[Will Hunt]

In reply to your 'prof Pete' comment Will:
I'm not posting to try to appear clever. I don't think I'm clever. I do think I have an OK capacity for researching and absorbing lots of info, spotting patterns, and a reasonable nose for bullshit or opportunity.

I'm afraid my bullshit detector went off when I read your post. Clearly you don't want another lockdown (who does?) but the fact that you started reaching for stuff about man-made virus escaping from a lab (could be true I suppose, but what's it got to do with whether you need a lockdown?), spreading lockdown fear to cover up partygate (this makes no sense), media conspiracy to push fear of omicron etc etc etc. I thought Dan had hacked your account.

[Paul B]

https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1473556411946717184

Looking milder
Booster = good
Highly transmissible
Total hospitilisation numbers may exceed previous peaks?

[petejh]

Will that’s a complete misrepresentation of what I said. Read my post again, I’m not suggesting links between those things! There’s a very big difference between mentioning different things and making a link, implied or direct.

The fact of last week’s select committee, which took evidence on the wuhan lab, is a completely separate point to my point that the public haven’t had the relative likelihoods explained for the various possible outcomes of this omicron wave. Or that the evidence for omicron having lower severity of outcome elsewhere has been completely disregarded in the media furore and government rhetoric over the last week and a bit.

If it sounded like I was saying scary omicron rhetoric = cover up wuhan then I wasn’t and apologies for writing it poorly. Maybe I should have put that point about the select committee in a separate post, just so that people wouldn’t think I was implying the one was a direct reason for the other.

I mentioned the select committee last week because it’s a genuinely interesting piece of info not because I think there’s some grand conspiracy. 
I would hope that people are grown up enough to read a piece of information and take it on the merit or not of that information, and not some imagined intent.  Seems you aren’t and need a nappy and someone to wipe your arse and spoon feed for you.

[Will Hunt]

Seems you aren’t and need a nappy and someone to wipe your arse and spoon feed for you.

Yes please, Daddy.

[Wellsy]

Abort thread

[spidermonkey09]

If the data says a lockdown is needed to prevent NHS overload in the next weeks

Thats what we're discussing. I don't think the data does indisputably say that.

So on the topic of lockdowns, in my opinion we are not at a point yet to call anything more than some extra restrictions

This is an interesting semantic point, but any restrictions which restrict people from meeting others in their own home or close pubs etc, as have been mooted in the last few days, are essentially a lockdown whatever name we give it.

I rate Paul Mainwood as well. I will pass over your reference to oversensitive middle class people, but actually saying 'noone got hurt' fundamentally ignores the harms lockdowns cause. Everyone will have personal stories of family members having their employment or income decimated by them - this obviously counts!

Where politics matter is the national scandal that the NHS is in such a woeful state. Those extra staff we need will take years to train so we can only look to immigration to gap fill until then. If the NHS was healthy we might have only needed light restrictions for omicron. The government foot shooting responses throughout this pandemic (vaccines aside) is costing everyone a fortune in life, health and finance. It's not stopped either.... when the NHS is in crisis you don't push 5%  we desperately need from the front-line because they are unvaccinated; when any safe infection control protocol should make that irrelevant.

I agree with this apart from the unvaccinated staff issue, but the fact remains that it isn't going to get solved in the short term so we need a workable strategy for that period. For me, lockdowns shouldn't be part of that strategy unless absolutely essential.

[Offwidth]

In reply to your 'prof Pete' comment Will:
I'm not posting to try to appear clever. I don't think I'm clever. I do think I have an OK capacity for researching and absorbing lots of info, spotting patterns, and a reasonable nose for bullshit or opportunity.

I'm afraid my bullshit detector went off when I read your post. Clearly you don't want another lockdown (who does?) but the fact that you started reaching for stuff about man-made virus escaping from a lab (could be true I suppose, but what's it got to do with whether you need a lockdown?), spreading lockdown fear to cover up partygate (this makes no sense), media conspiracy to push fear of omicron etc etc etc. I thought Dan had hacked your account.

I'm fairly sure I'll agree with Pete on the wuhan lab issues. I don't think the infection came from the lab but there sure was a cover up (of embarrassing idiocy) about the fact it could theoretically have come from there. Then there were all the consequentials that dropped out...there was a lack of openess that the covid work in the wuhan lab included a type of gain of function research and that was  part-funded by  US research grants....and then Fauci played rhetorical games to pretend it wasn't gan of function (but only by his incredibly tight definition). Then the fact that the work that was then banned in the US was undertaken in bio-protection level 2 and level 3 labs. There is nothing we can do now but this wuhan lab foolishness doesn't help public trust in science. Neither does the fact Oxford Uni still employ two Profs in senior leadership positions who still support herd immunity ideas that have been dangerously wrong time and time again (Gupta and Heneghan should be back as profs with no portfolio for now, imho, and under ethical investigation).

A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary was pretty fair on the wuhan lab debate.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/did-covid-leak-from-a-lab-in-china

[Will Hunt]

The rhetoric of fear going on around this omicron wave smells strongly of bullshit. It appears that the modellers have been incentivised to paint the worst case picture and this has been run with by virtually the whole media because it's by far the best bad-news story going. I don't know the incentive to panic the population by briefing a narrow picture of the severity of this wave - cover up partygate? Ultra cautious precautionary principle after poorly handling previous waves? Pressurise vaccine compliance in the population? Make the government appear they took action and controlled the omicron wave? Cover up the news, or compound the impact of the slow-to-emerge news, that the commons select committee heard evidence on Wednesday last week that a human-engineered virus and lab leak theory is now considered the most likely origin of covid. (notable that this didn't make the BBC or most of the other main media outlets)?

This is the paragraph that most triggered my bullshit-ometer, Pete, because it seems to me that you've forgotten to apply Occam's Razor. You're suggesting something conspiratorial (in which you invoke the Wuhan thing as a reason for the government/media bigging up omicron more than they ought to) and I suspect that you do that because it will lead you to the outcome that you want - which is to be opposed to a lockdown under any circumstances. By the way I have absolutely no opinion on whether the virus escaped a lab in Wuhan or not. It seems perfectly plausible to me. The only element of the discussion I'm interested in is whether a lockdown might be needed and this has nothing to do with that.

What I see is Chris Whitty wrestling with having to give advice which he knows will directly lead to more or fewer deaths. He's got some information to do this, but it's incomplete and may be confounded by the differences between the UK and SA; he's got to give the advice at a particularly feverish time because this is coincidentally the point in the year when people all decide to socialise at the same time. He can't wait, as Jim wants him to, until the data "indisputably" points to needing a lockdown to prevent failure of the healthcare system because of the lag time between people becoming infected, falling ill, and needing hospital care. If you wait until you're 100% sure then it's already too late to do anything about it.

That's all. I remain hopeful that another lockdown won't be needed because I'm sick to the back teeth of the whole thing. Our arguments on here will soon be moot anyway because we're getting better and better information all the time about whether a lockdown is needed or not.

[Offwidth]

If the data says a lockdown is needed to prevent NHS overload in the next weeks

Thats what we're discussing. I don't think the data does indisputably say that.

....and neither do I (as yet) so what exactly are you arguing about on that point?

So on the topic of lockdowns, in my opinion we are not at a point yet to call anything more than some extra restrictions

This is an interesting semantic point, but any restrictions which restrict people from meeting others in their own home or close pubs etc, as have been mooted in the last few days, are essentially a lockdown whatever name we give it.

I rate Paul Mainwood as well. I will pass over your reference to oversensitive middle class people, but actually saying 'noone got hurt' fundamentally ignores the harms lockdowns cause. Everyone will have personal stories of family members having their employment or income decimated by them - this obviously counts!

Restrictions are mooted because a real bad outcome is in the short term accurate modeling range and even best case the NHS won't have a great time of the next two months.

Lockdowns were not the Guardian's fault they were a public health necessity and the deaths and health outcomes,  time required to drop restrictions,  financial hit and social damage were all made worse by govenment dithering.

Where politics matter is the national scandal that the NHS is in such a woeful state. Those extra staff we need will take years to train so we can only look to immigration to gap fill until then. If the NHS was healthy we might have only needed light restrictions for omicron. The government foot shooting responses throughout this pandemic (vaccines aside) is costing everyone a fortune in life, health and finance. It's not stopped either.... when the NHS is in crisis you don't push 5%  we desperately need from the front-line because they are unvaccinated; when any safe infection control protocol should make that irrelevant.

I agree with this apart from the unvaccinated staff issue, but the fact remains that it isn't going to get solved in the short term so we need a workable strategy for that period. For me, lockdowns shouldn't be part of that strategy unless absolutely essential.

That sounds like cakeism to me. If that 5% ends up being part of the the 'camel straw' that forces lockdown are you  really OK with that ....or would you prefer we do all we can to avoid lockdown?. A similar factor is also doing damage and increasing lockdown risks......stopping employment of unvaccinated care workers has added significant pressure to the care system and therefore has increased NHS bed blocking. Brexit also made staffing worse. Javid picking numerous fights with NHS management and staff has made staffing worse. Ministerial boasting about how many new doctors and nurses we have this year when even more are retiring or leaving or long term sick, hides a key recruitment problem, which also makes staffing worse.

[spidermonkey09]

That sounds like cakeism to me. If that 5% ends up being part of the the 'camel straw' that forces lockdown are you  really OK with that ....or would you prefer we do all we can to avoid lockdown?. A similar factor is also doing damage and increasing lockdown risks......stopping employment of unvaccinated care workers has added significant pressure to the care system and therefore has increased NHS bed blocking. Brexit also made staffing worse. Javid picking numerous fights with NHS management and staff has made staffing worse. Ministerial boasting about how many new doctors and nurses we have this year when even more are retiring or leaving or long term sick, hides a key recruitment problem, which also makes staffing worse.

You're doing your usual thing of going off on a rant about the Tories and Brexit. Ignoring all that, I agree there may be an element of wishful thinking in the short term, but can't see that it will be too much of an issue in the summer, which is when I thought it was coming into force? NHS staff are required to have the Hep B jab, this one is no different from what I can see. It will become obligatory at some point, its just a question of when. Wouldn't have a problem with it being delayed in due course but i think its right to put unvaxxed staff on notice so they can get themselves jabbed.

Should add that I think Whitty is doing an amazing job and providing the govt with all the relevant advice from a healthcare perspective. I understand that he can't personally wait for indisputable evidence before giving advice,  but I do think the govt should before implementing that advice.

[Offwidth]

What I see is Chris Whitty wrestling with having to give advice which he knows will directly lead to more or fewer deaths. He's got some information to do this, but it's incomplete and may be confounded by the differences between the UK and SA; he's got to give the advice at a particularly feverish time because this is coincidentally the point in the year when people all decide to socialise at the same time. He can't wait, as Jim wants him to, until the data "indisputably" points to needing a lockdown to prevent failure of the healthcare system because of the lag time between people becoming infected, falling ill, and needing hospital care. If you wait until you're 100% sure then it's already too late to do anything about it.

I think you can be pretty sure if Chris Whitty was PM Plan B light would have been running for months and Plan B+ as soon as omicron hospitalisations started in large numbers in SA. His job is to support the PM so he has been stretching the envelope on what he can say since September 2020 and more so in the last few days than ever.

Omicron measures are not about deaths (and  deaths were always secondary in the UK given our response). It is about keeping the NHS running on the covid emergency alongside other emergency work. SA data shows omicron death rates  are proportionally low ... given we have more vulnerable than SA ours will likely be higher (but nothing like as high as delta). The key question in terms of hospital overload is how many people will go into hospital with omicron and how long will they need to stay?

Another problem is just when we need clear data the PCR system is starting to creak.... there are increasing  logistics based shortages and increasing delays in returning results. Symptomatic infections will almost certainly exceed system capacity this week. ONS weekly  infection surveys will become even more important but they are delayed by a week.

Plus the NHS off sick rate in London went from 1900 to 4700 last week.

[Offwidth]

That sounds like cakeism to me. If that 5% ends up being part of the the 'camel straw' that forces lockdown are you  really OK with that ....or would you prefer we do all we can to avoid lockdown?. A similar factor is also doing damage and increasing lockdown risks......stopping employment of unvaccinated care workers has added significant pressure to the care system and therefore has increased NHS bed blocking. Brexit also made staffing worse. Javid picking numerous fights with NHS management and staff has made staffing worse. Ministerial boasting about how many new doctors and nurses we have this year when even more are retiring or leaving or long term sick, hides a key recruitment problem, which also makes staffing worse.

You're doing your usual thing of going off on a rant about the Tories and Brexit. Ignoring all that, I agree there may be an element of wishful thinking in the short term, but can't see that it will be too much of an issue in the summer, which is when I thought it was coming into force? NHS staff are required to have the Hep B jab, this one is no different from what I can see. It will become obligatory at some point, its just a question of when. Wouldn't have a problem with it being delayed in due course but i think its right to put unvaxxed staff on notice so they can get themselves jabbed.

Should add that I think Whitty is doing an amazing job and providing the govt with all the relevant advice from a healthcare perspective. I understand that he can't personally wait for indisputable evidence before giving advice,  but I do think the govt should before implementing that advice.

I'm just pointing out areas that have increased our risk of a lockdown this winter (none of which involve The Guardian in any way). That removal of 5% of NHS front line staff will make a big negative difference, just like removal of care staff did to increased NHS bed blocking. So did you want to do all we can to avoid lockdown or not (with direct health outcomes, indirect outcomes and  deaths, financial damage, and social damage)?

I think all NHS staff should be vaccinated as well but removing them if they don't get their first jab by Feb 3rd is to me akin to playing russian roulette. Infection control makes risk from the unvaccinated very small so we can wait a few more months.

[spidermonkey09]

I think all NHS staff should be vaccinated as well but removing them if they don't get their first jab by Feb 3rd is to me akin to playing russian roulette. Infection control makes risk from the unvaccinated very small so we can wait a few more months.

Yeah, I'd agree with this; I thought the date was April but just checked and thats when the second jab needs to be done by currently. Seems silly to do it in the middle of winter. My money would be on that changing by a few months like you say.

[petejh]

The rhetoric of fear going on around this omicron wave smells strongly of bullshit. It appears that the modellers have been incentivised to paint the worst case picture and this has been run with by virtually the whole media because it's by far the best bad-news story going. I don't know the incentive to panic the population by briefing a narrow picture of the severity of this wave - cover up partygate? Ultra cautious precautionary principle after poorly handling previous waves? Pressurise vaccine compliance in the population? Make the government appear they took action and controlled the omicron wave? Cover up the news, or compound the impact of the slow-to-emerge news, that the commons select committee heard evidence on Wednesday last week that a human-engineered virus and lab leak theory is now considered the most likely origin of covid. (notable that this didn't make the BBC or most of the other main media outlets)?

This is the paragraph that most triggered my bullshit-ometer, Pete, because it seems to me that you've forgotten to apply Occam's Razor. You're suggesting something conspiratorial (in which you invoke the Wuhan thing as a reason for the government/media bigging up omicron more than they ought to) and I suspect that you do that because it will lead you to the outcome that you want - which is to be opposed to a lockdown under any circumstances. By the way I have absolutely no opinion on whether the virus escaped a lab in Wuhan or not. It seems perfectly plausible to me. The only element of the discussion I'm interested in is whether a lockdown might be needed and this has nothing to do with that.

What I see is Chris Whitty wrestling with having to give advice which he knows will directly lead to more or fewer deaths. He's got some information to do this, but it's incomplete and may be confounded by the differences between the UK and SA; he's got to give the advice at a particularly feverish time because this is coincidentally the point in the year when people all decide to socialise at the same time. He can't wait, as Jim wants him to, until the data "indisputably" points to needing a lockdown to prevent failure of the healthcare system because of the lag time between people becoming infected, falling ill, and needing hospital care. If you wait until you're 100% sure then it's already too late to do anything about it.

That's all. I remain hopeful that another lockdown won't be needed because I'm sick to the back teeth of the whole thing. Our arguments on here will soon be moot anyway because we're getting better and better information all the time about whether a lockdown is needed or not.

The difference between your interpretation and my intent, is that my intent behind that paragraph is that all, any, or none of those things going on in the background could have something to do with the way this wave has been framed by the gov and media for public consumption. Or they could have nothing at all to do. It’s simply spitballing.
The wuhan stuff is genuinely interesting and highly relevant to anyone even slightly interested in science communication, public trust in politics, geo politics and just what’s happening in the world. I thought that was obvious. 

I think the framing of the risks of omicron overwhelming healthcare have led to a moral panic in the last couple of weeks, which helps nobody make informed decisions. The almost sole focus verging on panic by media and even it seems gov messaging, on models which assume same severity of outcome as delta is to me a completely bizarre way to frame a problem where evidence exists that runs counter to the narrative being breathlessly pushed. The counter evidence in a real life population suggests it’s plausible to think the UK population, with much better overall immunity levels than SA, would not experience in real life the outcomes given by the models - models requested by ministers (understandably) to show worst case outcomes. We’ll see won’t we. I’d be saying lockdown right away if my take on the available facts suggested locking down was a proportional response to the risk.

[spidermonkey09]

On the modelling issue, I thought this was good. I've listened to Sam Freedman a lot during the pandemic.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/new-approach-needed-avoid-covid-data-disputes-and-modelling-misunderstanding

[James Malloch]

Plus the NHS off sick rate in London went from 1900 to 4700 last week.

For me this kind of thing is the biggie. It seems like the NHS is all but certain going to have a real shit time in Jan/Feb. That’s on top of the really shit time it’s had over the last 21 months. And the people needing support from the NHS for non-COVID reasons might also have a really shit time because of this, again.

Workers must be exhausted, suffering from all sorts of mental health problems. But because we want Christmas to go ahead we’re going to wait and learn a bit more from the data - when it’s already pretty clear that it’s not going to be good.

I admit that I’ve no idea what the right thing is (and I’m saying this from a comfortable position) but I’m all for a lockdown of some sort. We’re a wealthy country and should be able to afford to support business through one. Put an emergency tax on those who are able to continue to work to help fund it, increase other taxes to help fund it, or whatever.

If not, then the government should go on TV and specifically state what they are happy to happen and why they are making that choice. Explain the likely hospitalisation numbers and say directly to the NHS staff why they have chosen that rather than other options, and say the strain they expect them to be under due to staff illness/burn out combined with massive admissions. Tell them that they chose to fuck their mental health again because they wanted the rest of the country to get together over Christmas.

I’d hate another lockdown, but I feel like we’ve had it relatively okay compared to much of the world so far. And if, in 2 weeks (or whatever) the data that they are now waiting for shows that things aren’t as bad as the modelling suggests, then loosen the restrictions.

Edit - this probably isn’t well thought through, but the premise is simply that I think that if a lockdown now can reduce the expected burden on the NHS, then I’m all for one and think it’s morally the right thing to do.

[petejh]

On the modelling issue, I thought this was good. I've listened to Sam Freedman a lot during the pandemic.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/new-approach-needed-avoid-covid-data-disputes-and-modelling-misunderstanding

Yep, he’s really good. This paragraph describes well the current situation:

If I were a politician or adviser my main takeaway would be that restrictions, if imposed now, would make a significant difference to the numbers. But not that the numbers will unquestionably be high enough to require restrictions. Where you’d go from there depends how wedded you are to the precautionary principle and your assessment of the costs of restrictions (which have, unhelpfully, not been modelled at any point during the pandemic). As we can see these are, reasonably enough, the questions that the cabinet are asking.

The gov’s restrictions so far are more or less exactly what you’d expect given the apparent risk.

And the majority of the media in the way they’ve framed this latest wave have been truly awful and scaremongering.

[ali k]

the majority of the media in the way they’ve framed this latest wave have been truly awful and scaremongering.

Who are you referring to here? (apart from the Guardian obvs).

If anything it’s been the complete opposite from the Telegraph, Mail, Sun etc.

[spidermonkey09]

the majority of the media in the way they’ve framed this latest wave have been truly awful and scaremongering.

Who are you referring to here? (apart from the Guardian obvs).

If anything it’s been the complete opposite from the Telegraph, Mail, Sun etc.

I think the i have really bad form on reporting of variants, and this one has been no different. That is actually what frustrates me, the reporting of covid from the papers I like has been dire.

[petejh]

Who are you referring to here? (apart from the Guardian obvs).

If anything it’s been the complete opposite from the Telegraph, Mail, Sun etc.

The BBC, sky news, ITN, channel 4, the telegraph has only just in the last day or two really pivoted away from parroting the last two weeks of doom stats from government. The mail/express/sun I can’t really say as I don’t look at them, but pretty sure I glimpsed a few front page Armageddon headlines on them as I walked past in the local shop.
R4, R5, R1. (I’m confident you could add R2 to that but I’d rather listen to white noise).

So yeah nothing of any influence or reach…

[Fiend]

(I’m confident you could add R2 to that but I’d rather listen to white noise).

I can recommend you some pretty thrilling pieces by Merzbow if you like?? (One of which I was listening to on the way back from Trefor in the summer....not my usual driving music I admit).

[ali k]

Pete - just listing a lot of media outlets and saying they’ve reported Covid numbers doesn’t amount to much of an argument to back up your accusation of ‘scaremongering’.

Do you extend the accusation of scaremongering out to other leaders / foreign media because those countries are imposing further restrictions?

[Johnny Brown]

I haven't seen any scaremongering either. What we've all seen is that omicron is much more transmissible. And we all know that the data hasnt come through yet to be certain if it is sufficiently less severe to prevent that transmissibility becoming the nightmare we all know it could be. So we're all then reacting with our natural level of risk and risk tolerance and being bemused by those with radically different levels.

[petejh]

Pete - just listing a lot of media outlets and saying they’ve reported Covid numbers doesn’t amount to much of an argument to back up your accusation of ‘scaremongering’.

..is nowhere remotely resembling what I actually said. What I did say was that the media have focussed on the doom predictions not the covid numbers.
This is completely ridiculous it’s like trying to communicate with runes. Perhaps I should try posting a cave painting.
Forget it.

[Oldmanmatt]

I haven't seen any scaremongering either. What we've all seen is that omicron is much more transmissible. And we all know that the data hasnt come through yet to be certain if it is sufficiently less severe to prevent that transmissibility becoming the nightmare we all know it could be. So we're all then reacting with our natural level of risk and risk tolerance and being bemused by those with radically different levels.

It’s not always “scaremongering “ but it’s often over sensational.

Take today’s 100k threshold headlines. Compare “date reported” with “Specimen date”, the latter giving a much better picture:



Quite alarming…



Quite different.