Fogle can fucking do one as well.
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A good piece about the 11 days in March when our government (following the ‘science’) allowed huge numbers of people to unwittingly share the virus around.
Other countries’ governments followed very different science.
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60/. On 3 Feb, @BorisJohnson made this speech in Greenwich.
— Stefan Simanowitz (@StefSimanowitz) April 16, 2020
“There’s a risk that new diseases such as #coronavirus will trigger a panic & a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real & unnecessary economic damage.” #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/EbLEWTAeVZ
He wrote a much longer piece in the Observer last week. It was searing, but mostly searing about how terrified he was for himself and for the futures of his young family if he should die. It was genuinely moving.
In the linked piece he says
The folks who understand maths warn me of all manner of caveats and assumptions. Sure. It’s going to be a highly inexact science. But roughly? Ten per cent? Twenty? Fifty?
No. The answer is somewhere around two thirds. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Basically most of them. Basically most of the cases. Basically most of the deaths. Most of the horrible sickness and dread. Most of the loved ones lost.*
That asterisk at the end though. So small. But important. It links to, in tiny tiny print at the bottom
*I’m not sharing the calculations. They’re so rough.
Why not Dominic ? You say, in bigger print and further up
Demand, then, honesty. Clarity. And – now, right now – demand transparency
Well I’m demanding it. You have numbers. Share them.
EDIT: By the way, given the clamour about how testing will free up non-infected staff to go back into hospitals, it’s worth noting from his Observer article that he was tested while he was very sick in hospital. Twice. Both negative. Worth bearing in mind if we’re thinking of sending people back into hospitals on the basis of test results.
VB
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Those skin prick antibody tests got called out as being bollocks, didn’t they?
Tests like this rarely “just work”. They have a known sensitivity and specificity in the population they’re validated for.
Mik went into hospital twice, he was tested as negative and sent home
Matt Hancock admitted that 15000 people are still coming in daily, through British airports, unchecked and not required to be quarantined. Until this is addressed, it’s difficult to assert that the government is taking this seriously enough even if the police continue to fine sunbathers or threaten to check which aisles people are shopping in.
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they can’t all be returning brits surely? So who are they and why do they need to come here now? It’s not like we need the workforce bolstering
I’d expect international travel to be almost nil for now - a sealed metal tube with recirculating air must be almost perfect for spreading this thing…
They did, but he had the swab tests (he described the nose swab for the second test going so far in that it entered his mind !). Both neg. In the end they did CT and saw what looked very like Covid changes in his lungs. So he probably did have it.
It seems the specificity on the swab tests is not bad - greater than 90% One-third of patients who have coronavirus could wrongly test negative, according to health experts. But the sensitivity is around 70%. So two false negs in an actually positive patient occur 0.3 squared of the time - 9%. Not all that often, but easily often enough that we can believe his story.
VB
Could most of them be coming from cleaner places than here (honestly I don’t know) ? The disease hasn’t really exploded in some parts of the world yet. If so then they’ll be bringing less disease than they’ll find when they land.
VB
If only Derbyshire police had had one of their drones up. They could’ve nicked some of these idiots.
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Masks. Our scientists say they’d make no difference.
I do like the irony that Hancock’s degree was in PPE.
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Where are the words from ? (OK, just seen the link.)
One of the govt team was saying (yesterday ?) that our capacity for testing was 35,000 per day but that we were doing many fewer than that. Why ? I guess there’s a bottleneck somewhere else. Nurses too busy to take samples ? Likewise care workers too busy/not competent to test the vulnerable outside hospital ? Self-quarantining key workers unable to get to test centres ? Not enough swab kits ? Not enough ‘chemicals’ to run the equipment ? The latter two would affect ‘capacity’, so maybe they’re less likely explanations. In any process chain with a bottleneck somewhere all the other parts will be wondering why they’re under-utilised.
EDIT: I’ve just read the article. Exec summary:
- We’re ready but the samples for testing aren’t arriving.
- We don’t know why.
- So it must be because the government doesn’t care/lacks the political will to stop everyone dying.
1 and 2 stack up (especially 2 - this bloke knows no more than I do about what the problem actually is). 3 is what I would expect Rik from The Young Ones to say. Get a grip Guardian. There’s a bottleneck here. If you want to be investigative journalists then get out and do some investigating. Find the bottleneck.
VB
one of my senior nurse colleagues tells me the issue is the tactic of setting up out of town testing centres - that is where the capacity is.
and I quote my colleague:
“for that to work the NHS staff and care workers need to get to the centres - but when they aren’t working (12 hour shifts), they are shopping, eating or sleeping” - despite it being vitally important, there seems to be little inclination to go to the centres.
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Cummings’s head.
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If only it were that simple 
.
VB
In terms of testing, Korea, Taiwan, germany etc all have a working model - Why don’t we adopt it instead of re creating the wheel?
Jeremy Howard says he’s a scientist. He isn’t https://www.wired.com/2011/12/kaggle/.
He might, albeit by accident, be right about masks though. I have a feeling in my water that they must help, even if it’s only a bit.
But it’s not just our scientists who didn’t recommend them. Remember how the behavioural scientist in that other Guardian piece you linked to, and that I got so aerated about, said one of our problems was that we weren’t drawing on the expertise of the WHO ? They say healthy people who aren’t caring for the sick don’t need masks https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks. So should we draw on their expertise ?
VB
