Originally Posted by jfman (Post 36035156)

Sorry I forgot quotation marks. I was paraphrasing the sentiment of the article, and other articles, that I view as deflecting from the pertinent questions around this. Testing and contact tracing.

We get this right and the lockdown is worth it. We get this wrong and we will be back in lockdown by August.

Originally Posted by Chris (Post 36035139)

A comment copied over from the Keir Starmer thread:




The Vallance quote is however lacking context.

It was made on best evidence at the time, but it was made at a specific and quite early stage of the crisis and was not qualified in any way as far as I can see. Did he offer 20,000 as a pinpoint for 'good' beyond which all is 'bad', or is it at the lower, mid or upper range of a scale of 'good'? How far beyond it is 'meh'? At what point do we hit 'truly awful'?

And ultimately, are we more interested in whether it's 20,000 extremely sick people who would have died this year anyway but now have Covid-19 on their death certificate too, or are we interested in an 'excess death' figure that tries to get closer to the actual impact on the size and health of the population?

I'm not trying to obfuscate here; simply pointing out that regardless of who it was who stood up and said '20,000' its value in isolation is strictly limited. And also that cold, dispassionate statistics, collated many months from now, are the only things that can actually give us a good idea how good or bad the government's response was.

Originally Posted by Damien (Post 36035136)

Looks like a much more interventionist stance on obesity will be coming in the aftermath of the viru: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...care-flgswhmvx

Originally Posted by jfman (Post 36035156)

Sorry I forgot quotation marks. I was paraphrasing the sentiment of the article, and other articles, that I view as deflecting from the pertinent questions around this. Testing and contact tracing.

We get this right and the lockdown is worth it. We get this wrong and we will be back in lockdown by August.

Originally Posted by pip08456 (Post 36035161)

Trump doesn't agree with you.

"When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing we would have very few cases."

Originally Posted by Hugh (Post 36035158)

I was pointing out this was not congruent with actuality, as senior Government officials actually had.

Originally Posted by Damien (Post 36035136)

Looks like a much more interventionist stance on obesity will be coming in the aftermath of the viru: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...care-flgswhmvx

Originally Posted by Pierre (Post 36035169)

The CSA (not Government) in a commons hearing on March 18th (or around then) said when compared to annual flu deaths of 8,000 then 20,000 would be a good outcome.

But this was when the epidemic was in its infancy, WHO had only declared the pandemic 10 days before and only 81 people had died in the UK.

So he was foolish to make that statement, Professor Chris Whitty, has continually refused to put a figure on it.

Originally Posted by Damien (Post 36035136)

Looks like a much more interventionist stance on obesity will be coming in the aftermath of the viru: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...care-flgswhmvx

Originally Posted by Paul (Post 36035173)

Ah yes, more state inteference, because that always works. :dozey:

Originally Posted by Paul (Post 36035173)

Ah yes, more state inteference, because that always works. :dozey:

Originally Posted by Taf (Post 36035176)

I think we should remember that all this stuff we are buying from the shops is coming from warehouses. And they are possibly not receiving new stock in from manufacturers as many production centres are not running both here and abroad.

That's why the world needs to get back to work.

Rationing anyone?

Originally Posted by jfman (Post 36035180)

It's not why the world needs to go back to work. It's why some need to go back to work, and others need to do what they can to facilitate that happening safely.

Originally Posted by Sephiroth (Post 36035182)