There are three kinds of average, mean, median, and mode.
For mean average, you take the ages of all the teachers individually, add them, and divide by total number of teachers. This is the average the paper shufflers are most likely using.
For median, you write down all the ages of all the teachers, put them in order from least to greatest, and then strike off the first in the list, then the last, then the next-to-first, then the next-to-last, and so on, until you reach the middle number. That is the median. This average is mainly useful for getting rid of extreme outliers (as when trying to find an average income, and you have a couple billionaires skewing the whole thing). Since you're unlikely to have teachers who are aged 500 years old (or 2!), this is not a helpful average to use in this situation.
The third is mode, which is even less helpful, as it involves taking all the individual ages, and counting up how many times a particular age (say, 43) occurs in the lot. The number that appears the most often is the mode average. I struggle to think of anything this is useful for. Maybe deciding what house numbers to offer at the hardware store?
Generally speaking, when people simply say "average," they are thinking of the mean average.
When calculating the average age one takes the age of the youngest teacher and the age of the oldest teacher and divides the sum by two.
Nope, that's the midrange
When calculating the mean age one adds all the ages of all the teachers and then divides the sum by the total number of teachers.
Yes
If one says the mean age of all teachers is 40, that still means roughly half of the teachers are over 40 using a bell curve.
Only if the teaching population is normally distributed, which we've no reason to think it is. The median, on the other hand, would have half the population above and half below.
There might come a time when people who are seriously ill with Covid-19 may themselves actually ask to be left to die, to reduce the burden on medical staff, and to free up beds, oxygen supplies, and other resources.
Please God it doesn't happen.
It does. When my son was on the Covid ward in his hospital - not ICU (Heidelberg) there were always patients who had chosen not to be ventilated, so my son and his colleagues were keeping them as comfortable as possible while they died.
I speak in the past tense because he is on parental leave for the next year, so no more Covid nursing for him for a while. (Good old EU, they get a year each with a month’s overlap).
My chief point is that there is such a thing as an acceptable level of deaths. There is for everything, from the flu to driving motor vehicles.
Yes, and also no. You're right that we don't try to achieve zero road deaths, for example, because to do so with the things we currently have available would mean restricting speeds to walking pace or something, and we don't want to do that.
But there's no fixed number of deaths that is reasonable.
"As Low As Reasonably Practicable" is a guide that is used in many safety-critical fields, which basically means that you spend money and implement safety rules in order to increase safety up to the point where the difficulty and expense of extra rules is disproportionate to the minimal gain you get from them.
I'm sure you're familiar with the QALY idea used in assessing whether medical treatment is worthwhile. That's a similar idea.
So we don't decide, for example, that 100,000 deaths from Covid is acceptable, but 500,000 is too many. We look at likely reductions in deaths from particular actions, and look at the cost of those actions (economic cost, quality of life cost, mental health cost, loss of education cost, and so on) and make a judgement call as to what is worthwhile.
To go back to your road safety example, seatbelts are compulsory, and have saved lives. The costs are a modest increase in the production costs of a basic car (because it has to have seat belts), and a trivial reduction in personal liberty (you've got to wear one, and ensure your passengers are wearing one). Whereas a 10mph speed limit in built-up areas would also clearly save lives, but it would increase the duration of journeys around town by a factor of 2-3, which we decide isn't worth doing. (You'd also want to modify standard cars to make sustained driving at 10mph an easy and sensible thing to do.)
Or were you only speaking of this pandemic? And if so, why only of this situation?
Because it’s not just a question of how to prioritise funding like those other things you mentioned - in this situation we’re shutting down our entire fucking society. That’s a pretty big difference.
There might come a time when people who are seriously ill with Covid-19 may themselves actually ask to be left to die, to reduce the burden on medical staff, and to free up beds, oxygen supplies, and other resources.
Please God it doesn't happen.
It does. When my son was on the Covid ward in his hospital - not ICU (Heidelberg) there were always patients who had chosen not to be ventilated, so my son and his colleagues were keeping them as comfortable as possible while they died.
That doesn't mean they're asking to be left to die to spare burden and resources, it just means they don't want ventilation, which is a pretty common option for advance directives.
For the 6 months we're talking about the government can safely borrow money to keep businesses and individuals afloat.
People were saying it would only need to be for 12 weeks back in March. Now it’s another 6 months on top of the 9 we’ve already had. Maybe in June it’ll be “only another year or so”.
How long is too long in your opinion?
Saying we shouldn't lock down because of the economy is just an admittance that the government is too inconpetent to adequately provide economic support.
Yes.
It's also not as if hundreds of thousands of deaths is going to lead to economic success either. You think when hospital car parks are turned into triage stations and the full weight of the catastrophe sinks in the consumer confidence is going to trundle along happily?
In Britain? Yes, actually. If we’re all going to die horribly of disease then a fair chunk of the population would most likely rather do so with pint in hand and their friends alongside them. Or go on a tour of their favourite attractions one more time. Or anything rather than sit alone in the house never seeing anyone or having any fun while waiting for the Reaper to get around to them.
To go back to your road safety example, seatbelts are compulsory, and have saved lives. The costs are a modest increase in the production costs of a basic car (because it has to have seat belts), and a trivial reduction in personal liberty (you've got to wear one, and ensure your passengers are wearing one). Whereas a 10mph speed limit in built-up areas would also clearly save lives, but it would increase the duration of journeys around town by a factor of 2-3, which we decide isn't worth doing. (You'd also want to modify standard cars to make sustained driving at 10mph an easy and sensible thing to do.)
Have a wild guess at which of those I think is more analogous to full societal lockdown.
Maybe All sceptics secretly want their elders to die
Or maybe they realise that (relatively) imminent death is an integral part of being an elder in the first place, and changing the timing of that death by a year or so isn’t worth completely buggering up the lives of everyone else.
Speaking of economic and health trade-off's, the Trump administration* seems to be following MtM's advice:
The Trump administration allowed 15 poultry plants to increase slaughter line speeds during the pandemic, an action that boosts production and makes it more difficult for workers to maintain space between one another. It also appears to have hastened the spread of the coronavirus.
Now the outgoing administration is rushing to finalize a rule that would make the faster line speeds permanent and expand them to dozens of other poultry plants — a move at odds with views held by President-elect Joe Biden.
“Whether it’s cattle, whether it’s beef, whether it’s pigs, whether it’s chicken, they’re moving down that line faster and faster and faster to increase the profit rate,” Biden said last year. “People are getting sicker. . . . People are getting hurt. The very thing we should be doing now is making sure these people are protected, that they have space six feet apart, that they have shields around them. Slow the process up.”
Since 2018, the Trump administration has issued — or reissued — temporary waivers that grant permission to 54 poultry plants to increase line speeds. These plants are allowed to speed up lines from 140 to 175 birds per minute, a 25 percent increase.
They are also 10 times as likely to have coronavirus cases than poultry plants without the line-speed waivers, according a Washington Post analysis of data collected by the nonprofit Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN). The Post analysis mirrors academic research that shows more coronavirus cases in counties with plants that have waivers to raise line speeds.
Now this may sound bad, but as @Marvin the Martian would point out those people are all going to die someday, so why not now? And as meat packers they're likely to suffer injuries on the job, so does anything that makes that much more likely (such as increased line speed) really change anything, other than moving up the schedule a little bit? This could be called the Midas Cult, the idea that anything that can be made into money (like other people's health) should be made into money, because that's the most important thing.
The third is mode, which is even less helpful, as it involves taking all the individual ages, and counting up how many times a particular age (say, 43) occurs in the lot. The number that appears the most often is the mode average. I struggle to think of anything this is useful for. Maybe deciding what house numbers to offer at the hardware store?
Avoiding statistical representation like everyone who works at Amazon is, on average, a millionaire because of Jeff Bezos, though I suppose the median would work pretty well for that too.
There might come a time when people who are seriously ill with Covid-19 may themselves actually ask to be left to die, to reduce the burden on medical staff, and to free up beds, oxygen supplies, and other resources.
Please God it doesn't happen.
It does. When my son was on the Covid ward in his hospital - not ICU (Heidelberg) there were always patients who had chosen not to be ventilated, so my son and his colleagues were keeping them as comfortable as possible while they died.
That doesn't mean they're asking to be left to die to spare burden and resources, it just means they don't want ventilation, which is a pretty common option for advance directives.
Their reasons are many and varied, but some say they’ve had their time and to give the ICU bed to someone who hasn’t. 😢
For the 6 months we're talking about the government can safely borrow money to keep businesses and individuals afloat.
People were saying it would only need to be for 12 weeks back in March. Now it’s another 6 months on top of the 9 we’ve already had. Maybe in June it’ll be “only another year or so”.
Nobody other than Johnson said 12 weeks, though case numbers in Scotland were low enough in summer that had we the powers we could have pushed for elimination as NZ has, but it was people like you demanding that everything open up which meant that opportunity slipped away and we are where we are.
The difference now is that we have multiple effective vaccines. There's a clear end game.
There might come a time when people who are seriously ill with Covid-19 may themselves actually ask to be left to die, to reduce the burden on medical staff, and to free up beds, oxygen supplies, and other resources.
Please God it doesn't happen.
It does. When my son was on the Covid ward in his hospital - not ICU (Heidelberg) there were always patients who had chosen not to be ventilated, so my son and his colleagues were keeping them as comfortable as possible while they died.
That doesn't mean they're asking to be left to die to spare burden and resources, it just means they don't want ventilation, which is a pretty common option for advance directives.
There is a serious shortage of ventilators in NZ. Knowing this I have asked not to be ventilated if there is competition for their use. I would rather that I died than a parent of of young children for example. My GP knows this as do my brothers.
At the moment this seems unlikely given no community transfer and everyone who enters the country has to spend 2 weeks in managed isolation, and be tested at least twice, plus anyone who develops COVID is put in compulsory quarantine, but things can change rapidly, especially with the more contagious strains emerging.
Approximately one in three people have an underlying condition.
We have had 70000 excess deaths with the poorly timed partial measures we have had, what were they aimed to prevent - 500000 excess deaths.
70000 British civilians died in WW2, 384000 soldiers were killed. The population in 1939 was 41 million. So assuming my back of the envelope maths is right - about 10% of the population over 5 years.
This largely remembered as a catastrophe that profoundly changed society and touched almost every family.
If an excess 500000 of our 65.65 million population had died in 2020 - we would have lost an additional 7% of our population in a year.
We currently have 5% unemployment. In 1992 it was 12%
We have vaccines and we need 6 months to vaccinate the population. Frankly, I'd agree to 6 months lockdown with appropriate economic support to get that fucking done.
This constant attempt to fix everything in three months has fucked things up repeatedly across 2020.
in this situation we’re shutting down our entire fucking society. That’s a pretty big difference.
No, we're not. Our society still exists. Many people are able to work from home. Many others - those who work in essential occupations - will still be going to work, and taking Covid precautions. We chat online, hang out on zoom, discord, or whatever our thing is. We shovel snow off our elderly neighbour's driveway, go to church on zoom, make sure our elderly neighbours are able to get groceries, and shop for them if they're not. That's what makes us a society, rather than a group of individuals engaged in parallel play.
And, and I think this has to be an important part of being a society, we don't kill off our neighbours by spreading a deadly virus.
Sure - we can't gather in person. Playing bridge, scrabble, or whatever online isn't the same experience as doing it in a rented church hall, but it's something we can make work. And yes, if the way you experience society is chatting with people whilst propping the bar up every night, it's pretty hard to imitate that under lockdown conditions. But equating pubs with society seems just a touch hyperbolic.
Long and short of it is there's no meaningful fucking choice.
Any significant rise in infection levels will overwhelm hospitals. Then not only will elderly people people* be killed by Covid, but people will die from cancer, strokes, cardiac arrest, aneurysms and God alone knows what else, waiting for ambulances or stuck in them outside. Healthcare is a limited resource.
We went into the first lockdown two weeks too late because Johnson was too inclined to listen to people pontificating about people's inalienable rights to go around spreading novel viruses. His nature is against restrictions, and it's a shame he confused reluctance with hesitancy. If even he's backed into a corner then the situation is grim.
*an inaccurate impression anyway. Mrs T tells me her ICU is as much filled with people with diabetes and asthma as they are the elderly. These are the pre-existing conditions, by the way, which apparently also render their sufferers expendable by those who know the true price of everything and the true value of nowt.
They are filling up with middle aged people, cos often the very elderly either choose not have v aggressive treatments or they will not work. Most middle aged people have children - know what has a profound effect on your life, more than a recession? Losing a parent as a child.
They are filling up with middle aged people, cos often the very elderly either choose not have v aggressive treatments or they will not work. Most middle aged people have children - know what has a profound effect on your life, more than a recession? Losing a parent as a child.
Which is why we see the highest death figures among the elderly. Of course, if we don't have sufficient resources to treat the middle aged people...
Mrs T tells me her ICU is as much filled with people with diabetes and asthma as they are the elderly. These are the pre-existing conditions, by the way, which apparently also render their sufferers expendable by those who know the true price of everything and the true value of nowt.
I have asthma. I’m saying everything I’m saying in the full knowledge that I’m in one of the high risk groups who are more likely to die if we get covid. I’d still rather be able to live a normal life with that increased risk than lose my life in order to save it.
70000 British civilians died in WW2, 384000 soldiers were killed. The population in 1939 was 41 million. So assuming my back of the envelope maths is right - about 10% of the population over 5 years.
1%, not 10%. Mind where you put that decimal point.
I have asthma. I’m saying everything I’m saying in the full knowledge that I’m in one of the high risk groups who are more likely to die if we get covid. I’d still rather be able to live a normal life with that increased risk than lose my life in order to save it.
Just because you're eager to die (and take a bunch of other people with you) doesn't mean everyone else is.
We have vaccines and we need 6 months to vaccinate the population. .
6 months might be pushing it.... I've just checked the vaccine-queue-calculator, and it reckons
"Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your two doses of vaccine and be fully protected by between 17/12/2021 and 01/02/2022."
Even with a 12 week wait for the second dose, that would imply I could should not expect the first dose for another 9 months. I am at the bottom of the listed priorities (over 50, under 55, no other known underlying conditions), but there are still all the adults under 50 with no other vulnerabilities.
Given the disparity between how many tests they said they could perform, and how many were actually performed in the ramping stage, you'll forgive me if that doesn't fill me with confidence.
(In the interests of disclosure, I should say I'm actually likely to be sooner than the calculator predicts because of where I work)
Just because you're eager to die (and take a bunch of other people with you) doesn't mean everyone else is.
Say rather that I don’t want to sacrifice everything that’s good about my life just to maximise its length. What’s the point of being alive if you can’t live?
We have vaccines and we need 6 months to vaccinate the population. .
6 months might be pushing it.... I've just checked the vaccine-queue-calculator, and it reckons
"Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your two doses of vaccine and be fully protected by between 17/12/2021 and 01/02/2022”
Mine said not until July 2022. I’ll have gone mad and/or topped myself way before then if things go on like this.
I was talking about the “eager to die” bit. I’m not eager to die, but I’m also not so terrified of the prospect that I’ll do (or sacrifice) literally anything to minimise the risk of it happening.
I was talking about the “eager to die” bit. I’m not eager to die, but I’m also not so terrified of the prospect that I’ll do (or sacrifice) literally anything to minimise the risk of it happening.
I find it interesting that you object to being described as eager to die but have no objections to being described as eager get a bunch of other people killed. It's of a piece with not being willing to sacrifice literally anything, that there is no sacrifice so small you'd be willing to make it.
I was talking about the “eager to die” bit. I’m not eager to die, but I’m also not so terrified of the prospect that I’ll do (or sacrifice) literally anything to minimise the risk of it happening.
I find it interesting that you object to being described as eager to die but have no objections to being describe as eager get a bunch of other people killed.
So do I, when you put it like that. I guess I’m a bit more sociopathic and/or devoid of empathy than I thought. And frankly, I’ve always thought I was a decent amount of both those things.
Explaining ahead of time that I do Not agree with what @Marvin the Martian is saying.....
I would like to point out that Most of what MtM is saying is exactly what very many young (and a few not so young) people are thinking and saying.
And guess what?
For Lots of people, their behaviour reflects their beliefs.
Those who don’t act out their beliefs are caught in a horrible situation. It sucks and I Get that it sucks.
We can argue or get outraged about this, but that really won’t help.
If I get Covid then I m not hopeful of my chances: Underlying enduring condition.
I ve looked death in the face a few times but I have stuff left to do. So yes, Marvin’s ( il)logical outworkings of his beliefs outrage me. But......he is by no manner of means Alone in those beliefs.
I won’t be able to appeal to his better judgement. No one here will be able to shift his opinion. Because his is not a lone voice.
Anyone got a good idea for how Everyone who thinks like this can have a change of mind and heart?
I d be all ears.
So would half the planet.
I would like to point out that Most of what MtM is saying is exactly what very many young (and a few not so young) people are thinking and saying.
I don't think that there is much evidence that this tendency is most prevalent among the young -- there are some polls showing lower levels of support around specific lockdown measures. OTOH the age group most in favour of sending workers back into the office and children back to school were the over 65s.
Anyone got a good idea for how Everyone who thinks like this can have a change of mind and heart?
I d be all ears.
So would half the planet.
One impractical suggestion:
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Not having three ghosts handy kind of puts this idea at a disadvantage.
There's the Ghost of Christmas 2019 (when everything was All Right), the Ghost of Christmas 2020 (less said, the better), and the Ghost of Christmas 2021 Yet To Come...
My chief point is that there is such a thing as an acceptable level of deaths. There is for everything, from the flu to driving motor vehicles.
Once that is accepted, the response to covid becomes not a matter of saving every life we possibly can regardless of the costs to everyone else, but of balancing costs and benefits. Lockdown is causing serious hardship to many, and the economic and social impact of losing so many businesses, livelihoods, services etc. will be felt for years (even decades) to come. Additionally, the disruption to education and the impact on socialisation that comes with being barred from seeing friends/families for so long may well negatively affect this generation of children for the rest of their lives. There are tens of millions of people in the UK who will on average live for several more decades, and on the other side of the scale are a few million people who will on average live for a few more years.
I take no pleasure in saying this. But at some point the needs of the many do still outweigh the needs of the few. Quality of life is at least as important - if not more important - than quantity. And it's not like anybody lives forever anyway.
This viral pandemic isn't even The Coming BIG One ...
As the human population continues to grow and disrupts ecosystems globally on an ever greater scale and pace, there will likely be emerging new diseases that are far more deadly than COVID19 and perhaps more contagious ...
Imagine a hemorrhagic disease like Ebola transmitted by respiration ...
Or were you only speaking of this pandemic? And if so, why only of this situation?
Because it’s not just a question of how to prioritise funding like those other things you mentioned - in this situation we’re shutting down our entire fucking society. That’s a pretty big difference.
Nice swerve but I haven't merely addressed a question of prioritising funding, as you know. You clearly make the point that when it comes to prioritising who lives and who dies it's the good of the majority which should prevail; I point out that your simplistic notion of 'majority' is in fact a complex mixture of countless AND INEXTRICABLE minorities. Therefore, even if the welfare of the elderly were written off as payment for a better pandemic experience for the younger, and therefore more deserving, people, the results almost certainly would not be worth the sacrifice, even if such decisions were either practical, possible or conscionable.
I also point out the unpopular view that mankind is not in control of this particular circus. We don't need to shut down society. The effects of what we can't control - ie, the virus - has done that. (That society generally functions at all is, of course, mainly about the disposition of funding, profit and market-trading, with a little bit of necessary philanthropy thrown in.) The barest glimpse at a history book tells us that that is what a virus of this extreme nature does simply by being extraordinarily contagious, difficult to treat, and responded to carelessly. Circumstances change somewhat depending on contingencies eg, how such viruses are permitted to travel globally, as in how peripatetic we are as a species, how responsible we feel towards one another's preservation and any advances we may make in medical science. The rest is down to scale, propinquity and what is the extent of and our responses to the losses we're incurring as a result of this pandemic.
I personally do not believe things would be better without lockdowns and restrictions, operating with a bias to caring less for the vulnerable elderly and also those who should be judged as not having 'quality' of life enough worth saving. I think things would be just as bad; and in fact worse because in adopting that attitude we may have made ourselves less than we can and should be, humanly speaking.
This viral pandemic isn't even The Coming BIG One ...
As the human population continues to grow and disrupts ecosystems globally on an ever greater scale and pace, there will likely be emerging new diseases that are far more deadly than COVID19 and perhaps more contagious ...
Imagine a hemorrhagic disease like Ebola transmitted by respiration ...
Quite. I understand the reason we're not having the full-blown Hammer Horror of that kind of viral disease is simply down to the fact of Ebola being that bit more difficult to contract, easier to track and trace, and because it generates iron rings of protective and truly prohibitive international legal restrictions when it does surface.
Anyone got a good idea for how Everyone who thinks like this can have a change of mind and heart?
I d be all ears.
So would half the planet.
One impractical suggestion:
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Not having three ghosts handy kind of puts this idea at a disadvantage.
"Man," said the Ghost [of Christmas Present], "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant [of 'decrease the surplus population'] until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. O God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
The context is different, of course, and I wouldn't accuse anyone on this thread of being Scrooge-like. But I think there's still an important note of warning here.
For my own part, with my 'underlying conditions' I know I'm probably a goner if I get Covid-19. And that's fine. Compared to millions of others, I've lived a relatively easy, luxurious life whilst others have unfairly had to struggle even to put food in their mouths. And I've had a fabulous time, more or less. I just want to make sure my dog is properly taken care of, and I would rather not outlive my mother for her sake. But I'm damned if I'm going to start drawing the short-straw of existence on behalf of the UK's elderly just because this virus has got its claws into our economy, or our mental health, or our education etc.
This viral pandemic isn't even The Coming BIG One ...
As the human population continues to grow and disrupts ecosystems globally on an ever greater scale and pace, there will likely be emerging new diseases that are far more deadly than COVID19 and perhaps more contagious ...
Imagine a hemorrhagic disease like Ebola transmitted by respiration ...
Quite. I understand the reason we're not having the full-blown Hammer Horror of that kind of viral disease is simply down to the fact of Ebola being that bit more difficult to contract, easier to track and trace, and because it generates iron rings of protective and truly prohibitive international legal restrictions when it does surface.
As an aside, the UK continues to have open borders wrt no tests for travellers flying in from abroad.
Yeah but this hasn't been contracted out to serco.
Hee hee.
I am optimistic that the vaccination program will make good progress such that we can get close to normal life by the summer. Mostly because in my own hospital we have the vaccine as of today and expect to cover all staff in 3 weeks. It's quite easy to repurpose staff to vaccine sessions and vaccinate quite quickly.
It's more difficult in the community but unlike Test and Trace, mass vaccination is something the NHS does all the time. We are (massively) increasing a preexisting capability. Instead of T&T where we are paying private companies ridiculous money to fail...
Given the disparity between how many tests they said they could perform, and how many were actually performed in the ramping stage, you'll forgive me if that doesn't fill me with confidence.
(In the interests of disclosure, I should say I'm actually likely to be sooner than the calculator predicts because of where I work)
It's also notable that the infection rates are substantially and consistently lower in Scotland than in England.
There may not be an easy answer, but any idea why that is, please?
I don't think I can evidence a clear reason. Part of it, I suspect, is fewer people coming and going than in London and the South East of England. Nicola Sturgeon has also been clearer in her advice and quicker to implement lockdowns when needed.
This viral pandemic isn't even The Coming BIG One ...
As the human population continues to grow and disrupts ecosystems globally on an ever greater scale and pace, there will likely be emerging new diseases that are far more deadly than COVID19 and perhaps more contagious ...
Imagine a hemorrhagic disease like Ebola transmitted by respiration ...
Quite. I understand the reason we're not having the full-blown Hammer Horror of that kind of viral disease is simply down to the fact of Ebola being that bit more difficult to contract, easier to track and trace, and because it generates iron rings of protective and truly prohibitive international legal restrictions when it does surface.
I'd almost prefer it to be Ebola, because with Ebola it's much easier to identify who has it, quarantine/isolate them, and let the uninfected get on with their lives.
It's also notable that the infection rates are substantially and consistently lower in Scotland than in England.
There may not be an easy answer, but any idea why that is, please?
According to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, comedian Janie Godley is helping. Godley does voice-overs of the daily Covid briefings. They are very funny, widely shared on social media and reinforce the message. Here's a recent one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U7etG7Z4Ds
This viral pandemic isn't even The Coming BIG One ...
As the human population continues to grow and disrupts ecosystems globally on an ever greater scale and pace, there will likely be emerging new diseases that are far more deadly than COVID19 and perhaps more contagious ...
Imagine a hemorrhagic disease like Ebola transmitted by respiration ...
Quite. I understand the reason we're not having the full-blown Hammer Horror of that kind of viral disease is simply down to the fact of Ebola being that bit more difficult to contract, easier to track and trace, and because it generates iron rings of protective and truly prohibitive international legal restrictions when it does surface.
As an aside, the UK continues to have open borders wrt no tests for travellers flying in from abroad.
Idiocy. We're an island - if we'd closed the borders with strict quarantine for any citizens returning from elsewhere this time last year we'd never have even got the virus here in the first place.
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When calculating the average age one takes the age of the youngest teacher and the age of the oldest teacher and divides the sum by two.
When calculating the mean age one adds all the ages of all the teachers and then divides the sum by the total number of teachers.
If one says the mean age of all teachers is 40, that still means roughly half of the teachers are over 40 using a bell curve.
But this is moot as the new variations of the virus seem to have greater impacts on the younger populations.
There are three kinds of average, mean, median, and mode.
For mean average, you take the ages of all the teachers individually, add them, and divide by total number of teachers. This is the average the paper shufflers are most likely using.
For median, you write down all the ages of all the teachers, put them in order from least to greatest, and then strike off the first in the list, then the last, then the next-to-first, then the next-to-last, and so on, until you reach the middle number. That is the median. This average is mainly useful for getting rid of extreme outliers (as when trying to find an average income, and you have a couple billionaires skewing the whole thing). Since you're unlikely to have teachers who are aged 500 years old (or 2!), this is not a helpful average to use in this situation.
The third is mode, which is even less helpful, as it involves taking all the individual ages, and counting up how many times a particular age (say, 43) occurs in the lot. The number that appears the most often is the mode average. I struggle to think of anything this is useful for. Maybe deciding what house numbers to offer at the hardware store?
Generally speaking, when people simply say "average," they are thinking of the mean average.
Nope, that's the midrange
Yes
Only if the teaching population is normally distributed, which we've no reason to think it is. The median, on the other hand, would have half the population above and half below.
It does. When my son was on the Covid ward in his hospital - not ICU (Heidelberg) there were always patients who had chosen not to be ventilated, so my son and his colleagues were keeping them as comfortable as possible while they died.
I speak in the past tense because he is on parental leave for the next year, so no more Covid nursing for him for a while. (Good old EU, they get a year each with a month’s overlap).
Yes, and also no. You're right that we don't try to achieve zero road deaths, for example, because to do so with the things we currently have available would mean restricting speeds to walking pace or something, and we don't want to do that.
But there's no fixed number of deaths that is reasonable.
"As Low As Reasonably Practicable" is a guide that is used in many safety-critical fields, which basically means that you spend money and implement safety rules in order to increase safety up to the point where the difficulty and expense of extra rules is disproportionate to the minimal gain you get from them.
I'm sure you're familiar with the QALY idea used in assessing whether medical treatment is worthwhile. That's a similar idea.
So we don't decide, for example, that 100,000 deaths from Covid is acceptable, but 500,000 is too many. We look at likely reductions in deaths from particular actions, and look at the cost of those actions (economic cost, quality of life cost, mental health cost, loss of education cost, and so on) and make a judgement call as to what is worthwhile.
To go back to your road safety example, seatbelts are compulsory, and have saved lives. The costs are a modest increase in the production costs of a basic car (because it has to have seat belts), and a trivial reduction in personal liberty (you've got to wear one, and ensure your passengers are wearing one). Whereas a 10mph speed limit in built-up areas would also clearly save lives, but it would increase the duration of journeys around town by a factor of 2-3, which we decide isn't worth doing. (You'd also want to modify standard cars to make sustained driving at 10mph an easy and sensible thing to do.)
Because it’s not just a question of how to prioritise funding like those other things you mentioned - in this situation we’re shutting down our entire fucking society. That’s a pretty big difference.
People were saying it would only need to be for 12 weeks back in March. Now it’s another 6 months on top of the 9 we’ve already had. Maybe in June it’ll be “only another year or so”.
How long is too long in your opinion?
Yes.
In Britain? Yes, actually. If we’re all going to die horribly of disease then a fair chunk of the population would most likely rather do so with pint in hand and their friends alongside them. Or go on a tour of their favourite attractions one more time. Or anything rather than sit alone in the house never seeing anyone or having any fun while waiting for the Reaper to get around to them.
Have a wild guess at which of those I think is more analogous to full societal lockdown.
Scott Atlas, is that you?
Speaking of economic and health trade-off's, the Trump administration* seems to be following MtM's advice:
Now this may sound bad, but as @Marvin the Martian would point out those people are all going to die someday, so why not now? And as meat packers they're likely to suffer injuries on the job, so does anything that makes that much more likely (such as increased line speed) really change anything, other than moving up the schedule a little bit? This could be called the Midas Cult, the idea that anything that can be made into money (like other people's health) should be made into money, because that's the most important thing.
Avoiding statistical representation like everyone who works at Amazon is, on average, a millionaire because of Jeff Bezos, though I suppose the median would work pretty well for that too.
Their reasons are many and varied, but some say they’ve had their time and to give the ICU bed to someone who hasn’t. 😢
Nobody other than Johnson said 12 weeks, though case numbers in Scotland were low enough in summer that had we the powers we could have pushed for elimination as NZ has, but it was people like you demanding that everything open up which meant that opportunity slipped away and we are where we are.
The difference now is that we have multiple effective vaccines. There's a clear end game.
There is a serious shortage of ventilators in NZ. Knowing this I have asked not to be ventilated if there is competition for their use. I would rather that I died than a parent of of young children for example. My GP knows this as do my brothers.
At the moment this seems unlikely given no community transfer and everyone who enters the country has to spend 2 weeks in managed isolation, and be tested at least twice, plus anyone who develops COVID is put in compulsory quarantine, but things can change rapidly, especially with the more contagious strains emerging.
We have had 70000 excess deaths with the poorly timed partial measures we have had, what were they aimed to prevent - 500000 excess deaths.
70000 British civilians died in WW2, 384000 soldiers were killed. The population in 1939 was 41 million. So assuming my back of the envelope maths is right - about 10% of the population over 5 years.
This largely remembered as a catastrophe that profoundly changed society and touched almost every family.
If an excess 500000 of our 65.65 million population had died in 2020 - we would have lost an additional 7% of our population in a year.
We currently have 5% unemployment. In 1992 it was 12%
We have vaccines and we need 6 months to vaccinate the population. Frankly, I'd agree to 6 months lockdown with appropriate economic support to get that fucking done.
This constant attempt to fix everything in three months has fucked things up repeatedly across 2020.
No, we're not. Our society still exists. Many people are able to work from home. Many others - those who work in essential occupations - will still be going to work, and taking Covid precautions. We chat online, hang out on zoom, discord, or whatever our thing is. We shovel snow off our elderly neighbour's driveway, go to church on zoom, make sure our elderly neighbours are able to get groceries, and shop for them if they're not. That's what makes us a society, rather than a group of individuals engaged in parallel play.
And, and I think this has to be an important part of being a society, we don't kill off our neighbours by spreading a deadly virus.
Sure - we can't gather in person. Playing bridge, scrabble, or whatever online isn't the same experience as doing it in a rented church hall, but it's something we can make work. And yes, if the way you experience society is chatting with people whilst propping the bar up every night, it's pretty hard to imitate that under lockdown conditions. But equating pubs with society seems just a touch hyperbolic.
Any significant rise in infection levels will overwhelm hospitals. Then not only will elderly people people* be killed by Covid, but people will die from cancer, strokes, cardiac arrest, aneurysms and God alone knows what else, waiting for ambulances or stuck in them outside. Healthcare is a limited resource.
We went into the first lockdown two weeks too late because Johnson was too inclined to listen to people pontificating about people's inalienable rights to go around spreading novel viruses. His nature is against restrictions, and it's a shame he confused reluctance with hesitancy. If even he's backed into a corner then the situation is grim.
*an inaccurate impression anyway. Mrs T tells me her ICU is as much filled with people with diabetes and asthma as they are the elderly. These are the pre-existing conditions, by the way, which apparently also render their sufferers expendable by those who know the true price of everything and the true value of nowt.
Which is why we see the highest death figures among the elderly. Of course, if we don't have sufficient resources to treat the middle aged people...
I have asthma. I’m saying everything I’m saying in the full knowledge that I’m in one of the high risk groups who are more likely to die if we get covid. I’d still rather be able to live a normal life with that increased risk than lose my life in order to save it.
1%, not 10%. Mind where you put that decimal point.
Just because you're eager to die (and take a bunch of other people with you) doesn't mean everyone else is.
6 months might be pushing it.... I've just checked the vaccine-queue-calculator, and it reckons
"Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your two doses of vaccine and be fully protected by between 17/12/2021 and 01/02/2022."
Even with a 12 week wait for the second dose, that would imply I could should not expect the first dose for another 9 months. I am at the bottom of the listed priorities (over 50, under 55, no other known underlying conditions), but there are still all the adults under 50 with no other vulnerabilities.
Indeed.
(In the interests of disclosure, I should say I'm actually likely to be sooner than the calculator predicts because of where I work)
Say rather that I don’t want to sacrifice everything that’s good about my life just to maximise its length. What’s the point of being alive if you can’t live?
Mine said not until July 2022. I’ll have gone mad and/or topped myself way before then if things go on like this.
No. Just because you feel justified in spreading a potentially deadly disease doesn't mean you get to dictate what other people say about it.
I find it interesting that you object to being described as eager to die but have no objections to being described as eager get a bunch of other people killed. It's of a piece with not being willing to sacrifice literally anything, that there is no sacrifice so small you'd be willing to make it.
So do I, when you put it like that. I guess I’m a bit more sociopathic and/or devoid of empathy than I thought. And frankly, I’ve always thought I was a decent amount of both those things.
And
Explaining ahead of time that I do Not agree with what @Marvin the Martian is saying.....
I would like to point out that Most of what MtM is saying is exactly what very many young (and a few not so young) people are thinking and saying.
And guess what?
For Lots of people, their behaviour reflects their beliefs.
Those who don’t act out their beliefs are caught in a horrible situation. It sucks and I Get that it sucks.
We can argue or get outraged about this, but that really won’t help.
If I get Covid then I m not hopeful of my chances: Underlying enduring condition.
I ve looked death in the face a few times but I have stuff left to do. So yes, Marvin’s ( il)logical outworkings of his beliefs outrage me. But......he is by no manner of means Alone in those beliefs.
I won’t be able to appeal to his better judgement. No one here will be able to shift his opinion. Because his is not a lone voice.
Anyone got a good idea for how Everyone who thinks like this can have a change of mind and heart?
I d be all ears.
So would half the planet.
I don't think that there is much evidence that this tendency is most prevalent among the young -- there are some polls showing lower levels of support around specific lockdown measures. OTOH the age group most in favour of sending workers back into the office and children back to school were the over 65s.
One impractical suggestion:
Not having three ghosts handy kind of puts this idea at a disadvantage.
This viral pandemic isn't even The Coming BIG One ...
As the human population continues to grow and disrupts ecosystems globally on an ever greater scale and pace, there will likely be emerging new diseases that are far more deadly than COVID19 and perhaps more contagious ...
Imagine a hemorrhagic disease like Ebola transmitted by respiration ...
Nice swerve but I haven't merely addressed a question of prioritising funding, as you know. You clearly make the point that when it comes to prioritising who lives and who dies it's the good of the majority which should prevail; I point out that your simplistic notion of 'majority' is in fact a complex mixture of countless AND INEXTRICABLE minorities. Therefore, even if the welfare of the elderly were written off as payment for a better pandemic experience for the younger, and therefore more deserving, people, the results almost certainly would not be worth the sacrifice, even if such decisions were either practical, possible or conscionable.
I also point out the unpopular view that mankind is not in control of this particular circus. We don't need to shut down society. The effects of what we can't control - ie, the virus - has done that. (That society generally functions at all is, of course, mainly about the disposition of funding, profit and market-trading, with a little bit of necessary philanthropy thrown in.) The barest glimpse at a history book tells us that that is what a virus of this extreme nature does simply by being extraordinarily contagious, difficult to treat, and responded to carelessly. Circumstances change somewhat depending on contingencies eg, how such viruses are permitted to travel globally, as in how peripatetic we are as a species, how responsible we feel towards one another's preservation and any advances we may make in medical science. The rest is down to scale, propinquity and what is the extent of and our responses to the losses we're incurring as a result of this pandemic.
I personally do not believe things would be better without lockdowns and restrictions, operating with a bias to caring less for the vulnerable elderly and also those who should be judged as not having 'quality' of life enough worth saving. I think things would be just as bad; and in fact worse because in adopting that attitude we may have made ourselves less than we can and should be, humanly speaking.
Quite. I understand the reason we're not having the full-blown Hammer Horror of that kind of viral disease is simply down to the fact of Ebola being that bit more difficult to contract, easier to track and trace, and because it generates iron rings of protective and truly prohibitive international legal restrictions when it does surface.
"Man," said the Ghost [of Christmas Present], "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant [of 'decrease the surplus population'] until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. O God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
The context is different, of course, and I wouldn't accuse anyone on this thread of being Scrooge-like. But I think there's still an important note of warning here.
For my own part, with my 'underlying conditions' I know I'm probably a goner if I get Covid-19. And that's fine. Compared to millions of others, I've lived a relatively easy, luxurious life whilst others have unfairly had to struggle even to put food in their mouths. And I've had a fabulous time, more or less. I just want to make sure my dog is properly taken care of, and I would rather not outlive my mother for her sake. But I'm damned if I'm going to start drawing the short-straw of existence on behalf of the UK's elderly just because this virus has got its claws into our economy, or our mental health, or our education etc.
As an aside, the UK continues to have open borders wrt no tests for travellers flying in from abroad.
Hee hee.
I am optimistic that the vaccination program will make good progress such that we can get close to normal life by the summer. Mostly because in my own hospital we have the vaccine as of today and expect to cover all staff in 3 weeks. It's quite easy to repurpose staff to vaccine sessions and vaccinate quite quickly.
It's more difficult in the community but unlike Test and Trace, mass vaccination is something the NHS does all the time. We are (massively) increasing a preexisting capability. Instead of T&T where we are paying private companies ridiculous money to fail...
AFZ
A figure that probably comes with some caveats about testing capacity but concerning nonetheless.
It's also notable that the infection rates are substantially and consistently lower in Scotland than in England.
I don't think I can evidence a clear reason. Part of it, I suspect, is fewer people coming and going than in London and the South East of England. Nicola Sturgeon has also been clearer in her advice and quicker to implement lockdowns when needed.
I'd almost prefer it to be Ebola, because with Ebola it's much easier to identify who has it, quarantine/isolate them, and let the uninfected get on with their lives.
According to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, comedian Janie Godley is helping. Godley does voice-overs of the daily Covid briefings. They are very funny, widely shared on social media and reinforce the message. Here's a recent one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U7etG7Z4Ds
Idiocy. We're an island - if we'd closed the borders with strict quarantine for any citizens returning from elsewhere this time last year we'd never have even got the virus here in the first place.