Massive Spanner
Give Mason Mount a chance!
Working from home is great if you manage it right.Working from home... What a miserable existence that would be. I hope to heaven we all all fight it tooth and nail.
Working from home is great if you manage it right.Working from home... What a miserable existence that would be. I hope to heaven we all all fight it tooth and nail.
Personally i love it. I think my company are planning to move towards one or two days in the office a week at most and compensate with a bit more team outings. We already did a lot of our work through conference calls though.Working from home... What a miserable existence that would be. I hope to heaven we all all fight it tooth and nail.
If I was going to be a massive spanner, or reduce the quality of discourse significantly, I could suggest that your post is a short way of saying “I don’t really care about poor people down the line, or those that are crippled by debt and lost business, my Nan is fine and I’m alright, Jack.”Those are really long ways of saying "I don't care if old people die, I want to be able to go do whatever I want again."
I'm not sure a 500 person study of one specific job type (working in a noisy call centre vs being in a quiet home environment), lasting only 9 months with an obvious and direct incentive to the people involved to be productive (that a large increase in productivity would likely lead to being able to work from home full time, which would save the employee in commuting costs as well as hundreds of hours of their annual time) and in an industry with very little investment cost to trial this and with a company in a country whose population are notoriously compliant is great evidence. Neither of course is my much more limited and anectodal evidence.Your personal experience goes against the evidence of actual research on the issue, so can probably be ignored.
Although it does seem as though you should put a bit of thought into how to best motivate your staff.
As opposed to the joys of spending hours (and money) commuting to and from work every day?Working from home... What a miserable existence that would be. I hope to heaven we all all fight it tooth and nail.
My partner will probably lose her job soon. My sister lost hers. My self employed brother has no work right now. Numerous close friends have been heavily affected from a financial perspective. So .. no ... that's not true. I'm extremely concerned about the economic impact but I also respect the fact that the alternative - more deaths, and a completely overwhelmed health service, is much worse.If I was going to be a massive spanner, or reduce the quality of discourse significantly, I could suggest that your post is a short way of saying “I don’t really care about poor people down the line, or those that are crippled by debt and lost business, my Nan is fine and I’m alright, Jack.”
I’m not a massive spanner, mind you. Just a small one.
There is a very real discussion that the general public need to confront. Coming out of this is going to be brutal. Absolutely brutal. The sad reality is that the most disadvantaged in society are going to pay a very heavy price, and people who were bettering themselves in all manner of ways are now going to find themselves climbing back out of the well. Some will make it; some won’t. Public services, relentlessly underfunded and over-scrutinised, will be left to pick up the pieces. Acknowledging this probable reality can exist separately from the ongoing tragedy of death.
I don't think anyone is in any position to say a Government is being too conservative. This strikes me as the correct policy when there is a large amount of uncertainty about what happens when a lockdown is ended. If it is found that the measures can be eased more quickly, then the policy can be changed accordingly.Where I do think there should be a bit of discussion is on countries reopening. I think our roadmap here in Ireland is ridiculously long-winded and restrictive because our out-going government are a bunch of cowards...
It wasn't a binary choice, of course. New Zealand have "in epidemiological terms" eliminated the virus, and they're going to re-open the economy far more successfully than the US. What the US are suffering from most is a poorly executed strategy. The notion that the US somehow forgot about the economy in all of this kind of ignores the most important part of the story - the initial exponential growth. Cases were doubling every three days and they had thousands of cases by the time they implemented social distancing. New Zealand were at 100 cases by the time they reached "level 3" - essentially what we've called lockdown - and Czech Republic had under 100 cases by the same stage. That's because they had the economy front-and-centre at that stage, as they have in every stage. They were forced into this approach when the scale of the public health crisis became overwhelming, not because they put public health above the economy.After seeing the US unemployment figures I am now leaning towards opening up economies at the risk of widespread infection... Does that make me a republican-abroad?
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Government fails to meet six-figure Covid-19 testing target for sixth day in a row
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Basing it off of theseIf it's based on the Spectator article, that paragraph is a bit strange without any idea regarding the sample size or more details about the cases, the one anecdotal example doesn't allow to make that type of conclusions. They should be careful with the way they claim things.
Here you have examples of conflicting opinions.
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I was very much in the “lockdown can only be done for a matter of weeks” before it causes even more problems, but that was partly because I didn’t ever see the government offering the economical support it has. I agree with the gist of what you are saying, but cannot see how ending the lockdown now is the right move. The numbers are still too high for track and trace to be effective, and we still don’t have the infrastructure for even a smaller number.I get that and I get why we had a lockdown in the short term because the NHS was at risk of being overwhelmed...all of this that you are saying though, the actual science doesn't back any of it up. THe science suggests that in the longer term the economic impacts and the continuing effect of the virus itself will mean the measures we've taken here could well have cost lives rather than saved them. With science you don't just take one variable and ignore literally everything else. You would factor in the people who ARE dying because they can't get care, who are dying because of stress, mental health, not being looked after, loss of income. You factor in the many more who will fall under the same umbrella due to the economic impact of the biggest recession in history (which has been caused primarily by lockdown, not the virus). You factor in the percentage of people who have died of corona virus who would have been likely to die within the same time frame as these economic factors (what you will see is the expected death numbers will drop well below average when the virus subsides)...how many fit and healthy people have died of corona virus in the UK? I don't have an actual definite number but the figures I have seen have only been in the hundreds. You have to factor in the effect on the quiility of life for the people you are most aiming to protect. It's no good saving someone if you make the rest of their life lonely and miserable, because you aren't going to make them live forever. We'd all live longer on average for example if none of us ever got in a car again (over 25,000 less deaths or serious injuries a year straight away). We'd all live longer if none of us drunk alcohol ever again...where do you draw the line with stuff like that?
It's actually quite ridiculous how blinkered and tunnel visioned people's views are on this. The reality is we are dealing with a virus that has a mortality rate of less than 1%....and we have CREATED a global catastrophe that will take many years to fix in order to "fight" the virus...and actually when you look at the number of deaths against the mortality and infection rate it's seriously up for debate how effective these tactics have even been in a lot of countries. Look at the deaths in Germany compared to here...that is an example of an effective way to combat an epidemic vs an unsuccesful one. You can dress up the numbers how you want but there's no way that 30,000 deaths (and counting) looks like an effective strategy at this point. A strategy that causes so much damage and effect sliterally everyone so severely should be with the aim of MAXIMISING the number of people you save...not whatever half arsed attempt at something the UK have made can be called. We still can't even test people in care homes...the exact people this is meant to be to help protect.
When you go on about us saving thousands of lives a day, what are you even basing this on? There are problems here that will take years and years to resolve. There is the impending second wave which we will at present be in no shape at all to cope with. There is the fact that all these at risk people who have been locked up for 3 months, aren't suddenly going to turn healthy or no longer be at risk when you let them back out. A significant number of them will be much less healthy than before. What are you going to do towards the end of the year and every winter from now on? Keep locking them back up again? It is not a viable plan. It isn't even the basis on which to make one around.
It's not a black and white case of just hiding in the cupboard until the monster hopefully leaves the room like a majority of people seem to think it is. It's a very complicated problem, that needs some very smart people in charge of managing it and that isn't something we have had here at any point. There are data based models out there telling you that after 3 weeks a lockdown starts causing more damage than it saves. There's statistical data out there telling you that something as simple as austerity can be linked to nearly HALF A MILLION deaths. Imagine what a prolonged massive economic recession coupled with the fact it wont actually cause the virus to go away will do by comparison. If 30,000 is a tragedy what is a number that has some more zeros on the end of it? Because that's a very genuine possibility as things stand.
Is it an affluent and like minded area?So my road has thought it’s a good idea to have a street party... no social distancing being undertaken whatsoever. I can’t believe how people can be so ignorant.
Working from home may be more productive, but I think working from home under normal circumstances is different to enforced working from home. Coronavirus on the whole is reducing productivity because people don't have that realise of being able to live a normal life at the moment because they are always stuck at home.Your personal experience goes against the evidence of actual research on the issue, so can probably be ignored.
Although it does seem as though you should put a bit of thought into how to best motivate your staff.
I have applied that to all of his posts for the last couple of years to be fair. Saves me a lot of time reading the exact opposite opinions to my own.Your personal experience goes against the evidence of actual research on the issue, so can probably be ignored.
Although it does seem as though you should put a bit of thought into how to best motivate your staff.
It’s definitely harder than usual working from home right now. Especially for anyone with kids!Working from home may be more productive, but I think working from home under normal circumstances is different to enforced working from home. Coronavirus on the whole is reducing productivity because people don't have that realise of being able to live a normal life at the moment because they are always stuck at home.
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/20/21187...rus-productivity-mental-health-nicholas-bloom
https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/4/...irus-pandemic-covid-19-capitalism-ep-thompson
I didn't really read the comment thread so this may be off topic, but I just thought it was an interesting side note.
It's definitely changed in the last few days. Too many people seeing gleeful headlines with only rumours of changes in the last few days to confirm their own opinions, and it's seemingly back to normal outside. Like a giant school holiday.I waked through my town centre today for the first time since lockdown started. Quite frankly I was appalled. Large groups of kids on bikes, people stopping to chat, loitering and literally nobody following a safe distance. People were literally laughing at me and my partner for zig zagging and stopping and starting our walk patterns to keep distance.
Not gonna do that again in a hurry. Honestly it was like a normal Friday.
The statistician in me (and I hate fecking stats) always gets a bit irked by these excess deaths calculations, without confidence intervals.A little data on excess deaths v covid deaths in Greater Manchester:
https://medium.com/@urbixio/greater-manchester-covid-19-related-excess-deaths-c382c95b14f
On the face of it, it looks like a lot of the reporting coming in from (non-hospital) death certificates comes down to what local GPs and coroners are taking as policy, and a stance on "most likely" cause, or even on documenting deaths amongst people with other illnesses.
In Bolton for example, "Bolton reported 472 deaths in April 2020 and have had a yearly average of 222 for the month. There have been 168 Covid-19 deaths reported which would be a difference of 82 deaths above the yearly average and Covid-19 toll."
Whereas in its neighbouring town, Bury: "Bury reported 282 deaths in April 2020 and have had a yearly average of 155 for the month. There have been 110 Covid-19 deaths reported which would be a difference of 17 deaths above the yearly average and Covid-19 toll."
Some of these may be timing related. Others may come down to an individual outbreak (in a care home or something) that isn't described wholly by the numbers. But still, it sounds like the recording may come down to policies adopted by individual GPs/GP practices. Certainly that Bury number seems more credible than the Bolton one. It would be interesting to know if that kind of policy divergence is taking place in other health authorities as well.
For sure it could do with some +/- deviation bars sat on those graph averages - because as you say, averages are just that. It's more that as you move around Greater Manchester authorities you see different patterns that intrigues me - as Manchester as a whole probably does wobble up and down together (based on weather, flu, holiday timing and all those other tangible risk factors).The statistician in me (and I hate fecking stats) always gets a bit irked by these excess deaths calculations, without confidence intervals.
The yearly average is exactly that, an average. With a wide range, year on year. So talking about an “excess” of 17 deaths in any given months based on the yearly average just seems silly.
There’s bound to have been months in years gone by with a similar, or even greater, number of “excess deaths” - as compared to the average - which never even got a mention.
Indeed. The amount of shoddy reporting of statistics that has gone on the last few weeks and months is frustrating. It doesn't surprise me mind, but it's still frustrating. Confidence intervals are generally so easy to get and add so much more than a point estimate, but I suspect a lot of the time they're left out as they provide the sort of info that the person reporting doesn't want to show.The statistician in me (and I hate fecking stats) always gets a bit irked by these excess deaths calculations, without confidence intervals.
The yearly average is exactly that, an average. With a wide range, year on year. So talking about an “excess” of 17 deaths in any given month based on the yearly average just seems silly.
There’s bound to have been months in years gone by with a similar, or even greater, number of “excess deaths” - as compared to the average - which never even got a mention.
Regional mortality differences are interesting. With this pandemic we’ve all got used to seeing how some areas get really badly effected, while others seem to dodge the bullet. Previous outbreaks of illnesses like swine flu probably followed a similar pattern. Super spreaders or care home outbreaks causing localised mortality. Apart from a few PH specialists and research virologists, most of use were blissfully unaware!For sure it could do with some +/- deviation bars sat on those graph averages - because as you say, averages are just that. It's more that as you move around Greater Manchester authorities you see different patterns that intrigues me - as Manchester as a whole probably does wobble up and down together (based on weather, flu, holiday timing and all those other tangible risk factors).
As you say though, isolating datasets too much doesn't help, something completely different may happen in May, and we won't see the big picture until we've got many more months (and regions) of data on the charts. I'm more curious about whether doctors writing death certificates are getting policy advice on characterising cause of death, and if so from what source.
Based on that the claim is wrong though. The study discovered that kids weren't the main source of transmission within 31 households studied but they still represent around 10%. To even suggest that they aren't infections at all is an exaggeration. They are seemingly less contagious some studies believe that it's around three times less contagious than adults but they still are.
I've seen Westworld, I know where this is going.
This is pretty mad/dystopian. A robot patrolling parks in Singapore, shouting at people who aren’t social distancing.
This is pretty mad/dystopian. A robot patrolling parks in Singapore, shouting at people who aren’t social distancing.
I found it really weird that BBC news were reporting from a “street party” this morning. People sitting outside their front gardens on the pavement, others walking past. A couple of weeks ago they were shaming people (who probably live in small flats in London) for walking in parks.So my road has thought it’s a good idea to have a street party... no social distancing being undertaken whatsoever. I can’t believe how people can be so ignorant.
Why couldn't it have been an Artoo lookalike? It's nightmarish.
This is pretty mad/dystopian. A robot patrolling parks in Singapore, shouting at people who aren’t social distancing.
Holes in the roof and now the glazers can't even keep most of the lights on!
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa424/5819060Based on that the claim is wrong though. The study discovered that kids weren't the main source of transmission within 31 households studied but they still represent around 10%. To even suggest that they aren't infections at all is an exaggeration. They are seemingly less contagious some studies believe that it's around three times less contagious than adults but they still are.
Of course, I agree. However, looking at all the knock-on effects I'm wondering if the cure is indeed better than the disease. Nobody wants death, but the global economic implosion is increasingly concerning...It wasn't a binary choice, of course. New Zealand have "in epidemiological terms" eliminated the virus, and they're going to re-open the economy far more successfully than the US. What the US are suffering from most is a poorly executed strategy. The notion that the US somehow forgot about the economy in all of this kind of ignores the most important part of the story - the initial exponential growth. Cases were doubling every three days and they had thousands of cases by the time they implemented social distancing. New Zealand were at 100 cases by the time they reached "level 3" - essentially what we've called lockdown - and Czech Republic had under 100 cases by the same stage. That's because they had the economy front-and-centre at that stage, as they have in every stage. They were forced into this approach when the scale of the public health crisis became overwhelming, not because they put public health above the economy.
My estate is half filled with fecking street parties, and then the private facebook group is full of people commenting that they are disappointed their aren't more (apparently those not doing so do not appreciate the sacrifice of those in WW2).I found it really weird that BBC news were reporting from a “street party” this morning. People sitting outside their front gardens on the pavement, others walking past. A couple of weeks ago they were shaming people (who probably live in small flats in London) for walking in parks.
My partner wasn’t allowed to come to my grandads cremation, but everyone’s allowed to prance around to celebrate something that can be done annually.