Wuhan Killer Sneeze (thanks Tea)

[IdleRich]

Ok, so say early lockdown would have saved 20,000 people who were largely confined to quarters anyway - that's 1 in 3000 people.

Negligible then?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Ok, so say early lockdown would have saved 20,000 people who were largely confined to quarters anyway - that's 1 in 3000 people.

That's easy to say if it's not your parents/grandparents dying in horrific pain while hooked up to a ventilator.

And I've just made the argument a few posts ago that starting lockdown a few weeks earlier might have made it possible to end lockdown several months earlier. So even if you don't care about deaths at all, that is surely an important economic consideration?

It looks to me like we've fucked up about as hard as possible in both directions at once - economic hardship of a very lengthy lockdown and a huge number of unnecessary deaths (not forgetting all the people who've survived but now have serious health problems).

 

[slackk]

Mate of mine died of it at 52. Quite healthy. Its not always so cut & dry

 

[mixed_biscuits]

That's easy to say if it's not your parents/grandparents dying in horrific pain while hooked up to a ventilator.

There's a reason why care home infectees were not subjected to extensive help in hospitals: the NHS decided that the costs outweighed the benefits and assessed this monetarily: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924

Same reason why the government saw fit to let particular people die in order to save possible people in the future, by immorally planning for the impact of COVID according to the reasonable worse case rather than the most probable case.

The 'that's easy for you to say' refrain is not especially useful: many things of value (eg. alcohol, sugar, driving, flying, sports) also have the potential to harm - and this harm will not be doled out evenly or 'fairly'...just because some people will draw the short straw doesn't mean that we shouldn't draw straws at all.

And I've just made the argument a few posts ago that starting lockdown a few weeks earlier might have made it possible to end lockdown several months earlier. So even if you don't care about deaths at all, that is surely an important economic consideration?

You didn't make an argument, you just quoted SAGE, without supporting reasoning.

Oxford said at the time that lockdown was not required as handwashing and distancing had already secured most of the possible benefits.

Early lockdown just puts off the inevitable by a few weeks, unless one does a really good job, whereupon one is stuck - see NZ. This is playing out in the US as states that locked down early inevitably still get hit on opening up.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Why, though? The stark fact is that this disease is not affecting all countries equally, or even nearly equally. The UK was rated as recently as last year as being one of the best-prepared countries in the world for dealing with a pandemic of this sort, even after a decade of concerted attacks on the NHS and the scientific and medical establishment. Yet for a while we had the second-highest death toll of any country, until we were overtaken by a developing country with about three times our population. I don't think this is "just one of those things".

The pandemic has been a health test for countries, in every sense. We've done badly because the country is generally weak: top-heavy with the elderly (like Italy), a high proportion of people who don't take care of themselves (eg. Boris), dysfunctional health system, corrupt elites, too much money swilling around doing nothing of value but lending itself to this corruption, disastrous media stuffed with intellectual mediocrities and beholden to the government, sluggish and poor decision-making, credulous and supine public.

I found it interesting that the government had prepared us for poor performance before the fact by telling us to expect another Italy.

It should be a wake-up call that we're bottom of the heap in more ways than one...come this winter of discontent I think many will realise just how rotten the apple is.

 

[IdleRich]

I'm still reeling from these two claims made on the last couple of pages.

a) The government did make a mistake in delaying lockdown by a week as SAGE requested but it wasn't that serious cos it (that single error) only caused the avoidable deaths of on in 3,000 of the UK population
b) The government is lying about how serious the virus is and how many people have died through their incompetence. They are greatly OVERSTATING those numbers cos they don't want anyone to spot the truth, which is that lockdown was not necessary and they are so afraid of being sued for lost earnings they would rather dishonestly accept the blame for thousands of deaths.

To me those are absolutely fucking way out there batshit crazy ideas but they passed with almost no remark. Am I going mad or am I in the upisde-down or what?

 

[Leo]

The pandemic has been a health test for countries, in every sense. We've done badly because the country is generally weak: top-heavy with the elderly (like Italy), a high proportion of people who don't take care of themselves (eg. Boris), dysfunctional health system, corrupt elites, too much money swilling around doing nothing of value but lending itself to this corruption, disastrous media stuffed with intellectual mediocrities and beholden to the government, sluggish and poor decision-making, credulous and supine public.

I hate to say it but this is the way of the world. this is mankind, for the most part. we can hold up the ideal, push for the right thing to do, but there are few ideal societies. call me a cynic but regardless of how much scientific data you crunch, I doubt the US or UK will get any better at this.

 

[IdleRich]

According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, which relies on official government data, the US has recorded a startling 77,300 new coronavirus cases in 24 hours.
This is the highest one-day total for the pandemic so far. The US has consistently broken one-day records in recent days, but this is by a fairly wide margin.
10 July marked the last global record increase, with 67,800 new cases in the US.

And meanwhile Trump is selling magic beans from the Resolute Desk... it's twat and the mushroom stalk.

 

[Mr. Tea]

b) The government is lying about how serious the virus is and how many people have died through their incompetence. They are greatly OVERSTATING those numbers cos they don't want anyone to spot the truth, which is that lockdown was not necessary and they are so afraid of being sued for lost earnings they would rather dishonestly accept the blame for thousands of deaths.

Lewis has been banging this drum on Twitter and FB for months. His position is that the government wants us all to panic unnecessarily, wants us to think they've done a far worse job of keeping us safe than they have, and that the lockdown - which has cost many billions of pounds to businesses from small independent shops to major airlines - is being forced on us, on the false pretence of the pandemic, because of capitalism... somehow.

I don't think Lewis knows much about governments. Or capitalism, come to that (the fact that he is an entrepreneur notwithstanding).

 

[Mr. Tea]

The pandemic has been a health test for countries, in every sense. We've done badly because the country is generally weak: top-heavy with the elderly (like Italy)...

You're just making excuses for the government again, and this one doesn't even slightly work:

The UK, it may suprise you, is actually one of Europe's more youthful countries, and 41st overall - its residents are 40.4 years old, on average. The US (37.6 years) comes 63rd.

Mapped: The world's most elderly (and youngest) countries

www.telegraph.co.uk

The UK is younger than many countries that have fared far better than we have: Canada (234 deaths/1M population), Germany (109/1M), Greece (an astonishing 19/1M), Japan (an even more astonishing 8/1M), etc. etc. (We're on 664, higher than any major country bar Belgium).

 

[mixed_biscuits]

That was from 2014 and doesn't give the proportion of the elderly.

 

[Mr. Tea]

That was from 2014 and doesn't give the proportion of the elderly.

These stats are from three years ago:



So more than half the countries in Europe have a bigger proportion of over 65s than the UK does.

It's true that we're the fattest country in Europe but in global terms we're not even in the top 25, so that by itself doesn't explain it (we have lower obesity rates that New Zealand, for example, yet our death rate is 166 times worse than theirs).

Again, I'm just hearing excuses, and not even good ones.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

To be fair, I think you're more of a fanboy of the government than I am, as you think lockdown was a good idea.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

 

[IdleRich]

They are counting people who die of natural causes as coronavirus deaths if they tested positive at any time previously. Not clear how many deaths were recorded in this way

Probably none I'd expect if it turns out to be like every other long forgotten breathless announcement of over-counting which has been made over the last few months... but if there are loads then why is Hancock revealing it when - according to you - it should be exactly what he wants in that it is overstating the number of deaths and making the government look like they killed more people.

Let's be honest Hancock repeatedly lied yesterday about the date they started lockdown in an attempt to make the government look more decisive.
Last wee or whenever it was confirmed that the government (via Hancock) were completely lying about their oft-disputed test numbers, in an attempt to make what they had done in that respect look better.
Now the government appears to be desperately flailing around trying to take the focus off the imminent release of the Russia Report, forgive if I don't get too excited about yet another dubious statement by Cockhand which would, if true (unlike any of his other statements) make the government look more competent.

 

[WashYourHands]

To be fair, I think you're more of a fanboy of the government than I am, as you think lockdown was a good idea.

ah, an agitator.

I'm still reeling from these two claims made on the last couple of pages.

a) The government did make a mistake in delaying lockdown by a week as SAGE requested but it wasn't that serious cos it (that single error) only caused the avoidable deaths of on in 3,000 of the UK population
b) The government is lying about how serious the virus is and how many people have died through their incompetence. They are greatly OVERSTATING those numbers cos they don't want anyone to spot the truth, which is that lockdown was not necessary and they are so afraid of being sued for lost earnings they would rather dishonestly accept the blame for thousands of deaths.

To me those are absolutely fucking way out there batshit crazy ideas but they passed with almost no remark. Am I going mad or am I in the upisde-down or what?

i wouldn’t try and mediate with someone so belligerent, all-knowing and inflexible to different lines of reasoning outside their own parameters of ignorance.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

As explained before, the govt are constrained by the WHO reporting requirements for all /with cases (that otherwise would not be public) and are conceding ground to the fearmongering media to win the larger political battle...if they attempted to minimise deaths they would be crucified

 

[Mr. Tea]

To be fair, I think you're more of a fanboy of the government than I am, as you think lockdown was a good idea.

Well it's not a competition to see who hates the government the most. My main point is that your critique of the government revolves around the idea that they have lied to us to make us think the situation is far worse than it really is. This is not what governments do. What government actively strives to look bad and make itself unpopular? And if the argument is some sort of conspiracy theory that it's to justify the lockdown, then why were they so reluctant to introduce the lockdown in the first place? And who exactly does it benefit? Nobody is making money out of this, in fact everyone is losing money hand over fist.

I think a prompt, properly implemented and effective lockdown would have been a good idea. The lockdown we eventually got was none of those things. And then Cummings went on an illegal cross-country drive and suffered no legal or professional consequences whatsoever, so the whole country thought "Ahh fuck it, let's just hit the beach".

I'm not in favour of lockdowns for the sake of lockdowns. I'm bored out of my mind and am looking forward to seeing friends/relatives and, bizarre as it may sound, even getting back to physically going to work a couple of days a week.

 

[IdleRich]

As explained before, the govt are constrained by the WHO reporting requirements for all /with cases (that otherwise would not be public) and are conceding ground to the fearmongering media to win the larger political battle...if they attempted to minimise deaths they would be crucified

As explained several times, the WHO method seems the most reasonable way to count it - especially now that Italian investigation has concluded thst more than ninety percent of such deaths were directly caused by c19, and almost thirty percent of those deaths were people with absolutely no underlying condition.
Also I'm fucking glad that the UK government is constrained in that way as they have been caught again and again trying to tell utterly outrageous lies about almost every aspect of the pandemic and their response to it.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

The WHO recording protocol is designed to track spread, not assess severity, so it's not the ideal instrument.

That Italian stat is out of whack with our 1400-of hospital deaths.

Even with a 90%-of and their deleterious lockdown, Italy's outcome is in the same ballpark as their 2017 flu