The Lemon Fool

XFool wrote:I've never personally checked out the existence of Australia. I defer to the "priesthood" of geographers.

Really. Does that mean you rely entirely upon appeal to authority even when there are simple mechanisms to do side checks? books, newspaper articles, encyclopedia discussions, tourist guides, and maps depicting Australia; what would be the alternative explanation is for these? And a simple phone call or Skype to Australians would provide more evidence.

And of course you could line up at the Quantas desk and go there - using your GPS device as a backup.

There is no such overwhelming levels of circumstantial evidence with SARS-2 because it is too early to have fully mapped it out. What we have is a map saying "here be dragons".

XFool wrote:

Lootman wrote:Forecasts are just that - the opinion and prediction of some expert. How we respond to that dictates our measure of paranoia or complacency.

Or our measure of realism or denial?

That presupposes that you have any insight into what is real or not. Which in turn is a matter of knowing enough to know which experts are right and which are wrong.

XFool wrote:Meanwhile:

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/10/28 ... -news-176/

Not an impressive article.

langley59 wrote:

redsturgeon wrote:For those of you who think Covid is nothing to worry about, some food for thought.

I for one have never thought this and, as I have posted previously, consider myself to be at higher risk than average due to age and a lifetime of compromised breathing. However I do think that the reaction to it by the authorities has been disproportionate and has led to significant other health issues.

My best wishes to your two friends.

Lets imagine you have it your way and little or no action is taken. The hospitals are likely to be overrun with dying patients. Do you agree?

What impact do you forecast this would have on the other services a hospital normally provides? Cancer care, maternity, organ transplants, general surgery, etc?

My own forecast is it would virtually stop them all. So avoiding overloading our hospitals with COVID patients seems essential to me.

NeilW wrote:

XFool wrote:I've never personally checked out the existence of Australia. I defer to the "priesthood" of geographers.

Really. Does that mean you rely entirely upon appeal to authority even when there are simple mechanisms to do side checks? books, newspaper articles, encyclopedia discussions, tourist guides, and maps depicting Australia;

Wouldn't using any of those simply be relying on a similar "appeal to authority"?

NeilW wrote:what would be the alternative explanation is for these?

Well, quite.

NeilW wrote: And a simple phone call or Skype to Australians would provide more evidence.

And of course you could line up at the Quantas desk and go there - using your GPS device as a backup.

How many of us have personally verified all things we have been told of? How many of us have measured the circumference of the globe for ourselves? The distance to the stars? Confirmed that there is an icy Southern continent? That there are indeed blue whales living in the ocean?

NeilW wrote:There is no such overwhelming levels of circumstantial evidence with SARS-2 because it is too early to have fully mapped it out. What we have is a map saying "here be dragons".

We know it exists. We know it is a caused by a virus. We know it is infectious. We know it has spread around the world. We know it causes disease. We know of epidemics and pandemics. We know it hasn't gone away. We ought to know it isn't caused by magic, or by "dragons".

We have expertise, and we used to know this too - before we decided to be silly instead.

Lootman wrote:

XFool wrote:

Lootman wrote:Forecasts are just that - the opinion and prediction of some expert. How we respond to that dictates our measure of paranoia or complacency.

Or our measure of realism or denial?

That presupposes that you have any insight into what is real or not. Which in turn is a matter of knowing enough to know which experts are right and which are wrong.

Which is really about sense, judgement and trust. Which all seem to be in increasingly short supply these days.

XFool wrote:

Lootman wrote:

XFool wrote:Or our measure of realism or denial?

That presupposes that you have any insight into what is real or not. Which in turn is a matter of knowing enough to know which experts are right and which are wrong.

Which is really about sense, judgement and trust. Which all seem to be in increasingly short supply these days.

You are basically claiming to be smarter and more aware than others, and therefore conclude that your judgement is superior to the judgement of others.

Which would be great if it were true since we could ignore all the experts and just listen to you, the self-styled "expert on experts".

But then how would we know if you were totally wrong?

Lootman wrote:

XFool wrote:

Lootman wrote:That presupposes that you have any insight into what is real or not. Which in turn is a matter of knowing enough to know which experts are right and which are wrong.

Which is really about sense, judgement and trust. Which all seem to be in increasingly short supply these days.

You are basically claiming to be smarter and more aware than others, and therefore conclude that your judgement is superior to the judgement of others.

Which would be great if it were true since we could ignore all the experts and just listen to you, the self-styled "expert on experts".

But then how would we know if you were totally wrong?

That seems to be an example of just the sort of silliness I was referring to in my previous post. We have "experts", we should listen to them, rather than listening to self proclaimed "experts" claiming they know more than the experts do (or worse, that nobody knows "anything"). Which is precisely what I am not doing.

Mike4 wrote:

langley59 wrote:

redsturgeon wrote:For those of you who think Covid is nothing to worry about, some food for thought.

I for one have never thought this and, as I have posted previously, consider myself to be at higher risk than average due to age and a lifetime of compromised breathing. However I do think that the reaction to it by the authorities has been disproportionate and has led to significant other health issues.

My best wishes to your two friends.

Lets imagine you have it your way and little or no action is taken. The hospitals are likely to be overrun with dying patients. Do you agree?

What impact do you forecast this would have on the other services a hospital normally provides? Cancer care, maternity, organ transplants, general surgery, etc?

My own forecast is it would virtually stop them all. So avoiding overloading our hospitals with COVID patients seems essential to me.

I believe I said that I thought the reaction had been disproportionate, not what you imply above.

XFool wrote:We have "experts", we should listen to them, rather than listening to self proclaimed "experts" claiming they know more than the experts do (or worse, that nobody knows "anything"). Which is precisely what I am not doing.

You are picking Experts that you wish to agree with. We have universities that provide qualifications for expertise, but you are not concerning yourself with that, but instead whether an expert is on a particular committee or not.

johnhemming wrote:

XFool wrote:We have "experts", we should listen to them, rather than listening to self proclaimed "experts" claiming they know more than the experts do (or worse, that nobody knows "anything"). Which is precisely what I am not doing.

You are picking Experts that you wish to agree with. We have universities that provide qualifications for expertise, but you are not concerning yourself with that, but instead whether an expert is on a particular committee or not.

Yes. But what is so wrong with that? They are experts in what they need to be experts in for the job in hand. Why should they not be? Presumably they were chosen for that reason. Of course, you can claim that the people who chose them were not themselves expert enough! And so on...

What should we do when a pandemic breaks out? Spend five years on plebiscites choosing everyone the public approves of in the civil service, academia, the medical field and the government?

It sounds to me rather similar to the notion that every day I get out of bed I have to personally verify everything from the circularity of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun, all the laws of physics, the germ theory of disease, to rediscovering bacteria and viruses myself before I believe anything I hear from anyone else! Of course, every other individual in the nation will need to do the same themselves before we can agree on anything.

I suppose I dont have the habit of simply trusting the government to get everything right.

johnhemming wrote:I suppose I dont have the habit of simply trusting the government to get everything right.

Oh well, that's another matter!

XFool wrote:What should we do when a pandemic breaks out? Spend five years on plebiscites choosing everyone the public approves of in the civil service, academia, the medical field and the government?

I think it might be better just to run a big old " GET COVID DONE" campaign to distract folk from the damage
- they'll never notice

-sd

langley59 wrote:
I believe I said that I thought the reaction had been disproportionate, not what you imply above.

Ok, so do spell out for us what you think.

Do you think too much action is being taken to 'control the virus'? Or too little? Or is it about right?

88V8 wrote:

redsturgeon wrote:...the disease that has killed 45,000 and counting in this country...

But it hasn't.
I just read or started to read before my Adblocker got me blocked, that the UK deaths total has been revised down to 41,000.
And even that is dubious, as it includes anyone dying within 28 days of a positive test.

This is probably one of the worst handled bits of communication around the whole of this cluster cuss

It is actually:

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/deaths wrote:people who had had a positive test result for COVID-19 and died within 28 days of the first positive test

- probably because that is being timestamped as they are entered in to the system (and not redone for any/every subsequent test )

so if you look at the time from symptom onset to death
- from https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 895v6.full


- so while the most likely point of death is at 10-11 days after onset (the peak of that spread - and incidentally the value you should use to count back from peak deaths to see where people started showing symptoms )
- even accounting for a bit of a delay in administering the tests there is a fair bit of tail after the cut off

so in short the perception that using a 28 day cut off is going to inflate the figures seems quite a strange one

- sd

Mike4 wrote:

langley59 wrote:

redsturgeon wrote:For those of you who think Covid is nothing to worry about, some food for thought.

I for one have never thought this and, as I have posted previously, consider myself to be at higher risk than average due to age and a lifetime of compromised breathing. However I do think that the reaction to it by the authorities has been disproportionate and has led to significant other health issues.

My best wishes to your two friends.

Lets imagine you have it your way and little or no action is taken. The hospitals are likely to be overrun with dying patients. Do you agree?

What impact do you forecast this would have on the other services a hospital normally provides? Cancer care, maternity, organ transplants, general surgery, etc?

My own forecast is it would virtually stop them all. So avoiding overloading our hospitals with COVID patients seems essential to me.

Well, my team and I have really concerned ourselves fundamentally with a statistical analysis of patient treatment as a whole, in tandem with and related to a psycho-chemical and, broadly speaking, a behavioural analysis of over a thousand individual COVID patients. And we've come to the inevitable conclusion that the one course of action that the authorities must take, is to cut off their goolies
- or go down the Swedish model and dispense morphine in the care homes


- sd

Mike4 wrote:

langley59 wrote:
I believe I said that I thought the reaction had been disproportionate, not what you imply above.

Ok, so do spell out for us what you think.

Do you think too much action is being taken to 'control the virus'? Or too little? Or is it about right?

The virus isn't being controlled...we are, as I have explained before. Please don't reply, this is getting tedious.

langley59 wrote:

Mike4 wrote:

langley59 wrote:
I believe I said that I thought the reaction had been disproportionate, not what you imply above.

Ok, so do spell out for us what you think.

Do you think too much action is being taken to 'control the virus'? Or too little? Or is it about right?

The virus isn't being controlled...we are, as I have explained before. Please don't reply, this is getting tedious.

As the hosts of the virus that's pretty much the only way that anything can be done
- obviously it's not affecting our lizard overlords but we've not really got much option

-sd

Scientists hope for coronavirus vaccine by Christmas -

The government believes that a German vaccine backed by Pfizer could be ready to distribute before Christmas, with the first doses earmarked for the elderly and vulnerable.

Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, said that the vaccine was in the “last mile” and that the pharmaceutical company expected results within a matter of weeks.

Britain has already bought enough doses for 20 million people and is anticipating that some will be available for use immediately if the drug is shown to be successful.

Senior government sources expect that a verdict on whether it works will be available before Oxford's competing vaccine, which may not provide results before Christmas.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/scientists-hope-for-coronavirus-vaccine-by-christmas-nv03jlvb3

Cheers,

Itsallaguess