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Sajid Javid Opposes End of Free Testing

by Will Jones
21 February 2022 1:43 PM

Boris Johnson is due to address MPs about the lifting of the ‘last’ restrictions at 4:30pm. However, there was a glitch this morning as the Cabinet meeting to finalise the plan was delayed because of a reported standoff between Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, and Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary. Mr. Javid – a former sceptic who seemed to go native within hours of taking up the post in June – is said to want free testing to continue. The Telegraph has more.

The Treasury and Department of Health have been at loggerheads in recent days over the cost of some of the measures in the Living with Covid Plan, which is due to be announced by the Prime Minister in the Commons this afternoon.

Treasury officials are worried about the continuing cost of free Covid tests, which Boris Johnson has said is costing the country around £2 billion a month. 

Mr Sunak has said that any money for testing beyond March must come from the existing health budget.

But Mr Javid thinks testing should continue for more people, for longer, and has requested additional funds from the Treasury to pay for it.

As a former Chancellor and (former) sceptic, Mr. Javid should really know better than to want to drag out the Omnicold ’emergency’ by perpetuating the costly nonsense of constant testing. Let’s hope the sceptical and financially prudent voices win out in the Cabinet meeting that is now underway.

Worth reading in full.

Meanwhile, Sir John Bell – Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and a member of the expert advisory group to the Vaccine Taskforce – has said it’s time to “step back” from Covid restrictions “and get on with life”. The Telegraph has more.

The time was always going to come for society to “step back” from Covid restrictions “and get on with life”, an Oxford professor has said.

Mandatory, legally enforced quarantine is “probably not necessary” in the face of the more benign Omicron variant, Prof Sir John Bell told BBC Radio 4.

“People on the whole are pretty sensible,” he said. “If they feel that they’re highly symptomatic they’re not going to go in and sit next to somebody at work and spread the disease around.”

“I think we can rely pretty effectively on good behaviour from the population to avoid the spread of disease and even if it does spread we do know it to be mild and we now know that 97% of the population have now got antibodies to this virus.”

Tags: Living with CovidMass testingPCR TestingSajid Javid

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56 Comments
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Patrick5
Patrick5
5 years ago

Must step in to defend C a little here.
if(YouWantToInterfaceWithHardware==TRUE){
C can be alright;
and work ok;
if you’re really careful;
and keep pointer use to a minimum;
and spend time at the start carefully developing reliable functions;
which can handle data for you so that only when writing the functions;
not the overall code;
will you need to handle any memory directly;
}
 
C is ideal for embedded devices, especially as they have slower clock speeds and little memory so can’t ever handle the likes of python.
 
C is good for things you write once, and document well, But then don’t do much more development on once you’ve ironed out all bugs. Coded tools to “do a thing”, or run on an embedded device. C programs don’t cope so well when you keep coming back to them, or have people who didn’t write them initially come back to them and try to add extra functionality.
 
When you’re creating a big complex mathematical model or doing graphing or other data analysis C is very much the wrong choice, all the effort here that supposedly gains you speed is wasted. For common data tasks the lieks of python and R have built-in routines which are as efficient as the best C a programmer can write, because those routines, deep inside, are C written by an expert programmer, written once as a routine for a job and then placed in careful wrappers to ensure they can’t fail mysteriously. Writing out matrix handlig ,algebra handling, curve integrating, or standard deviation finding code in C will only ever be as efficient as the python and R implementations are anyway, but will take a lot mroe work and have a lot more chances to b*ggr something up.
 
Use C by all means, but use it where it belongs.

1
0
Patrick5
Patrick5
5 years ago

Also, you mention the need to hire a software engineer if you wish to use C or C++. Quite honestly these epidemiologists could use adding to their teams some experts on economics and human rights too, perhaps also some historians, both of past pandemics and of past dictatorships. Let these experts help advise on the asumptions going in to the model and what cautions should be taken when drawing the conclusions out.

4
0
Brian Sides
Brian Sides
5 years ago

I see that they are trying to support this crap code
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01685-y
Nature just lost all credibility
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/19/experts-largely-positive-computer-coding-thatled-coronavirus/
Some reverse ferret from earlier articles.

It might work on a good day providing the data that is read in was not corrupted before
it is read or during the read process. Plus of all the data is read in. Then if all of the data is written with out corruption fully over writing the data that was there. Plus the data does not get corrupted after writing. Plus there are no memory leakage. As for calling it a simulation as apposed to a string of if else statements. Clearly this is decades of work well spent by an experienced team. Supported by the computer development department. NOT

2
0
zebedee
zebedee
5 years ago

A C/C++ hater, how boring. Admittedly the code still contains lots of old C memory allocations which I dislike rather than using more modern stuff – I got a couple of std::vector’s in after quite a while admittedly they don’t do bounds checking as that would slow the code. I see no reason to use shared pointers. It’s always possible to run the code through dynamic analysis tools that will detect memory leaks and out of bounds issues for a given set of input values.

Mersenne Twisters are in the C++ 11 std::random library although I don’t believe this is used by the code which happens to be C++ 14 (a maximum on the Linux compiler and a minimum on the Windows compiler) rather than 17 or 20.

At the beginning of May I wrote some maths library classes with unit tests. It’s taken until quite recently to get the supporting code for the unit tests integrated. There is only one example unit test in the main code that uses this as the rest of my change lies idle which I have expressed my frustration about.

A fair point would be that they are a C team although there are bits of C++ code making their way in and thus adding more structure.

I generally submit my complaints as code changes and have had 13 accepted thus far as this is the more stoical approach.

0
0
Musa Khan Jalalzai
Musa Khan Jalalzai
4 years ago

I think we need reorganization of the state institutions to make the state intelligent and competent. The UK state is now teetering on the brink. Please understand the US leadership intentions about the UK that wants to make the country dismember.

0
0

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