In a recent viral tweet, the new German Health Minister, Professor Karl Lauterbach, shared what seems like an alarming graph:
It shows daily Covid hospital admissions in England for all children (i.e., those aged under 18) since the start of the pandemic. Lauterbach wrote:
The UK data shows alarming levels in children. Since Omicron can be warded off well by masks, mask requirements in school and regular testing are absolutely necessary.
Incidentally, the graph itself was produced by Independent SAGE – the group that’s like SAGE, only more pessimistic about Covid and more in favour of restrictions (and not an official Government advisory body).
So, what should we make of Lauterbach’s tweet? One of the stylised facts of the pandemic is that Covid poses almost no risk to children. Has this ceased to be true in the era of Omicron? No, fortunately it has not.
One reason that Covid hospital admissions for children shot up in late December is simple: infections shot up at around the same time (in the first week of January, more than 6% of the population tested positive). And when more people in the general population are infected, the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid will rise.
Under simple assumptions, if the percentage of the population that’s infected jumps from 1% to 6%, then so should the fraction of people admitted to hospital with Covid.
Another possible reason Covid hospital admissions for children shot up – suggested by Professor Russell Viner of UCL – is that Omicron has a greater impact in the upper airways, which are smaller in young children. And as others have noted, this feature also makes Omicron less deadly.
Yet another reason, notes the FT, is the introduction of treatment guidelines requiring babies who develop fever to be put under hospital observation.
Indeed, a new study from the U.S. confirms that Omicron is less deadly than Delta – even in young children. Lindsey Wang and colleagues compared two cohorts of under 5s: those who caught Covid for the first time during the Delta wave, and those who caught it for the first time during the Omicron wave.
The two cohorts were matched on a large number of relevant variables including age, sex, race and pre-existing health conditions. Results are shown below:
For all four outcome variables considered, the risk was significantly lower among those who caught Omicron. To take one example, only 0.14% of the Omicron cohort were admitted to the ICU, compared to 0.43% of the Delta cohort.
What’s more, as this graph from the FT shows, the recent uptick in paediatric hospital admissions for Covid isn’t large relative to seasonal peaks for other child respiratory viruses:
Returning to the German Health Minister’s tweet, the totality of evidence does not suggest that “mask requirements in school and regular testing are absolutely necessary”. In fact, I’d describe them as ‘absolutely unnecessary’.
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They should be in 5 days a week.
Sack them if they refuse.
The Civil Service requires massive downsizing.
What has where they work got to do with downsizing?
They’re a blob that needs draining.
I’m the first one to agree, just don’t know why their working location is relevant to conversations about the size of the civil service, or their willingness to carry out policies they don’t like.
I guess it’s relevant to the downsizing effort in the sense that any who refuse can be sacked. Perhaps with the added benefit that those who refuse are also likely to be the most ‘entitled’ of the bunch.
If I were put in charge of downsizing, I would be getting rid of the least productive people first, by looking at how much they produce per £ you pay them, rather than where they choose to work.
Tof – I agree with most of your comments, but on this we differ I employ you I decide where you work what time you start what time you finish, your smoke breaks etc.
Imo, wfh means that civil servants, famously inefficient to start with just sig around in their pyjamas logging on once every now and then trying to make money buying and selling on eBay.
They can all take a running jump as far as I’m concerned.
Where is your evidence for this?
As an employer I want to maximise what I get from my employees – there are trade offs involved in that. We are stakeholders in the civil service- I want them to be managed intelligently and to employ the best people.
The evidence is that the more of them there are the more England sinks into an economic abyss ergo they are badly managed, mostly doing pointless stuff inefficiently.
Oddly the land registry would seem to be a department that does a necessary job, although it could perfectly well be managed at county level and not from expensive premises in London.
We’re talking in this thread specifically about working from home vs office.
I agree about the land registry – could be even cheaper with smaller offices (for those that want them) and working from home…
You believe they “work” at home?
You believe the amount and quality of “work” they do from home is both monitored and is acceptable?
You believe that staffing in a Government Department is right in terms of competence and just-adequate numbers?
Wow.
How on earth would I know? How would you know?
My guess, based on my own experiences and from talking to others, is that in general the public sector puts less pressure on its employees and is more reluctant to discipline them, for many reasons not the least of which is that UK employment laws make all of this a right royal pain the behind. As to whether civil service productivity has fallen due to WFH, who knows? The “answer” is IMO better management, better incentives properly applied. All of you lot who are chirping about the lazy public sector probably didn’t think they were great BEFORE WFH, so just pushing people into expensive offices they don’t want to be in doesn’t seem like a very smart approach to dealing with the myriad problems of managing bloated organisations.
Civil Servants?
because lazy people springs to mind
I don’t think so
For how many of the strikers is home a flat share with four other 290-somethings?
“20-somehings”
Some of them. Why is that relevant?
I guess WFH is not so appealing when home is a crowded flat.
Possibly not. We provide an expensive office for those of our staff who prefer an office – I had assumed all the youngsters would want to come in, but many don’t. It seems to depend on many factors. I’m not convinced WFH is right for everyone but that’s for them to decide, as long as they do their work. I am glad we are able to offer choices without it affecting us negatively – it means we can retain good staff in a competitive market.
In what way is the Land Registry Office a ‘competitive market’?
I don’t remember saying it was.
To be clear, the “competitive market” I refer to above is the market for staff. Nobody works for free so filling any position involves some level of competing with other employers or alternatives so that the candidate chooses you. Better staff cost more money. Offering flexible working arrangements will probably allow you a wider choice of candidates, but of course you must decide whether your firm is able to offer that flexibility – if you are not then you may need to offer other things to attract people of the right quality – such as more money. Tradeoffs, to which the civil service is surely not immune.
While I am a traditionalist in many ways, and like to have people in the office, I do see how working from home has advantages as well as disadvantages. What I don’t appreciate is the ascendency to the new class of ‘laptop knowledge worker’, while others have to come to the office because thats where their work is. It has, through the times of madness created this group who feel distinguished and desirous of privilege, as superior to their office based colleagues. I would stipulate that they should be in the office Friday and Monday to prevent ‘weekend expansion’.
I’m looking forward to seeing how DOGE gets on in the US. I think a lot of the inefficiency of our Civil Service comes from the myriad of regulation that they have to comply with. Downsizing as it stands would just compound the problem. It needs speeding up, it needs simplifying dramatically. It will naturally reduce in size. More ‘Can do’ and less ‘Jobs worth’. Chronic inefficiency, sloth and waste are just baked in to it.
Why would working remotely cause “weekend expansion”?
Why do you “like to have people in the office”?
It’s simply a fact that lots of jobs can be done from anywhere, but yes let’s make everyone spend hours a day travelling just because some people can’t work from anywhere.
We’ve been round this quite a few times I recall, but lets go round one more time. This is my view.
Friday used to be known as ‘Poets Day’ (piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday…). If you work from home, and Friday is the most popular day by far, its not to try and squeeze out the last bits of productivity from your week, it is to have a relaxed feck about day before the weekend. Come on, lets be honest with each other.
People in the office aids communication considerably, it also allows a sense of camaraderie, and common purpose which you can’t have if you aren’t there. It allows a degree of separation of work and life which you cant achieve any other way. An office at home isn’t a ‘work environment’ not if you are breaking of to set the washer going, or feed the dog.
From a management perspective it is easier to see the general dynamics of operations. It is easier to see the wellbeing of the individual, are they happy in their work, are they motivated.? Some staff are not work shy. They are very dilligent, and can end up working well into the evening, because no-one can see that they are struggling with their workloads. Managers are there to manage, not just load their staff up with work like pack animals. Being able to be face to face and socialise with colleagues makes ideas easier to propagate and develop as well. It also gives employees access to their managers, to talk, discuss, socialise, request… . Tell me you can get that from a Zoom call.
Travel time is dependent on where the employee chooses to live, and chooses to work. I know people who travel great distances each day, and that is their choice. They could work closer to home, or live closer to work, but that is their choice. I’m not responsible for them having a two hour commute. Their choice… Some of them use it as productive time, in reflection, to plan out their activities for the day, wind-down after a busy day, maybe make some calls, chat with family and friends to unpack their day. It doesn’t have to be dead time. Commuting into London might be a long-winded affair, but elsewhere in the country commutes aren’t anything like as long and tying. If it takes less than 30 minutes to drive to the office, then that excuse is pretty weak, imo.
I’m not denying that people can work successfully from home, some of the time, or for periods of time. I freely accept there is no one answer to this question, and thanks to lockdowns there will always be a demand for work from home, but if there was to be a default setting, then in my view on balance, Work in Office is preferable
Thanks for your comprehensive comments.
My experience has been very different – overall productivity is probably a bit better than pre-WFH, and communication is pretty good. We have taken on new people and trained them. Some employees have struggled but I think this is because they were always weak but they relied on others in the office and now they have to do their own work, they are more exposed. Perhaps my firm is an outlier, though other people I know who WFH are very diligent as far as I can tell.
Why does there have to be a “default setting”?
If I might cut the Gordian knot, I think you might accept that the flaw in this debate is that you appear to imagine that Civil Serpent bosses will manage their minions as effectively as I am sure that you do.
The answer might be the privatise Land Registry into two or more private companies who employ the minions and organise their employees as they see fit.
Not too difficult then for the adequacy and cost of the work carried out by different companies to be compared.
It would need an intelligent specification of what was required and how succes would be measured and properly monitored. That would probably be the stumbling block.
If there’s an issue, which there probably is, then it’s with incentives which feeds into management (and of course I think a lot of what the public sector does, it should not do). Focusing on “getting back into the office” seems like a distraction to me.
P.S. Being honest I take breaks, work permitting, at various times, but equally when there is work to be done or ideas are flowing I am online late in the evening or on weekends, days off. If I didn’t have that flexibility, which I feel I have earned after almost 40 days of porridge, I might have retired already. WFH has also reduced the incidence of people taking sick days at our place (not that we had a big problem with it before).
A good post, from my own experiences of working from home you gradually stop the learning you get from being at the coal face, you loose the contact of new ideas or subtle variations in technics that can improve you and your job. You become insular, existing and working with the knowledge and experiences of what you gained before with little opportunity to develop your skills and expertise, by external influences. In todays working environments things change too quickly, you need to be in the forefront, the office, the work place to keep up.
I would suggest that if you can work effectively from home then your job is a perfect candidate or the future use of AI and your replacement.
I suppose Office romances are a thing of the past when flirting is banned.
Yeah, working from home allows you to do food shopping. Don’t tell that doesn’t happen.
Also saves massively on transport costs and on child care costs.
Young children will also benefit from being with a parent at home rather than shoved in some dreadful creche.
But are our Beloved Civil Serpents capable of managing the amount and quality of work produced by their minions? Or might they just employ more minions to get work done and bloat their little empires?
The only civil servant I know is extremely bright, sceptical, self motivated and right wing. He is much more productive working from home and if forced to go the office he will just move to a much better paid job in the private sector. He has no intention of striking.
But yes by all means manage people by how many hours they spend in an office rather than by how much they produce.
sack them
Why not sack people based on the work they do rather than where they do it?
I think the issue is the work they’re not doing, while they’re doing the chores, watching TV, watching the kids, walking to dog etc.
Perhaps whoever is meant to be managing them should, er, manage them then?
Of course once this “battle” is won the Unions will mobilise their work forces to demand ‘work from home’ allowances. So, there will follow demands for heating and lighting supplements, telephones and associated bills and to be paid tax free. Next will be specialist equipment such as chairs and desks soon to be followed by modifications to the home for office space.
I have worked in the Civil Service and know exactly how these things progress.
Of all the many different types of people I have worked with civil servants are by an enormous margin the laziest
and skiving is an industry pastime. The good, honest people get nowhere and inevitably are ground down by the surfeit of mediocrity around them. The whole industry needs closing down just like our parliamentary system and rebuilding from scratch.
Why not give people an allowance if it means you need a smaller, cheaper office? That’s what we have done. The people working from home in our firm are actually subsidising the people who work in the office. But we don’t mind – we appreciate that different individuals have different priorities and we try to accommodate everyone as long as they work hard, which they do.
I agree with most of your points on this – bad managers will continue to badly manage, no matter where their teams are
Thanks!
I was very sceptical to begin with but have been pleasantly surprised.
Perfect. Would someone lock the door behind them?
Recently redrew boundaries on new house site. Somehow somewhere registered LR documents got it wrong by many metres. So boundary between 3 sets of houses has now to be revisited & solicitors involved. I can’t establish who & how it happened but as you can’t get any sense out of LR office, it’s a mighty hassle, expensive & long winded & I suspect LR error.
Recently an Ordnance Survey man came by with sat mapping (for new build mapping). He got boundary correct (ancient fence posts) & it agreed with original registered boundary.
When asked if it was possible to send it to LR office to correct new digital line currently registered wrongly he said no, different organisation. Made me quite cross.
At present the Land Registry do not answer customers queries on Fridays. So the logical conclusion is that they will go down to 3 days which is what they are fighting for.
As RUK have forecast the only way we will ever resolve the State mess is to sack them and rehire as a private company.
So fire them. See if we notice the difference.
Almost torture to have to work at all.
The under the Boris government the genius Goldmans trader showed that money grew on trees. Oh, oops.
The one I know does work very hard, from home. Does anyone here have any hard evidence that this has affected productivity?
AI will soon replace many white collar workers and the first to go will be those who themselves work through laptops from home.My advice would be to be in the office in person and make your physical presence essential to the organisation. https://www.businessinsider.com/fully-remote-wfh-workers-highest-risk-losing-jobs-ai-chatgpt-2023-12?op=1
The big question should be why do we needs lawyers and the Land Registry to buy a home. Given that many cars now cost more than a house but the title is transferred on a simple piece of paper registered at the DVLA, why do we need such expensive ways of purchase.
All unemployed should be able to work from home 5 days a week. Drain the swamp
I would have thought that the contract of employment would stipulate where and for how long the employee works. But knowing how lax the civil service is it probably doesn’t, having the civil service always understood employment to mean office based and x hours. If the former then home workers are in breach of contract and liable to the consequences.
I’ve been waiting for a decision from them for more than 18 months. WFH explains why the LR service and productivity is so appalling. How much longer will i have to wait?
“Motivated and hard working”? My old friend worked at the Land Registry. He told me that they were allowed ten days per year uncertificated sick leave – which they treated as ten extra days holiday.
Uncertified sick leave did indeed used to be treated as extra leave although in the last few years things have tightened up.
Last June i submitted an application to Land Registry to add my spouses name to the title of my house. I was quoted an estimated date of November 2025 for completion of this very complex and intricate process. I actually called LR to check if that was a mistake. It wasn’t.
They need some Victorian justice – a long spell in a pestilential prison.
One downside of working from home that I’m not sure they are aware of is that a study in the USA suggested that those who WFH get less promotions and as a result don’t progress so far up the pay scales.
This is because of the old adage “out of sight, out of mind”, with managers not seeing them so often it’s the ones they see in the office, putting in their hours that get the raises and the promotions.