Schools to open or not?

[Derek Hardballs]

What do you think the risk of no lockdown was.

I believe Lockdown was a result of the mismanagement of containment. Lockdown was also based on flawed modelling, there's not one sane person on Earth who believes Imperial College's discredited model predicting 500,000 deaths to be robust in any way whatsoever.
Given that the risk of serious illness to the vast majority of people is miniscule then lockdown should have / should be limited to at risk groups and individuals.
It's clear that Lockdown has 'saved' the NHS at the cost of care homes, patients with other acute illnesses and the economy.
We're all capable of judging the risk to ourselves (whether our response is cavalier or conservative) and  we didn't / don't need an overbearing state terrifying us into accepting the closure of  society. There are unbelievable  levels of anxiety and it's the neurotic minority driving and distorting the debate.

Pray tell how we were going to contain the virus given our complete lack of preparedness, lack of testing labs, lack of tests, lack of testers? You agreed with cutting resources and devices to the bone and that’s what happens.

You sound like one of those fruitcakes in Hyde Park or in the US with a semi automatic rifle clipped to your camouflage trousers. 

You don’t believe in the science behind climate change or at least the consequences
You don’t believe lockdown should have happened
You don’t like a national health service

You are Donald Trump and I claim my £100

[Ossian]

We're all capable of judging the risk to ourselves (whether our response is cavalier or conservative) and  we didn't / don't need an overbearing state terrifying us into accepting the closure of  society. There are unbelievable  levels of anxiety and it's the neurotic minority driving and distorting the debate.

The problem with that analysis is that a 'cavalier' assessment potentially exposes others to risk. 

However conveniently it might fit into your analysis, the debate is not being driven by a 'neurotic minority'; it's being driven by conflicting opinions - none of them underpinned by a guarantee of being even - to coin a phrase - the 'least worst'.

[Babel]

We're all capable of judging the risk to ourselves (whether our response is cavalier or conservative) and  we didn't / don't need an overbearing state terrifying us into accepting the closure of  society. There are unbelievable  levels of anxiety and it's the neurotic minority driving and distorting the debate.

The problem with that analysis is that a 'cavalier' assessment potentially exposes others to risk. 

However conveniently it might fit into your analysis, the debate is not being drivent by a 'neurotic minority'; it's being driven by conflicting opinions - none of them underpinned by a guarantee of being even - to coin a phrase - the 'least worst'.

Well said, Oss. 

I'd add that we are in fact NOT able to judge the risk to ourselves to any degree of precision. That process can't be don rationally by most people to a reliable and societally-safe level. That's precisely why we have experts, and for that matter, professionally trained statisticians.

[JOK]

 the risk is miniscule compared to the cost of the lockdown.
You don't have to be a scientist to be a decent statistician. Unfortunately Imperial College scientists don't appear to be decent statisticians.

What do you think the risk of no lockdown was.
Given there has been at least 35k deaths with a lockdown policy, what do you think the death rate would be without one.
Or put this another way. How many deaths, from the same cause, in a 2 month period would be acceptable to you.

Clearly, any amount of deaths and untold grief would be acceptable as long as it doesn’t affect his profit margin too badly.
35k, 70k or 100k deaths out of a population of pushing 70 million statistically still leaves plenty of customers/ clients.
Proth please explain, if lockdown is such a terrible and needless idea, why did the majority of developed and developing countries have one? Do all countries have useless statisticians and incompetent governments?

[Borin' Baggie]

I referred to it in the OP. Rather than being so casually dismissive you should really look at the numbers. Johnson deals in risk - the risk is miniscule compared to the cost of the lockdown.

You don't have to be a scientist to be a decent statistician. Unfortunately Imperial College scientists don't appear to be decent statisticians.

The people doing the modelling that you're so critical of are qualified epidemiologists at ICL. Epidemiology is, quite literally, studying the distribution and incidence, ie the statistics, of diseases and ICL is considered to have one of the best public health departments in the world.

Given that you still don't understand the purpose of modelling and are still referring to absolute numbers instead of relative trends and comparisons, not to mention that the 500,000 figure comes from a scenario of us not doing anything to control the lockdown which is quite clearly not the reality, I'm not going to take seriously your opinions on the modelling and the risk. Your opinion is motivated by economic effects, not health risks.

As for Luke Johnson, if his appearance on Question Time is anything to go by he has no idea what he's talking about. He couldn't even get his statistics right and had to be corrected by a factor of more than 10.

[Shabby Russian]

What do you think the risk of no lockdown was.

I believe Lockdown was a result of the mismanagement of containment. Lockdown was also based on flawed modelling, there's not one sane person on Earth who believes Imperial College's discredited model predicting 500,000 deaths to be robust in any way whatsoever.
Given that the risk of serious illness to the vast majority of people is miniscule then lockdown should have / should be limited to at risk groups and individuals.
It's clear that Lockdown has 'saved' the NHS at the cost of care homes, patients with other acute illnesses and the economy.
We're all capable of judging the risk to ourselves (whether our response is cavalier or conservative) and  we didn't / don't need an overbearing state terrifying us into accepting the closure of  society. There are unbelievable  levels of anxiety and it's the neurotic minority driving and distorting the debate.

You avoided the specific questions.

Let me reiterate there was a clear and present danger to the economy in not having a lockdown. You can allow businesses to remain open, but you can't force people to use them. It was clear before the lockdown that a significant part of the population had voted with their feet and were not going to pubs, restaurants, cinemas etc, this would have only increased as the virus took hold. 

You seem fixated by this 500k deaths prediction, it is something I have heard mentioned in the Govt daily press briefings. Obviously no one knows for certain how many people would have died if we had not had lockdown, but I think it is safe to assume many more than the 35k at a conservative estimate who have died to date.

So can I ask you again (and clearly I am not asking you to be exact) . How many people do you think would have died from this virus if there had been no lockdown and at what level of death would you personally have found unacceptable.

[Protheroe]

The people doing the modelling that you're so critical of are qualified epidemiologists at ICL. Epidemiology is, quite literally, studying the distribution and incidence, ie the statistics, of diseases and ICL is considered to have one of the best public health departments in the world.

Have you seen their model? Using 13 year old code that gives different results on when given the same inputs on different computers? They're a bloody fraud.

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So can I ask you again (and clearly I am not asking you to be exact) . How many people do you think would have died from this virus if there had been no lockdown and at what level of death would you personally have found unacceptable.

I'm not suggesting 'no lockdown', I'm suggesting targeted containment.

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Clearly, any amount of deaths and untold grief would be acceptable as long as it doesn’t affect his profit margin too badly.

There's no talking to some people is there. What a fucking pathetic suggestion.

[Borin' Baggie]

The people doing the modelling that you're so critical of are qualified epidemiologists at ICL. Epidemiology is, quite literally, studying the distribution and incidence, ie the statistics, of diseases and ICL is considered to have one of the best public health departments in the world.

Have you seen their model? Using 13 year old code that gives different results on when given the same inputs on different computers? They're a bloody fraud.

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I have a few issues with your reply.

1. You've not responded to the query about whether you understand the difference in applying absolute numbers and relative trends. This is fundamental to my point, you need to look at the latter and not the former. I say this as someone with experience with scientific modelling.

2. I have "seen" their model, as in I looked through the code after it was posted on GitHub. The code is not 13 years old, that is false. It is based on code that was initially written 13 years ago but to say that is 13 years old is as false as saying Windows 10 is a 40 year old operating system as it reuses assets from MS-DOS. It has been built upon and amended to account for the change in parameters to replicate the current outbreak and has been cleaned up by John Carmack before publication.

3. The outputs were reproducible, this is expressly addressed in the public GitHub comments. I refer you back to my point about relative trends, ie parallelism of results (the key points). The deviation between results was due to threads not completing at the same time between runs, likely caused by the equipment being used and the environments not being equivalent (RAM usage, active programmes, different processors etc), but the results outputted by the Edinburgh team were parallel relative to the results modeled by Imperial. It doesn't matter if there are slight variations in the absolute values between runs if the outputs are relative, as someone who has used modelling and is used to this you use relative trends. The "bug" brought up by Edinburgh was not a bug as much as it was not a factor when writing the code, it was pointing out that the results were non-deterministic but that is irrelevant as the networks between runs are statistically equivalent so direct comparisons can be made due to the trends being equivalent hence it wasn't initially factored in.

4. The issue raised by Edinburgh has been addressed to confirm that it wasn't an issue and lo and behold the outputs are unaffected.

I implore you read up on it, starting on the GitHub library, before you continue commenting about this as your concerns are very clearly addressed. It reads like your opinion on this has been based on something published by a conspiracy website or something.

[baggy1]

Todays stats up to week 19 (8th May) are out now and there is as time goes on we get a better picture of what is happening using last year's death figures as a direct comparison. Also it must be reiterated that these figures are what has happened with a lock down in place. It will be very interesting how the stats move now the lockdown is being released. It is also worth pointing out that the ONS figures only cover England and Wales.

I've split the groups into Under 45s, 45-64, and over 65s purely because that was the way that last years data was structured and it helps with a direct comparison.

Under 45s are obviously the group that have been impacted the least with a net increase year on year of 200 deaths. It's worth pointing out that up until the start of April the figure was actually trending down on last year. One point to note the deaths for the last 3 weeks of data was starting to increase even with a lockdown in place which leads me to think that without that lockdown in place the U45s wouldn't be as immune to it as is being put out there. Plus without bars and cars then the actual figure, in theory, should be right down. 200 excess deaths in a figure of about 7000 deaths is running at just less than 3% of deaths in that age group which is approximately half of the population so a very small number overall.

45-64 - increase in deaths year on year for this age group is about 4,500 and again at mid March the figure was running at less than last year. The total population for this group is about 18M. The extra numbers have increased deaths in this age group by nearly 20% year on year. 

Over 65s have obviously taken the hit here with an excess of 50,000 deaths just in this group alone now. It's worth pointing out that this year has seen higher numbers throughout but only small with the excess being 2.3k at the start of March. The population for this group is about 12M and the extra deaths year on year is running at nearly 30%.

Overall there have been over 54,000 more deaths this year than last and this is when we have had the lockdown, without that having been in place that figure would have been exponentially higher, and one of those models would have been the half a million figure I'm sure. A conservative estimate without lockdown would have had to be double what it is and realistically we would have been looking at 4 times the figure. Scary numbers.

It should be pointed out that I am not against releasing the lockdown, but the correct procedure has to be in place for testing to show that if the virus reappears it can be identified early and mitigated against. Those steps are not in place yet and if this virus gets into the wider community again then we will have to lock down again causing a lot more damage. If we are not going to have that in place then we have to have the minimum level of steps taken - strict social distancing, wearing of masks at all times. Telling people to use common sense is simply not good enough.

[Borin' Baggie]

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So can I ask you again (and clearly I am not asking you to be exact) . How many people do you think would have died from this virus if there had been no lockdown and at what level of death would you personally have found unacceptable.

I'm not suggesting 'no lockdown', I'm suggesting targeted containment.

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To do this we needed to do three things:

1. Targeted, random testing. Couldn't be done as we still don't have the testing capacity for this.

2. Treatment of symptoms and isolation. Couldn't be done as we don't know any effective treatment and the disease can be spread by asymptomatic people making isolation difficult.

3. Closing of borders before it got here. We didn't do this in January/February and given that we don't know when it initially spread here exactly we don't even know if that would have worked.

We tried containment, it failed so we went into lockdown.