London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
2 cases in particular stand out to me:
Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to why you're not wearing a mask.
Supermarkets continue to be rammed, but staff aren't required to wear masks. Nor are they enforcing the requirement on customers beyond the door. One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning. Wtf aren't staff required to wear masks?
The attitude here is rapidly becoming "why should I bother if no one else is?". And frankly, I think the government know and encourage this. Its all but policy. Time and again we see them decline scientific advice, then act surprised when infection rates spike.
I'm especially frustrated as my best friend lives in Melbourne. Despite lockdown starting at basically the same time, and some crazy bad luck/incidents, Melbourne is back to BAU.
I remember the 2011 riots, courts were run 24h a day, sentences were extreme and people were tired and convicted the same day as the offense. That's very heavy handed. But that shows you the priority here.
Sensible legislation never rushed but forward thinking is the only option, not running kangaroo legal system suddenly.
And the people outside the supermarket who grab the dirty spray bottle handled by 500 people already, clean their trolley handle but not their hands, then put the mask on their face handling it, then rub their eye and go shopping.
Humans stupid.
At the end of the day this whole thing is dependent on the weakest link and there are a lot of weak links in society.
I think the general more aggressive Spanish way of communicating helps a lot.
where? my counter-anecdote is I've taken to counting everyone on the carriage I'm on (between zone 2 and 1), and it's never more than 2-3 people without a mask, something like 90-95% compliance (seems down from a few months ago, though). in supermarkets it seems higher than that, to the extent I was quite weirded out to see a single person not wearing a mask last week.
And of course on the rare occasion a staff member challenges someone not wearing a mask, they claim they're exempt and don't have to provide any proof.
But this isn't really true: "One staff member with covid will rapidly infect a few 1000 people given how busy they are on a Saturday morning.
Covid is pretty contagious, but you really need to be around someone for ~15 minutes to have a good chance of infecting them. Superspreading events can occur, but they are fairly rare.
I bet supermarkets aren't big transmission vectors.
...if you are the only one around them who is infectious.
> If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (~21 feet) and 4.8m (~15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.
Does that mean that someone has to breath in my virus for 15 minutes before there's enough of it inside them to infect them?
Or does it mean that if I'm the infected staff member constantly spewing virus near an ever-changing cast of shoppers, I can expect to infect about 4 people an hour, some of whom were near me for only seconds?
This one. Kinda. The timing may vary, and it's a risk distribution, so there are tails on the low and high ends.
While it might take some time for an infected person in close proximity to push a specific second person across some risk threshold in a 1-on-1 interaction, that's not the scenario we're worried about.
We're worried about how many people an infected person might infect during many, many interactions.
Even if the probability of infection is low in a single 2 minute interaction, some people in service jobs have thousands of interactions a day. (not all one-on-one).
I think that is probably true, after all we continued to buy groceries right through the lockdown period and cases remained low.
1) hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and
2) less people die unnecessarily
they need binary good/bad cause/effect edicts, like children. state and municipal governments are poorly catering to their own velocity based directives, and the juvenile more simplistic expectations of their population.
As I said - there are other factors here (many more than I mentioned) - that you can't compare countries so easily.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/drericlevi/status/132282229786701...
[1] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...
However there are several contributing factors and it certainly doesn’t come down to mask use as the primary one as mask discipline in the UK hasn’t been bad in my experience.
This is a seasonal disease (the main reason for the UK summer reprieve), and it’s now summer in Australia, and they have also been far better at quarantines and contact tracing and have used this period wisely to get the disease under control. All these factors matter in a response, and the UK has suffered from panic management and a lack of difficult measures at the right time and is now entering the peak season for this sort of virus so things will get worse for a month or two at least, even with a new lockdown.
I'm all for managing the virus spread but if the policies are a piece of meat, in the UK the policies are uncooked in Melbourne they were burnt.
The .au epidemiologists I've heard on NPR have made it clear that what worked in Melbourne was everything they did, including a lockdown and including contact tracing.
Melbourne started their lockdown in winter. Everyone obeyed it. It was strongly enforced [1, 2]. They beat coronavirus. And now they can enjoy their summer.
I live in London. At one point in the summer, our covid rates were lower than Melbourne's. But the UK's messaging was confused and contradictory ("eat out to help out", test and trace was shambolic, rules were not enforced). So no one is the least surprised that it has got out of control again so quickly.
[1] My parents live half an hour's drive from Melbourne. Police stopped every car on the highways to enforce no travel, fined the drivers and made them turn back home.
[2] One party of 26 people got busted ordering KFC to the same address and fined $26,000.
>The Avalon cluster has grown to 38, with 21 out of yesterday's 23 cases linked to it and another two still under investigation.
It isn't fair and might not even be entirely honest to describe this to a (mostly US) audience with a phrase like "numbers seem to be up again".
The trigger for Australia to go back into lockdown would be considered a giant fat ignorable nothingburger in almost every part of the US.
Short lockdown maybe, back to normal soon, not too many other places will be able to brag about that.
We will be able to save all the lives prior to vaccination that nations with less willpower seem willing to spend.
I don't live in the UK, just explaining how I read this comment.
So much of what governments are doing in response to this are just cargo cult science. We've had ample time to run proper controlled trials for much of this stuff -- the Danes were able to do so with masks [1], and there was a big study of gyms out of Norway [2] -- it's simply pathetic that our governments mostly haven't bothered.
[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20138768v...
Treating R, the number of infections from each case, as though it was the same everywhere is just a way of simplifying the model, but the map is not the territory and we need to be a lot more careful about whether our simplifying assumptions change the overall behaviour of the system being modelled than we have been.
In effect masks buy you a more open environment where people can leave their homes and do more stuff. Further, when locations decide to shutdown that shutdown is more effective.
You're grinding an axe here, but it has little to do with what I wrote.
Masks are effortless, but there is also a lot of reason to believe they are not nearly as effective as was sold to people in the early summer.
At some point we get into "just wear a crucifix to ward off the Devil" territory of superstition.
Masks are obviously helpful at preventing transmission of some illnesses, but I've seen enough evidence that Coronavirus spreads via aerosol to not really trust the things.
Imagine you are standing close to someone at a party who starts talking to you. You immediately notice their bad breath (~aerosols). Now imagine they are wearing a mask, then imagine you both are. How much of the bad breath would you still notice in each case? That's the effect of masks.
Mayeb you can post some (preferably peer-reviewed) literature links that show "a lot of reason" to believe this.
---------------
Data regarding the “real-world” effectiveness of community masking are limited to observational and epidemiological studies.
* An investigation of a high-exposure event, in which 2 symptomatically ill hair stylists interacted for an average of 15 minutes with each of 139 clients during an 8-day period, found that none of the 67 clients who subsequently consented to an interview and testing developed infection. The stylists and all clients universally wore masks in the salon as required by local ordinance and company policy at the time.
* In a study of 124 Beijing households with > 1 laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, mask use by the index patient and family contacts before the index patient developed symptoms reduced secondary transmission within the households by 79%.
* A retrospective case-control study from Thailand documented that, among more than 1,000 persons interviewed as part of contact tracing investigations, those who reported having always worn a mask during high-risk exposures experienced a greater than 70% reduced risk of acquiring infection compared with persons who did not wear masks under these circumstances.
* A study of an outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an environment notable for congregate living quarters and close working environments, found that use of face coverings on-board was associated with a 70% reduced risk.
* Investigations involving infected passengers aboard flights longer than 10 hours strongly suggest that masking prevented in-flight transmissions, as demonstrated by the absence of infection developing in other passengers and crew in the 14 days following exposure.
------------
Taken from: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien...
All of these studies were conducted on data from the spring, when cases were declining across the northern hemisphere. How are these places doing now?
DC: up dramatically
https://covid-19.direct/metro/DC
Canada: all-time highs
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/canada/
Germany: all-time highs
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
US nationally: all-time highs
California: all-time highs
https://covid-19.direct/state/CA
New York: up dramatically
https://covid-19.direct/state/NY
Boston (where the "unified hospital system" was located): near all-time highs
https://covid-19.direct/metro/Boston
I could go on.
Anyone who attempted to conduct a similar analysis today would have to credibly conclude that masks have no protective effect whatsoever. But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
The german paper is particularly ironic, given that it was published approximately concurrently with a huge increase in diagnosed cases in the same city, which is now at all-time highs for the year:
Absolutely not the case. It would be just as credible, as has been noted by others in the comments here, to suggest that the major cause of spread is unmasked private gatherings.
> But who knows...maybe they slightly alter the slope of the curve. It's impossible to tell without a controlled trial.
I agree that without controlled trials, it is very difficult to tell definitively. That does not, however, translate into "there are lots of reasons to doubt ..."
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1.8%) and 53 control participants (2.1%). The between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38) (odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23]; P = 0.33). Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.
> Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.
> The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection.
I don't think any public health experts are saying "wear a mask and you'll be safe", they're saying "if everybody wears a mask, that will slow the infection rate". A study of a community with "uncommon general mask use" does not dispute this.
Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question. Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
"Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."
The points you are raising about limitations in no way affect the conclusion of the work. Short of putting infected people in a room with uninfected people, there is no ethical way to test the hypothesis that "masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others".
But since it's pretty unlikely that masks are effective in one direction only, this is the highest-quality evidence we have that they have no effect in one of the two directions.
> Finally, I don't think it's clear that a randomized controlled trial is the best method to answer this question.
A randomized controlled trial is always the gold standard for an intervention of this sort. But yeah, you can't do one for that hypothesis. So you're stuck with something that is fundamentally un-falsifiable. The best you can do is try to do what people have done so far: look at populations, and see if mask mandates make any difference, or ask people who caught Covid if they wore masks, or do similar things within families.
This is called retrospective cohort analysis, and it is low-quality evidence, at best.
> Aside from ethical concerns, you can't give someone a placebo mask. Shouldn't we assume that people will behave differently when they're wearing a mask?
Yes, we should assume that this might happen. It could well be true that wearing a mask makes people be more careless about distancing, for example. This is called "risk compensation", and is a well-known phenomenon in public health.
1. do masks inhibit production of and exposure to aerosols carrying SARS-COV-2? This seems (to me) to me clearly established, and essentially irrefutable.
2. do mask mandates reduce the spread of COVID19? this is an entirely different question, and has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the abilities of masks referenced in (1) above.
Aerosols? It's far from established. In fact, it's a dubious claim, unless you're far more specific about what you mean by "masks". The best laboratory studies show that properly fitted respirators (i.e. as used in hospitals), can reduce aerosol emissions. But few people are wearing respirators, and essentially nobody is fitting them correctly.
Cloth masks? Surgical masks? Cup masks? About the only claim you can make is that they might reduce heavy droplets and then, only by about 30% or so. There's no reason to believe they have any effect on aerosol emission.
Michael Osterholm covered this extensively:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia...
Anyone who has done a mask fitting -- where they put you in a room with vaporized stuff that you can taste to detect leaks -- will tell you how difficult it is to get an aerosol-resistant seal on a mask. The chances that the general public is doing it is 0%.
“ Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.”
Also, I quoted this exact line in a comment below, so I'm not sure how you can credibly claim that I'm "mis-representing" something.
I see little to no compliance with customers or shop keepers in places like that.
I also saw lots of maskless partying and social drinking in November.
This is the bigger problem.
Did someone claim it was? The name of the game is and has always been suppressing the transmission rate of the virus. Masks are a low impact way to help a little bit towards that goal, nothing more.
Here's what Biden said:
> The first day I'm inaugurated to say I'm going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days.
Again, he didn't say that wearing a mask is enough, but with the 100-day timeline, reading between the lines, he's saying it will drive down the case count.
It started as just two weeks to flatten the curve, remember.
I got Covid from community transmission. I quarantined in my house, away from my wife, and wore a mask 24/7.
She didn't get my Covid.
Masks work, but people have to bloody well use them.
Out of curiosity, did she get tested? What about for antibodies?
She didn't get tested for antibodies as the health system has far more important things to deal with right now in the US, unfortunately.
I never got it.
An anecdote means very little, and certainly is not evidence that masks work without controls for every other thing that might have prevented you from getting infected.
Could it be ocular transmission?
https://www.ajmc.com/view/can-wearing-eyeglasses-mitigate-co...
They always believed in "herd immunity", so they're going to run with the minimum restrictions that achieve an ""acceptable"" death rate.
We still don't have a great picture of what's driving the infections, due to the failure of track&trace. I suspect it's schools, universities, workplaces, and (unfortunately) hospitals, but I don't have handy evidence for that.
Having Folkestone jammed with containers of undistributed PPE while the clock runs down to the Brexit logistics crisis isn't helping either.
Anyway, the Tory public have been inexplicably satisfied with the performance so far, and are probably going to widely ignore the last-minute changes to Christmas rules.
Getting the measures right gets rid of covid and lets people get back to normal. Bad measures give the worst of both worlds, prolonging the problem.
If there were a country with the nerve to have no 'measures' at all, they would have herd immunity, a pile of corpses, some long-term health conditions from covid (that we will have, too- everyone's getting this thing), no long-term health conditions from everyone being locked in their homes for a year, no year+ fucking of the economy, less consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, less of an immediate risk of an increase in authoritarianism via increasing the power of the local government...
For some size of 'a discrepancy in the pile of corpses (from this year)', I would, if I could push a button and switch to the world where people were left to do as they may, push it. A lot of people would, too, it's just too callous and inhuman to admit that yeah, sorry, if you're 85 and going to die in 3 years from the flu anyway your continued life might not be worth the price of greatly inconveniencing a 25-year-old for a year.
Authoritative collectivist monocultures are doing great with this pandemic, and that is practically the only combination that has a grip on things.
Our (UK) response has been a bit of a clusterfuck so far, we're not a good example to judge by.
Barnard Castle alone probably killed thousands, the way this government is doing contracts is probably criminal, we fucked up the T&T for months etc. etc. etc. etc.
Voting Mr Bean into office would constitute a comedy of errors; but what we have now (when you also throw Brexit into the mix) is far from funny.
> time period during which the UK would've had to do this for it to be effective
.. lies roughly from Feburary to the present day. No reason to allow travel from countries with significant prevalence.
> all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive, xenophobic and made things worse
[citation needed]
[citation needed]
Let's reverse the burden of evidence, and request [citation needed] for your implicit claim that the open borders lobby is not relevant here?
> the WHO and all the right-thinking people were insisting that border restrictions were counterproductive,
I'd argue that these were very much the wrong-thinking people. And that the WHO advice has been pretty terrible throughout. It seems obvious to me that closing borders is appropriate in a pandemic. The UK still hasn't done this. Lots of people were going abroad on holiday between lockdowns.
I'm not familiar with freight in Europe, so please excuse the diversion.
They drive freight vehicles onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle or on ferries? I'm guessing this isn't containerized freight, which would seem to make sense to transfer to freight rail (at least to cross the channel).
Both, although more volume goes through the ferries. (tunnel trains is 1.5 million trucks a year or something in that ballpark if I remember correctly)
With the very porous border, there is little lost time through checks -- it was easy to send the driver all the way from Germany to Manchester. I think from leaving the French motorway to driving onto the British one takes about an hour by lorry-on-train.
By ferry, it's little different than going from Germany to Denmark by ferry. They will glance at the passport as well as the ticket.
Boarding the train : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8r0kjJvvIY
(Cars go on a different train, enclosed and you stay in your car.)
“To put this into context, there are about 6,000 vehicles we would expect, just under in Dover today, probably I’d say 4,000 would have gone across from Dover, just under 2,000 on the Eurotunnel,” he said.
“But there’s probably something like 32,000 units that would have been the daily total so the vast majority including virtually all the vaccine actually comes via container.”
Containers will mostly be on ships, but some will come on normal freight trains. (Eurotunnel is the lorries-on-trains service.)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/france-ban-uk-...
(One of the world's biggest airports, several of Europe's busiest, frequent direct rail connection to the continent, frequent ferries on many routes, fully integrated free trade + work zone.)
"According to Getlink, the company which operates the Channel Tunnel, 1.64 million trucks traveled between the UK and the EU using the crossing last year. More than 2.5 million cars made the crossing, as did 51,229 buses and 2,012 freight trains.
Added to the even greater volumes of truck crossings made on ferries — the Port of Dover handled a record 2.6 million trucks in 2017, according to its own figures — it accounts for a massive annual volume."
People love to make excuses or put up obstructions to an idea, but solutions are almost always achievable with a little planning, resources and the will to make it happen.
It's the willingness and ability to take effective measures, not the geography, that matters.
Australia has a lower population than California, by the way. Obviously, its pop is mostly spread over the east coast, but compared to the UK it's extremely sparse, with no tunnels connecting it to the mainland. It's disingenuous (at best) to think that the island nations that had successful lockdowns were all doing something magically better than other places with significant restrictions to daily life like France, Italy, California, etc. because they couldn't realistically close their borders to ground traffic.
And obviously you can close a land border as well, it's just a matter of whether you're willing to do it. Australia also imposed tight restrictions on most of the land borders between states.
Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).
You could call them sensible, mature, selfless societies.
Either way one cuts it, the UK is neither.
Authoritative:
I don't consider less-inclusive political systems worse. They have best, average and worse cases, where the problem is that they get worst case many times over. A benevolent dictatorship is capable of getting the best case results, the predictable threat is that their replacement will not be capable of stewarding resources the same way.
Whereas more inclusive political systems get average case results more reliably and it is practically impossible to get a best case result with a lot of energy continually necessary to avoid worst case results.
Collectivist:
I don't consider collectivist to be a pejorative term and don't know of any context where it is. You picked a synonym, selfless.
Monoculture:
Just a fact of life. Where monocultures help them be able to predict what their neighbor does and trust that result, then large-scale immediate coordination without the state is easy. It isn't impossible for a multicultural society to achieve the same benefits, its also not happening. Unlike others that might use this word, I am not making any statement on a preferred living arrangement.
Oh I don't know, socialism scares republican voters shitless, I wouldn't be surprised if collectivism did too.
These words are not inherently insults regardless of how allergic other people are to adjectives.
All good though.
They are great at controlling the flow of information.
Collectivist definitely help.
Australia is in summer, so it would make more sense to compare it to the UK’s summer, if you insist on comparing two countries with very different population densities (a key factor in the spread of COVID-19).
[0] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...
[1] https://twitter.com/drericlevi/status/1322822297867018240?s=...
yes I know I posted essentially the same information to two comments, I apologise for the spam
I don't think this has been the case since September. Admittedly too late, IMO, but I think it has been the law since then.
Where masks are not worn here is in smaller family owned businesses. Some have notices requiring masks on the door, some (many) do not, even though it's a state mandate.
Since this is the US, we have no public transport so I can't comment on that.
I don't know, I'd like to call this Angevin idiocy or something. But yeah, Europe does have its fair share of covidiots too.
1) you wouldn’t (shouldn’t?) go around with your dick hanging out of your trousers, so why would you do the same with your nose and your mask
2) you’re a dick if you do this
Outdoor mask use is limited (50%?) but at least quite sparse and distant (it's pretty cold, and wet, and everyone drives anyways.) Indoors the numbers are much higher (I'm guessing at least 90%), including for smaller businesses. I'm trying to think of a single business around here (small or large) without at least a sign saying you need to mask up before entry, and I'm drawing a blank. Several have soap dispensers too, and haphazard plexiglass sheets to help physically separate staff from customers.
Food is strictly delivery and take-out. Even when dine-in was still AFAIK legal, some places had it already voluntarilly closed off anyways.
Compliance is very high (>95%?), but the people who do not comply are basically the same people who were problems in the Before Times: belligerent, mentally ill, or both. The drivers almost always let them get away with it, again just as in the Before Times, probably because it's a risk to even interact with these people. I, for one, try very hard not to make eye contact with them or even look in their general direction; treating them like the Bugblatter Beast of Traal is at least moderately effective.
I do wish they wouldn't flash the stupid "Masks Required" on the route signs so often, though. It makes it a lot harder to tell which bus is actually arriving. And showing it on the route indicator on the _back_ of the coach is just spiteful.
Or maybe they're one of 12,943 medical and public health scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration [0].
> Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.
Wearing a mask seems like a simple hygine measure to me.
Perhaps a signator might not wear a mask as a measure of protest against government "overreach", disregarding that part of the declaration, disregarding the law, and disregarding the risk of their actions to the health of their fellow citizens.
That last bit seems rather hostile. Rather belligerent. So I think we're right back to square one.
There are reasonable discussions and lawsuits to be had about how far is too far, and what reasonable public policy looks like. Even arguing on the internet sounds more productive to me than not wearing a mask as "protest" though.
To use a local(ish) example to me, Multnomah County in Oregon has about 815K people, and 3800 that are either living on the streets, in a shelter, or in temporary housing. That's 0.4%. Portland is known for having a homeless problem.
In the UK if someone is on the street and needs a place to stay there are shelters in every town. Nationally there are about 4,000 people that sleep rough, although most of the people that do suffer from addiction or mental illness. Many choose not to go to shelters because you have to be sober to stay in them.
What do you mean you have no public transport? Is it cancelled because of covid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un...
(typically with subsidies or other provisions for paratransit)
Also: younger kids are ferried back and forth to school in special yellow busses that are only used for school service. So actually there _is_ a widespread public transport service all over the US but people don't think of it as such because it's run by the schools and only usable by school kids. Some companies run their own busses too for their workers, to and from the plant, to suit shift hours.
Is it policy for the officers to pull one out and say 'you do now'?
Supermarkets do that sometimes at the door and good for them. But at this point, I'm tired of people "forgetting". I think it's time for actual enforcement.
I haven't worn a mask twice. Once because I forgot it and once because I just forgot to put it on.
If "I don't have one" isn't an acceptable excuse what am I supposed to do: produce one out of thin air? It's not like they give out free ones if you forget. There are so many signs now that they're basically invisible. If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.
Why the hell not? Seems like the very first thing they should be doing.
I have one in my car, a spare in my backpack, keep one in my jacket pocket, and a cheap disposable in my wallet folded up. That way if I forget, I'll have one.
My city in Australia had a grace period for everyone to get a mask. After that a lot of fines were handed out.
Without fines I doubt we'd have seen compliance anywhere near as high because there are a lot of people who don't want to wear them but do because they fear the fine.
When hardly anyone is wearing a mask you feel a bit weird or silly.
When half the people are wearing masks you look at the people who are and aren't and can't help but wonder which side is your in-group.
When fines are enforced, everyone has an "excuse" to wear a mask. Darn fines.
Then, when everyone is wearing a mask you feel naked if you don't have one. Only the seriously anti-social will defect.
How is it that after nearly 10 months of this would you not have a mask?
Do you also think that "sorry officer, I didn't realise that getting completely sloshed and then driving was illegal, what am I supposed to to? Suddenly sober up?"
> If I'm fined for not wearing it I'll stop wearing it entirely.
This makes absolutely no sense.
So you want to be fined daily because you got fined once for not wearing a mask during a pandemic?
And people don't understand why it's spreading so much.
That's like saying
> I was fined for dangerous driving, and because of this I'm now only going to drive on the wrong side of the road.
For some reason we can manage to prevent drunk agro people entering a club with the wrong shoes, but 8 months into a pandemic we can’t make people wear a bloody mask? It’s insane.
The government are partly to blame for making rules so haphazardly that even someone like me who reads EVERYTHING and wants to do the right thing 100% of the time finds them hard to be sure of.
But ultimately people have to start taking the blame for not even doing the basics or following the letter of the law but not the spirit - nose slingers are the prime example of this.
I’ve just decided to go my own much more stringent path and ignore dumb government advice.
At least in the US, dress codes in nightclubs exist as a deterrent to individuals with gang affiliations. It's pretty racist.
Guess which race anti-maskers are predominantly.
Here's video from one (St Pancras, about 35m people per normal year) today: https://twitter.com/scattermoon/status/1340393706009079812?s...
Most people appear to be wearing masks, but still it's not ideal.
That is an enormous over-exaggeration. It's a virus, not a magic spell. Plus, employees are not required to wear masks, but customers are.
> Time and again we see them decline scientific advice
Which scientific advice have they declined? So far as I can see, Boris is entirely under the influence of SAGE and does nothing without "scientific advice".
That's exactly my point.
He ignored calls for a September "circuit breaker", then had to panic in October.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/world/boris-johnson-ignor...
This article lists a host of other times scientists have been ignored then proven right:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-government-boris-johnson-...
And I've had a friend who wanted to beat the travel restrictions by leaving London before midnight. That's rule beating.
I see it everywhere.
A PSA because it's important: I can promise future you would rather remember "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas we had to stay home?" over "dang, do you remember that shit Christmas that someone accidentally gave Mum covid and she died because we REALLY wanted Christmas with the family in the middle of a pandemic". It really isn't worth it. Not right now. Just be patient and wait.
The biggest lie is that if you're under 30 you're immune. You're not - not even slightly. You're far less likely to die than someone who is 85 and obese with diabetes and high blood pressure. But no one knows what the long term health implications are for younger people who make a partial recovery. And there's been a non-negligible number of those.
This is why the idea of chasing herd immunity without a vaccine has always been misguided
Regarding your PSA: In the mean time Taiwan has not had a quarantine at all, and has been free of (internal) Covid for over 200 days. Other SE-Asian countries are all doing very well, Japan for example does not have quarantine either.
European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH
The point about test and trace plus limited lockdowns is that you can play whack-a-mole with clusters, which does a far better job of preventing transmission than anything short of a vaccine.
Countries with aggressive test and trace and compulsory self-isolation have done best of all - and with limited economic damage.
None of this should be rocket science, but apparently it's not a priority for the UK government which has literally used a deadly pandemic as an excuse to hand out billions of pounds of public cash to mates, cronies, and party donors. With no expectation of any effective service provision in return.
Literally. That is not exaggeration in any way. It's on the record - including some court records - that the UK gov has been doing this.
aggressive test and trace
compulsory self-isolation
An interesting question is why that has not been possible in European countries. A high-ranking politician of my acquaintance stated privately, and very clearly, that it was exaggerated concern for privacy (of a population that has no concern using the products of Facebook, Google and similar trackers, not to mention mobile phones), stoked by a "privacy maffia", made meaningful test and trace (along the lines of Taiwan and other SE Asian states) political suicide, which is why him and others, despite knowing better, did not bother floating this.
I think it's less because the disease doesn't affect them, and more because the restrictions do. If you're living as a family unit then restrictions are tough, but it's something else entirely if you're a single person living alone (or with people you don't like).
Indeed I've seen a similar attitude (although perhaps less actual rule breaking) from at-risk old people saying damn the rules, they'd like to see their relatives.
Not that I think this excuses it.
European lock-down policies have been a monumental failure. Not good enough to stop the spread. But ruining the economy (and everybody's fun). It is truly remarkable that Europeans agree with being locked away for nearly one year now with little to show for, while other societies achieve much better results with different, and less drastic measures. No curiosity at all, it seems, even to understand why Taiwan, Japan and other countries succeed! SMH
Educational 108
Hospital 42
Care home 38
Workplace 20
Other 10
Prisons 1
Food outlet/restaurant 1
Schools, hospitals, care homes, and workplaces account for the huge majority of spread. There's no empirical reason to think either tube trains or supermarkets are the problem.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-flu-and-co...
Of the traced outbreaks, most were in schools. But that is not really a surprise, as outbreaks in schools are really easy to trace. If you have a group of 25 students which basically spend 40 hours a week together and they all get sick, super obvious. But how do you trace clients of a restaurant back to a restaurant? You mostly don't.
My reading of these lists is as a mix between places that are easy to trace, and places where really a lot of infections are happening. It is hard to tell which are which and which are both. Not to mention where the other missing 80% of cases came from.
Weirdly I see slightly different numbers... Table 2 on page number 26 of the first pdf? Sorry if I'm looking in the wrong place...
Either way, I think this relies on contact tracing data, but contact tracing doesn't happen on trains or in supermarkets (super markets are exempt why exactly? No one knows). That's why their zeros...
The wearing of masks by retail employees has been mandatory in England since 24th September [1].
Up here in Manchester I don't recall seeing any supermarket workers not wearing them. I can easily believe that conditions in London are different though.
[1] https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/09/face-masks-made...
Is that really so? As I recall the viral load has to cross a minimal threshold before infection develops, and even then the lower the load the milder the illness.
A store employee with his mouth shut whom you pass by in about 3 seconds is a far cry from someone who is singing at you at 10 ft distance for an hour, or eating and chatting for that same hour.
I assume the large majority of tube users are the non compliant, simply because so few of the compliant have any reason to actually need to use the tube, so your 50% doesn't surprise me at all, certainly not that it's low.
Apparently the enforcement and compliance with the rules is night and day different here. They described London as a place with rules that everyone just ignores.
The rules stopped being followed some time ago, and I'll tell you why.
We can't believe in the government anymore, and it's because there's been too many cases of one rule for the people, one for the rulers. Multiple government level staff have been caught breaking the rules. Cummings was maybe the most egregious case, a known positive driving hundreds of miles to his parents, who is then protected by the PM from sacking. On top of that, when he actually did get sacked it was due to a petty internal power struggle months later, with no mention of the breach. Then there was the scientist with the affair, the MP who took the train back to Scotland, and so on. Plus stories of cronyism in who was given contracts to service the covid needs.
I can see why people think the rules are a theatre. They obviously don't think the rules matter, or that it matters whether we get the required projects done by competent people.
We elected a talker to waffle his way through the Brexit negotiations. That would have worked, because those treaties are impenetrable to normal people; He can do a bit of clever rhetoric to talk up this or that point, and nobody is any wiser because they won't know what it's like to be a cheese import business with no voice in the media. Now the game is up, because you can't talk your way out of a global pandemic, it's too far from normal politics to have practiced stepping around.
Just been to the Tesco at Roneo Corner in Havering (1 borough further out than Barking and Dageham).
38 customers without a mask inside the store (excludes kids even teens, excludes anyone with a pointless visor, excludes anyone with a green and yellow lanyard which means they're exempt).
8 members of staff without a mask (again, excluding as above).
Highlights include:
* a woman in Islamic dress with a head scarf and eye veil, she had covered every inch of her skin EXCEPT for her mouth and nose.
* a staff member with a managers badge and no mask
* a parent who took off his mask and gave it to his baby to play with once he was inside
* an aisle with about 40 people crammed in looking at the discount section with a staff member with no mask holding a "2m social distance" sign and getting in people's way, but not stopping them or asking anyone to move on!?
> Several aspects of this cluster are noteworthy for epidemiological and biological reasons and we report preliminary findings below. In summary: The B.1.1.7 lineage accounts for an increasing proportion of cases in parts of England. The number of B.1.1.7 cases, and the number of regions reporting B.1.1.7 infections, are growing. B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein. Three of these mutations have potential biological effects that have been described previously to varying extents:
> - Mutation N501Y is one of six key contact residues within the receptor-binding domain (RBD) and has been identified as increasing binding affinity to human and murine ACE2.
> - The spike deletion 69-70del has been described in the context of evasion to the human immune response but has also occurred a number of times in association with other RBD changes.
> - Mutation P681H is immediately adjacent to the furin cleavage site, a known location of biological significance.
> The rapid growth of this lineage indicates the need for enhanced genomic and epidemiological surveillance worldwide and laboratory investigations of antigenicity and infectivity.
https://www.cogconsortium.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Repo...
https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...
It might be that after you contracted COVID once, or a particular strain of COVID once, that you have a heightened immune response and less severe symptoms when you do catch the disease again. It is hard to say for sure what is going on from an isolated case, but this certainly doesn't bode well.
How doesn't it bode well? If you get one strain of covid, get over it, then catch another strain and your symptoms are much less than the first time due to your body having the proper defenses against covid, then that's your immune system working as intended.
For covid there’s no data yet, but my hunch says it reduces spread only slightly.
Could this possibly continued infection lead to faster mutation, or is the amount of people infected the cause for the rapid mutations, or something else?
In terms of this strain, the actual rate of mutation is higher (5.6E-4 nucleotide changes/site/year vs 5.3E-4) [https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...]
Is that a concern here?
The short answer is that 'The extent to which SARS-CoV-2 may evolve to escape immunity induced by infection or vaccination is not currently known'. However analysis has been carried out to work out how far from the receptor-binding site the mutations are, and how 'antibody-accessible' these are, with a few such as . No conclusions are drawn from this analysis.
Earlier on in the report (towards the end of page 1), this statement is given `One of these (the N501Y mutation) occurs in the region of the Spike protein, the receptor binding domain (RBD), that the virus uses to bind to the human ACE2 receptor. Changes in this region of the Spike protein can result in the virus changing its ACE2 binding specificity and alter antibody recognition`.
Saying all this, vaccines are designed to create a range of antibody responses, in order to stop this very fear of a single mutation rendering a whole vaccine useless. [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02544-6] I also recall reading somewhere that adapting the vaccine to account for a mutation (much like is done yearly with the flue vaccine) is relatively easy, though I haven't managed to find that article again yet.
That's my laymen's guess at the end - even if spike changes too much we can just fire up a new yearly vaccine, maybe bundle with the flu.
By tracking the growth of that strain then reckon it's 70% more easily spread. That could be statistical fluke due to a series of superspreader events or something like that but it seems less likely day by day.
See here for strain analysis https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1340327606303027201
E.g. see graph here
https://twitter.com/The_Soup_Dragon/status/13403496399466291...
Edit: complete conjecture but if new strain is more infectious but less dangerous it might actually be helpful in the long run as it might displace other strains. Fingers crossed
https://twitter.com/Davewwest/status/1339918672811462657?s=2...
https://twitter.com/avds/status/1340355825471287299?s=20
https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1340010730687492096...
This one shows high rates for Medway: https://twitter.com/RP131/status/1338158031067033601?s=20
California, Germany, Korea, Japan...
We don’t consider whether the reaction has been worse than the virus, but that’s because there’s so much political reputation, ego, and identity staked on having been “level-headed” about all this.
We have the solutions, we just refuse to do what it takes to solve it.
Western nations are taking half measures with poor enforcement, and blaming individuals for failures that should be attributed to institutions.
China welds people in their houses and forcibly enters homes and drags family to some location. I have no desire to emulate them.
If you want to get rid of the virus, you can, but you have to suck up the costs: shut down your borders and do whatever it takes. Close down internal travel: domestic flights were virtually shutdown in NZ; Ozzie’s had other overland travel restrictions between states etcetera. Stay at home: fuck the economy for a while, but then you all can relax.
NZ is about the same size and population as Oregon, so a single state could choose to do it, if they were willing to face up to the implications of the choice.
There is still time to do it now, to give yourselves enough time to vaccinate people that would be network nodes in the transmission graph, and health workers, and the at-risk population.
Or be honest like Sweden and decide that some deaths and chronic repercussions are acceptable costs (versus the alternative economic and human damage.)
But don’t give lame just-right excuses like “Australia is an island with a population almost half California.” Oz has a higher population than every other state except Texas, so....
[1] https://tia.org.nz/about-the-industry/quick-facts-and-figure...
In other words immiserate anyone who’s not a comfortable white-collar person that can hole up in their home, Zoom to work, and dispatch immigrants to deliver food
I personally don’t know of any restaurant that had to close due to Covid (and most restaurants are close to the edge during normal times).
My friends on unemployment benefits and requiring state healthcare would prefer not to be, in other circumstances, but they muddle through e.g. one friend needed emergency care the other day (free), and another friend needs their gall-bladder removed (free). And Covid is low (or no) risk even for the most unlucky jobs.
Unemployment benefits and the aged pension were raised significantly, employers were paid a subsidy to continue to employ people of income dropped by 30% or more from the jan quarter 12 months earlier - and the support is clacheduled to continue until March at present.
This was also exceptionally well distributed and applied in almost no time.
NZ is not a state, but instead has a precarious relationship with the USA and other countries, which can ban-hammer us for things it really shouldn’t have any say in.
A better example: “Since Canberra pointedly demanded an investigation into the origins and spread of the coronavirus, the number of Aussie businesses being squeezed in China has exploded. Crates of Australian rock lobsters have been left to rot at a Chinese airport, and mountains of coal have been stuck in Chinese ports. Beijing turned the screw again, hitting Australian wine exports with punitive tariffs of up to 212 percent, essentially closing off a US$1 billion market.” “Australia's virus-weakened economy is being targeted for political retribution and the two countries may be sliding into a shadow trade war.”
The federal government certainly could have done a lot better. But frankly, even a federal government that didn’t do anything would have been better than the current one which was promoting snake oil, and not promoting wearing masks or social distancing but working actively against them.
In the US, some of the relevant choices have to be made at the Federal level.
For example, Oregon does not have authority to close state borders to travellers from other states or countries.
Sure, with actual army deployment we could get somewhere (it seems we have about 20 soldiers per kilometer of border). But the massive difference in effort between "police airports and the coast with radar" and "Mobilize the army" is huge.
The issue is not whether it's possible - it is - it's whether the cost of doing so is too high. It's a fair consideration to make, but it should be clear that that's the consideration being made, rather than pretending that only island nations have this option.
I don't know why everyone keeps going on about other countries not getting the same results - no other rich country has even talked about trying, as far as I know.
At risk of being labelled “anti-lockdown” or whatever, i’ll clarify my point is we should have done MORE. Strict lockdowns, tracing, etc... AND providing direct relief and freezes.
You might want to check the news on South Korea. They're hitting daily records right now. This isn't to say they're at US levels, but with their current measures, they don't have control of the virus.
The standard is keeping the virus well under control for the majority of the time, ans when you do have a flare up, bringing it back under control before it becomes too bad.
I would assume this is a new generation (new wild-type) which has been reintroduced from the West. As such, Korea did succeed at containing the virus: their only problem is that Western countries didn't bother and made the problem magnitudes more difficult for everyone.
More generally, the press here almost exclusively report the facts that make the UK look like a failure and South Korea look like a success. So for example, the BBC reported on the removal of those social distancing measures, framing it as proof that South Korea's test and trace was so effective they could even reopen nightclubs... like, the day after they did, but making it sound like something they'd done a while ago with no ill effects. They then ran loads of reports on important topics like BTS whilst ignoring the explosion in cases. So everyone who gets their news from the British press is convinced that our government is incompetent, keeps on doing U-turns that damage businesses and the economy, recklessly reopened knowing it would result in the virus spreading, is behind the rest of the world in Covid testing, etc when we should've acted like South Korea... when in reality South Korea was even more like that and if the UK government had taken the same actions they'd have been described in that exact same negative way rather than glossed over and omitted. It's a complete and utter media illusion.
The U.K. government is beyond contempt, but these comparisons don’t help.
NZ is not an international flight hub. Heathrow was the busiest airport in Europe prior to COVID (it is not anymore).
NZ has done exceptionally well and I don't want to take away from it at all! But it would be dishonest to say that they faced challenges of the same magnitude.
They haven't faced challenges of the same magnitude only because they took action to stop an outbreak from starting, at the earliest opportunity. That's the only meaningful difference in how things have played out.
They passed the same challenges that the UK failed.
It is remote, but the UK is an island too, with complete control over who enters.
"How’s Sweden doing, you ask? More people have died of COVID-19 in the past 5 days than have died altogether in Norway throughout the entire pandemic.
Tegnell still hasn’t been fired."
(Sweden and Norway have similar populations, climate, and even language and culture, but very different COVID approaches)
It has denser and bigger cities.
Norway has had severe flu seasons, with high fatality rates that may have reduced the number of vulnerable people in the pop.
Cultural similarities are debatable; many in Sweden have complained about that outdated comparison.
Finally: minimising lives lost is not the only goal in a pandemic, or even in the day to day management of a country.
I'm not saying the Swedish approach is the most preferable, I'm saying cherry-picking Norway on some hand-wavy "all nordic countries are entirely alike wrt pandemics and you cannot compare them to other countries" manner is not scientific. And selecting one part of that country is not going to work unless you match on all important factors.
The rigorous way to do this is: form a list of parameters that affect the pandemic, and then match on a large pool of countries to compare outcomes. Calibrate your system. You can't just cherry pick either way. I can say - well, Sweden has similar pop densities to Germany, and Stockholm is denser than Berlin so Swedish should be worse. But that's not rigorous, it's just confirmation bias at work.
In truth, we'll only know the outcomes when the pandemic is over - probably by 2022 for most countries - and then it'll be an extended argument over whether it was worth say the economic damage, mental health consequences, etc. etc. for any actual reduction in excess deaths.
It's complicated.
Travel ban is advisory, overnight stay is banned by law.
> You must not leave or be outside of your home except for where you have a specific purpose, or a ‘reasonable excuse’
> If you live in a tier 4 area, you must stay at home. You must not leave your home to travel unless for work, education or other legally permitted reasons
So when Boris says "should" I believe he means "must unless you are in one of the excluded categories".
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tier-4-stay-at-home#stay-at-home
(steady stream of traffic leaving London:
https://twitter.com/Keyboar58668342/status/13403788744594022...
Fining people could arguably create a higher risk, as people would feel they had permission to break the ban if they accept a low risk of being caught and fined, and enforcement would involve more interaction between strangers.
Totally my experiences, but London looks like it hasn't given a shit for weeks.
Regardless of the recent uptick in London, the rules needed to be changed, everyone knew it, Boris didn’t do it, and then to mask another U turn they seized on this.
Chris Witty said today the idea that the new strain is more contagious is “just a theory”.
I've heard it said that this mutation increases the replication rate by 0.4.
If we can keep this under control, we could have instead originally had a replication rate of 0.6 and the pandemic would be long over - with no mutated strain.
It has 17 mutated bases (is that a lot? or typical?) Of particular concern is the mutated spike protein which "may, in theory, result in the virus becoming more infectious and spreading more easily between people."
Hm. Let’s hope the vaccine still works.
> Over time, as more mutations occur, the vaccine may need to be altered. This happens with seasonal flu, which mutates every year, and the vaccine is adjusted accordingly. The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t mutate as quickly as the flu virus, and the vaccines that have so far proved effective in trials are types that can easily be tweaked if necessary.
Dr Emma Hodcroft (@firefoxx66): https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1340327606303027201?s=...
The tl;dr as I understand it is that there may be something there, but it is too early to tell for sure.
"Let's not be hysterical. It doesn't mean it's more transmissible or more infectious or dangerous."
That there are new strains of COVID-19 has been covered over, and over, and over, and over again on the This Week in Virology podcast[2] (which usually has 4 to 6 virologists on it every week discussing COVID-19 news), and they've always had the same message:
New strains naturally arise all the time as the virus mutates, but there is no evidence that these mutations make the virus more transmissible or infectious. Nor do they make the illness more severe nor otherwise affect clinical outcomes, nor make treatment any less effective.
People just love to talk up the discovery of new strains, thinking that coronavirus mutations are like flu mutations (which actually do require new vaccines every year), but they're not.
Coronavirus strains are kept an eye on by scientists for the purpose of tracking the spread and origin of the disease, and there'll always be one strain that will be more common than others, but it doesn't mean it's something we have to fear any more than any other strain.
Luckily, it doesn't seem to be more dangerous in terms of hospital admissions.
Statement from Chris Whitty, UK's chief medical advisor to the government: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-chief-medi...
The response in the UK has been pretty rapid and strict, and this has been justified by the governments on the basis of monitoring of this new strain. It’s unlikely (of course not impossible) that this decision would be taken without some decent evidence backing it up.
Parroting NN Taleb: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Haven't we learned from coronavirus that we need to use the precautionary principle in the face of new information that is not fully understood. I don't know where you are from, but I locally heard a string of "there is no evidence of" starting in about January of 2019. There was no evidence that the virus would leave China (it did). No evidence that shutting down travel from infected areas would help (see Vietnam). No evidence of community transmission (it has happened in most of the globe). No evidence that masks help prevent transmission (appears to reduce transmission rates).
I am starting to think as soon as someone asserts "there is no evidence" for something related to the coronavirus, it is a foregone conclusion.
In any case, nobody can assert with absolute certainty that the coronavirus cannot mutate into a more severe or more transmissible virus, especially in the face of a the long human history of being (literally) plagued by mutating viruses.
A critical mutation is a possibility and we should be extremely cautious and vigilant against it. Even if we erroneously overreact 10 times to false mutations, the 11th time might be the one the matters. And the cost of those 11 overreactions will be much less than the cost of letting it go wild.
Mutations that have a real impact on the RNA of the virus are incredibly rare. Most random mutations and errors replicating don't produce any meaningful change in the virus and you have to get very unlucky for a deadly mutation to happen.
We should stick to scientific rationalism even if it has limits. There has been too much opportunistic fear-mongering and questionable decision making playing advantage off the back of a natural virus.
This thing obeys the laws of physics, kills people in a particular pattern and can be managed with scientific tools we have had forever. There is simply no need for everybody to be hysterical yet again, when the science of the virus can be so easily spelled out for the masses.
But noo, we have to have a boogeyman to build a network of cultural changes. This particular mechanism of hijacking a natural disaster for control is embarrassingly transparent.
The most important ones aren’t even particularly scientific. If you’re feeling ill, stay home. Wash your hands. Don’t hang around elderly or other vulnerable.
But these are simple and require no exceptional growth of state power and usurping of the right of free people to exercise their labor.
All these pro-labor types have no problem making scientists, politicians, etc. your effective boss.
Rich people deciding they must micromanage their doltish compatriots.
This is nonsense that assumes an antagonistic purpose to a discussion, and not actually an attempt to reach a higher understanding.
A burden of proof applies to law, by convention, but not to the truth of a situation.
If I say "513x217=111321", it's true whether I prove it to you or not. My statement of it does not obligate me to prove it.
This is so different from my point that I'm not sure how it relates.
I am confident there is literal treasure near to where I live, because I've seen very convincing evidence of dredging from multiple sources. In my mind, it is proven. But, I'm not acting on that because I don't find it worthwhile.
On the other hand, if a stranger told me there was a police traffic stop in a particular direction, I'd probably take a detour - even if there was a complete lack of proof.
Proof doesn't guide my action at all - I don't require a burden of proof in order to act.
Burden of proof is a legal concept, not a philosophical one.
It might be a side-effect in many local politics right now (never let a good crisis to waste), and many of them act incompetent (or maybe they're always incompetent but now we see it clearer when they're in the spotlight), but I don't think that was the point GP was making. It also assumes a conspiracy of actors that want to change the world by "building a network of cultural changes..." (Occam's razor)
Such an approach is guaranteed to massively fail and in doing so cost a lost of money and lives. It’s bad public policy because it is financially ruinous and leads to a greater number of deaths.
Here’s the logic: We know that resources (time, focus, money) can be wasted if they are spent on things that are not effective. We also know that resources are finite. There is only so much time, so much money, and so many different things that you can try to accomplish at once. Therefore, limited resources must be deployed efficiently — towards the most effective interventions — if we want them collectively to achieve the greatest effect.
This means dangers that are scientifically exceedingly unlikely to occur should perhaps not be entirely ignored but should not be driving major policy decisions.
The issue here is not an absence of evidence. There is an abundance of evidence that coronavirus mutations are fundamentally different from influenza mutations.
I know that this is a joke, but it does rhetorically undercut your main point a bit. Hindsight is 2020 and resources are limited, if you let speculation without evidence rule the day you'll be drowning in potential problems, most of which will never materialize.
Nobody is saying "just ignore the new strains", they're saying "there is no reason to panic about new strains given the evidence", yes the evidence could change but that can be true of anything; you might wake up tomorrow to find out that new evidence suggests cell phone use increases risk of dementia, but there is no good reason to go around living your life like this might actually be true.
Well, the coronavirus won't mutate into Ebola, if that's what you're afraid of. And viri as deadly as Ebola aren't particularly successful as they tend to kill their host before spreading sufficiently (HIV is quite nefarious in that respect and I'd think close to worst case).
Humankind is in no danger of extinction from this virus or any other known. The old and infirm need to take precautions, as well as those tending to them. The rest of us have other things to worry about. Stop the fear mongering.
To a standard human, "no evidence" means "there is no evidence".
To a medical professional, "no evidence" means "there is insufficient evidence for us to be certain".
The clash of terminology is very unfortunate, and it prevents one from discussing probabilities at all. A statement from the WHO is either that something is "certain" or that there is "insufficient evidence at this time", even if there is sufficient evidence for one to conclude something with 80% probability.
> The B.1.1.7 lineage carries a larger than usual number of virus genetic changes. The accrual of 14 lineage-specific amino acid replacements prior to its detection is, to date, unprecedented in the global virus genomic data for the COVID-19 pandemic. Most branches in the global phylogenetic tree of SARS-CoV-2 show no more than a few mutations and mutations accumulate at a relatively consistent rate over time.
It's certainly still not proven that it's definitely more infectious than the other strains. But it's a bit of a stretch to infer from previous experience here, given the quantitative difference.
[1] https://virological.org/t/preliminary-genomic-characterisati...
Are we witnessing a religious schism in the making? Is it with us to stay, post-covid?
1) Masks work in preventing the spread of the virus. 2) Masks don’t work in preventing the spread of the virus.
If we don’t wear masks, then: under (1) we have hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of sickness instances, and hundreds of billions of lost dollars due to reduced economic activity and sickness, compared to the wearing mask scenario.
(2) There’s very little difference. Some may say we unnecessarily spend money on masks, but considering that the making of masks can employ otherwise unused resources, especially in the clothing manufacturing and distribution economy, it may actually be a positive to make and distribute masks even if they don’t work, comparable to a stimulus, but more effective because all of the money is immediately deployed, and not just saved, and there are far fewer ideological issues with giving money away for nothing, and it does not require any deficit spending. Further, even if masks don’t help with COVID, they will help reduce chances of spreading other diseases and therefore reduce the strain on hospitals.
Now if you further consider that there is a lot of evidence to indicate that masks do have an effect, and the countries that have handled COVID best by and large swear by them, it’s an absolute no brained to mandate them.
Initially, in March, I had similar thoughts - in my case it's currently like this:
- with the temperature being 0-5 Celsius throughout the day the mask keeps my face a bit warmer than when not wearing it. I do like it in this context :)
- as I have to get off&on the bus and 2 trains, I just keep it on all the time while commuting. The recommendations are not to touch the mask's external surface (and not to indirectly get in contact with it), keeping it on all the time seems to be the least dangerous option.
- wearing glasses while wearing as well a mask can be very challenging (fogging); once I finally manage to make everything work (dozens of tiny adjustments) I "freeze" my setup and keep it like that until I know that I won't need the mask anymore.
Therefore, nothing extreme going on if you see me driving or walking alone with the mask on - just being practical :)
The evidence ranges from the fact that masks almost certainly capture water droplets which are supposed to be major carriers of the virus to the fact that there is correlation between countries that wear masks having reduced spreads compare to ones that don’t. In fact, a recent study compared districts in the same state, grouping them by whether the district implemented mask mandates or not, and found that the ones that had mask mandates had significantly lower levels of COVID hospitalizations vs the ones that didn’t.
There’s a LOT of evidence that masks reduce COVID spread. What there isn’t, is conclusive evidence that lets us say with a 95% degree of probability that masks work. Or carefully designed scientific studies that prove this.
But evidence doesn’t just mean a double blind scientific study, and if we waited for that degree of confidence to make decisions in everyday life, or even in very significant arenas like business and politics, we would be making no decisions at all. The entire IT industry, a massive trillions of dollar industry, for example, has switched from waterfall to agile development on the basis of far less and weaker evidence that agile works better than waterfall than we have for whether or not masks work.
That’s not evidence, that’s a hypothesis. And in its current form it can be empirically disproved:
Some masks allow droplets through and others don’t. Most people have no idea which one they are wearing. https://youtu.be/Py6SCZHAUgQ
Of those which don’t allow passage, many will simply redirect the exhaled air from going forward to going sideways with same number of droplets left in the air. For example a surgical mask does just that - my glasses fog up at every exhale.
Well, if we take the view that evidence doesn't require scientific studies then it is just your bullshit vs my bullshit. You say different levels of Covid hospitalizations in districts with mask mandates vs districts without. I say confounding factors. I say the U.S. has high levels of mask use yet still high levels of Covid spread. You say confounding factors. Etc.
The entire IT industry is a great example because there is a massive amount of bullshit, cargo culture, and magic silver bullets that doesn't really work in it.
/s
Hard to say who is right or wrong since it's just a function of weighting different values differently.
Honestly Costco and Fred Meyers + others really Amped up the game. You can’t enter if you don’t have a mask. Fred Meyers were nice enough to give you a mask if you don’t have one for free. You’d have to really be a rebel not to wear a mask. There are quite a few rebels here and there but strict enforcement by supermarkets really worked.
If the police were enforcing this I bet a few African American folks would have been shot over not wearing masks. The cops here just go crazy mode for the smallest thing.
We've had a pretty authoritarian year of lockdowns and tough regulations, so now compliance is way down all over the board.
Some parts of the coastline has been totally closed, but since it's now our major vacation people are just swarming malls and other locations.
I'm expecting a pretty big outbreak again, possibly either matching or eclipsing our previous growth that we had at the start of June.
> "You mean the natural selection of hosts, not viruses",
No, just simply 'natural selection', as the overall process that determines which entities get to reproduce.
Natural selection for the hosts is about their chances for reproducing (before dying from the disease). And in this case, we don't care about that since its a fair assumption that the patient is not having sex in ICU. :)
Natural selection for viruses is about having the opportunity to jump hosts and replicate more viruses. The longer the host lives the higher the chances for the virus to propagate.
How many people, on average, were on the brink of starvation 200 years ago? We're still better off, I'd guess, but it's not that amazing
Being (slightly) overweight is generally good for health, especially when combating a virus.
200+ years ago the vast majority of people were definitely starved for nutrients, living off whatever they could get locally, with very little meat compared to today.
On the other hand, if you consider the possibility that viruses might be a tool used by someone else (God, aliens, evil scientists hired by bad governments), fatality becomes an important, if not the defining aspect of the tool.
What did I miss? How is this mutation attacking differently?
A rhetorician would call these different "methods" of attack but you're right that in fact they're merely different degrees of the same method.
> The new variant has mutations to the spike protein that the three leading vaccines are targeting. However, vaccines produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein, so it’s unlikely that a single change would make the vaccine less effective.
Not all hospital beds are equal. Can you put a covid patient in a bed next to a covid-free patient? Probably not.
How many staff are off ill or self isolating?
Can the covid staff treat non-covid patients? If so, is there a PPE robing/disrobing overhead to this?
I guess we all just have to hope this doesn't affect the efficacy of the vaccines. Apparently the spike protein is affected, although it sounds like the changes are relatively small and thus they're hoping it doesn't make any difference.
he's clearly been prepared to upend his own ideological leanings
What you said:
[nothing to do with him upending his ideological leanings].
Your bafflement would arguably be less if you took more care in reading the comments before you respond.
I am baffled that anybody could observe what has happened and come to the conclusion that the prime minister has “clearly been prepared to upend his own ideological leanings”, because it has to me been clearly demonstrated that the prime minister and government will push forward with policies in line with their “ideological leanings”, even though they are likely harmful, until the very last moment when they are forced by circumstance to change direction.
- Both of the "full lockdowns" were implemented at least 2 weeks later than experts were calling for. Which is why they had to go on for so long.
- Between the two lockdowns people actively encouraged to go out to restaurants with the "Eat out to help out" scheme even though anyone with half a brain could have told you that this would lead to a sharp increase in cases.
- London was opened as Tier 2 even though it had as many cases as other parts of the country and should have been Tier 3 if the rules were being applied consistently.
etc, etc.
The international reaction to COVID-19 is hugely irrational and the cost far outweighs the advantages of this approach.
We’re ‘saving’ the lives of the elderly by giving them absolutely nothing to live for.
Johnson is an oaf, but covid has kept him fairly serious. His waffling bumbling act was dropped.
As other poster pointed out, monarchy and CoE would disagree though.
no it hasn't, it's kept him doing what he always does, wandering from tactical decision to tactical decision. the March lockdown only happened when public pressure became unbearable, he allowed the treasury to subsidise people eating in restaurants, he continues, in month nine, to hand large contracts to unqualified mates, both wasting money and reducing the ability to deal with the pandemic, and despite it being a once-in-a-century pandemic, did not ask for an extension on the disorganised negotiations with the EU, meaning that in the middle of December, it's still unclear how trade with EU, including...food and medicine, is meant to work in 12 days.
his entire career is just making the easy choice in the moment with no forethought.
We should be using statisticians, virologists, public health advisors, doctors, etc., to come up with suggestions. Maybe a few separate groups. Johnson's decision then is "shall I try and circumvent this expert advice or not".
Seems like politicians have no idea how to delegate, and press are so poor at reporting they can't somehow cope with presenting things that aren't personality competitions.
The best thing Johnson could do is sanction his advisors and make sure of the rule of law in their regard - he's used his father as a personal representative in governmental actions, but his father has been publicly and openly breaching the rules. Who could possibly honour "Johnson's" advice when he won't even hold his own personnel to that standard. It's beyond ridiculous and shows utter contempt for the British public IMO.
That evidence would presumably come in the form of vaccinated patients developing infections from the new strain. Given that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines appear to have a window of about one month before full effect, it could be some time before the hypothesis can be tested.
The new variant has mutations to the spike protein that the three leading vaccines are targeting. However, vaccines produce antibodies against many regions in the spike protein, so it’s unlikely that a single change would make the vaccine less effective.
Over time, as more mutations occur, the vaccine may need to be altered. This happens with seasonal flu, which mutates every year, and the vaccine is adjusted accordingly. The SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t mutate as quickly as the flu virus, and the vaccines that have so far proved effective in trials are types that can easily be tweaked if necessary.
Peacock said, “With this variant there is no evidence that it will evade the vaccination or a human immune response. But if there is an instance of vaccine failure or reinfection then that case should be treated as high priority for genetic sequencing.”
If it's true that the new strain is 70% more transmissible then that means more people will get sick before we can reach immunity thanks to a vaccine, hospitals will be overwhelmed sooner and more people will die.
So the "problems" it is causing is just that EITHER more stringent restrictions of the same kind are required to contain it OR if uncontained healthcare will be overwhelmed more quickly.
So problems of degree not of kind.