Wuhan Killer Sneeze (thanks Tea)

[Leo]

Indeed. I don't know how connected those in nursing homes are but one option might have been for families to take their oldies back under their own roofs, where the virus may be less prevalent.

Now, it's hard to arrange things like that if you're not allowed to leave your house and make things happen.

Lowering the deaths by a significant amount is all about targeted management of the vulnerable: the old and the already ill. It's not about locking up the young and healthy.

unfortunately, many of the oldies in nursing homes here are past the point of being transferable to a relative's home, they require too much professional care that the typical family wouldn't always be able to provide. also, wouldn't that also result in the young/strong/healthy family members going out and potentially bringing the virus home with them? I think that's believed to be a source of nursing home infections, young staff coming to work and bringing it in from the outside.

 

[IdleRich]

That's right on the panic: his lockdown was the politically safest option, motivated by public opinion stirred up by the sensationalist press.
Neither existing science nor SAGE indicated that it would be a good idea - check the minutes.

Unfortunately I did check them a few weeks ago.
And yeah, I was disappointed and surprised to see that they hadn't been recommending it when it seemed as though the rest of the world had universally decided lockdown was a good thing and all of the scientists you saw on the news were demanding it and so on.
But yeah I take your point - at the time when I'd really expected the minutes to show that they (along with everyone else in the scientific community in the world) had been begging Johnson to lock the country down while he resisted, in fact they had been kinda been coasting cautiously along without saying too much. There's only really two possible explanations for this.... number one, the sinister presence of the Blind Driver himself overseeing the panel had so compromised, corrupted and finally broken it that its members simply found themselves too scared and ultimately unable to give the correct but unpalatable advice to the supreme leader. Or Cummings basically just altered the minutes retrospectively to get the lying Tories off the hook. Either way he needs to be held accountable for the damage wrought by his actions.

 

[IdleRich]

That's a reasonable assumption but this tack would not have worked for the government as the WHO have obliged the ONS to record all deaths-with from COVID and the press could make a lot of fuss about the discrepancy.

But my point still stands. The government has an incentive to decrease the official death numbers by any means they can. If it's going to cause a discrepancy then they have an incentive to try to find a way to remove this.
And remember (er, if I'm remembering correctly) that the point I was actually making was not "The UK government manipulated figures downwards" but (I think) that I was talking more generally and I was saying that "As a rule governments wanted to manipulate figures downwards not upwards" in response to your implication that governments were inflating the figures.
So your pointing out that it was hard for one government to do this effectively and get away with it, does not really address the issue.

 

[IdleRich]

That's right on the panic: his lockdown was the politically safest option, motivated by public opinion stirred up by the sensationalist press.

I think that we've both said (and so we presumably agree) at times that a really major issue has been that Johnson keeps reacting to public opinion and his message has been unclear and varying and confusing and blah blah blah even when at times he may have randomly struck on doing the right thing. So yeah what I was taking issue with the idea that Johnson suddenly ordering a lockdown in a kind of panicked response to criticism in the press and worrying why all the other countries had done it does not make him some kind of brave hero who was ahead of anything. In fact, I think what you're saying with the timescale is that SAGE were not advising to lock down, Johnson went along with that and then suddenly panicked cos all the other countries were doing it and the press were shouting at him and overrode them and ended up (once again) with a kind of halfway house that was later than all the other countries and yet was deviating from the scientific advice that he did have, all while claiming repeatedly that he had only followed the science. I mean, before we even come to considering the outcome that doesn't seem like great leadership to me.

 

[IdleRich]

The government's policies have been pretty much dictated by majority public opinion with a two-week lag so as not to make the causality obvious.

I think we're pretty much one hundred percent agreed on that particular piont.

 

[IdleRich]

Rich. Tea. Biscuits.

Good.

Bore-born(e) biscuits

Really bad.

 

[IdleRich]

There's only really two possible explanations for this.... number one, the sinister presence of the Blind Driver himself overseeing the panel had so compromised, corrupted and finally broken it that its members simply found themselves too scared and ultimately unable to give the correct but unpalatable advice to the supreme leader. Or Cummings basically just altered the minutes retrospectively to get the lying Tories off the hook. Either way he needs to be held accountable for the damage wrought by his actions.

Obviously I'm joking there... but it's quite funny that I often saw the point made that Johnson kept claiming to be following the science, but UK is acting differently to all the other countries that are also following science, so (sarcastically) UK science must be different from the science of other countries... but it actually kinda turned out it was. Why was that?

 

[IdleRich]

This kind of thing totally baffles me....
`

“We don’t live in a communist country! This is supposed to be America,” said Tee Allen Parker, who has banned wearing of masks at her bar.

But what's the difference between ordering someone to wear a mask and ordering them not to?

 

[chava]

Please someone obliterate American corporate culture.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

There's only really two possible explanations for this.... number one, the sinister presence of the Blind Driver himself overseeing the panel had so compromised, corrupted and finally broken it that its members simply found themselves too scared and ultimately unable to give the correct but unpalatable advice to the supreme leader. Or Cummings basically just altered the minutes retrospectively to get the lying Tories off the hook. Either way he needs to be held accountable for the damage wrought by his actions.

This smacks of conspiracy-theorising: not only does SAGE comprise tens of reasonably independent scientists, these scientists have also been speaking to the press on their own behalf...and furthermore Cummings said in his televised interview that he was in favour of lockdown.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Johnson went along with that and then suddenly panicked cos all the other countries were doing it and the press were shouting at him and overrode them and ended up (once again) with a kind of halfway house that was later than all the other countries and yet was deviating from the scientific advice that he did have, all while claiming repeatedly that he had only followed the science. I mean, before we even come to considering the outcome that doesn't seem like great leadership to me.

Yeah, it's terrible leadership, I agree.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

But my point still stands. The government has an incentive to decrease the official death numbers by any means they can. If it's going to cause a discrepancy then they have an incentive to try to find a way to remove this.

The governing party's main aim is to be reelected, that's all; the coronavirus crisis is perceived to be a volatile and unpredictable situation that will be portrayed in the worst possible light by the press; consequently they're best off priming the public for the worst (eg. by telling them to expect another Italy) and narrowing the gap between the press' and their own portrayal of the situation as much as is possible, to minimise the extent to which the opposition could claim that they would have acted otherwise....which is how it's played out: Labour have generally argued that they would have been slightly more rigorous than the Tories - a small quantitative difference rather than the qualitative difference of no-lockdown vs. lockdown

 

[mixed_biscuits]

I think that's believed to be a source of nursing home infections, young staff coming to work and bringing it in from the outside.

Maybe the Turkish(?) tactic of paying nursing home staff to live on site is the way to go here.

 

[IdleRich]

This smacks of conspiracy-theorising: not only does SAGE comprise tens of reasonably independent scientists, these scientists have also been speaking to the press on their own behalf...and furthermore Cummings said in his televised interview that he was in favour of lockdown.

That was a joke. See above.

 

[chava]

Maybe the Turkish(?) tactic of paying nursing home staff to live on site is the way to go here.

Did they really do that? I heard they basically jammed the doors shut to the elderly, but I thought the idea that staff should join them was a crazy idea by a scientist-type who later got banned from twitter (or FB).

 

[Mr. Tea]

The governing party's main aim is to be reelected, that's all; the coronavirus crisis is perceived to be a volatile and unpredictable situation that will be portrayed in the worst possible light by the press; consequently they're best off priming the public for the worst (eg. by telling them to expect another Italy) and narrowing the gap between the press' and their own portrayal of the situation as much as is possible, to minimise the extent to which the opposition could claim that they would have acted otherwise....which is how it's played out: Labour have generally argued that they would have been slightly more rigorous than the Tories - a small quantitative difference rather than the qualitative difference of no-lockdown vs. lockdown

This is rather at odds with Johnson's early insistence that it was nothing much to worry about, being seen shaking hands with patients while wearing no PPE and so on, isn't it? And I remember the Telegraph, at least, taking the line that this was "no worse than ordinary flu" and saying only a few people had died, while the death rate even at that point was in the several hundreds.

Don't forget, also, that the timing of the start of lockdown is a factor at least as important as the stringency of the lockdown.

I am still totally unconvinced that the government wants us to think the situation is worse than it is. That's just not what governments do. Whatever happened to "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON"?

 

[IdleRich]

I am still totally unconvinced that the government wants us to think the situation is worse than it is. That's just not what governments do. Whatever happened to "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON"?

Yeah it's a completely untrue.

 

[luka]

something to cheer poor old biscuits up

 

[version]

 

[WashYourHands]

Date of UK lockdown - 23rd March