Boris' Dad flew to his Villa in greece via Bulgaria to get round the travel ban from Greece to the UK.

A few people are being critical. (to say the least)

I wondering if he was checking his hearing or something :rolleyes:

If you've signed up to the Covidzoe app, they show some extra data from their own analyses.

This is from their latest report to the government on people reporting not feeling well.

Attachment 42503

I see the Bouffant Buffoon's father has travelled to Greece.
:rolleyes:

ETA: oops, already mentioned. Sorry.

That's interesting, but of course there could be any number of reasons for people not feeling well. The modellers in Scotland, who are not known for their over-optimistic forecasts shall we say, think there are only about 1,500 people in the country in the infectious stage of the virus at the moment.

This map is interesting.



I wonder if Wales is going to have to lock down Merthyr Tydfil. Some other bits of England are looking a bit dodgy too. Is that Bradford, Sheffield and Manchester standing out?

Duplicate. Silly me.

Would this be the same "Boris' Dad" who's applied for a French passport?

Yes, that's consistent with the data from that app.


https://covid.joinzoe.com/data

Blackpool looks potentially concerning

Here's an interesting article from a Welsh newspaper.

https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/nor...virus-18517404

It points out that of the 12 councils with the highest number of recorded coronavirus cases overall in Britain, almost all are in Wales and two are in Scotland. There isn't a single English local authority in there at all. However if you look at the recorded death statistics these councils are nowhere to be seen. Because England has never published true figures on infections detected. It's harder to hide the deaths (though they tried that too for a while by only counting people who had died in hospital).

(Midlothian is the real surprise there for me. It's the next LA to where I live, the county boundary is only three miles away, and it's where I do any shopping I can't do in the village. It's never been a problem area at all in Scotland terms, unless they're including Edinburgh city in there which I suppose they might be, and last week it had no new cases at all.)

Is the under-testing and under-reporting in England just incompetence, or are they actively trying to mislead and make England look good when it's not, I wonder.

Given who's in charge a mix; incompetence that they're happy with.

I suspect you're right. At the beginning Sturgeon said one thing I agreed with (probably the only one at that point), that she was determined to get honest recording of cases and deaths. By and large she seems to have succeeded in that, although now the natural noise in the reporting as odd cases are added and subtracted is actually swamping the real results, as the prevalence is so low.

Ironically we periodically got pelters from Tory politicians about how bad Scotland was compared to England by this or that metric, when in fact the truth was that England was hiding at least half its care home deaths, and a huge slice of its positive test results. The true statistics as they come through show that Scotland's death and infection rates have been catastrophic, just not as catastrophic as England's.

No figures on deaths or infections today?

Is this the place to talk about so-called lockdown sceptics?

Lots of cherrypicking and messing of data to claim it's no worse than a bad flu season and that deaths are mostly due to the lockdown (yes, really claiming that!)

Anyway the ONS data doesn't support that - especially for England and Wales ( Scotland is recorded separately).

It's probably relevant because you can see the undercounting by 2000 to 4000 per weeek for the 5 weeks of the peak.

Attachment 42511

ETA you can see that now, we at least look to be accounting for the COVID-19 deaths

I ended up making a a Twitter thread about this, and unsurprisingly getting blocked by one prominent advocate when I asked how he made his graphs.

This graph was in reply to one claim that winter 2017-2018 was equivalent

I haven't been able to find the figures for yesterday. Even the BBC's summary page, updated daily, doesn't include them for the first time ever AFAIK, though it looks like they've added them to the graphs. By eye, yesterday's deaths seem to be slighter higher than Wednesday's, which was 176.

ETA: Actually I'm not sure they have had added Thursday's figure to the graphs. They repeat that Wednesday's figure was 176 but even that's buried in the text. In previous updates there's been a graphic near the top of the page giving, aot, the previous day's number of deaths and new infections. That graphic seems to have been removed entirely.

E again TA: The global Covid tracker I use doesn't have any UK numbers for yesterday either, only the cumulative numbers.

seems the govt hasn't released them, I wonder if that's anything to do with the pubs opening on Saturday?
It's being pushed by the govt as 'Super Saturday'
Don't want to worry people.

Remember, if you get sick because of the government rushing through lifting lockdown restrictions in the middle of an uptick in infections during a pandemic, it's your fault for being insufficiently alert. :rolleyes:

This site says 89 for yesterday.

It does have this note, which might explain any delays:

A Facebook friend was trying to claim it was no worse than flu, pointing at the ONS figures, but that was before Covid-19 deaths were actually showing up in the published figures.

Ah.. I'm talking a lot later... like now.

Anyway here's my thread on it as Alistair Haimes seems to be a goto person for such spurious analyses.

https://twitter.com/ParkinJim/status...778314240?s=20

Basically, this graph, if not completely "fiction", is about as true as a John Wayne war film "based on real events"

Attachment 42512

Scotland announced five new infections and one further death yesterday at the usual time (12.30). The local authority area new infections added up to ten though. With the numbers so low the noise in the data sometimes overwhelms the actual numbers!

England apparently decided to sort out its data recording yesterday and incorporate the pillar 2 tests they'd been concealing for months to make themselves look better. By all accounts they have been doing a thorough job of it, by allocating the newly-disclosed results to the correct days and also removing duplicate counting (some people were tested by both pillar 1 and pillar 2 and had been counted twice). So this explains the delay in the England figures I think and anyone looking at them now should be able to get a much better idea not just of what's going on but of what was going on. Just a pity they didn't do it sooner and it took Leicester to bring it to a head.

I also saw a report that they were going to start issuing the results, in public, by postcode area. If this is true it will be absolutely great and will allow people to get a real idea of what's going on in their local area. I've been howling about this for weeks, because the LA region where I live is about 100 miles wide and rumour had it that the grumbling viral activity being reported was all centred on a care home in Eyemouth which is genuinely getting on for 100 miles from me. So if England starts producing postcode area data hopefully Scotland will have to do the same. I can't wait!

One thing that's coming out is that Leicester really is the worst area in England by a fair margin and other towns that have been mentioned do not have problems to nearly the same extent. The only other comparable area is Merthyr in Wales where there was a big meat packing plant cluster which bumped the numbers up really high but which the authorities say they have under control by contact tracing. So maybe Leicester will be an isolated incident at least for now.

The very high infection numbers for many places in England are still a worry though, considering the opening up that's happening. The cases occurring at the moment aren't being contact-traced and isolated so how will they manage when people are going to the pub?

I have been hearing more about the Annan-Gretna cluster, although it's been difficult to verify this from press reports.

I'm told that the problem started with a healthcare worker who works in England but lives in Scotland and brought the virus back from work. Well no border closure would have prevented that because people would be allowed to cross the border to go to work. However (and this bit is in the press reports) "illegal gatherings" were involved, allegedly indoor house parties, and that's where the virus was spread around a number of people in the community in Scotland.

Who is this genius, working in a hospital in a relatively high-prevalence area, who then goes home to a low-prevalence area and illegally mixes with people indoors? I don't suppose he or she will be prosecuted for this, but dammit if it was up to me there would be charges brought.

So they changed the method to make the figures look lower to reassure the party goers?

If so, it wouldn't be the first time that the government has done something similar.

Well, the timing is convenient.

As I understand it the opposite is the case. The outcry over the previous deceptive reporting method caused by the Leicester outbreak (which didn't show at all in the published figures, only in the ones they weren't publishing) has prompted a wholesale overhaul and they're not only going to do it right from now on, they're allocating all the historical unreported cases to their correct dates so that the historical figures are also correct.

Nor does the ECDC data

Just a negative 29726 cases

I think the negative number is the result of the elimination of the double counting I mentioned earlier. Some people had tests on both pillar 1 and pillar 2 and because of the shambolic recording and reporting system they were double-counted when the two groups were combined. That has now been corrected.

Shambolic from start to finish.

Have you been listening to BBC More or Less?

It's been utterly damning every week.

About the testing, and the lateness of the lockdown, indeed.

The most recent (the 14th in the 7 episode series :) ) seemed fairly optimistic about the current situation in terms of dealing with the disease.

I do hope so. The situation in England scares me. Opening pubs while there's still free circulation of virus and no effective contact tracing in operation. I do not want that on our southern border and the very mention of the border controls necessary to protect us from it are causing British nationalists to go into meltdown. The obvious way out is for England to suppress the virus too, it just doesn't look all that likely from where I'm sitting right now.

But that worked out so well for Texas...

A number of my Tory friends and acquaintances here in Wales are lamenting the fact that the Welsh government isn't following in lockstep with Westminster and claiming that it's a terrible flaw with devolution.

I, on the other hand, see it as an excellent argument in favour of devolution even though Westminster is doing its best to undermine the efforts of the devolved parliaments to keep their people safe. :mad:

It's interesting that Wales has quite a lot of cases at the moment but the situation is quite different from that in England. The Welsh cases are almost all related to three nasty outbreaks associated with slaughterhouses or meat packing plants and are being hunted down and quarantined and the outbreaks contained. That's how you do it. England is opening up with too much infection to be able to contain clusters in that way.

They think the Annan-Gretna cluster is under control now. It has transpired it originated in Carlisle hospital where there was nosocomial (hospital-acquired infection) spread. There was an interview with the matriarch of one of the affected famlies in which she insisted that her family had always adhered to the guidelines but they were getting local abuse for spreading virus. As was delicately hinted by the medical response, if virus comes into your family from another family, you have not been properly adhering to the guidelines.

Race to stop Carlisle hospital virus spreading in Scotland

New cross-border coronavirus case links Scots to English hospital

It's being reported that there are 11 cases in D&G associated with the cluster, although I'm not seeing that many in the D&G reported statistics. They think they're done contact tracing, the 11 people and their contacts are isolating, and three workplaces that became involved in the cluster are being tested wholesale (including a seafood processing plant).

It seems that virus was spreading in Carlisle hospital, a member of staff (or possibly more than one) who lives in Scotland brought it back home over the border, and then some careless behaviour apparently involving illegal gatherings spread it into additional families and three workplaces. The health authorities think they have it contained now, at least on the Scottish side. I presume the Cumbrian authorities are sorting out Carlisle hospital.

Let's hope this acts as a salutary warning to some people.

Colossal shambles over the so-called 'green list' of non-quaranting countries entering the UK. This morning Grant Shapps announced that the USA would not be on the list (for obvious reasons) and neither would Greece until the arrangement is reciprocal.

Late afternoon we hear that Greece will be on the green list.

Piss up ... brewery ... anyone?

"What's that Mr Johnson? Your father Mr Johnson? Yes, of course he has to be able to get home to go to the pub Mr Johnson. I'll sort it out immediately Mr Johnson."

Probably not Merthyr. The cases are primarily dure to the issues with the packing plant, and is being dealt with seperately.

Yes, I had read that. That's the difference, when you've got cases down to a manageable level and you've got a working test-trace-isolate system going, you can get in there and control a cluster without having to apply the hammer to the entire town. In England they're opening up when cases are still way above a manageable level even if they had a decent TTI operation, which they haven't.

I don't know what Carlisle is doing about its hospital cluster, but the bit if it that spilled into Scotland appears to be eleven cases and they think they have it walled off. We're opening up quite a bit now, but they've told the area round Annan and Lockerbie they have to stay in the existing stage for another couple of weeks. I hope we don't have to revert anywhere to lockdown again but you never know.

Listening in horror to the BBC news this morning. At the moment they're interviewing people from the travel industry. The message seems to be "Sure being on a plane is risky, but don't be a wuss".

I'd like to see the interviewer be a bit more challenging. "Will you feel a personal responsibility if someone dies after catching Coronavirus on a flight ?"

Otherwise it's just cheerleading the lifting of lockdown restrictions whilst spreading the message that it's your fault if you catch it. :mad:

Why would the department of health give a quarter of a billion pounds contract to procure face masks to a financial services and investments company based in Mauritius?

A CEO that has close ties with cabinet minister Liz Truss?

Surely not.

Pure coincidence I'm sure. :rolleyes: