Coronavirus - potential Black Swan?

[NobodyInParticular]

2 minutes ago, Dr Doom said:

Enrich themselves, no different to all the other dodgy contracts handed out in the name of the crisis

So you'll know who is being enriched how, then, with evidence. 😂😂😂😂

[Dr Doom]

1 minute ago, NobodyInParticular said:

Because those measures that combat the spread of COVID also combat the spread of other infectious diseases prevalent in winter. It's no mystery. In spring excess death rates ran ahead of COVID deaths. 

Yes, some would could call those lockdown/SAGE deaths.

[NobodyInParticular]

16 minutes ago, Dr Doom said:

Withdrawal of usual medical treatment, people too scared to go to hospital dying at home, suicide, deaths of despair....etc

Some of that will be true. But not over 1000 a day, surely? And they wouldn't be in ICU beds with respiratory issues, would they. 

[NobodyInParticular]

1 minute ago, Dr Doom said:

Yes, some would could call those lockdown/SAGE deaths.

People not dying of flu are deaths? 

[Dr Doom]

1 minute ago, NobodyInParticular said:

So you'll know who is being enriched how, then, with evidence. 😂😂😂😂

Fat brown envelopes, or however it works nowadays. Corruption is hard to prove, but is rife in government.

[nightowl]

32 minutes ago, NobodyInParticular said:

See "where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate", that is usually where it is the cause of death. 

The phrase "mentioned on the certificate" implies it doesn't need to be the cause of death. I do realise from experience cause of death isn't an exact science either -someone else dying, not me btw!

[captainb]

11 hours ago, Confusion of VIs said:

Hard to see how the data could be sketchy given the current death rates.

Function of actual transmission rates which we don't actually know, just positive tests. 

That's the sketchy side. One reasonable argument as seen from the ons survey is this latest wave has a large slant of young people who have got bored of restrictions getting infected. Much less likely to get bad symptoms, get tested etc etc so actual case count is very high. 1 in 30 in London each week is not nothing. 

[NobodyInParticular]

Just now, Dr Doom said:

Fat brown envelopes, or however it works nowadays. Corruption is hard to prove, but is rife in government.

The PPE stuff wasn't well hidden. Why the sudden change in competence in hiding corruption? Or maybe (Occam's Razor) this time it isn't. 

[Dr Doom]

Occam's Razor assume corruption

[NobodyInParticular]

3 minutes ago, nightowl said:

The phrase "mentioned on the certificate" implies it doesn't need to be the cause of death.

It explicitly notes this. It's because the cause of death is normally the proximal one, for example, it might be heart failure caused by COVID, but it wouldn't say "it's covid what done it". Plus there will be a level of uncertainty of mechanism without 1500 autopsies a day. If run over then COVID isn't likely to be mentioned. 

3 minutes ago, nightowl said:

 

Same experience. Proximal cause used. 

[NobodyInParticular]

2 minutes ago, Dr Doom said:

Occam's Razor assume corruption

Sorry, not how the Razor works. You are assuming more, not less, complication. 

[Dr Doom]

5 minutes ago, nightowl said:

The phrase "mentioned on the certificate" implies it doesn't need to be the cause of death. I do realise from experience cause of death isn't an exact science either -someone else dying, not me btw!

It's a really difficult thing for sure. In fact there's a whole dedicated subsection of science focused on this. But it's all been thrown out of the window because ooh emergency pandemic COVID19. Along with approval process for vaccines it seems. Sorry if I seem a bit cynical. Just find it deeply disturbing all of it.

[satsuma]

15 minutes ago, captainb said:

Function of actual transmission rates which we don't actually know, just positive tests. 

That's the sketchy side. One reasonable argument as seen from the ons survey is this latest wave has a large slant of young people who have got bored of restrictions getting infected. Much less likely to get bad symptoms, get tested etc etc so actual case count is very high. 1 in 30 in London each week is not nothing. 

I tend to believe the current numbers, of Covid cases, are due to young people meeting up and ignoring the rules.  I also think the higher hospitalisation of younger people may be the same in terms of root cause.  I would hope we see the vaccine take effect soon, the scenario where it does not work is not a good one.  

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

30 minutes ago, satsuma said:

I tend to believe the current numbers, of Covid cases, are due to young people meeting up and ignoring the rules.  I also think the higher hospitalisation of younger people may be the same in terms of root cause.  I would hope we see the vaccine take effect soon, the scenario where it does not work is not a good one.  

 

I suspect it will only have 50% of the stated effectiveness in the over 70s.

The issue isn't so much the virus as dodgy immune systems. 

The dodgy immune systems are also what are helping drive viral resistance. That Cambridge study patient who was given plasma with antibodies and then drove several rounds of mutation before dying is a case in point.

I do think that medicine/science, by trying too hard to save these individuals is causing unintended consequences. 

 

[Confusion of VIs]

2 hours ago, Dr Doom said:

It's not a "theory". The official uk government definition of covid death is if you get run over by a bus, test positive for covid, and then die within 28 days that is a covid death.

And if you die of Coved 29 days after a test it is not a Covid death.

It is a roughly accurate statistic, most people can understand that. Why not you?

[Dr Doom]

1 minute ago, Confusion of VIs said:

And if you die of Coved 29 days after a test it is not a Covid death.

It is a roughly accurate statistic, most people can understand that. Why not you?

It is a very "rough" statistic I agree. By rough I mean massively wrong and misleading.

Cancer, Heart Attacks, Stroke, as long as you have a positive PCR result in the last 28 days, it's a "covid related death".

[Will!]

15 hours ago, Bruce Banner said:

It might, but so many differing opinions and we have a PM who changes his mind almost daily.

'Too early to say': scientists unsure if UK Covid variant is more deadly (msn.com)

From where you sit, is the government doing a competent job with Covid? 

I'd could write pages about what has been done wrong, but I'll restrict my answer to two things Boris had direct control over, as distinct from problems he inherited or operational problems where things would have gone wrong whatever the policy.

1.  Test & Trace.  This was too important to put an incompetent crony in charge of.  If, as @Confusion of VIs said, Boris's political career wouldn't have survived a 'let it rip' approach and we see he's now suffering politically because of the lockdown, then even basic political self-preservation should have told him that effective T&T was the only way between the Scylla of lockdown and the Charybdis of 'let it rip'.

A competent T&T head would have told Boris that he needed effective quarantine measures for those entering the country to reduce the flow of infection 'upstream' of T&T until the workload T&T could handle was established.  That obviously didn't happen.

2.  Failure to prepare in the summer.  Coronaviruses are seasonal, and it was obvious by the start of May that hospitalisations were on the wane.  Boris's decision making at that time may have been affected by his own hospitalisation, but there was plenty of time over the summer to prepare the public for disruption over the winter.  There's a bed crisis every winter in the NHS and one of the lessons of the swine flu pandemic was that patient cohorting for infection prevention and control purposes imposes a significant overhead on inpatient services.  The NHS only returned to Incident Level 4 on 4th November.  In my view it should never have left it.

 

Edited January 24, 2021 by Will!

[ticket2ride]

11 hours ago, Arpeggio said:

If we have so far given ~4 million people in priority groups a first injection. Why haven't we given them the 2nd dose for fuller protection yet? With so many deaths why aren't we doing this?

We need to do this and get back to normal as soon as possible with the vaccine passport.

This woman can hardly contain her enthusiasm!

Or these!

https://digital.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/publication/r18hs017045-lazarus-final-report-2011.pdf

"fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported"

Bock bock! Chicken Boris. Don't be a chicken, Jab the mofos with their 2nd mRNA injection. Prove the skeptics wrong.

Sputnik jab for you, comrade.

[Bruce Banner]

20 minutes ago, Will! said:

I'd could write pages about what has been done wrong, but I'll restrict my answer to two things Boris had direct control over, as distinct from problems he inherited or operational problems where things would have gone wrong whatever the policy.

1.  Test & Trace.  This was too important to put an incompetent crony in charge of.  If, as @Confusion of VIs said, Boris's political career wouldn't have survived a 'let it rip' approach and we see he's now suffering politically because of the lockdown, then even basic political self-preservation should have told him that effective T&T was the only way between the Scylla of lockdown and the Charybdis of 'let it rip'.

A competent T&T head would have told Boris that he needed effective quarantine measures for those entering the country to reduce the flow of infection 'upstream' of T&T until the workload T&T could handle was established.  That obviously didn't happen.

2.  Failure to prepare in the summer.  Coronaviruses are seasonal, and it was obvious by the start of May that hospitalisations were on the wane.  Boris's decision making at that time may have been affected by his own hospitalisation, but there was plenty of time over the summer to prepare the public for disruption over the winter.  There's a bed crisis every winter in the NHS and one of the lessons of the swine flu pandemic was that patient cohorting for infection prevention and control purposes imposes a significant overhead on inpatient services.  The NHS only returned to Incident Level 4 on 4th November.  In my view it should never have left it.

 

Interesting, thanks. 

With hindsight, what do you think would have been the outcomes of the three options... Scylla (implemented properly, without the eat out and Christmas breaks), a competently implemented T&T, and Charybdis?

[anonguest]

2 hours ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said:

I disagree.

I think he is an economist.

Actually I agree with a good chunk of what Doom says. People just get over emotional about "saving lives", even if the lives have little value for the person themselves and society.

I broadly agree with that statement. It's an interesting, and I believe valid, point that really needs to be debated but doesn't get done properly precisely because of the overly emotional responses of most people.  Not just coronavirus but other social issues where deaths may be involved.

As a pure hypothetical.....

I wonder how many of the 'we must stop covid at all costs' brigade would have exactly the same stance IF, say for example, covid was a disease that only afflicted prisoners in jails?  And it's mortality rate was way higher than it is at present - nearly 100%.  That would mean, IF kept in jail, more than 80,000 dead (UK prison population approx. 83,000).  The simplest solution to de facto guarantee their survival would be to, at least temporarily for the duration of the pandemic, release them.

How many would agree to let that happen?

 

Edited January 24, 2021 by anonguest

[zugzwang]

28 minutes ago, Bruce Banner said:

Interesting, thanks. 

With hindsight, what do you think would have been the outcomes of the three options... Scylla (implemented properly, without the eat out and Christmas breaks), a competently implemented T&T, and Charybdis?

Swimming against a riptide is tough but it's worth it to get to dry land.

The alternative is passively drifting out to sea.

[Dr Doom]

13 minutes ago, anonguest said:

How many would do agree to let that happen?

That did happen to a limited extent

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-prison-releases

I don't remember being asked

[anonguest]

Just now, Dr Doom said:

That did happen to a limited extent

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-prison-releases

I don't remember being asked

Interesting. I must have missed that bit of news back then. The hypothetical question still stands though.

[zugzwang]

1 hour ago, Confusion of VIs said:

And if you die of Coved 29 days after a test it is not a Covid death.

It is a roughly accurate statistic, most people can understand that. Why not you?

Everyone can understand it. Denialists/Trumpers dispute it for ideological reasons.

[Dr Doom]

For logic reasons