The Lemon Fool

servodude wrote:

Ashfordian wrote:
Secondly, many of those taken by Covid would not have been alive in equivalent circumstances 30 years ago due to the medical advances over the 30 year period.

This is the kind of hilarious argument I read these boards for
- thanks for not letting me down

The original "100s of millions saved thanks to vaccine" comment was utter [expletive deleted] though to be fair. 7 million died and that number was unlikely to vary much after the exponential growth period had ended in May/June 2020.

GS

GoSeigen wrote:

servodude wrote:
This is the kind of hilarious argument I read these boards for
- thanks for not letting me down

The original "100s of millions saved thanks to vaccine" comment was utter [expletive deleted] though to be fair. 7 million died and that number was unlikely to vary much after the exponential growth period had ended in May/June 2020.

Was it?

I thought pandemics generally had several waves and peaks of infection before fading away, for reasons we don't really understand.

Had we had no vaccine, the exponential growth of which you write was feared likely to return, IIRC.

Mike4 wrote:

GoSeigen wrote:
The original "100s of millions saved thanks to vaccine" comment was utter [expletive deleted] though to be fair. 7 million died and that number was unlikely to vary much after the exponential growth period had ended in May/June 2020.

Was it?

I thought pandemics generally had several waves and peaks of infection before fading away, for reasons we don't really understand.

Had we had no vaccine, the exponential growth of which you write was feared likely to return, IIRC.

Geometric gents please (were talking about discrete sampling)

Deaths very accurately fitted a geometric growth pattern at the time.
That would obviously have been capped eventually due of population limits - but well to the right hand side of anything observed because it was politically unacceptable to most to let it (doing nowt) run far enough to find the point it where started to look logistic.

But hey if we can write off anyone alive due to the medical advances of the past 3 decades there's plenty of headroom to find out at the next pandemic

servodude wrote:

Mike4 wrote:
Was it?

I thought pandemics generally had several waves and peaks of infection before fading away, for reasons we don't really understand.

Had we had no vaccine, the exponential growth of which you write was feared likely to return, IIRC.

Geometric gents please (were talking about discrete sampling)

Deaths very accurately fitted a geometric growth pattern at the time.
That would obviously have been capped eventually due of population limits - but well to the right hand side of anything observed because it was politically unacceptable to most to let it (doing nowt) run far enough to find the point it where started to look logistic.

But hey if we can write off anyone alive due to the medical advances of the past 3 decades there's plenty of headroom to find out at the next pandemic

We don't write off people that are alive today because of medical advances. You are stupid for saying this.

However these fantastic medical advances create proportionately more vulnerable people in the population so it is unfortunate that as evolution happens, the human race will not always be a winner over a short time period. Over the longer term though humans will be a winner though. Not accepting this is one of the main reasons the UK overreacted and wasted hundreds of billions that is no longer available spent on future medical advancements. For those in the last decade or two of their lives, this is a fact you are going to have to accept and live with!

servodude wrote:

Ashfordian wrote:Secondly, many of those taken by Covid would not have been alive in equivalent circumstances 30 years ago due to the medical advances over the 30 year period.

This is the kind of hilarious argument I read these boards for
- thanks for not letting me down

Yes!

It leaves one with the confusing impression that, when it comes to matters of disease and medicine, Ashfordian both favours fewer people being allowed to die and simultaneously favours more people being left to die.

Ashfordian wrote:We don't write off people that are alive today because of medical advances. You are stupid for saying this.

It may well be a stupid thing to say but, in effect, it was you that said it...

Ashfordian wrote:However these fantastic medical advances create proportionately more vulnerable people in the population so it is unfortunate that as evolution happens, the human race will not always be a winner over a short time period. Over the longer term though humans will be a winner though.

What does this mean?

XFool wrote:

Ashfordian wrote:However these fantastic medical advances create proportionately more vulnerable people in the population so it is unfortunate that as evolution happens, the human race will not always be a winner over a short time period. Over the longer term though humans will be a winner though.

What does this mean?

In the short term old people will die, so that in the long term we'll have more old people. Obvious, innit?

Scott.

Ashfordian wrote:It's just a shame that the country collectively lost its mind and rationale over Covid and that we needed scheme like EOTHO, etc

I'll tell you what, IMO, is fundamentally wrong with your argument here. It seems to me to be based on a basic, simple, but unrealistic assumption:

That, in a pandemic, there is one ideal, simply determined, 'sweet spot' or solution that minimizes the total harm.

There may be such a 'sweet spot'.
There may not be such a 'sweet spot'.
There may be more than one such 'sweet spot'.

Even if there is such a 'sweet spot' nobody may know how to realistically determine it.
Even if there is such a 'sweet spot' it might not be determinable, even in principle.
Even if there is such a 'sweet spot' it might change over the course of a pandemic.

There is much to criticise in our government's response to the pandemic. However, any government would have been faced with a situation where it would have been impossible to hit the exact spot that minimised overall deaths and long term harm, other than by blind chance. (And, if they had, we wouldn't even know it.)

Welcome to the world of pandemics.

Ashfordian wrote: The reality is that Covid was and is a winter cold for many. That was certainly not the narrative coming out of these people, despite Chris Whitty orginally saying this in April 2020 in a Gresham College presentation on Youtube.

Covid has also been a death sentence or life sentence for many and how do you know that if it had been allowed to run riot, in the hope of achieving herd immunity, before people had had their jabs which did not stop infection but , we are told, reduced the effects, things would not have been a whole lot worse for many more people. Lonely as it was, I followed the instruction to self-shield and thereby avoided infection, which might well have killed me at that stage. Ironically, I picked it up in April this year when queuing for my booster jab and that was unpleasant, certainly worse than a cod, but not lethal. There are plenty of quite young people who are still suffering from long Covid and other permanent effects. It would be interesting to know at what stage of the epidemic they were infected. It can't be easy when a new virus arrives on the scene to know just how virulent it is.

As for current delays in every public service, including the NHS, multiple strikes and dishing out loans to crooks who had no intention of repaying them won't have helped with that problem.

Should be interesting:

Top scientist Vallance to face questions on Covid decision making

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-67451422

Summary
Patrick Vallance will give evidence to the UK-Covid 19 Inquiry shortly

Vallance was the government's chief scientific adviser between 2018-2023

The inquiry is currently looking at pandemic decision-making. No-one will be found guilty or innocent; the purpose is to learn lessons

Lawyers for Vallance have told the inquiry that full pages from his diaries, kept while in office, should not be shown on screen during public hearings

Eight media organisations, including the BBC, want the entries shown in context as part of a full diary page

Vallance kept "evening notes" in the pandemic as part of "brain dump" to protect his mental health, his lawyer has previously said

XFool wrote:Should be interesting:

Top scientist Vallance to face questions on Covid decision making

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-67451422

Summary
Patrick Vallance will give evidence to the UK-Covid 19 Inquiry shortly

Vallance was the government's chief scientific adviser between 2018-2023

The inquiry is currently looking at pandemic decision-making. No-one will be found guilty or innocent; the purpose is to learn lessons

Lawyers for Vallance have told the inquiry that full pages from his diaries, kept while in office, should not be shown on screen during public hearings

Eight media organisations, including the BBC, want the entries shown in context as part of a full diary page

Vallance kept "evening notes" in the pandemic as part of "brain dump" to protect his mental health, his lawyer has previously said

It is!

Vallance is pushed now on information detailed in his diary which Andrew O'Connor KC says shows a “repeated failure” by Boris Johnson to understand things like graphs and scientific concepts, and regularly forgetting things he has recently been told.

Patrick Vallance says that the prime minister acknowledges himself that he gave up science when he was 15.

He notes this was not an issue unique to Boris Johnson, and recalls a meeting of science advisers from across Europe, where an adviser from one country said "the leader of that country had enormous problems with exponential curves” - something which raised a laugh in the meeting, as all the leaders had that issue.

"It was hard work sometimes to make sure [Boris Johnson] had understood what a graph of a piece of data was saying and I learnt from a number of meetings … there were certain things that would catch his eye and would work for him, and other things that wouldn't work for him," he says.

Vallance is being asked about how he was required to provide scientific advise to key decision makers.

He said earlier that only 10% of the civil servants hired as part of the government's graduate intake programme had a science, maths or engineering degree, with 90% coming from a humanities and social science background.

"It means that the routine consideration of science in policy formulation was not where it needed to be," he told the inquiry earlier today.

Earlier witnesses, including the No 10 adviser Dr Ben Warner, have raised similar concerns, saying they were worried about the lack of scientific skills in key government departments.

Vallance says the government now has a target for 50% of all fast track recruits to have a science or mathematics background by 2024.

He adds he will "look with interest from the sidelines to see whether it's achieved".

A couple of quotes from the BBC. Like Vallance I'll be interested to see if the number of scientifically literate civil servants does increase or if they continue to be PPE graduates. It would also be good if more politicians had a science background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTRpt55pgkA

Vallance's testimony today is dynamite stuff.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-67451422

O'Connor shows the inquiry more notes from October 2020.

Vallance wrote at the time: "We have a weak indecisive PM". He also described the right-wing press as "culpable" in decision-making on Covid measures.

Commenting on it now, he says the note was due to a "late-night moment of frustration".

He goes on to add that Johnson "was influenced a lot by the press" in his decision-making during the pandemic.

Who'd a thunk it?

Back when a lot of us were frustrated the government seemed to be dragging their feet over taking action during the pandemic, the argument put by some here was that the science was only one input to take into account, and politicians had bigger things to think about.

It's becoming apparent that they simply didn't have the ability to understand the science. As many of us suspected at the time.

Scott.

Would it be an advantage to have a Prime Minister who has a science degree?

CliffEdge wrote:Would it be an advantage to have a Prime Minister who has a science degree?

Maybe just one that recognised their limitations.

Scott.

CliffEdge wrote:Would it be an advantage to have a Prime Minister who has a science degree?

Science is so narrow and specialised that I tend to think not. Does a physicist know anything about biology, and vice versa?

Thatcher was of course a great example of a scientist whose knowledge was not a mile deep and an inch wide. But that might be the exception that proves the rule.

How about a PM who has actually run a business? Has not spent his or her life in the public sector?

Lootman wrote:

CliffEdge wrote:Would it be an advantage to have a Prime Minister who has a science degree?

Science is so narrow and specialised that I tend to think not. Does a physicist know anything about biology, and vice versa?

If it is not considered too rude: You seem to me to keep on making this same mistake.

Physics is a specialised subject; biology is a specialised subject. Why would you expect an expert in any specialised subject to know much about another specialised subject? Would you expect an expert in Western Philosophy to automatically have deep knowledge and understanding of The Art of Ancient China? (There will always be exceptions).

It is perfectly possible for an expert in a specialised subject to have other, wider interests, outside their specialism. This - believe it or not - is not even unknown with scientists. The main issue is, I think, as has been observed and commented on by very many people over time, is that many people with a strong arts type background have very little, or even no, significant knowledge or understanding of scientific and mathematical ideas and methods.

Another point is, however broadening for the mind a deep knowledge of Latin poetry or Etruscan pottery may be, unlike science and mathematics it doesn't necessarily give you any immediate insights into general practical matters that can crop up in everyday life - such as say, a pandemic.

XFool wrote:

Lootman wrote:Science is so narrow and specialised that I tend to think not. Does a physicist know anything about biology, and vice versa?

If it is not considered too rude: You seem to me to keep on making this same mistake.

Physics is a specialised subject; biology is a specialised subject. Why would you expect an expert in any specialised subject to know much about another specialised subject? Would you expect an expert in Western Philosophy to automatically have deep knowledge and understanding of The Art of Ancient China? (There will always be exceptions).

It is perfectly possible for an expert in a specialised subject to have other, wider interests, outside their specialism. This - believe it or not - is not even unknown with scientists. The main issue is, I think, as has been observed and commented on by very many people over time, is that many people with a strong arts type background have very little, or even no, significant knowledge or understanding of scientific and mathematical ideas and methods.

Another point is, however broadening for the mind a deep knowledge of Latin poetry or Etruscan pottery may be, unlike science and mathematics it doesn't necessarily give you any immediate insights into general practical matters that can crop up in everyday life - such as say, a pandemic.

I’d completely disagree. If you have a science degree you will have two invaluable assets. First a range of mathematical tools to assess evidence and second an understanding of the scientific method. Either leaves you streets ahead of a PPE graduate or historian.

Spet0789 wrote:

XFool wrote:If it is not considered too rude: You seem to me to keep on making this same mistake.

Physics is a specialised subject; biology is a specialised subject. Why would you expect an expert in any specialised subject to know much about another specialised subject? Would you expect an expert in Western Philosophy to automatically have deep knowledge and understanding of The Art of Ancient China? (There will always be exceptions).

It is perfectly possible for an expert in a specialised subject to have other, wider interests, outside their specialism. This - believe it or not - is not even unknown with scientists. The main issue is, I think, as has been observed and commented on by very many people over time, is that many people with a strong arts type background have very little, or even no, significant knowledge or understanding of scientific and mathematical ideas and methods.

Another point is, however broadening for the mind a deep knowledge of Latin poetry or Etruscan pottery may be, unlike science and mathematics it doesn't necessarily give you any immediate insights into general practical matters that can crop up in everyday life - such as say, a pandemic.

I’d completely disagree. If you have a science degree you will have two invaluable assets. First a range of mathematical tools to assess evidence and second an understanding of the scientific method. Either leaves you streets ahead of a PPE graduate or historian.

You'd have thought someone with a stack of sticky Thatcher Annuals would have understood this