I’ve decided to post an update every day, but the updates proper will be on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with shorter ones on the other days. This is in response to numerous requests in the comment from people who find it difficult to keep track of the threads if there are over 1,000 comments, something that happens if more than 24 hours pass since the previous update. Friday’s update, for instance, attracted 1,714 comments.
Today, I’ve decided to devote the entirety of the update to Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College, including a guest post by “Sue Denim”, the software engineer who wrote “Code Review of Ferguson’s Model” for Lockdown Sceptics on May 6th. That article was the most talked-about post that’s appeared on this site, as well as the most viewed.
This seems like a good time to publish Sue’s latest thoughts about Professor Ferguson’s model because yesterday the Imperial College modelling team, including Neil Ferguson, published a paper in Nature, based on a new model, arguing that the lockdowns have saved the lives of approximately 3.1 million people in 11 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). In the UK alone, the authors think the lockdown has saved 470,000 lives.
That 3.1 million figure, which they call “counterfactual deaths”, is the number of deaths they estimate would have occurred by May 4th if there had been no non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and people’s behaviour hadn’t changed one jot in response to the pandemic. But that’s a rather obvious sleight of hand. In effect, their argument involves contrasting the collective impact of the NPIs in all 11 countries, including Sweden, with a counterfactual scenario in which nothing was done at all, and saying, “Look! The lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives.”
No one, as far as I’m aware, has ever advocated that governments around the world do nothing in response to the pandemic. Rather, the argument is about whether they over-reacted. Have the full lockdowns saved more lives than less severe restrictions would have done, given the public health impact of imprisoning everyone in their homes, as well as the catastrophic economic consequences?
It’s also highly implausible to imagine people would have done nothing in response to the pandemic – just carried on as normal – in the absence of state-mandated, top-down directives. This flatly contradicts both common sense and actual mobility data from Google and other sources that shows people’s mobility falling before the lockdowns were imposed.
The authors try and get round this by including the following caveat:
The counterfactual model without interventions is illustrative only and reflects our model assumptions. We do not account for changes in behaviour; in reality even in the absence of government interventions we would expect Rt to decrease and therefore would overestimate deaths in the no-intervention model
So they know the 3.1 million number is wrong because their assumptions are wrong, but provide a specific number anyway for “illustrative only” purposes. But what is it supposed to illustrate, given that it doesn’t actually tell us how many people would have died in the absence of any NPIs?
I think I know the answer: it illustrates the ideological worldview of the scientists involved, which is that virtually the entire population in these 11 countries are sheep-like entities who must be told what to do by experts like them. Reading about a dangerous virus in the news –seeing pictures of hospitals in Italy being overwhelmed – won’t affect their behaviour in the slightest.
The epidemiologists who’ve been advising the UK Government during this crisis often protest that they are perfectly neutral scientists, and anyone who criticises them is “ideological”. But as we can see, this Imperial College model takes for granted an essentially communist worldview in which the masses must be directed by central planners.
In order to make a convincing argument for the lockdowns, the paper would have to compare the number of lives saved as a result of the severe restrictions imposed in 10 of the 11 countries with the number that would have been saved if those 10 countries had stuck with the same mitigation strategy as Sweden. That’s the relevant counterfactual, not the one they’ve conjured up, and the case for the lockdowns depends upon calculating the number of lives saved in contrast to that counterfactual and demonstrating that it’s greater than the collateral damage done by the extra measures taken. This paper only tells us how effective the lockdowns have been in contrast to an alternative scenario – the do-nothing approach – which no one is arguing for.
In other words, the paper isn’t a defence of the lockdowns imposed in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Rather, it’s an argument for doing something rather than nothing.
Needless to say, that isn’t how it’s being presented by its authors, or how it’s being reported in the press. The BBC’s headline yesterday, predictably enough, was “Lockdowns in Europe saved millions of lives“, apparently taking the Imperial team’s claim at face value, while the Sun at least has the good sense to put that claim in inverted commas: “Lockdown ‘prevented the deaths of 470,000 Brits from coronavirus – and 3m across EU’.”
Imperial has put out a press release claiming that the lockdowns have saved 3.1 million lives in Europe. Hang on. Wasn’t that 3.1 million number supposed to be purely “illustrative”, i.e. not a meaningful estimate of how much loss of life (if any) the lockdowns have prevented? The same release includes a quote from Dr Seth Flaxman, one of the paper’s authors, bragging about how many lives have been saved because governments across Europe have followed the sagacious advice of him and his team:
Using a model based on data from the number of deaths in 11 European countries, it is clear to us that non-pharmaceutical interventions – such as lockdown and school closures, have saved about 3.1 million lives in these countries.
An “illustrative only” figure seems to have been transformed into a hard data point without a second glance.
In the BBC story, Dr Flaxman emphasises that the crisis is far from over. “Claims this is all over can be firmly rejected,” he says. “We are only at the beginning of this pandemic.” That warning is echoed by Dr Samir Bhatt, another of the paper’s authors: “There is a very real risk if mobility goes back up there could be a second wave coming reasonably soon, in the next month or two.”
This follows from their model, since they assume the only reason the rate of infection has declined in the 11 countries they’ve looked at is because it’s been effectively suppressed by NPIs, not because the number of people with natural immunity is far greater than initially thought, or because the virus is nosocomial, or seasonal. The possibility that the majority of people who’ve died from COVID-19 are unusually vulnerable – elderly people in care homes and hospitals with underlying health conditions – and that further waves of infection are unlikely to have anything like the same infection fatality rate (IFR) isn’t considered by the paper’s authors. The model assumes the IFR is and will continue to be about 1% – four times greater than the CDC estimate. It also doesn’t allow for the fact that the IFR varies according to age.
Meanwhile, another paper in Nature – this one from a team at the University of California – claims that NPIs in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France, and the United States have prevented 530 million people becoming infected. But, again, the relevant counterfactual is no NPIs whatsoever, rather than a more measured approach. So not a persuasive argument for lockdowns either.
The argument made in these papers for the lockdowns is unpersuasive. It’s the equivalent of justifying Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drug trafficking in the Philippines, in spite of the fact that it’s resulted in the deaths of over 7,000 suspects, by pointing to the number of drug deaths it’s prevented and making the relevant counterfactual the absence of any policing whatsoever rather than a less draconian approach.
There’s a saying among scientists – just because something is published in Nature doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. But Imperial’s new paper takes the biscuit. Running my eye over the list of authors, I was surprised not to see Mystic Meg’s name there.
____________________________
So, on to the main event: Sue Denim’s latest blog post. I’m posting it in the update today, but will move it to the right-hand menu tomorrow so it sits beneath Sue’s previous two blog posts. A quick reminder that “Sue Denim” is not the author’s real name – kinda obvious when you think about it. The writer is a senior software engineer/consultant who doesn’t want to disclose his/her identity. As he/she wrote at the beginning of his/her first post:
I have been writing software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years.
How Replicable is the Imperial College Model?
by Sue Denim
After Toby published my first and second pieces, Imperial College London (ICL) produced two responses. In this article I will study them. I’ve also written an appendix that provides some notes on the C programming language to address some common confusions observed amongst modellers, which Toby will publish tomorrow.
Attempted replication. On the June 1st ICL published a press release on its website stating that Stephen Eglen, an academic at Cambridge, was able to reproduce the numbers in ICL’s influential Report 9. I was quite interested to see how that was achieved. As a reminder, Imperial College’s Report 9 modelling drove lockdown in many countries.
Unfortunately, this press release continues ICL’s rather worrying practice of making misleading statements about its work. The headline is “Codecheck confirms reproducibility of COVID-19 model results”, and the article highlights this quote:
I was able to reproduce the results… from Report 9.
This is an unambiguous statement. However, the press release quotes the report as saying: “Small variations (mostly under 5%) in the numbers were observed between Report 9 and our runs.”
This is an odd definition of “replicate” for the output of a computer program, but it doesn’t really matter because what ICL doesn’t mention is this: the very next sentence of Eglen’s report says:
I observed 3 significant differences:
1. Table A1: R0=2.2, trigger = 3000, PC_CI_HQ_SDOL70, peak beds (in thousands): 40 vs 30, a 25% decrease.
2. Table 5: on trigger = 300, off trigger = 0.75, PC_CI_HQ_SD, total deaths: 39,000 vs 43,000, a 10% increase.
3. Table 5: on trigger = 400, off trigger = 0.75, CI_HQ_SD, total deaths: 100,000 vs 110,000, a 10% increase.
In other words, he wasn’t able to replicate Report 9. There were multiple “significant differences” between what he got and what the British Government based its decisions on.
How significant? The supposedly minor difference in peak bed demand between his run and Report 9 is 10,000 beds, or roughly the size of the entire UK field hospital deployment. This supports the argument that ICL’s model is unusable for planning purposes, although that’s the entire justification for its existence.
Eglen claims this non-replication is in fact a replication by arguing:
although the absolute values do not match the initial report, the overall trends are consistent with
the original report
A correctly written model will be replicable to the last decimal place. When using the same seeds and same input data the expected variance is zero, not 25%. Stephen Eglen should retract his “code check”, as it’s incorrect to claim a model is replicable when nobody can get it to generate the same outputs that other people saw.
Number of simulation runs. ICL have contradicted themselves about how Report 9 was generated. Their staff previously claimed that, “Many tens of thousands of runs contributed to the spread of results in report 9.” In Eglen’s report we see a very different claim. He explains some of the difference between his results and ICL’s by saying:
These results are the average of NR=10 runs, rather than just one simulation as used in Report 9
Imperial College’s internal controls are so poor they can’t give a straight accounting of how Report 9 was generated.
The point of stochasticity is to estimate confidence bounds. If incorporating random chance into your simulation changes the output only a bit, you assume random chance won’t affect real world outcomes much either and this increases your confidence. Report 9 is notable for not providing any confidence bounds whatsoever. All numbers are given as precise predictions in different scenarios, with no discussion of uncertainty beyond a few possible values of R0. None of the graphs render uncertainty bounds either (unlike e.g. the University of Washington model). The lack of bounds would certainly be explained if the simulation was run only once.
People working on the ICL model have argued the huge variety of bug reports they received don’t matter, because they just run it repeatedly and average the outputs. This argument is nonsense as discussed repeatedly, but if they didn’t actually run it multiple times at all then the argument falls apart on its own terms.
Models vs experiments. The belief that you can just average out model bugs appears to be based on a deep confusion between simulations and reality. A shockingly large number of academics seem to believe that running a program is the same thing as running an experiment, and thus any unexplained variance in output should just be recorded and treated as cosmic uncertainty. However, models aren’t experiments; they are predictions generated by entirely controllable machines. When replicating software-generated predictions, the goal is not to explore the natural world, but to ensure that the program can be correctly tested, and to stop model authors simply cherry-picking outputs to fit their pre-conceived beliefs. As we shall see, that is a vital requirement.
Does replication matter? It does. You don’t have to take my word for it: ask Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, who in 2015 stated:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.
Alternatively ask Professor Neil Ferguson, who is a signatory to this open letter to the Lancet requesting retraction of the “hydroxychloroquine is dangerous” paper because of the unreliability of the data it’s based on, supplied by an American health analytics company called Surgisphere. The letter justifies the demand for retraction by saying:
The authors have not adhered to standard practices in the machine learning and statistics community. They have not released their code or data.
ICL should give the authors the benefit of the doubt – maybe Surgisphere just need a couple of months to release their code. They are peer-reviewed experts, after all. And statistics isn’t a sub-field of epidemiology, so according to Imperial College spokespeople that means Ferguson isn’t qualified to criticise it anyway.
Initial response and the British Computer Society. Via its opinion writers, the Daily Telegraph picked up on my analysis. ICL gave them this statement:
A spokesperson for the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team responded to criticism of its code by saying the Government “has never relied on a single disease model to inform decision-making”.
“Within the Imperial research team we use several models of differing levels of complexity, all of which produce consistent results. We are working with a number of legitimate academic groups and technology companies to develop, test and further document the simulation code referred to. However, we reject the partisan reviews of a few clearly ideologically motivated commentators.“
The first bolded statement is typically misleading. In the SAGE publication from March 9th addressing lockdowns, the British Government was given the conclusions of the SPI-M SAGE subgroup in tables 1 and 2. On page 8, that document states the tables and assumptions are sourced to a single paper from ICL which has never been published, but from the title and content it seems clear that it was an earlier draft of Report 9. There is no evidence of modelling from any other institution contributing to this report, i.e. it doesn’t appear to be true that the Government has “never” relied on a single model – that’s exactly what it was fed by its own advisory panel.
The second bolded statement is merely unfortunate. By ideologically motivated commentators they must have meant the vast array of professional software engineers who posted their reactions on Twitter, on GitHub and on this site. The beliefs of the vast majority in the software industry were summarised by the British Computer Society (BCS), a body that represents people working in computer science in the UK. The BCS stated:
Computer code used to model the spread of diseases including coronavirus “must meet professional standards” … “the quality of the software implementations of scientific models appear to rely too much on the individual coding practices of the scientists who develop them”
Is Imperial College going to argue that the BCS is partisan and ideologically motivated?
On motivations. It’s especially unfortunate when academics defend themselves by claiming their critics – all of them, apparently – are ideological. Observing that coding standards are much higher in the private sector than in the academy isn’t even controversial, let alone ideological, as shown by the numerous responses from academics agreeing with this point, and stressing that they can’t be expected to produce code up to commercial standards. (They “need more funding”, obviously.)
But in recent days people have observed that “for months, health experts told people to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests.” The world has watched as over 1,200 American epidemiologists, academics and other public health officials published an open letter which said: “[A]s public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission …. this should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay at home orders.”
According to “the science” the danger posed by this virus depends on the ideological views of whoever is protesting. This is clearly nonsense and explains why Imperial College administrators were so quick to accuse others of political bias: they see it everywhere because academia is riven with it.
To rebuild trust in public science will require a firm policy response. As nobody rational will trust the claims of academic epidemiologists again any time soon, as the UK’s public finances are now seriously damaged by furlough and recession, and as professional modelling firms are attempting to develop reliable epidemic models themselves anyway, it’s unclear why this field should continue to receive taxpayer funding. The modellers with better standards can, and should, advise the Government in future.
Professor Sunetra Gupta Pooh-Poohs Imperial’s “We Saved the Planet” Baloney
Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford and a long-standing sceptic, was interviewed by Sarah Montagu on Radio 4’s World at One today and asked whether she agreed that the lockdown has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. She demolished the lockdown case so I asked a regular contributor to this site to make a transcript.
Sarah Montagu: Coronavirus is in retreat across the country. So said England’s Health Secretary yesterday after reporting 55 deaths, the lowest death toll since the weekend before the lockdown. Is the virus in retreat because of the lockdown and does it mean that it was all worth it? Imperial College said this week that the lockdown saved millions of lives in Europe. But there is another view that the price of the lockdown was and will yet be felt in different ways. Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and I asked her whether she would have argued for herd immunity all along.
Sunetra Gupta: Yes I think I would have said that but on the proviso that we put as much money as possible and to make up for what hasn’t happened over the last 30 years to support the vulnerable sections of the population. So I would have said yes, I think at that point we had enough information to know that there were certain sectors of the population who were particularly vulnerable and that we needed to protect them. And the word protect of course carries with it all sorts of implications, but essentially it seemed to me that there was a real gap in the resources available to achieve that. Let’s now try and divert as many resources as possible to protect the vulnerable population and to reduce their risk. And the way to reduce the risk to the vulnerable population, as we have done unwittingly in some cases with the pathogens that do kill elderly people and others who are vulnerable, is by having enough immunity ourselves such that the risk posed to the vulnerable population is low.
Sarah Montagu: So what the idea [is] that the rest of the population carry on as normal, try possibly to get the virus so that they can be the people who represent the herd immunity?
SG: I mean, that’s how we’ve traditionally dealt with the pathogens that do at the moment kill the elderly and vulnerable. I mean it’s a terrible thing that that happens, but it happens, but I guess we’ve made that decision that we need to balance out that problem against the problem of completely shutting down the economy or compromising our social interactions to the point of farce, let’s face it.
SM: So, what? Has the lockdown been a farce?
SG: We’re trying to wriggle out of this situation in a way that is I think quite farcical, we’ve come up with rules that are quite arbitrary to my mind.
SM: The idea would be to change the strategies so that it is the older and frail who should be staying indoors?
SG: First of all I think we need to go out there and make a proper map of what their risk is, and the risk to the elderly and frail is not just contingent on how elderly and frail they are but how immune the rest of the population is. So we need to go out and test to the best of our abilities, knowing now that some people are not going to register positive on these tests simply because they happen to be entirely resistant to the disease. We need some very clever statisticians and people who are disinterested in promoting any kind of sense of what they think is going on to make a proper clear, best assessment of what the risks are to the vulnerable in every part of the country – which is, talking about the UK, there is a huge variation in who’s been exposed, given the locality; there’s enormous heterogeneity and homogenising this data just to fit certain precepts or some preconceptions is not helpful. What we need to do is go out there, look at who’s been exposed in different regions, look at who is vulnerable and come up with a strategy, put money – public money – into supporting the people who are vulnerable, given the risks that they face. Though in London I think the epidemic has more or less run its course from what I can see and, you know, perhaps we can have different strategies, but it’s very likely from the data that it hasn’t spread out from London, so we need to make sensible decisions about how to protect people.
SM: So should we relax about the R number, lift the lockdown quickly and not be phased by the idea of a second wave?
SG: I think the R number is impossible… There will be another resurgence of this, like any other respiratory pathogen in the winter, and we need to prepare for that.
SM: We hear that there is some regret expressed in Sweden at their high death toll. Would that not have happened here if we didn’t have the lockdown?
SG: I think it’s unfortunate that people are focusing on that point. I think that what Tegnell said that they could have done better to protect the care homes and that is indeed what we should have done… we should have protected if we could, and far be it from me to say how that would have been possible, but to protect people in care homes – I think we’re agreed on that and I think it’s unfortunate that people are jumping on that to say that they should have locked down earlier. What I don’t understand about lockdown, is what is the exit strategy from it anyway?
SM: Would you just lift it as quickly as possible?
SG: Yes. Right now, yes, absolutely.
SM: Do you think the disease arose earlier in China than has been suggested?
SG: Absolutely, yes.
SM: When do you think it appeared?
SG: I wouldn’t want to put a number on it but I think that in any normal system by the time you detect deaths from a disease it’s been around for at least a month.
SM: So, what are we talking – October rather than November?
SG: Yes, something like that – October or November.
For those who want to listen to it, it’s here. Starts at the 20m 25s point.
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘WHO Says Transmission by Asymptomatic Covid Patients “Very Rare”‘ – The National Review reports on the WHO’s latest bit of bonkers guidance
- ‘Government to row back on pledge to have all primary children back to school before the summer‘ – What fresh hell is this?
- ‘False negatives, testing capacity and pheasants‘ – The team at BBC Radio 4’s More or Less train their forensic analytical skills on the reliability of the Government’s swab test
- ‘Over 95% of UK “COVID-19” deaths had “pre-existing condition”‘ – Off-Guardian points out this means the majority of us are not at risk
- ‘A Perfect Storm for the “Woke” Revolution‘ – Rory Hamilton worries that the combination of the pandemic and the BLM protests has injected a dangerous accelerant into the culture war
- ‘Zoos could shut for good with animals having to be put down, MPs warn‘ – Another unanticipated effect of the lockdowns flagged up by the Telegraph
- ‘The eight reasons building a contact-tracing app is so difficult‘ – Shouldn’t they have thought about these difficulties before announcing it?
- ‘Satellite images of packed Wuhan hospitals suggest coronavirus outbreak began earlier than thought‘ – Interesting story in the Telegraph
- ‘Businesses Struggle to Open After Being Hit a Third Time‘ – Depressing Wall St Journal report pointing out that retail businesses were first hit by the coronavirus pandemic, then by the economic downturn, and now some are reeling after being vandalized and looted
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
For those of you who haven’t yet subscribed to mine and James Delingpole’s weekly London Calling podcast, here’s a link to the latest episode, recorded yesterday. We share our dismay at the events of last weekend – with the journalists who applauded the mob that tore down Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, and the police who stood by and let them do it. What’s next? Hadrian’s Wall? It’s a symbol of colonialism, after all. I suggest to James that we should head north and start dismantling it ourselves as a parody of the “Rhodes Must Fall” nonsense, but he worries about the “wildlings” that might pour through the gap. You can listen to it here.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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[…] You can read our own critique of the Flaxman paper here. […]
I agree with everything you write except on the subject of tearing down Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol. I fully support the mob that tore down the statue of someone who profited from the exploitation of other people, and I look forward to seeing more statues of others whose money was made at the expense of slaves suffering the same fate.
Speaking of the Imperial College model, I’m reading up on the paper before I read it. I found the following in the 8 June London Sun, and I’d appreciate other eyes looking at it because there’s something wrong here:
“The team from Imperial analysed data from 11 countries in Europe, including the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and Belgium, up until 4 May to predict infection rates.
“The team estimated that by that date between 12 and 15 million individuals in these countries had been infected with Covid-19.
Deaths averted“By comparing the number of observed deaths against those predicted by their model in the absence of interventions, the authors suggest that approximately 3.1 million deaths have been averted due to lockdowns.”
Now, one of these sets of numbers could be wrong (I’ll check in the IL paper); or I could be misunderstanding; but this seems to be saying that the Infection Fatality Rate is either 20% (3.1M/12M) or 25% (3.1M/15/M). That sounds way high, about 100 times the current USCDC estimate.
Sorry; s/b “20% (3.1M/15M) or 25% (3.1M/12M)
If modelling predicts 500k and the actual number of deaths is 40k then the only conclusion that can be made is that everything done or not done to arrive at 40k deaths contributed to that result.
In the UK they are attributing the lives saved to the lockdown. On that basis Sweden also saved lives without a strict lockdown. South Korea and Japan managed to save even more lives by not bothering with any form of lockdown.
The logical conclusion from these examples is no locking down saves even more lives than locking down which in itself actually costs more lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/magazine/german-soccer-tries-to-kick-off-a-comeback-for-pro-sports.html?auth=login-facebook&utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
Football has come back and nobody has died. Countries have opened up and nothing untoward has happened regarding the virus. In fact wherever you look there are no signs of a second wave.
Now this may be a bit out there but please hear me out. Could it be that everything is working out well because there was no danger? In a similar sense, if you think it’s raining outside, you go outside and don’t actually get wet could the reason be that it’s not actually raining?
I know it’s a crazy idea but it’s definitely a possibility.
What’s happened here is it was raining outside, some miserable drizzle that didn’t hurt most people very much. Then that drizzle stopped, althogh the mainstream media still hasn’t admitetd that, weirdly it stopped long before the optimistic models said that the cloud could have run empty. Ferguson’s model, predicting the cloud held sufficient water to rival the atlantic ocean and that every drop would drown someone, has been shown to be even more wrong than the optimistic ones. We have to ask whether it started raining earleir than believed, whether this weird rain somehow just doesn’t stick to some people, or whether the rain falls in short bursts occasionally only. Either way the only way for us to work this out is to go outside and try.
Can someone enlighten me. I am from N.Ireland and I got the following reply to a freedom of information request I made to the NI Executive –
“I am writing to confirm that the Executive Office has now completed its search for this information and have established that this information is not held by the Department. Further information in respect to your request may be available from the Department of Health and Social Care in London. ”
Some of the questions I asked were
1.Please advise if any virologists or epidemiologists were consulted, who were they and what advice did they supply?
2. were there any other suggestions put forward other than lockdown and, if so, why was the lockdown option chosen as the only way to counteract the virus?
3. Were any economists consulted as to the economic impact? If so, who were they and what was their advice?
4. Were there any mental health experts consulted? If so, who were they and what was their advice?
5. Were any experts on suicide prevention consulted. If so, who were they and what was their advice?
6 Were there any experts on the physical and mental health effects… Read more »
Yeesh!!!!
Right. I’ll look at this as a distraction from considering whether to take a long walk off a short pier.
It rather depends what you’re looking for. Freedom of information requests would not cover information legally not in the public domain. Cabinet records are released after 20 years nowadays and not available before that, so a FOI request for cabinet records or details of the proceedings of cabinet would not yield results before this. SAGE meeting minutes up to 8th of May have been released “in full” (read: heavily redrafted) on gov.uk. Ivan dig out a link, I expect, but you should be able to find through google. Toby posted in the blog on this and posted links to a couple of analyses along with it. As far as I can see, there’s no evidence that any economist contributed to the SAGE meetings (and someone will correct me if I’m wrong).
I don’t know that COBRA meeting minutes are available anywhere, or ever have been.
In theory, as I understand it, the process goes something like: SAGE provides advice to the government, based on consensus opinion
The “government” (meaning the few members of the inner cabinet, the… Read more »
Not “Ivan” – I can
I should add – you’re on absolutely the right lines, but unfortunately this research will have to be done by historians in the future. These will of course be historians from other countries, and they will have to brave the locals throwing stones at them and trying to barter for animal skins as they do their work.
[…] when I first read it. I know I had a crack at Neil Ferguson’s latest paper in Nature in yesterday’s update, but I wasn’t expecting the editor to react by calling for the closure of Imperial College, […]
Interestingly, I was just thinking about this last night. Why would anyone want to go to Imperial College now to study when clearly their academic standards are so low and they are now a laughing stock because of Ferguson et al. You would think they would realise they need to jettison these people or they will have less students enrolling and therefore less money. Maybe they need to be made aware just how ridiculous their modelling team are. A few humorous memes on social media to that effect may have some impact.
It’s not about attracting students, it’s about generous funding from friend Bill et al.
Is Diane Abbott a part time maths lecturer there?
Boris, Whitty and Vallance are travelling together in a car which crashes into a wall then ends up in the Thames. All three are killed. Who is saved? Answer – the British people.
We can but hope they took one for the team!
Everyone keeps comparing covid deaths for each country but this is a false measure of whether the lockdown worked or not. The real measure is excess deaths by all causes. If one country that didn’t have a lockdown had 10000 covid deaths and another of the same size that had a lockdown had 5000 deaths it does not mean the lockdown was successful. The non lockdown country would have no real excess deaths apart from the covid deaths whereas the lockdown country would have perhaps many thousands more deaths caused by the lockdown itself and those deaths may not even show up immediately as future unemployment or mental health issues caused by the lockdown could result in lots more fatalities months or years from now.
EXACTLY.
Why all disses of Sweden are fundamentally bullshit.
Somebody today claimed that Sweden had failed because it had 10x the death rate of Norway. I had to ask for citations on the Swedish strategy to beat Norway at all costs. I’m still waiting.
If Sweden had protected care home residents, just the way most other countries failed to protect that particular category of people who made up the main proportion of people who would be in serious danegr if they caught the virus, they’d have had almost zero deaths. This is what Anders Tegnell talked of when he mentioend regrets, he knows full well that they were right not to lockdown everyone and that saving lives is done by carefully placed interventions, not blanket oppression. He was simpy wshing they’d thought about mrore specific protections for the really vulnerable early on. Well done Sweden for managing to do it amost perfectly, and keeping your liberties and economy throughout it all.
Apparently we are all to be outside our houses at 8pm on 5 July to clap and celebrate NHS workers on the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the NHS. Will we all be expected to take the knee at the same time?
I shall remain indoors observing the lockdown and getting pissed like the good little zealot I am
Jermey Corbyn wanted you to kneel to-night…
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1270689136765263872
WTF!
My pronouns are Fuck and Off
No, no, no. This is too much.
Vomit, vomit, vomit.
I think I have the explanation for everything that’s going on,it’s not real !,yes that’s right not real,I reckon that I am in a coma in a hospital bed somewhere and all of this is a very vivid disturbing nightmare and unfortunately all of you,my sceptical friends,are just part of my fevered imagination,when I awake it will actually be the year 2120 and everything is a really great,to quote the words of that old 20th century musical poet Donald Fagen with his ballad IGY,
‘ just machines to make big decisions,programmed by fellows with compassion and vision,we’ll be clean when their work is done,we’ll be eternally free and eternally young,what a beautiful world this will be,what a glorious time to be free ‘
To prove it is all but a dream I will slap myself in the face,ow !!,bugger ! it is real,it is 2020 and it is becoming worse than a nightmare !.
I know one thing,all the positivity and hope we were told the 21st century would bring,at school and on programmes like Tomorrow’s World in the 1970s and 80s,hasn’t really turned out like that has it ?.
My thought was virtual reality – a lifetime in Hell to pay for what must have been very serious crimes (you know, things like saying ‘All Lives Matter’!).
Perhaps this is purgatory ?,mind you,isn’t that supposed to be temporary ?,this doesn’t seem like that.
I had a crappy year last year, including having had a skin cancer removed. At the end of last year I thought to myself “thank god 2019 is over.”
If I’d known what was coming, I’d have stopped the dermatologist from removing the bloody thing. With a bit of luck, it might have killed me by now.
15 million Iranians may have been infected with coronavirus – one in five of the population – health official admits
Hmm I’ve seen that figure – around a fifth – somewhere before. Seems pretty consistently the level this disease tops out at.
Thsts interesting iran are going for heard immunity . They r consistently having under 1oo deaths a day in a population of 90 million 20% Infected they been out of a y kind of lockdown for a month they are getting towards herd immunity probably why there deaths are not shooting up they are I think in a good position and there is light at the end of the tunnel UNLIKE US
Iran have og course been criticised by MSM for their approach.
If COVID-19 isn’t notifiable in Iran and they don’t bother with a lockdown then it’s probable that the death toll doesn’t look much different to a regular bout of flu with a few more people than usual dying of respiratory problems.
“Support Bubbles” !!!
Jesus, God, this man has clearly been brain damaged by his stay in hospital.
Boris, I have to tell you two things, first NOBODY is listening to this woke drivel any more, and second, your career in politics is finished. At this stage, it makes no difference how much unenforceable garbage you come up with, you are finished, so stop trying to save your own skin and save your country instead – from yourself.
To quote a former leader – “Who will rid me of this turbulent pillock” OK they weren’t his exact words, I am paraphrasing a little, and anyway I failed my history O level, but you get my meaning I hope. Whilst thinking along those lines, and I stress I have no experience of this myself as I have never visited, but I hear tell that on the darkweb you can hire assassins. If this is so then wouldn’t it be an idea to get up a crowdfunding page somewhere? Knocking off a PM might cost a shed load of shitcoins (is that the right word?) but surely it must be worth it now.
If that sort of thing is… Read more »
Does paying the congestion charge count as aiding and abetting these days?
Asking for a friend….
I can offer blue badge parking if it helps…
I agree he needs to go as quickly as possible he is wrecking the economy of this country he must be stopped ,I cant even bare to watch his pathetic speeches any more it’s gone past a joke and nobody is laughing
Is there a sitting MP that would actually do the right thing?
It seems the medical establishment is finally waking up to the potential death toll of non covid patients caused by lockdown
“There is a growing concern among many consultants that when it comes to Covid-19 the cure may be worse than the disease.”
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-09/coronavirus-horrendous-toll-on-non-covid-19-patients-emerging-nhs/
Something all of us here – and many others like Peter Hitchens and Toby, of course – have been saying right from the start. And only now do the intellectual giants who run the country and the NHS realise?
No s**t Sherlock!
Lordy, maybe a few of these consultants should have given a few of us a call in March.
Is everyone who works in any public institution dumb as pigshit?
Like….. I’m finding it hard to come up with any other explanation now.
Reading this it occurs to me that the government with their lockdown and BLM have the same objective: complete control of the narrative and the people. So when are they going to join forces?
https://www.europereloaded.com/paul-craig-roberts-asks-can-we-survive-our-collective-stupidity/
Have they not?
It absolutely would not surprise me to see that bumbling oaf “taking a knee”.
I so hope that he does not debase himself (and our country) that far; like you, though, I could easily imagine him doing so.
Well judging by the protests outside Downing Street the other day they’re making a pretty good fist of pretending to be on opposing sides.
What – like Boris and Starmer, our two socialist leaders?
UK must prepare for riots as anger grows over coronavirus restrictions, says government adviser
Of course “address the underlying causes” always means “do things that were always part of the lefties’ political agenda”, never “string up a few ministers responsible for lockdown pour encourager les autres”.
Still, we desperately need a yellow vest or orange vest movement of some kind on the right of politics to force the “Conservative” Party and supposedly “conservative” institutions and businesses to actually show some spine when faced with leftist and identity lobby bullying.
A summer of unemployment and economic misery combined with leftist zealots trying to impose a Cultural Revolution might be fertile ground for such a reaction.
Frankly, it’s probably either that or ultimately facing a choice between a French Revolutionary Year Zero type catastrophe or a Franco-ist defensive coup, and I doubt our remaining conservatives have the balls or the competence for the latter.
We’re heading for interesting times.
Hahahahahahaha.
If only.
Think we might see it this weekend if the Football Lads are allowed anywhere near the BLM protesters.
Apologies if this has been mentioned in the thread already, but have seen some data from ONS and May deaths are below trend ie negative excess deaths. This is more evidence of the virus harvesting the vulnerable early on. These people, most of whom were sick enough to be in hospital or needing full time care would be dead by the end of 2020 anyway. Obviously not nice for families but not worth trashing the rest of the country for.
It was never worth trashing the country for. Too late now though.
It would be great if we could at least stop the trashing now but it seems everything must be destroyed.
I have good days and bad days through all this. Today was a relatively good day until the press briefing, and now it seems clear there will never be a genuinely good day again.
What’s the bloody point?
I don’t watch the press briefings. What was it that upset you?
Everything. Whitty and Vallance loving every bloody minute of it, while they try to make sure that the papers they write will be as valid and accurate as possible for the use of those other countries that still exist in the future, when they face a minor pandemic.The fact that Boris must have been using the lectern to help him stay upright, having lost the use of his spine (I can only assume that him walking into the room was mostly done with camera trickery) the continued message from the press that it was all terrible, but could only have been done better if we’d gone SOONER HARDER FASTER LONGER. The ridiculously pathetic set of relaxations announced. The fact that the light I saw at the end of the tunnel this week turns out to have been a train coming in the other direction.
I stopped watching the briefings a few weeks ago – and even before that I’d watched them at double speed. Really couldn’t stand the slogans, the waffling BS and self-congratulating.
Just peruse the summaries now, though to be fair that misses the very telling body language.
Yes, I know what you mean; I have bad days – and worse days!
I get the impression that the government are kicking the can down the road shying away from making proper decisions thus all the waffle about bubbles
Why?
I think they are pinning g everything on the oxford vaccine, they cant see anything past september when if it works and that’s a big if, it will become available.
This is a very dangerous strategy to follow.all eggs I basket
This is a real worry.
ANYBODY ELSE AGREE with my take on things ?
Unfortunately I don’t think they are that clever. I think they are just scratching around in the dark. Zoos warned they are very near to closing down forever, so suddenly zoos can open. Same for garden centres a month ago. There is no logic to any of the rules or thinking, either from phe, sage or the government. They are in their own bubble.
Yes I think you talk sense reactive rather than proactive.
3 million people about to lose jobs in tourism and hospitality if quarantine is not removed and social distancing not scrapped or reduced. I am a huge animal lover but seriously?
Well every little helps. Pressure must be on wee Jimmy to open Edinburgh Zoo
She could be the chief exhibit – though they would have to put up a notice, “Do not throw rotten tomatoes at the animals”.
UK Column did an interesting article about professor bubbles not so long ago.
Apparently we are paying some young academic to work out how to release us from lockup by functioning in bubbles.
The government had decided it’s too complicated, so maybe it’s now yet another convenient red herring.
Today’s edition is a cracker. It would be great if more people paid attention to them: https://www.ukcolumn.org/
I don’t think the bubbles really mean anything. I’ve always thought it’s a totally ludicrous and unenforceable idea, it’s just meant to give the impression that the government is doing a ‘controlled easing’ but give the people an inch and they’ll take a mile, as they say.
I think it will just add to the confusion – but I suspect that’s the idea.
There is no strategy, just a random set of half-baked thoughts and ideas, which is why it is such a mess.
I would rather be inoculated by a dose of the virus myself rather then their virus – and I would want the same for my children too at least its a known extremely minimal risk vs a unknown potentially greater risk.
Thats meant to be ‘rather then their vaccine’
Agree, been thinking for a while now something else is up. Hancock?
God help us, these vaccines that would permanently alter your RNA/DNA would not have been tested properly (death, disability and long term effects of altering RNA/DNA)
Another completely unenforceable rule from Boris tonight. What gets me is the muppets they interview on the BBC who have actually been following the rule not to visit relatives if it means an overnight stay. What did they think was going to happen to them – lined up against the wall and shot by the cops, perhaps? Fucking morons.
Just read the details on the BBC website and it’s the most complicated load of bunkum imaginable. Completely unenforceable even if anyone could understand it. Surely Boris is having a laugh! I am!
It will be enforced by the track and trace app. For those who are foolish enough to download it.
But who I’d going to download it ? Crazy to do it
Agree I mean what is up with people today?
Year Zero update:
Gone with the Wind has been taken off HBO Max following calls for it to be removed from the US streaming service.
…
Tom and Jerry carries racism warning
….
It follows the removal of Little Britain from Netflix, BritBox and BBC iPlayer
I’ve just ordered Gone With The Wind on DVD for my niece as I think it’s important she understands history properly and, in this case, what not to do. She needs to understand why slavery was bad, and erasing it from history won’t do that.
You’ll probably be ok for a couple of years, before they’ve got the fire brigade set up to deal with reprobates like you.
Isn’t burning books what the Nazis did? Has it come to that?
For BLM, yes, of course.
1984 yet agsin. All books destroyed except ‘rubbish’.
Little Britain wasn’t funny anyway. But I shall miss Barbara and Papa Lazarou when they are deleted from history.
I agree with you about Little Britain. I may hate their crappy “comedy”, but I will defend to the death our right to view it.
The BBC analyst mentioned Tintin as well, which from my recollection of it must be well ripe for the Cultural Revolutionary chop.
A teacher I know shared on social media a picture of George Galloway with a speech bubble caption “we won”. Boris, I really get the impression you don’t want to lead. Show some backbone and stand up to these people, for the sake of the country and our future.
The main news today – that the UK is set to have the deepest recession of all major countries in the world – the worst in 300 years – and all that is announced is single people can stay overnight somewhere?!
I agree with Professor Sunetra Gupta on her unherd interview – if lockdown ended tomorrow and everything went back to normal, probably nothing much would happen. Or rather, actually thousands of lives would be saved, from those who are going to miss their cancer screening and those who will die from poverty related issues.
Boris lead?
But he’s the king. And king’s don’t lead, their prime ministers do.
Oh …….
During an “warm” discussion at work today, someone with an oxbridge education said that Fergusson has saved nearly 500,00 people in this country.
What hope do we have.
I could puke. (sorry if you are having your dinner.)
You can brainwash people at Oxbridge just as easy as anywhere else
Today is the first day I have got angry with the situation we are all in, I have remained calm these past 12, yes 12 weeks. Why do people not see what is being done to them?
I did not get angry during our discussion, only privately later.
We are doomed if this is the best we can do.
Clearly your ‘oxbridge friend’ isn’t the best we can do. Lots of smart people on here.
Superfergie!
They can’t even spell “colonial” correctly at Oxford…the protestors spell it “collonial”. 🙂
Maybe they think it’s a roads protest.
PPE (not the useful kind) I presume?
No that’s the single use plastics ……..but you might think they are both past their usefulness
It has nothing to do with your alma mater and everything to do with whether you have a critical mind. Guilty of an oxbridge education, but is sniffed out the bullcrap from the beginning. And most of my friends who are also ex-oxbridge – even if they went to the other place – have finally sniffed it out too.
Some of us were even there at the same time as many of the protagonists!
Lol mine haven’t
And most of mine are —- *sharp intake of breath* – scientists!
Did they study classics by any chance?
The Greats course clearly lost the requirement for analysis and critical thinking between the early 70’s when I was there, and Boris’s time in the mid-80’s.
Too much drinking (with the Bullingdon Club) and not enough thinking.
To be fair, it’s clear that he hasn’t yet recovered from intensive care; he could step down (with some face saved) on grounds of ill health.
These scientists are planning to only allow restrictions to be lifted in order to calibrate their models for next time. Claims of proceeding with caution are designed to help with that – not designed to help society get out of this absurd situation
Spot on. We’re all just little lab rats in their fascinating socio-epidemiological experiment
Completely fed up with scientists and their dislike of risk.
Not every scientist cowers from all risks. Just a shame that those of us in scientific careers who can take a rational attitude to risk don’t all know which others are like us, so haven’t been able to work together without the brain-dead busy-body averse-to-all-risk types interfering.
“<i>Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that, from Saturday, single adults can spend the night at another house in a “support bubble”.</i>”
So are they actually going to bother to change the actual law this time, or has that now become too inconvenient a formality and the government just issues dictats whenever it feels like it?
Because unless they change the law, or it is overturned by Dolan’s challenge, the law still says:
7.—(1) During the emergency period, unless paragraph (2) applies, no person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place—
…..
(b)
indoors, and consists of two or more persons.
Parliament made it “too much of a formality” with their ridiculous conga. That was the intention.
And these idiots have the cheek to call themselves “conservative”!?
i don’t think we’ve had a conservative since the glory days of Mrs Thatcher
Love to see an adviser telling her she needed to “take a knee” to appease the mob…..
The average person doesn’t read statutes on gov.uk, they will have just seen the announcement on the daily briefing/BBC/MSM etc so they’ll assume it’s legal now (or from Saturday, whatever arbitrary day the easing is supposed to come into force).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2ewxCPtw7w
Oooh Norwegian health chief on Unherd!
Should be interesting….
1: Chris Whitty “we’re not at the end of this epidemic. Not by a long shot. We’re in the middle of it”
2. That bloody woman from Sky: claiming that Tegnell has admitted his no-lockdown strategy failed
I think I give up.
And he’s fluffed the schools question from the guy at the DT. And the 2m rule question.
To the “has he been taken prisoner by the scientists?” Question. He looks like they’re both pointing a gun at him.
Trouble is, making claims re Tegnell just fits their agenda.
She certainly lets herself down in many ways. Boris, Vallance and Whitty need to be questioned aggressively, but in a clever, not shouty/gotcha manner – it is counterproductive and too easy for them to deflect
Whitty gives the game away…. they think this started in February, realised it peaked in April and are assuming that it will be “over” by October. So they plan to manage the “ease” out of lockdown over that timeframe so that they can model the impact of these gradual changes. That way, they will have a better response “next time”. We are part of their live experiment….
Whitty says ….. What counts is what measures have the most impact on the virus, but the least impact on society. That is a “very complicated balancing act”, he says.
So sledgehammer to crack a nut then?
I think that horse has bolted, Chris.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way but definitely makes sense.
Beff? Workin’ for Keir?
Is it me or is this super sinister?
He says it is only by breaking the links between households that we can continue to bring the R down.
Breaking links. WTF?! Aren’t we separated enough?
Have I missed something? Can’t bear to watch the actual update, so I’ve just been checking the summary.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/305525
Just seen this on twitter for reopening of schools if anybody wants to sign to drum up some more support
Thank you!
I signed. 1340 signatures so far, they seem to be clocking up fairly quickly. If enough of us sign in the next hour we may be able to get it on to the top three “trending” petitions.
1363 now.
Signed. Good luck to them.
Though the zombies have a petition on the go to keep schools closed, apparently for ever.
Would be nice to have a petition to reopen the unis too, even without the teaching the research they do is very important to the UK’s standing in the world.
Have just signed.
1534 now. (20:00)
Signed
I get the impression that Johnson doesn’t even believe this crap himself anymore. That makes it worse, though.
All that stuff about bubbles… he’s having a bubble.
I am a bit worried by the ‘objective to get all schools back by September’ – this is not the same as ‘get all kids back by September’ and he knows that from the way he is saying it.
That bit was terrifying
I’m banking on the virus having all but disappeared by that point so that there will be absolutely no reason for the restrictions to still be in place. Even if it hasn’t completely disappeared, I’m hoping that there will be much more scientific evidence in the mainstream by that point to allow people to adequately assess risk.
If scientific evidence had ever meant anything to this government there never would have been restrictions in the first place.
Just seen the NHS ‘Track and Trace’ advert. So fucking patronising and at the end:
More normal? Nah, not having that.
I just blocked their number on all my phones :o)
Just a power grab by the authorities, as we suspected all along.
Another rando obvious thought. (Mark will like this one)
The BLM shit is actually the perfect figurative representation of lockdown.
Shut the economy. NHS –> NCS. Suspend civil liberties. Apply this internationally.
= Kill literally hundreds of millions across the age spectrum, across the world, in a myriad of disgusting and preventable ways – in the pursuit of saving a few million lives.
*****
Burn shit down. Governments impose curfews on top of already locked down populations. Protests spread across the world with varying degrees of ferocity – all are disruptive, and largely pointless.
= Destroy thousands of black lives (via their livelihoods) in the name of protesting on their behalf.
Not gonna argue…..
It’s almost as if they were inextricably linked…
Go down the twitter rabbit hole and it’s amazing what you might find.The world’s in chaos, the lockdown is a nonsensical lie – anyone with half a brain can see that, and BLM is being exposed for the nonsensical hysteria that it is (why now? George Floyd live funeral streaming FFS, mass woke fascist rioting?)
So therefore what is the actual truth, I think there’s clues out there right now, even in MSM (not the BBC I might add)
There will be a reckoning. It will come, keep faith.
It will. Don’t despair. It plays into their hands.
It suddenly dawned on me – and perhaps this is obvious to everyone else on here already but I can be slow off the mark – that what all this has in common, lockdown, BLM, Greta-luvvin-climate degenerates, and all the rest, is a hatred of society and the normal, healthy social structures that we depend on. The mass imprisonment of healthy people and culture of fear (2m rule etc.) is all really just another side of the coin of anarchistic riots, tearing down not just statues but whole institutions (‘defund the police’ ffs).
Yes
It might just be a little bit more than that.. Incredible as it is to believe.
But, think of this : We know who they all are now don’t we…? It’s hard to see if there are any heroes in amongst all of this, but the true villains are the easiest to spot.
They want to create ever more powerful institutions with control over every aspect of our lives, our thoughts and our expressions. They wish to be the new ruler. Anarchism is actually about having no ruler. These rioters seek to impose absolute rule so I dont think they have much to do with anarchism. They are statist rioters seeking to increase the power of the state through violence.