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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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As we've discussed, the only truly objective figure for how it's going is the figure for daily deaths in hospitals. As we also saw, this was constantly finagled in case people started ignoring lockdown. But, last week, it became unmistakable -- it was going down, down, down. So it has now disappeared. Subsumed in the deaths from everywhere. It takes two seconds for the newsreader to say "of which xxx were in hospital" but they just can't quite manage to find the time to say it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So, Belarus and Brazil are the 'ostrich alliance'. I thought Sweden was in there somewhere. Oh, no, that's right, I'd completely forgotten, the Swedes are applying a different technical analysis which might be right and it might be wrong.
I don't mind Channel 4 News singling out 'populists' who apply a particular model for reasons other, you might reasonably suppose, than strict health guidelines, but I do object to the lip-smacking tone of the commentary. Honestly, these populist leaders don't want harm to come to their country just because it happens to suit their book. Mainly because it wouldn't suit their book.
Still, if we didn't have populists we would have to invent them.
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Grant
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The most depressing thing about this hysteria is the corruption of the BBC and the rest of the media. It's become apparent that the government only hit their 100,000 testing target by posting 40,000 tests to testing centres and then including them in the 100,000. It's a level of corruption in plain sight that I've never seen in my life. But it's been ignored.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You're quite wrong. Every media outlet bar none pointed all this out -- it's exactly the sort of thing they love. And the government did exceptionally well to get anywhere near the target.
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Grant
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The news media did indeed point it out. Then they swiftly moved on. The story didn't have legs because the media left it alone in a way they never would have done in a "peacetime" scenario
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Twice in a row Andy Becket of the Guardian has managed to come up with such arresting headlines I've been forced to read his article. The last one was 'Is Britain Moving Towards A One-Party State', this one is
| Lessons from the botched 1957 pandemic |
I didn't think it would be a story of how some virus or other messed up. Sure enough, he was referring to the Tories and the Asian Flu
| Harold Macmillan is usually remembered for saying that during his government Britons had “never had it so good†in their standard of living. What has been forgotten, almost completely, is that he said this in the middle of a pandemic |
I have to admit that is true of me and every person who ever lived apart from Andy Beckett.
| Like Boris Johnson, he was a new premier with a preference for optimistic public statements. |
Despite going to the same school, this yoking would have both choking.
| In 1957, the British economy was actually quite fragile, and Macmillan acknowledged this in his speech, but the idea that Tory rule kept Britain prosperous and safe was central to his premiership. As now, the party had already been in power for years, and needed to present a Labour government as a terrible risk. |
I think this could have been said of any year in the period 1920-2020. Though occasionally substituting Labour for Conservative. But this is in the flu thread so best get on to the next paragraph now Andy's blocks are in place
| The pandemic, of a new strain of flu, had started in China the previous winter. During the first half of 1957 it steadily moved across Asia and then the rest of the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people, to the alarm of the world’s media, including the British press. |
The parallels are positively spooky....
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| The government advised those with symptoms to stay at home, but otherwise took little national action as the flu spread right across the country during the autumn, instead leaving it to local medical officials to work out what to do. |
Since this has rather been our view as well, it is worth pointing out that this has kinda been the policy of every government since Hammurabi. But it isn't the Beckett way
| In some areas, schools were closed, but few sporting events or other mass gatherings were cancelled. In October, the peak of the outbreak in Britain, the Conservative party conference went ahead as usual. Macmillan’s speech didn’t mention the pandemic. |
In my very dim recollection schools were closed because too many teachers were off sick but you get the picture: masterful inaction. Actually that was a Macmillan hallmark.
| The outbreak continued into the winter, and ultimately may have killed more than 30,000 Britons. Senior medical figures were horrified at Britain’s performance. |
About average for a bad strain but what was their beef?
| John Corbett McDonald of the public health laboratory service wrote to Ian Watson of the Royal College of General Practitioners: “Although we have had [over] 30 years to prepare for what should be done in the event of an influenza pandemic†– since the previous one in 1918 – “we have all been rushing around trying to improvise [solutions]. We can only hope that … at the end it may be possible to construct an adequate explanation of what happened.†|
Heads will roll but will they be the right ones?
| Many critics of Johnson over coronavirus are hoping for a similar reckoning. |
But Andy... Andy... he's done the exact opposite! You can't win with Andy Beckett if you're a Tory prime minister. Full piffle here but the URL says it all https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/cavalier-tory-leader-botched-pandemic-response-1957
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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All the Guardian's article-writers are vehemently anti-Boris, predictably enough. Criticism of government policy is discernible all over the shop but just this week Newsnight omitted the Guardian from its nightly round-up of newspaper headlines. Possibly a coincidence but it happened the day after the Guardian's headline lambasting Dom Cummings for attending the scientists' pow-wow.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The Chinese Virology Institutes's director denied his lab was the origin of the virus in a highly significant way. It was open to him to rule it out by saying something like, "We were not investigating Corona-type viruses at the time." Which might or might not be true but would certainly leave a smoking gun trail (for or against).
Instead he contented himself with bromides. "We have strict codes of conduct" and "High levels of bio-security." I need not remind the Director that there is no such thing as a man-made regime that can guarantee the prevention of the accidental release of pathogens. Though of course there will be a paper trail of all their codes of conduct and suchlike. The odds are definitely dropping though still not, I think, more than an each-way punt on the information we have.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Further to the above Andy Beckett article about the 1957 epidemic, did you spot how we know there wasn't an outcry from the medical establishment? I only noticed it this morning reading it through with Hatty.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Hatty wrote: | | Possibly a coincidence but it happened the day after the Guardian's headline lambasting Dom Cummings for attending the scientists' pow-wow. |
I have to confess I was confused by that, as they want to know why more wasn't done sooner. And yet:
According to two people involved, Cummings played far more than a bystander’s role at a crucial SAGE meeting on March 18, as the panel discussed social distancing options to tackle the Covid-19 outbreak.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because the meetings are private, the people said Cummings asked why a lockdown was not being imposed sooner, swayed the discussion toward faster action, and made clear he thought pubs and restaurants should be closed within two days. They then were. |
This rings true to me. Not least because I've been to some scientists' pow-wows where I naively thought some decisive action was going to be decided on. More fool me. The phrases that I still remember were "trends are unclear", "too soon to reach conclusions", and "more research is required". A complete and utter bunch of merchant bankers.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | John Corbett McDonald of the public health laboratory service wrote to Ian Watson of the Royal College of General Practitioners: “Although we have had [over] 30 years to prepare for what should be done in the event of an influenza pandemic†– since the previous one in 1918 – “we have all been rushing around trying to improvise [solutions]. We can only hope that … at the end it may be possible to construct an adequate explanation of what happened.†|
Heads will roll but will they be the right ones? |
Ah, more deja vu.
John Corbett McDonald, as a dedicated public servant, should be commended for emphasising what should have been done to ensure that the medical services were fully equipped for what might happen, to provide a resilient and robust systemic service.
And that's where he went wrong.
Early in my career as a systems designer I learnt a harsh lesson, that the bill payers weren't interested in paying for what might possibly happen at some undefined time in the future (and building in resilience and fail-safe contingency), they only wanted to pay the minimum for what would happen now.
What John Corbett McDonald needed was some kind of apocalyptic doom-sayer or prophet that scared the shit out of the bill-payers.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Very interesting (really) but you didn't answer my AE question.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Further to the above Andy Beckett article about the 1957 epidemic, did you spot how we know there wasn't an outcry from the medical establishment? I only noticed it this morning reading it through with Hatty. |
OK, I'll bite. How did you spot that?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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1. Andy Beckett is seeking evidence about "senior medical figures being horrified at Britain’s performance in 1957"
2. He has the entire resources of the Guardian with which to find it
3. In 2020 we have learned that 'senior medical figures' in this context consist of squintillions of people with resounding titles from a stupendous number of institutions, bodies, university departments and acronyms
4. The best, the only, evidence Andy Beckett could find was someone who worked in something called the public health laboratory service (no caps and lower) writing to someone who worked for the Royal College of General Practitioners.
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