COVID-19

[Opti]



[Gfamily]

It might be worth getting some cash in, and putting individual notes into clear plastic bags, so you can hand them over with a pair of tongs.

I half recall that at Eyam, they left money for provisions in a stone hollow containing vinegar - but coins were more suited to that sort of 'money laundering'.

[jimbob]

I’ve bored people many times with this over the years. But one last time - because there's a lot of "but how do we pay for it?" about.

Money is not resources. Look at everything in terms of resources, never money.

Money is an imaginary thing, created and destroyed at printing presses and with a click of a mouse in the Bank of England. The Chancellor of the Exchequer could transmit £1,000 to all of us in a couple of minutes and spend the rest of the day playing Candy Crush.

Resources are real. Resources are where the actual problems lie.

When General Eisenhower said in 1944: I want 5,000 landing craft, the problem wasn’t how much a landing craft costs. It was how the hell do you build them. Production everywhere was maxed out, every scrap of steel and every machine tool and every factory worker already building something else. So trade-offs had to be made. Someone will have decided to stop producing corvettes or something, to build landing craft instead.

In 1939 the problem was very different. There was plenty of spare capacity, it was just that everything was facing the wrong way. The machine tools were set up for making private cars, not Spitfires, people were working as housewives instead of in factories. A massive transformational shift. But the potential was there - nobody would be buying private cars, so the car factory was silent, its people waiting to be put to work.

Our resources are now like 1939. We have instantly gone from near full employment, to mass unemployment. I estimate there are now 4-5 million unemployed (many still on the payroll of companies and getting paid, but not actually having anything to do). We have gone from a sophisticated economy, with every company operating at high efficiency, to a chaotic economy with broken supply chains and misdirected production. Bad news, but this is what enables sudden transformation.

The Spitfires and landing craft equivalents in 2020 are healthcare personnel and equipment. We can devote almost unlimited resources to supporting each key worker. In 1944, for every 1 frontline fighting soldier, there were 4 logistics and support people behind the line, and countless more behind the scenes in factories. We now have so many un and underemployed we can do the same:

- An Uber driver chauffeurs a hospital planner to and from home
- A cabin crew does the planner’s supermarket shopping and cooks her evening meal
- A retail worker looks after her kids

Crucially, we will not import health resources (we cannot import ICU nurses and presumably no country will be mad enough to sell us their ventilators). We have local resources to exploit instead. So many that we can rotate people in and out if they get sick. We have unemployed people who can design, manufacture and deliver materiel to front line troops, and to build hundreds of Treatment Centres, and act as support staff.

In WW2 it took 8 months to train a fighter pilot, it is a 22 week course to train an army medic. A huge well educated country can do pretty much anything if that is its only focus.

This is not as hard a task as it looks. In 6 months there could be a bed and nurse for every patient and many multiples of current ICU beds. Governments are able to ignore money. All it needs is to list your resource priorities, list your unused resources, and start redirecting.

Yup, it's similar in scale to a medium sized war.

Casualty rates greater than the height of the Blitz - survivable as a country and society, but it will need lots of countries on effectively a war footing. Which will also manage the slump in demand.

Keynes for the win least bad option

[Gfamily]

Academia in 2020

[FlammableFlower]

Yep.

Today we had the "last day of normal teaching is Tuesday, after that everything goes online" directive. Very weird running the last teaching lab of the year today. At least I knew that no one was going to be touching their face...

Campus will still be open - amongst other things, we have students that for various reasons really don't want to go home/have nowhere else to go - essentially being at uni is a refuge from abuse in the family.

[shpalman]

I owe you an apology I assumed that the British wouldn't be c.nts about containment and social distancing https://twitter.com/nicktolhurst/status ... 28289?s=09

[EACLucifer]

Not sure the Government is living in the real world any more.

They're saying that if one person in any household has a persistent cough or fever, everyone living there must stay at home for 14 days, and that all of them should, if possible, avoid leaving the house "even to buy food or essentials".

Except that the country has gone so nuts that supermarket delivery slots are non existent, so how are these people going to get food and the like - especially given we've also been told not to stockpile. In large parts of the country, particularly in the South, people don't know their neighbours so it's not like you can just ask your neighbour next door to grab you some things from the supermarket.

CF

And absolutely no consideration of those who don't have local healthy relatives.

Self isolating with chronic mobility problems aint exactly fun either; I'm used to having some come over and help twice a week.

[sTeamTraen]

UK government scientific advisers have realised that the "mitigation/herd immunity" strategy is bollocks, about a week after every scientist not on their committee told them so. So apparently it'll be a lockdown anyway, only with another week of exponential growth compared to where they could have been.

ETA: I haven't read all of the thread in detail for the last few hours, so this may already have been covered, e.g. by mikeh's comment earlier. Soz if this is a duplicate.

[sTeamTraen]

Yup, it's similar in scale to a medium sized war.

Talking of which, I wonder if Putin might think this would be a fun moment to send a couple of armoured brigades to the border with Estonia?

[AMS]

Crucially, we will not import health resources (we cannot import ICU nurses and presumably no country will be mad enough to sell us their ventilators). We have local resources to exploit instead. So many that we can rotate people in and out if they get sick. We have unemployed people who can design, manufacture and deliver materiel to front line troops, and to build hundreds of Treatment Centres, and act as support staff.

In WW2 it took 8 months to train a fighter pilot, it is a 22 week course to train an army medic. A huge well educated country can do pretty much anything if that is its only focus.

This is not as hard a task as it looks. In 6 months there could be a bed and nurse for every patient and many multiples of current ICU beds. Governments are able to ignore money. All it needs is to list your resource priorities, list your unused resources, and start redirecting.

One thing I've been wondering - we should soon have tests for serum antibodies to check who for sure has recovered from the virus. While there's an unclear risk of reinfection, the expanding immune population are a high value resource, and it would be good to think what roles they could be used for.

[EACLucifer]

I’ve bored people many times with this over the years. But one last time - because there's a lot of "but how do we pay for it?" about.

Money is not resources. Look at everything in terms of resources, never money.

Money is an imaginary thing, created and destroyed at printing presses and with a click of a mouse in the Bank of England. The Chancellor of the Exchequer could transmit £1,000 to all of us in a couple of minutes and spend the rest of the day playing Candy Crush.

Resources are real. Resources are where the actual problems lie.

When General Eisenhower said in 1944: I want 5,000 landing craft, the problem wasn’t how much a landing craft costs. It was how the hell do you build them. Production everywhere was maxed out, every scrap of steel and every machine tool and every factory worker already building something else. So trade-offs had to be made. Someone will have decided to stop producing corvettes or something, to build landing craft instead.

In 1939 the problem was very different. There was plenty of spare capacity, it was just that everything was facing the wrong way. The machine tools were set up for making private cars, not Spitfires, people were working as housewives instead of in factories. A massive transformational shift. But the potential was there - nobody would be buying private cars, so the car factory was silent, its people waiting to be put to work.

It's good you mention wartime production, it's probably the best analogy, but we weren't this unprepared in '39. As early as '36 we'd got the Shadow Factories Plan, coordinated by Lord Nuffield, to turn the Morris group's production over to wartime needs.

Our resources are now like 1939. We have instantly gone from near full employment, to mass unemployment. I estimate there are now 4-5 million unemployed (many still on the payroll of companies and getting paid, but not actually having anything to do). We have gone from a sophisticated economy, with every company operating at high efficiency, to a chaotic economy with broken supply chains and misdirected production. Bad news, but this is what enables sudden transformation.

The Spitfires and landing craft equivalents in 2020 are healthcare personnel and equipment. We can devote almost unlimited resources to supporting each key worker. In 1944, for every 1 frontline fighting soldier, there were 4 logistics and support people behind the line, and countless more behind the scenes in factories. We now have so many un and underemployed we can do the same:

- An Uber driver chauffeurs a hospital planner to and from home
- A cabin crew does the planner’s supermarket shopping and cooks her evening meal
- A retail worker looks after her kids

Crucially, we will not import health resources (we cannot import ICU nurses and presumably no country will be mad enough to sell us their ventilators). We have local resources to exploit instead. So many that we can rotate people in and out if they get sick. We have unemployed people who can design, manufacture and deliver materiel to front line troops, and to build hundreds of Treatment Centres, and act as support staff.

In WW2 it took 8 months to train a fighter pilot, it is a 22 week course to train an army medic. A huge well educated country can do pretty much anything if that is its only focus.

This is not as hard a task as it looks. In 6 months there could be a bed and nurse for every patient and many multiples of current ICU beds. Governments are able to ignore money. All it needs is to list your resource priorities, list your unused resources, and start redirecting.

The key thing is to learn from the past. Wartime production didn't just involved new factories making products, it involved having as many people as possible making product components. Not got the facilities to build spitfires? You can make wing assemblies.

And the other key was simplifying the production of designs. Our inspiration should be the Sten gun. Almost all facilities that could work metal could make *some* parts of a Sten gun, even the Polish resistance were making them. We need the respirator equivalent; as simple as possible to build and operate. Better a few people die from respirator failure than huge numbers die from no respirators.

Seeing industry leaders interviewed about this made me utterly furious. We've had a couple of months to prepare. That time could have been spent working out how we would tool up when needed, or better, doing so. We shouldn't be worrying about getting designs approved; we should be taking known, effective designs, force-purchasing the patents, and publishing the details of every component so manufacturers can produce parts. Then the original manufacturers can spend their time assembling and testing them.

[Herainestold]

Meanwhile in Singapore

https://twitter.com/MsMelChen/status/12 ... 9460558848

[shpalman]

(never mind)

[EACLucifer]

UK government scientific advisers have realised that the "mitigation/herd immunity" strategy is bollocks, about a week after every scientist not on their committee told them so. So apparently it'll be a lockdown anyway, only with another week of exponential growth compared to where they could have been.

ETA: I haven't read all of the thread in detail for the last few hours, so this may already have been covered, e.g. by mikeh's comment earlier. Soz if this is a duplicate.

First rule of fixing stuff; if option A precludes option B, but not vice versa, attempt option A first.

This is comparing different regions in Italy (apologies if already posted) and fits well with historical Spanish Flu data.

https://twitter.com/drjenndowd/status/1 ... 1498956806


Guess which one went with an early and aggressive containment strategy?

[shpalman]

For what its worth, blog post from me on this evenings updates, plus the new Imperial College London modelling paper (unsure if its upthread anywhere, if not already seen then there's lot of data to unpick and its clearly informed CMO policy)

https://medium.com/@michael.g.head/uk-c ... 6e146e4be3

If not, it's linked in this
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/co ... egy-deaths

[Gfamily]

3d printer used to fabricate valves that were in short supply in Brescia


https://it.businessinsider.com/coronavi ... i-brescia/

[JQH]

Seen a claim on FaceBook that Johnson is only "advising" people not to go to pubs etc rater than ordering the venues to close because if he did the latter the venues could claim on their business insurance. While this fits in with my prejudices about Johnson, I've no clue how this kind of insurance actually works and hence whether there's any truth in the post. Anybody better informed?

[TopBadger]

Business Continuity insurance... its intended to cover unexpected things that stop a business trading for a while.

I doubt insurers could pay out en masse and im not sure Govt advising against using rather than closing down businesses would trigger the continuity cover anway. As with any policy exclusions apply.

[Grumble]

Seen a claim on FaceBook that Johnson is only "advising" people not to go to pubs etc rater than ordering the venues to close because if he did the latter the venues could claim on their business insurance. While this fits in with my prejudices about Johnson, I've no clue how this kind of insurance actually works and hence whether there's any truth in the post. Anybody better informed?

I’ve seen a plausible claim on twitter that the only actual powers he has for this kind of situation are in the civil contingencies act, but those are limited to 30 days so the government don’t want to use those yet. Parliament may have to grant government more powers.

[Woodchopper]

I’ve bored people many times with this over the years. But one last time - because there's a lot of "but how do we pay for it?" about.

Money is not resources. Look at everything in terms of resources, never money.

Money is an imaginary thing, created and destroyed at printing presses and with a click of a mouse in the Bank of England. The Chancellor of the Exchequer could transmit £1,000 to all of us in a couple of minutes and spend the rest of the day playing Candy Crush.

Resources are real. Resources are where the actual problems lie.

When General Eisenhower said in 1944: I want 5,000 landing craft, the problem wasn’t how much a landing craft costs. It was how the hell do you build them. Production everywhere was maxed out, every scrap of steel and every machine tool and every factory worker already building something else. So trade-offs had to be made. Someone will have decided to stop producing corvettes or something, to build landing craft instead.

In 1939 the problem was very different. There was plenty of spare capacity, it was just that everything was facing the wrong way. The machine tools were set up for making private cars, not Spitfires, people were working as housewives instead of in factories. A massive transformational shift. But the potential was there - nobody would be buying private cars, so the car factory was silent, its people waiting to be put to work.

Our resources are now like 1939. We have instantly gone from near full employment, to mass unemployment. I estimate there are now 4-5 million unemployed (many still on the payroll of companies and getting paid, but not actually having anything to do). We have gone from a sophisticated economy, with every company operating at high efficiency, to a chaotic economy with broken supply chains and misdirected production. Bad news, but this is what enables sudden transformation.

The Spitfires and landing craft equivalents in 2020 are healthcare personnel and equipment. We can devote almost unlimited resources to supporting each key worker. In 1944, for every 1 frontline fighting soldier, there were 4 logistics and support people behind the line, and countless more behind the scenes in factories. We now have so many un and underemployed we can do the same:

- An Uber driver chauffeurs a hospital planner to and from home
- A cabin crew does the planner’s supermarket shopping and cooks her evening meal
- A retail worker looks after her kids

Crucially, we will not import health resources (we cannot import ICU nurses and presumably no country will be mad enough to sell us their ventilators). We have local resources to exploit instead. So many that we can rotate people in and out if they get sick. We have unemployed people who can design, manufacture and deliver materiel to front line troops, and to build hundreds of Treatment Centres, and act as support staff.

In WW2 it took 8 months to train a fighter pilot, it is a 22 week course to train an army medic. A huge well educated country can do pretty much anything if that is its only focus.

This is not as hard a task as it looks. In 6 months there could be a bed and nurse for every patient and many multiples of current ICU beds. Governments are able to ignore money. All it needs is to list your resource priorities, list your unused resources, and start redirecting.

Where your analogy is different to WW2 is that British rearmament started in 1934, and continued apace during the 'phony war'. When the intense fighting began in April 1940 Britain had been preparing for six years and had been on a war footing for eight months.

Time for preparations now is measured in weeks.

[lpm]

If not, it's linked in this
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/co ... egy-deaths

What the hell does "In the last few days" mean? Four days ago is when the herd immunity strategy was announced. Did they already suspect their model was failing even while Johnson was speaking?

Every hour counts at this point of the exponential. Why couldn't Johnson have changed tack at 7:00 this morning? Yesterday lunchtime? Saturday evening?

The whole point of Thursday's strategy was to be wonderfully agile, dialing up and damping down at exactly the right moment. Not to be waiting "a few days".

[EACLucifer]

I’ve bored people many times with this over the years. But one last time - because there's a lot of "but how do we pay for it?" about.

Money is not resources. Look at everything in terms of resources, never money.

Money is an imaginary thing, created and destroyed at printing presses and with a click of a mouse in the Bank of England. The Chancellor of the Exchequer could transmit £1,000 to all of us in a couple of minutes and spend the rest of the day playing Candy Crush.

Resources are real. Resources are where the actual problems lie.

When General Eisenhower said in 1944: I want 5,000 landing craft, the problem wasn’t how much a landing craft costs. It was how the hell do you build them. Production everywhere was maxed out, every scrap of steel and every machine tool and every factory worker already building something else. So trade-offs had to be made. Someone will have decided to stop producing corvettes or something, to build landing craft instead.

In 1939 the problem was very different. There was plenty of spare capacity, it was just that everything was facing the wrong way. The machine tools were set up for making private cars, not Spitfires, people were working as housewives instead of in factories. A massive transformational shift. But the potential was there - nobody would be buying private cars, so the car factory was silent, its people waiting to be put to work.

Our resources are now like 1939. We have instantly gone from near full employment, to mass unemployment. I estimate there are now 4-5 million unemployed (many still on the payroll of companies and getting paid, but not actually having anything to do). We have gone from a sophisticated economy, with every company operating at high efficiency, to a chaotic economy with broken supply chains and misdirected production. Bad news, but this is what enables sudden transformation.

The Spitfires and landing craft equivalents in 2020 are healthcare personnel and equipment. We can devote almost unlimited resources to supporting each key worker. In 1944, for every 1 frontline fighting soldier, there were 4 logistics and support people behind the line, and countless more behind the scenes in factories. We now have so many un and underemployed we can do the same:

- An Uber driver chauffeurs a hospital planner to and from home
- A cabin crew does the planner’s supermarket shopping and cooks her evening meal
- A retail worker looks after her kids

Crucially, we will not import health resources (we cannot import ICU nurses and presumably no country will be mad enough to sell us their ventilators). We have local resources to exploit instead. So many that we can rotate people in and out if they get sick. We have unemployed people who can design, manufacture and deliver materiel to front line troops, and to build hundreds of Treatment Centres, and act as support staff.

In WW2 it took 8 months to train a fighter pilot, it is a 22 week course to train an army medic. A huge well educated country can do pretty much anything if that is its only focus.

This is not as hard a task as it looks. In 6 months there could be a bed and nurse for every patient and many multiples of current ICU beds. Governments are able to ignore money. All it needs is to list your resource priorities, list your unused resources, and start redirecting.

Where your analogy is different to WW2 is that British rearmament started in 1934, and continued apace during the 'phony war'. When the intense fighting began in April 1940 Britain had been preparing for six years and had been on a war footing for eight months.

Time for preparations now is measured in weeks.

Tool up time is probably faster now than the kind of serial production we were doing then for armaments.

That said, the time lost is inexcusable. There is a lead time on production of any product; that could have been underway in January at very little cost if the products were not needed, and it was not.

The same things that worked then would work now, though. It's too late for the Shadow Factories approach, though it would have given us a head start, it isn't too late for some of the other tricks, namely distributed production of components with centralised assembly and testing, and also kicking all intellectual property issues into the long grass. Build now, a comission can work out who gets paid what later.

[EACLucifer]

If not, it's linked in this
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/co ... egy-deaths

What the hell does "In the last few days" mean? Four days ago is when the herd immunity strategy was announced. Did they already suspect their model was failing even while Johnson was speaking?

Every hour counts at this point of the exponential. Why couldn't Johnson have changed tack at 7:00 this morning? Yesterday lunchtime? Saturday evening?

The whole point of Thursday's strategy was to be wonderfully agile, dialing up and damping down at exactly the right moment. Not to be waiting "a few days".

And the whole problem with it, all along, is that infection is not a tap, it's water overflowing a failing spilway. You can't turn it off when you want, and it erodes your ability to contain it as it flows.

Early containment was likely vital; this was in published literature before this latest horror even began, in studies of Spanish Flu across different American cities. Johnson's feckless flapping will be measured in many lives.

[lpm]

Better a few people die from respirator failure than huge numbers die from no respirators.

Seeing industry leaders interviewed about this made me utterly furious. We've had a couple of months to prepare. That time could have been spent working out how we would tool up when needed, or better, doing so. We shouldn't be worrying about getting designs approved; we should be taking known, effective designs, force-purchasing the patents, and publishing the details of every component so manufacturers can produce parts. Then the original manufacturers can spend their time assembling and testing them.

Good point - we would all rather be on a dodgy respirator than not at all.

Your argument cuts through the silly "But what about the regulations" waffle in this:

BBC News - Coronavirus: Plan to ramp up ventilator production 'unrealistic'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51914490

Two wasted months. Don't need perfect, don't need efficient, just need them delivered. It now needs a command economy - but I'd be happy to exploit capitalist greed. Offer a million a unit or whatever, we only need 20,000. Or maybe make 50,000 to be sure. If there's some billionaire ventilator maker walking around afterward who'd care - better than a billionaire hedge fund manager.

[EACLucifer]

Better a few people die from respirator failure than huge numbers die from no respirators.

Seeing industry leaders interviewed about this made me utterly furious. We've had a couple of months to prepare. That time could have been spent working out how we would tool up when needed, or better, doing so. We shouldn't be worrying about getting designs approved; we should be taking known, effective designs, force-purchasing the patents, and publishing the details of every component so manufacturers can produce parts. Then the original manufacturers can spend their time assembling and testing them.

Good point - we would all rather be on a dodgy respirator than not at all.

Your argument cuts through the silly "But what about the regulations" waffle in this:

BBC News - Coronavirus: Plan to ramp up ventilator production 'unrealistic'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51914490

Two wasted months. Don't need perfect, don't need efficient, just need them delivered. It now needs a command economy - but I'd be happy to exploit capitalist greed. Offer a million a unit or whatever, we only need 20,000. Or maybe make 50,000 to be sure. If there's some billionaire ventilator maker walking around afterward who'd care - better than a billionaire hedge fund manager.

That was basically my logic. A relatively small amount of money back in January could have paid for the plans to be developed so that when we needed to shift production, we could.