Graham wrote:
I don’t necessarily take this as evidence of BBC political bias, but more as evidence of how journalists will behave in order to get a story they can sell.
Actually, I think that it is more to do with journalists being pretty lazy and wanting to report something, anything and make a big story from it, most especially now during the lockdown where “normal” isnt happenng. How many “News Articles” have you seen which are a direct twitter post? There are very few real questions being asked because there is no direct investigative journalism happening. It had been heading this way since social media exploded and its now peaked because of the lockdown. The “news” right now is either a government spokesperson saying something or a social media post.
Regards, SD..
Peter wrote:
A virus is perfectly capable of simply dying out, if the density of the infectable population goes below a certain level. One could equivalently state this as R being below 1 in the specific population.
Which is exactly what I mean. If every single person isolated himself for two weeks, the virus would have been dead, gone for ever. The problem is how to do it. Realistically it is impossible, although it far from unthinkable that it could be possible. It is the same with the elderly care centers. Just close them down, isolate them, problem solved. In theory – easy, in practice – impossible. We can of course do lots of stuff, isolate them so the risk of getting that one infection is small. But no matter how you look at it, the chance of that one infection is directly proportional to the infection “pressure” outside of the center. OK, so isolate every single person in there! but then you are back to rule number one, which is impossible in practice, and in particular for elderly people in need of constant care.
Then we also have the concept of thinking in hindsight. If we put stronger measures on the elderly care centers, things would have looked a whole lot better. But who should have put stronger measures, and how, and most importantly – why? No one knew up front how to deal with this. No one knew what would happen. In Norway the elderly care centers were closed for visitors a couple of weeks before any other measure. Still, 60% of the deaths have occurred at those places.
LeSving wrote:
If every single person isolated himself for two weeks, the virus would have been dead, gone for ever.
Perhaps not much different to the other crazy strategy of letting everyone get it (with no other measures). Minor problems with that approach are, it would not be two weeks. How many weeks to establish a place of isolation for every person, cat, dog or other reservoir? Several years even if we tried. How many weeks for an infection to no longer be infectious 6 weeks but probably at least 10 maybe even more. How many people would actually die if they were in isolation a period beyond a few days.
Perhaps that was the motive for the enquires about a tent 
My point is there is bit missing, you need a something more than isolation which is testing.
One final point is we don’t whence this came from, its not improbable that some species is now a reservoir for this virus or at least one that will mutate in the same or similar way 12mths or 12 years down the track again. AFAIK this is how ebola is still with us.
Graham wrote:
I don’t necessarily take this as evidence of BBC political bias, but more as evidence of how journalists will behave in order to get a story they can sell.
I would agree in isolation. The problem is with the BBC the cards always seem to fall in one direction. There are almost endless cases of left wing activists, etc being put out as independent experts, this is close to never the case the other way. Plenty of former directors have acknowledged such.
I must admit though, other than the rare bit of viewing I have nothing to do with the bbc and try to get information and news from a spread of sources.
Do we have much data on the risk of transmission when outdoors?
My bet would be on touching surfaces, with airborne transmission being way down the list if there is any air movement (wind).
As for research, I’ve never seen anything. All the studies I have seen involved depositing a ton of a similar virus (CV19 is apparently not yet available to labs for testing) onto some surface, exposing it to [whatever] and then seeing how much is left after x hours/days. These are always open to criticism because nobody is checking if the virus is capable of infecting a person afterwards.
Inevitable really.
That’s hilarious and totally normal in certain organisations.
He was perhaps hoping to get “NHS pricing” from suppliers, of whom there would be plenty since most of them cannot get onto the NHS Approved Supplier List which is going to be guarded better than Fort Knox.
I’ve just seen a firm selling antibody test kits (trade only) and in their description they basically say “don’t worry, we are not robbing the NHS of supplies, we can’t sell to the NHS because we can’t get on their approved list”.
I live below a hill and on top of that hill is a big restaurant. One of the big national greasy chains, hence the sewer pipe running down the hill would get regularly bunged up with congealed fat / frying oil from their kitchen, causing the sewage to run down the hill 
Back when British Telecom were running a national “do you want ADSL; if so, register your interest” scheme, the restaurant manager there got himself registered with BT as the ADSL coordinator for the 3 villages below the hill, and told everybody down there that there was zero chance of BT ever providing ADSL. He then proceeded to sell bandwidth off the pub’s 2mbps DSL connection (at least 10k/year back then) which they had for their POS terminals, to the villagers below the hill, via wifi, for a lot of money. When I found out (in the UK, the pub manager’s name is by law displayed on a plate above the pub door, and it was the same as the BT ADSL coordinator) I told BT, they fired him immediately and appointed me. With my younger son we maildropped every house in the villages and got them to all sign up their interest and got ADSL in no time at all
A useful measure of whether someone has real expertise is whether they do not start each sentence with “so”
Never a truer word spoken.
kwlf wrote:
and the mortality in the Hydroxychloroquine groups has been significantly higher in many of the trials. I
Please Post the Study you are referencing.
Peter wrote:
. Today they were so bad one felt actually sorry for Michael O’Leary (Ryanair) when he was grilled over customer refunds / consumer rights. The reporter didn’t seem to realise there is a virus going around, which has caused a few problems for quite a few people
This is not a process issue, but simply a financial decision. If they have the capacity to process or issue a voucher, they have the capacity to process and issue a payment.
Mr. O’Leary prides himself in not asking for a bailout or subsidies, but chooses to force his customers to in effect extend him a loan for 6 months. He has taken the deliberate decision to not pay a debt that is due when it is due, but to delay it, to help Ryanair’s cashflow.
From a business survival point of view, this may well be the right decision – if this forced interest free loan makes the difference between bankruptcy and survival, this may even be best for the creditors overall, which will all get their money eventually.
But he should be more honest about what he is doing.
Please Post the Study you are referencing.
As I mentioned it is not a randomised controlled trial and so may be subject to various biases.
The jury is still out, but whether or not they’re harmful I think it’s looking increasingly unlikely that either substance will prove highly effective in treating COVID. And that’s the rub – if you have a medicine that reduces the harm from a disease by 50% or more then that’s great. If you have a medicine that decreases mortality by a few percent you’d probably take it but.. meh. And if it makes you more likely to die, then no thanks.
If there is harm from Hydroxychloroquine it is probably as much from people having put too much faith in it, as much as any direct toxic effect.
