go, what he should say, who he should meet etc.

The plans assume someone in that position wouldn't just make shit up on the hoof and ignore advice. They (perhaps incorrrectly these days) assume anyone involved in implementing the plans is competent in their role.

Just remember that Whitty and others on Sage wanted to keep the schools open.

OK, I'll remember that. What does it tell me?

I doubt I'd have to because I doubt you understood what he said.

That was in the plan. It effectively then got hijacked/controlled by media... closing down schools etc

And the post analysis is that the planning did not recognise the impact that media etc would have on the plans.( as to why this was the case when the plans were drawn up in the last 10 years is beyond my comprehension,)

I don't remember that. So were they over ruled by the politicians or did they change their minds as evidence came in?

I'd like to know the actual numbers of deaths from Covid, not the figures that are given that include people who had Covid in March then got hit by a bus in August having their cause of death recorded as Covid. The amount of fudging that has gone on leads me to distrust the figures further. A friends wife is a doctor, she's been told to record deaths as Covid related when there is another cause of death. 

My mates mum died of it, proper died of it, so I'm not denying that there are deaths due to it I'm just wanting the true figure, not the inflated figure that's meant to keep us all scared. I wonder why the figures are fudged so much? Who benefits? What are they hiding and what are they pushing through the back door under the guise that it's all to protect us from Covid?

Tin foil hat time.

P.S. I'm not a denier, I wear a mask when required and don't cough on my nan. That reminds me, I should probably go see her sometime.

But the crucial thing you need to establish for your position to make sense is that there was an appropriate plan that was better than what actually happened. And there wasn't! And even if there was (which is impossible since covid is a new disease with an epidemiology unlike diseases we're familiar with) we'll never know whether that plan was actually better than the actual course of action, because there's no counterfactual.

No one can say whether closing schools was an error or not. All you can say is that policy changed - that much is true! Did it change because of social media - you think so, but there's no evidence. The fact that the gvt didn't plan for the impact of SM doesn't mean that SM hijacked policy. They didn't plan for the PM's chief bell-end getting caught with his pants down and destroying public confidence in the gvt either, did they? So did Cummings' antics "hijack policy" as SM did? Or was it just part of the ongoing catastrophic failure of the gvt to handle the crisis with a modicum of competence and integrity?

And did policy change for the better or the worse - you say the worse, but there's no evidence.

You're just throwing out foundationless random red herrings in a way that appears to be an attempt to excuse the abysmal, rock-bottom performance of the worst government in living memory. Presumably because you voted for them. 

I'm not sure that you've noticed, but if there's any fudging going on, it's to reduce the figures; hence the recent introduction of the 28 day limit, reducing the official death toll by 5k. And the 'run over by a bus' argument has been regularly debunked.

You say you're not a tin foil hat wearing denier, but your statements suggest otherwise.

I don’t know.  I haven’t seen any evidence 20,000 people haven’t ​​​​​​​been run over by a bus in the last 6 months, have you?

Was it in the plan (such as it was), or did the plan evolve in response to changing circumstances as more was learned about the nature of the pandemic. It would, after all, be idiotic to stick to a plan that was overtaken by improved understanding. Mind you, idiotic is par for the course with this government. 

That would be the ONS analysis of those who died with covid as a clear cause on the death certificate, over 50,000. Only the old 46,000+ UK government numbers had those who had covid who were killed by a bus etc. If you do the sums a very conservative estimate of about 60 people a week, who had at some stage have tested positive would be been expected to die now of a unrelated cause of death. 0.5% of the population have tested positive so 0.5% of average weekly deaths in the summer: possibly over a thousand in total since the end of March...but 5,000 deaths were removed from the official UK government numbers. 

Who told your Dr friend that as a matter of interest?... it's a criminal and professional offence (they would be struck off if caught) to falsify causes of death, so I assume the doctor ignored such dumb advice.

A recent r4 more or less programme stated that based on the figures they'd calculated the 28 day rule would produce a 10% swing in either direction, depending which way it was applied, but all the longer term trends would remain the same. 

Most people March to July were only tested when they were serious enough to be hospitalised, which could easily be two weeks into the infection. If those who were vulnerable in the main died 4-6weeks into the infection, it is clear a 28days cut off would catch the majority of fatalities. 

The 4000 or so newly lost genuine covid deaths from those official stats are about 10% of the overall official numbers and could even be the majority of would have genuinely qualified as weekly deaths right now.

It is prose like this which generates such fear - so you are guilty of making people suffer. For every one who suffers with covid, there are 1000 others who suffer with the fear of getting it and the regs imposed by BigGov (NB. not the obvious one)

Your reasoning is irrational and your language discourteous. 

hardly surprising when gov delayed orders of PPE - some of which - furthermore were deffective

Balls.

 No it isn't. If you think it is, show how.

Fine.

Ah yes the cunning invisible BigGov who somehow manage to be both big and small at the same time.

I was not aware of this, thank you for the correction.

She did ignore it, she was shocked it would even be suggested for the reasons you've stated.

What are you alluding to here: that there is a parallel shadow government (the "deep state" perhaps?) that is actually running things and imposing regulations on the populace?

You were going on about "reliable sources" earlier. What are your reliable sources? Where are you getting your understanding from? I remember some months ago when you were trying to explain to me why you believed Bill Gates controlled the WHO with some blog posts from academics that didn't say what you said they did and then a PDF "research report" in poor English by some chap who only seemed to have published anything on weird anti-vax conspiracy type "news" sites.

I like to think I have a healthy dose of scepticism,  I could always be mistaken  and I'm happy to be put right if I've got the wrong end of the stick.

That story really jumped out to me. Do you know who had told her this? Some senior doctor where she works? The Dept of Health? Dominic Cummings? Obviously to you it's your friend's wife and you know who everyone is, but to the rest of us it does sound a bit, well, "my friend's wife told him that she had been told..." and far fetched.

Quote: Thousands of oil and gas operations, government facilities and other sites won permission to stop monitoring for hazardous emissions or otherwise bypass rules intended to protect health and the environment because of the coronavirus outbreak, The Associated Press has found.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/thousands-allowed-to-bypass-environment...

Lots of underhand opportunistic stuff will have happened due to cv-19. That doesn't mean that those opportunities are the cause behind the policies.

There are some changed coronial processes due to COVID19, partly due to the surge in numbers of deaths and partly due to a need to simplify things from a health point of view, eg carrying out post mortems on infected people. That doesn't stretch to lying about cause of death.

Yep. Tin foil hat time indeed. A useful stat that is unaffected by the classification of cause of death is excess deaths.

Let me correct that for you:

For every one who suffers with covid, there are many others who havn't suffered from it because of the the fear of getting it and the regs imposed by the government.

The national pandemic plan was put together some time ago. It  gives an overall strategic view of the issues to be addressed and not the specifics. It was not thrown together this year or late last year.

Wow!  Have you ever watched or witnessed someone die of cancer?  Especially pancreatic cancer?  Death doesn't always come like in fairy tales, its a slow, slow and very painful death.  Try lung cancer.  You're breathing gets worse and......  Well work it out yourself.  When my mum was dying  of bowel cancer, she had a few months of being shit scared of dying, let alone the having cope with her shit coming out into a bag fitted to what was left of her bowels.   So people who die don't always die well.  And I think I had to call the ambulance when my mum got some serious pains before she was diagnosed.  I'm sure I won't be the first person to call an ambulance when someone was dying.

Actually quite a lot of the people who I knew and are now dead, died simply quickly and peacefully.  Its how a lot of us go - especially if it happens without warning.  Natural causes I think its referred to) A lot of people, as I mentioned aren't so lucky..  Covid is no different to any other disease in that respect and is certainly far, far less fatal than many other serious illnesses.  Cancer of the lung, for example, or perhaps a inoperable brain tumour .  You won't live!.  Are you old enough to remember Ebola or perhaps AIDS??

As for the rest of your comments about Covid, and how terrible it is:- Most people, including older people, survive.    Try and work it out for yourself.  On the BBC tonight 26 people died of it.  And there were around a 1000 new cases.

The media are a major problem, combined with folks lack of a sense of scale. 1000 new cases a day, sounds really bad etc.. but then that's approx. 120,000 new cases by Xmas..  sounds even worse. Or it could put as 191 years for 70m people catch it at a rate of 1000/day. 

Nobody has said otherwise.  But if 150,000 people were catching some other serious, contagious illnesses every day we’d have the same problem and same solution as for covid.

You’re ignoring every comment in this thread about the need to control the spread rate to preserve the functioning of the NHS.  Imagine calling that ambulance for your mum and being told “there are no ambulances and the hospitals are full.  Goodbye”.  We were perhaps one week away from that point, and the control measures now in place are far more about keeping us away from that point than they are individual risk from covid because that situation raises individual risk from every disease and accident across the population.

I just picked the figures from the BBC news.

Unless of course he died of something else later - as we all will.

 It simply isn't correct to suggest that a significant proportion of the people who are recorded as Covid deaths under the 28 day measure actually died from something else and this proves that Covid deaths are being over-reported because:

Thanks for that!.  So you are saying that the number of Covid-19 deaths are over exaggerated?

60,000 out of a population of. 60,000,000.  We are not immune to dying from diseases - its a tiny proportion of the population.   

And you chose to ignore my remarks about the general risk taking most of us take a lot the time in both our professional lives and our recreational hobbies.  Just because there is small  chance of dying in a car crash or falling off a cliff, or being run over, or smoking, or drinking.  Living and life is full of risk.  And your comments about avoiding risks on a climbing website is quite ironic and made me smile.  Thanks..

And of course the fear of Covid-19 is keeping those who may have something wrong with them away from their GP or hospital.  It is widely reported that thousands are expected to die because they've now either stopped going for treatment for whatever they were being treated for, and for many that includes cancer treatments - all put on hold for Covid-19.

So by not controlling Covid-19 are you saying people will be more inclined to visit their GP or hospital....that seems to be some bent logic to me. 

Yes, I have been ignoring the comments about the need for controlling it.  The OP wasn't asking that question.

But its a balancing act and whilst we are bending over backwards to try to stop Covid spreading we are are also committing other people to certain death, like the thousands of people who are estimated to be too scared to go to their GP for some ailment which could well be potentially dangerous, or the thousands people who have now stopped getting treatment because they are terrified of catching Covid-19.  Then there's the issue of the mental health effects of people who are now absolutely terrified of the illness and won't leave their house.  

I live in a village with only a couple of thousand people.  Yet several of them have not left their house once since this all began.  One of whom has blocked off a public right of way which passes her garden as she is terrified the virus is going to jump over her fence, into her house and kill her.  Like several of the others their shopping is bought for them on-line and delivered to their doors.  

The NHS has not been overrun.  The precautions we put in place, such as the mass morgues and the Nightingale hospitals haven't been used, thank God.

Thats not what I said is it!!  And it is not what I inferred.  So please don't do it yourself.  Read it again.

For a detailed analysis of the governments response from January to lockdown read Lawrence Freedmans report.... it covers how the government was out of step with the public mood in mid March. 

What are you trying to say? I don't understand the point you are making tbh... 

But you can't fairly ignore this whilst commenting about how low risk covid is currently - it's only that low risk because we are acting on the need to control it.  The choice boils down to reduced access to healthcare because of covid, or reduced access to healthcare because of covid risk control measures. There are no good choices, but there's less awful ones.  

I imagine they'd be reacting worse if we weren't controlling the spread of the virus and we'd had 200,000 deaths or more on the news.  We can't magically have a world without covid restrictions and without way more infections and deaths.

Excellent.  The fewer people in shops the better.  

That's awful, but sometimes the world is awful.  I wonder how they'd feel if they know 4-5 people killed by Covid, another dozen or so bed ridden and had watched news stories about ice rinks packed with bodies and 200,000 or more dead?  You seem to be arguing that we should have a world without the restrictions and without covid.  I couldn't agree more, but at this point I can no longer see an easy way of getting there.   Look to New Zealand where they have almost no cases and they're still having local lockdowns and mask wearing on public transport.

We all want the moon on a stick, but we need a plan.

Let's hope it remains that way through winter.

We're many decades out from living free of restrictions on this path even if mild infection proves harmless and confers meaningful immunity but with a little work we could be in a much much better position, living with much reduced restrictions (and much more capable surveillance), more safely, more prosperous by Christmas when we'll be traveling to meet our families (and potentially killing them). I'm not sure what's bonkers about that. We'd still be living and dying with polio by your reasoning, there's loads of such viruses.

Covid will start killing again when it's prevelant enough the vulnerable can't be practically kept apart from it, keep it surpressed and herd immunity is a pipe dream, our economy rots but our parents don't live menaced. Let it run riot and herd immunity will cost a 100k+ lives, many more disabled, many businesses ruined anyway and that's if it's possible, if we develop enough immunity. The middle ground isn't always the best option, currently we're shackled to a ticking bomb unable to do much, you say detonate it, I say defuse it. 

Jk

No. It’s the combined measures along with the natural immunity that push R down further and enable lifting of those measures but still eliminate it from areas. If 10% are immune then you only need to have measures that protect 60% of the people to make up the 70%. 
 

In March we had to lockdown hard because we had no idea where the infections were. We now know where the pockets are and the rest of us can get on with our lives with simple precautions. 
 

The fact that lots of people aren’t confident on getting on with their lives is something needed to be addressed. I’m not sure people have confidence that track and trace is working correctly. 
 

There’s growing evidence that spread outside is low and that indoors is where it’s most likely to spread, particularly within households. 
 

So going to big clubs is bad as there are are a few hundred people who are transients. Going into a classroom not bad because it’s the same 30 kids and there’s only 30 of them. Unless one of the selfish parents decided to go to clubbing in Spain while the rest of the class all sensibly stayed at home. 

Possibly because it isn’t.  Going off fatality rates, death rates, pillar 1&2 detection rates and the data showing the average age of detection lowering, test and trace is almost certainly catching less than 40% of new infections - nowhere near enough to be effective.

The media aren’t doing any hard analysis on this, only digging in to anecdotal stories from individuals and national level employees etc.

Quite simple really, living with risk, even extreme risk is actually quite easy for humans. When the choice is between a future without the essential elements needed to live and increased risk many will choose the risk. People in conflict zones eventually go about their daily lives, working and even socialising. To deny the needs of humans to live their lives is to deny their humanity.

Statistically, COVID or not we are still living longer than most humans in history, much to the detriment of our planet, risk is chronically low so surely we can take a little more? You're point on selectively quoted statistics is certainly true for both sides of the argument, there's plenty of people who pointed the fingers at BLM protesters and beachgoers for endangering humanity and yet neither incidents caused a documented spike in cases. Some people will be under and over cautious in the opinion of others but like climbing your risk assessment is yours alone to make.

Why does it need to be more effective? 

If R is below or even slightly above 1 and we are mopping up a good chunk that should be enough. 

The concerning thing is the 20-30 asymptomatic superspreaders going from bar to bar and party to party. To my mind there should be more emphasis on stopping this kind of behaviour. Pick a pub meet your mates have a good time - go home. 

Not in a pandemic it isn’t. Your risk affects everyone else. By assuming the risk you are acting selfishly. It’s vitally important that everyone behaves in the same way. Just one person behaving recklessly in Spain has led to 96 infections at one event. You could argue that the several hundred were acting recklessly. And you’d be right. But several thousand have been affected by their selfish actions. 

Because we’ve spent about a month with R about equal to one, 2.5 million undergraduates are about to shuffle around the country (and some into the country), teachers and pupils are about to return to school, and winter is coming.  All of these things will raise R, as will the end of university term and the festive season.

Sorry I haven't read the whole 150 posts. I'm late to the party.

I'm in the tourist industry. My business this year came within a gnat's bollock of going to the wall and next year is going to be f*cking hard. Savings, loans and other shite has meant that we'll survive - just!

I've done everything that has been asked of me since March, everything by the book. Now I'm pissed off, enough is enough. If this thing actually exists (questionable) it obviously only affects the elderly and those with underlying health conditions - what percentage of the world's 14 year olds have died from this? (I have a 14 year old daughter)

Today I went for lunch in a restaurant. I was asked to wear a mask from the front door to my table and then when I was sat down I could take it off. From the front door to the table was about 4 metres. Mugged! Embarrasing.

My point is this. Instead of paying X billion to furlough the whole f*cking country, pay X million to sheild the vulnerable and let the rest get on with it. Somtimes life is cruel.

PS - those that know me know I'm a lefty snowflake but this thing is ridiculous.

E

That remains to be seen. I would hope that the universities and colleges have some plans in place to keep transmission down. 
 

Hopefully they don’t include shutting the university and sending everyone back home, but I know a few academics and while being clever in their field, lack a bit of common sense.  
 

My point being with schools, workplaces and colleges, it’s the same people in the same places every day. New infections shouldn’t happen in large numbers. 

No, I'm saying it is not correct to say that. The clue is in where I wrote: "it is not correct to say" (as you had) at the start of the sentence. 

It is only as low as that (whether 40, 50 or 60k) because of the countermeasures taken. There is a wide range of estimates of average case fatality rates but, with overwhelmed health services >1% looks likely. Even 1% would suggest >500k dead before herd immunity and many more left with long term problems. A price worth paying to avoid short term inconvenience?

I didn't choose to ignore them so much as run out of steam. Yours was a very long post, mostly full of rubbish and I couldn't be bothered to answer every line. Yes, of course life is full of risk and none of us will get out of it alive. As you say, especially in the climbing field, we all make our own choices of acceptable risk level but, mostly that risk only affects us. The difference with measures to control an infectious disease is that taking a cavalier, we all die some day, approach doesn't just effect us but increases the risk for everybody else. If you want an everyday analogy, it's the difference between driving at 120 mph on a track day and doing it on a residential street, past a school as the kids are leaving for the day.

It doesn’t really work like that.  You are adding more links to a network of 67 million people.  Suddenly a household where infection would run its course send it in to a school, where it jumps to another household, then to the workplace of someone else from that household, then to someone else’s child in a different school...

The interactions in the schools may be quite static over time, but what you’re doing is building way more connective bridges which is exactly what allows more transmission routes and raises R.

In teaching, massive effort is going in to this.  Some of it is even on point...  But halls or residence and rammed student HMOs?  No adults present to police any rules, nightclubs shut, almost non existent personal risk, pubs distanced and dull, supermarket booze cheap, bored out of their skulls after 6 months enforced living with their parents and not getting their end away?  Some places are having bans on overnight visitors but who’ll enforce it?  Spread like wildfire is my guess, then disperse to the parental units at the end of term...

Because it’s impossible to do that. The vulnerable live amongst us. Many people don’t know they’re vulnerable until they get the disease (including you), vulnerable people are nurses and other key workers. Who will do those jobs? 
 

Do you not think some very clever people have already thought about it and ruled it out. 
 

The current position of testing and local lockdowns is the way to go. But it needs to be done properly. If you lockdown a town, people shouldn’t be going to the next town for a beer. That seems obvious to me, but seems not to others. 

But the schools won’t be operating like that. The classrooms will be static. Masks worn in corridors. People should have Covid safe workplaces. Masks in shops. 

You've entirely missed the point.

The reason we have to have measures in place to control covid is that it's a new virus that's extremely contagious. That means that when it's uncontrolled, you have exponential growth and our society - especially the health service and economy - can't handle that many sick people at the same time.

It was February when this was first explained. It's now the end of August.

All we can do is explain again and again to you that the reason the cases are low is because we've controlled it with a really harsh lockdown and gradually easing restrictions. You don't want to understand that, and we can't make you. Just carry on with your total misunderstanding of what's happening in the world, if you find it easier. It's really easy to understand correctly, but you won't get there because you're unwilling.

Isn't that only the case pre secondary school?  Once you get subject based classes, you're mixing a lot of kids, even if each classroom at a time is only 30

Yes but then staff and students form bridges between previously distant people.

My work > me > my Jr > your Jr > you > your work

Suddenly a new transmission route is opened between my work and your work, for perhaps 260 days over the next year.  Millions of new bridges able to transmit the virus are formed, just waiting for an infection to appear at one end and zip along to the other.  It doesn’t matter that the classrooms are static.  Increasing connectivity increases R.  Hence why test and trace needs to sort it’s shit out as schools really are close to the absolute priority.

”Static classrooms” should slow spread *within* a school, but that is separate to the effect of schools returning forming bridges between previously well distances groups.  There is a similar effect with universities but where people shuffle between different bubbles twice in ten weeks, not 50 times as with schools.  It’s “six degrees of Kevin bacon” stuff.

Oh, Enty. I'm disappointed.

Not as far as I understand it. When it comes to subjects the years will be segregated. 

An outbreak could potentially run through individual halls of residences and campuses  and fairly quickly and be done by the end of term. But wouldn’t be asymptomatic with everyone and testing would pick outbreaks out quickly. At which point you lockdown the campus. 

Here's my estimate of CFR in a selection Australasian countries:

India 1.84%

Philippines 1.54%

Indonesia 4.34%

China 5.45%

Singapore 0.05%

Australia 2.10%

South Korea 1.71%

Malaysia 1.35%

Hong Kong 1.63%

Thailand 1.70% 

Sri Lanka 0.40%

New Zealand 1.30%

Vietnam 2.62%

Taiwan 1.44%

Myanmar 1.19%

Cambodia 0.00%

Brunei 2.08%

Macao 0.00%

& a comparison with the top 5 most affected countries:

US 3.06%

Brazil 3.18%

India 1.84%

Russia 1.71%

S. Africa 2.17%

All based on today's Worldometers.  I'd be pleased to learn I'm right, but curious also to know if I'm wrong.

Fire away!

word ...

More data on case fatality rates (which are problematic as they depend on testing levels and state determination on what constitutes a C19 death):

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

What we really want to know is the typical Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), the number of expected deaths for those infected, which is not so easy (and depends on national age demographics). Worldometer had this at 1.4% for NY using a 'most likely' estimate rather than my more deliberately conservative estimate. In countries where the population demographic is much younger, like in Africa, you would expect much lower state IFR for the same viral characteristics.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/

Who are Labour HQ, and why did they stop Corbyn in 2017, preferring the tories ?

This is intolerable. The evidence is damning. 

Labour party men put Tories into power. Only in the last few weeks has this come out.

That does not show a "BigGov" otherwise it would have brought the tories closer to their ideal as well. All it shows is some centrists really, really hate the left and so prefer to drag the left wing party to the right to try and minimise choice (whether they do that conciously or not is a different question) and would prefer a hard right win in order to discredit the left.

This is exactly where the 'the powers' want you - to see no connection. The emerging trends for the new normal are authoritarianism & technocracy. The elements of surveillance control already existing in those countries (and Israel) are much envied by the plutocrats.

The tendency was well instated long before the pandemic

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-...

The evolution is evident here. NB. UK 'played copycat' on example from Spain & Italy 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/15/spains-new-normal-is-lockdown-by-a...

UN commentary. Don't believe jk saying current regs are just temporary. 

https://www.technocracy.news/un-may-see-new-normal-on-other-side-of-5-year-...

What the vaccine campaign brings with it. The pressure for the world's governments to 'act together' to solve this 'problem' will mount - and the focus will be on digital passports

https://edri.org/covid-tech-the-sinister-consequences-of-immunity-passports...

They are quite simply: the corporations which push the products, and the plutocrats which live off the proceeds.

Many of the latter have strong connections with the world banks, and don't forget 'WE'RE BROKE' - and were so before the pandemic. When you can't pay off your loans 'you' (normally the car : house under acquisition) are owned by the bank !

Of course, when governments can't pay off their national debts it's not supposed to work like that. Indeed countries have the authority to cancel national debt, but that doesn't make them popular with the plutocrats. Check out Iceland.

Finally some of those plutocrats have philanthropic belief in making the world a better place ie. their version of such. 'They know what is best for us'

??

All good stuff but Offwidth's method is classic distraction tactic - focus in on the stats. The energy lost in doing this is without limit because it's so vast.

Offwidth wants you to focus on the minutiae; what's important is the bigger picture

Thank you for that - I hadn't looked at quite the same angle before.

Theres’s more than a few people expecting their campus to make it about 2-3 weeks in to term before this happens.  Extensive plans in place for electronic teaching, but it’s hard to lock down an undergraduate cohort residentially - many halls of residence have (highly) shared kitchens or catered dining halls so you can’t both restrict people from shared areas and feed them.  I’m not aware of plans to deal with this but I wouldn’t particularly expect to be.  Some halls still have shared bathrooms...  If there is an outbreak you can’t send people home as many could be asymptomatic and false negatives from the test; sending them home to parents 20 to 30 years older would be borderline criminally negligent, although not as bad as discharging untested bed blockers back to care homes.

Teachers won't be. We will be rotating all day between different classrooms. I teach up to about 500 different kids a week, depending on amount of KS3 and 4 versus A level I'm doing.  Masks in corridors are only going to be in areas with lockdown isn't it?

What fence ?

"word" as in "The Word" (presumably of God).  Truth spoken.

We are all going to die at some point.

We will all differ on the degree to which we are willing to compromise the quality of our lives in order to prolong our own existence.

Offwidth wants you to focus on the minutiae; what's important is the bigger picture

I try to keep an eye on both ... 

Originally the advice was not to wear masks at all.

Now for communal areas its:

In lockdown areas they are required.

In other areas it is now a choice for the headteacher with no guidance either way from government.

Of course it took me a couple of seconds to write that so chances are the advice has changed in that time.

It's actually nothing like minutiae to face a highly contagious virus with an IFR of around 1% where we are a long way off herd immunity. Without social distance measures our hospitals would probably be overwhelmed in a month with tens of thousands more deaths.

As for Lee's wider picture, it's normal to share his concerns with globalised capital without succumbing to tin hat conspiracy nonsense, but this is a covid thread about why people are dismissing a lethal pandemic and Lee's views are an outlier in that.

Yep, I don't actually see any kids until the end of next week, so we may all be wearing hazmat suits by that point!

The problem, of course is that a) wearing a mask in shops and on public transport is hardly much of a compromise on the quality of our lives, and b) for most of us, it isn't our own lives we're prolonging, it's the lives of more vulnerable fellow humans.

I know selfishness is a common weakness in humans, myself included, but how selfish do people need to be to refuse to make tiny sacrifices in order to save the lives of thousands. And then to spread misinformation to such an extent that's designed to make out that, by acting selfishly, they and others are actually in the right all along? Would have been barely credible before the western world started imploding just a few years ago.

Did you read the comment from the "TN Editor" above the UN sec gen's reproduced statement? "The Secretary-General of the UN lays out two possibilities to get through the pandemic: either accept UN leadership today or go through a five-year global depression and then accept their leadership as the “new normal”. Either way, it’s the same outcome." That simply isn't what Guterres's article is saying, and for anyone with a basic understanding of how UN does, and doesn't, work, it is very clearly not what is going to happen.

I clicked one of the articles next to it to see what else is on the site: https://www.technocracy.news/swedens-senior-epidemiologist-wearing-face-mas... There the "TN Editor" comments "The global reaction to wearing face masks and practicing social distancing is based on pseudo-science and thus is a scam of epic proportions. The Technocrat agenda working against humanity has nothing to do with the health of the population, but rather the social engineering of it." which is patently ridiculous, but the headline completely misrepresents what Tengell said. His point is that it is dangerous to make people think that wearing a face mask will solve all the problems around covid, a perfectly sensible point. Indeed even they quote him (it's from an article in the FT but "Technocracy" just takes it from another "alternative news" site that has ripped it off the FT) saying:

“Face masks can be a complement to other things when other things are safely in place,” Tengell added.

“But to start with having face masks and then think[ing] you can crowd your buses or your shopping malls — that’s definitely a mistake,” he further urged.

You are using websites that are just 2020 versions of New World Order/black helicopter conspiracy shit. Elsewhere this morning you've written we shouldn't focus on details because they are designed to make us miss the 'big picture', but it seems you've invented a big picture and are using information sources that are utterly dishonest about the "details" to try and support your fantasy. 

If this was just your worldview in your head, well then fair enough, but the fact that you keep wanting to push it onto other people via these forums is more worrying. I don't want to make this personal and your willingness to share links like that uncritcally suggest naivete over malevolence, but SURELY you have some sort of little alarm bell go off in your mind when you read that sort of stuff? 

All that may be so, but my point was that Trump and Bolsonaro have not needed the pandemic to roll back huge swathes of environmental conservation measures. The Washington Post has a useful compilation of these:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollback...

Similarly, the New York Times has this useful commentary on Bolsonaro's approach to environmental exploitation:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/world/americas/bolsonaro-brazil-environm...

Make no mistake, Trump and Bolsonaro care little for environmental protections and their actions and those of like-minded politicians need to be opposed, whether there is a pandemic crisis or not. Simply attempting to attribute their environmental vandalism to the pandemic is to let them off the bigger hook. 

It's not just face masks is it?

It's all the activities and events that are curtailed or cancelled.

It's easy to try and shame others by talking of selfishness but isn't it selfish to expect  the next generation to sacrifice so much to protect those of us who are approaching the end of full lives?

The proliferation of conspiracy theories is the root cause of the problem you are describing. And they are dangerous, especially at the moment, there are plenty of people out there who do believe in them and act accordingly.

‘Lockdown’ means different things to different people doesn’t it? 
 

‘Lockdown a campus’ would mean to me that if you’re based on that campus you restrict yourself between the campus and home if you have no symptoms. Exactly the same as the whole country did in March. You ask people not to go out and socialise for a couple of weeks. We are taking about the top most clever people in the country here, they should be able to understand that fairly simply. 
 

If it’s in your halls of residence then you  lockdown that block. Same as if you have it at home or return from Holiday, you lock down your household. 

Treatment for cancer have continued, I know somebody who went through chemo in April.

Yes fear of Covid will have prevented people who should have been checked out from going to hospital, it's one of the many awful aspects of this, and another good reason why we need to get and keep it under control. Wishing it away with nonsense and waffle, which has basically been your contribution to this thread, won't get us anywhere.

That’s one person. The objective is to reduce the likelihood of transmission. You won’t ever stop it completely unless we come up with a 100% 1minute spit test. 
 

I suspect we are trying to mandate the whole country act in the same way. That’s the way governments and unions think. 
 

It’s a much better idea to let the headteacher decide how to mitigate the risks in their school. They know the layout, they know the numbers and more Importantly they know the individual staff and pupils.
 

On TV last night someone was saying their kids were expecting to wear masks and were actually shocked when they found out they didn’t have to wear them. And this seemed to have worried the kids more. That’s just one example of pupils attitude and will be different in a village school to an inner city one and behaviour will be different. 
 

The problem with ‘guidance’ nowadays is that people don’t see it as guidance they see it as a mandate and if they fail to follow it to the letter they’ll be hung out to dry.

And that’s really the nub of the problem. And has been since day one of the lockdown in the U.K.  - Here’s the guidance, work out how it affects you and follow a path. Then we had everyone else pointing fingers at everyone else claiming no one is following the guidance. It’s a British thing. 

You missed the bit where people shout that they want better or different guidance and then rush to accuse the governement of a u-turn when they offer that "better" guidance.

These events can happen later. We are in a Pandemic. The US are seeing a rise in children with heart problems following infection. So they may not die, but they may be disabled for life. But at least they had a nice 16th birthday party. 

Indeed. That’s pretty much the people who want everyone to have exactly the same rules and behave the same way to make it ‘fair’ but have no actual concept of what fair means. 

Or maybe we could have a bit more freedom to choose which things we think are worth doing?

When it comes to checking out governement guidance there is only one source that is worth using and that is the guidance published on the gov.uk website.

Whether you agree with it or not the guidance has always been clear, the problem comes when people start trying to cause confusion to push their own agenda. both extremes have been equally guilty of this in my experience.

In a pandemic you need an overall policy to steer behaviours. If you let people decide how to behave they force low paid people to work with no protection, or flock to the seaside towns.
 

If you issue guidance then people should decide how to apply the guidance. If you issue rules then people must follow the rules. 
 

Too often people have mixed up rules with guidance and that’s where the issues always have been. 

Have any Uni's restarted in Europe yet,a nd if so have there been any closures due to Covid outbreaks.

The problem there is, for most of us, the primary reason for taking precautions isnt for our own direct benefit but to protect others who are more vulnerable.

Are you sure that is the way that "most of us" are thinking?

We primarily protect the vulnerable by the ways that we interact with them.

It becomes somewhat trickier and more divisive when we start proposing restrictions on the ways that we interact with those who are not vulnerable.

So what exactly are you suggesting here? That we lock up all the vulnerable for a few months whilst we try and make sure that everyone else catches it in that time to create herd immunity?

not 'lock up' - just minimise risks for the vulnerable; otherwise, sounds good to me

glad someones' got it at last  

The definition of Herd immunity. Yeah! That's going to work well with vulnerable people.

the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results if a sufficiently high proportion of individuals are immune to the disease, especially through vaccination.

"the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease"

If vaccines don't produce meaningful protection then yes. Perhaps those in high risk groups with very public facing jobs will need to retrain and change career or role, economies can't be put on hold indefinitely. 

If the vulnerable choose not to isolate that is of course their individual choice. 

Oh, and if your contribution and some of the other contributions are so good and wise, no doubt the government will be seeking you out.  Or should have at the start.  Don't wait up!

Good luck.

Would have been nice, like.  There’s a good dozen or so posters I wish the government had spoken to, not to mention the hundreds of scientists who were signatory to the open letters circulating in early to mid March.

 I’ve also got some advice for them on testing eyesight...

More papers from the SAGE meetings have been published. In particular from behaviour modellers who proposed ways of making the public more compliant by a campaign of fear. 
 

The country simply was not ready to lockdown on mass. Some were but the way everyone complied in the end was really due to a campaign of fear. 
 

We now have an issue where the population is hamstrung by that fear. 
 

Amd we have conspiracists who have latched on to that fear and are saying it was unnecessary.

And we have people who think we should remain in lockdown.

We are in a bit of a pickle. 
 

Perhaps if the PM had spent a month gravely warning us it may be necessary at any point, and defining a set of “levels” and the criteria for triggering them, we would have been ready to accept it sooner.

Instead he want to a hospital he claimed had covid patients, made a point of telling the whole nation he shook everyone’s hands...

Gee, I wonder why people were not thinking lockdown was required?

... them he caught covid and nearly died

People keep telling me this, but I don’t see it.  Not in my contacts, not in my local area and not in the news.

The school teachers and unions are pressing for a return to schools as soon as possible. There’s been no u-turns this week? A few replies up you were saying Universities and schools were going to cause a rise in the R number...

I’m confused.  You said:

I said:

You said:

I have said I think universities and schools returning will raise R.  I agree with you on that.  I do not think me stating this shows me to be hamstrung by fear - at no point have I called for school return to be delayed.  I think it’s a statement of the bloody obvious, and one with no shortage of evidence to justify it as a prediction.

At no point have I shown myself to be hamstrung by fear.  On the contrary I have over the last few weeks suggested compensating measures to make sure R remains below 1 when schools and universities reopen as they must (especially schools); examples I have suggested include shutting pubs and increasing the effectiveness of test and trace through more local / regional devolution - with funding.

So I really don’t know what your point actually is?  Being hamstrung implies being stuck unable to make decisions; I know what decisions I want to see made, and why.  The reasons why are 4-6 potential weeks of exponential growth ahead of “fear”.

Also...

That’s a bold statement to make about our current government. We had one just this morning re: masks in English schools.

It was a question - question mark. A rhetorical one. There seem to be a lot of people worried about the schools returning. Maybe not fearful? 

Okay; I think I’m reading something different in to “fearful” - there’s a lot of worry around schools returning that I consider justified caution but no fear.  Well, not yet and hopefully not ever!

Nonsense misrepresentation of Guterres' statement and capability, also of my statement. I am saying, I thought quite clearly, the opposite: that in the presence of endemic CV19 and the absence of a medical breakthrough we will not be free of these restrictions (or versions of them) for years, probably decades. What would be short lived, 'very temporary', would be additional restrictions to bring R<<1 for a couple of months dramatically reducing the amount of virus in circulation, allowing a much more significant return to social and economic normality for the holiday season and beyond by unloading test and trace to do more thorough work and by freeing those still genuinely fearful for their lives to re-engage with society. In the longer run it would also free us quite significantly to travel to other countries which similarly pursue effective eradication and even to and from those that don't by freeing up resources to robustly manage with the risk of imported cases.

International coordination and cooperation to manage risk and deliver solutions? If this bothers you I'd suggest a switch to a full tinfoil balaclava.

jk

The following are a series of non-contiguous extracts - which of course I have cherry-picked  - therefore you are well advised to read the full article !

Quote: Various forms of immunity passport are a compelling idea. It sounds as if they could allow us to get back to a more normal life. But the reality is not as clear-cut as in the movies, and the threats to how we live our lives – in particular, the people that could be most harmed by such schemes – mean that we must be incredibly cautious.

Quote: In the last few weeks, “digital immunity passports”, certificates, apps, and other similar ideas have become prominent in discussions about how to exit from global lockdowns, with proposals popping up in Germany, Italy, Colombia, Argentina and the US to name a few. It is a legitimate policy goal to help people find safe ways to exist in this “new normal”

Quote: A new generation of “haves” and “have nots” ? The crux of the problem with immunity passports is that they will likely be used to decide who is and who is not allowed to participate in public life: who can go to work – and therefore earn money to support themselves and their family; who can go to school; and even who can stay in hotels. By essence, these “passports” could decide who can and who cannot exercise their fundamental rights.

Quote: In the context of an absence of scientific proof, significant risks created by false positives and false negatives and big concerns about data protection and privacy, the idea of digital immunity passports becomes even more sinister.

Quote: Don’t let science fiction become reality : Digital immunity passports are no longer the preserve of science fiction. There is a very real risk that these schemes are putting innovation and appearance over public health, in a move often called “technosolutionism”. Digital and biometric immunity passports not only threaten the integrity of our sensitive bodily and health data, but create a stratified society where those who can afford to prove their immunity will have access to spaces and services that the remainder will not– de facto becoming second class citizens. The New York Times calls this “immunoprivilege”.

Quote: Until then, <we know what we're doing> let’s rather focus on improving our national health systems, ensuring that research goes into preventing this and future pandemics (despite the push-back from Big Pharma) and that we build a new society free of virus such as COVID-19 and surveillance capitalism.

https://edri.org/covid-tech-the-sinister-consequences-of-immunity-passports...