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Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

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Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#331

Post by DanBC »

rebuilder wrote: post #50
DanBC wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Death Rate = (number of deaths / number of cases) = probability of dying if infected by the virus (%) That's not a great way of measuring the death rate during an on-going epidemic. They should be measuring the number of people who died today / number of cases a week ago.

Why a week ago? If it takes longer than a week for victims to die, in a situation with rapidly increasing infections that will give a very distorted number.

Sure, maybe just one week is too short and it needs to be longer. But that just makes my point stronger, doesn't it?

Using the total number of people infected today means they're including a bunch of people who may go on to die, but they're not including those deaths yet. So they're making the death rate look smaller than it is.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#333

Post by lozenge »

SilkRoadie wrote: post #153
hanoz wrote: post #91

I think we (UK) are trying to be too cute about managing the curve, like we can ramp it up to the capacity line then slam on the brakes with the big measures at exactly the right time and keep it ticking along there nicely through the spring and summer and have this thing wrapped up by the end of the year. It could all go very badly wrong. I get the impression we're being overly influenced by a few gurus of behaviora…

I would be on board with the UK plan if it was more proactively protecting the at risk population. Why aren’t large events stopped? I get one infected person won’t infect a whole stadium... the main thing for me is people from all over go to these large events and so there is a high risk of introducing the virus to new areas by having them. There should be more testing and local alerting. It would keep people on thei…

And now more details of the plan are trickling out - over 70s being advised to stay at home (but not yet), etc.

At every point people will ask, "if cancelling large events/closing schools/WFH would have helped, why didn't you announce it weeks ago instead of now?"

Plus, it isn't as if people are actually keeping calm and carrying on. Their shopping has been disrupted, half their friends are staying home (despite no government advice to do so), they can't visit their doctors in person any more, and everybody is stuck to the news. Productivity in offices has dropped due to the anxiety and uncertainty, and I don't think Boris' "life goes on as normal for now but that may change later" speech late Friday has done anything to prevent that.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#334

Post by jrandm »

simonw wrote: post #59
jrandm wrote: post #52

Here is a link to the Coronavirus Action Plan on GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-actio... I would suggest anyone read this and other official publications before any Twitter thread to understand the UK government's approach to the virus. Large, complex decisions are hopefully not made off of a few hundred word summary of the situation.

That document says "Published 3 March 2020" - do you know if it still reflects current government thinking?

It is still linked on all of the relevant sites. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information... is a page with more frequent updates.

Specific local health authorities probably have the most up-to-date information for any given geographic area.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#335

Post by mirimir »

lallysingh wrote: post #303
lozenge wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(warning: conspiracy theory, but at least an original one) I'm thinking this only makes sense in the context of Brexit. Brexit will be a massive hit to the competitiveness of British businesses... somebody in government is hoping to counteract this by taking an approach different to the rest of Europe. If the UK's approach works, it will end up economically ahead of all the other European countries, something like th…

.. fewer elderly to take care of?

Although I'm personally offended, being unimaginably (for me) old, this does make some sense. After all, many countries have been angsty about demographic inversion. And SARS-CoV-2 could resolve that within a decade or less.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#336

Post by sitkack »

knzhou wrote: post #227
ubercow13 wrote: post #212

Modelling disease spread seems like the kind of scientific endeavour that one can dedicate one's whole life to becoming an expert in, and many people presumably do. Considering that, why should anyone give much credence to a random medium article on the topic by a 'silicon valley tech executive'? (lol) There are 10's of thousands of scientific research papers [1], by scientists, on COVID-19 already, and this guy is j…

Because the models the government's epidemiologists are using explicitly don't account for all possible actions. Back when this was taking off in China, a bunch of epidemiologists came out and said it was completely uncontrollable there. They were wrong, because they hadn't accounted for the extreme actions the Chinese government was willing to take; it was not even a possibility in the models. The same story repeate…

The US we are trying as hard as possible to track the exponential pandemic curve as closely as we can.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#337

Post by AmericanChopper »

brokenkebab wrote: post #261
rusk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OBE is a political honour, not a scientific one.

I'm not sure following honors/awards is always the safest path, but your answer doesn't make sense to me at all: he was awarded for infectious disease control "particularly the Ebola crisis response in West Africa", which sounds to me like valuable experience, and solid ground to claim some knowledge.

The more explicit reason to view him as credible is his body of work. The award was ostensibly given in recognition of that work, so to cite the award in support of his credibility is pretty much the same thing as citing the work, just with an appeal to authority thrown in. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, an appeal to authority is as valid as the authority you’re appealing to.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#338

Post by csomar »

Thinking about it from where I am right now, I don't think it is crazy.

Let's think about it again: China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. They are countries which are very connected to each other; and yet, somehow, they managed to contain it. It's 'herd responsibility'. The people are applying social distancing and hygiene rules, that's why it's working.

It's possible, as a knowledgeable politician, that you recognize that it's impossible to implement such measures in your country. The reasons are beside the technical abilities of your government: Your citizen are not committed enough to the hygiene. And that's not because Asians are cleaner or superior, they have been exposed to these viruses before and thus they are already trained to deal with them.

It's not the same deal for many countries of the west. We didn't have much trouble in the last few decades and thus people have forgotten why we do most of the hygiene measures in the first place.

Also, here is my first reaction, as a citizen, if the government has declared 'herd immunity' as their strategy: STAY AT HOME. I'd also probably warn the closer one and avoid contact with them too.

So the UK might win twice here: Have enough social distancing by fear (and fear is a hell of a thing as you experienced in the last few days); and also have its population adopt strict hygiene and distancing rules making it safer in the future and readier for the next disease.

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#339

Post by yulaow »

vanniv wrote: post #289
yulaow wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of young people still need icu treatments here in italy. If you don't flatten the curve early a lot of younglings too are gonna die and fast considering the very limited number of icu beds and the very high number of early contagions the uk seems to want to reach.

Some will. Possibly more than would have if we spread the illness over time. But that set of outcomes has risks and costs too. But regardless, it isn't really clear that the curve-flattening efforts are even effective. Italy is clearly experiencing an utterly uncontrolled outbreak. Despite pretty much the maximum amount of lockdown possible to achieve. Don't believe that they have only 20k cases, or only 3k new ones…

To clarify current national-level lockdown effects are expected to be seen starting twelve days from now.

Some or the old red zones which covered the starting point of the infection are currently with 0 new detected cases since 3 days so it seems lockdown works IF u put them in place soon enough. [ https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&... ]

Re: Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?

#340

Post by hellodave555 »

It's totally insane and I am amazed more people in politics and the media aren't calling it out. Other countries have already demonstrated it can be contained with rapid testing, tracing and limited lockdowns so why are we doing this?

Lets assume 60% of the population are to catch it, they have said they want the worst of it over by the winter. That's 40 million people. If 5% need an ICU bed and the average ICU stay is 2 weeks (both conservative numbers) and infections are spread out perfectly over the next 8 months we will need 125,000 ICU beds, the NHS has something like 5,000 and most are already used for non-coronavirus patients.

You run our of ICU beds the fatality rate is going to rocket, more like 3-6% then 1-2% and we are looking at deaths of 1.2million - 2.4million, let alone all the deaths that come from a completely over-run NHS.

How can you describe a plan that will allow the collapse of the NHS and the death of millions anything other than insane?

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