I don't think you should interpret Darat's post literally. Defund to the point of collapse, criticise, privatise is a known strategy.

Similar situation in India as public health centers and government hospitals are inundated with Covid cases, the poor and destitute are denied access to what little medical services they had earlier. Many are being turned away from hospitals even for serious non-Covid ailments. Over the past few decades the government has slowly dismantled the public medical machinery in preference for a market based economy that favored expensive private hospitals.

Care minister has no idea how many people have died in care homes but she did a simply splendid job of captaining the sixth form hockey team so jolly well give her a chance.

There was a piece on this exact thing I read yesterday but can't find it now. There are major staff shortages at the Nightingale.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1252710832703705090

Quote embedded in tweet. The Financial Times' allegation is that the actual figure of covid-19 deaths is more than twice what the official figures are.

Interesting 'Live' headline on that page may be relevant to one of the ongoing discussions in this thread

No further details at this time.

The figure referenced in the tweet is "up to 41,000" which apparently been determined by analysing Office of National Statistics (ONS) data.

It seems to me entirely reasonable that the official figure is a significant underestimation. The government themselves are quite clear that it only includes those for whom a definitive Covid-19 diagnosis has been obtained (which would exclude those untested and those with a false negative) and in England and Northern Ireland only includes those who have died in hospital.

In other words the government is clear that the official figure is a subset of Coronavirus deaths. Whether the true figure is currently as high as 41,000 is another matter entirely.

What is clear to me is that the UK has mismanaged Coronavirus, especially in the early days and weeks when testing and tracking might have been a way to contain the outbreak.

Maybe it uses the same technology the government are proposing to use to avoid hard borders in Ireland :rolleyes:

If so, those weeks may not be in this year ;)

After Prime Minister's Questions, this paper is praising Keir Starmer and criticising the government

Why is that significant? It's the Daily Mail. Praising the leader of Labour.

Slightly over egged in that there are two sets of official government figures (actually 3 because the NHS also produces a set) https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistic...-daily-deaths/
the hospital deaths and the ONS deaths from death certificates that includes community deaths.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulat...ing10april2020
There are many statements out emphasising the difference between the two in terms of lag and population they are concerned with. It just reads like the journalist only just discovered this. I think that trying to extrapolate data based on hospital death data is not a good idea. The Euromortality data I also posted shows a rapid drop in mortality so assuming that community deaths will continue to rise may not be correct (although I appreciate makes better news).

A detailed discussion of the issues I previously posted was published on 08/04
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/reconc...ata-in-the-uk/
at which site the daily stats including the weekly ONS stats are linked to.

They also allude to how only about half of the rise in deaths are registered as due to covid-19, and get tangled up in whether the other deaths are due to people not coming into hospital with other illnesses and dying (interestingly if you look at doctor strikes when admissions fall, deaths fall), or misregistration, but as I have said the excess attributable mortality, the excess deaths not directly due to covid-19 will be likely due to MI and stroke which we know rise after respiratory infections. This is a testable prediction and I expect we will shortly see some stats published about how strokes and MI rates have gone up. If I am wrong then I am sure people here will remind me my prediction was faulty.

If they had been reading here they wouldn't have made the mistake I have been told off for being over pedantic about. Their colourful graph confuses date of reporting of deaths with date of deaths. Perhaps the daily fail needs to come here rather than us being posted over there!

There is a simple answer to why the number of tests being done is falling in the UK although capacity is rising, we are over the peak so the number of new cases requiring testing is falling.

As you know I think you are wrong. I think that there may be several differences to be considered in early management, but testing and tracking (contact tracing) was not a failure. You have been unable to identify a failure in the process. Probably more important was a delay in social distancing. Failure to (which might have been very difficult) to close the border effectively with compulsory quarantine of those arriving from Europe was probably essential. Modelling suggests that contact tracing alone could not contain covid-19, but control would only have been possible in combination with social distancing to drop R₀. So earlier introduction of social distancing was probably the most important thing that could have been done, this would have enabled contact tracing to be more effective. Closing schools was probably unnecessary, but restrictions on free movement, clubs, pubs, restaurants concerts etc would have been helpful.

The government are now inviting the military to the daily briefings:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/worl...ost_type=share

Maybe they think this will give them a veneer of competence. :rolleyes:

It looks like they screwed up on failure to implement testing (when epidemiologists and other experts were screaming for it) AND failing to implement social distancing soon enough. I'm happy to paint this government's abject failure with a very, very broad brush.

Presumably we can add failure to procure sufficient PPE and then having the temerity to blame those NHS personnel who are putting their lives at risk for misusing the PPE to the list of government failures.

There is the longer term failure of failing to maintain the level of preparedness. The Sunday Times article was particularly scathing about that.

On the positive side, the government did get the Nightingale Hospitals up and running - though didn't manage to staff them properly and IMO they were proactive in putting in place measures to protect most people and businesses financially - so it wasn't a complete bust.

In other news:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52383073

I was listening to the radio and it seemed to me that the government will claim success if they have the capacity to conduct 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month rather than actually carrying them out.

This is important because the current capacity is 40,000 tests a day but less than half of that number of tests are being carried out. I can envisage the end of the month rolling around with 30-40,000 tests being carried out on the best day. This simply isn't good enough if 100,000 tests are required - and I presume that this is the minimum requirement.

Whilst having more tests would have been good, I am not sure that the lack of testing resource was an issue that could have been addressed this year once the pandemic appeared. It was a resilience issue that should have been previously addressed. So I am going to give PHE a pass on this for the moment and pass responsibility to the past.

On PPE issues I (and some of my colleagues) have fairly dim views on the behaviour of some people within the NHS early on who were using PPE inappropriately and wastefully, to some extent this is a family fight and I don't want to get in to it. I do think that the pandemic stockpile was inappropriately biased to flu when it was very clear from briefings over many years there were other high risk viruses, so failure to include sufficient FFP3 (N95) masks and gowns was a failure, but again this was a historic failure.

What I hear from the people involved with purchasing was there was a huge surge in middlemen promising delivery of all sorts of things from ventilators to gloves but often with little evidence that they actually could deliver, and no sales for assessment. I suspect the rather bureaucratic NHS purchasing system could not cope with sourcing in this world of middlemen and multiple vendors and perhaps someone from a more commercial background should have been engaged. Again important resilience issues, Germany and the Czech republic and China who had manufacturing capacity for PPE banned exports even with the EU, so plans on purchasing failed. Clearly resilience planning requires maintaining more UK capability.

There was always some doubt about how the Nightingale hospitals would be staffed, since it would always involve taking staff from the acute hospitals already under pressure. I have had an offer to go to the local Nightingale hospital, but it is dependant on my own hospital releasing me, which they won't do. (As a huge Mash fan I fantasise that it will be like working at the 4077th, the problem is I am probably more like Major Burns and less like Hawkeye than I'd like to admit. However being slightly OCD and pedantic has virtues in healthcare, in real life I'd probably report Hawkeye to the GMC!)

Bizarrely this is a good thing, if infections are falling then demand falls. Moving towards some sort of broader screening process requires the clinical need to have fallen.

If people had started in Jan it would be a different story.

I don't know about the UK but that's not what happened in the US. Here our incompetent POTUS dismantled a lot of the pandemic response team and resoources.

Yes we had pandemic response plans geared toward flu. I was involved in developing the regional pandemic plan here when it looked like the H5N1 HPAI might break out. Looking back on it, not a lot was directly useful.

But we also began planning for SARS and knew things full well like the fact not only were gowns important, but hanging them outside the room and reusing them was contributing to the spread of SARS.

Yes, that planning was dropped when SARS was controlled. And worse, vaccine funding and research dried up. But had the pandemic response team still been intact, they would have known things like gowns were a critical part of PPE. We also knew that from the ebola outbreak that reached here.

But when you have no pandemic expertise and only an ignorant narcissist as POTUS who simply imagines there is no problem, you don't have even the beginning of PPE stockpiles.

That may all be true for the UK and the EU but it is not the only factors involved in the US failure to respond.

3D face shield production popped up fast here among volunteers with access to the printers. The plans were shared and people started producing them everywhere.

Again, only speaking for the outbreak here in the US, or more specifically WA State: Man flies in from Wuhan, develops symptoms the next day and ends up in isolation in a hospital with the diagnosis of COVID 19. There might have been some cautions to the family members but no one looked at anyone else this man came in contact with from the plane he arrived on to all the people he had contact with from the day he arrived until he was in isolation.

Next thing we know there is a deadly outbreak in a nursing home. The ED staff that treated the first patients from there and some of the EMS responders were exposed not knowing there was COVID in the area at first. They picked up on it quickly but not before some EMS workers were infected and not before one of the ED doctors got infected and came incredibly close to dying. (His survival story is in the news.) Public health took more than a week to even look at the problem growing in that nursing home and never did more than a cursory job of contact tracing. In their defense we have underfunded our public health in this state for years.

From the nursing home a visitor went home to Georgia and symptoms developed there. Not sure when she was warned but the visitors here were not given good advice on self quarantine. They had to hold a press conference of their own to get any attention to the problem. I won't review the rest of that story.

Next, by accident a COVID case is discovered in a person who thought he had the flu. It didn't take long for one of our local researchers to connect that genome to the first case in the hospital.

Now instead of any attempt to get control of the situation by contact tracing, public health being understaffed as they were simply moved on to the next stage, mitigation.

Then there were the announcements from our top public heath officials that only people with symptoms and exposure should be tested (covering up for the testing debacle) and no asymptomatic cases were spreading it. That went on long after the evidence of asymptomatic spread piled up.

And many healthcare workers in nursing homes were never given proper PPE. Again with the shortage of N95s they were simply told surgical masks (also called procedure masks) were sufficient. The excuses for that ******** were numerous.

So it's crap that contact tracing early on wouldn't have prevented a lot of spread. And given this disease has spread to other states and rural areas, it's clear no one bothered with contact tracing there when it was still early enough one could have accomplished prevention with contact tracing.

That continues daily here with each POTUS press conference.

Well that's my limit for now, I'm only 5 pages behind in the thread.

:confused: The graph would look exactly the same by both methods of counting. It would be fractionally adrift all the way to the top, but the error in the 'daily' figure would be insignificant in the grand running total, and certainly not discernible in such a graph.

Ahh, I was assuming it was humor that I was missing, but I had no context.

Jeez, you'd think this thread was entitled Covid and UK Politics.

That's even better then - a young bloke like you will be fine!

Excuse me if I find that that entirely Karmic. I hope it stays out of the slums, but when I saw there had already been deaths I couldn't see how it wouldn't spread.

Yeah, I saw the story about the dead doc.

It might turn out that counting the dead medics will be the only way of knowing the real cost to India. I've been concerned about the situation there from the start - seems like the perfect place for the virus to run unchecked.

Is Modi pals with Putin?

That seems like the apparent Russian approach - if they die in the ambulance waiting 16 hours to even get to the hospital, you're not sure what they died of, so don't count them.

Meanwhile, in other political news (and touching on my reply to Susheel), do we count the millions who starve as a result of Covid-19 as victims of the disease, or just unlucky?

It looks a certainty that the famines accompanying the pandemic will probably kill a lot more people.

As of right now, there has been somewhere over $5 trillion handed out in stimulus packages worldwide. Less than 1% of that would ensure the worst doesn't happen.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52373888

And this morning's final story on politics, is how the disease and lousy government is de-stabilising South and Central America to the point where criminal gangs have taken up the slack: https://www.thedailybeast.com/you-kn...a-covid-savior

I'm guessing the story of Al Capone lives strong in the minds of crooks everywhere.

I bet the army will be happy with the plans to spread the blame about. They’ll have the Queen up there soon.

Actually it would be very clear deaths had plateaued, and perhaps were falling.
https://www.cebm.net/wp-content/uplo...21th-April.png

It's the same everywhere. Problem is not everyone can bribe these days. You think you can make an offer to the government and that's it ? Plz.

The Atheist...I am 53, but thanks anyway. :D

Please learn to scale any images you post. That one went way off my screen.

The Mail graph is cumulative, not daily. The true date of occurrence of the death is insignificant in such a graph.

Plus: "These numbers will be revised upwards over next week"

Apologies fits perfectly for me, it is just a link to the original image.

I was referring to the bottom graph, deaths / day; which actually seems to use deaths reported that day not deaths occurring that day. I would post a link to the image but I'd probably upset you again!

In India it's not just starvation. A twelve year old girl died on her long trek home because of the lockdown. Her family were daily wagers who lost the source of income and also were left guessing about what kind of aid they could receive. The meal packets distributed in many states are few and far between. They have also been evicted from their temporary residences and the summer heat has just begun to peak. There have been a number of suicides where parents have killed their children and killed themselves.
There are various volunteer organizations and even individuals doing their best, but it isn't enough. The number of deaths resulting from the gruelling trek many of these people were forced into is criminal.
Add to this the dirty tricks played by the BJP in non BJP states through the captive media. BJP funded news channels have indulged in rumour mongering in various non BJP states resulting in violence and even a lynching two days ago in Maharashtra.
And the supreme court came out with this:

https://m.timesofindia.com/india/pay...w/75274875.cms

They have managed to pack the courts with RSS acolytes and their current concern is in enabling the rounding up journalists and activists critical of the government.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...ng-delhi-riots

Looks like Cummings spent the afternoon putting electrodes on Simon McDonald’s knackers, now the retraction. It is beyond satire. How stupid does this government think we are?


EU are now corroborating what Sir Simon McDonald said in his video testimony to the select committee yesterday

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52377087

This makes the retraction letter a lie

They were elected with a thumping majority - so pretty ******* stupid.

That's young enough to still be classed as young, and the stats in that group are pretty good. I hope your air isn't too polluted, though, because that is a bad thing.

That's not being reported very widely.

I'm a bit lost for words. Certainly puts things in a touch of perspective for places like NZ, which is doing it very easy so far.

Jesus, the corruption there makes US look like a kindergarten Mafia.

I can see why so many of your countrymen have already moved here and millions more want to.