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Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown?

Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown? FWIW I’ve always been suspicious of the way R is used by the government and media. It’s always going to be a best guess averaged over an area, but with asymptomatic transmission and initially poor access to testing, seems like it should be treated with caution. Not dismissed, but not the main driver, I guess.

hummusman 6y ago
The R number is in essence the driver of this pandemic. But like you say the published figure is at best a conservative estimate and at worst an educated guess. Imo the way it’s reduced down into this singular all-explaining number belittles the sheer scale of variables and complexities going on in the real world. But hey, explaining that would be too much like hard work for many tabloid outlets.
- toyg 6y ago
  Tabloid outlets? For many ministers of the Crown.
learnstats2 6y ago
I have found it consistently disappointing that the BBC has been putting out UK government statistics and interpretations uncritically - as we see (for example) in the headline here.
- Zhyl 6y ago
  The More or Less podcast, also from the BBC, does a good job of digging into what the stats actually mean and whether they're correct or misleading. Their main beef over the pandemic has been when ministers and the government have been lying fairly explicitly about testing targets (counting posted tests as completed tests). I find BBC as a whole hasn't been as critical, but they certainly seem to be at least making an effort to explain and contextualise. They aren't parroting government statistics as much as they could be doing.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  They purged all the journalists capable of doing what you want.
- lkramer 6y ago
  My feeling is that the BBC has been quite spooked by the threats the Tories made to them after the last election to basically dismantle them. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/15/boris-johnson-threatens-bbc-with-two-pronged-attack https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/15/boris-johnson-... Straight out of the Trump playbook of course... Every critical question and exposure of wrong doing is actually just biased media.
technothrasher 6y ago
> Headline begs the question The headline assumes its conclusion in a premise? Perhaps you meant the headline raises the question?
- emmelaich 6y ago
  Love the pedantry :-) But 'begs the question' is avoiding the issue. Not (necessarily) assuming the conclusion.
  - wussboy 6y ago
    “What are you? President of the Pedantic Society?” “Vice President, actually.”
- DerDangDerDang 6y ago
  looks like both of us is one of today's lucky 10,000 ;) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beg-the-question https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beg-the-...
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Sure, if you believe in some archaic mistranslation.
- sneak 6y ago
  http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info
toyg 6y ago
> what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? R was good enough in London, back then. That's all they were worried about.
rtkwe 6y ago
It's the number to eventually end the largest restrictions but keeping it low was always going to require either continued light lockdown or a large monitoring project to catch and quarantine random popup cases like China is doing. Just recently in the US I've only had two places doing temperature checks which is wild to me at this point, it was the local courthouse and a random artists collective store I was visiting.
- DerDangDerDang 6y ago
  Wall-to-wall testing would be my preferred route. In fairness I think that would be gov.uk's preferred route too if they could organise it (they can't). I got temperature check and covid symptom questionnaire on entry to (private) hospital, but it's not widespread.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  > Just recently in the US I've only had two places doing temperature checks which is wild to me at this point I've gotten a temperature check every time I've entered a commercial building for the last few months (in NYC), but temperature checks hew dangerously close to safety theater.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    It's a small thing that can catch some low symptom cases in the absence of randomized testing. It's not the most effective thing but I don't think it's theater.
    - jrumbut 6y ago
      It also (perhaps primarily) catches high symptom cases where the person decided to go out anyway. To add to the anecdata, in Massachusetts I've only had my temperature checked at a doctor's office but I've also visited very few places.
      - rtkwe 6y ago
        Yeah, though I'm not sure how much forced quarantine orders are being used in the US right now.
iainmerrick 6y ago
what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? Starting the new school year, for one thing. For many of us that was critical to letting us keep working (and mass home-schooling and online teaching for young kids was not working).
- DerDangDerDang 6y ago
  Fair point, and you're right something had to give on that score. Classroom pods for young kids seem to work fairly well overall, it just ups the risk for visiting the grandparents. The university side didn't seem to work out as well - possibly partly because uni staff are (understandably) less willing to work crunch hours to meet duty of care than primary school staff.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    I think it's quite simple, there is good evidence that younger children (U14s) get covid less than adults, and spread it less when they do have it. So schools - especially primary schools are not the issue. Reopening universities was - students do get it, and they all live together in shared accommodation so as soon as one got it lots of them did.
    - iainmerrick 6y ago
      Yes, agreed on all points with both of you! During the summer, when they talked about opening schools and claimed that young children weren’t major vectors for the virus, I was very skeptical and assumed it was mostly just an excuse -- but it does actually seem to have worked out! If primary school children were spreading the virus en masse, the current spike would be vastly bigger. (It’s very unfortunate in the US that school opening has been so strongly politicized.) Opening the universities is another matter entirely. That definitely shouldn’t have been done. I was going to say “in hindsight” but in fact that was pretty obvious right away.
    - socialdemocrat 6y ago
      Pretty sure the latest research showed there was no difference. It only looked like they spread it less because they get less symptoms.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I remember the health minister describing an r value below one as being a budget available to spend.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  That's not unrealistic though, I don't envy anyone in the world having to balance the economy and their excess deaths - in the US especially economic downturns can directly translate to deaths and suffering of their own.
  - mantap 6y ago
    That is based on the premise that less restrictions are better for an economy. That isn't necessarily the case though. If people are scared to go out it doesn't matter if places are legally allowed to open or not. Also sustained moderate restrictions might be worse than a short term period of harsh restrictions. Better to bring cases down a low level, build consumer confidence, then use your R budget.
  - vixen99 6y ago
    You can't work at getting a balance unless someone does a detailed cost/benefit analysis. I've seen no such thing. In Britain supposedly highly educated people in government and the civil service have been acting it seems, on whim and dodgy statistics which have been utterly refuted by respected independent academics. I suspect that many thinking people in the UK would concur with the view that sections of their government would be hard put to it to run a drinks party in a brewery.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    There was a paper that came out of Germany earlier this year that said the optimum replication rate in terms of keeping the economy going was 0.63. This idea that there is a trade off between health and business is false.
  - lordnacho 6y ago
    But the error bars on that R value are big enough that you should be very cautious. Both due to statistical noise and potential systematic error. If you see a range of 0.9-1.1, should you act like it's around 1? It might be prudent to inflate the figure by some amount.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
habosa 6y ago
Eat Out to Help Out will go down as maybe the dumbest policy in COVID times in any nation. They paid us to eat at restaurants ... basically the highest risk activity.
- froh 6y ago
  I thought you were kidding o-O > Eligible establishments are those in which food is sold for immediate on-premises consumption. ... > The discount cannot be applied to the following items: > ... > * food or drink that is to be consumed off premises https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-information-about-the-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme/get-more-information-about-the-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-informat...
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    Holy shit that’s basically mass murder.
    - te_chris 6y ago
      Tbf, it was in summer so a lot of outdoor dining options. But yes, overall, dumb.
      - riffraff 6y ago
        That partially justifies discounts for eating on premises, but I cannot imagine why those would not apply for take away. Trying to protect waiters/esses jobs, maybe?
        pjc50 6y ago
        Money for giant pub chain JD Wetherspoon owned by Tory Brexit propagandist, perhaps.
        DerDangDerDang 6y ago
        Exactly that, nominally. Though pjc50’s comment looks pretty convincing given gov.uk could have used the same money to make it easier for businesses to restructure to offer delivery...
beaker52 6y ago
> Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? People were rebounding from not being able to visit their friends for 6 months.
- sgt101 6y ago
  There is a delusion that we can simply shut everything for ever and there will be a) no consequences, b) continued compliance.
  - goodcanadian 6y ago
    Indeed, I feel compliance where I am is fairly low, already. Yes, people largely follow the rules, but they are looking for every loophole they can find, and they are completely ignoring basic things like physical distancing and limiting the number of people they interact with.
    - thinkingemote 6y ago
      It's worth remembering that the original lockdown models always factored in a certain amount of non compliance, and afterwards the model makers expressed suprise that real levels of non compliance were significantly lower than expected. Non compliance concerns are often a social group function or a side effect of anxiety. it's normal for humans to identify enemies and other groups to make them feel better. A spectral enemy that one can blame for the bad things. I wouldn't be surprised if the UKs behavioural modification experts know and use this too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    It would have worked if one acted earlier. Then lockdown would have lasted shorter and more moderate restrictions could have been put in place which people could more easily follow. Ofoten The problem is authorities come with too draconian restrictions too late rather than coming with milder restrictions earlier.
garmaine 6y ago
> Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown? NO!!! Sorry this is infuriating. What’s the point of getting to R<1 if you then immediately end lockdown and have it shoot right back us? It’s a necessary step, but just abstep in the process. You need to stay in lockdown long enough to get case counts low enough to be able to fully trace.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  For political reasons, this isn't possible for the UK right now. To be fair, they've made a mess of the whole pandemic, which is very disappointing given that public health was invented there.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Something I learned after moving from the UK to Germany, is that my German friends think Otto von Bismarck invented modern public health in 1883 and the NHS was based on their model. My German language and history is not good enough for a rigorous comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otto_von_Bismarck&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop#Sickness_Insurance_Law_of_1883 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otto_von_Bismarck...
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Modern public health (which is sanitation essentially) was rolled out across the UK much earlier than anywhere else. It is perhaps a mark of public health's incredible success that both replies think I was talking about the NHS. Also, Bismarck invented the modern industrial state long before anyone else had realized this stuff was important.
    - spiralx 6y ago
      Bismarck did create the first public health system back then and the model is called the Bismarck Model. The NHS is nothing like that though and is based on what's called the Beveridge Model after the man who proposed it: https://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems-part-1-the-beveridge-model/ https://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems... http://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems-part-3-the-bismarck-model/ http://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems-...
goodcanadian 6y ago
Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? Numbers were low which makes R very hard to calculate. When numbers are low, it doesn't matter much if there is some growth. And, finally, we were under tiered area restrictions depending on local rates (though I felt the chosen restrictions were a bit odd). Finally, in some parts of the country, a full lockdown didn't really make sense even when it was ordered (though arguably, this is lockdown-lite compared to the spring).
fxtentacle 6y ago
Keeping R<1 is the mandatory criteria for not having your health system collapse. So the goal of lockdowns is to make R<1 and to keep it that way. As soon as R>1 you need the next lockdown, so when it's working and R is going down, it kind of makes sense to wait for R<0.8 and not just R<0.999 before you end the lockdown, or else you'll have to restart the next one very soon.
- easytiger 6y ago
  So when R was > 1 the health system collapsed?
  - maweki 6y ago
    It will, as an R higher than 1 means that there will be no maximum in the new infections at all (while any health system obviously does have a maximum capacity that is significantly lower than the size of the population). R going lower than one means, there will be a maximum in the future. Of course, only when numbers are currently increasing. R is basically the second derivation of the case count (+1). So a lower R first means that the increase in new infections decreases, until the new infections decrease.
    - 360walk 6y ago
      Even R>1 has a maximum in future new infections because R gradually declines over time as more people have had the disease and have some form of protection.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DanBC 6y ago
    In the UK, in many places: yes. You need to understand that people are still being ventilated on sub-optimal machines outside a proper ITU; a lot of care has been cancelled; and many hospitals are currently on the cusp of declaring major incidents and closing access (including A&E) to any new patients. I genuinely don't understand what the public thinks of when people in healthcare talk about system collapse. What level of dysfunction and preventable death is needed for the public to accept that the system has collapsed? One source: https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/difficult-to-maintain-emergency-care-as-regions-icus-at-full-stretch/7029067.article https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/difficult-to-maintain-emerg...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rienbdj 6y ago
After the first lock down the government allowed everyone to go on holiday abroad. In theory people had to quarantine on their return, but compliance was very low and spread during the flight back was inevitable.
nsgi 6y ago
Between August and November restrictions had been relaxed a lot. Most public places were open, you could meet friends indoors, etc.
tinus_hn 6y ago
R is a useful value for statisticians. For policy makers it’s just mumbo jumbo that means exactly the same as the infections graph: if it’s going up, R is above 1, if it’s going down R is below 1. It’s not magic.
- learnstats2 6y ago
  Not quite. R tells you: the graph is likely to keep going up (or will peak and go down). Policy makers should care about this more.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    This is false, the R value cannot tell you about the future or wether graphs are ‘likely to go down’. They tell you wether the graph is going down, which you can tell from the graph. It just quantifies this. This is exactly why the R value is not very useful. It is calculated over historical data so it has no predictive power whatsoever. However, it does falsely appear to have this power. Quote: > There is always a slight time lag in the R number of a matter of weeks
    - DerDangDerDang 6y ago
      I’m no statistician, but for me the most egregious failures on this have been constant use of ‘The’ R number and ‘The’ curve. The implication is that we have a single infallible measure that’s universally applicable, with no reference to exactly how R from different studies were weighted to come up with the announced figure, or how the sample populations of each study were skewed.
    - learnstats2 6y ago
      > There is always a slight time lag in the R number of a matter of weeks ah ok: that's not what I understand from how governments are reporting it. My understanding is that it's the (best estimate) of how virus cases are spreading today. Since the graph of cases for today tells you how the virus has spread in the last two weeks, that's not the same information. If you claim that R is only estimated from the historical number of cases, then R is not giving you information that you couldn't technically identify from this graph, I agree. However, R could be estimated using other information.
michaelt 6y ago
> what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November I assume our political leaders made a decision with the following inputs: 0. As someone with a degree in classics, I don't have an intuitive understanding of how fast exponential growth can get out of control. 1. The death rate dropped from 9500/week in mid-April to 300/week in mid-July. And stayed below 300/week until the end of September. 2. Our scientific/medical advisors say we should keep things locked down - but it's their job to be cautious, they're medical advisors not economic advisors. I have to weigh up their advice against other interests. 3. Compared to at the start of the first lockdown, we now have more testing capacity and PPE. Face masks are now available for everyone not just medical staff, for example. 4. There are loads of industries saying if they can't re-open they'll need a government bail-out and we've already spent an eye-watering amount of money on the furlough scheme. 5. Some of these industries, like gyms and universities, point out that having them open is good for the nation. Keeping schools closed seems to be widening the performance gap between rich and poor children. People avoiding hospitals is leading to more cancers going untreated. 6. Countries like Sweden and America haven't locked down at all. 7. We're going to keep a lot of restrictions in place, with restaurants and theatres running at a fraction of their normal capacity, so it's not like we're going completely back to normal. 8. The prime minister's own chief advisor is breaking lockdown rules because he's bored of them, and punishing him isn't an option, so it'd be a lot less embarrassing if we could make what he did allowed retroactively. Between these inputs, our leaders convinced themselves that lowering restrictions was the right thing to do in August.
- sethammons 6y ago
  Can you expand on America and not locking down? That is not matching my experience in the states.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    I live in a Southern state. Infection rates are the highest they've ever been and there's definitely nothing resembling a lockdown where I am.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago

hummusman 6y ago

The R number is in essence the driver of this pandemic. But like you say the published figure is at best a conservative estimate and at worst an educated guess. Imo the way it’s reduced down into this singular all-explaining number belittles the sheer scale of variables and complexities going on in the real world. But hey, explaining that would be too much like hard work for many tabloid outlets.

toyg 6y ago
Tabloid outlets? For many ministers of the Crown.

learnstats2 6y ago

I have found it consistently disappointing that the BBC has been putting out UK government statistics and interpretations uncritically - as we see (for example) in the headline here.

Zhyl 6y ago
The More or Less podcast, also from the BBC, does a good job of digging into what the stats actually mean and whether they're correct or misleading. Their main beef over the pandemic has been when ministers and the government have been lying fairly explicitly about testing targets (counting posted tests as completed tests). I find BBC as a whole hasn't been as critical, but they certainly seem to be at least making an effort to explain and contextualise. They aren't parroting government statistics as much as they could be doing.
secondcoming 6y ago
They purged all the journalists capable of doing what you want.
lkramer 6y ago
My feeling is that the BBC has been quite spooked by the threats the Tories made to them after the last election to basically dismantle them. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/15/boris-johnson-threatens-bbc-with-two-pronged-attack https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/15/boris-johnson-... Straight out of the Trump playbook of course... Every critical question and exposure of wrong doing is actually just biased media.

technothrasher 6y ago

> Headline begs the question The headline assumes its conclusion in a premise? Perhaps you meant the headline raises the question?

emmelaich 6y ago
Love the pedantry :-) But 'begs the question' is avoiding the issue. Not (necessarily) assuming the conclusion.
- wussboy 6y ago
  “What are you? President of the Pedantic Society?” “Vice President, actually.”
DerDangDerDang 6y ago
looks like both of us is one of today's lucky 10,000 ;) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beg-the-question https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beg-the-...
renewiltord 6y ago
Sure, if you believe in some archaic mistranslation.
sneak 6y ago
http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info

toyg 6y ago

> what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? R was good enough in London, back then. That's all they were worried about.

rtkwe 6y ago

It's the number to eventually end the largest restrictions but keeping it low was always going to require either continued light lockdown or a large monitoring project to catch and quarantine random popup cases like China is doing. Just recently in the US I've only had two places doing temperature checks which is wild to me at this point, it was the local courthouse and a random artists collective store I was visiting.

DerDangDerDang 6y ago
Wall-to-wall testing would be my preferred route. In fairness I think that would be gov.uk's preferred route too if they could organise it (they can't). I got temperature check and covid symptom questionnaire on entry to (private) hospital, but it's not widespread.
wutbrodo 6y ago
> Just recently in the US I've only had two places doing temperature checks which is wild to me at this point I've gotten a temperature check every time I've entered a commercial building for the last few months (in NYC), but temperature checks hew dangerously close to safety theater.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  It's a small thing that can catch some low symptom cases in the absence of randomized testing. It's not the most effective thing but I don't think it's theater.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    It also (perhaps primarily) catches high symptom cases where the person decided to go out anyway. To add to the anecdata, in Massachusetts I've only had my temperature checked at a doctor's office but I've also visited very few places.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      Yeah, though I'm not sure how much forced quarantine orders are being used in the US right now.

iainmerrick 6y ago

what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? Starting the new school year, for one thing. For many of us that was critical to letting us keep working (and mass home-schooling and online teaching for young kids was not working).

DerDangDerDang 6y ago
Fair point, and you're right something had to give on that score. Classroom pods for young kids seem to work fairly well overall, it just ups the risk for visiting the grandparents. The university side didn't seem to work out as well - possibly partly because uni staff are (understandably) less willing to work crunch hours to meet duty of care than primary school staff.
- sgt101 6y ago
  I think it's quite simple, there is good evidence that younger children (U14s) get covid less than adults, and spread it less when they do have it. So schools - especially primary schools are not the issue. Reopening universities was - students do get it, and they all live together in shared accommodation so as soon as one got it lots of them did.
  - iainmerrick 6y ago
    Yes, agreed on all points with both of you! During the summer, when they talked about opening schools and claimed that young children weren’t major vectors for the virus, I was very skeptical and assumed it was mostly just an excuse -- but it does actually seem to have worked out! If primary school children were spreading the virus en masse, the current spike would be vastly bigger. (It’s very unfortunate in the US that school opening has been so strongly politicized.) Opening the universities is another matter entirely. That definitely shouldn’t have been done. I was going to say “in hindsight” but in fact that was pretty obvious right away.
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Pretty sure the latest research showed there was no difference. It only looked like they spread it less because they get less symptoms.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

I remember the health minister describing an r value below one as being a budget available to spend.

mhh__ 6y ago
That's not unrealistic though, I don't envy anyone in the world having to balance the economy and their excess deaths - in the US especially economic downturns can directly translate to deaths and suffering of their own.
- mantap 6y ago
  That is based on the premise that less restrictions are better for an economy. That isn't necessarily the case though. If people are scared to go out it doesn't matter if places are legally allowed to open or not. Also sustained moderate restrictions might be worse than a short term period of harsh restrictions. Better to bring cases down a low level, build consumer confidence, then use your R budget.
- vixen99 6y ago
  You can't work at getting a balance unless someone does a detailed cost/benefit analysis. I've seen no such thing. In Britain supposedly highly educated people in government and the civil service have been acting it seems, on whim and dodgy statistics which have been utterly refuted by respected independent academics. I suspect that many thinking people in the UK would concur with the view that sections of their government would be hard put to it to run a drinks party in a brewery.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  There was a paper that came out of Germany earlier this year that said the optimum replication rate in terms of keeping the economy going was 0.63. This idea that there is a trade off between health and business is false.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  But the error bars on that R value are big enough that you should be very cautious. Both due to statistical noise and potential systematic error. If you see a range of 0.9-1.1, should you act like it's around 1? It might be prudent to inflate the figure by some amount.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

habosa 6y ago

Eat Out to Help Out will go down as maybe the dumbest policy in COVID times in any nation. They paid us to eat at restaurants ... basically the highest risk activity.

froh 6y ago
I thought you were kidding o-O > Eligible establishments are those in which food is sold for immediate on-premises consumption. ... > The discount cannot be applied to the following items: > ... > * food or drink that is to be consumed off premises https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-information-about-the-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme/get-more-information-about-the-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-informat...
- austhrow743 6y ago
  Holy shit that’s basically mass murder.
  - te_chris 6y ago
    Tbf, it was in summer so a lot of outdoor dining options. But yes, overall, dumb.
    - riffraff 6y ago
      That partially justifies discounts for eating on premises, but I cannot imagine why those would not apply for take away. Trying to protect waiters/esses jobs, maybe?
      - pjc50 6y ago
        Money for giant pub chain JD Wetherspoon owned by Tory Brexit propagandist, perhaps.
      - DerDangDerDang 6y ago
        Exactly that, nominally. Though pjc50’s comment looks pretty convincing given gov.uk could have used the same money to make it easier for businesses to restructure to offer delivery...

beaker52 6y ago

> Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? People were rebounding from not being able to visit their friends for 6 months.

sgt101 6y ago
There is a delusion that we can simply shut everything for ever and there will be a) no consequences, b) continued compliance.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  Indeed, I feel compliance where I am is fairly low, already. Yes, people largely follow the rules, but they are looking for every loophole they can find, and they are completely ignoring basic things like physical distancing and limiting the number of people they interact with.
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    It's worth remembering that the original lockdown models always factored in a certain amount of non compliance, and afterwards the model makers expressed suprise that real levels of non compliance were significantly lower than expected. Non compliance concerns are often a social group function or a side effect of anxiety. it's normal for humans to identify enemies and other groups to make them feel better. A spectral enemy that one can blame for the bad things. I wouldn't be surprised if the UKs behavioural modification experts know and use this too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  It would have worked if one acted earlier. Then lockdown would have lasted shorter and more moderate restrictions could have been put in place which people could more easily follow. Ofoten The problem is authorities come with too draconian restrictions too late rather than coming with milder restrictions earlier.

garmaine 6y ago

> Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown? NO!!! Sorry this is infuriating. What’s the point of getting to R<1 if you then immediately end lockdown and have it shoot right back us? It’s a necessary step, but just abstep in the process. You need to stay in lockdown long enough to get case counts low enough to be able to fully trace.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
For political reasons, this isn't possible for the UK right now. To be fair, they've made a mess of the whole pandemic, which is very disappointing given that public health was invented there.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Something I learned after moving from the UK to Germany, is that my German friends think Otto von Bismarck invented modern public health in 1883 and the NHS was based on their model. My German language and history is not good enough for a rigorous comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otto_von_Bismarck&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop#Sickness_Insurance_Law_of_1883 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otto_von_Bismarck...
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Modern public health (which is sanitation essentially) was rolled out across the UK much earlier than anywhere else. It is perhaps a mark of public health's incredible success that both replies think I was talking about the NHS. Also, Bismarck invented the modern industrial state long before anyone else had realized this stuff was important.
  - spiralx 6y ago
    Bismarck did create the first public health system back then and the model is called the Bismarck Model. The NHS is nothing like that though and is based on what's called the Beveridge Model after the man who proposed it: https://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems-part-1-the-beveridge-model/ https://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems... http://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems-part-3-the-bismarck-model/ http://morningsignout.com/international-health-care-systems-...

goodcanadian 6y ago

Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November? Numbers were low which makes R very hard to calculate. When numbers are low, it doesn't matter much if there is some growth. And, finally, we were under tiered area restrictions depending on local rates (though I felt the chosen restrictions were a bit odd). Finally, in some parts of the country, a full lockdown didn't really make sense even when it was ordered (though arguably, this is lockdown-lite compared to the spring).

fxtentacle 6y ago

Keeping R<1 is the mandatory criteria for not having your health system collapse. So the goal of lockdowns is to make R<1 and to keep it that way. As soon as R>1 you need the next lockdown, so when it's working and R is going down, it kind of makes sense to wait for R<0.8 and not just R<0.999 before you end the lockdown, or else you'll have to restart the next one very soon.

easytiger 6y ago
So when R was > 1 the health system collapsed?
- maweki 6y ago
  It will, as an R higher than 1 means that there will be no maximum in the new infections at all (while any health system obviously does have a maximum capacity that is significantly lower than the size of the population). R going lower than one means, there will be a maximum in the future. Of course, only when numbers are currently increasing. R is basically the second derivation of the case count (+1). So a lower R first means that the increase in new infections decreases, until the new infections decrease.
  - 360walk 6y ago
    Even R>1 has a maximum in future new infections because R gradually declines over time as more people have had the disease and have some form of protection.
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- DanBC 6y ago
  In the UK, in many places: yes. You need to understand that people are still being ventilated on sub-optimal machines outside a proper ITU; a lot of care has been cancelled; and many hospitals are currently on the cusp of declaring major incidents and closing access (including A&E) to any new patients. I genuinely don't understand what the public thinks of when people in healthcare talk about system collapse. What level of dysfunction and preventable death is needed for the public to accept that the system has collapsed? One source: https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/difficult-to-maintain-emergency-care-as-regions-icus-at-full-stretch/7029067.article https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/difficult-to-maintain-emerg...

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rienbdj 6y ago

After the first lock down the government allowed everyone to go on holiday abroad. In theory people had to quarantine on their return, but compliance was very low and spread during the flight back was inevitable.

nsgi 6y ago

Between August and November restrictions had been relaxed a lot. Most public places were open, you could meet friends indoors, etc.

tinus_hn 6y ago

R is a useful value for statisticians. For policy makers it’s just mumbo jumbo that means exactly the same as the infections graph: if it’s going up, R is above 1, if it’s going down R is below 1. It’s not magic.

learnstats2 6y ago
Not quite. R tells you: the graph is likely to keep going up (or will peak and go down). Policy makers should care about this more.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  This is false, the R value cannot tell you about the future or wether graphs are ‘likely to go down’. They tell you wether the graph is going down, which you can tell from the graph. It just quantifies this. This is exactly why the R value is not very useful. It is calculated over historical data so it has no predictive power whatsoever. However, it does falsely appear to have this power. Quote: > There is always a slight time lag in the R number of a matter of weeks
  - DerDangDerDang 6y ago
    I’m no statistician, but for me the most egregious failures on this have been constant use of ‘The’ R number and ‘The’ curve. The implication is that we have a single infallible measure that’s universally applicable, with no reference to exactly how R from different studies were weighted to come up with the announced figure, or how the sample populations of each study were skewed.
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    > There is always a slight time lag in the R number of a matter of weeks ah ok: that's not what I understand from how governments are reporting it. My understanding is that it's the (best estimate) of how virus cases are spreading today. Since the graph of cases for today tells you how the virus has spread in the last two weeks, that's not the same information. If you claim that R is only estimated from the historical number of cases, then R is not giving you information that you couldn't technically identify from this graph, I agree. However, R could be estimated using other information.

michaelt 6y ago

> what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November I assume our political leaders made a decision with the following inputs: 0. As someone with a degree in classics, I don't have an intuitive understanding of how fast exponential growth can get out of control. 1. The death rate dropped from 9500/week in mid-April to 300/week in mid-July. And stayed below 300/week until the end of September. 2. Our scientific/medical advisors say we should keep things locked down - but it's their job to be cautious, they're medical advisors not economic advisors. I have to weigh up their advice against other interests. 3. Compared to at the start of the first lockdown, we now have more testing capacity and PPE. Face masks are now available for everyone not just medical staff, for example. 4. There are loads of industries saying if they can't re-open they'll need a government bail-out and we've already spent an eye-watering amount of money on the furlough scheme. 5. Some of these industries, like gyms and universities, point out that having them open is good for the nation. Keeping schools closed seems to be widening the performance gap between rich and poor children. People avoiding hospitals is leading to more cancers going untreated. 6. Countries like Sweden and America haven't locked down at all. 7. We're going to keep a lot of restrictions in place, with restaurants and theatres running at a fraction of their normal capacity, so it's not like we're going completely back to normal. 8. The prime minister's own chief advisor is breaking lockdown rules because he's bored of them, and punishing him isn't an option, so it'd be a lot less embarrassing if we could make what he did allowed retroactively. Between these inputs, our leaders convinced themselves that lowering restrictions was the right thing to do in August.

sethammons 6y ago
Can you expand on America and not locking down? That is not matching my experience in the states.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  I live in a Southern state. Infection rates are the highest they've ever been and there's definitely nothing resembling a lockdown where I am.
- bobthepanda 6y ago