-
Covid killed almost 7 million people (so far) and continues to kill - even with the vaccines & measures that people called draconian and unnecessary. I shudder to think what that total might be if people's rights hadn't been temporarily restricted.
People in power had to make rapid decisions to save lives with minimal data and the need to manage public behaviors. They got some things wrong (and many right) and overall have nothing to apologise for.
-
One minor quibble, how much do you trust that number? Two things to consider, first is that the reporting in the US was over reporting Covid deaths (for funding reasons). If you had covid and died in a car crash, it was reported as covid death.
Second, I've seen reports showing flu death comparisons. Flu was zero, Covid was similar to the previous flu reporting (slightly higher).
-
Aren't you conflating two different things here - wealth inequality and the ability of bigger business to survive economic shocks - in this case Covid?
And the Oxfam report has been debunked so many times it's embarrassing. Anyone on the average wage in NZ or the UK is in their top 1% or global elite according to them.
-
According to *The Economist'*s analysis, the true Covid death rate is much, much higher at 23m.
"We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 17m and 30.4m additional deaths".
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
-
@Victor-Meldrew. Excess deaths at the moment are not due to the Covid virus right? So what are they attributing the excess deaths too? Undiagnosed cancers, disease not treated in a timely fashion or the vaccine? There are excess non covid deaths all over the Western world but because of what?
I have deleted the rest of my post because it will be pissing in the ocean.
-
@broughie said in Coronavirus - UK:
Excess deaths at the moment are not due to the Covid virus right?
I think the various methodologies aim to show both. E.g direct deaths from Covid (pretty accurate) and deaths caused by Covid. The latter seems to have a lot of variables - which may vary by country, health system capacity etc.
As Chris Whitty kept telling us, we won't know the full impact for 5 or more years.
-
In truth those articles are little more than opinion pieces, cherry picking some data points in an attempt to give credence to those opinions. As an example they liberally use the data showing the growth in wealth inequality during and after the pandemic but do not offer a comparison to times before, suggesting that it was the pandemic that caused a widening wealth inequality. The simple fact is that wealth inequality is normally increasing. The times when this is not so are really the outliers. It is economics 101 that if you have more income than you need, like you know, the rich have, then this allows a greater opportunity for increasing wealth. Conversely if you have less income than you need there is little opportunity for increasing wealth.
Mention was made about the recovery in the stock markets, which tends to assist the better off, being so much better than the recovery in the general economy, well duh! the two are nowhere near complete correlation- the economy didn’t tank to anywhere near the same amount as the markets. No mention of that though.
FWIW I have no doubt that there were many instances of businesses and people getting rich off the back of the pandemic but in truth that is so small as to be of no relevance.
-
@Victor-Meldrew "I had to come back"
https://unherd.com/2023/01/why-are-excess-deaths-still-so-high/
This is of most concern I think:
there is one outlier: people between the age of 0 and 24 registered lower-than-average death rates in 2020 and 2021. Throughout 2022, on the other hand, they have been dying at higher rates than expected. In other words, more young people are dying today in Britain than before, or even during, the pandemic — and we don’t know why.
Or my take is they don't want to know because it's against the narrative that the vaccine was safe and that would open Pandora's box. Let just sweep it under the rug.
-
That's an interesting article and does raise some valid questions. Linking anything to the vaccines will I think prove difficult as there are so many variables. For certain we cannot be swayed by the "this happened to a young guy in my neighbourhood" as an indicator, it will have to be by the overall trend. Individually, so much is coincidental and not necessarily causation. A case in point (and this goes against my statement about using individual occurrences as an indicator but I feel it does illustrate a problem in regard to coincidence). A doctor friend of a friend was vaccinating a patient who suddenly dropped down dead of heart failure. Fortunately for the doctor he had yet to administer the vaccine but if he had done so five minutes earlier the anti-vax brigade would have been all over it.
-
@Windows97 said in Coronavirus - UK:
Most of the justification was based on predictive models that turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate and seemingly never updated with real data to determine the accuracy there-of, or if the responses based off these increasingly inaccurate models were proportionate.
Statistically you simply cannot compare a prediction that says if we do nothing this will be the outcome with a result that is based on a different set of factors.
So, without getting into an argument about who was right or wrong, or by how much with regard to the pandemic, as it is 3 years later and I'm over it, but purely from a logical argument perspective...
It is false reasoning to argue that the experts were wrong in saying "if we do nothing we will have x many deaths" because we had only had y; because we didn't do nothing.
By locking down and running aggressive vaccination programmes, we changed the landscape.
It is possible that the experts were totally right, or totally wrong, or most likely somewhere in the middle. Where in the middle they fall is largely a matter of conjecture and everyone has their entrenched positions based on their own experiences of, and reaction to, the pandemic response.
There is plenty of evidence either way but much of it is anecdotal and even when it is empirical there are still massive demographic influencers.
-
As with the recent 'heat index weather warnings' in the UK, the information coming from the Government and other agencies is being directed at the greater population when it should be aimed squarely at those at risk
This would suggest that they've learned fuck all in the past 3 years
-
@MiketheSnow said in Coronavirus - UK:
As with the recent 'heat index weather warnings' in the UK, the information coming from the Government and other agencies is being directed at the greater population when it should be aimed squarely at those at risk
This would suggest that they've learned fuck all in the past 3 years
Basically what you are saying here is the government were fucked either way with what they communicated. People in this country have never listened and never will.
-
@MajorRage said in Coronavirus - UK:
@MiketheSnow said in Coronavirus - UK:
As with the recent 'heat index weather warnings' in the UK, the information coming from the Government and other agencies is being directed at the greater population when it should be aimed squarely at those at risk
This would suggest that they've learned fuck all in the past 3 years
Basically what you are saying here is the government were fucked either way with what they communicated. People in this country have never listened and never will.
No
Massive failings on behalf of the Government beyond the first lockdown when it was known that
Covid was dangerous to those in certain demographics and/or with co-morbidities
Masks were basically worthless
Vaccines didn't stop transmissionMandate for the vulnerable not the populace
-
@MiketheSnow said in Coronavirus - UK:
Basically what you are saying here is the government were fucked either way with what they communicated. People in this country have never listened and never will.
No
Massive failings on behalf of the Government beyond the first lockdown when it was known that
Covid was dangerous to those in certain demographics and/or with co-morbidities
That was clearly communicated. Wasn't necessarily dealt with correctly, but it was very very clear right from the start. However, it did also seriously affect those without any of the above. A 50 year old white fella I know with no co-morbid spent 8 weeks in hospital & 3 weeks in a coma. Kate Garraway's husband took years.
Masks were basically worthless
No argument from me, but if they said no masks required when they were in the other countries, they would have been smashed apart.
Vaccines didn't stop transmission
I honestly wonder what people were reading/writing about this. If you didn't listen to the media, and listened to what the vaccine makers/Whitty said they were always clear that it didn't stop transmission. But what they did do is reduce the amount of time people were infectious. I was blown away when high profile media came out a year or so after vaccine rollout genuinely surprised that vaccines didn't stop transmission.
Mandate for the vulnerable not the populace
There is no way Labout would have allowed this. No way.
-
@MajorRage said in Coronavirus - UK:
@MiketheSnow said in Coronavirus - UK:
Basically what you are saying here is the government were fucked either way with what they communicated. People in this country have never listened and never will.
No
Massive failings on behalf of the Government beyond the first lockdown when it was known that
Covid was dangerous to those in certain demographics and/or with co-morbidities
That was clearly communicated. Wasn't necessarily dealt with correctly, but it was very very clear right from the start. However, it did also seriously affect those without any of the above. A 50 year old white fella I know with no co-morbid spent 8 weeks in hospital & 3 weeks in a coma. Kate Garraway's husband took years.
Masks were basically worthless
No argument from me, but if they said no masks required when they were in the other countries, they would have been smashed apart.
Vaccines didn't stop transmission
I honestly wonder what people were reading/writing about this. If you didn't listen to the media, and listened to what the vaccine makers/Whitty said they were always clear that it didn't stop transmission. But what they did do is reduce the amount of time people were infectious. I was blown away when high profile media came out a year or so after vaccine rollout genuinely surprised that vaccines didn't stop transmission.
Mandate for the vulnerable not the populace
There is no way Labout would have allowed this. No way.
There'll always be outliers unfortunately, but the vast majority of those affected / who passed away with Covid were either in the vulnerable demographic and/or had co-morbidities
The politicians underestimated how many fell in to that category
Arguably locking down 'fatties' has made the situation worse going forward
The guilting and sacking people had for not having the vaccine - 'kill Granny' - made 'fact' by MSM drowned out any messages coming from Big Pharma and Whitty et al
Viewer fatigue contributed massively
Shame on Labour too then
-
@MiketheSnow said in Coronavirus - UK:
There'll always be outliers unfortunately, but the vast majority of those affected / who passed away with Covid were either in the vulnerable demographic and/or had co-morbidities
This is true.
The politicians underestimated how many fell in to that category
Arguably locking down 'fatties' has made the situation worse going forward
The guilting and sacking people had for not having the vaccine - 'kill Granny' - made 'fact' by MSM drowned out any messages coming from Big Pharma and Whitty et al
Absolutely. Which is why I hold the media significantly more accountable than the government. I feel the pandemic 'opened my eyes' to the colossal bullshit that is MSM
Viewer fatigue contributed massively
Indeed.
Shame on Labour too then
Yeah, but that's my point. Government were damned either way. You simply can't govern a pandemic in the UK. It's not possible.
-
End of term report is in
F
Key words
negligent and negligible
To summarise, a negligent UK Government basing their strategies on spurious Neil Ferguson led modelling resulted in a negligible reduction in death during the lockdown phases
I'm very grateful for the internet during this time because a very quick search of Neil Ferguson showed that he'd been shown to be inept on so many previous occasions that I felt very comfortable and safe ignoring practically every 'decree' from the UK Government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)
How he keeps getting gigs is beyond me
Neil obviously knows where the bodies are buried, although unsurprisingly there are not as many as he first thought
-
@dogmeat said in Coronavirus - UK:
@Windows97 said in Coronavirus - UK:
Most of the justification was based on predictive models that turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate and seemingly never updated with real data to determine the accuracy there-of, or if the responses based off these increasingly inaccurate models were proportionate.
Statistically you simply cannot compare a prediction that says if we do nothing this will be the outcome with a result that is based on a different set of factors.
So, without getting into an argument about who was right or wrong, or by how much with regard to the pandemic, as it is 3 years later and I'm over it, but purely from a logical argument perspective...
It is false reasoning to argue that the experts were wrong in saying "if we do nothing we will have x many deaths" because we had only had y; because we didn't do nothing.
That's not quite my argument.
In order for any statistical model to work there are assumptions you need to feed into it. I know this from working with predictive statistical models as my day job (albeit a long time ago).
You work with assumptions because you don't have real data - these assumptions can by updated as more accurate data is discovered. A few basic ones would be death rate, infection rate, duration of infectious period etc. off the top of my head.
For clarity and transparency you also release your "bad" scenario and also the key factors (more assumptions) that could lead to a significant decrease from that "bad" scenario (vaccination, lockdowns etc.)
So basically it's put forward an "if we do these things we can expect a reduction from this to that".
You can then fairly easily measure your prediction from "this to that".
You can then also update the assumptions in your model with increasingly accurate data as time goes on.
However the above requires honesty and transparency and also an admission that your going to be wrong - your dealing with data and assumptions that are never going to be correct.
So I'm not arguing the method - I'm arguing the transparency of how the information was passed on. We only ever seemed to get the "worst case scenario" given to us with not much else behind it.
For some real life examples we were originally told that covid could survive on surfaces for days and be transmitted (my mate used to leave his delivered groceries out for a 2 days on the kitchen bench before touching them). If the model is built assuming this transmission is possible, when it is not, this will have a significant effect on the the end result. When you write a model assuming masks will have an effect - and they do not, this will have a significant effect on the end result. When you write a model assuming that vaccinations will have a significant net benefit and they do not - this will have a significant effect on the end result.
In short it's more than possible to test the accuracy of your predictive models "after the fact" - was this ever done?
However I'm also cogniscient of the fact that the data may be so politically compromised that we may never know the truth - and that doesn't particularly sit well with me either.
-
@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - UK:
Covid killed almost 7 million people (so far) and continues to kill - even with the vaccines & measures that people called draconian and unnecessary. I shudder to think what that total might be if people's rights hadn't been temporarily restricted.
People in power had to make rapid decisions to save lives with minimal data and the need to manage public behaviors. They got some things wrong (and many right) and overall have nothing to apologise for.
Well I guess that the people who lost their business, their jobs, watched their grandparents die without being able to visit them, died alone in hospital because people weren't allowed to visit them (and the majority of the people that died were the most vulnerable in our population), couldn't go to funeral's, birthdays, weddings and watched their kids grades and social skills disappear into the toilet, those that got lauded for being "hero's" during the outbreak of covid and then ostracized and forced form their jobs over vaccine mandates might disagree with you.
-
I'm not sure what you are saying.
Are you saying governments should have carried on as normal with no restrictions, let the virus rip and to heck with the consequences like collapsed health systems and all the normal health care that goes with them (check the early COVID impact in Italy) and mass graves and cremations?
Or are you saying governments should have rapidly (and repeatedly) changed advice, rules and approach on social interaction, vaccine impact and transmissibility as we learned more about the virus?
Because it's fair to argue the first approach would have caused panic and poss. societal breakdown in Western countries and the second the possibility of a confused public and a loss of confidence in the science and data.
I would recommend Kate Bingham's book - The Long Shot - which sets out how the vaccinnes were developed. The sort of real-word data like infectiousness and how it was transmitted just wasn't known or was changing constantly and health systems had no way of getting it in the timescales authorities were working with when making decisions.
Coronavirus - UK