Covid-19 and Politics

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GlennB said:
"About 4,000 people raved in Daisy Nook [June 13th, Manchester area] that night. Meanwhile, another 2,000 people attended a “quarantine rave” in Carrington, 15 miles away. Similar raves have popped up throughout June. Staffordshire: 1,000 people raved in Brookhay Woods, near Lichfield. Liverpool: hundreds of revellers danced to house music in a forest near Kirkby. Bristol: 1,000 people gathered in Stokes Croft. Leeds: police shut down a rave in an underpass of the M1 motorway as shocked motorists watched participants flood on to the road ..."

Not just insanity but willful insanity.

As Brit expats aiming to return to the UK soon we've been checking the situation in Wales, our destination. Today I visited a certain Welsh tourism website and its headline said "Visit Wales. Later". Damn right, and it suggested that hotel bookings etc might resume in mid-July. Given that flights to the UK won't be resuming until then, at best, it doesn't hamper our plans any more than they're already hampered (that's to say considerably, as our buyers are Belgian).

Right now I'm thinking that Greece would be nuts to allow the resumption of tourism by the English, especially given the shocking performance at Bournemouth beach a few days back and other examples of total disregard for the health of others such as the raves above. But, of course, a UK passport doesn't mention which home country you're from.
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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

The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world.

Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US.

“They’ve got access to most of the drug supply [of remdesivir], so there’s nothing for Europe,” said Dr Andrew Hill, senior visiting research fellow at Liverpool University.
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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.
 
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?)
 
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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.
 
Rolfe said:
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...
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I hope they used a really scary color for that infinite increase.
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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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).
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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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'.

Mind you the woman I'm most thinking of I only knew because I found her dog in the middle of the road when I was working, no lead, no collar. So I got my dogs back in the car, grabbed a spare lead, dodged the cars to catch it and get it to a safe place, found there was no collar or tag so started stopping and asking any of the locals that went past if they recognised it, eventually someone did and said he'd knock on her door on his way past.

I had to get on with my work so my wife drove out to wait with the dog while I called the client I had planed to pick up from to explain and say I'd have to be with them later, and went on to my next job and my wife waited about another half hour until this woman arrived (bare in mind we didn't even know she was home and would be on the way).

Flash forward to last week and in between expressing how wonderful it is that Boris' Wonder Drug will save us all complains that my wife was going to take her uncollared, untagged dog to the pound and says "lucky my neighbour came and told me, I suppose he was the real hero"

So that's her grasp of reality anyway.

Sorry, OT, just wanted to vent!
 
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.
 
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.
 
Rolfe said:
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.
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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.

Official figures just released suggest Test and Trace was unable to trace one third of those who tested positive (and thus their contacts, too) between 28 May and 3 June. However, Independent Sage labelled Hancock’s claim that 85% of contacts had been traced as “deeply misleading” since Test and Trace entirely missed 75% of all new symptomatic cases during this time.
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https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2471
 
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