LionRed
The author is based in the UK at the moment (ex-pat Kiwi) and travels the world as a consultant in developing countries working on business development. As a result, he is totally cynical about NGOs, the UN and WHO etc. He is regularly exposed to contact with governments and diplomatic agencies. He has regularly commuted to Myanmar and South East Asia over the past three years so is able to understand what China is up to in the world.
It’s getting chilly in the UK
The weather is getting very odd here, with overnight temperatures dropping to -5C in Northern Ireland. This parallels the political climate which is also getting very frosty.
Following on from my comments on Professor Neil Ferguson I would like to add that he and his team have been the recipients of 5,000,000 GBP in grants. The following quote from the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy throws some light on the situation.
He holds research grants totalling £5 million in the areas of (a) development of statistical techniques for analysing heterogeneous infectious disease data, (b) modelling viral evolution under immune and treatment induced selection, (c) BSE/vCJD risk assessment, (d) Epidemiology of Foot and Mouth disease and Avian Influenza in livestock, and (f) Mathematical modelling of emerging and deliberately released pathogens.
There have been many comments about the usefulness and accuracy of the statistical model that he developed and used. They have focused on the model itself. If we are generous and say that the model is perfect in every way there are still doubts about the accuracy of the forecasts and conclusions presented by him and his team. No matter how good a model is, it is only as good as the data inputs and the assumptions made regarding the variables concerned.
A report in the UK Daily Telegraph states:
We now know that the model’s software is a 13-year-old, 15,000-line program that simulates homes, offices, schools, people and movements. According to a team at Edinburgh University which ran the model, the same inputs give different outputs, and the program gives different results if it is run on different machines, and even if it is run on the same machine using different numbers of central-processing units.
Worse, the code does not allow for large variations among groups of people with respect to their susceptibility to the virus and their social connections. An infected nurse in a hospital is likely to transmit the virus to many more people than an asymptomatic child. Introducing such heterogeneity shows that the threshold to achieve herd immunity with modest social distancing is much lower than the 50-60 per cent implied by the Ferguson model. One experienced modeller tells us that “my own modelling suggests that somewhere between 10 per cent and 30 per cent would suffice, depending on what assumptions one makes.”
The Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank) in the USA analysed the Ferguson report and questioned the use of a R0 of 2.4 and the subsequent infection rate of 81%. It used a death rate of 0.9% to calculate total predicted mortality.
This 2.4 “reproduction number” (R0) was “based on … the early growth??rate of the epidemic in Wuhan.”
How can the socio-economic conditions of China be applied to the USA or the UK?
The key premise of 81% of the population being infected should have raised more alarms than it did. Even the deadly “Spanish Flu” (H1N1) pandemic of 1918–19 infected no more than 28% of the U.S. population.
I promise this is my final word on the model (unless something really interesting comes out of the woodwork), and to quote one of my lecturers from long ago who was impressively unacademic but full of common-sense: “All forecasts by definition are wrong, all you can do is to make them the least wrong possible. Try to make them the best guess possible at that moment in time.”
The adoption of the Ferguson report has had an impact on care homes. This is rapidly becoming (as forecast) a national scandal. In the region where I live the local main hospital has a bed occupancy of 50% when they were expecting to operate to full capacity, putting a strain on resources, with rationing from triage on the cards to limit admissions. This has been achieved by pushing out the elderly into care homes, often without having been tested for COVID-19. As a result, the death rate in care homes is increasing as more cases are reported. This is compounded by testing in care homes being erratic. One nurse in a care home waited for two weeks for their test results which showed as positive. As a result, the care home which was infection free now has three residents being barrier nursed with the hospital still trying to discharge more patients into the home.
Spurious conspiracy theory? On 17 March Professor Ferguson visited 10 Downing Street and gave a presentation to senior members of the Cabinet. He woke up the next morning with a high fever and a dry cough, and on the following day he tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. In the days that followed, Johnson, his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, health secretary Matt Hancock, and chief medical officer Chris Whitty reported symptoms of the virus. Johnson, Whitty, and Hancock tested positive on March 26. Cummings followed suit on March 30. It has just been revealed that Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary and arguably the second most important person in government, had coronavirus at the same time as the prime minister.
Sir Mark had symptoms from around 2 or 3 April, the government revealed on Thursday. Was Professor Ferguson patient zero? I do not know the answer and I am aware that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but hmm.
What this does mean is that the people responsible for leading and guiding the country were either out of action or severely impaired at a critical time in the attempts to get the virus under control. This explains the impression that was prevalent at the time of a government dithering and floundering from one self-inflicted crisis to another.
The illness of Sir Mark Sedwill was kept secret from the public. This is patronising and disrespectful in the extreme and was accompanied by repeated claims that Boris Johnson was “in good spirits” while he was actually in intensive care and facing death (according to his own admissions).
It is this secrecy, in a different context, that Jeremy Hunt (ex-Health Secretary and ex-Foreign Secretary) argued in the House of Commons this week, may have cost lives. The shielding from the public of potentially questionable scientific advice being offered by the secretive and shadowy SAGE body, whose minutes are kept from the public domain and whose membership has only just been made public, was dangerous. It did not open up the advice to public scrutiny and allow its decisions to be publicly challenged.
The wheels are definitely coming off the government machine, and to mix my metaphors, it is completely rudderless. There are rumblings of dissent, with the teachers’ union and the transport union (RMT) blocking the easing of restrictions. Both these unions benefit from far-left leadership. Sadiq Khan the Mayor of London has just blackmailed the government into giving a grant of 1,100,000,000 GBP and a loan of 500,000,000 GBP. He had asked for 2,000,000,000 GBP to keep the transport running in London. In a fit of pique at not getting his way, he has raised the congestion charge in London to 15 GBP, extended its hours and made it apply on Saturday and Sunday. (Previously it was weekdays only). This followed a plea by Boris Johnson for the public to use their cars more than public transport as the risk of spreading COVID-19 is less in a private vehicle. Khan appears to be deliberately undermining everything the government is doing, and surprise, surprise he is far left. Mark my words, there will be tears before bedtime.
All is not well within the Conservative ranks with the cabinet splitting between hawks and doves. The issue here is when and in what form the easing of the lockdown should start. The sound you can hear is knives being sharpened and it is fun trying to guess who will be the sacrificial lamb. The public will demand some blood letting and the politicos will start positioning themselves to exploit this within the Conservative party. The two factions are in a grim, but disguised power battle. The economy is starting to go downhill faster than a bobsled at St Moritz and is forecast to take a major hit in the next three months. It is acknowledged as heading towards the biggest recession this century, with business failures, massive unemployment and reduced tax take on the cards. However, the general view from here is that this will be nowhere near as damaging as the decline in the New Zealand economy.
The MSM here still treat Jacinda Ardern as the source of all that is goodness and light on the planet, but she is starting to get a kicking on social media. It is interesting to note that over the past two years she has been firmly admired and supported on social media, but as the truth about her character and policies emerges more and more people from NZ are contributing to UK social media with negative assessments of her achievements, if any.
Viewed from afar, with an election coming up in NZ, it seems to be developing into a race between the impact of a massive recession and whether the Labour party can disguise the true state of the economy until after the election. With the National party underperforming it is going to take a miracle for them to grasp power from Labour. Their biggest hope is for the true state of the economy to leak out well before the election and exploit it to the hilt. Will Jacinda crack under the constant pressure of the ruined economy or will her cohorts manage to shield her from her growing number of critics?
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