Shooting the messenger rather than addressing the point Khen?
Interesting Telegraph columnists perspective on Europe's vaccine catastrophe: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...-shook-europe/
He refers to Die Welt and Der Spiegel, are they more to your liking or are they untouchable too?
This is going to be the true story of the first half of this year.
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
When the "messenger" is a pathological liar and fundamentally untrustworthy, then, yes. Furthermore, "Die Welt" is an equically despicable paper, just with a tad more civilized paint (one of their lead writers openly caters to Nazi wannabes. Not a joke). It's from the same publisher after all.
Also, do you know the best way to get someone to swallow a lie? Simply state several true things and then add one lie into it. That's how they do it and that's why you should not trust anything those asshats say.
And our chief virologist (Drosten) (who's completely independend from politics) has stated that hindsight is 20/20 and that criticism after the fact in this case is stupid. Published in DER SPIEGEL, by the way.
Of course you can always play the armchair general with what we know now. But, as Drosten said, a true revision of the fact would necessitate look at what we knew then.
But I'm sure that a genius like you knew months in advance which of the more than 20 potential vaccines would be the successful ones?
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
This article has the same problem as the other one you posted.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
No we didn't know which ones would be successful months in advance.
What we did know though is the pandemic is costing us billions of pounds or euros per week.
Our government backed every leading horse and got orders in early paying early to be at the front of the queue. Not just one queue but almost every queue they could. They didn't back one horse, they backed virtually all of them. It therefore didn't matter which vaccine worked, we would have it.
Buying 40 million doses at £25 each costs £1bn. Given the pandemic is costing billions per week, if we can end the pandemic days, weeks or months earlier then that is money very well spent.
We have hundreds of millions of doses on order. Enough to vaccinate the whole population 5 times each approximately. That won't be needed, once we have vaccinated everyone here we can use the rest for foreign aid to help other countries get over it. Or bin those that don't work but still money well spent.
Fiddling around umming and ahhing while the pandemic rages while trying to save pennies per dose but ending at the back of the queue is really fiddling while Rome burns.
Hope is the denial of reality
Twitter Link
Good start. Daily vaccination updates coming from Monday.
And yet your government still feels the need to delay the 2nd dose massively. Your logic does not square.
I have the statement of an expert in his field about this. And we have an armchair general's (you) opinion about this, who fell for the hateful propaganda of a rag paper.
Guess which one I'll go with.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Because words matter, is that full vaccination or half vaccination? I assume it's half.
Either way, and putting the pedant aside, that's great news and the speed at which we're doing it is super dooper. I just wish I had more confidence that they're not going to fuck it up. Because I think this cabinet have the sense and credibility of a chunk of bum fluff, I'm worried that something really, really important is being sacrificed in order to expedite the rollout.
Of course it squares. They're not all available today.
It is about getting as many people vaccinated as soon as possible by any means at any cost. It is a value judgement and when the alternative is restrictions costs £6bn per week it is absolutely necessary.
To quibble over which vaccine to buy is a false economy. No hindsight necessary.
Until said otherwise I'd assume single vaccination not double vaccinated yes.
What's being sacrificed is billions of pounds extra were spent to buy all the vaccines in advance. But the pandemic costs 6 billion per week so one week pays for the vaccine programmes.
Yes, because money is the only concern. Jesus. Ever thought about why they're not all available today? I'm sure you'll promptly proceed to pull something out of your ass as well.Of course it squares. They're not all available today.
It is about getting as many people vaccinated as soon as possible by any means at any cost. It is a value judgement and when the alternative is restrictions costs £6bn per week it is absolutely necessary.
To quibble over which vaccine to buy is a false economy. No hindsight necessary.
Obviously not. Now kindly fuck off, armchair general. You're an economics expert and now you presume to know all about vaccination strategies. Get fucked.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
The strategy being employed is the smartest one. You get fucked you overly defensive ignorant turd.
Why are they not all being available at once, what a dumb question. Not polite to use the r-word anymore but struggling to understand how someone supposedly educated could write something so fucking stupid as "And yet your government still feels the need to delay the 2nd dose massively. Your logic does not square"
I hope you don't teach or need logic if that is your level of objective thought. They're not all available because they're not all licenced, manufactured, bottled and cerified.
Can only use what you have and can only have once you've bought it at the timescale manufactured and certified.
Don't be so bloody moronic you fool.
Let's hope it's just that. The problem I have is that I think Johnson is more concerned about being first, and showing the UK is number 1, as opposed to safely and robustly vaccinating us.
I'm not suggesting the current approach isn't safe (because I genuinely don't know) and I understand why we're delaying the second jab. It's just a cynical hunch i can't shake.
What you're feeling is probably the understandable concern that the goal of this strategy is to justify loosening restrictions sooner—which, with this govt's track record, may well mean "prematurely".
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
If you hate yourself, please enjoy this complimentary thread:
Twitter Link
The future of the Republican party
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Yarp, probably. Although I think we probably ended the first "lockdown" at about the right time. Started it too late and made a mess of the subsequent ones, but when you've got libertarian Tory back benchers and Nigel Farage on your back needs must.
Agree that the worst problems were the delayed start (after the dangerous herd immunity strategy initially proposed) and subsequent serial bungling. Big problem w/ first lockdown was the abrupt lifting of restrictions and the measures taken to encourage transmission. It won Johnson and Sunak a few political points, but the price was horrifying.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Another major issue I don't feel gets enough coverage was and is the extent to which the test and trace is just not working as well as it needs to.
The premise of opening up the country was ostensibly that we had this, air quotes, "world beating" test and trace system which would mean only those who'd been exposed would need to isolate and everyone else could have something resembling normality. This is a system that seems to have worked well in places like South Korea.
Well, spoilers, we do not have a world beating test and trace system.
According to data from https://covid.i-sense.org.uk/ it was reaching only 32% of contacts of infected peopled in late November, and even that miserable total was their best result, their historical data goes as low as 13% in August and generally hovers around the 20% mark. For the majority of the pandemic you can only count on about 1 in 5 infected people having their contacts traced. According to Sage, the number needs to be more like 80%, 4/5.
If I'm reading the data right, the major bottle neck seems to be testing, they generally only seem to get a positive test for half to a third of infections. One cause of this is that you are actively discouraged from getting a test if you do not have symptoms. The thing explicitly tells you not to book a test unless you have symptoms, my boss said he lied to the thing over Christmas to get a test after he'd been in contact with someone who was infected but he didn't have symptoms. This goes back to the time they boasted about how many tests they had available, then the system got overwhelmed and ole Twat Hancock decided to blame people booking tests when they had no symptoms, seemingly forgetting or not caring that asymptomatic transmission is a thing.
Also the app requires bluetooth and a modern smart phone, so that's fucking stupid. I hope no one with a Xperia A4 or Moto XT1097 gets the Coronavirus, you dumb fucks!
So basically, they had this policy that was betting 10s of thousands of lives that they could do this one thing.
They could not do this one thing.
And once it became clear they could not do the thing, they continued to do the policy.
Last edited by Steely Glint; 01-05-2021 at 09:22 PM.
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
Think a major problem is implied by your framing—they bet big, but didn't properly hedge that bet. Even under the best circumstances, the usefulness of testing and tracing will be constrained by eg. coverage, compliance, false negatives, etc. You can mitigate those problems by maintaining policies that reduce risk of transmission—restrictions on large gatherings, recommendations to work from home if possible, mandate online teaching for unis, mandate the use of face masks, implement longer quarantine and consider quarantining entire household if someone tests positive, etc (difficult to say precisely which combination of interventions are the best, but no doubt every country can compose a menu that's palatable to its people). But that's a tough sell when you've already sold the public on a "yay return to normal" pipe dream, as Johnson, Sunak and others had. See eg. previous discussions in this thread in conjunction with worrying developments in several regions in England, the decisions about unis, etc. Most people are not keen on a "life is still shit" narrative—they want a narrative that offers a sense of freedom and control.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I suspect the true reason for the test and trace system was to be able to say they had a test and trace system, so they could open the country up.
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
No. The restrictions were lifted staggered and not all at once and R stayed below 1 for months.
The mistake was having holidays during a pandemic reseeding the virus from Spain all across the UK again.
Test & Trace here was a joke.
I had an alert two months ago. I opened up the app from the alert. The information on what the alert was supposed to be indicating was missing entirely. I came out of the app, went back in to try to reload the alert, and it crashed.
My sister who is a deputy head of an inner-city primary school in London had to disable the app along with other teachers at the school. The app kept alerting, but would not say which child (if any) was infected or provide any other pertinent information. The alerting became nothing more than an annoyance.
So it was certainly World-Beating. No one else made such a crap system.
Data privacy was extremely high because of Apple/Google policies. They tried to build one that was less private but Apple and Google refused to facilitate it. Saying which child was infected was literally not how Apple and Google designed it to work.
Interestingly test and trace last week got through to 92.6% of contacts. Don't hear so much about the percentages now that they're like that.
Interesting to see now how different countries are setting out their stall for the vaccine rollout.
Macron has set an ambitious target of getting a million vaccines out by 31/1
Boris has set an ambitious target of getting 14 million out by 14/2.
Be interesting to see how or whether those are reached.
Incorrect. There was a massive easing of important restrictions all at once starting July 4, followed by messages (back to work) & policies (eat out to help out) that greatly facilitated community transmission. R is crude and often misleading measure when dealing with covid, in general because of the extreme heterogeneity in transmission, and in the UK's case in particular because of testing & tracing issues. It is almost certain that, at times when R seemed to be be just below 1, there were a number of important regions where it was at or above 1. Lifting a restriction on peeking out through your window one day and then lifting a restriction on hanging out at a packed pub the next day might look like a staggered approach, but it's not in any meaningful sense—hence the criticism from and concern among the govt's advisors, which was reported in the recent Times article.
No doubt that was a mistake—precipitated in part by the govt's messaging—but plainly misleading to describe it as "the" mistake.The mistake was having holidays during a pandemic reseeding the virus from Spain all across the UK again.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Incorrect. The restrictions were phased out and mostly through the whole of June and July. 4 July was the restrictions on some hospitality and was over a month after the restrictions on non essential shops and nearly a month before the restrictions on indoor gyms and nail salons etc. The lifting of restrictions was spread over multiple months.
I think the blame game is part of the problem. Why would any one think that plan would work, no one has been ok with that level of intrusion. Did people rely to heavily on it being the end all solution to contact tracing? Since we mentioned schools over here when an infection was reported the admin would quarantine those who had contact and alert the rest of the school, without violating privacy or HIPAA. But of course this being florida "contact" meant only those that sat next to the infected for a class period. They ignored hallways, who used the desk the next period and teachers were never considered as a possible contact or spreader. So of course we ended up getting the calls at least once a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
No that was never the primary element of contact tracing, so it wasn't the end all solution. The primary element was and always has been manual contact tracing. The app is only meant to be supplementary so eg if you don't know who you've been near as they're a stranger then it pings.
Our daughter's school have taken this very seriously. They have divided the school into year group bubbles and this there is no mingling at all. When I drop the girls off in the morning and pick them up they go in via different entrances, they use different classrooms, they even have different segregated playgrounds now. Everything that can be has been segregated to keep them apart.
We have twice been told that they need to isolate. Once for my youngest in Reception class barely into the school year so she then had to stay off for a fortnight, then for our eldest in Year Two we got the message for her on the first day of the Christmas holidays meaning she needed to self isolate until the 25th ironically - the only thing that affected though was we didn't take her to the shops since we were already not planning on meeting anyone during the holidays.
This is a roundabout way of restating my claim that there was a massive easing of important restrictions on July 4. Restaurants, bars, pubs and cafés are very important from a transmission perspective; gyms and nail salons are less important—more important than peeking out the window, granted, but not as important as the other categories.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
There has to be a date when hospitality is allowed to resume trade. It wasn't done all at once with the other relaxations like sport, or gyms, or religious services, or non essential shopping. It was done separately from other things as another step. Not the all at once you claimed.
Short of keeping them shut forever, or opening only half at once (which would be worse for social distancing as everyone crams into the ones allowed to open) I'm not sure practically how you would want it done differently.
What else would you want? Bars with a name beginning A to J can open, the rest remain shut? So all the punters go to those bars?
It is truly astounding how difficult it seems to be for you to read and parse sentences in their entirety. If I say "massive easing" and "important restrictions" and "all at once", you're supposed to be able to understand that all three parts matter; examples of slight easing of relatively unimportant restrictions later on have no bearing on the initial claim.
Here are some ways:Short of keeping them shut forever, or opening only half at once (which would be worse for social distancing as everyone crams into the ones allowed to open) I'm not sure practically how you would want it done differently.
What else would you want? Bars with a name beginning A to J can open, the rest remain shut? So all the punters go to those bars?
- only permit outdoor service
- only permit table service
- restrict total number of patrons
- restrict size of each party
- mandate 2m distance
- restrict hours for table service
- keep bars closed
- keep cinemas, museums and theme parks closed
- not encourage people to eat at restaurants with massive financial incentives and powerful messaging
Why you chose not to spend even ten seconds trying to answer this question before trotting out that inane straw man is honestly beyond me.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote