If Boris has the the right data then Vallance and Whitty must be reading them upside down then. Over the past few day's they both have made it clear they don't see things the same as Boris. The last few day's have also made it clear as mud that the government scientists and the government no longer see eye to eye on anything. Even the "The guided by science" message Boris publicly dumped yesterday.
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The mental equivalent for Boris of in the cellar, in the dark, with no stairs and a sign beware of the leopard. All the while magic thighs cummings his chief adviser telling him that he demands a total absence of solid facts.
Julia9054
Guru
- Location
- Knaresborough
I’ve no doubt Johnson has access to the data and to advisers. It’s what he chooses to do with the information and who‘s best interests he has in mind when he makes his decisions is what I call into question
Slick
Guru
Of that there is no doubt, which is why I said it's up to us to ensure we don't become one of his acceptable statistics.
srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
The thing is that I rather doubt he has access to any more information than the rest of us. Throughout this crisis it's been clear that government information has been shockingly poor at best.
Outside the ONS, which is doing a very good job and which is very transparent, we seem to be incapable as a country of combining information from multiple sources in a reliable way. The revelation this week that PHE has been misrecording cause of death is just the latest example.
You add to that the fact that Johnson has given up even pretending to listen to advisors who might give him information he doesn't like and I'm more convinced than ever that he's winging it using publicly available information.
Getting good data isn't a tricky job if you go about in the right way. You need people who are able to specify data precisely and who have the balls and the clout to make data suppliers provide it. And you need data suppliers who are culturally attuned enough and who have enough resource capacity to collect it well and supply it on time.
Despite throwing billions at furlough and loan schemes we don't seem to have bothered spending the mere millions good quality information would cost.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/patrick-vallance-boris-johnson_uk_5f10c66ec5b6cec246c06c9e
Interesting take on the consequences of home working that may explain to some extent why Johnson is at odds with or at least keeping quiet over Vallance's views.
Interesting take on the consequences of home working that may explain to some extent why Johnson is at odds with or at least keeping quiet over Vallance's views.
We've not even been spending the millions on the ones who need to know what to do with it and act on it.
Another thing yesterday Vallance and Whitty was happy to point out and who to blame.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53444951
Another thing yesterday Vallance and Whitty was happy to point out and who to blame.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53444951
I believe the statistical consequences of that will turn out to be minor; the political ones another matter.
If large numbers of people testing positive had later died of non-covid causes unassociated with their infection, then their deaths would not be part of the excess death figures but just those of people who would have died anyway, be it car crash, heart conditions, accidents or whatever. Establishing statistical links to flu or in this case covid, is one of the major reasons for compiling excess death figures in the first place, especially where deaths occur outside a hospital environment. In the case of flu, naff-all testing is done outside hospitals but we still accept the thousands of deaths recorded to other conditions during a flu season as caused by flu simply based on the stats.
The excess death figures track the covid figures in proportion remarkably well, indicating the majority of excess deaths are related to covid in some way.
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
midlife
Guru
According to the FAQ you can pay by credit card at the checkout
https://www.bankruptbikeparts.co.uk/FAQ
https://www.bankruptbikeparts.co.uk/FAQ
Bromptonaut
Rohan Man
- Location
- Bugbrooke UK
It's possible, but by no means certain, that government has access to more data than is published. Knowing stuff and not publishing absent considerations such as National Security looks very much like concealment for party advantage and will come back and bite. My primary point however is that Johnson's entire history is of somebody with no time for detail or the intricacies of actually delivering the broad brush waffle piffle that characterises his public utterances.
See the 'Oven Ready' Brexit deal or the London Garden Bridge.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53437555
BBC piece about the spit tests now trials in Southampton have got going.
capacity for 300,000 spit tests a day. 10 million a day would be needed and be 1 billion a month!
BBC piece about the spit tests now trials in Southampton have got going.
capacity for 300,000 spit tests a day. 10 million a day would be needed and be 1 billion a month!
Some tech may be here in coming months, albeit too late for wave 1
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...rus-antibody-tests-after-trial-success-report
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...rus-antibody-tests-after-trial-success-report
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Didn’t know they had something to do with Corona!
srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
Absolutely. I've probably said something like this before in the thread. The only reliable indicator of how many people have been killed by the pandemic is total all cause excess mortality.
Here, courtesy of the CMI of the UK actuarial profession, is the best illustration of what's been happening.
Really? I follow this sort of thing quite closely for professional reasons, and I don't remember hearing about it. I could have missed it, of course. I didn't mean to cite it as an example of a meaningful problem with a useful statistic - the PHE data is only useful as a broad trend indicator - but as an example of the woeful lack of care with which data collection has been treated in the crisis.
