As Wales goes in to firebreak the infection rate again fails to increase here, and in some areas continues to drop.
Interesting developments at Chester FC who have a stadium that is half in England and half in Wales. A charity is running a drive in cinema at the football ground and are only using the English side of the pitch. Unfortunately the toilets are on the Welsh side of the ground, so temporary toilets have had to be brought in to the English side of the stadium.
Okay, so if a person is going to the toilet which type of toilet will be better in terms of infection control – actually the ones in Wales. Elsewhere we have had arguments about gyms and soft play centres.
Working internationally you get used to differences like this. For example drive to France and you will find cars on the other side of the road. Yes, it would be sensible if we all drove on the same side of the road, but we don’t, and the chances of everybody adopting the same side of the road are pretty slim. I just hope people manage to programme self drive cars carefully.
It is interesting how many people seem to be talking about others and jhow bad they are. Almost like nobody can remember the saying.
Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbour’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbour.
That is the speck in the eye stuff in modern language. This attitude is repeated time after time in the Bible.
If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself. You might be needing forgiveness before the day’s out. Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law. If you think you are too good for that, you are badly deceived.
Not the easiest way to live life, but when I have managed to live up to it I have found it really positive for me.
I got a couple of pages in before I came to a reply:
I don’t know what you mean by female,
Page 9 lines 5 and 6
The deposition goes on in the same way. When you were there did you – I can’t tell you what happened after I was there.
Some people define lies as telling people something that is not true. I once worked with somebody that defined a lie as being found out to have told something that was not true.
I wonder where we all sit on the greyscale of truth/ie?
I was watching the select committee grilling people over the government response to the pandemic today. There was one expert who was not a glass half full, nor a glass half empty. He was more a “Don’t bother to look at the glass”.
His view was that we need a Tier 3 shutdown along with a circuit break.
I was more interested in the discussion on behavioural science. Apparently very few people with positive results stayed in isolation for the full period required.
Here the local infection rate is the same today as it was 10 days ago. Not because of tier 3 restrictions – they have still to make a difference. It appears to be because people have changed their behaviour. If this is the case then it means that it is in our power to control the virus spread, we can do it without government controls, without shutting down business.
We get the restrictions we deserve?
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The news this week has been full of the Manchester deal or no deal game.
The Tier 3 rules are intended to apply for 4 weeks at a time. Apparently the disagreement was that Manchester wanted the 80% furlough payout for workers. One thing that concerned me a little was who that money went to, did it really pay the poorest, or did it support the business owners. To my surprise I discovered that the 80% rule is still in operation for another 10 days. So all this stand off on wage subsidy was about something that didn’t exist till November. The longer the stand off the longer the lower rate would apply.
In the end (just before the deadline) the request was apparently modified to around 25% more per capita than Liverpool was being given. Why should a builder in Manchester get 25% more than a builder in Liverpool? I’ve seen so many people complain about the gym closure mismatch that say nothing about the mismatch in this funding demand.
In the end I have to conclude that your views on this issue will probably be along political lines. I have seen comments on this that would make Qanon proud. We need to try to take political bias out of this, and it isn’t easy.
What I do know is that restrictions have been needed for some time to save lives. I also know that people are desperate. Over the next 6 months we are going to see more and more businesses going to the wall. And here is the hard choice – do we try to keep everybody afloat, or do we decide to cut them loose now so we can support the others for longer?
And this to me is the issue behind the deal or no deal. We still have not come to terms with the amount of economic pain we will see over the next 6 months.
Not that he is ever likely to stand for it. But in his latest interview he has said some really impressive things (well, sort of the stuff I said a week ago).
First of all, the country is fatigued with restrictions, so we want to use public health measures not to get in the way of opening the economy, but to being a safe gateway to opening the economy.
Put ‘shut downs’ away and say, ‘We’re going to use public health measures to help us safely get to where we want to go’
I recommend listening to the whole interview. To hear somebody say “I got it wrong” is really refreshing. There is a follow up on 60 minutes overtime that gives his view on where we will be next year. In short he is talking about reducing the use of face coverings, but they will still be around until 2022
The mixture of realism and hope is interesting.
There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us
I like that term – passionate patience. Might be my goal for the next year.
Posted inCOVID|Comments Off on Fauci for President
I said some time ago that there were cat aliens taking over the world. The way they do it is to get their servants to display images of them with subliminal control messages. And now we have proof that this has been going on for longer than social media, A cat image has been discovered in the Nazca lines in Peru that is 2000 years old.
In other news we have now been told that there is a death rate of almost 1000 a day – of hedgehogs. That is about 1 a minute during the hours of darkness. To put this in perspective – this is around 20% of hedgehogs. It is little wonder that their numbers are dropping quickly.
There are almost as many pets in the UK as there are people. We are a country that loves animals. It just seems a shame we seem to care a little less about the ones that live in the wild.
One of the things I always try to remember is how new democracy is to many countries in Europe. We hear many issues about the effect of social media on our democracy. Chatham house have a paper dealing with this. One comment in the paper struck home to me
Perhaps most importantly, we should not think of democracy in a static way – that is, as a system that can be perfected once and for all and then simply maintained and defended against threats.
In effect this is saying that defending the status quo weakens democracy, and I think I agree with that. I always have issues with the overlap in functions of parliament, government and judiciary in the UK. A lot of people have issues with the House of Lords. I actually have issues with how the membership is granted. I dislike the fact that there are still a large number of hereditary peers, but this is not simply to do with the fact they are hereditary.
When one hereditary peer drops out they are replaced by another one. but most hereditary peerages are required to be male. At the moment they are all men.
The hereditary peers that are allowed to sit are chosen in a set ratio – the Conservative Party chooses 42, the Lib-Dems 3 and the Labour Party 2. This ratio is fixed. This hardly seems balanced.
But why should so many of the peers be associated with political parties? There are so many great people in this country that are not politicians, but are in touch with the people. I can just imagine Billy Connolly adding some spice to debates.
We need to keep thinking about how we are governed to keep our system relevant – to ensure people feel they have a voice.
But the thing that has really got me thinking was a BBC article on the American presidential election. You know there are two options, right? No – there are actually over 1200 people standing for president in the next election. I like the sound of Mark Charles, a lot of his policies sound challenging – for example his first 100 day statement proposes changing the US constitution to remove things like the exemption to the slavery prohibition (yes, slavery is still permitted in the USA constitution for on specific reason).
But it was the strategy of Brock Pierce that struck me. He plans to target one or two states – just enough to stop the two main candidates getting a majority in the electoral college.
Okay, short diversion – the votes of people in the USA do not elect the president – instead they elect people to go to the electoral college from each state (e.g. California elects 55, Texas 38). All of these form the electoral college and choose the president based on who gets 270 votes out of 538.
Oh did I say that the electoral college for a state is based on the winning votes in a State (in 48 of the 50 states), this means that the % of votes for one party does not represent the % of people chosen for the electoral college. The usa.gov website gives a good example from 2016
In 2016, even though millions more individuals voted for the Democratic candidate than the Republican candidate in CA, PA, and TX (if you add the votes from the 3 States), the Democratic party was only awarded the electors appointed in CA. Because the Republican candidate won the State popular vote in PA and TX, the Republican party was awarded 3 more total electors than the Democratic party.
CA – 8,753,788 Democratic votes cast vs 4,483,810 Republican votes cast = 55 Democratic electors
PA – 2,926,441 Democratic votes cast vs 2,970,733 Republican votes cast = 20 Republican electors
Total – 15,658,117 Democratic votes cast vs 12,139,590 Republican votes cast for the national popular vote, but 55 Democratic electors vs 58 Republican electors appointed based on each State’s popular vote.
Clinton got about 3,000,000 more votes than Trump in 2016.
So if Brock gets his wish and stops both Trump and Biden getting 270 electoral college votes then the house of representatives chooses the president from the top three candidates, and the Senate chooses the vice-president from the other two. This has happened once before (1824 when John Quincy Adams was chosen even though he got 10% less votes than Jackson). So Brock is betting that there will be such division they will chose the third candidate.
When I finally got my head round all this I was left with the feeling that this is system that really could lead to problems. With people reporting having to wait 11 hours in the queue to vote can we really call this democracy? Check out the tweet in the middle of this BBC article.
Forget your tier 1 2 or 3 – it is all useless – the world has come to an end – Quality street are unable to provide their full mix of sweets in all boxes.
We can no longer cope – we need to get back to full quality street standards.
There are so many “favourites” we all have in the food world. Although I am vegetarian there is one meat product I cannot refuse – the Scottish Mince Pie. And today I got my delivery. We all want our favourite foods available when we want them. We just pop to the shop and buy them.
In Austria the restaurants have seasonal food. One of my local restaurants was the Schabanack and it publishes a schedule of food weeks – tomorrow is the start of Martinigansl season – roast goose.
With all the fuss about Brexit and amendment 16 to the agriculture bill this week it struck me that we are getting closer to needing to adopt the natural schedule. I remember eating fresh strawberries at a party in early January. Apparently strawberries are flown in by the tonne every day.
Yes, it might be good for the air miles to reduce that, but I was just thinking about the attitude we have that creates this trade. I know a lot of people that are concerned about the international trade in food – based on the recent issues in the news we can assume there are a lot of people that want to protect our local farming. But how many eat based on a food calendar – so let’s see. When is the UK season for:
So what did SAGE come up with a month ago? Well, it was a lot more than saying “circuit break”. They actually produced a long list of ideas to consider. For each they looked at the benefits and drawbacks and presented this to government along with a note that gave a suggested short list. The full list of options considered were:
Lockdown – total open ended
Lockdown – total limited to two weeks (probably repeated on a 6 week cycle) – the so-called circuit breaker
Limiting mixing within the home
Limiting outdoor mixing and large events
Working from home
Alternate work weeks (week at work – week at home) half of staff in the workplace half at home at any one time
Close bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants
Close indoor gyms. leisure centres, fitness etc
Close places of worship / community centres
Close non-essential retail
Close close contact personal services
Close all or some schools
Close schools where there is an outbreak
Close class/year group in school where there is an outbreak
Week on week off for schools, half class sizes
Close further education
Close higher education
Quarantine new university students
Close childcare
Prohibit visits to hospitals and care homes
Re-introduce shielding at home
Improve the COVID-secure scheme
Require face coverings indoors
Extend list of indoor places where face coverings are needed
Restrict public travel to key workers
Impose 5 mile limit for non-essential travel
Restrict travel between UK nations or regions
Some of these are more effective than others. Some are surprising. It is absolutely clear that restrictions in the education sector could bring the R level below 1 in the view of SAGE.
So what did they produce as a short list for consideration by government:
A circuit breaker (looks like it might be a 3 week one to start with, repeated regularly)
Work from home (until a vaccine is distributed)
Banning all contact in homes with others not in the support group (short term till levels drop)
Close all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms and personal services (short term till levels drop)
Universities and colleges to use on-line teaching unless essential (short term till levels drop)
There are some interesting statements in the paper, such as:
Single interventions are unlikely to be able to reduce incidence. If schools are to remain open, then a wide range of other measures will be required.
The paper is quite clear that measures could be introduced at a regional level. It is also very clear that taking action or not taking action – it will be the poor that will suffer in both cases.
As part of the paper they presented the results of studies to show where infection was taking place
In the household (one family member infecting the others) accounts for about half of the cases
Work activities like health and social care
Leisure activities such as bars and restaurants
They suggest the restrictions that are introduced will need to last 6-9 months.
It makes interesting reading. The paper effectively says that schools must not close and also says schools closing (maybe just secondary) will be enough to reduce R below 1. So this got me thinking about something I said the other day – why don’t we move the narrative from negative to positive? Instead of considering making schools close can we work toward a way of making schools places where infection will not spread?
Look at the list of restrictions being introduced and ask yourself – if we took the money needed to support the businesses being closed and applied it to making education safer would that be enough? If that could just lower the R value to less than 1 would it be money well spent?
With the political arguments taking place I thought I would go look at the SAGE documents to see what they actually said. They reviewed over 25 different options for responding to the increased infection rate – one of them was a circuit break (or actually a series of circuit breaks).
One of the key lines in the report is that it says it is one half of the information that needed to be considered, the other part is the economic and harm study.
There are a wide range of options considered, several of which are not thought to be effective. An interesting one is large outdoor events do not seem to have much impact on the virus rates. Likewise closing shops has a minimal effect.
It is interesting to note that one of the restrictions considered and not put forward is closing borders between parts of the UK.
So what does the report say a circuit breaker is:
It would be a stay at home order – just like the first lockdown. Schools and universities might need to close.
It might be timed around school holidays to reduce the effect on education
A two week circuit breaker would give a four week delay (that suggests 2 week circuit breaker followed by a six week work period)
The death rate would not be reduced – it would just flatten
It would have negative effects on people (particularly poor and BAME)
It is worth remembering this report was written back in September, and the world has changed since then – for example the R value appears to have been about 0.1 lower than the assumption in September.
If you do the maths then the actual hospitalisation rate increase is just slightly higher than the rate that was predicted had a circuit breaker taken place.
So should we have gone for a circuit breaker. Really tough question – would you be willing to stay in your house for 2 weeks at a time every 2 months? Would we send university students home? Would we cancel all non-urgent hospital visits?
