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Here is a discussion on Channel 4 on the approach taken by the UK government. https://youtu.be/C98FmoZVbjs?t=590 https://youtu.be/C98FmoZVbjs?t=590 Debating a

• MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  > there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic I don't see that this is a criticism. This kind of decision-making should be based on expertise, not emotion. It seems unlikely that they're unconcerned with the harm done. Minimising harm is the entire point of responding to the pandemic, after all. > you can't "nudge" people to adopt certain behaviours in one country when the rest of the world is doing the opposite to what you advocate. You've not shown that the nudge-based approach will be ineffective.
  • madaxe_again 7y ago
    Harm to what? The populace, or the bank balances of the cabinet?
    • MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      I agree that misaligned wealth-incentives for politicians can be a serious issue, but I'm not convinced it's likely to apply here. Unlike many political issues, this one threatens the nation's leaders personally, and the cabinet presumably has a far higher average age (and therefore vulnerability) than the general population. As we've already seen with Iran, the people at the top aren't safe from infection.
• sgt101 7y ago
  Look at chart 7 of Pueyos article. He uses this chart to underpin his argument that the lockdown in Wuhan is the way to approach controlling the virus. But note, on that chart it shows that testing only became available to the Chinese authorities 9 days before the lockdown. In all other outbreaks (even the US one) there has been widespread testing - it's just not reasonable to make inferences from that situation to any of the others. Pueyo doesn't understand the data, worse he has made no effort to understand the data (like actually reading the chart for a start). He's just a lad messing round with numbers.
  • eyko 7y ago
    > In all other outbreaks (even the US one) there has been widespread testing Can you back up that claim? From what I've read, the opposite seemed to be the case, especially in the USA.
    • wideasleep1 7y ago
      Until late Feb, it was mainly CDC, but in March many more states came into the picture: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/testing-in-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/test... Depending on one's view of 'widespread' testing, we have currently about 20K tested, and around 2.4K positively diagnosed.
      • golem14 7y ago
        I think it's about 19K "SPECIMEN" tested, not people. Maybe 8K people tested as of today, but only <1K people tested until about a week ago. So, yes, I think claiming the US had widespread testing is stretching the truth beyond BS level.
        • sgt101 7y ago
          But in China for the equivalent stage of the outbreak there was zero testing. Because there were no tests. The data cannot be compared.
    • 7y ago
• pmontra 7y ago
  A more cynical question: can a PM win the next elections or politically survive the next weeks if a lot of people die and he just shrugged his shoulders, when the rest of the world did their best to keep people alive, successfully or not? I bet he'll have to change course pretty soon.
  • freehunter 7y ago
    And that’s the real calculus here: how will this be perceived after the dust settles? If the population doesn’t think their leaders did enough, there’s risk of reprisals. If the government does the wrong thing but people think it was right, everything is fine. But if the govt did the right thing and people think it was wrong, correctly or incorrectly, there may be reprisals.
    • madaxe_again 7y ago
      Irrelevant. All that matters is the editorials and vox pops in the months immediately prior to an election. Voters don’t remember where they left their keys, never mind last year - and if the current U.K. gov have shown anything, it is that they can and will win every election until the end of time - they’ve presided over a decade of unmitigated disaster, and their approval just keeps growing. No, we’ll be talking about how Jeremy Corbyn singlehandedly introduced covid to the U.K. It won’t be “true”, but that is... irrelevant.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    Yes, if the Tory press back them up. Brexit has shown that the narrative can be spun in their favor.
    • roenxi 7y ago
      The impacts of Brexit are relatively abstract; COVID-19 is piles of dead bodies and 1 in 20 families losing a grandparent. Spinning that positively is mighty challenging.
      • 7y ago
• phpnode 7y ago
  I'm going to go with the guy who was awarded an OBE for his work in infectious disease control: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2016/leading_infectious_disease_expert_john_edmunds_awarded_obe.html https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2016/leading_infecti...
  • rusk 7y ago
    OBE is a political honour, not a scientific one.
    • edoceo 7y ago
      Got the Politit honour for all the scientific work. It's yet another accolade for their recognized expertise.
    • brokenkebab 7y ago
      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.
      • rusk 7y ago
        Thanks for putting some more meat on your appeal to authority. Seems a little bit more reasonable, but I have little faith in UK institutions in 2020.
      • AmericanChopper 7y ago
        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.
        • 7y ago
• switch007 7y ago
  That's almost a BBC level of "debate". An expert, plus some dude who disagrees and makes good television. Could they not find an actual qualified person with a different opinion instead of a "SV Tech Executive"?
  • gtyras2mrs 7y ago
    Reminds me of a stand-up routine by Dara O'Briain, "for the sake of balance, we must now turn to Barry who believes the sky is a carpet painted by God". Obviously an exaggeration in this case - but here one guy is a recognized epidemiologist and the other is a SV tech guy.
• 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  Won't all the Brits be banned from entering all the countries in the world for very very long if they have such a big change of carrying the virus?
  • lozenge 7y ago
    If you get it, you're only highly infectious for 7 days, and infectious for 30-60 days. After that, you might have antibodies for (some variants of) the virus, but you won't have the actual virus.
    • bosie 7y ago
      where did you get the 30-60 days from? is that also true if you are asymptomatic?
• deleted 7y ago
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• foobarbazetc 7y ago
  There is no “UK strategy”, just like the number of cases in the US is much higher than the stats say but there are no tests for ordinary people. The “UK strategy” is “let old people die”. That “strategy” will be scrapped in the next day or two. Because it’s dumb. It’s like some “theoretical” thing that ignores what’s actually happening and what has happened before. Everyone is going to be Italy. Unless they’re China or South Korea and get it under control.
  • throwaway1777 7y ago
    China was Italy before Italy was Italy. 400M people locked down. But they showed it works.
  • foobarbazetc 7y ago
    Told you all: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy-deaths https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy...
• cynusx 7y ago
  Well, they are both in agreement that we need to reach herd immunity at minimal cost. They also agree to keep the rate of new infections below NHS's capacity to handle. They disagree on: - adherence to lockdown measures over a longer time - actual rate of spreading the disease I agree with John Edmunds on these two points, however I am frankly disappointed a third approach is absent from the debate which is to lockdown aggressively now and deliberately infect healthy-age adults to achieve herd-immunity in the healthiest (most active) population. These types of organized "corona parties" if you will could be medically supervised and coordinated with the NHS's ability. In that case you have controlled (accelerated) spread with 0 viral coefficient and uncontrolled general population spread with a viral coefficient. That said, it would only be ethical if the government believes it could manage the capacity of the NHS. I think more realistically it's a foregone conclusion that the country health systems will be overrun and that drastic lockdown measures only make sense for a few weeks to make sure herd immunity comes at effectively half the cost in human lives. If they don't believe they can manage the NHS capacity then the UK governments' policy is by all means the most human and economically effective way to manage it
  • dash2 7y ago
    > These types of organized "corona parties" What if we gave a corona party and nobody came? Seriously, I don't think forcing people to be infected is ethical in any way whatsoever, unless you are a truly brutal trolley-pushing utilitarian, and very confident that your strategy will work....
    • aidos 7y ago
      Your parent wasn’t advocating for forced infection. It’s my understanding that pox parties were a fairly common way to manage the spread of chicken pox. If you take some extreme assumptions; everyone will catch this, and you can infect in a totally controlled way where only the ones you wanted to infect were infected, you could definitely argue that controlled infection was the best course of action.
      • dempseye 7y ago
• ThePhysicist 7y ago
  Wow, Tomas Pueyo is a self proclaimed „growth hacker“ with no experience in epidemiology. I would prefer to have people weigh in on the issue that actually have more than two weeks experience in this. Everyone can have good ideas but giving people like Pueyo a platform for their self marketing must be an insult for all real experts that work on these issues.
  • guitarbill 7y ago
    With statements like "the markets are up", and the hyperbole of "so we're saying 'we want to kill 200,000 people'" and "killing everybody", which even the anchor has to reign him in on, Mr Pueyo seems like such a douchebag. he comes of as incredibly unlikeable (at least to me). especially compared to Mr Edmunds, who goes through how herd immunity is a good end-game in a measured and calm manner. to which he seems to offer no counterpoint. they even both agree on lowering the peak, just not on how to do that/when to do it. edit: it seems reasonable to me to suggest not impose quarantine measures too early, to not drag those measures on for longer than necessary - that just makes it more likely people will disobey it. indeed, because a vaccine is so far off, herd immunity seems like the only plan for now.
    • mirekrusin 7y ago
      Funny thing about this is that they don't disagree on herd immunity. They argue over optimal rate and tradeoffs (where/when measures slider should be moved). In this rare case Pueyo credentials don't matter much as he pretty much echoes open letter from scientific community coming from Italy. What is not mentioned is that buying a bit of time also increases a chance for many people to get treatment that is yet to be discovered/approved.
      • guitarbill 7y ago
        absolutely, although it's a balancing act. there's also a mental health component to isolation/quarantine, and how do you measure that? it's a tough and complex call in any case, and i'm glad i don't have to make the call.
  • 7y ago
• madaxe_again 7y ago
  > But there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic. You say that as though that’s a good thing. The coldest, most rational view is that the virus will eliminate the weak and elderly, and therefore be of benefit to society. Given that the current U.K. government have enthusiastically spoken about eugenics, this is essentially the mindset you’re supporting. So. Would you really still say that cold, clinical, and unemotional is the best way for us to act?
• philwelch 7y ago
  > Listening to them both, I honestly don't know who is right. Well, I suppose we'll find out.
• DanBC 7y ago
  > But there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic. Boris Johnson's chief SPAD recently (this year) employed a known eugenicist, and that person only resigned after considerable public consternation.