#COVID19 | Page 882 | Vital Football

#COVID19

Calvin Plummer said:
No part a, and of course part b. But if we had of:

A) been prepared for a pandemic as we were advised to be.

B) taken it seriously and put in measures far earlier

C) not ignored the Kent variant for months and instead made idiotic promises about Christmas.

Then it is clear deaths and disruption would be significantly reduced.

Tell me if this government had ignored advice about a terrorist attack and over 120k had died would you still be justifying this shite?
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So please back up the repugnant claim the the Government's incompetence is responsible for 90% of Covid deaths.
 
Calvin Plummer said:
No it doesn't, your posts are full of glee. You've been pulled up by multiple people over it, you are repugnant.
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The fact you choose to read my posts that way, speaks more of your literacy levels and prejudices against the author, than any actual slant you perceive there to be.
 
Strett said:
So please back up the repugnant claim the the Government's incompetence is responsible for 90% of Covid deaths.
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You pulled me up for rule breaking last week so give yourself a slap. Rule 1. UK Government can do no right ( while a tory government obviously) EU can do no wrong.
 
Strett said:
So please back up the repugnant claim the the Government's incompetence is responsible for 90% of Covid deaths.
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I would say the government's decision making over Christmas has led to an awful lot of unnecessary deaths. You can see from our deaths/capita that we have one of the highest in the world, and you can literally see the effects of the government's Christmas advice in the new year numbers.
90% is a big exaggeration, but it took Johnson and co far longer than it should have to learn the lessons from last Summer.
 
i am a tree said:
Can you put a decent amount of that article in quotes? I ain't paying them to see it.
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Cock, sorry.

Here...

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is “deeply riddled” with bugs, “a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen”.

When ministers make statements about coronavirus policy they invariably say that they are “following the science”. But cutting-edge science is messy and unclear, a contest of ideas arbitrated by facts, a process of conjecture and refutation. This is not new. Almost two centuries ago Thomas Huxley described the “great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

In this case, that phrase “the science” effectively means the Imperial College model, forecasting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, on the output of which the Government instituted the lockdown in March. Sage’s advice has a huge impact on the lives of millions. Yet the committee meets in private, publishes no minutes, and until it was put under pressure did not even release the names of its members. We were making decisions based on the output of a black box, and a locked one at that.

It has become commonplace among financial forecasters, the Treasury, climate scientists, and epidemiologists to cite the output of mathematical models as if it was “evidence”. The proper use of models is to test theories of complex systems against facts. If instead we are going to use models for forecasting and policy, we must be able to check that they are accurate, particularly when they drive life and death decisions. This has not been the case with the Imperial College model

At the time of the lockdown, the model had not been released to the scientific community. When Ferguson finally released his code last week, it was a reorganised program different from the version run on March 16.

It is not as if Ferguson’s track record is good. In 2001 the Imperial College team’s modelling led to the culling of 6 million livestock and was criticised by epidemiological experts as severely flawed. In various years in the early 2000s Ferguson predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu. The final death toll in each case was in the hundreds. In this case, when a Swedish team applied the modified model that Imperial put into the public domain to Sweden’s strategy, it predicted 40,000 deaths by May 1 – 15 times too high.

We now know that the model’s software is a 13-year-old, 15,000-line program that simulates homes, offices, schools, people and movements. According to a team at Edinburgh University which ran the model, the same inputs give different outputs, and the program gives different results if it is run on different machines, and even if it is run on the same machine using different numbers of central-processing units.

Worse, the code does not allow for large variations among groups of people with respect to their susceptibility to the virus and their social connections. An infected nurse in a hospital is likely to transmit the virus to many more people than an asymptomatic child. Introducing such heterogeneity shows that the threshold to achieve herd immunity with modest social distancing is much lower than the 50-60 per cent implied by the Ferguson model. One experienced modeller tells us that “my own modelling suggests that somewhere between 10 per cent and 30 per cent would suffice, depending on what assumptions one makes.”
 
Strett said:
Cock, sorry.

Here...

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is “deeply riddled” with bugs, “a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen”.

When ministers make statements about coronavirus policy they invariably say that they are “following the science”. But cutting-edge science is messy and unclear, a contest of ideas arbitrated by facts, a process of conjecture and refutation. This is not new. Almost two centuries ago Thomas Huxley described the “great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

In this case, that phrase “the science” effectively means the Imperial College model, forecasting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, on the output of which the Government instituted the lockdown in March. Sage’s advice has a huge impact on the lives of millions. Yet the committee meets in private, publishes no minutes, and until it was put under pressure did not even release the names of its members. We were making decisions based on the output of a black box, and a locked one at that.

It has become commonplace among financial forecasters, the Treasury, climate scientists, and epidemiologists to cite the output of mathematical models as if it was “evidence”. The proper use of models is to test theories of complex systems against facts. If instead we are going to use models for forecasting and policy, we must be able to check that they are accurate, particularly when they drive life and death decisions. This has not been the case with the Imperial College model

At the time of the lockdown, the model had not been released to the scientific community. When Ferguson finally released his code last week, it was a reorganised program different from the version run on March 16.

It is not as if Ferguson’s track record is good. In 2001 the Imperial College team’s modelling led to the culling of 6 million livestock and was criticised by epidemiological experts as severely flawed. In various years in the early 2000s Ferguson predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu. The final death toll in each case was in the hundreds. In this case, when a Swedish team applied the modified model that Imperial put into the public domain to Sweden’s strategy, it predicted 40,000 deaths by May 1 – 15 times too high.

We now know that the model’s software is a 13-year-old, 15,000-line program that simulates homes, offices, schools, people and movements. According to a team at Edinburgh University which ran the model, the same inputs give different outputs, and the program gives different results if it is run on different machines, and even if it is run on the same machine using different numbers of central-processing units.

Worse, the code does not allow for large variations among groups of people with respect to their susceptibility to the virus and their social connections. An infected nurse in a hospital is likely to transmit the virus to many more people than an asymptomatic child. Introducing such heterogeneity shows that the threshold to achieve herd immunity with modest social distancing is much lower than the 50-60 per cent implied by the Ferguson model. One experienced modeller tells us that “my own modelling suggests that somewhere between 10 per cent and 30 per cent would suffice, depending on what assumptions one makes.”
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Thanks!
I would never expect a government to accept the data of a single model. If they are doing that then they are insane, because as this articles states, the modelling is always based on some assumptions.
Best to take multiple different models, made using different assumptions, and combine them to get a picture of a reasonable range of scenarios. Of course, we don't know if that is or is not what the government has done.
 
i am a tree said:
I would say the government's decision making over Christmas has led to an awful lot of unnecessary deaths. You can see from our deaths/capita that we have one of the highest in the world, and you can literally see the effects of the government's Christmas advice in the new year numbers.
90% is a big exaggeration, but it took Johnson and co far longer than it should have to learn the lessons from last Summer.
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Can't disagree with much of that, but the international death rate comparison is something we should wait on a while; I'm not doubting much at the moment as this is the only real measure used.

As @in_the_top_one said right at the start, the best measurement of mortality when making international comparisons is excess deaths, as there is little to compare internationally with the collation of what constitutes a 'covid death'
We have even altered how we count them in the UK more than once during the pandemic.
 
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i am a tree said:
Thanks!
I would never expect a government to accept the data of a single model. If they are doing that then they are insane, because as this articles states, the modelling is always based on some assumptions.
Best to take multiple different models, made using different assumptions, and combine them to get a picture of a reasonable range of scenarios. Of course, we don't know if that is or is not what the government has done.
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Indeed and this is an old story, so corrections may have been made.
 
Strett said:
The fact you choose to read my posts that way, speaks more of your literacy levels and prejudices against the author, than any actual slant you perceive there to be.
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Lol sure cupcake. Same for ITTO who has also said similarly to you? Why not tell us more about how you didn't advocate for herd immunity while you're at it...

You and DF are two halves of the same coin, just posting random little snippets from social media to further your own political agendas, completely ignoring the whole so you can focus on tiny little details to distort.

Also, trust me you're not difficult to read :)
 
Strett said:
Can't disagree with much of that, but the international death rate comparison is something we should wait on a while; I'm not doubting much at the moment as this is the only real measure used.

As @in_the_top_one said right at the start, the best measurement of mortality when making international comparisons is excess deaths, as there is little to compare internationally with the collation of what constitutes a 'covid death'
We have even altered how we count them in the UK more than once during the pandemic.
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Which is well over 100k cupcake.
 
We can quibble about numbers, but our government has to bear a lot of blame for the number of Covid deaths.

Nearly a year ago (BJ was missing COBRA meetings to sort out his sex life) they could have twigged that we're an island and quarantined everyone arriving in the country. They finally got round to it a few weeks ago.

They let infected patients return to care homes, killing off loads of the most vulnerable, then pretended it was all the fault of the NHS.

They farmed out PPE provision and test and trace to chums and offshore companies with no expertise, spaffing millions up the wall, rather than realising that local NHS teams were quite good at test and trace.

Corporate manslaughter wouldn't be far from the mark.
 
pebble said:
We can quibble about numbers, but our government has to bear a lot of blame for the number of Covid deaths.

Nearly a year ago (BJ was missing COBRA meetings to sort out his sex life) they could have twigged that we're an island and quarantined everyone arriving in the country. They finally got round to it a few weeks ago.

They let infected patients return to care homes, killing off loads of the most vulnerable, then pretended it was all the fault of the NHS.

They farmed out PPE provision and test and trace to chums and offshore companies with no expertise, spaffing millions up the wall, rather than realising that local NHS teams were quite good at test and trace.

Corporate manslaughter wouldn't be far from the mark.
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Why is Sturgeon devoid from blame? Scotland have similar rates.
 
Calvin Plummer said:
We tried ignoring it, the Kent variant was detected and still we tried ignoring it. That resulted in thousands of deaths and an NHS collapsing. What do you think would have happened if we carried on ignoring it?

It's no coincidence that more aggressive strains have popped up when we've ignored the virus. One of which shows a propensity to evade vaccines and to reinfect people.

We needed to stop the deaths, remove the strain on the NHS and minimise the likelihood of a new variant which would undo the work done towards vaccinations.

Imagine a new strain had popped up here, similar to the SA variant that meant our vaccines were now useless. What would your thoughts be then?

The damage to the economy had been far greater because on two occasions 1) when the virus first appeared here and 2) when we let the Kent variant run unchecked we ignored the science and didn't lockdown quickly. That meant R spiralled out of control and lockdown was far longer than necessary.

It's been a tale of mismanagement that's cost over 100,000 lives and caused vast damage to the economy.
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I'm so angry! It really does seem that the Tories are going to get away with how they've handled the f@cking mess.

And guess who'll end up paying for it.
 
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