- Nov 11, 2009
- 11,377
Same in that normally I'd never read the Guardian, but now I do as it's free on there, and i like much of it. Polly Toynby excepted!
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How do you think Boris has handled it so far ? 8th May
- Thread starter WATFORD zero
- Start date
Same in that normally I'd never read the Guardian, but now I do as it's free on there, and i like much of it. Polly Toynby excepted!
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
I'm pretty sure we're also putting suspected vivid deaths in the official stats, and possibly France.
The ONS excess deaths is going to be closest to the true number but you can't make a comparison between that figure and the Belgium covid figures as it's not like for like.
Interestingly I heard on the news that our current excess deaths is the same as the 2018 flu season.
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
It is interesting to see the boot put into Johnson by the Tory press (or at least little bits of it, I suspect other Torygraph writers might be a bit more kind but I don't really read it since it went behind paywall). However, this early lockdown / no lockdown comparison with other countries isn't consistent across the world. It is quite possible that it matters not only who you are but where you are.
As an example I give you this article regarding South Africa that I posted on the "when will this shit end" thread. They have had a massively strict lockdown (evening curfew, complete ban on the sale of fags and booze (imagine that here!)) and the actions of Ramaphosa have been largely popular.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-52619308
And yet, right now, their cases are increasing massively and the graph on the article looks like "a peak". No explanation is offered on the article. Over the weekend I pointed out someone else's poor thinking when it came to causation versus correlation, so I need to be careful here but two things are true; firstly we are heading into SA winter and the bug MAY be seasonal, a la flu, secondly, actually enforcing such a strict lockdown in a large and often lawless country in unlikely to be wholly successful. Are criminal gangs flogging moonshine and fags round the back? Can you properly socially distance in an overcrowded township? And that's ONE country. I genuinely don't think you can say yet why Spain, Italy, Belgium and the UK have done "badly" and Greece has done "well".
It sounds like I'm defending Johnson though and I'm not really. He famously doesn't do detail. That would be bad enough but he was also AWOL for much of the peak. Bit harsh blaming a man for nearly dying isn't it. Come on GB, you're beyond the pale. Except the ****wit spent more or less all day of March 3rd shaking hands with CV victims and then went on telly and bragged about it while Vallance quietly facepalmed in the background.
So as much as "listen to the science" has been repeated ad nauseam the government really hasn't. For much of the crisis they have been led by Cummings, Patel and Raab, three uber libertarians without a medical bone in their bodies.
So what am I saying. Well, IMHO, we could have handled this crisis far better, particularly when it comes to things like PPE and the care home scandal, as well as who was actually running things at times. And the new advice *is* muddled. Stay alert? How the hell does that protect you from a ****ing invisible virus?
But to simply compare lockdown strategies is wrong. Sweden has not done as badly as us. Belgium has. Greece may be a success story but, as we're seeing in that link above, South Africans may have suffered the toughest lockdown of all for nothing.
I'm convinced there's a link between infection rates and big airports. Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France all have massive hub airports. Not sure about Belgium but they're sandwiched between CDG and Schiphol.
I wonder how many direct flights there are from the Far East to Greece and East Europe - many probably go via Schiphol, CDG or Heathrow.
Jimmy Grimble
Well-known member
Excellent coverage on this from the FT. Not pretty reading for the UK though.
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- Jul 10, 2003
- 25,919
- Thread starter
- #125
That is interesting, because it's the first set of figures I have seen where the prime intention is (as far as possible) to compare statistics by only measuring excess deaths in all countries and not any government Covid specific reports with all that entails.
Maybe also post it on this thread https://www.northstandchat.com/showthread.php?379428-Number-of-Deaths where a lot of the stats and figures are.
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You might well be onto something and I'd not even considered it before. If you think "airports and transport hubs" then Brussels has the Eurostar and all the traffic in and out for the EU administration and so on that is there. For some obscure reason I recall from a John Simpson book that more or less any flight to or from a former Belgian colony (Kinshasa was his example) has to go via Brussels as well.
Now consider Northern Italy. You have the financial transport hub of Milan plus Venice airport both around the Lombardy region. It really kicked off just after February half term. Lots of Milan ex pats potentially home for a week, shitloads of tourists flying to Venice to ski in either Northern Italy or Slovenia (we went to a Slovenian mountain resort last September via Venice airport) plus actual visitors to Venice itself (maybe early for cruise ships but still). Compare that with Greece which would have been cold, out of season and more or less isolated.
The very things that have made all these places successful in a global economy then contributed to give them a coronavirus pain in the butt.
I have no idea if any of this is correct but I'm prepared to believe "airport theory" and give you a
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
Cheers, that's very interesting.
Another thumbs up for this theory.
Simply put, Covid-19 had to fly in to the UK and be seeded. Coughing carriers waltzing around packed airports such as Heathrow could have infected thousands adding to the thousands of people who were bringing it into our Country weekly anyway.
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
Cheers, there's probably a load of holes in the theory but it must be at least a contributing factor.
It's why I can't get on with the comparisons with New Zealand. All these places in Europe are within about a 1000km area containing a few hundred million people, thousands of international flights, huge amounts of movement between them.
New Zealand is literally the edge of the world, in the same area is 4 million people and water not to mention 4 hours flight to the next nearest county.
Comparisons with Hong Kong are fun (but unfair I know).
A stone's throw from China, dense population, few open spaces.... but totally have it licked (so to speak).
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
Someone shared good article on this yesterday.
In a nutshell the anti government protest groups used their influence to organise the population into not spreading the virus. Everyone took it seriously because they suffered a high death toll from SARS so the locals already had experience and knew what to do very quickly. Actual government weren't given much credit at all.
I still find it mind blowing how well they've done given the population density and the direct travel links to Wuhan.
This is exactly the sort of unsubstantiated, second hand, social media rumour that I'm inclined to believe 100%
Dick Knights Mumm
Take me Home Falmer Road
This is exactly the sort of unsubstantiated, second hand, social media rumour that I'm inclined to believe 100%
If you don't believe Wozza - more fool you.
And don’t forget Boris let slip he was seeing his mum, (Mother’s Day?) before hurriedly correcting himself and claiming he meant via Skype.
Frankfurt is a huge hub.
How did they turn him on? Did they smother each other in chum and let the dog lick them off?
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Or was it chaterbate again?
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