Coronavirus update - NO MORE RESTRICTIONS

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

Writes a long-arsed article criticising lockdown then concludes it by saying 'a Swedish approach was always unrealistic in Britain', not sure where he was coming from really.

MD (Dr Phil Hammond) does an excellent piece on Sweden in the latest Private Eye. I don't think it's online anywhere so I can't link it. He says there was a 'slowdown' in Sweden which didn't need to become a full lockdown because 'the majority of Swedes understood and accepted the risks and complied with measures voluntarily'. Obviously I can't vouch for that but my lad spent the first two months of lockdown in Holland and was surprised how stupid British people were in comparison when he moved back here.

MD asks if the UK could've copied Sweden and continues

"Yes, but our outcomes would likely have been far worse. The UK is a much more overcrowded and busier travel hub than Sweden and with little border control the pandemic 'loading dose' in the UK was much higher and more widely spread, so health services would have been under much greater pressure without lockdown.

The UK is also singularly ill-placed to cope with Covid. Our public health is appalling. We have emerged from the pandemic as the Sick Man of Europe because we were the Sick Man of Europe before it started. Covid has just acted as an accelerator of pre-existing risks and inequalities. The UK puts much less into its health and social care system than Sweden. Sweden has a much better life expectancy than the UK (where improvements have stalled for two years running). The UK has far greater levels of poverty, over-crowding, obesity and chronic disease than Sweden. If the UK had tried the Swedish approach without lockdown, the wave of serious illness would've overwhelmed the NHS, because we can barely cope with the wave of serious illnesses that aren't Covid. Yet many are preventable.

Too many Brits take too little personal responsibility for their health, junk food is everywhere and the state does not help those most in need. Two thirds of those who have died from Covid in the UK were already living with disability, and 80% had one or more pre-existing illnesses. Sweden, on the other hand, is one of the fittest nations in Europe, the ideal country to test a more relaxed approach."

The Headline writers made it more interesting than the actual article.

[A Quiet Monkfish]

Re: Coronavirus update

So now we know: Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Our arrogant quangocrats and state “experts” should hang their heads in shame: their reaction to coronavirus was one of the greatest public policy blunders in modern history, more severe even than Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Suez or the ERM fiasco. Millions will lose their jobs when furlough ends; tens of thousands of small businesses are failing; schooling is in chaos, with A-level grades all over the place; vast numbers are likely to die from untreated or undetected illnesses; and we have seen the first exodus of foreigners in years, with the labour market survey suggesting a decline in non-UK born adults.

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Pandemics always come with large economic and social costs, for reasons of altruism as well as of self-interest. The only way to contain the spread of a deadly, contagious disease, in the absence of a cure or vaccine, is to social distance; fear and panic inevitably kick in, as the public desperately seeks to avoid catching the virus. A “voluntary” recession is almost guaranteed.

But if a drop in GDP is unavoidable, governments can influence its size and scale. Politicians can react in one of three ways to a pandemic. They can do nothing, and allow the disease to rip until herd immunity is reached. Quite rightly, no government has pursued this policy, out of fear of mass deaths and total social and economic collapse.

The second approach involves imposing proportionate restrictions to facilitate social distancing, banning certain sorts of gatherings while encouraging and informing the public. The Swedes pursued a version of this centrist strategy: there was a fair bit of compulsion, but also a focus on retaining normal life and keeping schools open. The virus was taken very seriously, but there was no formal lockdown. Tegnell is one of the few genuine heroes of this crisis: he identified the correct trade-offs.

The third option is the full-on statist approach, which imposes a legally binding lockdown and shuts down society. Such a blunderbuss approach may be right under certain circumstances – if a vaccine is imminent – or for some viruses – for example, if we are ever hit with one that targets children and comes with a much higher fatality rate – but the latest economic and mortality statistics suggest this wasn’t so for Covid-19.

Almost all economists thought that Sweden’s economy would suffer hugely from its idiosyncratic strategy. They were wrong. Sweden’s GDP fell by just 8.6 per cent in the first half of the year, all in the second quarter, and its excess deaths jumped 24 per cent. A big part of Sweden’s recession was caused by a slump in demand for its exports from its fully locked-down neighbours. One could speculate that had all countries pursued a Swedish-style strategy, the economic hit could have been worth no more than 3-4 per cent of GDP. That could be seen as the core cost of the virus under a sensible policy reaction.

By contrast, Britain’s economy slumped by 22.2 per cent in the first half of the year, a performance almost three times as bad as Sweden’s, and its excess deaths shot up by 45 per cent. Spain’s national income slumped even more (22.7 per cent), and France’s (down 18.9 per cent) and Italy’s (down 17.1 per cent) slightly less, but all three also suffered far greater per capita excess deaths than Sweden. The Swedes allowed the virus to spread in care homes, so if that major failure had been fixed, their death rate could have been a lot lower still.

My guess is that only half of our first-half collapse in GDP would have happened under a variant of the Swedish model. This means that the other half – some £250 billion – was an unnecessary cost caused directly by the lockdown itself. The decision to shut everything down, rather than to impose and promulgate extensive social distancing, hygiene measures, ubiquitous PPE and testing, means that we have wasted a quarter of a trillion pounds worth of GDP, as well as needlessly ruined the education of millions of children and cancelled the health care of hundreds of thousands of adults. I suspect that this immense, unbearable additional cost saved very few additional lives, and that almost all of the gains came from social distancing, not the lockdown.

Some of the lost GDP will be recovered; the intangible costs of lockdown – the cancelled weddings and sporting events, the failed IVF cycles, the time not spent with family – will remain with us forever.

This is a catastrophically high price tag for the British state’s systemic incompetence, the uselessness of Public Health England, the deep, structural failings of the NHS, the influence of modelers rather than proper scientists, the complacency, the delusion, the refusal to acknowledge that the quality of the British state and bureaucracy are abysmally poor.

Even more depressingly, a Swedish approach was always unrealistic in Britain. Panic and hysteria were the only possible outcome when the failure of the system became apparent. I’m not seeking to absolve Boris Johnson of blame, but he would have found himself in an impossible situation had he sought to ignore the official advice, and he inherited few, if any, working levers to pull.

So what now? How should Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, reboot the economy? Sweden, once again, is a role model. After decades of socialist decline from the early Seventies, the Swedes slashed the size of their state (though it remains too big), liberalised their economy, reformed their schools along market principles and scrapped their counter-productive wealth tax.

They learnt that the state cannot drive prosperity: only the private sector can do that. The Tories used to understand this: Sunak needs to take inspiration from Tegnell, and push for a Swedish, liberal approach to saving our economy, trusting individual initiative, not resorting to a top down, Whitehall-knows-best attitude. HS2 and green projects are not the answer. The Conservatives will only survive their handling of Covid if they don’t also botch the recovery.

The Chancellor et al are quoting figures that suggest the economy is bouncing back more quickly than originally anticipated. What he no doubt knows but doesn't broadcast, is the knock on effect that hasn't even been factored in to the figures and which hasn't begun : car loans, mortgages, business rents, rates, plus all those businesses waiting to lay off staff in Sept/Oct. They talk about a 'second wave' of CV19 - there's going to be a second wave of economic despair, I fear..

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

The Chancellor et al are quoting figures that suggest the economy is bouncing back more quickly than originally anticipated. What he no doubt knows but doesn't broadcast, is the knock on effect that hasn't even been factored in to the figures and which hasn't begun : car loans, mortgages, business rents, rates, plus all those businesses waiting to lay off staff in Sept/Oct. They talk about a 'second wave' of CV19 - there's going to be a second wave of economic despair, I fear..

Definitely. I have a Funding Circle account, and whilst a few companies have paid off their loans in full during this, roughly half (just under) have not been making repayments since March. These include businesses, like a meat processing firm, who have probably not been told to cease production during the pandemic. Some of these companies are not contactable at present, and a few have had new loan arrangements that they cannot or are not adhering to. A handful of companies have repaid their loan in full.

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

From the BBC

Géraldine Allot is a primary school teacher currently visiting her family in Embrun in the French Alps; she is trying to adjust her travel plans as a result of the UK's quarantine announcement.

“I am disgusted,” she told the BBC. She and her family are having to change all their travel plans. She needs to be at school meetings on 1 September ahead of the new term.

Obviously, none of the blame of travelling during a world-wide pandemic should fall on her. I understand her anger, but she only has herself to blame.

I find it a bit crazy that people are spending money on things that may be cancelled in a flash, that's their prerogative, but to blame Governments for doing the "right thing" is wrong. I don't think the borders should have been re-opened this soon, and having "travel corridors" when people are only allowed to meet outdoors in the UK or with one single household, seems a bit contradictory. But, as the Government (UK) seem hell-bent on being reactionary and not pre-emptive (New Zealand) then I suspect a lot of people will continue to lose a lot of money on a knowingly fluid situation.

[the other bob wilson]

Re: Coronavirus update

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/14/government-quietly-drops-13m-covid-tests-from-england-tally

[the other bob wilson]

Re: Coronavirus update

It could well not last, but I remember when Welsh regions filled seven out of the ten top places in the weekly chart linked. I worked my way down it and was soon assuming I must have missed my home county (RCT, which was at no. 1 for a few weeks), but it's there in a position I never thought I'd see it in.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/15/coronavirus-uk-map-latest-deaths-confirmed-covid-cases

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

It could well not last, but I remember when Welsh regions filled seven out of the ten top places in the weekly chart linked. I worked my way down it and was soon assuming I must have missed my home county (RCT, which was at no. 1 for a few weeks), but it's there in a position I never thought I'd see it in.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ed-covid-cases

It can go the wrong way a lot faster than it takes to get the right way.

I wonder what the Drakeford critics have to say about the fact that 6 out of 9 counties with a 0.0 rate are in Wales?

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/england-germany-neck-neck-race-produce-first-vaccine/

[MOZZER2]

Re: Coronavirus update

looks like it's all hunky dory back in wuhan now after de-stablising the world

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-53816511

[delmbox]

Re: Coronavirus update

looks like it's all hunky dory back in wuhan now after de-stablising the world

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-53816511

Good

[goats]

Re: Coronavirus update

looks like it's all hunky dory back in wuhan now after de-stablising the world

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-53816511

Don’t believe a thing that comes out of China

[xsnaggle]

Re: Coronavirus update

All we have to worry about from China now is their latest outbreak of Bubonic Plague. That would make this look like child's play if it broke out seriously.
It'swhen it become pneumonic that it really kicks off. Hence the nursery rhyme 'Ring a ring a rosies'

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

All we have to worry about from China now is their latest outbreak of Bubonic Plague. That would make this look like child's play if it broke out seriously.
It'swhen it become pneumonic that it really kicks off. Hence the nursery rhyme 'Ring a ring a rosies'

OK, in the unlikely scenario that people are reading xsnaggle's post and taking it seriously and, maybe, even taking it so seriously they have a sense of panic or fear, here are the facts to add a sense of perspective.

There have been 31 reported cases of Bubonic Plague in the country of China between 2009 and 2019. An average of 3 a year in a country that has, roughly, about 1/7th of the world's population.

There has been a reported case in Inner Mongolia. The affected village has been sealed off.

In the US, there has been an average of 7 plague cases between 1970-2018 (range of 1-17), 80% in bubonic form.

Hence the nursery rhyme "Hush little baby"

[xsnaggle]

Re: Coronavirus update

OK, in the unlikely scenario that people are reading xsnaggle's post and taking it seriously and, maybe, even taking it so seriously they have a sense of panic or fear, here are the facts to add a sense of perspective.

There have been 31 reported cases of Bubonic Plague in the country of China between 2009 and 2019. An average of 3 a year in a country that has, roughly, about 1/7th of the world's population.

There has been a reported case in Inner Mongolia. The affected village has been sealed off.

In the US, there has been an average of 7 plague cases between 1970-2018 (range of 1-17), 80% in bubonic form.

Hence the nursery rhyme "Hush little baby"

Given that few believe that the original numbers for this virus reported by China were actually correct, why should anyone believe their reported numbers on the plague?
If the numbers are so small and insignificant why are they being so up front at all, unless its to prepare the ground for the reality later?

[CCFCC3PO]

Re: Coronavirus update

Given that few believe that the original numbers for this virus reported by China were actually correct, why should anyone believe their reported numbers on the plague?
If the numbers are so small and insignificant why are they being so up front at all, unless its to prepare the ground for the reality later?

So, because "few people" believe the covid figures reported in China, you make the illogical conclusion that these figures are also false without determining that the covid-19 figures are false.

China have been reporting cases of the bubonic plague since 2009, at an average of 3 a year.

At which stage do we stop believing their figures? 2009? 2012? 2019? If it is 2009, then, using your logic "If the numbers are so small and insignificant why are they being so up front at all, unless its to prepare the ground for the reality later? ", and I would ask how long do they need to "prepare the ground for"?

If it is 2019, then why have they been reporting cases since 2009?

Sorry, but there isn't a lot of sense in your argument.