The Flu (Health)

[Mick Harper]

Not so much me, Borry, as human beings. That's why we instituted the rule. You know, 'presentation is half the battle'. Why the need for people not to take potshots anyway? Do you have something to hide among the verbiage? Perhaps you could pick out the bits that you are referring to, they sound quite interesting.

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

A new reason for casting doubt on the daily death figures -- which are going the right way for us but the wrong way for the medical interventionists. There is apparently the need to co-ordinate the figures between the four different health services: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. "Is there anyone in the office who can add up four numbers?"

On the same general drift, Italy's daily deaths (which are stabilising/going down) are reported as overall numbers (which are going up); Spain's (which are still going up) are still being reported as daily figures.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

Valuable insights. We, Der Englanders, just assume the NHS is the NHS (the clue is in the name) but for the others it is presumably a symbol of self-rule. Even if health is a 'reserved power' this must be pretty meaningless while the NHS is centrally funded (or block-granted or whatever). Though I did notice that Nicola instituted some (health) isolationist measures before 'we' did. It would actually be quite advantageous if all four ran separate polices and collected separate statistics and we might better know what works and what doesn't. So that won't be allowed.

This is of course quite separate from collating the daily death toll. There's nothing stopping England issuing its own. So that won't be allowed.

[Boreades]

How quickly we forget Avian Flu, predicted to cause mega-deaths. Ah, the good old days. With the same theoretical modelling techniques by (guess who) Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson.

Only 10 or so days ago he was estimating 500,000 deaths in the UK. Now “unlikely to exceed 20,000”. The anti-climax is worse than the cure.

[Mick Harper]

I got my first look at this Ferguson chappie you're all going on about and all I can say is that academics, like policemen, are getting younger and weirder by the day. But so am I so I will stick to my own specialty, the daily death figures, reportage thereof. The big news is that Italy's has suddenly gone skywards and consequently is getting wall-to-wall coverage instead of careful ignoral. Since I haven't been obeying that wise rule 'never trust a single day's figure' I have to say I was alarmed too. I shall have to wait-and-see but so far I've been rather impressed by the smoothness of the various bell-curves. Including the ones that have not thus far got their own bell-end.

The British figures were technically alarming too but since all of a sudden nobody is telling us whether we've moved over from an eight-hour day to a diurnal one, got more people on the blower to relatives, and made sure that NHS talks better unto NHS supranationally, I shall have to wait-and-see there too.

Everyone agrees that the daily 'rate of infection' is (in Europe) flattening out, going in the right direction, coming down, rising less steeply and other encouraging usages but nobody attempts to apply the other-than-encouraging reasons, notably the spread of testing kits and the non-spread of people to test. When they refer to this figure at all which, one would have thought, should lead every news bulletin and have a panel of experts poring over the numbers in the studio like retired field marshals in the days of the Falklands War. There are, it seems, no retired epidemiologists.

But that is a feature of the present campaign, the journalists feel unequipped to challenge the experts, or even ask the right questions. The medical ones that is, they regularly put the boot in with politicians, equipment suppliers, over-active police, under-active police and so forth.

The fact that the top tier of government is going down with the disease but showing no signs of incapacity, however relative that may be, signals the next great trend: 'We can take it' syndrome. A positive relish for war stories once it becomes clear that we are not going to lose the war. Though I must say the recent 'clapping of front line staff' was a bit premature. We normally wait until after the war for the parades.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Do you want the part of beanstalk or don't you? Everyone's a critic, everyone's a casting director. Playing the title role is never enough for some people.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

[Boreades]

Hatty, can you help Harpo with this?

[Mick Harper]

More on the daily death figures. Ours are rocketing up but nobody will say whether they are rocketing up faster or slower, the only critical factor (to be bloodless about it). An expert, when asked specifically how it compares with Italy, changed the subject which suggests it's better. Spanish daily numbers were headlined (they are still going up), Italy's were ignored in favour of the grim but not significant "they've gone over the ten thousand mark".

I turned to Al-Jazeera for enlightenment and got given exactly the same set of messages. However, the streamer running across the bottom of the screen said 'Italy: 889 deaths' but not whether that was more or less than the day before. Later on I found out it was less (than 919). Only marginal of course but definitely important since the 919 was a big jump. Important enough to be given the 'careful ignoral' treatment anyway.