Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!

[davek]

That's also something to consider regarding the Asian nations as well, as Hofstede's power distance stuff pins Asian cultures as being often more hierarchical and collectivist, and people more willing to defer to authority than more individualistic western societies. America has the situation of being both individualistic, governed by a knobhead, and with a healthcare system (and welfare system with regards to sick leave etc.) that discourages people from getting tested/treated. Was reading a study a few days ago about the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, and there was a clear link between willingness to get tested/treated and the speed and spread of the disease.

If we regard the world wars as the moment when America took over economic ascendancy from Europe, I wonder if this outbreak might be what sees the shift away from America to China?

Collectivism will always ultimately succeed over individualism; a plan is always better than chaos.

The post war period was marked in the west by a consensus around a deal between government and society over job and service provision. The west surged in all areas of life. It is only since the late 70s that that contract broke down and neo-liberalism replaced it and varying degrees of chaos ensued from the deregulation of economic life and the increasing privatisation and atomisation of people to a point where the term 'society' is questioned as a necessity.

In short: the west ballsed it up.

 

[LouReedwalkonthewildside]

Which is kind of the point he's making. Johnson, for one reason or another has avoided scrutiny......again.

He hasn't avoided scrutiny and it should be at the end of this when we should vent our frustration with this government.

 

[Tubey]

Which is exactly what Witty was saying from the very start. Lockdown is needed, but it can only work in short bursts, so has to be used judiciously, and at the time, he didn't think it was time to use it. Taleb is an entertaining writer, but his background is in financial risk, so I just find it utterly bewildering that people are taking his words above those of people who have spent decades tackling pandemics around the world. The hubris is simply staggering.

No, he didn't.

The initial strategy was drawn up 3 March and can be found here - https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...pect-across-the-uk#expert-advice-and-guidance - and was in place for weeks. It had no consideration whatsoever for lockdown; there was to be no attempt to suppress it beyond shielding the vulnerable with measures. Indeed, as described by Vallance publicly - https://www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5 - and Johnson with his "take it on the chin" comments, the idea was to allow rampant spread amongst the younger in society to achieve herd immunity. Delay a bit, sure (and that was in the original plan - the delay phase before mitigation), but not pro-actively suppress.

That all changed 16 March, when this was published - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf - and Whitty et al understood they'd made a colossal mistake. We then moved to a "suppression" model, after further delay, on 23 March. By the way, the government was fully aware of the content of that 16 March report ahead of publication, so wasted well over a week deciding to go to the "suppress" model because they didn't know what would fly politically and the emphasis was still on saving the economy if at all possible. Again, not me saying that, Neil Ferguson said it - https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/04...guson---We-don-t-have-a-clear-exit-strategy-/

The above is all a matter of record. Nothing above is opinion - hence all the links. The reason I'm criticising the government, Whitty, Vallance and the rest of them is quite simple - it's been proven at this point that they ballsed up the initial response. It doesn't matter how much of an expert Whitty is, it doesn't mean anything when we're talking about something he and others were blatantly wrong about. He has even admitted their decision not to mass test and get on top of the virus when it first arrived was a terrible mistake - and it was.

Experts can make mistakes. You had experts like Jenny Harries saying Cheltenham was fine because the virus isn't really a problem in large gatherings, says science. That aged well - https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2...es-were-reminded-of-her-neck-breaking-u-turn/ - they are not immune to criticism. The only credit I can give them is that, at the very least, when presented with overwhelming facts, they changed course and didn't let their egos blind them.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Collectivism will always ultimately succeed over individualism; a plan is always better than chaos.

The post war period was marked in the west by a consensus around a deal between government and society over job and service provision. The west surged in all areas of life. It is only since the late 70s that that contract broke down and neo-liberalism replaced it and varying degrees of chaos ensued from the deregulation of economic life and the increasing privatisation and atomisation of people to a point where the term 'society' is questioned as a necessity.

In short: the west ballsed it up.

And yet collectivism doesn't appear to be able to stop these pandemics starting in the first place.

 

[orchard]

No, he didn't.

The initial strategy was drawn up 3 March and can be found here - https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...pect-across-the-uk#expert-advice-and-guidance - and was in place for weeks. It had no consideration whatsoever for lockdown; there was to be no attempt to suppress it beyond shielding the vulnerable with measures. Indeed, as described by Vallance publicly - https://www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5 - and Johnson with his "take it on the chin" comments, the idea was to allow rampant spread amongst the younger in society to achieve herd immunity. Delay a bit, sure (and that was in the original plan - the delay phase before mitigation), but not pro-actively suppress.

That all changed 16 March, when this was published - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf - and Whitty et al understood they'd made a colossal mistake. We then moved to a "suppression" model, after further delay, on 23 March. By the way, the government was fully aware of the content of that 16 March report ahead of publication, so wasted well over a week deciding to go to the "suppress" model because they didn't know what would fly politically and the emphasis was still on saving the economy if at all possible. Again, not me saying that, Neil Ferguson said it - https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/04...guson---We-don-t-have-a-clear-exit-strategy-/

The above is all a matter of record. Nothing above is opinion - hence all the links. The reason I'm criticising the government, Whitty, Vallance and the rest of them is quite simple - it's been proven at this point that they ballsed up the initial response. It doesn't matter how much of an expert Whitty is, it doesn't mean anything when we're talking about something he and others were blatantly wrong about. He has even admitted their decision not to mass test and get on top of the virus when it first arrived was a terrible mistake - and it was.

Experts can make mistakes. You had experts like Jenny Harries saying Cheltenham was fine because the virus isn't really a problem in large gatherings, says science. That aged well - https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2...es-were-reminded-of-her-neck-breaking-u-turn/ - they are not immune to criticism. The only credit I can give them is that, at the very least, when presented with overwhelming facts, they changed course and didn't let their egos blind them.

Do you think in your interpretation of events you're giving the government an easy ride for not addressing the obvious requirements for raising NHS capacity and sustainability with their original 'plan'?

 

[Bruce Wayne]

No, he didn't.

The initial strategy was drawn up 3 March and can be found here - https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...pect-across-the-uk#expert-advice-and-guidance - and was in place for weeks. It had no consideration whatsoever for lockdown; there was to be no attempt to suppress it beyond shielding the vulnerable with measures. Indeed, as described by Vallance publicly - https://www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5 - and Johnson with his "take it on the chin" comments, the idea was to allow rampant spread amongst the younger in society to achieve herd immunity. Delay a bit, sure (and that was in the original plan - the delay phase before mitigation), but not pro-actively suppress.

That all changed 16 March, when this was published - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf - and Whitty et al understood they'd made a colossal mistake. We then moved to a "suppression" model, after further delay, on 23 March. By the way, the government was fully aware of the content of that 16 March report ahead of publication, so wasted well over a week deciding to go to the "suppress" model because they didn't know what would fly politically and the emphasis was still on saving the economy if at all possible. Again, not me saying that, Neil Ferguson said it - https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/04...guson---We-don-t-have-a-clear-exit-strategy-/

The above is all a matter of record. Nothing above is opinion - hence all the links. The reason I'm criticising the government, Whitty, Vallance and the rest of them is quite simple - it's been proven at this point that they ballsed up the initial response. It doesn't matter how much of an expert Whitty is, it doesn't mean anything when we're talking about something he and others were blatantly wrong about. He has even admitted their decision not to mass test and get on top of the virus when it first arrived was a terrible mistake - and it was.

Experts can make mistakes. You had experts like Jenny Harries saying Cheltenham was fine because the virus isn't really a problem in large gatherings, says science. That aged well - https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2...es-were-reminded-of-her-neck-breaking-u-turn/ - they are not immune to criticism. The only credit I can give them is that, at the very least, when presented with overwhelming facts, they changed course and didn't let their egos blind them.

Imagine that.

 

[peteblue]

The funny thing is, in many ways, Germany has been able to test large numbers of people because they have a much less centralised system than here in the UK. I wonder if those among the 'State/NHS is best/privatisation of healthcare is the devil' group would now accept that testing could have been done far faster in the UK if the state didn't try and monopolise it all and let university and pharma labs do their bit? Equally, state run hospitals only account for around 50% of beds in Germany (which has quite a few more ICU beds per head of population than the UK). Again, not a model I can imagine many going for in the UK.

please don’t mention this to @davek ........

 

[NilSatisOptimum]

He hasn't avoided scrutiny and it should be at the end of this when we should vent our frustration with this government.

This is exactly when we lay foundations for scrutiny, or else government will filibuster and punt COVID19 into long wavy meadows of grass, any process that shines a light on their mishandlings gets the same reaction. Only sycophants would want it otherwise.

 

[peteblue]

With Johnson and Cummings now soon to be back at the helm the mistakes will again soon start to rack up at a rate.
Remember 23rd January, the UK government stated we were very low risk to this pandemic, Whitty the next day reaffirmed this low risk bias belief. Litany of mistakes has continued, leopard's and spots.

Was this during the period when China was pretending that the virus wasn’t transferable from person to person ?....

 

[Tubey]

Imagine that.

But that's just the point isn't it? All people are saying and criticising them for is that they got it ridiculously wrong - so much so that the course shouldn't have needed changing because the course we were initially on was so stupid in the first instance.

Even the intellectual colossus that is Robert Peston could see the obvious problems with the "mitigate" strategy, 12 March...

Robert Peston: How risky is Boris Johnson’s maverick coronavirus strategy?

There is no question more important for all of us than whether Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock are right that there is no alternative to letting coronavirus run its course in the UK, and to control the peak of the epidemic so that it falls in summer when the NHS may have the...

www.itv.com

... yet these highly trained, experienced experts couldn't? If that's not valid ground for criticism of their incompetence then I don't know what is.

 

[Tubey]

Do you think in your interpretation of events you're giving the government an easy ride for not addressing the obvious requirements for raising NHS capacity and sustainability with their original 'plan'?

They underestimated it. Hugely. They thought they could shield the elderly and that everyone under the age of 60 would see a 0.1% death rate or something and it'd just be a heavy seasonal flu.

And I could understand that very easily if this was the approach they took in January - hell, I personally thought it would be much less dangerous than even that. But the problem was they still held the same approach in March, when it should have been very clear from Italy that this was something very different and much more dangerous.

 

[Harryflashman]

But that's just the point isn't it? All people are saying and criticising them for is that they got it ridiculously wrong - so much so that the course shouldn't have needed changing because the course we were initially on was so stupid in the first instance.

Even the intellectual colossus that is Robert Peston could see the obvious problems with the "mitigate" strategy, 12 March...

Robert Peston: How risky is Boris Johnson’s maverick coronavirus strategy?

There is no question more important for all of us than whether Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock are right that there is no alternative to letting coronavirus run its course in the UK, and to control the peak of the epidemic so that it falls in summer when the NHS may have the...

www.itv.com

... yet these highly trained, experienced experts couldn't? If that's not valid ground for criticism of their incompetence then I don't know what is.

every time anyone questions what we’re doing or where we’re going next we’re told “they know best “ . Stuff like this doesn’t really support that position , I find it hard to see any other explanation than they got it badly wrong .

 

[LouReedwalkonthewildside]

This is exactly when we lay foundations for scrutiny, or else government will filibuster and punt COVID19 into long wavy meadows of grass, any process that shines a light on their mishandlings gets the same reaction. Only sycophants would want it otherwise.

We can scrutinise the Government to death now mate but at the end of the day they're all we've got at this moment in time so hopefully they'll get it right (they haven't up to now IMO)

When we have pulled through all this though we can hold Boris and the other bellends' feet too the fire good style.

 

[ForeverBlue92]

Once lockdowns are over - is it basically herd immunity strategy for Europe or are the powers that be going to enforce future lockdowns?

When you see the damage to the economy I cant imagine any further lockdowns after this one.

Even China isnt locking back down and there will still be many cases and deaths over there regardless of what their propaganda says.

 

[davek]

And yet collectivism doesn't appear to be able to stop these pandemics starting in the first place.

You made a claim that the west may be eclipsed by collectivised countries, not me.

My view is that we in the west have abandoned regulation and a planned economy and society and it's caught up with us. It isn't a choice between the centralised authoritarian regimes and the way we've been operating in the west in the neo-liberal period. There's a middle way. We had it (and some nations had it more than others) post war. We threw it away.