Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#91

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #61

f6v wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So alcohol spreads COVID? This always gets me. Isn’t it obvious that alcohol consumption is a social activity? Not all of it, but to a large degree. Limiting the consumption seems logical. Of course, you can’t assess the impact of individual measures at the moment, as you need a controlled experiment and proper statistics. But is this measure really something to be that upset about?

If you want high compliance, the rules need to be perceived as fair and just. Telling people they can't have beer with their dinner is plainly frustrating. Not to mention that people can just get their takeaway from the restaurant, and then walk next door to the corner store and go "food shopping" to pick up a 6 pack. If there was evidence that drinking alcohol spreads covid, I would expect that to be a clear message…

[deleted]

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#92

Post by cygx » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #57

Daishiman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody is asking the hard questions and the hard answer is that it is downright impossible to isolate the most vulnerable from the general population. Tried and attempted in multiple places; turns out you only need one nurse, one doctor, one caretaker, one young kid in a large household to infect those people. Maybe, just maybe, the experts (and I mean the people who have spent their lifetimes studying the transmi…

> Tried and attempted in multiple places Really? Where was this tried at scale? Where did we spend a fraction of the cost that we incur locking down an entire population. This just isn't true. > Maybe, just maybe, the experts (and I mean the people who have spent their lifetimes studying the transmission of respiratory diseases) have already weighed in, their answers don't look that different from when things started…

I'm always surspised that we're still arguing about this.

Look at the excess mortality in Belgium:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

Supposedly, that's with the percentage of Covid cases still in the single digits. It seems obvious that if you do not get a handle on this, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed eventually. No sane person wants to see that happen, hence the drastic measures...

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#93

Post by djsumdog » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

lamplighton wrote: post #68

I live in Southwark, and it's always astonishing how people don't wears masks around here. Customers, Cashiers, Barbers... Iceland, Off-license, Asda... It's like people don't care at all. Only about 50% of people are wearing masks. Sharp contrast with France where people need to wear masks all the time, and it's heavily enforced. I don't expect the number of cases to go down TBH.

That masks are scientifically shown to do anything. They are more superstition at this point. You can look at numbers between regions with high mask usage and low mask usage and there's literally no correlation.

Meanwhile they are contributing massive amounts of plastic waste, textile waste, and provide a placebo while also providing alienation between individuals.

The larger factor that correlates is population density. Low population areas around the US rarely impose mass mandates and they also don't have high numbers.

Lastly, hypothesis: people who are convinced of the merits of a masks are also likely to murder the people in the other room in the Stanly Milgram experiments.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#94

Post by matz1 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

protoman3000 wrote: post #4

What are the reasons why we can’t have a very hard 4-week long Chinese style total shutdown?

Why would I want a measure that is more damaging than the virus ?

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#95

Post by ageitgey » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

itsmemattchung wrote: post #5

Can someone elaborate on the differences between the numbers reported by the gov.uk website NOIDS[1] (notifications of infectious diseases) versus the numbers reported another gov.uk website[2] ? Looking at NOIDS's weekly reported COVID-19 cases from Week 52[3], I only see 85 new COVID-19 cases. Whereas when I look at the coronavirus.data.gov.uk website, the numbers soar and continue shoot through the roof. What's go…

NOIDS is an outbreak detection program. The idea is if a primary care doctor suspects someone has something important and unexpected, like Cholera or Polio, they can let the disease control authorities know so they they can be on the lookout for outbreaks. It's an early warning system.

During a giant epidemic, no primary care doctor is detecting a new covid outbreak and reporting that up the chain as though thats new information - not when people are told to get tested outside primary care and aren't allowed to come into primary care with covid symptoms and tens of thousands are testing positive each day and have known covid cases. There's just no reason to do that. So NOIDS numbers are meaningless for Covid. But if covid recedes, then the system is in place for detecting future outbreaks.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#96

Post by bananapear » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #11

In the UK, 95% of the deaths are people over 60. There are more deaths for people over 90 than under 70. When are we going to start putting all these efforts and resources into focusing on the vulnerable populations and not painting with a broad brush. We know that lockdowns are too blunt an instrument which is why most of Europe is having to engage in ever more draconian measures. We are mortgaging our future here,…

This [1] is a useful summary of statistics comparing the current situation to that of Spring and earlier years. It’s interesting to see that the total number of hospitalised people and deaths are broadly in line with previous years, but the portion tagged as COVID is increasing. There’s lots of discussion around the issues with PCR testing (e.g. picking up old virus fragments & false positives). Difficult to know what to believe but there seems to be a lack of studies/data to back up the accuracy, and the NHS have recently switched to using Lateral Flow devices for regular staff testing due to the volume of asymptomatic staff being require to isolate.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7cUVU6o28QeIil__fQyqntQcYK...

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#97

Post by jeofken » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

flagrant wrote: post #89

jeofken wrote: post #47

Uncountable seeds of friendship and love never take root, due to meeting people being banned. Untold numbers of ideas and plans never made between entrepreneurs. All due to people with power over government arms or mass media being caught up in a mass hysteria. Governments will print money Weimar-style to fund their debts and liabilities in the 2020s, as they kill commerce and free life. In my country we were spared…

The citations do not support what you say. Citation [0] says only that excess mortality in specifically the third quarter of 2020 was not higher than previous years. It says nothing about the excess deaths for all of 2020. Citation [1] is data for 2019, before COVID-19. Why did you cite these articles and pretend they say something they don't?

In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths, but only writes exact numbers for different quarters. In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up.

I’m getting HTTP error 500 (iOS safari from a Swedish domestic IP) when going to the statistics database - idk if it’s just me or if they deployed something buggy recently. Can therefore only find articles atm, but they are still from the government statistics bureau source.

The first paragraph of [0] says “Den ökande spridningen av coronaviruset i samhället syns ännu inte i antalet dödsfall i Sverige, visar preliminär statistik från SCB” which is English is “The growing spread of Coronavirus in the community is not yet showing any change in the number of deaths in Sweden, shows preliminary statistics from the (government) central bureau of statistics” and I think that states it rather clear.

I do believe you argue in good faith though and welcome corrections - although I still believe in principle it is not right to hinder free people from living free.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#98

Post by djsumdog » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

f6v wrote: post #37

malka wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because UK is not a dictatorship. China is.

Yeah, lockdown parties are a basic human right.

Gathering is a basic human right:

     Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

There is no reason stated. There is no exception for "virus." Human rights laws were not written for fair weather. They were written for crisis and disaster.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#99

Post by iridium_core » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

waterglassFull wrote: post #82

protoman3000 wrote: post #4

What are the reasons why we can’t have a very hard 4-week long Chinese style total shutdown?

It took Victoria, Melbourne over three months of a hard lockdown to get the numbers to Zero. If you compare some of the attitudes in both policing and policy to Australia and the response between parties you'll understand why the UK can never get there. Consider this: - Victoria handed out 20K~ fines by August 26 [1] - England & Wales handed out 25K~ fines between 27 March and 16 November [2] - The UK has 120K~ polic…

Australia also forecasts that it will increase its Federal debt by AUD$500 billion due to the pandemic - AUD$20,000 per person.

Meanwhile aged care deaths in the most heavily affected state, Victoria, are actually down 1,000 YoY. Its almost certain that the majority of the COVID deaths that did occur in Melbourne were with COVID - ie. people of advanced age and serious existing health conditions who would have died around this time anyway.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#100

Post by f6v » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #87

f6v wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that we can force humans into acting against their fundamental instincts to socialize is folly. Do you really want to go down that road? Well, here we go: procreation is a fundamental human instinct. Do you want to legalize rape? Didn’t think so. You see how folly your argument is?

> Well, here we go: procreation is a fundamental human instinct. Do you want to legalize rape? This is non-sequitur. A better comparison is like legally enforcing abstinence to eradicate HIV. If you can't get the idea that isolation is counter-intuitive to humans and damaging to their health and psychology, and therefore bound to be hard to get compliance, I'm not sure what to say. This is why jail is jail. Isolation…

Individual’s comfort can’t be a number one priority in a times of crisis. Sitting at home in a digital age when video calling anyone in the world is absolutely free, it’s the least you can do. Also all the entertainment which is available nowadays. How hard can it be to make this sacrifice so that someone’s grandma doesn’t die?

> isolation is counter-intuitive to humans

20 million cities are counterintuitive, and so is math. We get by.

I’m not denying that what is asked from people is a huge sacrifice. But not the biggest sacrifice you can imagine. And it’s definitely manageable.