I cannot decide whether I like Prof Balloux or not. A lot of the stuff he tweets is much needed rubbishing of crap science. But he also seems to hold himself above many of the scientists making a concerted effort to get track and trace working in the UK (which has massively failed to be fair). Didn’t he also sign Great Barrington? Anyway I think overall he’s a good voice for making sure you don’t become a lockdown evangelist without considering all of the negative effects.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
If it doesn’t work, why did we spend so much money on it? That’s the problem. They’ve spent a fortune on an ineffective system that was too late. The general public can’t be blamed for thinking we’ve fecked the test and trace when it was our Government that told us how essential it was. Currently we’d have been better of bribing everyone with a share of the £12bn to stay at home. Instead they bribed people to go out and spread the virus.
Yeah he seems to fancy himself as a bit of an agent provocateur. I follow him for balance, as otherwise I’m in a very one sided echo chamber. And a lot of what he says is fairly sensible, even if it goes against the grain.
Really just used his tweet as a means to share that data anyway. 96k cases a day is huge numbers. Just under a million every 10 days. And increasing all the time.
Theres been a lot of this. For example Boots have been given the green light for a new 12 minute test that costs £120 and will be in 200 stores in the coming weeks. Who is the CEO of Boots? Seb James. Who does he know very well? Look at this picture.
One sitting bottom left, one sitting bottom right
Same. Think he’s good to follow for those reasons. His discussion of the downsides of all public health responses really made me appreciate how much people of Melbourne (where I am) have had to sacrifice over the past few months. To be fair RAB who has gone awol from this thread also helped me see all of the negatives too. Think I was definitely guilty a few months back of thinking lockdowns were the obvious solution without much consideration of the negatives. I’m not saying that they didn’t work here, because they absolutely have, just that they come at a significant cost that can’t be ignored.
And as someone with elderly family with Yorkshire and NI, the covid case numbers are really worrying. Hope we can get through winter.
100% agree. The biggest problem with the system, as I understand it, is how it was portrayed in the beginning. It absolutely was presented as our saviour, and we now know that just wasn't realistic. To me there's three reasons for that:
- We (the government primarily, but also the people) were desperate for a positive message, and unknowingly deceived ourselves into thinking it could prevent another quarantine because the alternative was a bit too much to process in those darker moments;
- We're a technophilic country, most of the West are but us and the US lean more heavily in that direction, and so the idea that technology could be our saviour, especially with technological heroes like Apple and Google getting involved, came naturally; and
- The government tend to think like @finneh that private industry are just better at everything because of the magic of "innovation" and some other wooly metaphors from Milton Friedman that you can apply religiously in any scenario, so when there was an opportunity for them to get involved, and they told us they could do all this stuff, well of course they're right they're the most successful businesspeople in our country, what do these silly civil servants know.
But that shouldn't distract us from the limitations of the system. Yes we were misled to begin with, but we are capable of assessing the evidence ourselves too. And we should be expected to, IMO. Still presenting it as a potential saviour that if only the government fixed, we wouldn't have to submit to these restrictions, is not true, and ultimately it's not helpful.
Last edited:
Well people have to work and go get shopping etc, whilst there are asymptomatic People walking around or people who have symptoms but are ignorant of it or in denial.
It's a private testing service, and they've engaged for procurement with the manufacturer of the test. I'm struggling to see a correlation of where government have helped Boots here? Literally anyone with the capital and existing regulatory sign off can set up private testing.
No matter how much money you chuck at it, laboratory processing is where the bottle neck of mass testing exists. Those systems weren't designed for the volume they're seeing.
Tory England is bit on a network of old boys. The old adage is true that it’s who you knowTheres been a lot of this. For example Boots have been given the green light for a new 12 minute test that costs £120 and will be in 200 stores in the coming weeks. Who is the CEO of Boots? Seb James. Who does he know very well? Look at this picture.
One sitting bottom left, one sitting bottom right
Whilst what you say is true, I think it’s also a bit naive. Look at tory MPs having their family setting up new companies to win contracts for supplying PPE for example
Are the issues caused by flaws inherent in the idea or through lack of administrative resources though? If it’s the latter, there are a lot of people who would love a job right now.
Your link said that once we are over 1000+ cases per day, test and trace becomes ineffective. If we had managed test and trace effectively we would be in a much better position, when did it start, late May? When did we exceed 1000 cases per day? Early September, late August?
Maybe my annoyance with our failed test and trace not only costing lives, but also siphoning £12 billion to "friends of the governement" because they follow the privatisation ideology no matter the cost, meant was too dismissive of your post last month. If that is the case, I apologise. It is hard to look past the suffering that government mistakes and potential corruption are causing.
I didn't know that. But it doesn't surprise me. Thanks for sharing.Theres been a lot of this. For example Boots have been given the green light for a new 12 minute test that costs £120 and will be in 200 stores in the coming weeks. Who is the CEO of Boots? Seb James. Who does he know very well? Look at this picture.
One sitting bottom left, one sitting bottom right
Two different things, procuring PPE is shady as anyone can set up a company & have the right contacts and then go from there. Some of my former colleagues switched from supplying used phones to PPE immediately as the influx of Far East suppliers came out of the woodwork. That has more corrupt practice than anything I've seen in this pandemic.
Boots aren't some fly by night supplier though, they're a high street pharmacist and a proposition of quick testing is no different than what has been offered by private medical facilities since the start of the pandemic, are they all connected to the government? The company on the 12 minute test, LumiraDx, are selling their machines private, so anyone can engage for procurement with them as long as they have the capital - wouldn't surprise me if United have these machines. It's difficult to draw any form of link to government on this story, other than a small fact that the CEO attended the same school as the Johnson.
Looks like Teesside will be the next into Tier 3. Announcement expected later apparently.
The administrative resources required to deal with the number of cases we have now would be so astronomical that no-one could ever agree to it, if the evidence for input vs. output was laid out plainly - whether that's this tight government or the general public.
I don't think 1,000 was intended to be interpreted as the magic number, it's just a simple number for us to wrap our heads around. The unfortunate reality is that in every single month, we've had over 1,000 cases in a single day, and hovered around that for many days either side. The average case numbers haven't dropped below 500 a day in the entirety of the pandemic, and the current best estimates are we're still only catching 1 in 4 cases. If you multiply that 500 by the average number of contacts people have by the average time it takes to reach someone, you run into the inevitable problem that the amount of people you would need to do that job is far beyond what we can manage if that is the absolute best we can do, and the only reasonable expectation is that, without a lockdown, we'll consistently have substantially higher figures requiring multiples more people as it expands.
We point to Germany as a success story, and we know conclusively their test and trace system is much, much better and yet here they are on the edge of another lockdown. They're doing that so they don't have the same number of critical patients and ultimately deaths, and many of us here will agree with that approach, but it doesn't change the fact they're taking absolutely drastic economic measures just to manage that situation. If Germany, with many more qualified people, a much more efficient administrative system, a localised approach and a much better handle of virus transmission find themselves accepting contact tracing won't save us now, we need to take this more severe measures, then it's not a big leap to say that even without Serco, the contact tracing system would not have prevented us from being forced into taking these severe restrictions again.
That was my only point. I share your disgust with the way the system has been handled, and the shocking way they've handled the money here, but we can hold that view while also acknowledging that the test & trace system could not have been formed in a way that would have prevented the wider situation from unfolding. And at the very least, we can reasonably disagree on that issue without the suggestion that that viewpoint is only based on a misunderstanding of the issue at hand.
Now. But in July when it should’ve been in place? Whatever way you slice it, the Government have fecked it. That other Governments have also fecked it to varying degrees won’t change that.
Yeah, even in July. We have had too many cases the entire time. It's one of the things Fauci has kept saying in the US to his increasing bemusement when people were saying "we're past the first wave so we can start to take control". You need to get case levels down to a manageable level before you can manage them. The fact that they're better than what they were before, and they're not rising, doesn't mean they're at a manageable level.
For you to believe that this is dozens of government's faults, you would have to have an alternative to point to. The only countries that have been able to get on top of things with contact tracing have had many, many fewer cases. The lowest we've ever had our case levels was a 7-day average of 583. For most of July it was over 600. South Korea had over 600 cases in a 7-day average for just 4 days. In June and July they had an average of under 50, and even with that their cases jumped up by 7x in late August, because of a few super spreader events.
We needed to get our case levels to those levels to be able to control this through test & trace. They're the success stories. And they were able to do that because that system was in place from MERS, years ago. When they were confronted with MERS, and they didn't have that system, they weren't able to create that system during the epidemic and solve the problem that way. They had to take drastic measures after being caught unaware.
Every other country that has had an average of over 600 cases per day in a given month has lost control of this, regardless of whether their contact tracing system was praised or criticised, whether it was launched early or late in the pandemic. And experts have provided technical and logical explanations on why that is.
It isn't possible to create this system in the midst of a pandemic and have it work the way you're suggesting it can. If there's a criticism of the system it's that we didn't create one like South Korea's when they were facing MERS, to get ahead of the game. But that's a very different kind of problem.
Of course it’s Governments fault. They’re the ones making the decisions. Be it their failure to prepare after spending money commissioning reports on pandemic preparedness or in ending lockdown before they had a working system in place. The spotlight needs to remain on their failures, not brushed under the carpet.
I agree, it's important to shine the spotlight on their actual failures.
Whether it was a failure to not have the right systems to deal with the pandemic in the first place is a complicated question. It quickly becomes a philoshopical question. I don't blame South Korea for not being able to deal with MERS, personally. I'm sure many in South Korea do, because we like having people to blame. It makes the problem easier to live with.
In the UK, if one of the political parties suggested we should spend billions on pandemic preparedness and take billions away from the military, perhaps lots of people would agree now but few people would have agreed then. I don't blame past versions of ourselves for thinking that way. The question would have (and did) turn to "if we are going to take away billions from the military then we should spend it on these 10 other real issues we're facing now, rather than that one issue we might have". If we spent all of the money we would like to on preventing all generational and existential risks from ever materialising, we would destroy society ourselves before something else could. That's just the nature of the problem. It would be nice if that was all someone's fault but it's just a consequence of existence, an unsolvable problem, just a problem we need to manage to survive.
Fair points but why did we waste money on getting reports to just ignore it all? Under funding of essential services have made the matter worse and this Government has consistently taken steps to cut funding. We shouldn’t be making excuses for them. Alas, I think we’re at the point of going round in circles.
If you're referring to the government shoveling tens of billions to private companies without any kind of performance criteria or even an understanding of what success or failure looks like... Then no-one who shares the viewpoint of Friedman would expect anything less than catastrophe. Listen to his views on almost any governmental project administered either by the public or private sector where funding is channeled via central government and the inevitability is that the end result will be a poor return on investment. In fact you could argue that there's an incentive in running it poorly as it's likely to cause the government to increase payments in order to try to get it running better (ala the NHS). Either way there is no incentive to run it well in either scenario. The public sector have no personal profit incentive to run the system well, the private sector will maximise profit without having to worry about the negative results of underinvestment.
It's like rent control in the sense that if government caps the revenue in which a private body can earn, the end result is a poorer service. In the example of rent control the property will fall into a state of disrepair because the only means in which to increase/maintain profit is to reduce maintenance/upkeep costs. In the example of track and trace the revenue is fixed so the only means of increasing profit is to reduce operating costs (employ cheaper call centre workers instead of more experienced and costly operatives). This is why we have legislation to prevent monopolies in industry, because there is no incentive for a monopoly to be efficient when they can merely increase the price they charge to mitigate their own inefficiencies. It's pretty laughable therefore that we've created a track and trace "monopoly" and expected it to be any different. It would obviously have been far smarter to have dozens and dozens of regional track and trace contracts and quickly the businesses with great results would expand and win contracts for other local authorities and the ones with poor outcomes would lose their contracts (due to their poor outcomes).
You can look throughout the Covid crises and this complete failure to consider incentives is ever-present. The belief that people will self-isolate after a positive test, despite personal incentives telling them to go to work. The belief that people will stay at home for 14 days after going abroad, despite personal incentives telling them to go to work. The belief that people will name every single one of their close contacts, despite every personal incentive telling them that they're screwing over their colleague/friends livelihood by doing so. The fact that the young are expected to comply with rules where for them the restrictions are far worse than the disease with no incentive to comply. In actual fact the majority of incentives in the long term will have been counterproductive to both the economy and to controlling the virus (in my view).
It's quite ridiculous to rely on private business or private individuals to voluntarily reduce their own potential profit / income / liberty where every objective incentive tells them to do the complete opposite.
Announce a policy that every member of society will be tested for Covid on 15th December and that everyone with a negative test will receive £1k. I guarantee the R rate will hit the floor between now and then.
TL;DR - Private companies will only be better at everything if there is an incentive for them to be better.
Last edited:
David Cameron standing just above them too
Hope you're feeling OK. I would assume it's sick leave, because you've got a virus - however, I suspect you need to check with your HR folk.
From the Eton Boating Song:
And nothing in life shall sever, The chain that is round us now.
Like something out of the apocalypse!
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
Looks like I was right on the second wave and eat out to help out being a disaster.
Looks like a very quiet rush hour, you can see cars actually moving.
Apparently not today now. More likely early next week.
It's interesting that the ONS data appears to suggest that the North East (although not Teesside specifically) is levelling off in terms of the rate of infection, although it is still increasing. Whether this is relevant, who knows.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
A graph for the “casedemic” prats.
We are in our third week of 'circuit breaking' here in NI - cases are starting to come down but they are still much higher than anybody would like and our hospitals are at capacity. I wouldn't be surprised if our 4 week lockdown becomes a 6-8 week one. I'd support this if I thought it would mean things being relaxed a bit for Christmas.
Don't know if you've read the paper? It draws some interesting correlation between the data sets. I wouldn't call the scheme a disaster from a wider perspective, and certainly not the overriding cause of a second wave. You only have to look at September's data from the ONS to work that out. Quote from the paper itself:
Quite a broad percentage range, and a big envelope. What would be an interesting follow up is for someone with a background in epidemiology to review this, rather than the view of an economic professor.
Some alarming stats last night was that North West hospitals now have higher patient levels than what they had back in March/April. With the weighting of the rates further North, any wider outbreaks down South could compound those dramatically. We're not far off from Patrick Vallance's prediction back in September either now, which is worrying.
I was on a call with a Professor of Immunology this morning and he was saying that Pfizer and Moderna will be applying for emergency use authorisation of their vaccine candidates in the third week of November.
Yeah pushed to Monday now.
I think the hospital admissions are being cited as the driving factor behind the decision.
As thought when the government was asked about a circuit breaker they bought up the economy.
Economy and money is more important to them than the wider populations health.
Economy and money is more important to them than the wider populations health.
Italy did 31k cases today. On one half you've got small business owners and the grey economy, which is huge in Italy, calling to relax what's already in place, and the rest asking why we're not already back in full lockdown.
Yes, but this is Boots. They're the second largest pharmacy chain in the world. Of course they're going to be out there at the forefront of private testing. No malfeasance needed.
I do appreciate the allure of being able to reduce almost everything to two simple principles: incentives are all that matters, and government is bad at almost everything. If you repeat if often enough, wrap it up in a few allegories, and then apply it to unfalsifiable positions, after a while, whether it's true or not doesn't really matter, you've thought it so often that it becomes impossible to believe it isn't true. That works well for your essentially unfalsifiable policy suggestion at the end, but I think runs into a couple of problems with your analysis of real world events.
Serco are not the only company who run the test and trace program, they're just the most high profile. Serco operates 30% of the test sites, while the rest are apparently operated by Sodexo and G4S, and Mitie, Boots and the army provide support. On the tracing side of things, SITEL have the other big contract. So the theory that there is no competition and the government has created a natural monopoly kind of falls down on that one. As you say, they're incentivised to expand, win a larger share of the contracts, and to do so by providing better outcomes. And we know that they do have key performance indicators, they exist in the contracts in a redacted form because they are "commercially sensitive". There's lots you can say about that but given your whole spiel was about incentives, those are two pretty significant differences vs. the original premise.
Of course you can just move the goalposts to talk about perfect competition rather than natural monopolies. That's the beauty of the Friedman doctrine. It's endlessly flexible as long as the argument still comes back to those two simple principles.
Yeah, also the fact that older people testing positive seems to be on the increase.