Nominated, it made me laugh, it made my wife laugh, and later I'm going to tell it to the dog (but pretend it's my own joke:p)

When it comes to the economy no sacrifice is too great for someone else to make.

Has Dominic Goings stopped running yet?

So .. here in Czech Republic big parts of the lockdown were ordered against the constitution. Yesterday the city court in Prague abrogated the corresponding law. It was really just a process mistake. The law should have been declared by the cabinet, based on crisis plan. It was declared just by health ministry, based on national health plan. But it seems the cabinet actually did that on purpose to avoid paying damages, which would take place if it was declared based on crisis plan.
So on Thursday, some, but not all, lockdown measures are canceled, active on Monday. Some of it might be reintroduced properly over the weekend. But some were quickly canceled ahead of Monday, active now. Small stuff like leaving the country.
In other words, there's complete chaos everywhere. Not like violence in the streets, of course. But for any question 'am I supposed to do X' the answer is 'who knows ? maybe ?'.

I find this bewildering. A poll of who to trust about coronavirus and Boris Johnson comes top of politicians with 51%. He even beats some medical advisors.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavir...-poll-11977655

But back in March as government policy was being announced, he said be prepared to "lose loved ones before their time".

Just heard Tory MP Tom Tugendhat tell BBC news that the Chinese government falsified coronavirus statistics because it put the interests of the ruling party ahead of the people. Good job nothing like that could happen in Britain, eh?

Of course not. Our undercounting is due to utter incompetence, not guile and cunning. ;)

That's one thing that pisses me right off.

Yes, China's figures were dodgy.

However, so are everyone else's, apart from a a very few countries with clear and transparent systems, but let's attack China!

Mmmm... I think there's a bit of a difference, to be fair. Everybody's stats are off because testing is incomplete, inconsistent, and not everything is known. But except for a couple of cases, most of what countries are reporting should be considered true. Incomplete, but not falsified.

China actively suppressed and misreported their information early on. And while there's no hard evidence, there's fairly strong reason to suspect that the information they've been reporting over the last month is also purposefully misleading.

Those are pretty different scenarios. On the one hand is "here's the best info we've got, but we know it's not perfect and we know we're missing some stuff". On the other hand is "Oh no, we don't have a problem, nobody is sick... wait some people are sick, but the party is acting fast and building hospitals... and gee look at that, we've completely eliminated it as a problem while the rest of the world is screwed! Yay for the glorious party!"

To be a bit less subtle and a bit more American... It's kind of like how Biden sometimes says stuff that isn't completely true... but Trump actually lies on purpose. Neither one should be taken at face value without some double-checking, but they're not quite the same kind of "dodgy".

Depends on how you quantify false, I think.

In UK, USA and many other countries, a large, but unknown, number of deaths are not being attributed to Covid.

Nobody disputes that - heck, the actual government admits it.

I seem to recall the president of USA saying it would be gone by April. Has he retracted that or admitted a mistake yet?

I'm not even going to mention Bolsonaro or many others who have denied and falsified until it becomes impossible to hide.

You'll say it anyway. Good work.

Followed by a glorious non sequitur.

Large YET unknown. I'm pretty sure we will know. Also I'm pretty sure we will never now the truth about China.

UK aren't including any deaths not tested and recorded in a hospital, they are as bent as china's

I'm not sure why people are questioning the independence of SAGE when its lead by the eminent Professor of eugenics and population cull Dr Dominic Cummings.

First Secretary Dominic Raab, deputising for the Prime Minister, admits he has no recollection of even reading the ExerciseCygnus report which showed alarming gaps in the UK’s preparedness to deal with a pandemic.

I can't see how we'd know what those totals will be. Deaths not attributed now aren't going to be changed later, and measuring excess deaths isn't reliable when so many other unknowns need to be accounted for, like these:

Suicides caused by Covid v suicides saved by people being with family instead of alone.
Car crash deaths dropping are almost calculable.
Excess deaths from people dying of heart attacks they may have sought treatment for in ordinary times.
Reduced deaths from 'flu and other communicable diseases caused by social distancing and hygiene rules.
Deaths saved through vastly reduced pollution.
Deaths where Covid was present with other morbidities - which killed them?

We might get an idea of where the true number is, but I don't agree that we'll have a true picture.

Why differentiate ? All excess above average is caused by the situation, which is caused by the virus .. so all is caused by the virus. Don't forget flu IFR is estimated exactly this way.

Dyson has said the medical ventilator it developed to help treat patients with Covid-19 is no longer required.

It began developing a device in response to a government appeal for firms to take part in a national effort to increase the number of ventilators.

But in a note to staff, founder Sir James Dyson said that demand for ventilators had been less than first envisaged.

The Cabinet Office said that tests on ventilators are still ongoing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52409359

I mostly agree with this. It's hard enough to get accurate numbers of Covid deaths from the OECD countries. Many more countries are at least capable of counting deaths, so that will give us a reasonable way to calculate the global total.

There could be many more dying from completely unrelated causes, though, such as those caused by whatever natural disasters happen this year. What about a really bad monsoon season caused by AGW? I'm not sure how we should count possible deaths from civil unrest, revolutions, or war, either. Should we count them as pandemic related if the apparent trigger was the pandemic?

NYT has open access to COVID articles due to the crisis.

Johnson's bit on the side certainly gets around, doesn't he?

A large but unknown number of deaths are not attributable to covid-19. It will be very hard to sort out what deaths are due directly to covid-19, what due to other infections (e.g. flu which is still circulating but is very hard to test for at the moment because lab resources are all redirected to testing for covid-19), and what are due to late but currently unrecognised complications of covid-19 etc. Cause of death is always a guess, hardly anyone has a post mortem, even when there is a post mortem, these are not always correct. There is no perfect knowledge, there hasn't been in the past, there won't be in the future.

This is completely untrue. ONS mortality statistics include all deaths, in hospital, in home, in care homes. They are broken down by place of death. There has never been a requirement to have a test to diagnose covid-19. There has always been a clinical case definition. I personally have certified a death due to covid-19 despite the virology test being negative because the clinical and radiological features were diagnostic.

This is completely untrue. The chief medical and scientific officers lead SAGE.

I am not sure whether you are just repeating fake news without fact checking or whether you are deliberately sowing disinformation.

At the time of Exercise Cygnus Dominic Raab was a back bench MP, so it not completely clear why he should have read it. Are you saying all MPs should have read it?

It is worth remembering that there are large parts of the world with very few ventilators. From a global health PoV they may still have value.

Not reading it when it was first published is excusable, but yes all MPs should have read it by, at the most, one month ago.

But when covid-19 came along he was in a totally different position. Of course he should have read it as soon as we realised we were dealing with a pandemic.

:rolleyes:

Malaria deaths are expected to be impacted badly, so will deaths from starvation caused by supply problems and lack of donations in a worldwide recession. Those two alone could kill more than Covid directly.

It seems to me any total will be so much a guess as to be fairly meaningless.

So, all the thousands of uncounted deaths in UK will be attributable to Covid?

Well attending meetings of it is not the same as leading it. I understand the concern, but there's no need to exaggerate.

Coronavirus: Cummings attended meetings of key scientific group

Then why have they stopped development and why hadn’t they been approved?

It wasn't even exaggerated. Captain_Swoop's post was so wildly over-the-top that it could only possibly have been a joke.

He was just attending the meetings. Nothing to see here. All perfectly normal. Please move along.


Downing Street spin is that Cummings was merely 'listening in' as an observer. Multiple attendees of Sage told the Guardian that both Cummings and Warner had been *participating* in meetings of the group as far back as February.

But he is no longer a 'back bench MP and has been a minister since the crisis began. Don't you think he should have made himself familiar with it?

Is it a wallaby trained to jump up and down on the patient's chest?

I can't think of any good reason to make the minutes of a scientific advisory committee secret.
I can think of many bad ones.

Presumably they're not required because they've already generated the required publicity? Dyson, the Canadian Girlfriend of ventilators.

This is a bit of blow for countries like the UK who are basing their Coronavirus management fully or partially on herd immunity:

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

I wonder if that also has major implications for the development of a vaccine ?

I've said this before, but it bears repeating - even if it does confer immunity that's still not a slam-dunk for herd immunity. We don't know how long the immunity conferred by this virus would last for, but it has been tested on 2-3 other coronaviruses and in each case the immunity lasted for about a year.