I'm wary of the "quality adjusted" part of QALY as it tends to massively underestimate disabled people's self-understood quality of life and privileges ableist understandings of quality of life.
I think there's also a difference between choosing not to take expensive actions that prolong someone's life for a short period of time, and choosing to kill them off because it's convenient. There's a difference between killing someone and not keeping them alive. And being blasé about someone's health because they're old and sick and don't matter seems rather closer to actively killing them.
The other flaw in that argument lies in whether your second home has sufficient hospital/ICU provision to handle people relocating to their second homes. If not, you are doing the locals no favor.
To do so would be to entitle onself to be an exception to what has been deemed to be required to keep the pandemic in check.
It would but if what is deemed is totally daft, there is a case to be made for not sticking celery up your nose simply because you've been told to. I also agree that one must not upset those of a nervous disposition, by going for a drive in the country without a specific aim in view other than to admire the scenery.
So, much as the situation annoys me, I would not flout it "to make a point". But I think that were I a priest, I would have refused to be locked out of my church to say mass, as at least one priest round my way has.
To do so would be to entitle onself to be an exception to what has been deemed to be required to keep the pandemic in check.
It would but if what is deemed is totally daft, there is a case to be made for not sticking celery up your nose simply because you've been told to. I also agree that one must not upset those of a nervous disposition, by going for a drive in the country without a specific aim in view other than to admire the scenery.
So, much as the situation annoys me, I would not flout it "to make a point". But I think that were I a priest, I would have refused to be locked out of my church to say mass, as at least one priest round my way has.
You keep coming back to that last but in that case your issue isn't the lockdown but advice from particular denomination(s).
The other flaw in that argument lies in whether your second home has sufficient hospital/ICU provision to handle people relocating to their second homes. If not, you are doing the locals no favor.
I think this is quite an issue in Cornwall, and the Highlands, and maybe other areas. Quite a lot of them are saying, please don't come, which I accept.
The other flaw in that argument lies in whether your second home has sufficient hospital/ICU provision to handle people relocating to their second homes. If not, you are doing the locals no favor.
And that for that matter if you do anything from your second home, you risk giving the virus a 100 mile jump if you(pl) had caught it. Whereas if you stay in the same area you only take it back to where you caught it from.
To do so would be to entitle onself to be an exception to what has been deemed to be required to keep the pandemic in check.
It would but if what is deemed is totally daft, there is a case to be made for not sticking celery up your nose simply because you've been told to.
What is "totally daft" about the lockdown measures? They are certainly not an exact science, but I am certain they are a whole lot better than no measures at all, and I am certain on the basis of applied common sense.
I also agree that one must not upset those of a nervous disposition, by going for a drive in the country without a specific aim in view other than to admire the scenery.
Again, this is not about other people's dispositions. It's about the example you set, and about the danger you might pose, or if you steadfastly refuse to admit you might pose a danger, the danger other like-minded and less hygiene-conscious individuals might pose following your example.
were I a priest, I would have refused to be locked out of my church to say mass, as at least one priest round my way has.
This is a separate issue, and without more data, no meaningful comparison with driving to Devon can be made.
It's an issue in a lot of rural areas, the locals who know what infrastructure they have (accessibility to health services, grocery stores etc) have for a long time known that second home owners and holiday lets put an extra strain on those facilities, but recognise an economic benefit of non-locals spending money in the local pub etc. (There are, of course, other issues relating to house prices and locals needing to work there being unable to afford to live there). With the covid19 pandemic this has put those services much higher on the agenda, especially as visitors now bring nothing into the community but put extra costs on it.
There have been incidents across the whole UK where local communities have put up signs telling people not to come - whether to spend lockdown in a second home, or simply to come to a nice place for a walk or bike ride. I've seen stories of locals taking more direct action including vandalism of cars (in one reported case in the Lake District this was a community nurse who took a holiday let so she didn't need to drive back and forth from the nearest city, if I recall the story correctly), which must reflect a very deep anger at visitors.
The ethics of taking a trip away from home when the community you're imposing yourself on don't want you to put even more strain on local services should be quite clear.
1. The need to protect NHS workers which is made more difficult due to the poor preparation by key bodies (like PHE) and the NHS is general to prepare. However, there has not been an NHS disaster in Sweden and their preparation wasn’t great. But this is IMO the greatest argument for lockdown.
I don't think this is right. The strongest argument for lockdown is to prevent runaway exponential growth of demand on NHS resources that would exceed our capacity. Protecting NHS workers is an important thing, of course, but the most important thing lockdown gets for you is not having more sick people than we can cope with.
3. Economics vs risk of death. How high would the risk of death have to be for you to voluntarily think it worthwhile to wreck your business? Or job? Your answer to this will influence your view.
4. Civil liberties vs risk of death. How high would the risk of death have to be for you to accept the sort of police-state infingements on civil liberty being imposed on us now?
5. How far do you view the extreme down-turn in the economy as actually quite a good thing. I’ve heard this a lot, and if you think that creating a self induced recession is a good corrective to rampant materialism, then all I can say is I disagree. There are better and fairer ways of tacking this problem.
I don't think 5 is at all a good thing. Sure - there are good things that we can take from it, but millions of people have just seen their livelihoods evaporate, and are in for some pretty rough times.
For point 4, I'm not feeling the police-state, but perhaps that's because I think the lockdown is sensible, and I'm not trying to evade it. It's also true that lockdown here doesn't have heavy-handed policing - we don't have police going around yelling at idiots in parks.
For point 3, I suppose I can separate into two - how I think things should work, and how things actually do work. I think that given that people staying home is in aid of public health, the public purse should pay for people to stay home. But that's not quite what is happening. It's complicated, because if I choose to keep on as normal, it's not just me I'm placing at risk, but my whole community. That means I can't just treat this as my personal risk assessment.
If it was all about me, I'd be wanting to go back to normal. I'm sufficiently young that there are good odds that if I did get it, I'd be OK. It's not about me.
And that for that matter if you do anything from your second home, you risk giving the virus a 100 mile jump if you(pl) had caught it. Whereas if you stay in the same area you only take it back to where you caught it from.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of your other points, this one is rubbish. The virus is already everywhere. By now you’d be hard pressed to find an area that was completely free of it if you were in the middle of the Sahara.
It's not everywhere. This seems to be a common misconception. It's not (mostly) floating around in the air or (mostly) lurking on surfaces. It's (hugely more) lurking in people, and we don't quite know for sure which ones (yet).
And that for that matter if you do anything from your second home, you risk giving the virus a 100 mile jump if you(pl) had caught it. Whereas if you stay in the same area you only take it back to where you caught it from.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of your other points, this one is rubbish. The virus is already everywhere. By now you’d be hard pressed to find an area that was completely free of it if you were in the middle of the Sahara.
We've not had anyone reporting symptoms and self-isolating here for 3 weeks. Chances are pretty good we're clear of it. Could be reintroduced any time but only freight is travelling on the ferry and most of that is sent unaccompanied.
And that for that matter if you do anything from your second home, you risk giving the virus a 100 mile jump if you(pl) had caught it. Whereas if you stay in the same area you only take it back to where you caught it from.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of your other points, this one is rubbish. The virus is already everywhere. By now you’d be hard pressed to find an area that was completely free of it if you were in the middle of the Sahara.
Because the virus is some-place it doesn't follow that brining more infected people is a good thing.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of your other points, this one is rubbish. The virus is already everywhere. By now you’d be hard pressed to find an area that was completely free of it if you were in the middle of the Sahara.
Greece&NZ are fairly clear...
There was a discussion about areas of Virginia from the other thread, which was in my head at the time.
But also Norfolk's only had about 130 fatalities and a couple of hundred communities, so I'd imagine that a decent proportion of the communities are (at the moment) still clear. Obviously they are less than 100 miles away from somewhere (and I'm not sure how many you'd say are independent, and how many share the same supermarket). So while an exaggeration and less applicable than a month ago...
Are there any software engineers on board? I've done a lot of programming and some modelling, though mainly network traffic load modelling. I have dipped my toes into medical modelling whilst working on the NHS NPfIT programme for computerising NHS data, which was a disaster from the get-go, and revealed to me how much effort is put into face-saving than true engineering. The modelling was just an order of magnitude too difficult for the resources at hand and I soon gave up.
I'd recommend anybody to read the current reviews of the code used by ICL on which Report 9 is based. I haven't accessed it. The original is being kept under wraps and a version put on GitHub, having been sanitised.
Two of the reviews are on a site unlikely to be accessed by the people who have so far commented because it is on the site lockdownskeptics: first review and second review.
Another weird thing about Report 9, which I have re-read is the lack of probabilistic estimates. Whenever I did models it was standard to give the degree of confidence. Typically people wanted 95%-ile modelling. I can get no clue as to the probability associated with the figures in Report 9. Also, as I think is now well known, nowhere in report 9 is it suggested that everybody should be forced to stay at home. This restriction only applied where there are COVID cases, and I think highly suspected cases (like normal flu). So the full lockdown is pure Boris so far as I can see.
Do you think any of this is relevant to the way in which government decisions are made. I do. We need to do a lot better and wider advice not to mention peer reviews would go a long way to help. A bit of transparency helps.
What about 60,000 deaths being avoided by lockdown in France? Is there anything wrong with the modelling outlined here, in your opinion?
Again, applied common sense tells me that infections propagate exponentially and that doing nothing to contain them would soon overwhelm most if not all health systems and a lot of people who need not have died will do. I don't need to know anything about modelling or economics to work that out.
So far as I know, in all countries in which strict lockdown measures have been applied, the number of new infections has decreased and in the absence of any other explanations, it seems reasonable to assume a causal link there (because the virus is (mostly) in people, not 'out there').
If we assume that all individuals in a society are equally valuable, it makes sense to me to protect as many of them as we can, and a lockdown is a first good move, or at least a first least bad move, and one that comes a long way ahead of my or your personal preferences.
5. How far do you view the extreme down-turn in the economy as actually quite a good thing. I’ve heard this a lot, and if you think that creating a self induced recession is a good corrective to rampant materialism, then all I can say is I disagree. There are better and fairer ways of tacking this problem.
These people really bother me. I feel like they’re rubbing their hands with glee and praying that the lockdown lasts until Christmas so that the whole evil edifice of capitalism can finally be utterly destroyed (regardless of the human cost). These are the people for whom no amount of safety precaution will ever be enough, for whom the virus will never cease to be an existential threat to the whole country, not because of any genuine concern over people’s lives but because it suits their own political ends for it to be thus.
I’m sure none of that applies to anyone on the Ship.
I find this misrepresentation of views while pretending not to, highly ironic in the context of your various comments on the 'Where is the Ship going' thread.
6. It has been reported that the models only examined two scenarios: 1. Total lack of any avoidance measures (aka a national hug-in). 2. Total lockdown. The idea that you can make recommendations that people will take into account (as Sweden) was not considered a possibility.
How does that fit with Figure 2 or Table 3 in the Report 9.
We have a second home and were tempted to do what many Parisians did and bugger off to our house-with-garden before the lockdown started. We didn't do it and were right not to. It would have been highly irresponsible.
Ironically despite it supposedly being a lower risk zone, it is also where most of our personal acquaintance who've caught the virus live (all recovered now, thankfully). If we'd gone there I think we may well have caught it as well. I think of that as our reward for being good citizens.
Ironically despite it supposedly being a lower risk zone, it is also where most of our personal acquaintance who've caught the virus live (all recovered now, thankfully). If we'd gone there I think we may well have caught it as well. I think of that as our reward for being good citizens.
I assume that it was lower risk based on the existing population profile (rather than when everyone traveled back) and additionally I assume that healthcare provision would have been based on permanent rather than transient population -- so on multiple levels you did the right thing.
Strong associations were found for restrictions of mass gatherings (RRR 0.65, 95% CI 0.53–0.79), school closures (RRR 0.63, 95% CI 0.52–0.78) and measures of social distancing (RRR 0.62, 95% CI 0.45–0.85). In a multivariable model, there was a strong association with the number of implemented public health interventions (p for trend = 0.001)
My main sympathy with those taking the precautionary approach is that it can never be proved to have been worth it. It’s just like the famous 2000 IT bomb. I worked on that and it paid my salary, and – nothing happened. Was that a triumph of our work? Or was the whole thing a cooked up panic? They same arguments will be revived about lockdown.
We will never know. Any thoughts?
NoProphet:
My doubts concern lockdown which is a fairly easily understood term. Lockdown in the UK is usually considered as starting with the prohibition for anyone to leave their house at will. And is more strongly enforced in some European countries.
The research you cite says nothing about this. I have never rejected the sort of measures mentioned in the article.
I'll just put this here: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-duran/
Quote:
Overall, we rate The Duran a Questionable source based on far right wing bias, promotion of Russian propaganda and right wing conspiracies, a lack of transparency, use of poor sources and plagiarism
...
History
Founded in 2016, The Duran is a strongly right leaning news and opinion website with ties to Russian state media. Based in Cyprus, the editor of the website is Alexander Mercouris, who in 2012 was disbarred as an attorney in London. According to the Telegraph, he then went on to become a “pro-Russian commentator on world affairs for Russian TV news outlets and websites.”
Unquote.
OK, point taken - even though I call that not a critique but a dismissal.
But does the same apply to their source in this case https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ and to all the scientists and medics quoted in the notes (scroll down the page to see them).
The other flaw in that argument lies in whether your second home has sufficient hospital/ICU provision to handle people relocating to their second homes. If not, you are doing the locals no favor.
I think this is quite an issue in Cornwall, and the Highlands, and maybe other areas. Quite a lot of them are saying, please don't come, which I accept.
Also in the state of New York. People from NYC who had vacation homes tried to get to them, and the locals were none too pleased.
OK, point taken. But does the same apply to their source in this case https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ and to all the scientists and medics quoted in the notes (scroll down the page to see).
Not necessarily, but it's very easy to cherry-pick sources, even legit sources, in order to create a very biased version of truth. After all, the fluffiest most gay-loving liberal and the most hard-line anti-gay zealot can find Bible passages that appear to support their ideologies.
This virus is very unpredictable. Last week a former colleague died after a long stay in ITU. He was 57. His wife is a fews year older and was not infected. I leant a few days ago that a lady in her mid 50's who lived across the road when he lived in the Black Country has had the virus but her husband who is of similar age and obese has not.
My wife and myself are classified as very vulnerable and we ent into our own lockdown over 2 months ago. This was quite easy as we have had the shopping delivered for at least 6 years and have no financial problems. We never used to go out anyway. The demise of a pensioner like myself would certainly benefit the exchequer.
I do, however, realise that most are far less fortunate and that if you are young and fit or have a young family, lockdown is a big deal.
We chose our own time to enter lockdown and we will choose our own time to leave it.
I feel for those who will soon be under pressure to return to work. I am glad that it will not be my decision. Mistakes have been made and thousands of lives have been lost. I hope and pray that we do better.
CBC The National had video of dramatic and earnest Boris Johnson. He's wrong. Or we're wrong. Far less infection and far less death here. We're no where near what he's touting for this week.
OK, point taken - even though I call that not a critique but a dismissal.
But does the same apply to their source in this case https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ and to all the scientists and medics quoted in the notes (scroll down the page to see them).
In my view, in addition to the dubious credentials of the site (i.e. anonymity), the quality of that summary is indicated by the fact that the writers try to use the damage to the economy caused by lockdown as part of the argument discrediting the notion of exponentional infection growth, as if the lethality of the virus might be sensitive to economic arguments.
@cgichard - your arguments here read very much like those of creationists and climate change denialists- find obscure sources, quote maverick scientists, give lists of "look, all these scientists say..." while ignoring that a hundred scientists is a tiny speck of a drop in an ocean.
I accept that I will be biased on this. I've already lost quite close relative to this horrible disease. He was in his late 70s, but still working, active, and as far as any of us all knew, in good health. Yes, he might, in stead, have been struck by a lorry, but the presumption is that if it had not been for Covid19 he would be working, active and in good health today.
At a guess, he would probably have been infected very shortly before the government started to implement measures. If you can remember, at that time, most of us were more or less unaware of what the risks were.
I've another close relative who is completely locked down inside a care home. She would be a prime candidate to be a victim if the virus gets in there.
I don't want to get the horrible thing myself. I don't want any more family members to either. It might be curtains for us too.
So the approach @Anteater is advocating fills me with horror. The nature of the disease means that even had the government done a good job, some of us would have died. Nevertheless, it hasn't and it isn't doing. As a result, it carries the bloodstains of a lot more of us on its hands, though we don't know which of us would still be alive if it had done a better job.
If it were more competent, if it took its responsibilities seriously, if it were interested in good government rather than good ratings, it might now be able to find ways to manage things in ways that could enable economic activity better without increasing the risk to health, but until it's able to do that, IMHO health and the preservation of lives comes first.
There's been no sign so far that it even intends to try to balance that by effective management, rather than just upping the risk to health.
Last night's drivelling apology for an address by the Prime Minister gives no confidence whatsoever.
.... But also Norfolk's only had about 130 fatalities and a couple of hundred communities, so I'd imagine that a decent proportion of the communities are (at the moment) still clear. Obviously they are less than 100 miles away from somewhere (and I'm not sure how many you'd say are independent, and how many share the same supermarket). So while an exaggeration and less applicable than a month ago...
Ah but @quetzalcoatl is declining to take up @Anteater's encouragement to bring it down to you!
The direct testimony of people I know working in the NHS (who have experienced more than one round of seasonal flu) convinces me that the Coronavirus is filling more intensive care beds, for longer, and with a greater number of fatalities and poor outcomes than flu does.
We have a second home and were tempted to do what many Parisians did and bugger off to our house-with-garden before the lockdown started. We didn't do it and were right not to. It would have been highly irresponsible.
OK so here's something a genuinely do not get, but I hope I am being honest with myself in saying that I admit I have blind spots and I am willing to have this one tested.
From my point of view, what is irresponsible in this outbreak is to do anything that would put somebody else at risk of infection.
So: What is it about the geographical location that makes acceptable behaviour "highly irresponsible", since you clearly believe that your behaviour now is highly responsible. How would being somewhere else change your behaviour to turn a good Paris citizen into a highly irresponsible rural person?
Now I do have rather strong views about buying holiday homes in rural areas, assuming that it true in your case. I know this seems to contradict a previous post, but this is the accurate portrayal. I could buy a second home but never would. But if (unlikely I know) I was left one in a will and need to organise the sales etc, I still cannot see why it would be irresponsible for me to be somewhere else so long as my infection avoidant behaviour remained exactly the same.
So if you are really saying that you wanted to avoid local resentment at Parisians decamping into rural France then I rather agree with that, but it has nothing to do with the reality of how likely it is that being somewhere different would make you more likely to infect someone with COVID as opposed to resentment.
So: What is it about the geographical location that makes acceptable behaviour "highly irresponsible", since you clearly believe that your behaviour now is highly responsible. How would being somewhere else change your behaviour to turn a good Paris citizen into a highly irresponsible rural person?
Not @la vie en rouge, but basically because as a Parisian she is not a "rural person":
a) once again you are ignoring the risks posed by the journey
b) as @la vie en rouge says, local hospital capacity is more geared to usual local capacity, not summer capacity, and out-of-season residents strain local resources in other ways too.
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So: What is it about the geographical location that makes acceptable behaviour "highly irresponsible", since you clearly believe that your behaviour now is highly responsible. How would being somewhere else change your behaviour to turn a good Paris citizen into a highly irresponsible rural person?
As I said above, at least part of this comes down to provision of local services; rural health services tend to be scaled for the numbers of permanent residents, similarly logistics for things like supermarkets would be scaled along similar lines, and may only be scaled up accordingly a couple of times a year. More people in the area increases demand for such things.
My area has a lot of holiday let’s and second homes, and the health infrastructure is shaped by the fact that they are not permanently occupied. There are two risks from people using them now. The first risk is that increases the resident population beyond what the health infrastructure is designed to cope with, and it is already over-stretched because of comparatively high levels if Covid-19 in the area. Increasing the population also increases the possibility of passing infection around. More people=greater possibility of transmission. The second risk is that people will come with the illness and pass it on to others.
Second home owners appeared in my area and then proved to have brought the disease with them: the were not showing owhen they left home, so they thought they were all right.
Social distancing methods are a compromise. They are not 100%. They minimise but do not eliminate the risk when isolation is not possible. That's why the rule isn't just social distancing.
So by going to a second home and practicing social distancing you introduce a risk into that local area, albeit one made smaller by the distancing.
Eutychus:
I accept that other models exist and I think I have already pointed out that lockdown is not just about Ferguson. For all I know the French, Spanish etc etc authorities have never read Report-9.
My concern is about the really behind "following the science" which is far below what I, for one, would expect. The strength of science is in reproducability, criticism, peer reviews and consensus, not one small group of scientists with a track record of wildly over-predicting catastrophes, keeping everything to themselves. I wish there was more openness, and really do not understand why Neil Ferguson seems to be Boris' Dr. Dominic. From what little I know of him, I doubt strongly he is a Tory party donor!
OK my experience with NPfIT has made be a skeptic of UK Gov produced software. And I can give some good private industry horror stories but nothing in the same league. It truly was appalling. It looks like the same may be about to happen with tracing. Based on current reports, UK Gov will do it's own app and this relies on people being prepared to run an app which keeps Bluetooth switched on all the time, and so drains the batteries.
They have rejected offers from Google and Apple, and I am no fan of either, and can well understand people's unease at have a virtual electronic tag run by Google. I've not (yet) looked at their ideas but assume they will be based on triangulation from wifi routers or towers. So at the moment, the Grand Plan seems based on something which, at least to me, seems far from provably feasible.
I'd hold my nose so far as Google or Apple support is concerned. A better chance of getting something rapidly that works after a fashion.
NPfIT was indeed a disaster. Mind you, my local GP practice is doing a remarkably good job in keeping the service going, using generally available IT capabilities. I appreciate that's very different to the ambitions of NPfIT. But it shows the practice is not IT stupid.
Our second home is in a small provincial town. The main reason it would have been so irresponsible to go is that we don't have a car and would have had to get the train. It should be obvious why this is an infection risk, especially if everyone does it.
the quality of that summary is indicated by the fact that the writers try to use the damage to the economy caused by lockdown as part of the argument discrediting the notion of exponentional infection growth, as if the lethality of the virus might be sensitive to economic arguments.
Yeah - this kind of conflation of data and wishes removes any shred of credibility the argument may have had. Any decision about what to do about the virus has to consider both the effects of the virus and the effects (economic and otherwise) of the lockdown, but the assessment of the effects of the virus and the economic consequences of lockdown have to be independent.
The effects of the virus will also be economic. Treating the ill costs money that could have been spent elsewhere. People who are ill are not at work, and people who die are neither working nor spending. The economic costs of the lockdown are, to a small extent, offset by avoiding economic costs of the pandemic running wild.
@Alan Cresswell yes, of course. But as @Leorning Cniht has confirmed, if you read the link @cgichard posted, the impression you get is that exponential growth can't possibly be a fact because the economic impact if it was would be really really bad. (It doesn't quite say that in so many words, but that's the overall impression you're left with).
To put it another way, what that summary obfuscates is this: easing lockdown might make a difference to how fast the virus spreads and how many people are infected, but it won't make the virus any more or less infectious per se.
And I had an exciting trip to our waste recycling site just now for the first time in two months (by appointment only). Highlight of my day!
Oh, I thought there was universal (here at least) acknowledgement that the exponential growth in number of infections and the economic impact of measures to restrict that growth were separate, and that the article linked to was wrong in conflating them in the way it did. I hadn't intended to imply any disagreement with that, I was just taking it as read.
On the otherhand, for a purely economic consideration the costs of the disease as well as the lockdown both need to be considered - and, especially as the economic costs of the disease running away with little control will be experienced for a long time those can still be significant if our controls on the spread of the virus are inadequate. Especially as inadequate control will make the period where some restrictions will be necessary longer.
Comments
I think there's also a difference between choosing not to take expensive actions that prolong someone's life for a short period of time, and choosing to kill them off because it's convenient. There's a difference between killing someone and not keeping them alive. And being blasé about someone's health because they're old and sick and don't matter seems rather closer to actively killing them.
So, much as the situation annoys me, I would not flout it "to make a point". But I think that were I a priest, I would have refused to be locked out of my church to say mass, as at least one priest round my way has.
You keep coming back to that last but in that case your issue isn't the lockdown but advice from particular denomination(s).
I think this is quite an issue in Cornwall, and the Highlands, and maybe other areas. Quite a lot of them are saying, please don't come, which I accept.
There have been incidents across the whole UK where local communities have put up signs telling people not to come - whether to spend lockdown in a second home, or simply to come to a nice place for a walk or bike ride. I've seen stories of locals taking more direct action including vandalism of cars (in one reported case in the Lake District this was a community nurse who took a holiday let so she didn't need to drive back and forth from the nearest city, if I recall the story correctly), which must reflect a very deep anger at visitors.
The ethics of taking a trip away from home when the community you're imposing yourself on don't want you to put even more strain on local services should be quite clear.
I don't think this is right. The strongest argument for lockdown is to prevent runaway exponential growth of demand on NHS resources that would exceed our capacity. Protecting NHS workers is an important thing, of course, but the most important thing lockdown gets for you is not having more sick people than we can cope with.
I don't think 5 is at all a good thing. Sure - there are good things that we can take from it, but millions of people have just seen their livelihoods evaporate, and are in for some pretty rough times.
For point 4, I'm not feeling the police-state, but perhaps that's because I think the lockdown is sensible, and I'm not trying to evade it. It's also true that lockdown here doesn't have heavy-handed policing - we don't have police going around yelling at idiots in parks.
For point 3, I suppose I can separate into two - how I think things should work, and how things actually do work. I think that given that people staying home is in aid of public health, the public purse should pay for people to stay home. But that's not quite what is happening. It's complicated, because if I choose to keep on as normal, it's not just me I'm placing at risk, but my whole community. That means I can't just treat this as my personal risk assessment.
If it was all about me, I'd be wanting to go back to normal. I'm sufficiently young that there are good odds that if I did get it, I'd be OK. It's not about me.
Regardless of the merits or otherwise of your other points, this one is rubbish. The virus is already everywhere. By now you’d be hard pressed to find an area that was completely free of it if you were in the middle of the Sahara.
We've not had anyone reporting symptoms and self-isolating here for 3 weeks. Chances are pretty good we're clear of it. Could be reintroduced any time but only freight is travelling on the ferry and most of that is sent unaccompanied.
There was a discussion about areas of Virginia from the other thread, which was in my head at the time.
But also Norfolk's only had about 130 fatalities and a couple of hundred communities, so I'd imagine that a decent proportion of the communities are (at the moment) still clear. Obviously they are less than 100 miles away from somewhere (and I'm not sure how many you'd say are independent, and how many share the same supermarket). So while an exaggeration and less applicable than a month ago...
I'd recommend anybody to read the current reviews of the code used by ICL on which Report 9 is based. I haven't accessed it. The original is being kept under wraps and a version put on GitHub, having been sanitised.
Two of the reviews are on a site unlikely to be accessed by the people who have so far commented because it is on the site lockdownskeptics: first review and second review.
For those who cannot bring themselves to access a site created by Toby Young, you could try the thread on GitHub: We, the undersigned software engineers, call for any papers based on this codebase to be immediately retracted.
Another weird thing about Report 9, which I have re-read is the lack of probabilistic estimates. Whenever I did models it was standard to give the degree of confidence. Typically people wanted 95%-ile modelling. I can get no clue as to the probability associated with the figures in Report 9. Also, as I think is now well known, nowhere in report 9 is it suggested that everybody should be forced to stay at home. This restriction only applied where there are COVID cases, and I think highly suspected cases (like normal flu). So the full lockdown is pure Boris so far as I can see.
Do you think any of this is relevant to the way in which government decisions are made. I do. We need to do a lot better and wider advice not to mention peer reviews would go a long way to help. A bit of transparency helps.
Again, applied common sense tells me that infections propagate exponentially and that doing nothing to contain them would soon overwhelm most if not all health systems and a lot of people who need not have died will do. I don't need to know anything about modelling or economics to work that out.
So far as I know, in all countries in which strict lockdown measures have been applied, the number of new infections has decreased and in the absence of any other explanations, it seems reasonable to assume a causal link there (because the virus is (mostly) in people, not 'out there').
If we assume that all individuals in a society are equally valuable, it makes sense to me to protect as many of them as we can, and a lockdown is a first good move, or at least a first least bad move, and one that comes a long way ahead of my or your personal preferences.
I find this misrepresentation of views while pretending not to, highly ironic in the context of your various comments on the 'Where is the Ship going' thread.
Ironically despite it supposedly being a lower risk zone, it is also where most of our personal acquaintance who've caught the virus live (all recovered now, thankfully). If we'd gone there I think we may well have caught it as well. I think of that as our reward for being good citizens.
I assume that it was lower risk based on the existing population profile (rather than when everyone traveled back) and additionally I assume that healthcare provision would have been based on permanent rather than transient population -- so on multiple levels you did the right thing.
This is about 144 locations worldwide:
So @Anteater you're fully wrong with this:
Science is our friend.
Data is our friend.
I am reminded of a recent news story https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2020-04-29/swindon-man-jailed-after-recklessly-infecting-three-women-with-hiv/ about a chap who went to prison for eight years after having unprotected sex with, and infecting three women with HIV. So much for his individual freedoms.
My doubts concern lockdown which is a fairly easily understood term. Lockdown in the UK is usually considered as starting with the prohibition for anyone to leave their house at will. And is more strongly enforced in some European countries.
The research you cite says nothing about this. I have never rejected the sort of measures mentioned in the article.
https://theduran.com/facts-about-covid-19/
I'll just put this here: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-duran/
Quote:
Overall, we rate The Duran a Questionable source based on far right wing bias, promotion of Russian propaganda and right wing conspiracies, a lack of transparency, use of poor sources and plagiarism
...
History
Founded in 2016, The Duran is a strongly right leaning news and opinion website with ties to Russian state media. Based in Cyprus, the editor of the website is Alexander Mercouris, who in 2012 was disbarred as an attorney in London. According to the Telegraph, he then went on to become a “pro-Russian commentator on world affairs for Russian TV news outlets and websites.”
Unquote.
But does the same apply to their source in this case https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ and to all the scientists and medics quoted in the notes (scroll down the page to see them).
Also in the state of New York. People from NYC who had vacation homes tried to get to them, and the locals were none too pleased.
Not necessarily, but it's very easy to cherry-pick sources, even legit sources, in order to create a very biased version of truth. After all, the fluffiest most gay-loving liberal and the most hard-line anti-gay zealot can find Bible passages that appear to support their ideologies.
My wife and myself are classified as very vulnerable and we ent into our own lockdown over 2 months ago. This was quite easy as we have had the shopping delivered for at least 6 years and have no financial problems. We never used to go out anyway. The demise of a pensioner like myself would certainly benefit the exchequer.
I do, however, realise that most are far less fortunate and that if you are young and fit or have a young family, lockdown is a big deal.
We chose our own time to enter lockdown and we will choose our own time to leave it.
I feel for those who will soon be under pressure to return to work. I am glad that it will not be my decision. Mistakes have been made and thousands of lives have been lost. I hope and pray that we do better.
In my view, in addition to the dubious credentials of the site (i.e. anonymity), the quality of that summary is indicated by the fact that the writers try to use the damage to the economy caused by lockdown as part of the argument discrediting the notion of exponentional infection growth, as if the lethality of the virus might be sensitive to economic arguments.
Notwithstanding that often, older people tend to eat a bit less, that's quite a stockpile
At a guess, he would probably have been infected very shortly before the government started to implement measures. If you can remember, at that time, most of us were more or less unaware of what the risks were.
I've another close relative who is completely locked down inside a care home. She would be a prime candidate to be a victim if the virus gets in there.
I don't want to get the horrible thing myself. I don't want any more family members to either. It might be curtains for us too.
So the approach @Anteater is advocating fills me with horror. The nature of the disease means that even had the government done a good job, some of us would have died. Nevertheless, it hasn't and it isn't doing. As a result, it carries the bloodstains of a lot more of us on its hands, though we don't know which of us would still be alive if it had done a better job.
If it were more competent, if it took its responsibilities seriously, if it were interested in good government rather than good ratings, it might now be able to find ways to manage things in ways that could enable economic activity better without increasing the risk to health, but until it's able to do that, IMHO health and the preservation of lives comes first.
There's been no sign so far that it even intends to try to balance that by effective management, rather than just upping the risk to health.
Last night's drivelling apology for an address by the Prime Minister gives no confidence whatsoever.
Ah but @quetzalcoatl is declining to take up @Anteater's encouragement to bring it down to you!
From my point of view, what is irresponsible in this outbreak is to do anything that would put somebody else at risk of infection.
So: What is it about the geographical location that makes acceptable behaviour "highly irresponsible", since you clearly believe that your behaviour now is highly responsible. How would being somewhere else change your behaviour to turn a good Paris citizen into a highly irresponsible rural person?
Now I do have rather strong views about buying holiday homes in rural areas, assuming that it true in your case. I know this seems to contradict a previous post, but this is the accurate portrayal. I could buy a second home but never would. But if (unlikely I know) I was left one in a will and need to organise the sales etc, I still cannot see why it would be irresponsible for me to be somewhere else so long as my infection avoidant behaviour remained exactly the same.
So if you are really saying that you wanted to avoid local resentment at Parisians decamping into rural France then I rather agree with that, but it has nothing to do with the reality of how likely it is that being somewhere different would make you more likely to infect someone with COVID as opposed to resentment.
Not @la vie en rouge, but basically because as a Parisian she is not a "rural person":
a) once again you are ignoring the risks posed by the journey
b) as @la vie en rouge says, local hospital capacity is more geared to usual local capacity, not summer capacity, and out-of-season residents strain local resources in other ways too.
As I said above, at least part of this comes down to provision of local services; rural health services tend to be scaled for the numbers of permanent residents, similarly logistics for things like supermarkets would be scaled along similar lines, and may only be scaled up accordingly a couple of times a year. More people in the area increases demand for such things.
So by going to a second home and practicing social distancing you introduce a risk into that local area, albeit one made smaller by the distancing.
I accept that other models exist and I think I have already pointed out that lockdown is not just about Ferguson. For all I know the French, Spanish etc etc authorities have never read Report-9.
My concern is about the really behind "following the science" which is far below what I, for one, would expect. The strength of science is in reproducability, criticism, peer reviews and consensus, not one small group of scientists with a track record of wildly over-predicting catastrophes, keeping everything to themselves. I wish there was more openness, and really do not understand why Neil Ferguson seems to be Boris' Dr. Dominic. From what little I know of him, I doubt strongly he is a Tory party donor!
OK my experience with NPfIT has made be a skeptic of UK Gov produced software. And I can give some good private industry horror stories but nothing in the same league. It truly was appalling. It looks like the same may be about to happen with tracing. Based on current reports, UK Gov will do it's own app and this relies on people being prepared to run an app which keeps Bluetooth switched on all the time, and so drains the batteries.
They have rejected offers from Google and Apple, and I am no fan of either, and can well understand people's unease at have a virtual electronic tag run by Google. I've not (yet) looked at their ideas but assume they will be based on triangulation from wifi routers or towers. So at the moment, the Grand Plan seems based on something which, at least to me, seems far from provably feasible.
NPfIT was indeed a disaster. Mind you, my local GP practice is doing a remarkably good job in keeping the service going, using generally available IT capabilities. I appreciate that's very different to the ambitions of NPfIT. But it shows the practice is not IT stupid.
Yeah - this kind of conflation of data and wishes removes any shred of credibility the argument may have had. Any decision about what to do about the virus has to consider both the effects of the virus and the effects (economic and otherwise) of the lockdown, but the assessment of the effects of the virus and the economic consequences of lockdown have to be independent.
To put it another way, what that summary obfuscates is this: easing lockdown might make a difference to how fast the virus spreads and how many people are infected, but it won't make the virus any more or less infectious per se.
And I had an exciting trip to our waste recycling site just now for the first time in two months (by appointment only). Highlight of my day!
On the otherhand, for a purely economic consideration the costs of the disease as well as the lockdown both need to be considered - and, especially as the economic costs of the disease running away with little control will be experienced for a long time those can still be significant if our controls on the spread of the virus are inadequate. Especially as inadequate control will make the period where some restrictions will be necessary longer.