One of the biggest myths of the pandemic is that government action has been the deciding factor in death rates. So we blame Brazils ‘high’ death rates on Bolsonaro, and claim Germany’s ‘low’ death rates are something to do with superior German organization.
And yet South America has overall high death rates, perhaps because they locked down way too early to effectively ‘flatten the curve’. There seems to be no correlation between politics and death rates. The Guardian contends that the high death rates in Peru are down to nasty individualists ignoring the advice of their socialist leaders, and the lower death rates in Brazil are down to the nasty individualists following the advice of their ‘far’ right leader. Yet the trajectory of South American coronavirus deaths seems to affect all countries almost equally.
We have a similar geographic grouping in Germany, Denmark, Austria, Poland, Latvia and Belarus. Very similar Covid death graphs. Not very similar politics.
What this should be telling us, is that we are missing something vital about Covid transmisssion and mortality. Instead we are obsessed that the type of politics we personally dislike is causing the issue.
If lockdowns really work, why are are other respiratory deaths only down 9% between mid March and now, compared to the 2015-19 average? (This is statisically significant and makes 2020 the lowest for 10 years). Map that reduction to Covid and that implies that all the lockdowns and restrictions may have saved as few as 10,000 lives. Make some really, really generous assumptions (compare 2020 to worst years rather than average – assume no affect on non influenza like respiratory illnesses etc) and I can get an estimate in the 25-35K range for lives saved. This seems quite a bit below the estimates of how many lives lockdown is costing.
Or, you can believe SAGE that their restrictions reduce COVID deaths by 90% but all other respiratory disease deaths by 9%.
I think there are other differences between socities and what have you that can (and are thrown in) but the real answers will probably be found in a complex interplay intreplay of a number of factors as you say, than this or that ideologically driven interpretation.
There’s divided socities (us, Scotland, USA..Brexit, Independence , Trum) with very partisan media especially broadcast, amplifying divisiions, but also population density, societel habits of behaviour, centralised health services, against de-centralised, over reliance of private companies , under reliance on them, the leraned behaviours in the far east from previous scares pandemic-wise, and the list can go on and on.
The big panic here (basically caused by that video from Bergamo hospital at a crucial time, to *protect the NHS* that then caused hasty and careless of decanting of patients into care homes….one can go on and on.
The fact is the virus IS stillvery novel, we are still finding out different things about it, and trying to create a kind of dogma of certainty out of the fluctuating statistics just risks piling on another layer of bad outcomes.
Glyn Jones
3 years ago
Sorry, Is this the same Jeremy Hunt (who is actually the MP for the end bit of my garden) who was Health Secretary from 2012 – 2018? The one who was told in 2016 (after exercise Cygnus) that the UK health system was badly prepared for a pandemic, yet did nothing? And you think he would have done a better job?
While there’s still time to edit Ken, you might want to remove the unnecessary hyphen from your own eye… He who is without grammatical sin and all that.
Yes, and Hunt’s “cabinet” includes Burnham who, as Health Minister, refused 8 times, a call for investigations into the un-necessary and premature deaths of around 2000 people in Staffordshire hospital. Indeed, he was accused of covering up the scandal for some years.
I know it’s possibly off the specific topic but one thing I know about is news, the news media and the cataclysm created by the digitisation of all forms of information…all of which came together in jeremy Hunt’s incredibley useless version of John Prescott’s incredibly useless original suggestions of local/hyper local TV stations, (like they have in canada) which instead of creating a field of flowers flourishing locally and providing news, has created a TV channel populated by the worst sort of cable TV channel content only waiting for some VC type takeover…or to collapse into extinction, which without the ludicrous hidden subsidy from the BBC…it would have already.
The fact is the *channel* should have been internet based.
Jeremy Hunt’s championing and engineering of it in the form it took was just dim.
LUKE LOZE
3 years ago
Or maybe reacting to the Imperial random number generator Jeremy decided to bring in lockdown earlier and harder. To clear the hospitals covid positive patients are shunted into care homes a few weeks earlier than happened, with the earlier seed time and colder weather the cooped up residents die at twice the rate of as happened – so 50,000 dead in care homes.
With schools shut more grandparents in the cold early March weather are looking after grand kids. The harsher lockdown measures mean no going outside apart from shopping, the disease which had been circulating unoticed in schools for a month spreads with ease to the grandparents, who along with their other chronic conditions are too scared to bother the NHS. Another 50,000 die. With the death toll > 100,000 and growing fast the blunt lockdown measures become harsher and harsher, all deaths caused by the lockdown must now be blamed on the virus, this becomes a vicous circle.
Speculation is fun. Perhaps a mildly competent political class and health bureaucracy would have protected rather than sacrificed care home residents. Care workers would have been prioritised for testing and emergency measures put in place to massively increase the number of care workers, with sick pay. Live in workers on £1000 a week would make headlines but save lives. Home deliveries of food would be prioritised for those deemed most at risk. Young people could have been repeatably told that their risk was tiny, but to take sensible precautions. The private sector could have been allowed to help with testing and PPE.
Actually in computers there actually is no such thing as a random number, Imperial simply wrote a huge piece of crap software to confirm what they believed anyway
There are ways to get truly random numbers into computers with sensors, I doubt Imperial went this far.
The ‘code’ seen online was apparently the heavily cleaned up version, which is really scary considering how bad it is.
The lack of structure and use of concepts deemed dangerous 50 years ago is shocking.
Imperial’s arrogant claim that because it used random meant it couldn’t be tested for consistent results shows the amateur nature of the team. Multiple jnr devs I’ve known could have done it with ease.
I suspect most of the Imperial team have high IQs, but were truly unaware of what a hacked piece of unmaintainable spaghetti code they wrote.
And of course all the variables they put in about the virus such as infection rates and fatality rates were guesses too, often 10 fold off.
Spot on…it seemed one news video at a key moment (of Bergamo medics and hospitals being over run) sparked the panicky idea that above all the Health Service needed to be protected..rather than the patients in it…who were decanted with the disease into care homes with the results that the countries that *protected their Health service* best actually seem to be the ones with most deaths….
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Seeing the headline on the landing page and not noticing the photo I assumed this was the other Jeremy. Namely, Corbyn. In which case the UK would have faced the virus as an increasingly Islamic version of Venezuela. All the Jews rapidly fleeing in the country would have been unable to travel, leaving them massively vulnerable to the ongoing pogroms.
But it’s Jeremy Hunt, in which case I don’t suppose the response would have been any different to the grotesque combination of tyranny and farce that has unfolded over recent months.
Brian Villanueva
3 years ago
Summary: “if only we had a functional, establishment, leader instead of that populist, Brexit-loving, loony…”
Macron is a prototypical establishment leader in Europe, but France’s COVID cases are terrible. Looking across Europe, there is little apparent correlation between leadership style, party, mask mandates, border closures, lockdowns, and COVID hospitalization / death rates.
That’s not really that surprising for an partially airborne disease. What is surprising is the number of people wasting ink trying to “prove” that their government policies would have made it better.
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago
Pondering counterfactuals is fun, but in my humble opinion, that is not how any of this works. It is driven by currents at different scales short, medium and long term, over which individual leaders have almost no impact – the important factors are the playlist of human sensibilities aggregated at national and supra-national level. I would even include, say, WWII in this – ie the fact Churchill (and Hitler) were leader in place had little impact – what played out would have happened mostly the same, with minor differences, regardless. As such, the only important long term trends are the rise of algorithmic and genetic technologies. The medium term ones are globalisation and demographics. The short term stuff is entertaining (cartoons often are) but pretty much irrelevant.
Consider WWI for a moment. Countless Historians have pasted on lines of reasoning as to why it happened, what triggered it (Bosnian assassination blah blah) etc, but I have, after years of buying all that, come to the conclusion it is retrofitted rubbish (all them History professors have to justify their salaries somehow, and the entertainment businesses is as good as any). Imagine different leaders and different choices by them across the whole of Europe at the time of WWI. I don’t for a second now believe that WWI would not have played out pretty much the same with minor variations. Imagine no rise of Hitler. I still think a war in Europe at about the same time and of the same magnitude would have happened. Patterns playing out, outside human agency.
Jay Williamson
3 years ago
Really? I know you dislike Boris Johnson, but this is a waste of time article.
You should have finished reading it, it has a “happy” ending
Roger Inkpen
3 years ago
I assumed the headline was referring to whether Hunt would have handled the pandemic better than Matt Hancock! As health sec, I don’t suppose he’d have been any better at challenging the alleged ‘science’ behind any of the restrictions.
As for JH becoming PM, I guess all your scenarios have a ring of plausibility. But what happened with the chaos in Parliament over Brexit? Would Hunt have forced through a transition deal? would he have given more time for a trade deal? Then more time? And then agreed to another EU ref?
One of the biggest myths of the pandemic is that government action has been the deciding factor in death rates.
So we blame Brazils ‘high’ death rates on Bolsonaro, and claim Germany’s ‘low’ death rates are something to do with superior German organization.
And yet South America has overall high death rates, perhaps because they locked down way too early to effectively ‘flatten the curve’. There seems to be no correlation between politics and death rates. The Guardian contends that the high death rates in Peru are down to nasty individualists ignoring the advice of their socialist leaders, and the lower death rates in Brazil are down to the nasty individualists following the advice of their ‘far’ right leader. Yet the trajectory of South American coronavirus deaths seems to affect all countries almost equally.
We have a similar geographic grouping in Germany, Denmark, Austria, Poland, Latvia and Belarus. Very similar Covid death graphs. Not very similar politics.
What this should be telling us, is that we are missing something vital about Covid transmisssion and mortality. Instead we are obsessed that the type of politics we personally dislike is causing the issue.
My big question for governments and advisors is:
If lockdowns really work, why are are other respiratory deaths only down 9% between mid March and now, compared to the 2015-19 average? (This is statisically significant and makes 2020 the lowest for 10 years).
Map that reduction to Covid and that implies that all the lockdowns and restrictions may have saved as few as 10,000 lives. Make some really, really generous assumptions (compare 2020 to worst years rather than average – assume no affect on non influenza like respiratory illnesses etc) and I can get an estimate in the 25-35K range for lives saved.
This seems quite a bit below the estimates of how many lives lockdown is costing.
Or, you can believe SAGE that their restrictions reduce COVID deaths by 90% but all other respiratory disease deaths by 9%.
Fully endorse your view that we are missing something vital about Covid transmission….
I think there are other differences between socities and what have you that can (and are thrown in) but the real answers will probably be found in a complex interplay intreplay of a number of factors as you say, than this or that ideologically driven interpretation.
There’s divided socities (us, Scotland, USA..Brexit, Independence , Trum) with very partisan media especially broadcast, amplifying divisiions, but also population density, societel habits of behaviour, centralised health services, against de-centralised, over reliance of private companies , under reliance on them, the leraned behaviours in the far east from previous scares pandemic-wise, and the list can go on and on.
The big panic here (basically caused by that video from Bergamo hospital at a crucial time, to *protect the NHS* that then caused hasty and careless of decanting of patients into care homes….one can go on and on.
The fact is the virus IS stillvery novel, we are still finding out different things about it, and trying to create a kind of dogma of certainty out of the fluctuating statistics just risks piling on another layer of bad outcomes.
Sorry, Is this the same Jeremy Hunt (who is actually the MP for the end bit of my garden) who was Health Secretary from 2012 – 2018? The one who was told in 2016 (after exercise Cygnus) that the UK health system was badly prepared for a pandemic, yet did nothing?
And you think he would have done a better job?
You should have got into your shed and wrote him a letter.
I should have done. I do actually have a shed in his constituency.
I don’t know who is worse. Jeremy Hunt or my actual MP Damian Hinds.
‘written’ him a letter, not ‘wrote’
Adrian and I are common people. We both understood “wrote”.
You may have understood it, I’m afraid I have never understanded wot I wrote.
If some modern educationalists get their way, we will see children expressing their own grammatical style not dissimilar from all of the above!!
I should have knowned that, but at my school we only did wrote learning.
Adrian, please. I’m sure you mean “rote” not “wrote”. You are just giving our Ken extra ammunition.
I knows wot I meant and I knows wot I rote. Ken can ken wot he can ken.
While there’s still time to edit Ken, you might want to remove the unnecessary hyphen from your own eye…
He who is without grammatical sin and all that.
‘written’ a letter to him. Not ‘written’ him a letter.
….as any fule kno.
Yes, and Hunt’s “cabinet” includes Burnham who, as Health Minister, refused 8 times, a call for investigations into the un-necessary and premature deaths of around 2000 people in Staffordshire hospital. Indeed, he was accused of covering up the scandal for some years.
So the average British PM would consider him just the chap or chapess for the job!
I know it’s possibly off the specific topic but one thing I know about is news, the news media and the cataclysm created by the digitisation of all forms of information…all of which came together in jeremy Hunt’s incredibley useless version of John Prescott’s incredibly useless original suggestions of local/hyper local TV stations, (like they have in canada) which instead of creating a field of flowers flourishing locally and providing news, has created a TV channel populated by the worst sort of cable TV channel content only waiting for some VC type takeover…or to collapse into extinction, which without the ludicrous hidden subsidy from the BBC…it would have already.
The fact is the *channel* should have been internet based.
Jeremy Hunt’s championing and engineering of it in the form it took was just dim.
Or maybe reacting to the Imperial random number generator Jeremy decided to bring in lockdown earlier and harder. To clear the hospitals covid positive patients are shunted into care homes a few weeks earlier than happened, with the earlier seed time and colder weather the cooped up residents die at twice the rate of as happened – so 50,000 dead in care homes.
With schools shut more grandparents in the cold early March weather are looking after grand kids. The harsher lockdown measures mean no going outside apart from shopping, the disease which had been circulating unoticed in schools for a month spreads with ease to the grandparents, who along with their other chronic conditions are too scared to bother the NHS. Another 50,000 die. With the death toll > 100,000 and growing fast the blunt lockdown measures become harsher and harsher, all deaths caused by the lockdown must now be blamed on the virus, this becomes a vicous circle.
Speculation is fun. Perhaps a mildly competent political class and health bureaucracy would have protected rather than sacrificed care home residents. Care workers would have been prioritised for testing and emergency measures put in place to massively increase the number of care workers, with sick pay. Live in workers on £1000 a week would make headlines but save lives. Home deliveries of food would be prioritised for those deemed most at risk. Young people could have been repeatably told that their risk was tiny, but to take sensible precautions. The private sector could have been allowed to help with testing and PPE.
Actually in computers there actually is no such thing as a random number, Imperial simply wrote a huge piece of crap software to confirm what they believed anyway
Something of which Prof Ferguson is blissfully unaware.
too busy making merry!
There are ways to get truly random numbers into computers with sensors, I doubt Imperial went this far.
The ‘code’ seen online was apparently the heavily cleaned up version, which is really scary considering how bad it is.
The lack of structure and use of concepts deemed dangerous 50 years ago is shocking.
Imperial’s arrogant claim that because it used random meant it couldn’t be tested for consistent results shows the amateur nature of the team. Multiple jnr devs I’ve known could have done it with ease.
I suspect most of the Imperial team have high IQs, but were truly unaware of what a hacked piece of unmaintainable spaghetti code they wrote.
And of course all the variables they put in about the virus such as infection rates and fatality rates were guesses too, often 10 fold off.
Spot on…it seemed one news video at a key moment (of Bergamo medics and hospitals being over run) sparked the panicky idea that above all the Health Service needed to be protected..rather than the patients in it…who were decanted with the disease into care homes with the results that the countries that *protected their Health service* best actually seem to be the ones with most deaths….
Seeing the headline on the landing page and not noticing the photo I assumed this was the other Jeremy. Namely, Corbyn. In which case the UK would have faced the virus as an increasingly Islamic version of Venezuela. All the Jews rapidly fleeing in the country would have been unable to travel, leaving them massively vulnerable to the ongoing pogroms.
But it’s Jeremy Hunt, in which case I don’t suppose the response would have been any different to the grotesque combination of tyranny and farce that has unfolded over recent months.
Summary: “if only we had a functional, establishment, leader instead of that populist, Brexit-loving, loony…”
Macron is a prototypical establishment leader in Europe, but France’s COVID cases are terrible. Looking across Europe, there is little apparent correlation between leadership style, party, mask mandates, border closures, lockdowns, and COVID hospitalization / death rates.
That’s not really that surprising for an partially airborne disease. What is surprising is the number of people wasting ink trying to “prove” that their government policies would have made it better.
Pondering counterfactuals is fun, but in my humble opinion, that is not how any of this works. It is driven by currents at different scales short, medium and long term, over which individual leaders have almost no impact – the important factors are the playlist of human sensibilities aggregated at national and supra-national level. I would even include, say, WWII in this – ie the fact Churchill (and Hitler) were leader in place had little impact – what played out would have happened mostly the same, with minor differences, regardless. As such, the only important long term trends are the rise of algorithmic and genetic technologies. The medium term ones are globalisation and demographics. The short term stuff is entertaining (cartoons often are) but pretty much irrelevant.
Consider WWI for a moment. Countless Historians have pasted on lines of reasoning as to why it happened, what triggered it (Bosnian assassination blah blah) etc, but I have, after years of buying all that, come to the conclusion it is retrofitted rubbish (all them History professors have to justify their salaries somehow, and the entertainment businesses is as good as any). Imagine different leaders and different choices by them across the whole of Europe at the time of WWI. I don’t for a second now believe that WWI would not have played out pretty much the same with minor variations. Imagine no rise of Hitler. I still think a war in Europe at about the same time and of the same magnitude would have happened. Patterns playing out, outside human agency.
Really? I know you dislike Boris Johnson, but this is a waste of time article.
You should have finished reading it, it has a “happy” ending
I assumed the headline was referring to whether Hunt would have handled the pandemic better than Matt Hancock! As health sec, I don’t suppose he’d have been any better at challenging the alleged ‘science’ behind any of the restrictions.
As for JH becoming PM, I guess all your scenarios have a ring of plausibility. But what happened with the chaos in Parliament over Brexit? Would Hunt have forced through a transition deal? would he have given more time for a trade deal? Then more time? And then agreed to another EU ref?
A Kirkup’wet dream’…