Scrutable

raven wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 04, 2021 3:38 pm

I'm just hoping a lot of schools had inset days today. That'll limit the impact of his incompetence a bit.

(What the heck was that bit about pastoralizing the economy he was on about on Marr? I do not think that word means what he thinks it means. Subtitles translated it as 'pastoral eyes', which made about as much sense.)

Quite a few did although possibly fewer than may originally have been planned as schools were encouraged to shift Inset days around and move them to the end of last term instead. Thankfully the bagkitten's school just said bollocks to that and switched to "home schooling" for the last day of term while keeping yesterday as the planned Inset day. There was no schoolwork given out on that last day of term. I'm hoping plenty of other schools did the same/similar.

lpm wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 04, 2021 3:22 pm

There will be analyses showing how many extra people died from this one day of dithering and opening up of schools. Johnson belongs in prison for manslaughter.

Testify.

I wonder if it would be possible to crowd fund a private prosecution?

Woodchopper wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:42 am

Martin_B wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 04, 2021 10:25 pm

raven wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 04, 2021 3:38 pm

(What the heck was that bit about pastoralizing the economy he was on about on Marr? I do not think that word means what he thinks it means. Subtitles translated it as 'pastoral eyes', which made about as much sense.)

I presume he meant trying to shepherd the economy to make it do what the Tories want it to do; but like many stupid people who have been given a bit of education he believes that using longer words makes him seem more intelligent. It was something he was notorious for as a (failed) journalist.

It’s a Second World War analogy. There was a plan to pastoralize the German economy after its defeat. It would have involved destruction of all factories, mines and other industrial infrastructure. Didn’t happen though.

I found a transcript. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/03012101.pdf

Marr put it to him scientific advice said to lockdown in September. BJ protested sure, we could've lockdown from March onwards, shut down transmission and 'basically pastoralized the UK economy'. So possibly he meant some combination of putting people out to grass /taking a wrecking ball to industry.

(My initial thought was pivoting hospitality workers to picking fruit & veg....)

For a journalist/politician he's not great at articulating ideas, is he. Definitely lacks the common touch. And sense.

To articulate an idea you have to understand it. I don't think Johnson understands much.

1 in 30 in London currently Covided.

1 in 50 in England.

I'm grateful I can work from home, am well stocked with food and have no need to leave the house except for exercise. There will easily be 50 people in a supermarket, even late in the evenings.

The UK will overtake Italy again for official covid deaths, maybe even today.

Bad. 62 322 cases and 1041 deaths reported today. The latter shouldn't even be due to the weekend reporting backlog. Almost ten thousand more in hospital compared to the height of the first wave.

Good thread on UK excess mortality statistics: https://twitter.com/nickstripe_ons/stat ... 32544?s=21

lpm wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:03 pm

1 in 30 in London currently Covided.

1 in 50 in England.

I'm grateful I can work from home, am well stocked with food and have no need to leave the house except for exercise. There will easily be 50 people in a supermarket, even late in the evenings.

In another attempt to go one better my local area is now claiming 1 in 18
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55560166

please tell me that's down to inaccurate tests/sampling ?!

Hunting Dog wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 07, 2021 7:58 am

In another attempt to go one better my local area is now claiming 1 in 18
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55560166

please tell me that's down to inaccurate tests/sampling ?!

Basildon's official cumulative case total since the start of the pandemic is currently 6,901.7 per 100,000 (e.g. about 1 in 14.5). Of course there will be many more that were never deteced.

But maybe the quote "nearly 6%" of the Brentwood and Basildon's population of 77,000 and 187,000 respectively had tested positive for coronavirus" was referring to a cumulative figure?

Woodchopper wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 06, 2021 7:43 pm

Good thread on UK excess mortality statistics: https://twitter.com/nickstripe_ons/stat ... 32544?s=21

It's almost as though Nick Strioe knows what he is talking about.

And still covid deniers replying to that saying you have to correct for population (spoiler alert he does in one of the tweets in that thread).

bob sterman wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 07, 2021 8:13 am

Hunting Dog wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 07, 2021 7:58 am

In another attempt to go one better my local area is now claiming 1 in 18
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55560166

please tell me that's down to inaccurate tests/sampling ?!

Basildon's official cumulative case total since the start of the pandemic is currently 6,901.7 per 100,000 (e.g. about 1 in 14.5). Of course there will be many more that were never deteced.

Indeed. The ones who've been detected are (hopefully) the ones you don't have to worry about anymore since they should be out of circulation. The number of new infections per day only serves as a marker for how many infectious people there really were in the population over the past week or so.

bob sterman wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 07, 2021 8:13 am

But maybe the quote "nearly 6%" of the Brentwood and Basildon's population of 77,000 and 187,000 respectively had tested positive for coronavirus" was referring to a cumulative figure?

The way that fast exponential growth works means that most of those who "had tested positive" ever will be the ones who are positive now.

But it's difficult to compare new positive case rate with numbers of current positives in the population, especially as the UK has no protocol for declaring someone not positive anymore.

Hell's teeth, I took a look at Tony Young's Twitter feed, well,
someone was taking the piss out of him and I wondered what other garage he was spotting There's a man refusing to interact with reality.

In Ireland, r > 2 now.

Brightonian wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 07, 2021 6:39 pm

In Ireland, r > 2 now.

They're now saying R is "between 2.4 and 3".

The claim that there is no sign of a second wave in London has been untrue for some time. This using the 2015-2020 ONS weekly all deaths reports:



If you alter the Y axis so you're not so blinded by the horror of April, it becomes more clear:



The baseline is the average for 2015-2019 for that particular week number

London to run out of hospital beds within two weeks:
https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/exclus ... 64.article

Great thread on how this winter is far worse than a bad flu season
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status ... 55364?s=21

lpm wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:03 pm

1 in 30 in London currently Covided.

1 in 50 in England.

What's the basis of that ratio? Is it positive test in the last X days, or an estimate of infectiousness, or something else?

Johns Hopkins data has 702,739 positive tests in the whole UK in the past 14 days, so just over 1%. And England can't be a whole lot different to that simply because it's something like 83% of the UK population.

sTeamTraen wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 08, 2021 1:11 am

lpm wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:03 pm

1 in 30 in London currently Covided.

1 in 50 in England.

What's the basis of that ratio? Is it positive test in the last X days, or an estimate of infectiousness, or something else?

Johns Hopkins data has 702,739 positive tests in the whole UK in the past 14 days, so just over 1%. And England can't be a whole lot different to that simply because it's something like 83% of the UK population.

It's off of the ONS model - clicky

Not sure how they work it out.

monkey wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 08, 2021 1:35 am

sTeamTraen wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 08, 2021 1:11 am

lpm wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 05, 2021 6:03 pm

1 in 30 in London currently Covided.

1 in 50 in England.

What's the basis of that ratio? Is it positive test in the last X days, or an estimate of infectiousness, or something else?

Johns Hopkins data has 702,739 positive tests in the whole UK in the past 14 days, so just over 1%. And England can't be a whole lot different to that simply because it's something like 83% of the UK population.

It's off of the ONS model - clicky

Not sure how they work it out.

The flu and Covid-19 surveillance reports have lots of different estimates for flu at least. And includes symptomatic self-reporting. Not sure about the modelling.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... ce-reports

Covid-19: 'Major incident' declared by London mayor Sadiq Khan
The spread of Covid in London is "out of control" according to Sadiq Khan, who has declared a "major incident".
It comes as the coronavirus infection rate in London has exceeded 1,000 per 100,000 people.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55588163

FlammableFlower wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 07, 2021 6:23 pm

Hell's teeth, I took a look at Tony Young's Twitter feed, well,
someone was taking the piss out of him and I wondered what other garage he was spotting There's a man refusing to interact with reality.

https://mobile.twitter.com/toadmeister/ ... 1208017924

The penny might be dropping. Although he posted that just after he posted this.

https://mobile.twitter.com/toadmeister/ ... 7154356224

So maybe not.

OffTheRock wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 08, 2021 6:08 pm

The penny might be dropping. Although he posted that just after he posted this.

https://mobile.twitter.com/toadmeister/ ... 7154356224

So maybe not.

Gigantic Man-Baby wrote: Evidence that masks work is very thin

Then links to that scientific evidence.

Oh no my bad sorry links to some paid-for-polemic by some far-right website of f.ck-knucle libertarian shills, where an emeritus chemist wanders off his reservation to demostrates his lack of understanding of such fundimentals as the difference between the size of a free virus particle and the size of an aerolised droplet of bodily fluids. I have no idea why he thought bringing the electromagnetic spectrum into the debate other than to convince the ignorant of the "scienciness" of his argument.

He also has this corker:-

This (exhaled) air MAY or MAY NOT contain particles of moisture (mostly water). These moisture particles MAY or MAY NOT contain mucus, cellular debris, bacteria etc. from our respiratory tract

No, they do they do, there is no MAY or MAY NOT about it. A person exhaling a completely dry, completely "clean" exhalate would be a f.cking medical marvel and probably seriously ill!

The rest of it is a strange melange of argument from authority and argument from incredulity. If only there was some method to actually examine whether masks actually had any effect on transmission* ...

Here it is in all his terrible glory.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-year-of-disguises/


*My 30 seconds pubmed search chucked up 747 such papers, not all will be relevant, but as a random example Number 3 was this https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32335167/

Findings: Within first 100 days (31 December 2019 to 8 April 2020), 961 COVID-19 patients were diagnosed in HKSAR. The COVID-19 incidence in HKSAR (129.0 per million population) was significantly lower (p<0.001) than that of Spain (2983.2), Italy (2250.8), Germany (1241.5), France (1151.6), U.S. (1102.8), U.K. (831.5), Singapore (259.8), and South Korea (200.5). The compliance of face mask usage by HKSAR general public was 96.6% (range: 95.7% to 97.2%). We observed 11 COVID-19 clusters in recreational 'mask-off' settings compared to only 3 in workplace 'mask-on' settings (p = 0.036 by Chi square test of goodness-of-fit).

Conclusion: Community-wide mask wearing may contribute to the control of COVID-19 by reducing the amount of emission of infected saliva and respiratory droplets from individuals with subclinical or mild COVID-19.

And below that...

m'cup of tea has just gone everywhere.
c.nt.