A lot of people believe Boris about how well the pandemic has been handled and brought under control (they listen to 'feeleys' not the numbers) and the fantastic new drug (which might save 10%). The problem when you keep telling people how wonderfully you're controlling a pandemic is that some people get the crazy idea the pandemic is under control.

The "fantastic new drug" is a bog-standard anti-inflammatory that has been around since before I was a student. "Nothing should die without benefit of steroids" was a common quip early in my career. It's arguably over-used so I guess it was sensible to do a trial to make sure it was really beneficial, but it should have been used a priori from the start. It's a bit like headlines saying great breakthrough we've discovered that giving oxygen to covid patients saves quite a few.

US buys up world stock of key Covid-19 drug

And are going to charge $3120 for a course of treatment that remains unproven.

Void the patent and have local companies sell it as a generic.

What's interesting is the 2019 Global Health Security Index rated 195 countries on their preparedness to handle a pandemic. At the top were the United States in the number one spot and the UK in number two.

What the rankings failed to take into account was the quality of political leadership in the various countries. As we've seen, despite being the best prepared neither country had the best response.

Well be fair given how badly its going in the USA they are probably going to need it the most...

That's the stuff that shortens recovery time by a few days for seriously ill patients, but doesn't actually stop anyone from dying? I think this is more of a problem for people who might need the drug for other conditions it's actually helpful for.

The Guardian have excelled themselves. Looking for "spikes" they've published a map with regions coloured scary-purple if they've had an increase of over 100% last week compared to the week before. Scotland looks terrible. Stirling, Aberdeenshire and Dumfries and Galloway are all shown as having spiking cases.

Rising coronavirus infections in pockets of UK raise fears of further local lockdowns

Stirling had one case two weeks ago and three last week (after several weeks of none at all and none so far this week either).
Aberdeenshire went from four cases to five cases which is only a 25% increase so I don't know what they're on about.
Some idiot statistician dumped ten lost cases from April into D&G's stats for 19 June (after a week of no cases at all) so that goes purple too, although come to think of it the way they've split the weeks it really goes from 10 to 1, not from 1 to 10 so again what gives?

They're suggesting D&G might be about to be locked down on that basis! Also Lanarkshire. North Lanarkshire had seven cases last week, down from nine the week before. South Lanarkshire had 11 cases last week down from 17 the week before. So according to the Grauniad, local lockdowns are imminent.

Leicester had 944 cases in two weeks, about 450 of them last week. Someone at the Guardian needs a remedial course in statistical interpretation. (Of course they couldn't simply say in the headling that "Rising coronavirus infections in pockets of England raise fears of further local lockdowns", could they?)

Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

It's pretty embarrassing. I mean you'd think someone would notice. We had a week with no cases at all, then one case the following week then three the next. OMG cases are spiking, they more than doubled in a week, we need a lockdown! I don't think so.

I hope they used a really scary color for that infinite increase.

It is a thing people will cling to for hope and Trump will dangle as a treat to Governors who dance to his tune. It will get his followers to pressure those Governors. If some disparity in outcomes results, he'll say it was because of following his plan (and almost certainly red state/blue state implications for the election).

Thanks for this, I knew it was enormously overhyped but I didn't realise quite how much. It just struck me how much people were acting like 'oh well that's all over then'.

If Sir Keir Starmer was accurate when he questioned Boris Johnson in PMQs today, it's not comfortable reading:

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

Doesn't sound much like a "world beating" track and trace system to me :mad:

Where did this "track and trace" thing even come from. The system that is required is test, trace and isolate. (More comprehensively, find, test, contact-trace, isolate and support.) There's no "track" involved, which is a term more appropriately applied to the identification of chains of viral transmission by RNA sequencing.

It makes it sound like an Amazon parcel. It completely ignores the testing and isolation parts. It's almost as if someone wants to confuse the public.

Some of the ‘pillar 2’ (private testing) data is now available it seems, but it hasn’t been provided to local authorities in a timely manner to let them actually deal with the outbreaks.

More hotspots in the North of England, mainly in areas with high numbers of BAME people.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-and-rochdale

I think Starmer is right. The reports of what's going on in Leicester suggest that any contact tracing is more of a token gesture. I'm not massively confident that Scotland has it right either, but the situation in England is a serious cause for concern.

When you consider that countries that suppressed this virus into oblivion by contact tracing, then re-opened slowly and carefully, still experienced sudden spreading clusters of infection they struggled to contain, what hope is there that a second wave in England can be avoided? Now I fully appreciate that these countries I mentioned have contained these clusters. My point is that they struggled, despite having platinum-plated contact tracing systems that many people criticise as over-intrusive. Opening up like it was Mardi Gras with barely a token gesture to contact tracing is a recipe for disaster.

The basic problem is that Boris Johnson is fantastically lazy and so will do the absolute minimum to appear to be doing something.

That kind of attitude permeates and so that's the kind of solution that gets put in place, something superficially impressive which would only deliver anything of value accidentally. The government's contract tracing is exactly that and as an added bonus, lines the pockets of Boris Johnson's chums.

An article from the British Medical Journal from a UK doctor which is very critical of the NHS Test and Trace system.

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2471

Marston's boss says their pubs won't be collecting contact details, stopping people 'propping up the bar' or making his staff wear masks when the pubs re-open.

I hope that their customers bear this in mind when the decide which, if any, pubs they decide to frequent.

Contrast that with the approach adopted by a Bristol pub I know:

.....and so it goes on

https://www.facebook.com/AlmaTavernAndTheatre/

That's rather better researched than the mince in that earlier article I linked to last night in which Stirling was highlighted as being a red zone because its infection rate had tripled - I checked the data and a week with one case was followed by a week with three cases. In the entire region. They named Dumfries and Galloway as heading for a lockdown, probably based on the fact that after a week of no cases at all the region recorded ten cases the following week - due to old data from April being added to the system on the Friday of that week. (D&G may be having a small cluster at the moment, one case then suddenly five cases, but still penny numbers. You do not lock down because six cases appeared in a very rural area.)

Maybe they found someone on the staff who isn't entirely innumerate.

And there was and indeed still is the infrastructure that has been used successfully in other outbreaks for contact tracing. Namely environmental health officers. But they have generally been ignored.

Doing something quietly using existing public sector resources would be something someone who wanted to address an issue quickly and cost effectively would do.

If you wanted instead to make a grand statement and then line the pockets of your friends then you'd build something complicated from scratch and contract out the whole thing. :mad:

This is an interesting article about the divergence between Scotland and England and notes that Scotland has always used the local authority infrastructure and it still is. The numbers of contacts traced per case are quite low so I'm still a bit dubious about this (but having said that we've only just started to come out of lockdown) but they do seem to be having some success.

Scotland could eliminate the coronavirus – if it weren't for England

The cluster that has emerged in the south-west of Scotland is apparently a cross-border issue centred in Annan and Gretna. Only nine cases so far, all in isolation and contacts being traced. This sort of thing is inevitable and it doesn't need to involve England at all - there's still virus present in Scotland. However bandying around words like despicable, astonishing, shameful and racist when a political leader merely doesn't rule out some border controls if the situation worsens is absolutely sickening.

Every country larger than a tennis court is operating some internal border controls to combat this virus, but apparently Scotland, the supposedly valued equal partner in this cherished union (remember "lead us, dont leave us"?) has to allow English tourists to re-seed virus all over the country.

A number of councils including Tory run ones now complaining to UK health ministry they do not have access to credible local Coronavirus stats in order to make decisions regarding mitigating action even tho they know these stats exist within central govt.

I'm just surprised it took them so long to notice. This problem has been evident for weeks if not months.

It's pretty frightening. If you go back to The Hammer and the Dance, the point of the Hammer is not that this alone will solve your coronavirus problem, it's to give a country that was unprepared and hence overwhelmed a second chance. The hammer both brings viral prevalence back down to a level where it can realistically be contained and gives time for the country to prepare, and most specifically to prepare what is needed for the Dance.

What is needed for the Dance is a robust, rapid and reliable find, test, contact-trace, isolate and support operation. Which England quite clearly does not have.

For weeks during lockdown Johnson did nothing at all, leading to many people assuming that he had only locked down to give the NHS a bit of a breather before embarking on the second wave in the futile pursuit of the mis-named "herd immunity". Although the WHO criteria for lifting lockdown included having sufficient TTI capability, England's did not. Instead all that was required was that there was room in the hospitals for more sick and dying people. "Off you go to the pub then, there's room for you now in intensive care" was the quip. But as this time wore on it became more and more obvious from events abroad that a TTI system was really essential. So Johnson did his usual thing of announcing that England was going to have the best one in the world, ignored the LA public health experts who are the nucleus of building such a system, contracted it out to his mates, and opened up anyway before it was even ready never mind tested to see if it could cope.

Reading accounts of how TTI works in countries that are actually beating the virus, we see a number of essential components. One is getting people with clinical signs tested within hours, and another is interviewing them about their contacts as soon as possible and identifying and isolating these contacts within about 24 hours. And above all, getting everyone. There's no point in doing a stellar job of contact tracing on ten new cases if there are actually several hundred new cases you don't know about.

This is what has been going on. I said the other day that there must have been a superspreader event in Leicester to have caused these numbers of cases, but apparently this is thought not to have been the case. There was simply so much virus already in circulation when restrictions were eased that it more or less picked up right where it had left off. It's been known for four weeks that virus was freely circulating there, but nothing has been done. The people doing the contact tracing have not even been told who has tested positive so they can start to do their job.

Leicester is by far the worst, but there are numerous other large towns in England in a similar situation. The way this is going these places are simply a bit earlier on the same curve as Leicester. There doesn't seem to be a hope in hell of contact-tracing in these places, so cases are bound to increase. The R number is probably well above 1 already.

We've also seen from experience abroad that even countries that have well and truly crushed the virus with military-grade testing and tracing systems that pay scant regard to civil liberties have experienced spreading new clusters of disease that they're struggled to contain even with these super-efficient systems.

The point about the Dance is that if infection starts to spread again you have to re-impose some restrictions to get R back down below 1. I can't see Johnson doing that. First he opens the country when infection is widespread meaning that it's going to be far harder to contain spread to R~1 than if it was more contained, then he does it without a functioning TTI operation, then he pretty much paints himself into a corner on not reintroducing restrictions. That isn't dancing, that's Texas. Meanwhile Scotland seems to be successfully dancing for now, and with a much lower viral prevalence and contact tracing teams under local authority control, has a significantly better chance of making it work.

This is going to get very ugly indeed in a few weeks time, and I don't think it's either deplorable, or shameful, or astonishing, or racist, to want to keep options open as regards border controls with a country that's heading where England is heading.

I'm so glad I'm not in the pub game anymore. Reopening on a Saturday is insane. The forecast is for showers, which, while it may mean less demand could also mean that all the people who agree to sit in pub gardens will make a rush for the bar when the rain starts. I wouldn't want to be the bar staff tasked with stopping them, especially if it holds off long enough for a few pints first...

Some analysis of the cases in Leicester - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ays-phe-report

Schools in England are going to reopen full time in September.

Apparently the combination of relaxing social distancing, treating individual years as bubbles in school (but clearly that's impossible at home as soon as siblings return from school), different start times and so on will magically stop the spread of Coronavirus.

The Government needs positive headlines and they don't care whose lives (apart from their own) they have to risk to get them. :mad:

Quelle surprise :rolleyes:

Kids going back to school and people returning to work resulted in a spike in infections among those two populations.

The government hasn't given sufficiently good guidance on how to make schools and workplaces safe. The idea that just staying 2 metres apart will somehow protect people if they're sharing the same indoor workspace is, IMO, laughable.

Dozens of countries will be exempt from a travel quarantine from Monday, UK government sources have indicated.

Now government sources have indicated that a very long list of countries is likely to be published by the end of this week.

It is possible that up to 75 countries deemed low or very low risk will be exempt from the UK's quarantine from Monday, 6 July.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53261752

That's interesting. And worrying. It's clear the virus has been circulating pretty freely in Leicester for weeks, and who knows about other towns. This is not the place to be when you're opening up. The place to be is that you're poised to jump on every new case and contact-trace it into oblivion. To contain any clusters that pop up so that the virus doesn't get a hold in the wider community. Opening up when the virus already has a hold in the wider community is suicidal.

Contrast the cluster in Annan and Gretna. Nine cases. (Only seven in the reported stats so two must only have been identified yesterday.) The first of these cases was reported on Monday of this week. Three days ago. They're on it. Everyone is at home isolating and the contacts are being tracked down. I imagine the people involved in the English side of the cluster (Longtown?) are being treated the same way. That's how you try to do it. I don't think they have a hope in hell in Leicester unless they lock down a lot harder, and how are they going to do that unless they put a police cordon round the area 24/7?

And by the way let's not blame English visitors for the Annan/Gretna cluster. I'd bet very heavily on this being caused by Scots travelling south to visit the flesh-pots of Carlisle, given that Carlisle is open and Annan and Dumfries are still closed - or were until Monday. Yes we need some sort of control on the border, but it's as much to keep Scots living in virus-free areas from going to the pub in an infected area as it is to control virus introduction by tourists coming north.

But will they exempt the UK from their quarantine list?

Not needing to quarantine when I get back doesn't help me to go on holiday if I have to quarantine for the entire 14 days I'm away.

How is this supposed to be possible? Children will move around, interact with each other, share teachers, use common spaces like libraries, gymnasiums, canteens, corridors....

If Eton can do it....

As I understand it, the intention is that they use shared spaces at the same time and in the cases of libraries, gyms and canteens perhaps not at all. The school will be turned on its head and instead of students going to different rooms, they will stay in the same room - potentially with the same teacher.

Of course that doesn't help for some subjects which require specialist equipment and doesn't acknowledge teaching specialities but I expect that most of the people making these proposals and the decisions read Classics, PPE or some other subject where you didn't need a lab. :rolleyes:

But will they reciprocate?

From that linked BBC story:

I guess the answer is "not necessarily".

If I was a country, like New Zealand, with a low to zero incidence of Coronavirus, I wouldn't want Brits wandering round unless they had been through quarantine - not least because they'd have just spent the best part of 24 hours sharing air with a few hundred fellow disease vectors travellers.

OTOH, I'd be fine with some kiwis entering the UK without quarantine though with the pubs not needing too many staff and Premiership Rugby reducing the salary cap, I'm not sure why they'd want to come here :p