Main Coronavirus / Covid-19 Discussion Thread

[Kinky Gerbil]

Thing is, I've seen 1% banded about as proof that it isn't so bad, well that 35 a day is 1% of their residents, every 3 days, that's shocking. And I take your point about the other residents not being able to go to hospital but that's kind of the point isn't it, people claim the hospitals are coping - They are, by not doing other stuff, people are dying as a direct result - As per our previous conversation on anecdotes, my sister in law is a senior blood cancer consultant, they are having to make decisions about treating the 80 year old Covid patient or the 18 year old suffering Leukemia, to hear her talk about that the situation is heartbreaking.

But again that’s completely without any context.

What’s the normal rate?

According to the google 103,000 people died in care homes in 2014 (can’t find anything else) that’s 29 people a day.

It’s not right, but that’s the same in normal times - we hear horror stories from inside the NHS (not frontline staffs fault) all the time.

 

[PILTDOWN MAN]

As far as I recall, he was not, which is startling really isn't it? A reflection on how big business can appear to do what they like and point the finger at, and reach out for financial support from the govt. Privatise the profits, socialise the losses as they say

By employment law he has a duty of care to his staff let alone his customers, therefore talk of shortages of PPE firstly is his responsibility. Quick to take the profits slow to react to spending money including even testing kits. Of course there should be help via the government or NHS but these owners of profit making organisations needs to step up as well. Probably not seen as part of the agenda by reporters.

I used to know the NHS Trust CEO in the Hasting area, unfortunately she died of cancer two months after retiring, she left her role because of political interference. She was always saying about the waste in the NHS, especially interestingly the use of PPE and consumables. As an example she would use the cost of equipment in an operation in the NHS compared to a private hospital. Because the focus is to make money in the private sector everything is accounted for unlike the NHS where it's free vend. She said the more equipment bought, the more was used, but not always necessary. I make this point because I'm convinced the here and now needs to be somewhere between the two examples. Not an easy task.

 

[BeHereNow]

Let’s see if this prediction comes true.
https://youtu.be/k4NtMlTMJ74

 

[Barham's tash]

Thing is, I've seen 1% banded about as proof that it isn't so bad, well that 35 a day is 1% of their residents, every 3 days, that's shocking. And I take your point about the other residents not being able to go to hospital but that's kind of the point isn't it, people claim the hospitals are coping - They are, by not doing other stuff, people are dying as a direct result - As per our previous conversation on anecdotes, my sister in law is a senior blood cancer consultant, they are having to make decisions about treating the 80 year old Covid patient or the 18 year old suffering Leukemia, to hear her talk about that the situation is heartbreaking.

My brother in law will become another such statistic because he should have started intravenous chemotherapy in late March and the fact he didn’t, down to Trust policy due to Covid, has meant on Saturday he was told he has months left. Nothing else can be done. Heartbreaking isn’t the word.

 

[Green Cross Code Man]

My brother in law will become another such statistic because he should have started intravenous chemotherapy in late March and the fact he didn’t, down to Trust policy due to Covid, has meant on Saturday he was told he has months left. Nothing else can be done. Heartbreaking isn’t the word.

Sincerest sympathies to you and your family in a terrible situation. So heartbreaking.

 

[The Wizard]

England 391
Scotland 60
Wales 22
NI - NA yet

Looks like around 480 or so with NI included, down significantly from previous Thursdays.

 

[The Wizard]

New chart from NHS England

 

[Machiavelli]

This is an excellent demolition of behavioural economics -- or 'nudge' theory. It also exposes that, when the government insists that it is "being guided by the science", some of it is beyond suspect. I hope that we'll get a rapid and full public inquiry into CV19 and that the role of the nudge unit is interrogated closely.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...th-coronavirus


Nudge theory is a poor substitute for hard science in matters of life or death
Sonia Sodha

Behavioural economics is being abused by politicians as a justification for flawed policies over the coronavirus outbreak

Sun 26 Apr 2020 09.30 BST

I first came across “nudge” – the concept many consider to be the pinnacle of behavioural economics – at a thinktank seminar a little over 10 years ago. We were all handed a mock wine menu and asked what we’d order.

This was supposed to illustrate that most price-aware diners order the second-cheapest bottle to avoid looking tight and that restaurateurs use this to nudge us towards the bottle with the highest markup. I remember thinking it an interesting insight, but that these sorts of nudges were nowhere near as likely to transform the world as their enthusiastic proponent claimed.

Lots of far more eminent people disagreed with me. Behavioural economics looks at how people make decisions in the real world – warts, irrational biases and all – and applies this to public policy. Its signature policy is set out in the 2008 book Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. The central insight is that changing the way choices are presented to people can have a huge impact. Make saving for retirement or donating your organs an opt-out rather than opt-in and watch as people suddenly adopt more socially responsible behaviour. Coming just as the financial crisis hit, Nudge was perfectly timed to achieve maximum traction by offering politicians the chance to reap savings through low-cost policy. Sunstein was quickly appointed to a senior job in the Obama administration, while David Cameron set up the behavioural insights team, dubbed the “nudge unit”, led by psychologist turned policy wonk David Halpern.

The nudge unit has since had a mixed track record: there have been some real successes on pensions and tax payments but in other areas it’s been a bit of a damp squib. So I was surprised when Halpern popped up to talk about the government’s pandemic strategy in the press in early March. It was he who first publicly mentioned the idea of “herd immunity” as part of an effective response to Covid-19 (the government has since denied this was ever the strategy). And it’s clear from the briefing he gave journalists that he favoured delaying a lockdown because of the risk of “behavioural fatigue”, the idea that people will stick with restrictions for only so long, making it better to save social distancing for when more people are infected. “If you go too early and tell people to take a week off work when they are very unlikely to have coronavirus, and then a couple of weeks later they have another cough, it’s likely they’ll say ‘come on already’,” he told one reporter.

Halpern is reportedly on Sage, the government’s scientific advisory committee for emergencies, and he is also the government’s What Works national adviser, responsible for helping it apply evidence to public policy. So one might expect there to be something substantial behind the idea of behavioural fatigue.

But evidence presented to government by the Sage behavioural subcommittee on 4 March, representing the views of a wider group of experts, was non-committal on the behavioural impact of a lockdown, noting that the empirical evidence on behavioural interventions in a pandemic is limited. Shortly after Halpern’s interviews, more than 600 behavioural economists wrote a letter questioning the evidence base for behavioural fatigue.

Rightly so: a rapid evidence review of behavioural science as it relates to pandemics only fleetingly refers to evidence that extending a lockdown might increase non-compliance, but this turns out to be a study about extending deployment in the armed forces. “Behavioural fatigue is a nebulous concept,” the review’s authors later concluded in the Irish Times.

This is a common critique of behavioural economics: some (not all) members of the discipline have a tendency to overclaim and overgeneralise, based on small studies carried out in a very different context, often on university students in academic settings. It’s extraordinary that Halpern was briefing on what essentially looks like his opinion as if it were science. We won’t know how influential it was in the government’s decision to delay lockdown until a post-hoc inquiry, but there’s no reason to suppose Boris Johnson wasn’t listening to his “what works” adviser. “The behavioural psychologists say that if you don’t shake somebody’s hand, that sends an important message… [about] washing your hands,” he said on 9 March.

It’s less extraordinary, though, when you understand that the Behavioural Insights Team is a multimillion-pound profitable company, which pays Halpern, who owns 7.5% of its shares, a bigger salary than the prime minister. Here lies the potential conflict of interest: someone who contributes to Sage also has a significant financial incentive to sell his wares. It perhaps explains BIT’s bombastic claims – “it’s no longer a matter of supposition… we can now say with a high degree of confidence these models give you best policy,” Halpern claimed in 2018. And: “We make much of the simplicity of our interventions… but if properly implemented, they can have a powerful impact on even our biggest societal challenges.” (It is worth noting that Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, says that one reason the composition of Sage has been kept private is to protect scientists from “lobbying and other forms of unwanted influence which may hinder their ability to give impartial advice”.)

This hubris has led some behavioural scientists to push their approach way beyond those realms such as consumer policy, where it has the potential to be most effective. My jaw dropped on reading a recent 70-page BIT report on applying behavioural insights to domestic abuse that included not one survivor’s voice and in which the word “trauma” appeared only once. It describes domestic abuse as a “phenomenon made up of multiple behaviours undertaken by different actors at different points in time”. Its recommendations are that strange mix of common sense dressed up as behavioural revelation and jarring suggestions that tend to characterise behavioural science when it overreaches itself.

Little wonder that a House of Lords committee was highly critical of government tendencies to emphasise nudges at the expense of other effective policy solutions in 2011. Nudges undoubtedly have their place, but they’re not going to eradicate domestic violence or end catastrophic climate change.

The problem with all forms of expertise in public policy is that it is often the most formidable salespeople who claim greater certainty than the evidence allows who are invited to jet around the world advising governments. But the irony for behavioural scientists is that this is a product of them trading off, and falling prey to, the very biases they have made their names calling out.

I can only imagine how easy it might have been for Johnson to succumb to confirmation bias in looking for reasons to delay a lockdown: what prime minister wants to shut down the economy? And it is the optimism bias of the behavioural tsars that has led them to place too much stock in their own judgment in a world of limited evidence. But this isn’t some experiment in a university psychology department - it is a pandemic and lives are at stake.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

New chart from NHS England

View attachment 122975

Is that true, as in from a NHS source.

Looks like we should have shielded the at risk and not a total lock down from that data.

 

[golddene]

But again that’s completely without any context.

What’s the normal rate?

According to the google 103,000 people died in care homes in 2014 (can’t find anything else) that’s 29 people a day.

It’s not right, but that’s the same in normal times - we hear horror stories from inside the NHS (not frontline staffs fault) all the time.

If your figures are correct those dying would be 282 a day !!!!

 

[RossyG]

Is that true, as in from a NHS source.

Looks like we should have shielded the at risk and not a total lock down from that data.

Yup.

 

[Napper]

Is that true, as in from a NHS source.

Looks like we should have shielded the at risk and not a total lock down from that data.

wonder how many at risk survived this. Not reported

 

[BeHereNow]

Sir Patrick Vallance said:

“It’s worth remembering, again, that the ONS rates are people who’ve got Covid on their death certificates, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were infected because many of them haven’t been tested.”

They are the facts and I like hearing the facts, maybe I’ll grow out of it.

 

[mikeyjh]

But again that’s completely without any context.

What’s the normal rate?

According to the google 103,000 people died in care homes in 2014 (can’t find anything else) that’s 29 people a day.

It’s not right, but that’s the same in normal times - we hear horror stories from inside the NHS (not frontline staffs fault) all the time.

The context was in my previous post. The company concerned had an average of 20 per day in April 2019, 60-70 in April 2020, I'm not sure what I can add to that.

 

[mikeyjh]

My brother in law will become another such statistic because he should have started intravenous chemotherapy in late March and the fact he didn’t, down to Trust policy due to Covid, has meant on Saturday he was told he has months left. Nothing else can be done. Heartbreaking isn’t the word.

Not much to to say, very sorry for your and the family....

 

[Triggaaar]

Sir Patrick Vallance said:

“It’s worth remembering, again, that the ONS rates are people who’ve got Covid on their death certificates, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were infected because many of them haven’t been tested.”

They are the facts and I like hearing the facts, maybe I’ll grow out of it.

It's unlikely you'll grow out of it just yet, it seems you've only just grown into it. You didn't seem that fussed about facts 2 days ago. There's a big difference between Covid being reported on a death certificate because it's believed by the doctors to being a contributory factor, and Covid being reported when the patient repeatedly tests negative. You seem to be suggesting that the government are trying to secretly inflate the figures, but Patrick Vallance is being quite open about how deaths are being recorded.

View attachment 122900
View attachment 122901
View attachment 122902
View attachment 122903

 

[Weststander]

Peston says we possibly have the worst death toll in Europe.

Belgium per capita 655
Spain per capita 525, which excludes the estimated 57% who died in care homes and they still exclude.
Italy 463, with many Italian sauces repeatedly saying they’ve excluded huge numbers of deaths.
UK 384
France 369

 

[darkwolf666]

My brother in law will become another such statistic because he should have started intravenous chemotherapy in late March and the fact he didn’t, down to Trust policy due to Covid, has meant on Saturday he was told he has months left. Nothing else can be done. Heartbreaking isn’t the word.

So so sorry to hear that... Terrible for all concerned, all the best from here in Kent

 

[beorhthelm]

Is that true, as in from a NHS source.

Looks like we should have shielded the at risk and not a total lock down from that data.

yes, was not a politically acceptable approach though. especially shield those frail in hospital or carehomes, who in retrospect may have been put at risk or increased by other actions.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

The context was in my previous post. The company concerned had an average of 20 per day in April 2019, 60-70 in April 2020, I'm not sure what I can add to that.

How many homes - which has been answered - 320 hundred odd

Which puts the figure in a completely different light

No one is trying to put a positive spin on death - just stopping the mass hysteria making it sound like everyone in care homes is dying.