Coronavirus - potential Black Swan?

[zugzwang]

Christ on a bike. Sense at last!

 

Labour calls for incoming travellers to UK to be placed in quarantine hotels

The shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds has called for quarantine hotels for incoming travellers to the UK and criticised the manner in which services were outsourced – though without providing a comprehensive alternative.

He told Sky News:

We need now to put additional protections in place. We do need that effective border testing regime. And we also need an effective quarantining regime, which we’ve not had. The government did not introduce a comprehensive quarantining regime until June last year. The UK was an international outlier. Back in May last year, it was only the UK, Iran, Luxembourg and the US Virgin Isles that had no travel protections in place.

The government introduced a quarantining system far too slowly in June of last year. The government’s own figures show that between June of last year and September around about two million people had their passenger locator forms, their details if you like, spot-checked by Border Force at the border. Only around 3% of those were successfully contacted to ensure they were quarantining, now that just isn’t good enough, it isn’t effective. The government hasn’t had a grip on this situation throughout. We desperately need them to get a grip and have that comprehensive plan in place.

The Labour government would have taken a very different approach to the set-up of the quarantining system in the first place. The government’s ‘Isolation Assurance Service’ decided to outsource this system to a company called [Sitel]. The government’s own target of contacting 20% of those coming into the UK hasn’t been met... isn’t nowhere near that. We would actually have used a far more effective system, wouldn’t have outsourced it in the way the government has and we would have acted more quickly. I’ve been raising the issue of border protections from last April.

The government needs to introduce quarantining hotels and have an effective testing system in place. And it needs to avoid the situation that we’ve seen over the weekend of those crowds and crowds of people at Heathrow airport. That’s happening because the government does not have this strategy in place.

[Dr Doom]

8 minutes ago, anonguest said:

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

Depends how cushy the furlough/bribe money is I guess

[Dr Doom]

I wonder how many would be supportive of lockdown with no furlough

[Social Justice League]

The UK now has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world and a dead economy, so it's a job well done for the current cabinet who have given their donors 10's of billions of pounds to fail.

They should be charged with manslughter imo.

The country gets what they voted for though, so voters also have to take some of the blame for this situation by electing this "Get Brexit Done" cabinet.

[Dr Doom]

Yes just ignore the fact that the statistics are all very dubious, and not directly comparable between countries because of factors like amount of testing and cycle threshold of pcr test.

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

1 hour ago, zugzwang said:

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

The alternative is passively drifting out to sea.

You are not meant to swim against a riptide.

Better to relax and float and call for help if you are a weak swimmer, or else swim at 90 Degrees to the current.

I prefer lateral/perpendicular thinking.

The government is caught  in linear group think.

 

Edited January 24, 2021 by Mikhail Liebenstein

[Social Justice League]

44 minutes ago, Dr Doom said:

Yes just ignore the fact that the statistics are all very dubious, and not directly comparable between countries because of factors like amount of testing and cycle threshold of pcr test.

I'm not ignoring the fact that the current cabinet are gormless idiots who are robbing the country blind with their response to the 'deadly virus', which has been adject failure all round.

Fooking bent c0nt$.

[anonguest]

I have recently written/shared collated anecdotes of those people I personally know who have had covid and recovered - commenting on how an apparent common factor in those who recovered really quickly and had few(er) symptoms, of getting immediate absolute physical rest.

It was just pointed out to me just earlier this morning, and I reflected on, that two other possibly interesting factors appears to shared among those same quick recovery people.

All of them, to the best of my knowledge, are non-smokers AND, perhaps more significantly(?) they are all either teetotal or hardly ever consume alcohol (and in truly negligible amounts when they do).  As far as I am aware that latter lifestyle feature  puts them in a notable minority of the population? 

I leave that to others to make of that what they will.

I really think that the death statistics will be possibly more revealing as/when it is determined what were the liefstyle habits of victims as well as just whether they one or more existing medical conditions from a small list.

Edited January 24, 2021 by anonguest

[captainb]

1 minute ago, anonguest said:

I have recently written/shared collated anecdotes of those people I personally know who have had covid and recovered - commenting on how an apparent common factor in those who recovered really quickly and had few(er) symptoms, of getting immediate absolute physical rest.

It was just pointed out to me just earlier this morning, and I reflected on, that two other possibly interesting factors appears to shared among those same quick recovery people.

All of them, to the best of my knowledge, are non-smokers AND, perhaps more significantly(?) they are all either teetotal or hardly ever consume alcohol and in negligible amounts when they do.  As far as I am aware that latter lifestyle feature  puts them in a notable minority of the population? 

I leave that to others to make of that what they will.

Indeed it does. But as the vast majority of people who get infected also recovery quickly there is no correlation. 

On fact, given communities that don't drink alcohol or drink less (Bangladeshi and other Muslims) see disproportionatly affected it goes the other way on scarce evidence 

[anonguest]

Just now, captainb said:

Indeed it does. But as the vast majority of people who get infected also recovery quickly there is no correlation. 

On fact, given communities that don't drink alcohol or drink less (Bangladeshi and other Muslims) see disproportionatly affected it goes the other way on scarce evidence 

Good point.  I overlooked that.  However, isn't the consensus (here on HPC at least) that the reasons for that higher mortality is more down toother reasons that dominate?  Vitamin D, jobs/occupations, genetics even?

[Confusion of VIs]

4 hours ago, Dr Doom said:

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.

Death within 28 days has validated as a roughly accurate statistical proxy by the ONS, what evidence have you that it is inaccurate. 

  

[captainb]

42 minutes ago, anonguest said:

Good point.  I overlooked that.  However, isn't the consensus (here on HPC at least) that the reasons for that higher mortality is more down toother reasons that dominate?  Vitamin D, jobs/occupations, genetics even?

Whole host of factors but no evidence alcohol consumption or not is one of them. 

As far as I am aware nursing homes aren't big on the vodka and you would expect some lower rates in Muslim communities if alcohol was a significant factor . In reality there is no evidence of that. 

[Dr Doom]

7 minutes ago, Confusion of VIs said:

Death within 28 days has validated as a roughly accurate statistical proxy by the ONS, what evidence have you that it is inaccurate.

People dying of heart attacks, strokes, terminal cancer, falling off a ladder counted as covid related deaths.

The only reason it is 28 days now is because it was pointed out by Carl Heneghan that with the previous definition of a covid case it was literally impossible for anybody to ever recover, in statistical terms. Hence the ~5,000 cases lobbed off in the summer, which you can see on some graphs. 28 is a number pulled out of thin air, like every other bit of "scientific evidence" rolled out in front of the braindead general public to consume and hopefully believe.

[NobodyInParticular]

1 hour ago, anonguest said:

I have recently written/shared collated anecdotes of those people I personally know who have had covid and recovered - commenting on how an apparent common factor in those who recovered really quickly and had few(er) symptoms, of getting immediate absolute physical rest.

It was just pointed out to me just earlier this morning, and I reflected on, that two other possibly interesting factors appears to shared among those same quick recovery people.

All of them, to the best of my knowledge, are non-smokers AND, perhaps more significantly(?) they are all either teetotal or hardly ever consume alcohol (and in truly negligible amounts when they do).  As far as I am aware that latter lifestyle feature  puts them in a notable minority of the population? 

I leave that to others to make of that what they will.

I really think that the death statistics will be possibly more revealing as/when it is determined what were the liefstyle habits of victims as well as just whether they one or more existing medical conditions from a small list.

No one I know who has contracted has died of it. A couple have long Covid. Sadly, people once removed from people I know have died from it. Both my parents just got their first vaccinations. 

[NobodyInParticular]

23 minutes ago, Confusion of VIs said:

Death within 28 days has validated as a roughly accurate statistical proxy by the ONS, what evidence have you that it is inaccurate. 

  

He has none, just conspiracy theories. 

[NobodyInParticular]

1 hour ago, anonguest said:

I have recently written/shared collated anecdotes of those people I personally know who have had covid and recovered - commenting on how an apparent common factor in those who recovered really quickly and had few(er) symptoms, of getting immediate absolute physical rest.

It was just pointed out to me just earlier this morning, and I reflected on, that two other possibly interesting factors appears to shared among those same quick recovery people.

All of them, to the best of my knowledge, are non-smokers AND, perhaps more significantly(?) they are all either teetotal or hardly ever consume alcohol (and in truly negligible amounts when they do).  As far as I am aware that latter lifestyle feature  puts them in a notable minority of the population? 

None I know who have recovered have been teetotal, and some smokers. The long covid sufferers were the fittest, ironically, although also least likely to have immediately rested. So it seems hit and miss based on anecdotes. Best to see statistics. 

1 hour ago, anonguest said:

I leave that to others to make of that what they will.

I really think that the death statistics will be possibly more revealing as/when it is determined what were the liefstyle habits of victims as well as just whether they one or more existing medical conditions from a small list.

 

[dances with sheeple]

2 hours ago, zugzwang said:

Christ on a bike. Sense at last!

 

Labour calls for incoming travellers to UK to be placed in quarantine hotels

The shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds has called for quarantine hotels for incoming travellers to the UK and criticised the manner in which services were outsourced – though without providing a comprehensive alternative.

He told Sky News:

We need now to put additional protections in place. We do need that effective border testing regime. And we also need an effective quarantining regime, which we’ve not had. The government did not introduce a comprehensive quarantining regime until June last year. The UK was an international outlier. Back in May last year, it was only the UK, Iran, Luxembourg and the US Virgin Isles that had no travel protections in place.

The government introduced a quarantining system far too slowly in June of last year. The government’s own figures show that between June of last year and September around about two million people had their passenger locator forms, their details if you like, spot-checked by Border Force at the border. Only around 3% of those were successfully contacted to ensure they were quarantining, now that just isn’t good enough, it isn’t effective. The government hasn’t had a grip on this situation throughout. We desperately need them to get a grip and have that comprehensive plan in place.

The Labour government would have taken a very different approach to the set-up of the quarantining system in the first place. The government’s ‘Isolation Assurance Service’ decided to outsource this system to a company called [Sitel]. The government’s own target of contacting 20% of those coming into the UK hasn’t been met... isn’t nowhere near that. We would actually have used a far more effective system, wouldn’t have outsourced it in the way the government has and we would have acted more quickly. I’ve been raising the issue of border protections from last April.

The government needs to introduce quarantining hotels and have an effective testing system in place. And it needs to avoid the situation that we’ve seen over the weekend of those crowds and crowds of people at Heathrow airport. That’s happening because the government does not have this strategy in place.

LOL, it is WAY too late, Labour are F*ucking useless!

[pig]

These guys have got to be posting on this thread lol:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/brazil-covid-coronavirus-deaths-cases-amazonas-state

“There’s an atmosphere of disgust, abandonment, despair and impunity,” said one staff member at the Alvorada health clinic in Manaus, where medics were filmed pleading for divine intervention. “What we’re watching is a complete massacre, a desperate situation, a horror film,” added the worker, who asked not to be named.

Much of the anger is directed at the government of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has trivialized Covid-19 even as his country’s death toll soared to the second highest on earth.

Bolsonaro’s biddable health minister, Eduardo Pazuello – an army general with no medical experience – visited Manaus on the eve of last week’s health collapse but pushed bogus Covid-19 “early treatments” promoted by his leader rather than solving the impending oxygen crisis.

“The president’s bootlicker had days of warning that Manaus’s hospitals were going to run out of oxygen. He did nothing but prescribe useless chloroquine,” the journalist Luiz Fernando Vianna wrote in the magazine Época, blaming Bolsonaro and Pazuello for the “slaughter”.

[anonguest]

Just now, captainb said:

Whole host of factors but no evidence alcohol consumption or not is one of them. 

I wasn't claiming or insinuting there was a link. I would have assumed that IF there was then we would have all read something about it by now. Just throwing in a vaguely possible speculative factor. But accept it could be a real case of correlation not being causation.

 

As far as I am aware nursing homes aren't big on the vodka and you would expect some lower rates in Muslim communities if alcohol was a significant factor . In reality there is no evidence of that. 

Except in that sort of sceanrio the presumably signficantly increased frailty/weakend immune systems would outweigh any possible small benefit from abstaining from booze.

Re: the muslim community (whcih should be a good test) that would require more in depth questioning of the liefstyles of covid victims by researchers.  Are the ONS or medical reserachers consistently also recording liefstyles of covid victims? Established medical condtions, yes.  But lifestyle factors (beyond perhaps smoking)?

After all, not all claimed muslims are teetotal.

 

Edited January 24, 2021 by anonguest

[NobodyInParticular]

4 hours ago, Dr Doom said:

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".

Statistics have usage. Even if imperfect, it can be useful for planning as an uptick suggests more COVID infections as the are rarely large and sustained changes in the numbers being run over by buses, and the number of people with other co-morbidities similarly. Is it 100% accurate? No. It would not be possible to autopsy everyone, and the lag would make the information useless for planning. Is it as awful as you suggest? Unlikely, as it has been designed by medical professionals to have reasonable applicability with reasonable responsiveness and cost. 

The use of proxies for the information you really want but cannot reasonably collect is normal in healthcare, engineering, etc. and has a large body of science behind it. I was even involved in predictive models using data which was not that directly that required to model the likely underlying behavior because getting that data would not have been possible without costing £1m plus. 

4 hours 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.

 

Boris would approve of your classical references. 

2 hours ago, zugzwang said:

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

Indeed. 

2 hours ago, Dr Doom said:

For logic reasons

😂😂😂

[Dr Doom]

4 minutes ago, pig said:

These guys have got to be posting on this thread lol:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/24/brazil-covid-coronavirus-deaths-cases-amazonas-state

“There’s an atmosphere of disgust, abandonment, despair and impunity,” said one staff member at the Alvorada health clinic in Manaus, where medics were filmed pleading for divine intervention. “What we’re watching is a complete massacre, a desperate situation, a horror film,” added the worker, who asked not to be named.

Much of the anger is directed at the government of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has trivialized Covid-19 even as his country’s death toll soared to the second highest on earth.

Bolsonaro’s biddable health minister, Eduardo Pazuello – an army general with no medical experience – visited Manaus on the eve of last week’s health collapse but pushed bogus Covid-19 “early treatments” promoted by his leader rather than solving the impending oxygen crisis.

“The president’s bootlicker had days of warning that Manaus’s hospitals were going to run out of oxygen. He did nothing but prescribe useless chloroquine,” the journalist Luiz Fernando Vianna wrote in the magazine Época, blaming Bolsonaro and Pazuello for the “slaughter”.

All of the people within the system with any power, standing up against this utter lunacy, are being incrementally stamped out by the mainstream media, using the usual tactics slander misinformation etc. Trump was the kingpin, he's been taken out. Others include Anders Tegnell, they had to adjust the settings on the PCR to get rid of him. This President of Brazil is just the latest on the hit list of dissidents, adjusting the PCR CT level should do the trick. Next I predict will be that dude from Tanzania who was testing the test result on a goat, came back positive. He's kept all of the BS out of his country, I'm seriously considering migrating there until some sort of sanity returns to planet earth.

 

[Dr Doom]

Sorry I forgot the Military Dictator of Belarus, he will be shamed soon too I predict.

[dances with sheeple]

2 hours ago, Social Justice League said:

The UK now has the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world and a dead economy, so it's a job well done for the current cabinet who have given their donors 10's of billions of pounds to fail.

They should be charged with manslughter imo.

The country gets what they voted for though, so voters also have to take some of the blame for this situation by electing this "Get Brexit Done" cabinet.

Nobody knew about Covid (in the general public at least) when people voted for the party that said they would respect democracy?

[hotblack42]

Anyone advocating toughing it out on the basis that this is just one of things we have to work together to get through, stoically accepting a period of elevated mortality is wasting their time.  Western societies haven't lived that way for many decades.  Roughly 55% are public sector employees or on benefits.  In their minds the deal is that the state fixes macro problems. End of story.

There's no going back to the self reliant + local collaboration model, other than via a painful collapse.

[Dr Doom]

13 minutes ago, NobodyInParticular said:

Statistics have usage. Even if imperfect, it can be useful for planning as an uptick suggests more COVID infections as the are rarely large and sustained changes in the numbers being run over by buses, and the number of people with other co-morbidities similarly. Is it 100% accurate? No. It would not be possible to autopsy everyone, and the lag would make the information useless for planning. Is it as awful as you suggest?

It is as awful as I suggest.

When the bodies are autopsied the findings are that the vast majority didn't die of covid.