COVID-19

[shpalman]

And as we're talking about optics. How is a moderately uninformed person supposed to take social distancing seriously if they can see schools still open?

I have been told that there is footage from Italy of a dozen army trucks taking away the bodies that there is no capacity to bury in Bergamo (a fabulous city where I have given talks; when normality returns, go there with Ryanair and ignore the "Milan" in the airport name). If something similar happens in the UK it's going to be more optics than a very large pub. For 20 years after Jim Callaghan's "Winter of Discontent" the Tories taunted Labour with reminders of "the dead going unburied".

Yes, there is, it was on the news yesterday but I didn't post a link here (to the photos at least) because I thought it might be too much.

A Google video search for "bergamo esercito scorta bare" will show you.

[Pucksoppet]

Critical thinking really ought to be part of the core curriculum.

I don't know if it still is, but it was introduced in the 90s into the primary school curriculum. In my last couple of years there we had to do 15 mins of the critical thinking class each day IIRC. The problem is that the only thing I remember of it was everyone* thinking it was unmitigated sh.t, and not knowing what the hell it was about or for. That is literally my only memory of it. This may have been different in other schools with other teachers

*kids at least.

Which is disappointing, to say the least. Normally kids love finding holes in adults' arguments, and gleefully point out inconsistencies. I'm sorry you had a bad experience of it.

Perhaps it could be taught in a better way than they way you experienced?

[Matatouille]

Perhaps it could be taught in a better way than they way you experienced?

I really hope so! Tbh most others of my age group that I've talked about this with don't even remember it. Maybe that was because their teachers skillfully weaved it into other stuff with great effect, or it was similarly naff. I doubt it contributed to any lack of critical thinking in society, but I similarly doubt it helped many people learn to apply it as a matter of course, and now is the sort of time when that can have an ability to come back and bite us.

[sTeamTraen]

Critical thinking really ought to be part of the core curriculum.

I don't know if it still is, but it was introduced in the 90s into the primary school curriculum. In my last couple of years there we had to do 15 mins of the critical thinking class each day IIRC. The problem is that the only thing I remember of it was everyone* thinking it was unmitigated sh.t, and not knowing what the hell it was about or for. That is literally my only memory of it. This may have been different in other schools with other teachers

*kids at least.

Which is disappointing, to say the least. Normally kids love finding holes in adults' arguments, and gleefully point out inconsistencies. I'm sorry you had a bad experience of it.

Perhaps it could be taught in a better way than they way you experienced?

I haven't met you IRL as far as I know, but I hope you will allow me to assume that you, like most of the members of this board, love finding holes in other people's arguments. It's possibly the #1 reason many of us are here, probably associated with an IQ over 120 (i.e., in the top 10% of the population).

I was that kid too -- when I was 9 I had a teacher whose every spelling mistake I pointed out gleefully (she hated it, but I thought, FFS, just learn how to spell). But it does not surprise me in the least that most kids would not enjoy this. Many of them have trouble fully understanding a lot of abstract concepts anyway, and resort to rote learning to get through exams (even I did that for O-level Latin).

[sTeamTraen]

The three slowest curves are UK, Finland and USA, which highlights the benefits of not testing (UK and USA) and social distancing (Finland) on preventing an increase in case numbers.

Do we have enough cases/deaths/understanding of testing patterns yet to understand why Germany is having so few deaths relative to its neighbours? Dividing deaths by cases on the Worldometer numbers in my head right now, I get 0.3% for Germany, 3.4% for France, 4.5% for the UK, 4.6% for Spain, and 8.3% for Italy. That's with 15,000 recorded cases in Germany, which is comparable to France and Spain.

I didn't think there was any a priori reason to suppose that the German healthcare system would be especially effective, certainly not to this apparent extent. Maybe they are testing a lot of kids, who are coming out positive but don't then die?

[Little waster]

Critical thinking really ought to be part of the core curriculum.

I don't know if it still is, but it was introduced in the 90s into the primary school curriculum. In my last couple of years there we had to do 15 mins of the critical thinking class each day IIRC. The problem is that the only thing I remember of it was everyone* thinking it was unmitigated sh.t, and not knowing what the hell it was about or for. That is literally my only memory of it. This may have been different in other schools with other teachers

*kids at least.

So mission accomplished

From my rapidly fading memories of my teacher training, teaching critical thinking in schools was the last-but-one "next big thing" in pedagogy*.

There is a chunk of the curricular time statutorily dedicated to whatever PSHE the school cobbles together. No one is particular responsible for it, it has limited impact on OFSTED and neither pupils or staff are that fussed so essentially whichever Humanities teacher is slowest-moving gets it dumped on them to produce the PSHE content for the whole school for every year. The schools then either give over a lesson a cycle or dedicates a whole day a term to doing it and the poor sod responsible puts in the minimum effort required** to tick the boxes regarding sexual health, cyber-bullying, financial skills, citizenship etc. Happy the day when you stumble on an entire program already online e.g IIRC Barclays provide a careers one for 6th Formers which filled up a term or two.

At some point in the last decade or so the educational benefits of metacognition became apparent so a number of schools tried to formalise that by dedicating part of the PSHE timetable to teaching those skills calling it "Learning-to-Learn" or "Critical Thinking" or "CASE(?)" the idea is by improving the students general thinking skills this would synergistically cascade through the entire curriculum. It ran into the same issues as general PSHE teaching, merely adding extra non-essential workload onto already-overworked staff without any significant buy-in from either pupils or staff. AFAIK most schools have dropped it and instead just schedule a dedicated "Literacy/Numeracy" lesson, reverted to the standard PSHE or extra Maths/English instead. Instead the individual teacher is supposed to incorporate the Critical Thinking elements into their normal lessons and ideally the departmental curricular planners should design it into their Scheme of Work.



*Walking into a classroom (especially one without a permanent teacher assigned to it) was a bit like educational archaeology where the latest "big idea" resource had simply been stapled over the previous big idea resource which in turn was blue-tacked over the one before that etc.
So your "Thinking Grid" would cover the "HOT Thermometer" which is stuck on the front of the "5 Rs" completely obliterating the "SOLO taxonomy" squiggles, meanwhile on some high shelf covered in dust would be the sad neglected remains of laminated "De Bono Thinking Hats" which will still be around a 100 years from now.

**Usually the teacher who actually has to deliver it looks at the provided resource, says this is sh.t and does their own anyway. Either way it rarely ends well.

ETA: If the mods want to split off this bit from COVID-19 I'm fine with that.

[Rich Scopie]

D'oh! Onions not unions!

Shhh. Don’t ruin a wonderful, if accidental, mental image.

When I was learning French at school, it took me quite a long time to understand that a trait d'union (hyphen) was not one of those nasty organisations that my Tory-leaning Dad used to complain about. (This was in the 1970s, when a lot of people in the UK could name as many trade union leaders as cabinet ministers.)

When I was little, my Great-uncle convinced me that Vic Feather was the main man in Last of the Mohicans...

[shpalman]

The UK is at 144 fatalities on 19 March..

When was Italy at 144 fatalities?

On 5 March.

How many days ago was 5 March?

14 days.

We keep running the maths, various methods, using confirmed cases and fatalities and calculations of the exponential. And every single time it comes up with the same answer. We are about 14 days behind Italy. We are 14 days behind now, were 14 days behind a week ago, were 14 days behind at the start of the month.

Which is why we were shocked at last week's announcement claiming we were 4 weeks behind Italy and so only needed limited action. If they'd said 16 days or something it would have been fine. But 4 weeks was plain wrong. All the charts show it to be wrong. The daily evidence keeps showing it was wrong.

We are 6 days behind Spain. 3 days behind France. We can see the future.

Indeed. I had the impression that the "4 weeks behind Italy" comment was based on the idea that there were actually 5000-10000 cases in Italy at the time, as compared to the official numbers (not just the currently incubating cases, but actual infectious cases which had not been counted). However, it's not like the UK has implemented South Korea's testing and tracing policy either. And it's not like the UK's intensive care provision is orders of magnitude greater than that of northern Italy either.

This idea of monitoring it and being ready to implement measures to flatten the curve at the right moment so people don't get bored of having to stay home... if Italy's death rate is actually starting to level off now it will reach roughly double the number of deaths which Hubei province declared. This would be because the lockdown was not strict enough early enough.

The CFR from Hubei compared to the rest of China, and Italy compared to Hubei, might lead you to think that there could be about an order of magnitude more cases here than in the official numbers. The solution to this is for everyone to stay at home and if not to maintain social distancing. Simply, assume that you are an asymptomatic carrier and don't go near other people.

But another thing Italy did was to implement things first for a week and then ok we need another week and ok we need a whole month and ok for two weeks of that it's going to be even more strict and by the way it's another month. So it kind of broke it up into manageable chunks of time. Better than saying in February that everything is locked down until June, even if in the end everything will probably be locked down until June in one way or another. (We are all hoping that the situation will peak over the next 5 days or so, in the north of Italy at least; in the south they will suffer the effects of lots of people rushing home just before the north locked down.)

What they didn't do is say "at the right moment we will ask that everyone over 70 will have to stay isolated for 4 months" even if it's going to end up being 4 months here anyway. There's more of a sense that if everyone can stay home as much as possible maybe those over 70 who do need to go out can do so with much less risk.

I can kind of understand that there would have been much less will to comply with the lockdown if it would have been implemented back when the issue did not seem so serious. This is not the same as the idea that if it goes on too long people will get bored of it. There would be also be an issue at the point when it seems like the rate of new cases has dropped to almost zero but you can't completely unlock everything just yet in case there are a few cases still incubating (or, at least you have to remain extremely vigilant). I can imagine people thinking that they can start to relax once it seems like "the worst is over" which would only cause another flare up a week or two later. I don't have a simulation (yet) which indicates how much longer the lockdown has to be for every day of delay at the beginning.

"Ah but if we suppress it now it will only come back in the autumn and that will be worse" well if you can suppress it now you can suppress it then too, except you will be better prepared with more testing and ICU capacity and maybe useful therapies and even vaccines which have been developed in the meantime so you'll get to it quicker and it will be less bad.

[Stephanie]

To be clear, I’m entirely OK with criticism of political decisions. The choice to recommend people avoid bars and theatres, but not order them to shut, is boneheaded incompetence of the highest order, for example.

It’s criticism of scientific and medical advice by people who don’t have both the expertise and the data to do so that bugs me, and in that context, while I cede to no-one in holding Boris Johnson for a dangerous and ignorant a..eh.le, it’s actually possible that when he repeats the advice of his civil servants without embellishing it, he might be right - or at least, not demonstrably wrong.

It’s obvious that if government policy had the NHS in better shape, we’d be better off, but there’s a limit to how helpful it is to bash on that right now. Save it for when we have a leader of the opposition who’ll make something effective of it, for a start.

Yes, this.

And pucksoppet, it has nothing to do with authority. More hypocrisy of seeing the same people who berated others during Brexit for ignoring experts now picking holes in things. I didn't point at anybody here, either.

[lpm]

Has anyone seen figures for numbers of UK Covid patients currently in ICU beds? I haven't seen any stats. Italy gives these numbers.

14 days ago Italy was on 148 deaths and 351 patients in ICU. UK is on 144 deaths so probably assume similar number of about 350 in ICU?

Now Italy is at 2,500 ICU cases. Due to the 14 day lag we will reach this marker on 2 April.

UK basic number is total of 5,000 ICU beds, obviously most already full of non-Covid patients. Emergency surge (using operating theatres etc) probably could cope with an extra couple of thousand? But the exponential curve is remorseless.

The Italy statistics show Covid cases in ICU increasing at about 30% per day in the first couple of weeks. But for the past week has only been increasing by about 11% a day. I guess this is because certain regions max out and the number of ICU beds filled becomes constant, while in the less affected regions there's still capacity being filled at 30% growth. Eventually the daily growth rate hits zero. Which is when a BBC political journalist says "Good news. The number of patients being treated in ICU has now stabilised."

The death rate curve is noisy in the first couple of weeks, when a random handful of deaths can make the line jolt up and down. But they smooth out later in a quite awful way. When you get to several hundred deaths per day (Italy now, UK start of April) the random ripples vanishes beneath the size of the wave. The curves for cases in each countries is smoother - but less useful for comparisons because of differences in testing policy. Because we in the UK now have to go with death rates it's hard to be precise on whether the 14 day lag is 13, 14 or 15. We match up exactly at 14 now, but there could easily be a day or two's worth of random noise.

Instinctively, when we say the govt got it wrong in their "4 week" claim and it's actually about 14 days, we think linear. It feels like they got it 2x wrong. It's incredibly hard to stop yourself thinking "that means there'll be double the cases in 4 weeks than they thought". Exponential is so tricky we can never get our ballpark estimates anywhere close. If the exponential is 33% per day, it mean a 14 day error becomes a 56x error. The amount of cases at 4 weeks is 56x greater than the govt experts thought at last Thursday's policy announcement.

[shpalman]

Here's another piece of hard-won Italian experience for you: Luca Zaia, the president of the Veneto region, has just said in a press conference that having your ICU full of Covid patients means your ICU uses 20-30 times more oxygen than usual. This is another limiting factor with regards to setting up field hospitals or, more specifically, reopening old hospitals.

[TopBadger]

Even in this tremendously privileged, double university parentally educated, middle class house, Kid A (year 12, level 9 maths at gcse) has been in tears about having to teach herself a level maths. The school have been brilliant, esp for her year. She is probably catastrophising just a little bit (no idea where she gets it from) but it’s still not nice.

Maths might be one of the subjects that better lends itself to self study. Can recommend Engineering Mathematics by Stroud - offers a pane by pane walkthrough of pretty much everything I've ever needed in Maths.

[Blackcountryboy]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... s-51972372

Most probably they will be people on minimum wage living hand to mouth, some of them also losing their accommodation.

[JellyandJackson]

Thank you TopBadger.
We’re now much more concerned for her mates doing chemistry & biology who won’t get to do their practicals.

[Pucksoppet]

To be clear, I’m entirely OK with criticism of political decisions. The choice to recommend people avoid bars and theatres, but not order them to shut, is boneheaded incompetence of the highest order, for example.

It’s criticism of scientific and medical advice by people who don’t have both the expertise and the data to do so that bugs me, and in that context, while I cede to no-one in holding Boris Johnson for a dangerous and ignorant a..eh.le, it’s actually possible that when he repeats the advice of his civil servants without embellishing it, he might be right - or at least, not demonstrably wrong.

It’s obvious that if government policy had the NHS in better shape, we’d be better off, but there’s a limit to how helpful it is to bash on that right now. Save it for when we have a leader of the opposition who’ll make something effective of it, for a start.

Yes, this.

And pucksoppet, it has nothing to do with authority. More hypocrisy of seeing the same people who berated others during Brexit for ignoring experts now picking holes in things. I didn't point at anybody here, either.

Perhaps I wasn't engaged enough in the Brexit debates.

I think authority at least gives one a ticket for being politely listened to*, but not a pass against having your statements critically examined by all and sundry. Ignoring experts because they are experts does, however, seem a little excessive.

Hypocrisy seems to be part of the human condition, together with being able to hold logically inconsistent beliefs and behaviours in the same head.

It’s criticism of scientific and medical advice by people who don’t have both the expertise and the data to do so that bugs me, and in that context, [...] it’s actually possible that when he [the Prime Minister] repeats the advice of his civil servants without embellishing it, he might be right - or at least, not demonstrably wrong.

I agree with nekomatic's position.

*Having letters after your name, or holding a senior position is an indication of past competence, and in Bayesian probabilities makes it more likely that you are competent now (Prior probability), but no matter what, such accoutrements do not guarantee current competence.

[Stephanie]

tbh, i'm probably the last person to be considered sufficiently respectful of experts (in fact, i seem to recall, people had a go at me for not protecting their expertise from sheldrake). my position is that most of us are sh.t at this stuff, but smarter folk are better at justifying why what they think is right, than say, someone like me.

[Pucksoppet]

tbh, i'm probably the last person to be considered sufficiently respectful of experts (in fact, i seem to recall, people had a go at me for not protecting their expertise from sheldrake). my position is that most of us are sh.t at this stuff, but smarter folk are better at justifying why what they think is right, than say, someone like me.

I'm sh.t at it too, and lazy, but at least this place gives me the opportunity to try, with pretty good feedback. Thanks.

[lpm]

The correct Brexit parallel is when we were disputing UK experts by quoting EU experts. Currently we are disputing UK experts in exactly the same way. Plus we can quote contradictory things that UK experts and politicians are saying - e.g. when they claim one thing but do another.

[Stephanie]

again, i was never actually talking about people in here

eta (other than the quick reference to sheldrake). I suspect neko, like me, has just watched twitter "brexit" experts become epidemiology experts.

[TopBadger]

Telling people we're more weeks behind Italy than we are as per numbers is more likely to be an attempt to control panic than to be accurate with the science.

[Brightonian]

Thank you TopBadger.
We’re now much more concerned for her mates doing chemistry & biology who won’t get to do their practicals.

In Ireland, school students are being given 100% for the oral component of language exams and a few other practicals. Doesn't seem right to me, and I can't see why they can't just ignore these practical components and declare this year's exam results are purely for written parts (if they even happen anyway). Linky.

[Grumble]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... s-51972372

Most probably they will be people on minimum wage living hand to mouth, some of them also losing their accommodation.

Britannia Hotels are a truly awful organisation. Consistently slated for being filthy as well, not surprised to find they would do this kind of thing.

[Gentleman Jim]

Thank you TopBadger.
We’re now much more concerned for her mates doing chemistry & biology who won’t get to do their practicals.

If it helps, I will be spending the next x weeks, carrying out all AQA required practicals to give reference results when school resumes
I'll be on here as much as I can if they have any questions

[Gentleman Jim]

I dare say most in he field will already have access but for interested others:

https://www.thelancet.com/coronavirus?d ... onavirus20

open access

[JQH]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... s-51972372

Most probably they will be people on minimum wage living hand to mouth, some of them also losing their accommodation.

Time to revive the "c.nt of the Day" thread?