Covid news and views

[djm]

It's getting a bit tiresome now.

As someone with autism that is also extremely introverted I have no problem with social distancing (big improvement for me) and a lack of social contact. However I do like to eat out, travel and got to pubs, and I need to travel for work.

My last trip was two weeks in China, travelling on to the Philippines via Korea, then to the US (Pennsylvania, California, Washington state, Michigan and New York) then South Africa. I had to cut South Africa short as was concerned I would not be allowed back home and got back the day before lockdown. That was last February, and my region has not been out of lockdown since.

I can't help thinking that the lockdown has achieved little, that the numbers although high lack any context. It has been a huge overreaction to a disease that is very low risk to most. In the UK only two people under 20 have died. In the UK 3-4 people a year die from being struck by lightning. So in some age groups the risk of dying from a lightning strike is higher than dying from covid.

Not that I am flippant about the risk to other demographics, but it seems to me that shielding vulnerable groups and allowing the economy to function and some level of herd immunity to build in less vulnerable groups would have been a far more pragmatic approach.

Full credit to our government though, the UK is doing very well at vaccinating people.

Hopefully that means I will soon be abe to eat out and travel again. Much as I love this soggy island it is also nice to get off it once in a while.

[Ferrus]

I was literally the last person to get married the the district of Barcelona where I live before lockdown came down. I last saw my parents on that day for a few hours and since it has been impossible to see them. In the lull im the summer I did some local travelling, even travelling into France briefly. Hopefully with vaccinations going apace (my dad is already vaccinated) I'll be able to see them again this spring or summer, maybe on a joint holiday.

That said things are a lot less stressful now as my wife's vulnerable parents returned home and we aren't responsible to keep them safe which means I can take a little bit more of a relaced attitude.

I may be the only one, but I'm really going to miss this pandemic. This is what life would be like if the population just plummeted, and the people who disappeared were managers and other folks doing useless work who make money off the backs of blue collar workers. I hope my company does WFH for those people forever.

Aren't you a manager?

Not everyone WFH is part of the non-productive side of things though, pretty much all software devs like myself are doing it too.

[djm]

I note with interest that Sainsburys (one of the larger supermarket chains in the UK) has announced over a thousand job losses in the month it had to put out a revised forecast as it made £60m more profits in January than expected.

It seems that most of these are at head office, and I suspect are the kind of useless middle management that Starla referenced. I guess if you are making more money 1 year into them being paid not to work, you get to asking did they actually contribute anything. In the long run it is not the low paid staff in closed down restaurants and shops that will struggle to get new jobs, it the middle-class middle managers that have sat at home having a free holiday whilst people deliver things to them.

[starla]

Aren't you a manager?

Not everyone WFH is part of the non-productive side of things though, pretty much all software devs like myself are doing it too.

Not a manager, just an individual contributor. I haven't managed people since 2013, and even then I was also an engineer, managing 12 people was just something I did in my spare time. Because it wasn't a lot of work. You just approve timecards and such. That's what my employer actually believed.

Yeah software devs aren't really part of my world. No hate. Purchasing/quality/pure management tho? WFH has just magnified whatever behaviors previously caused me issues. Purchasing is lazy and constantly tries to get out of doing things by making more work for anyone who asks them to do their jobs, quality never gets around to looking at your stuff, and you can't proceed until they sign off. Management is running around like chickens with their heads cut off over things that don't actually matter and never manages to solve a problem. The stuff they worry about now is more removed than ever from what matters.

[Ferrus]

Not a manager, just an individual contributor. I haven't managed people since 2013, and even then I was also an engineer, managing 12 people was just something I did in my spare time. Because it wasn't a lot of work. You just approve timecards and such. That's what my employer actually believed.

Yeah software devs aren't really part of my world. No hate. Purchasing/quality/pure management tho? WFH has just magnified whatever behaviors previously caused me issues. Purchasing is lazy and constantly tries to get out of doing things by making more work for anyone who asks them to do their jobs, quality never gets around to looking at your stuff, and you can't proceed until they sign off. Management is running around like chickens with their heads cut off over things that don't actually matter and never manages to solve a problem. The stuff they worry about now is more removed than ever from what matters.

Fair enough. I actually have experience of this as I was working for a travel based tech company when Covid hit. 25% redundancies, but all in product management, marketing, sales and design teams. No one from engineering except in smaller overseas offices where the whole office was being closed.

[Sinny]

It's getting a bit tiresome now.

As someone with autism that is also extremely introverted I have no problem with social distancing (big improvement for me) and a lack of social contact. However I do like to eat out, travel and got to pubs, and I need to travel for work.

My last trip was two weeks in China, travelling on to the Philippines via Korea, then to the US (Pennsylvania, California, Washington state, Michigan and New York) then South Africa. I had to cut South Africa short as was concerned I would not be allowed back home and got back the day before lockdown. That was last February, and my region has not been out of lockdown since.

I can't help thinking that the lockdown has achieved little, that the numbers although high lack any context. It has been a huge overreaction to a disease that is very low risk to most. In the UK only two people under 20 have died. In the UK 3-4 people a year die from being struck by lightning. So in some age groups the risk of dying from a lightning strike is higher than dying from covid.

Not that I am flippant about the risk to other demographics, but it seems to me that shielding vulnerable groups and allowing the economy to function and some level of herd immunity to build in less vulnerable groups would have been a far more pragmatic approach.

Full credit to our government though, the UK is doing very well at vaccinating people.

Hopefully that means I will soon be abe to eat out and travel again. Much as I love this soggy island it is also nice to get off it once in a while.

I don't even think anyone that young has died... Last year when I posted the first "young" death from "Covid" in the UK, a young female adult who had "suddenly died" of "Covid", I posted about how it made zero sense.

Madrigal basically called me a conspiracy theorist, but a few short months later it was ruled that she had actually died of a heart attack and the "Covid" death was falsified, as are the majority of them.

Remarkable isn't is, how some people are so pathetic they feel the need exert so much control and power over other people by demanding they stop living their lives and close down their economies for a virus with a 99.9% survival rate for the majority of the population.

I think some of you people need to brush back up on the Stanford Prison Experiment and take note of how easily, quickly and willingly you become the Nazi enforcement of the corrupt state.

The only people Lockdown has benefited are the billionaires of multinational corporations and their paid hit men/hench men.

Fuckin hell, if a virus with a 99.9% survival rate gives you nightmares... it's time to get your blankey and your bottle and go to sleep in your cradle

[Madrigal]

Sinny one thing is to think lockdowns weren't the way to go about tackling covid, another is to think Covid is a big story made up by the illuminati (or whichever elite group). That's pretty much a conspiracy theory.

[Ferrus]

For a virus with a 99.9% survival rate for the majority of the population.

Statistical data, please.

And define 'majority of population' specifically.

I'm happy to consider any argument but it has to be based on well specified terms and conclusions backed by data.

[djm]

I don't even think anyone that young has died... Last year when I posted the first "young" death from "Covid" in the UK, a young female adult who had "suddenly died" of "Covid", I posted about how it made zero sense.

Madrigal basically called me a conspiracy theorist, but a few short months later it was ruled that she had actually died of a heart attack and the "Covid" death was falsified, as are the majority of them.

Remarkable isn't is, how some people are so pathetic they feel the need exert so much control and power over other people by demanding they stop living their lives and close down their economies for a virus with a 99.9% survival rate for the majority of the population.

I think some of you people need to brush back up on the Stanford Prison Experiment and take note of how easily, quickly and willingly you become the Nazi enforcement of the corrupt state.

The only people Lockdown has benefited are the billionaires of multinational corporations and their paid hit men/hench men.

Fuckin hell, if a virus with a 99.9% survival rate gives you nightmares... it's time to get your blankey and your bottle and go to sleep in your cradle

Although some big business has benefitted, plenty of equally big business has lost a lot of money. That is why I don't subscribe to the conspiracy theory.

It strikes me that the overreaction is more due to politicians not wanting to make a call that gets them branded killers by the hysterical online mob if it goes awry. This has led to a political race to the bottom in removing freedoms from a public that doesn't seem to mind too much being paid to be idle.

The main beneficiaries to my mind are the hard left, who like seeing capitalism flounder and don't mind if the finance systems fail.

In the UK it has led to a Tory chancellor of the exchequer being widely lauded for putting out a budget throwing money like confetti and upping taxes like the worst excesses of Dennis Healey in the Wilson government. Whilst I accept that this money needs to be paid back, it would be far better had we not spaffed so much of it in the first place. He will get away with this act of banditry because his opposite number in the opposition is an economically illiterate idiot that wants to give everyone on the government payroll no matter how wealthy and how useless a pay rise, whilst also not raising tax.

I am of the opinion that everybody must feel some financial pain from this. If most individual taxpayers have no penalty, then they will be demanding a free holiday every single flu season. we live in a society where fiscal responsibility has been largely decoupled from the public. nearly half of all workers pay no income tax contribution at all, this is not a recipe for nationwide fiscal prudence.

[Ferrus]

I am personally of the opinion that the lockdowns and the worse of the restrictions and its economic impact would never have been necessary in the first place if Western countries, like those in Asia such as Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan had imposed border restrictions for travel (and testing for those engaged in business), even if it was only for travel to and from China, early on and had had sufficient testing capacity and recommended masks from the outset instead of against them based on outdated research on flu from 100 years ago (they also ignored the second-order effects of them (see here)). While Wuhan was disconnected from China and from places like Hong Kong and Singapore flights were coming in and out of the city to Europe and the US with hardly any control. Much of Asia has not had lockdowns with anything like the intensity of those in Western countries and life there is largely back to normal as you can see from Chinese New Year celebrations to the point where they are vaccinating at a leisurely pace and the economic impact has been far more muted. The decisive action of these countries, especially China, has now put them on an economic footing whereby the military and economic gap, that was reducing beforehand, has now reduced even further - and I have a suspicion that this had expedited the time for a flashpoint invasion of Taiwan which could lead to a more general US-China war at some point in the future which will have far more devastating effects. (The current shortage of semiconductor chips, a great deal of which are made in Taiwan, gives a glimpse of why this island is so important.)

Even if it is true that Covid has a relatively low IFR - from what I see in error bounds of between 0.4% - 1% from this report, although with 1-3% (see here) requiring intensive hospitalisation*. It was the latter as far as I can tell the main cause of the lockdown due to ICU limitations, a break down in the healthcare system akin to what happened in northern Italy. This has knock-on effects in terms of availability of treatment for other quotidian injuries and illness. Although there is conflicting data here, on the one hand widespread reports of herd immunity being reached quickly were not consistent with the serological data (see here) that came in, and yet at the same time the predictions of a huge peak in countries without lockdown restrictions was not met either, there were instead rolling waves of peaks that suggested exogenous factors were responsibility for the scale and effect of the peak, probably exogenous factors specific to individual countries (perhaps genetics) and climates. It may also have to do with the fact that the virus did not follow the pattern of continuous transmission as predicted by simplistic mathematical epidemiological models like SIR (see here), but rather was spread in clumpy spikes due to superspreading (see here). In which case Nassim Taleb was probably right early on that more effective measures would have been reducing super-spreader events in underground train systems, stadiums and large nightclubs rather than blanket lockdowns. But that said a worse pandemic is surely in the offering sooner or later and the terrible incompetence of the WHO and many Western governments to take decisive action, or even understand properly the wide range of the risk profile during the period of maximum uncertainty during the early stages of the pandemic unfolded, doesn't really give much confidence of their ability to deal with the grave crises of pandemics and war that are bound to occur sooner or later this century. On top of that, if the virus was so weak and the Chinese data wrong, I would question why the Chinese took such harsh measures in Wuhan at the start (even to welding people in their houses). Sure it is a communist government with little interest for personal freedoms or business but... as a country the whole political edifice since Deng Xiaoping has been tying the legitimacy of the one-party rule to economic growth, the action that they took was one that could directly affect the very stability of the power to which they grasp so forcefully - so why would they take the risk of an economic downturn unless the effects of inaction were likely worse for the economic performance of the country in the long run? (The same chain of thought applies, mutandis mutatis to the Singaporean government who took pretty forceful measures, at least among the immigration labour force who were the main vector of the disease there.) They are one of the few who actually grew last year despite the pandemic starting there. Again, perhaps they are fiddling the books - it is entirely possible - although quite a lot hangs on that assumption.

Not that I think they are completely innocent either - to my mind is clear China has something to hide about the early stages based on deliberate acts to prevent investigation, including by the WHO themselves. Based on historical precedent, I don't really buy a grand conspiracy theory that this was some kind of premeditated plot. But when you consider the secretive nature of Communist governments in the past, and take cases such as Chernobyl or the nuclear disaster at Kyshtym the most likely explanation would be arse covering for a mistake, either in terms of missing or underplaying a natural zoonotic infection, or some kind of laboratory accident. I mean, there is no evidence for this, so I cannot make any specific claim or even know if it is true, it is all circumstantial. Probably we will never had real data. But in the end, the truth of the matter will probably be completely irrelevant if the Chinese spin the narrative in their favour anyway, which Western countries have made all too easy with their comical incompetence.

* It is true that risk of mortality decreases logarithmically by age, so under 40 the risk of fatality is around 0.01%, whether that constitutes a majority seems to me highly dependent upon the demographics of the country in question - and the general health of the population, the UK and USA suffering for their high rates of obesity has probably also played an enormous role in the severity of the illness in those countries (see here). It seems more of an accurate statement for Africa countries - that by all accounts have had a pretty good pandemic due to this effect. Though I do wonder if the huge HIV positive pool of people there is a timebomb for a covid mutation (or some other nasty bush virus) that incubates in an immunocompromised human host for a long time before escaping. As Starla said the long term trend is for viruses to become harmless (like the various viruses that make up the cold) and widespread or deadly and concentrated (such as say smallpox), but that doesn't mean extremely harmless short term mutations can't become both widespread and deadly in a short space of time when people have little natural immunity as any brief perusal of the history of pandemics show, including the 1918 Spanish flu where the second wave was far fiercer, driven by a new mutation.

I am of the opinion that everybody must feel some financial pain from this. If most individual taxpayers have no penalty, then they will be demanding a free holiday every single flu season. we live in a society where fiscal responsibility has been largely decoupled from the public. nearly half of all workers pay no income tax contribution at all, this is not a recipe for nationwide fiscal prudence.

I strongly suspect the exact opposite will happen given the demographics and politics of the moment. A lot of people not paying income taxes - do not so because of side benefits from having children and other deductions on top of the basic non-taxable threshold which is quite low - even in my first job I was paying them on a fairly low salary but was not eligible for deductions. But given what is seen as a dangerous demographic decline, especially among native populations in Europe and the US, I suspect the trend will be for more tax reliefs to parts of the population that have children in pro-natalist policies, the easiest and least politically controversial of which are negative income taxes - somewhat akin to what is already happening in Hungary and that Mitt Romney proposed in the USA recently.