Saturday Night Fight

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 20:54:13 +0200, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 07/04/2020 15:43, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:25:05 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 07/04/20 10:18, David Brown wrote:
The job of a country's leader in a situation like this is to ask the medical
experts what they need, and give it to them.

That is true in many other cases too, e.g. managers should
give competent employees whatever is necessary for the
employees to succeed. Then get out of the way and let them
succeed.

Or fail. Multiple, almost random, experiments are sometimes
appropriate and have had huge payoffs. That has happened (so many
times!) in medicine.

Managers should also stop runaway trains.


Let's put this all in terms of electronics, which you might understand.
Imagine Trump is the boss of the electronics development department, and
you are working with a difficult analogue card. It has been challenging
getting it to work reliably, partly because the customer is using it in
a wide variety of circumstances and haven't told you the details of the
use-cases, and don't give you much feedback. But you make a lot of
money from each success, so you are trying to find different
combinations of resistor values that have a better chance of success on
more customer sites.

Your manager walks in.

Trump: "I've heard of a guy in a different company who had success with
blue resistors."

You: "The colour doesn't matter - it's the value that is important."

Trump: "No, blue resistors are great. Great. I don't really know,
maybe they are maybe they're not. But if looks good. Looks great. I
like them."

You: "I can't see how blue resistors would help. I'm not even sure if
we have any resistors that happen to be blue."

Trump: "Well, get the blue resistors. I'm authorising full use of blue
resistors now. I want blue resistors on all the cards, delivery to
customers by tomorrow morning. This will be great. We have it all
under control. I'm not sure - you know, I'm no electronics engineer.
But I've a gut feeling about these things. Call it intuition. But we
have the best engineers working on this - these are really great guys.
And we'll put blue resistors everywhere. It'll be great."


Fortunately, it seems that at least some of your medical establishment
is managing to ignore Trump. And hopefully he won't find out and fire them.

Lord, but you are being stupid and tedious. Do you always "think" in
childish made-up stories? Do you actually believe the drivel that you
write? You make up stories that you would like to be real, but they
aren't.

Do you ever actually design electronics yourself? That would be
hilarious to see.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:44:46 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 6:48:50 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:27:08 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Some medical types will be hyper-cautious, and some will try to see if
things work

In aircraft design, you want to go with hyper-cautious types. The
'try to see if things work' folk get fired (or worse, are cited in
the subsequent suits).

Even the best aerodynamic calculations and simulations miss things,
because air flow is chaotic. That's why we have wind tunnels and
flying test beds.

Yeah, but every human is one of the deliverable products. We test
COVID-19 treatments on mice, and stuff bridge models into
wind tunnels that couldn't hold the whole thing, We test cars
with dummies.

The try-everything-on-patients approach is a very slow, uncertain testing plan.
Laboratory experiments CONTROL all the pesky variables, including subjects,
for good and sufficient reasons.

People aren't mice. And people are dying now.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Clive Arthur]

On 06/04/2020 10:58, Tom Gardner wrote:

<snipped>

Hydroxychloroquine might have the same benefits as the
Patriot missiles did in the Gulf war.

Yes, I remember that, when pressed about the claimed number of
interceptions, a military spokesman eventually admitted that
'interception' meant 'passed in the air'.

--
Cheers
Clive

 

[mpm]

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 4:54:42 PM UTC-4, Ricky C wrote:

> There is a lot more evidence of people "trying things" with bad results. Lots more.

Exhibit 1:

https://www.insideedition.com/headlines/22474-toxic-tush-doc-who-injected-super-glue-and-cement-into-womens-posteriors-gets-10-years

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 2:11:48 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:37:36 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:23:05 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

We need to find them first. Try things. In parallel.

That's called epidemiology, and the starting point is medical records.
The Mayo Clinic became a world leader by keeping good, consistent records.
Consistency IS a problem, China presumably has a better system than the US
patchwork of latest-and-greatest-softwares. A very large healthcare
system in the US is the Veterans Administration; that's something
they would be good at.

So, building up a body of records certainly IS being done, you just
don't hear about it because (1) the records are confidential and (2)
no great results yet, so it's mainly 'maybe-someday'.

Ultimately we need vaccines and antibodies, but they would take time
to get into production once they work.

Thus the lockdown; to get the time.

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.

A reporter for EWTN wants to know why our president hasn't shut down all supermarkets and fast food places.

EWTN is owed and operated by the Catholic church.

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 16:31:54 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell
<terrell.michael.a@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 2:11:48 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:37:36 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:23:05 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

We need to find them first. Try things. In parallel.

That's called epidemiology, and the starting point is medical records.
The Mayo Clinic became a world leader by keeping good, consistent records.
Consistency IS a problem, China presumably has a better system than the US
patchwork of latest-and-greatest-softwares. A very large healthcare
system in the US is the Veterans Administration; that's something
they would be good at.

So, building up a body of records certainly IS being done, you just
don't hear about it because (1) the records are confidential and (2)
no great results yet, so it's mainly 'maybe-someday'.

Ultimately we need vaccines and antibodies, but they would take time
to get into production once they work.

Thus the lockdown; to get the time.

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.


A reporter for EWTN wants to know why our president hasn't shut down all supermarkets and fast food places.

EWTN is owed and operated by the Catholic church.

Here's another one.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/07/ezekiel_emanuel_us_must_stay_locked_down_for_12-18_months_until_theres_a_vaccine.html

Sound like he expects it to keep killing people forever without a
vaccine. That's a common opinion.

Looks to me like most of the world has peaked or is getting close.
Some european countries have daily new case rates a small fraction of
peak. The ones that started sooner are falling fastest.

The basic curve may be a 4-6 week Gaussian, smeared out in bigger
countries that have multiple infection centers. These things tend to
have steeper tails than rises.

Luxembourg is a small country right in the center of Europe. It has a
half-sine looking curve, down about 5:1 from peak.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 8/4/20 12:17 am, Tom Gardner wrote:

On 07/04/20 14:48, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:27:08 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 20:18:10 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

[about shotgun-style testing of drugs for COVID-19]

How would you react if, when you were grossly overloaded
creating a product, a politician told you to include parts
that you've previously rejected as being a poor fit?

Some medical types will be hyper-cautious, and some will try to see if
things work

In aircraft design, you want to go with hyper-cautious types.   The
'try to see if things work' folk get fired (or worse, are cited in
the subsequent suits).

Even the best aerodynamic calculations and simulations miss things,
because air flow is chaotic. That's why we have wind tunnels and
flying test beds.

Aerodynamic calculations and simulation can miss things, but
the air turbulence isn't the reason.

Airframes are very carefully designed to be laminar flow, i.e.
zero turbulence. Why? Because turbulence = drag = inefficiency.

In practise, laminar flow is unachievable over most of a wing and
airframe surface area. The Mustang airfoil attempted it, but few since
have, except for specialised applications like high-performance gliders.

It's also quite hazardous, because the laminar flow can break down
suddenly with small changes in flight regime, causing large flow
separations and sudden changes in form drag. So instead, aeroplanes are
designed to flip into turbulent flow early, and to keep the thickness of
the turbulent layer as thin as possible. In a large passenger jet, it's
still six inches or more towards the tail end of the fuselage, is the
reason for most of the wind noise you hear.

The only time there is turbulent flow over a wing is when
it is stalled, and an airliner should never be anywhere near
that.

This simply isn't true. Airflow can be tripped to turbulence by a layer
of dust left after rain, let alone a riveted seam. The point isn't to
avoid turbulence, but to avoid big flow separations.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 8/4/20 10:50 am, whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 2:31:33 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:44:46 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

The try-everything-on-patients approach is a very slow, uncertain testing plan.
Laboratory experiments CONTROL all the pesky variables, including subjects,
for good and sufficient reasons.

People aren't mice. And people are dying now.

Mice can be controlled (bred to a small range of genome, for instance) and that
lessens noise in the results. People who are in extremis are a bad test subject,
because that always involves all their complications (and they cannot always
be awakened for consent). Mice are likely to get fully infected faster anyhow
small lungs, you know).

Most important, you can give a STANDARD INOCULATION DOSE of the virus to the
mice at a known time. I'm not kidding when I say that controlled experiments
are much more efficient (and you get to dissect survivors so there's less mystery
about collateral damage. You really DO want to learn on non-patients.

Let the knowledgable folk do the real work.

Australia's #1 infectious disease research centre is testing on ferrets,
because their lung tissue is most like humans,

CH.

 

[whit3rd]

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 2:31:33 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:44:46 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

The try-everything-on-patients approach is a very slow, uncertain testing plan.
Laboratory experiments CONTROL all the pesky variables, including subjects,
for good and sufficient reasons.

People aren't mice. And people are dying now.

Mice can be controlled (bred to a small range of genome, for instance) and that
lessens noise in the results. People who are in extremis are a bad test subject,
because that always involves all their complications (and they cannot always
be awakened for consent). Mice are likely to get fully infected faster anyhow
small lungs, you know).

Most important, you can give a STANDARD INOCULATION DOSE of the virus to the
mice at a known time. I'm not kidding when I say that controlled experiments
are much more efficient (and you get to dissect survivors so there's less mystery
about collateral damage. You really DO want to learn on non-patients.

Let the knowledgable folk do the real work.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 7:26:53 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 20:54:13 +0200, David Brown
david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 07/04/2020 15:43, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:25:05 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 07/04/20 10:18, David Brown wrote:

<snip>

Fortunately, it seems that at least some of your medical establishment
is managing to ignore Trump. And hopefully he won't find out and fire them.

Lord, but you are being stupid and tedious. Do you always "think" in
childish made-up stories? Do you actually believe the drivel that you
write? You make up stories that you would like to be real, but they
aren't.

Trump is acting childishly, and he's clearly a lot more interested in getting himself re-elected in November than he is in minimisng the number of Americans who are going to die of Covid-19.

You stupidly and tediously deny this. You make up ideas about the Covid-19 epidemic that you would like to be real, but clearly aren't.

Do you ever actually design electronics yourself? That would be
hilarious to see.

Your grasp of electronic design - as opposed to electronic twiddling and selection of the best variations - is remarkably weak. If you were exposed to good electronic design - and Phil Hobbs might let you some respectable examples - you'd probably find it incomprehensible (from the design point of view), and might find it comical because it dealt with problems that you didn't know existed.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 7:31:33 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 11:44:46 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 6:48:50 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:27:08 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:09:54 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

Some medical types will be hyper-cautious, and some will try to see if
things work

In aircraft design, you want to go with hyper-cautious types. The
'try to see if things work' folk get fired (or worse, are cited in
the subsequent suits).

Even the best aerodynamic calculations and simulations miss things,
because air flow is chaotic. That's why we have wind tunnels and
flying test beds.

Yeah, but every human is one of the deliverable products. We test
COVID-19 treatments on mice, and stuff bridge models into
wind tunnels that couldn't hold the whole thing, We test cars
with dummies.

The try-everything-on-patients approach is a very slow, uncertain testing plan.
Laboratory experiments CONTROL all the pesky variables, including subjects,
for good and sufficient reasons.

People aren't mice. And people are dying now.

More of them than was strictly necessary. If Trump had managed to galvanise his administration into tackling the problem in the way that the South Korean government did, many Americas who have now died of the disease would never have been infected. He's been murderously incompetent.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 4:11:48 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:37:36 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:23:05 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

We need to find them first. Try things. In parallel.

That's called epidemiology, and the starting point is medical records.
The Mayo Clinic became a world leader by keeping good, consistent records.
Consistency IS a problem, China presumably has a better system than the US
patchwork of latest-and-greatest-softwares. A very large healthcare
system in the US is the Veterans Administration; that's something
they would be good at.

So, building up a body of records certainly IS being done, you just
don't hear about it because (1) the records are confidential and (2)
no great results yet, so it's mainly 'maybe-someday'.

Ultimately we need vaccines and antibodies, but they would take time
to get into production once they work.

Thus the lockdown; to get the time.

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

Colds don't kill people, and flu essentially only kills people who were going to die of something else fairly soon.

This approach would work for Covid-19, but would kill a couple of million Americans before enough people had had the disease to provide enough herd immunity to stop it propagating as an epidemic.

> As if nobody would starve to death.

In an advanced industrial country, they shouldn't.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 9:58:11 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 16:31:54 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell
terrell.michael.a@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 2:11:48 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2020 02:37:36 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd wrote:

On Monday, April 6, 2020 at 1:23:05 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

We need to find them first. Try things. In parallel.

That's called epidemiology, and the starting point is medical records..
The Mayo Clinic became a world leader by keeping good, consistent records.
Consistency IS a problem, China presumably has a better system than the US
patchwork of latest-and-greatest-softwares. A very large healthcare
system in the US is the Veterans Administration; that's something
they would be good at.

So, building up a body of records certainly IS being done, you just
don't hear about it because (1) the records are confidential and (2)
no great results yet, so it's mainly 'maybe-someday'.

Ultimately we need vaccines and antibodies, but they would take time
to get into production once they work.

Thus the lockdown; to get the time.

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.


A reporter for EWTN wants to know why our president hasn't shut down all supermarkets and fast food places.

EWTN is owed and operated by the Catholic church.


Here's another one.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/07/ezekiel_emanuel_us_must_stay_locked_down_for_12-18_months_until_theres_a_vaccine.html

Sound like he expects it to keep killing people forever without a
vaccine. That's a common opinion.

It will. If you can isolate everybody who get infected before they infect anybody else, it wouldn't. You can't do that well but you can come remarkably close to it, as China and South Korea have demonstrated.

South Korea never went into lock-down. If you remain vigilant after you have mininised the number of infected people around you can keep the rate of new infections pretty low without having most of the country locked down.

Looks to me like most of the world has peaked or is getting close.
Some European countries have daily new case rates a small fraction of
peak. The ones that started sooner are falling fastest.

The basic curve may be a 4-6 week Gaussian, smeared out in bigger
countries that have multiple infection centers. These things tend to
have steeper tails than rises.

That's a fatuous generalisation.

Luxembourg is a small country right in the center of Europe. It has a
half-sine looking curve, down about 5:1 from peak.

It's not so much small as tiny, and it's had a higher proportion of its population infected - 4,745 per million inhabitants than anything but other tiny states. Vatican City has done worse at 8,739 and San Marino is almost as bad. Andorra follows with 7,054. Iceland isn't quite as bad. Spain is the first substantial country with anything like that much infection at 3,036 infected per million.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Try to think about what the number represent, rather than telling us that some unspecified curve or other looks like a Gaussian bell curve (and none of them do in any useful way).

To my mind, the plot of number of new case per day is the most informative bit of information, and it only tells what was happening when those new case got infected, some five days to a week earlier.

Luxembourg's new cases per day peaked around the 26th March, though it's a very noisy curve and probably heavily influenced by what's happening in the adjacent bits of Belgium, France and Germany.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

John Larkin wrote:

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.

Or become homeless. In 1918 the economy wasn't hurt at all because there
was no lockdown. Just a lot of dead people. There is a sensible middle
ground but it's a lot less than a year.

After a few months of this we will probably start hearing of increased
suicide and drug use, and maybe violence from drinking. Maybe a large
number of people will demand to go back to work before that point, but
more likely after that point.

 

[Ricky C]

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 11:55:16 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 8/4/20 1:43 pm, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.

Or become homeless. In 1918 the economy wasn't hurt at all because there
was no lockdown. Just a lot of dead people. There is a sensible middle
ground but it's a lot less than a year.

After a few months of this we will probably start hearing of increased
suicide and drug use, and maybe violence from drinking. Maybe a large
number of people will demand to go back to work before that point, but
more likely after that point.

Domestic violence services have seen a sharp increase. Liquor sales have
doubled.

So have toilet paper sales and garlic.

Medical guy on the radio this morning saying there's no guarantee there
will *ever* be a vaccine for this bug.

What in life does have guarantees other than limited ones?

The "sensible" duration depends on how this particular disease shapes
up. We don't know yet.

Indeed. While the White House said repeated they didn't want to get involved in mandating various measures to prevent the disease or limit its spread, you can be sure they will be getting involved in ramping up the economy!

In fact, for the most part, the only parts of this that the White House has been involved with were financial in nature or part of promoting Trump's image. Turns out he and his family have a financial interest in promoting Hydroxychloroquine. Pretty much everything else in the daily briefings has been to make him look good. He even steps in when questions are asked of his experts to prevent them from answering, potentially to stop anyone from making him look bad.

--

Rick C.

-++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 8/4/20 1:43 pm, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.

Or become homeless. In 1918 the economy wasn't hurt at all because there
was no lockdown. Just a lot of dead people. There is a sensible middle
ground but it's a lot less than a year.

After a few months of this we will probably start hearing of increased
suicide and drug use, and maybe violence from drinking. Maybe a large
number of people will demand to go back to work before that point, but
more likely after that point.

Domestic violence services have seen a sharp increase. Liquor sales have
doubled.

Medical guy on the radio this morning saying there's no guarantee there
will *ever* be a vaccine for this bug.

The "sensible" duration depends on how this particular disease shapes
up. We don't know yet.

CH

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 1:55:16 PM UTC+10, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 8/4/20 1:43 pm, Tom Del Rosso wrote:
John Larkin wrote:

Some expert on the radio this morning (heard while driving to work)
said that we can gradually relax the lockdown over the next year or
year-and-a-half when a vaccine is available.

As if no cold or flu ever went away without a vaccine.

As if nobody would starve to death.

Or become homeless. In 1918 the economy wasn't hurt at all because there
was no lockdown. Just a lot of dead people. There is a sensible middle
ground but it's a lot less than a year.

After a few months of this we will probably start hearing of increased
suicide and drug use, and maybe violence from drinking. Maybe a large
number of people will demand to go back to work before that point, but
more likely after that point.

Domestic violence services have seen a sharp increase. Liquor sales have
doubled.

Medical guy on the radio this morning saying there's no guarantee there
will *ever* be a vaccine for this bug.

There's no guarantee, but we are trying a lot harder, with a lot more different approaches than we ever have before. We've got vaccines against a lot of viral diseases, and there's nothing yet known about Covid-19 that suggests that it might present any difficulties.

The "sensible" duration depends on how this particular disease shapes
up. We don't know yet.

Actually, the sensible time to sustain lock-down depends on the area being locked down and the number of potentially infectious people in it.

Any area which doesn't contain any potentially infectious people doesn't need to be locked down. It may need to be quarantined to prevent potentially infectious people coming in.

The area which needs to be locked down is pretty much constrained by the kind of boundary you have to set up to maintain that quarantine.

There's nothing mysterious about it, but it does call for thinking about borders in lots of detail.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 07/04/2020 21:59, Ricky C wrote:

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 5:33:40 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 07/04/2020 08:32, Tom Gardner wrote:

Having said that, BoJo's behaviour over Brexit (he voted to leave
as a tactical decision towards becoming the next leader of his
party), and in too many other ways is pretty despicable. If this
kills him it would finally get the seriousness of the situation
through to some twats.

In that case his obituary could channel that of the thane of
Cawdor: "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it".

I am no fan of Boris Johnson but I do think he has pretty much
listened to and acted upon the scientific advice he has been given
by experts. This is in itself quite impressive since he got into
power using a team that denigrated experts quite routinely in their
election campaign.

What? "Boris Johnson said he was shaking hands with coronavirus
patients just weeks before he tested positive for Covid-19"

He didn't catch it from doing that though. I agree he was being reckless
shaking hands with infected patients but that *wasn't* how he caught it.

So where is the taking "scientific advice he has been given by
experts"???

You may not have noticed but the UK is in lockdown at present and a Tory
government is implementing socialist economic policies to help control
the rapid spread of the virus. It had got bad enough in London at the
time that he caught it that several of my friends who were in London on
business ended up with Covid-19 as a souvenir just prior to lockdown.

I think you should give Boris the benefit of the doubt on this
one.

I would if there were any doubt. Unless you believe the virus is
transmitted by emails, it is pretty clear he gave himself this
virus.

Not exactly. I doubt in the confines of No 10 with its narrow corridors
that they can ever obey social distancing rules of 2m separation.

Personally I think he has overreacted to the Imperial paper and
applied a national lockdown because London and Birmingham needed
one. You can't accuse him of ignoring the problem. It is sad that
it has now for him become a personal battle for his own survival
against the virus.

I don't know what he acted on. I know he was being an idiot by
shaking anyone's hand much less CV-19 patients.

Outside of London people were still shaking hands right up to lockdown.

In London where the virus had already taken hold things were a lot less
relaxed. At that time the only cases in my county were returning skiers
from Northern Italy - things are a little different now - but there are
still under 300 confirmed cases here out of a population of 600k in the
largest land area county in England. It is sparsely populated.

But at least he was taking the threat seriously unlike President
Trump who denounced Covid-19 as "the sniffles" that would just go
away until things really started to turn ugly. As a result of
Trumps prevarication USA will do pandemic bigger and better than
any first world country.

I'm pretty sure if he took the coronavirus as seriously as he should
have, he would not be in the ICU.

What have you heard that doesn't support this?

He has followed the policy of the scientific advisors and locked the
country down completely. Somewhat harder than I would have done and with
a devastating effect on industry. Their original policy of isolating the
infirm and elderly and allowing herd immunity to build up in the young
fit and healthy looked to me like a more rational approach even though
it risks running out of ventilators if things were to go awry.

It still isn't clear which approach is right. The only remaining
adherent to the herd immunity "intelligent" lockdown is The Netherlands
(and they are taking some flak for it) with neighbouring Belgium in the
hard lockdown camp. So far neither are doing particularly well with very
high population densities and major cities in close proximity. Many
people commute "long" distances (both countries are rather small).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52135814

The failure in our UK government strategy is that there is nowhere near
enough testing (something they are working to fix at last) and that they
have absolutely no exit strategy from the lock down. The model paper
that they based the lockdown on shows an even worse spike in November
than we would have had if they allowed it to run unchecked in summer.

We are basically down to praying that its infectivity tails off in the
midsummer when the atmosphere is warmer and drier. I'm not convinced
that will make a big difference. It is still too soon after lockdown to
tell if the changes are truly slowing down the rate of infection and
deaths. The virus has got into care homes and prisons which is bad.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 07/04/20 23:28, Clive Arthur wrote:

On 06/04/2020 10:58, Tom Gardner wrote:

snipped

Hydroxychloroquine might have the same benefits as the
Patriot missiles did in the Gulf war.

Yes, I remember that, when pressed about the claimed number of interceptions, a
military spokesman eventually admitted that 'interception' meant 'passed in the
air'.

I also remember a newsreel video of a Patriot in Israel
being launched, then flying through a 180degree arc
before impact.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 07/04/2020 23:28, Clive Arthur wrote:

On 06/04/2020 10:58, Tom Gardner wrote:

snipped

Hydroxychloroquine might have the same benefits as the
Patriot missiles did in the Gulf war.

It has already claimed on US life unnecessarily.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-chloroquine-idUSKBN21A3Y2

Yes, I remember that, when pressed about the claimed number of
interceptions, a military spokesman eventually admitted that
'interception' meant 'passed in the air'.

Patriot missiles were pretty effective at shooting a returning British
Tornado in the "safe" corridor out of the air.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/20/patriot_missile/

--
Regards,
Martin Brown