Boris Johnson- Prime Minister (Vol. 4)

[Slagathore]

El stovey said:

Coronavirus: 'Earlier lockdown would have halved death toll' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-5299506

“ The number of coronavirus deaths in the UK would have been halved if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier, a former government adviser has said.
Prof Neil Ferguson, whose advice was crucial to the decision to go into lockdown, said the outbreak had been doubling in size every three or four days before measures had been taken.
The prime minister said it was still too early to make such a judgement.
"We will have to look back on all of it and learn the lessons that we can."
Boris Johnson added: "A lot of these things are still premature. This epidemic has a long way to go."



https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/20/earlie...

“ Three-quarters of coronavirus deaths in Britain might have been avoided if the lockdown had begun a week earlier, modelling suggests.

Researchers said that if the UK had imposed the measures seven days earlier its death toll now would be on a par with the 8,000 in Germany.

They also said it would have been possible to have a shorter and less economically damaging lockdown.

Britain introduced its lockdown measures on March 23, when 359 deaths had been reported. Germany took such steps on the same day, but had reported only 86 fatalities at that time.

The UK's death toll has now exceeded 35,000 people.

Modelling from British scientist James Annan suggests that entering lockdown a week earlier would have reduced the number of deaths by three-quarters....‘


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8310667/I...

“Rowland Kao, professor of epidemiology and lead author of the paper, said there had 'definitely' been enough information about the coming pandemic in mid-February.

He demanded to know why lockdown was not imposed sooner, saying he hoped the country was 'following the right science'.

“Professor Kao told MailOnline that if the whole of Britain was forced to stay at home a fortnight earlier it would have a 'similar' effect on the death toll.

Applying the 80 per cent reduction to Britain's 32,490 fatalities suggests almost 26,000 deaths could have been prevented. “

https://fullfact.org/health/limits-what-we-can-say-about-early-lockdowns/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/lockdo...

And that is from the expert who has pretty much called everything correctly from the start.

The one thing I've taken away from this pandemic is that some experts are more reliable than others! Feguson appears to have a dreadful track record.

[Mrr T]

JagLover said:

The rest of those you cite might well be credible sources but Neil Ferguson, seriously?. The guy whose model was found out to be completely broken and who is also a lockdown zealot based mainly on the fact that his model cannot handle anything in-between full lockdown and business as usual.

He is trying to regain some lost credibility by telling the media what they want to hear.

If anything positive emerges from this crisis it will be hopefully be a realisation of the limits of epidemiological modelling.

I do not believe there is any evidence his model is broken. The only link I have seen only referred to poorly structured code and one link to a team auditing the model which had spotted one inconsistency which was explained.

I do agree modeling CV19 was impossible at the time because we simply had no idea about many of the parameters. We should now know more so modelling will be more accurate. I think the bigger problem today is with the real world UK data.

Edited by Mrr T on Saturday 4th July 11:37

[JagLover]

El stovey said:

From your article



Not sure they’re looking at the U.K. and thinking they wished they’d followed us.

i'm sure they are not but reading the article they are having to lock down a significant part of one city as a result of

Reuters said:

Most of the cases are continuing to be based on family clusters ... (which) have this single link back to quarantine failure in a couple of hotels in central Melbourne

That is going to be the reality of life for a while in countries where hardly any of the population have it for quite some time. Maybe a vaccine enters mass production soon and they will be sitting pretty, who knows.

Besides which I think the economic consequences of this virus are going to be far more devastating. This time next year I very much doubt we are going to be talking about people dying at 87 when they could have lived to a ripe old age of 88. We are going to be talking about depression.

Bets on who will be the first of the Boris bashes to say "why did we lockdown?"

[isaldiri]

Slagathore said:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/lockdo...

And that is from the expert who has pretty much called everything correctly from the start.

He also said that the US would have less cases and deaths than Italy/Iran or China back in March. So not everything he said has been correct.......

[Blue62]

jakesmith said:

Former government advisor
Might
If
Modelling

Etc

You may regard it as an unfortunate truth, which would be to miss the point. I hope that we have a transparent enquiry at the end of this so that we can learn the lessons, it seems clear that we could have saved more lives with an earlier lockdown and the fact that Ferguson was one of those arguing against an early lockdown makes his assertion all the more concerning. When we were told that a protective ring had been put around care homes it was far from the truth, in fact the complete opposite, as we now learn.

I would hope that if there is a second wave we will move swiftly to protect those at risk and work hard to keep the economy and society moving, that's why facing up to the mistakes is critical.

[Red 4]

Mrr T said:

JagLover said:

The rest of those you cite might well be credible sources but Neil Ferguson, seriously?. The guy whose model was found out to be completely broken and who is also a lockdown zealot based mainly on the fact that his model cannot handle anything in-between full lockdown and business as usual.

He is trying to regain some lost credibility by telling the media what they want to hear.

If anything positive emerges from this crisis it will be hopefully be a realisation of the limits of epidemiological modelling.

I do not believe there is any evidence his model is broken. The only link I have seen only referred to poorly structured code and one link to a team auditing the model which had spotted one inconsistency which was explained.

I do agree modeling CV19 was impossible at the time because we simply had no idea about many of the parameters. We should now know more so modelling will be more accurate. I think the bigger problem today is problems with the real world data.

There was another expert (epidemiologist) on TV last night who said Ferguson's model was accurate.
Do nothing and you would have had circa 500k deaths. Given that excess deaths are now well over 60k with a (late) lockdown and that seems plausible.

The prediction is for a second wave to hit and peak in January.

The PH experts know better though.

[Slagathore]

isaldiri said:

He also said that the US would have less cases and deaths than Italy/Iran or China back in March. So not everything he said has been correct.......

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8347635/Lockdowns-failed-alter-course-pandemic-JP-Morgan-study-claims.html

I did say pretty much

But the main point is - locking down isn't the fix. Of course, if back in January, we locked down and no one ever left their homes, it would be fine, we'd have a tiny death toll, but that is obviously not practical.

[anonymous-user]

JagLover said:

El stovey said:

From your article



Not sure they’re looking at the U.K. and thinking they wished they’d followed us.

i'm sure they are not but reading the article they are having to lock down a significant part of one city as a result of

Reuters said:

Most of the cases are continuing to be based on family clusters ... (which) have this single link back to quarantine failure in a couple of hotels in central Melbourne

That is going to be the reality of life for a while in countries where hardly any of the population have it for quite some time. Maybe a vaccine enters mass production soon and they will be sitting pretty, who knows.

Besides which I think the economic consequences of this virus are going to be far more devastating. This time next year I very much doubt we are going to be talking about people dying at 87 when they could have lived to a ripe old age of 88. We are going to be talking about depression.

Bets on who will be the first of the Boris bashes to say "why did we lockdown?"

Sure but they’re in control and isolating cases by testing and contact tracing plus their economy is up and running.

We ended up with the worst of both methods by having lockdowns and high death tolls by straddling different methods of mitigation and not doing adequate testing and constancy tracing.

[anonymous-user]

Blue62 said:

I would hope that if there is a second wave we will move swiftly to protect those at risk and work hard to keep the economy and society moving, that's why facing up to the mistakes is critical.

Exactly, we need to learn now what’s gone wrong so we can stop repeating the same mistakes and adopting the same flawed decision making processes.

Finding out what went wrong in a few years time is pointless.

If as people say we’re only half way through, we need to stop these mistakes happening and look at why they have been before we go into the second half.

[Condi]

Red 4 said:

There was another expert (epidemiologist) on TV last night who said Ferguson's model was accurate.
Do nothing and you would have had circa 500k deaths. Given that excess deaths are now well over 60k with a (late) lockdown and that seems plausible.

The prediction is for a second wave to hit and peak in January.

The PH experts know better though.

There are multiple models, all of which gave different predictions, with the margin of error hugely compounded by our lack of understanding about how Covid affects different age groups, about how people would comply with lockdown and social distancing guidance, and about how transmission happens in the community.

6 months later and with many hundreds of times the data points as we had to start with, you would hope someone would now be able to create a model which is much more accurate. Maybe they have? If so then little information has been released. With everything we know now, you would expect any second peak to be mitigated, if not avoided.

[don'tbesilly]

JagLover said:

El stovey said:

From your article



Not sure they’re looking at the U.K. and thinking they wished they’d followed us.

i'm sure they are not but reading the article they are having to lock down a significant part of one city as a result of

Reuters said:

Most of the cases are continuing to be based on family clusters ... (which) have this single link back to quarantine failure in a couple of hotels in central Melbourne

That is going to be the reality of life for a while in countries where hardly any of the population have it for quite some time. Maybe a vaccine enters mass production soon and they will be sitting pretty, who knows.

Besides which I think the economic consequences of this virus are going to be far more devastating. This time next year I very much doubt we are going to be talking about people dying at 87 when they could have lived to a ripe old age of 88. We are going to be talking about depression.

Bets on who will be the first of the Boris bashes to say "why did we lockdown?"

Plenty of the PH experts over on the 'CV19 - Cure worse than the disease? (Vol 3)' thread have been asking that since Vol 1.

[Condi]

El stovey said:

If as people say we’re only half way through, we need to stop these mistakes happening and look at why they have been before we go into the second half.

The mistakes are already well know.

The primary cause of death was the returning of hundreds of OAPs to care homes in February and March without testing them for Covid. We were planting little bombs of death among the most susceptible population, without enough testing or PPE to identify and protect the staff and residents. Care homes account for 50% of deaths, whereas they only make up approx 0.6% of the national population.

Secondly the advice to avoid bars, pubs etc came too late.

And finally our lack of testing ability means even now we have absolutely no idea what percentage of the population have had it, or did have it when the virus was most prevalent. Without this basic information all other decision making has been done blindly, using incomplete facts and opinion.

[JagLover]

Red 4 said:

There was another expert (epidemiologist) on TV last night who said Ferguson's model was accurate.
Do nothing and you would have had circa 500k deaths. Given that excess deaths are now well over 60k with a (late) lockdown and that seems plausible.

The prediction is for a second wave to hit and peak in January.

Any so called "expert" who says that Ferguson's model was accurate is talking bks. They also used a method based on that model to analyse Sweden based on it having no lockdown and predicted far more deaths than Sweden has actually suffered.

[Red 4]

Condi said:

Red 4 said:

There was another expert (epidemiologist) on TV last night who said Ferguson's model was accurate.
Do nothing and you would have had circa 500k deaths. Given that excess deaths are now well over 60k with a (late) lockdown and that seems plausible.

The prediction is for a second wave to hit and peak in January.

The PH experts know better though.

There are multiple models, all of which gave different predictions, with the margin of error hugely compounded by our lack of understanding about how Covid affects different age groups, about how people would comply with lockdown and social distancing guidance, and about how transmission happens in the community.

6 months later and with many hundreds of times the data points as we had to start with, you would hope someone would now be able to create a model which is much more accurate. Maybe they have? If so then little information has been released. With everything we know now, you would expect any second peak to be mitigated, if not avoided.

Yes, all fair points.
The expert did say that little was known about the disease back in March and 500k deaths represented a worst case scenario.
However, he also said that given what we know now that figure remains accurate.

[Red 4]

JagLover said:

Red 4 said:

There was another expert (epidemiologist) on TV last night who said Ferguson's model was accurate.
Do nothing and you would have had circa 500k deaths. Given that excess deaths are now well over 60k with a (late) lockdown and that seems plausible.

The prediction is for a second wave to hit and peak in January.

Any so called "expert" who says that Ferguson's model was accurate is talking bks. They also used a method based on that model to analyse Sweden based on it having no lockdown and predicted far more deaths than Sweden has actually suffered.

Actually, having listened to the expert, he made perfect sense. He was very factual and did not appear prone to exaggeration.

Why are you harping on about Sweden again ? You do know that they have faired far, far worse than their neighbours, don't you ?

[JagLover]

Red 4 said:

Actually, having listened to the expert, he made perfect sense. He was very factual and did not appear prone to exaggeration.

Why are you harping on about Sweden again ? You do know that they have faired far, far worse than their neighbours, don't you ?

Of course they have. Because they haven't all hidden under their beds. Sweden is getting through this crisis unlike some other countries.

This is the study I was talking about Hospitalisations based on Imperial model and reality.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-we-trust-c...

Hospitalisations overstated 32 fold
Deaths overstated 15 fold by 1 July

The reason why I mention Sweden is that was the country to see the Imperial model vs reality clearly.

Coronavirus has got into a majority of British care homes I believe so there is no larger pool of vulnerable elderly the virus has not yet reached. To therefore extrapolate to that many deaths is ludicrous.

[Derek Smith]

The problem for Johnson is that he’s made mistakes, some of which have become clear as the situation evolved. There’s no way anyone could have gone through the crisis without making a decision that could have been improved with more knowledge. The real question is whether he made errors despite knowing the probable outcome.

He’s had to balance the financial fallout with the death/incapacitation rate. That’s the one we should concentrate on. If he’s got it wrong, then he’s open to criticism.

Mind you, what we want from any post Covid-19 enquiry is what we should do in the future, because the next virus is fermenting away now. It is a shame that, given previous enquiries, we’re unlikely to get it. It will be a blame game.

Politics will confuse everything. Those wanting to protect the tory party will put their point of view, regardless of facts. The same goes for both those who want to support Johnson and those against him. Labour, amongst others of course, will go for Johnson initially, but probably will include the cabinet, facts optional.

We’ll come away confused and without any hope for a better management the next virus.

On the plus side for me, the next one is unlikely to target the old again.

[Ridgemont]

Condi said:

El stovey said:

If as people say we’re only half way through, we need to stop these mistakes happening and look at why they have been before we go into the second half.

The mistakes are already well know.

The primary cause of death was the returning of hundreds of OAPs to care homes in February and March without testing them for Covid. We were planting little bombs of death among the most susceptible population, without enough testing or PPE to identify and protect the staff and residents. Care homes account for 50% of deaths, whereas they only make up approx 0.6% of the national population.

Secondly the advice to avoid bars, pubs etc came too late.

And finally our lack of testing ability means even now we have absolutely no idea what percentage of the population have had it, or did have it when the virus was most prevalent. Without this basic information all other decision making has been done blindly, using incomplete facts and opinion.

The counterfactuals will be debated for years.
I’m still not clear what people are proposing should have been done around OAPs.
It was advised that clinicians should take the call to test (as opposed to Scotland where no testing was the guidance). If they had mandated that covid testing was required then what? Stay in hospital? At the time there was anticipated to be a tsunami of cases due to arrive. What would have happened if there were 10s of 1000s of OAPs blocking ICU availability because of no offloading to care homes. That would have been a scandal in itself.
The care home situation is becoming more understood over time. It appears that one of the key issues was temporary staff: many homes were incapacitated by full time staff self isolating due to symptoms and therefore requiring temp staff who then introduced infection.
The only solution would have been daily testing of all carehome staff. A massive task which certainly was not feasible at the time.

The reality was that there was no significant capacity to test on all the fronts that the various institutions were fighting on. That will probably be the long term most significant finding of any investigation and is at the root of many of the failings that occurred, and is the result of many decades of public health policy. A structural failing that could not be compensated for by say a weeks earlier lock down or changes in direction say in February. You cannot magic up an operation from scratch.

The truism which cannot be ignored is that this is a massively infectious virus that will be with us for a long time. Until you have years worth of data on excess deaths there is absolutely no way of knowing how the various systems across multiple countries have been judged to have dealt with the virus. And for that matter whether some countries (for example New Zealand) have disappeared up a blind alley with the eradication route.
We are assessing the successfulness of public policy as the situation is unfolding and there are so many unknowns in play that short term assessments of success are futile. I argued back in March that the shoes waiting to drop were the US, India, South America and Africa in that order. The shoes are still dropping and will delay any retrospectives until they have hit the floor.

[Slagathore]

El stovey said:

Exactly, we need to learn now what’s gone wrong so we can stop repeating the same mistakes and adopting the same flawed decision making processes.

Finding out what went wrong in a few years time is pointless.

If as people say we’re only half way through, we need to stop these mistakes happening and look at why they have been before we go into the second half.

Do you think, now, that it is as deadly as was made out back in Jan/Feb/Mar? I appreciate it's only with hindsight that we can now see it wasn't, but my point here is about the lessons learned bit and not repeating the mistakes if a 2nd wave comes.

The obvious problem, given how different people are affected by it, is that the must vulnerable haven't been protected. Be it from hospitals discharging people back to care homes or staff bringing it in to the care homes etc. Asymptomatic cases and spread will have made it even harder to stop.

Until someone can explain how high risk and unhealthy old people have survived it and how a tiny amount of, supposedly, healthy and young people have died, then it's anyone's guess really why some people are dying and others aren't, and the answer certainly isn't down to government policy. The main variables I can see there are their own genetics and the treatment received.

I suspect a lot of people will have died because hospitals didn't know what they were dealing with at the start, or fully understood the problems it was causing, hence lots of reports of people dying from cardiovascular problems, not pneumonia, like we thought they would be at the start. I suspect the information they have now means they can treat people a lot more effectively.

The data now is very clear that for most people, it's no more serious than a cold and for some, so minor they don't get any symptoms. So it really reiterates the point that the most vulnerable were just not protected enough. That and we're a fat, unhealthy country and I suspect obesity will have played a small part as well.

You can do lessons learned now, there's enough information out there.

[Tuna]

Derek Smith said:

The problem for Johnson is that he’s made mistakes, some of which have become clear as the situation evolved. There’s no way anyone could have gone through the crisis without making a decision that could have been improved with more knowledge. The real question is whether he made errors despite knowing the probable outcome.

He’s had to balance the financial fallout with the death/incapacitation rate. That’s the one we should concentrate on. If he’s got it wrong, then he’s open to criticism.

Mind you, what we want from any post Covid-19 enquiry is what we should do in the future, because the next virus is fermenting away now. It is a shame that, given previous enquiries, we’re unlikely to get it. It will be a blame game.

Politics will confuse everything. Those wanting to protect the tory party will put their point of view, regardless of facts. The same goes for both those who want to support Johnson and those against him. Labour, amongst others of course, will go for Johnson initially, but probably will include the cabinet, facts optional.

Very true. Agreed with pretty much all the above.

Derek Smith said:

We’ll come away confused and without any hope for a better management the next virus.

On the plus side for me, the next one is unlikely to target the old again.

Not so sure about either of those. The academic community are going to be studying this pandemic in detail for years. This is the first time we've been able to gather data in near real time of the spread of a novel virus in a variety of populations. The analysis of the information will be the subject of many studies and Doctoral papers - and those will inform our reaction to the next virus.

And as for targeting the old - all bets are off. Just as with the local spreads, there are no absolutes - it's a roll of the dice. Viruses do not respect means, averages and probabilities (though they do of course approximate to them if you have enough viruses, enough countries and enough pandemics).