I think the article is too quick to turn away from investigating vitamin D deficiency. I also think its hard to argue for social deprivation when BAME doctors or senior nurses are the deaths. These jobs are in no way low paid. Social deprivation clearly is unhelpful but its not the primary causal factor. What about Viral load ? And we are surrounded by statistics but how many are useful ? For example if people over 65 are at the higher end of risk, how does that compare with BAME risk. So many unknowns .
Martyn Hole
4 years ago
Given that the author is studying psychiatric genetics, I would have thought genetic issues may be important. Think sickle cell anemia for example or breast cancer in the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
Julia H
4 years ago
Wouldn’t the chances of dying also be affected by the effect of the vitamin D deficiency? Perhaps (I don’t know) severe vitamin D deficiency on its own is a big risk factor for Covid-19 mortality and is also more prevalent in darker skinned people because melanin, which causes skin pigmentation, lowers the skin’s ability to make vitamin D in response to sunlight exposure.
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
‘I beg your pardon, they promised us a rose garden’, as someone almost sang a long time ago.
Instead we got Libya, an insane and immoral university fees/student borrowing system, Help for House Builders (sic (very sick)), that absurd referendum on a voting system that nobody wanted when Clegg might have got PR as a condition of coalition, hundreds more corrupt and disgusting peers, all manner of green nonsense including wind farm subsidies to Samantha Cameron’s father, another insane reorganisation of the NHS by a Tory spiv whose name I forget, mass immigration, Vince Cable, George Osborn… and oh so much more, so much more to sicken the stomach and torment the soul.
In retrospect, the whole thing was almost as bad as the New Labour years, but from this farrago did at least come the historic saving grace of Brexit.
Tony Hay
4 years ago
From today’s Analysis section (https://unherd.com/2020/05/… “There’s an interesting statistical anomaly called Simpson’s paradox. It is that you can find a trend going one way in lots of individual datasets, but that when you combine those datasets, it can make the trend look like it’s going the other way.”
Phil K
4 years ago
Interesting article but I disagree that Johnson won by “junking corporation tax cuts” – surely more that the Brexit party stood down in so many seats allowing the Tories to win. I’m a keen follower of politics, an ex Tory (after Brexit), and rather in despair. I always thought Johnson was a clown but have found myself gradually accepting him – but doesn’t that say a lot about our politics? Outsiders must have a low opinion of our political class which is one hell of a shame – we are a country with many clever and resourceful young people, we can achieve great things, and we must find a way to achieve that potential, despite our politicians……
Andrew Baldwin
4 years ago
The clearest case where the coalition government really did make a huge difference from what went before, largely in a negative way, was in the domain of official consumer price indices, destroying the formerly sharp distinction between household-oriented (e.g. the RPI) and macroeconomic (e.g. the UK HICP or CPI) consumer price series, and working towards making the CPIH the one index that rules them all and in the darkness binds them. To this end Osborne recruited that remarkable chameleon, Mark Carney. Most of Carney’s public career was in Canada, where he supported without reservations the official Canadian CPI as the target inflation indicator of the Bank of Canada, but he was happy to trash the way owner-occupied housing is calculated in the RPI, which uses the same accounting approach to measuring OOH as the Canadian CPI. The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report “Measuring Inflation” released in January 2019, was a curate’s egg of a document, correctly casting doubt on the suitability of imputed rents to measure OOH costs but endorsing the idea of one index that rules them all. The UKSA only picked up on the second part of the idea, and now wants to “reform” the RPI by replacing its accounting measure of OOH with an imputed rents measure. Johnson’s then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid David, had no better response than delay, saying such a change could only take place between 2025 and 2030, rather than categorically rejected such a reactionary move. It is really difficult to imagine a more dysfunctional outcome than making the CPIH the one index to rule them all. In Canada, where I live, this is the world we operate in. That’s why Carney, already indoctrinated in this way of thinking, needed no convincing. But at least our ruling index, the Canadian CPI, is an excellent household-oriented measure of consumer price inflation. And if it is a much more defective macroeconomic index, it at least includes housing prices. The CPIH is a duck-billed platypus of an index, a macroeconomic HICP series with an anomalous imputed rent component tacked onto it, and it doesn’t include house prices at all. If the Johnson government wants to make a sharp break from the past (and it certainly should) it should make the current ONS experimental series for consumer prices including a net acquisitions approach to OOH the target inflation indicator of the Bank of England as quickly as possible. And it should absolutely not give any consideration to replacing the current treatment of OOH costs in the RPI with imputed rents. The obvious reform to the RPI, as has already been indicated in the Johnson (Paul, not Boris) report, is the addition of a stamp duty component, already part of the ONS experimental series just mentioned.
Richard Slack
4 years ago
The Coalition was essentially fraudulent and with a parallel from 80 years earlier. In the late 1920s the City of London was borrowing short term money and lending it to risky ventures in Eastern Europe longer term. The profits could be good though the risk high. As always the banks thought they had the skills to get out in time and as always they all took the same risks at the same time, as Keynes often observed. And they were caught as banks in Eastern Europe crashed and the City’s creditors wanted their cash back. What was at risk the likelihood of the UK having to devalue sterling to pay its debts and the banks would lose their reputation for prudence and honest dealing which for some reason they enjoyed. So a different narrative was chosen; Sterling’s weakness was nothing to do with the banks, it was due to the difference between Government Income and expenditure and the newly elected Labour Government (minority) under Ramsey MacDonald was blamed for the gap and told this had to be removed, not by taxes (perish the thought!) but by cutting expenditure particularly welfare expenditure (or “waste” as the bankers called it). The Labour Cabinet could not accept this and so MacDonald was persuaded that a coalition government had to happen which was a effectively a Tory Government with the hapless MacDonald nominally leading it. It did not keep Britain on the Gold Standard, we came off it and sterling devalued by about 25% against Gold. The miseries of the 30s were the result.
In 2008 we discovered that the financial institutions had been playing fast and loose with everyone’s money and, guess what, had all be doing the same things and there was a hole where the money should be. Gordon Brown, actually sustained the crisis quite well with essentially Keynesian measures which even held the budget deficit but it cost him an election. With a hung Parliament the same voices were heard of the need for a coalition to “restore confidence” “balance the budget” and, more to the point cut public expenditure which had been allegedly out of control under Labour. The Lib Dems conceded on areas of policy such as Health, Welfare and Education and Privatisation, in return they got a pledge on pupil expenditure for poorer pupils which was washed out by the cuts, and a referendum on proportional representation which the Conservatives did their best to sabotage. Clegg was given a sinecure of Deputy Prime Minister.
Could it have been different. I think it could, all Clegg had to do was to agree to support all measures a minority Tory Government wanted to do to reduce expenditure( if he really thought that was a problem) , he did not need to support the policies on welfare etc, he might have had a chance of manoeuvring towards proportional representation., and he might have had rather more MPs in 2015 or whenever the election came.
The effect on the Labour Party was as bad. As New Labour was PR based rather than policy based the reaction in opposition was to apologise for much of its record and adopt a policy of “Austerity with a human face” rather than advocate the the Quantitative Easing could have been used to rebuild the economy. Ed Balls, as a student of Economics understood the parallel with 1930 but failed to make this point. By the time of the 2015 election no-one had a clue what the Labour Party stood for, Scotland went to the SNP and Balls was out on his arse.
Adrian Smith
4 years ago
So the BAME community now has a far greater level of herd immunity than the white community.
robertjones770
4 years ago
“Sometimes, the present is more like the past than the future”. Nicely put.
Stephen Follows
4 years ago
‘generally blaming foreigners for stuff that wasn’t their fault.’
Like all those people coming back from Wuhan after Chinese New Year? Not so much foreigners, more like barbarians at the (airport) gates.
I think the article is too quick to turn away from investigating vitamin D deficiency.
I also think its hard to argue for social deprivation when BAME doctors or senior nurses are the deaths. These jobs are in no way low paid. Social deprivation clearly is unhelpful but its not the primary causal factor. What about Viral load ?
And we are surrounded by statistics but how many are useful ? For example if people over 65 are at the higher end of risk, how does that compare with BAME risk. So many unknowns .
Given that the author is studying psychiatric genetics, I would have thought genetic issues may be important. Think sickle cell anemia for example or breast cancer in the Ashkenazi Jewish population.
Wouldn’t the chances of dying also be affected by the effect of the vitamin D deficiency? Perhaps (I don’t know) severe vitamin D deficiency on its own is a big risk factor for Covid-19 mortality and is also more prevalent in darker skinned people because melanin, which causes skin pigmentation, lowers the skin’s ability to make vitamin D in response to sunlight exposure.
‘I beg your pardon, they promised us a rose garden’, as someone almost sang a long time ago.
Instead we got Libya, an insane and immoral university fees/student borrowing system, Help for House Builders (sic (very sick)), that absurd referendum on a voting system that nobody wanted when Clegg might have got PR as a condition of coalition, hundreds more corrupt and disgusting peers, all manner of green nonsense including wind farm subsidies to Samantha Cameron’s father, another insane reorganisation of the NHS by a Tory spiv whose name I forget, mass immigration, Vince Cable, George Osborn… and oh so much more, so much more to sicken the stomach and torment the soul.
In retrospect, the whole thing was almost as bad as the New Labour years, but from this farrago did at least come the historic saving grace of Brexit.
From today’s Analysis section (https://unherd.com/2020/05/… “There’s an interesting statistical anomaly called Simpson’s paradox. It is that you can find a trend going one way in lots of individual datasets, but that when you combine those datasets, it can make the trend look like it’s going the other way.”
Interesting article but I disagree that Johnson won by “junking corporation tax cuts” – surely more that the Brexit party stood down in so many seats allowing the Tories to win. I’m a keen follower of politics, an ex Tory (after Brexit), and rather in despair. I always thought Johnson was a clown but have found myself gradually accepting him – but doesn’t that say a lot about our politics? Outsiders must have a low opinion of our political class which is one hell of a shame – we are a country with many clever and resourceful young people, we can achieve great things, and we must find a way to achieve that potential, despite our politicians……
The clearest case where the coalition government really did make a huge difference from what went before, largely in a negative way, was in the domain of official consumer price indices, destroying the formerly sharp distinction between household-oriented (e.g. the RPI) and macroeconomic (e.g. the UK HICP or CPI) consumer price series, and working towards making the CPIH the one index that rules them all and in the darkness binds them. To this end Osborne recruited that remarkable chameleon, Mark Carney. Most of Carney’s public career was in Canada, where he supported without reservations the official Canadian CPI as the target inflation indicator of the Bank of Canada, but he was happy to trash the way owner-occupied housing is calculated in the RPI, which uses the same accounting approach to measuring OOH as the Canadian CPI. The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report “Measuring Inflation” released in January 2019, was a curate’s egg of a document, correctly casting doubt on the suitability of imputed rents to measure OOH costs but endorsing the idea of one index that rules them all. The UKSA only picked up on the second part of the idea, and now wants to “reform” the RPI by replacing its accounting measure of OOH with an imputed rents measure. Johnson’s then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid David, had no better response than delay, saying such a change could only take place between 2025 and 2030, rather than categorically rejected such a reactionary move. It is really difficult to imagine a more dysfunctional outcome than making the CPIH the one index to rule them all. In Canada, where I live, this is the world we operate in. That’s why Carney, already indoctrinated in this way of thinking, needed no convincing. But at least our ruling index, the Canadian CPI, is an excellent household-oriented measure of consumer price inflation. And if it is a much more defective macroeconomic index, it at least includes housing prices. The CPIH is a duck-billed platypus of an index, a macroeconomic HICP series with an anomalous imputed rent component tacked onto it, and it doesn’t include house prices at all. If the Johnson government wants to make a sharp break from the past (and it certainly should) it should make the current ONS experimental series for consumer prices including a net acquisitions approach to OOH the target inflation indicator of the Bank of England as quickly as possible. And it should absolutely not give any consideration to replacing the current treatment of OOH costs in the RPI with imputed rents. The obvious reform to the RPI, as has already been indicated in the Johnson (Paul, not Boris) report, is the addition of a stamp duty component, already part of the ONS experimental series just mentioned.
The Coalition was essentially fraudulent and with a parallel from 80 years earlier. In the late 1920s the City of London was borrowing short term money and lending it to risky ventures in Eastern Europe longer term. The profits could be good though the risk high. As always the banks thought they had the skills to get out in time and as always they all took the same risks at the same time, as Keynes often observed. And they were caught as banks in Eastern Europe crashed and the City’s creditors wanted their cash back. What was at risk the likelihood of the UK having to devalue sterling to pay its debts and the banks would lose their reputation for prudence and honest dealing which for some reason they enjoyed. So a different narrative was chosen; Sterling’s weakness was nothing to do with the banks, it was due to the difference between Government Income and expenditure and the newly elected Labour Government (minority) under Ramsey MacDonald was blamed for the gap and told this had to be removed, not by taxes (perish the thought!) but by cutting expenditure particularly welfare expenditure (or “waste” as the bankers called it). The Labour Cabinet could not accept this and so MacDonald was persuaded that a coalition government had to happen which was a effectively a Tory Government with the hapless MacDonald nominally leading it. It did not keep Britain on the Gold Standard, we came off it and sterling devalued by about 25% against Gold. The miseries of the 30s were the result.
In 2008 we discovered that the financial institutions had been playing fast and loose with everyone’s money and, guess what, had all be doing the same things and there was a hole where the money should be. Gordon Brown, actually sustained the crisis quite well with essentially Keynesian measures which even held the budget deficit but it cost him an election. With a hung Parliament the same voices were heard of the need for a coalition to “restore confidence” “balance the budget” and, more to the point cut public expenditure which had been allegedly out of control under Labour. The Lib Dems conceded on areas of policy such as Health, Welfare and Education and Privatisation, in return they got a pledge on pupil expenditure for poorer pupils which was washed out by the cuts, and a referendum on proportional representation which the Conservatives did their best to sabotage. Clegg was given a sinecure of Deputy Prime Minister.
Could it have been different. I think it could, all Clegg had to do was to agree to support all measures a minority Tory Government wanted to do to reduce expenditure( if he really thought that was a problem) , he did not need to support the policies on welfare etc, he might have had a chance of manoeuvring towards proportional representation., and he might have had rather more MPs in 2015 or whenever the election came.
The effect on the Labour Party was as bad. As New Labour was PR based rather than policy based the reaction in opposition was to apologise for much of its record and adopt a policy of “Austerity with a human face” rather than advocate the the Quantitative Easing could have been used to rebuild the economy. Ed Balls, as a student of Economics understood the parallel with 1930 but failed to make this point. By the time of the 2015 election no-one had a clue what the Labour Party stood for, Scotland went to the SNP and Balls was out on his arse.
So the BAME community now has a far greater level of herd immunity than the white community.
“Sometimes, the present is more like the past than the future”. Nicely put.
‘generally blaming foreigners for stuff that wasn’t their fault.’
Like all those people coming back from Wuhan after Chinese New Year? Not so much foreigners, more like barbarians at the (airport) gates.