Interesting article. I’m afraid the author is in the silo I mentioned
Scientists like us said lock down earlier; we said test, trace, isolate. But they decided they knew better.
What if they just knew more ? What if they knew that they had already missed the testing boat ? We can blame who we like, but if doing the testing was impossible then making ‘doing the testing’ the kingpin of our response would have been to pursue a policy where the only absolute certainty was failure.
I could pick a lot more holes in the piece, most of them based on her own honest admissions - that the science was in its infancy, with researchers trying to understand it. That we should have based our response on that of China (she doesn’t mention that China is able and willing to exert extreme levels of state control, and was dealing with a problem largely isolated in one province at which it could and did throw the resources of the whole of the rest of the country). That we should have relied on the decades of experience of the WHO (without mentioning that the bulk of that experience is based on disease outbreaks in third-world nations, where people move less often and less far, and that anything which is decades old may well not be a good fit to managing a global pandemic’s impact on a country with a first-rate health system and tools like the internet and smart phones).
In the end she concedes that the government ‘did well’ up to March 12th and have done what she wanted since March 23rd. She criticises them for not recommending social distancing until March 16th (four days after March 12th) and not enforcing it for another week. On balance, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think I agree with that. But it hardly makes them Jair Bolsonaro.
Of course she is, because you have defined your silo as anyone who disagrees with Gov policy (though that is still mutating by itself). It is becoming clear that there are many in the area who share the same misgivings about the way that the Gov has behaved.
Shame we didn’t take our lead from Korea and Taiwan, their experiences with SARS seemed to jolly them along rather better than our efforts (right up to this moment)
What’s the best estimate now for how many people actually got sick as a result of that event ? Even an order of magnitude estimate would do. But it has to be based on something concrete. Not a guess, or an ‘I wish it to be this, so it is’ assertion.
On March 14th Patrick Vallance said shutting down mass events would not have a “big effect” transmission rates. But what did he know eh ? He’s probably a murderous liar. Or, worse still, an expert. Please don’t tell me you’ve sided with this
Maybe the point is that experts are only expert in their field. Just because you are an expert, it doesn’t mean that you know everything. Appropriate experts for appropriate areas.
Present company excepted, of course.
That answer wasn’t obvious to Patrick Vallance. He reckoned he knew. You and I are utterly clueless. We have neither any expertise whatsoever nor (almost) any information. It would always be safer not to do anything. Except for the people whose wage packet depends on that thing. It wouldn’t be safer for them. We’re going to see a lot of poverty over the next decade or so (if we’re lucky).
Bob, ive been fighting it for 10 days. If it hasn’t gone over the hump tomorrow its the hospital for me… im day 6 anti biotics, brandy and copius brufen/para
I’ve already conceded that he could be a murderous liar.
But assuming he’s not then what he was reported as saying was scientific - that shutting down mass events would not have a big effect on transmission rates. If he’d said not a justifiable effect, or not an acceptable effect, then those would have been political statements. But for scientists big is quite unambiguous, and he could easily have been asked to clarify it with a number. I would expect ‘not big’ to be a few percent, or significantly smaller than other uncertainties.
I forgot to add that , yes and it helps in the night , the issue is what was a minor crack on a molar 6 months ago has now infected. My best friends wife is a dentist, there is not a lot she can do unfortunately.
Clove oil works if it can seep in. The crack i guess is still quite minor but infected
