Sadly, most people don’t have any info in their profiles and this is a recurring issue when they ask for some help. They don’t get a response…
Much discussed previously.
However, there are 100% legitimate reasons why many people want to be anonymous. I know the backgrounds of many of these.
A BBC piece today was bemoaning US nurses being laid off.
The BBC is a joke; even worse now than at any other time. 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… A lot of these TV people are as thick as one of these
and watching the news coverage is often just painful.
MOL stayed amazingly good tempered. I would have returned a really sarcastic comment.
Peter wrote:
one felt actually sorry for Michael O’Leary
I thought that could never happen. It must have been unimaginably bad.
Ted wrote:
Only one infection is required in that environment
Only one infection is required in any environment regardless how you define that environment. The problem with elderly care centers is they are inhabited by persons in the highest risk group. In total, this is a statistical thing. The more the virus is spread in the entire population, the higher the risk is that an elderly care center also will receive that one infection. You could close them completely down of course, but how exactly? The centers were in no state to execute such measures, no money, no equipment, no know how, and the number of needed personnel would have to be tripled or quadrupled.
Only one infection is required in any environment regardless how you define that environment.
I don’t understand that. To take a silly example which proves the above is not simply true, why haven’t we all got Ebola? Or HIV?
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.
I am obviously no expert here but I have not heard anything stating that CV19 is somehow an exception.
Obviously it spreads more easily (and I posted a long list above) so it is harder to get rid of it. With HIV you achieve this by being careful who you shag (and not doing some other “borderline activities”) and preferably by the two people getting tested before they “get down to regular business”. This is straightforward. Due to the massive incubation time, 9 years or so, it will not disappear on human-life timescales.
The CV19 virus is a lot easier to catch, but AFAICT it still obeys the same laws. Whether this epidemic will die out by itself depends on whether R can be reduced far enough for long enough. Maybe this is not possible without wrecking the world economy, but I have not seen that proven.
Peter wrote:
The BBC is a joke
This is absolutely the truth and is pretty disgraceful.
The recent panorama show the BBC had with “doctors and nurses” who all happened to be left wing activists. It turns out the BBC went to a communist to get them.
There needs to be a sensible discussion about trying to get business going again and balancing keeping the virus from going exponential again.
LeSving wrote:
The problem with elderly care centers is they are inhabited by persons in the highest risk group.
This also demonstrates the problem with just trying to use global measures like a simple R0 to cover all situations. Residential care, almost certainly means a large number of people whom by definition cannot maintain social distancing! We don’t no what exactly the R number is for a large group of people say 50 plus living close together who need constant attention that often requies close physical contact several times daily, with multiple people, but I would guess it is well into the double figures. Sure it is not the same scale as a ICU bed but is not living in isolation going to the shops once a week.
Plus of course residential care environment is usually closed associated with a hospital.
LeSving wrote:
You could close them completely down of course, but how exactly?
I don’t know exactly what those measures might be, but they might include, new PPE for each personal contact, weekly or daily screening of the staff, testing of visitors etc. Some isolation within the facility etc. Of course these tests need to exist.
My point is simply one size does not fit all. I am not criticising early actions for something people didn’t understand, simply stating that the solution is not simply a global solution (unless you have a treatment) but often actually a local solution related to the specifics of the environment.
Peter wrote:
I don’t understand that.
You just need the local R to above 1 in any one place.
What infectious diseases have been eliminated via isolation alone in the history of humanity? AFAIK the Spanish flu mutated back to something less lethal overtime, i.e. something similar to its original form which still exists as H1N1
You just need the local R to above 1 in any one place.
Agreed.
What infectious diseases have been eliminated via isolation alone in the history of humanity?
Not eliminated (Ebola is still out there) but reduced to relatively contained regional diseases.
It is possible R will always be above 1 in large cities, due to mass transport. I just haven’t seen this stated.
Off_Field wrote:
The recent panorama show the BBC had with “doctors and nurses” who all happened to be left wing activists. It turns out the BBC went to a communist to get them.
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.
What many journalists are doing at the moment is seeking out people (health workers are excellent, because they have public sympathy, the public worships them and listens to them) who will say something controversial.
Several weeks ago The Guardian was doing much the same. Their journalists were doorstepping young, tired, stressed-out millenial generation docs and nurses and asking them provocative questions: “Have you got less PPE than you’d like to have?” “Are you considering not going to work if the hospitals become a war zone?” They answer “well, perhaps…” and of course the paper then runs with ‘Docs and nurses to go on strike over PPE’.
It’s shitty journalism, real gutter press stuff.
The BBC is regularly accused by both sides of the political spectrum of being biased against them. I take that as an indication that it is reasonably impartial, but please don’t take that as me saying I support it or that they do a good job.
This is how “journalism” has been done since for ever. You always dig out interview subjects which will support your story, and if by random chance you get one who doesn’t, you dump that interview 
It is totally obvious that right now the news producers have teams trawling facebook, twitter, you name it, for people having a moan, and they then contact them for an interview. Most of the people they put up could have been found – reasonably easily – only by trawling these places. “Research” has never been easier but it does result in a very low quality of interviews.
There is an alignment – based on “your enemy is my friend” – between all groups which are not aligned with the governing establishment, even if they have nothing in common. So you see assorted left-wingers aligned with LGBT, BAME, woke, PC, XR, etc, etc. And if you want some controversial news (is there non-controversial news? ) you have a dig around these groups and you end up with plenty of material.
PPE is yesterday’s news Today it is wearing masks in public (good/bad?). I’ll give that one 3 more days to run.
A useful measure of whether someone has real expertise is whether they do not start each sentence with “so”
