I suggested last week that all Conservative budgets have a habit of unravelling. Sunak's has followed that seemingly inevitable path.
Domestically, the nurses' pay offer is symbolic of the austerity implicit within it. This was no giveaway budget, unless you were big business.
The allocation of supposed levelling up grants revealed that corruption is deeply embedded within this government. The bias towards Tory seats must be visible from space, so blatant is it.
The £20 cut to universal credit was a measure revealing utter indifference to the least well off.
But the most telling comment has come from the United Nations. As the Guardian has reported this morning:
In a message of rare bluntness, the head of the UN's Office for Humanitarian Affairs has said UK ministers have decided to “balance the books on the backs of the starving people of Yemen”. Mark Lowcock says the decision to halve its funds to Yemen will see tens of thousands die and damage the UK's global influence. It is understood he was given no chance to appeal to the UK to rethink.
Lowcock's message was simple, direct and wholly appropriate. The government has put a false and doctrinaire economic demand, that it balance its books, ahead of the needs of people who will die as a result of its decision.
That is shocking. But then, so too has been the government's management of coronavirus been shocking. After all, it put a false and doctrinaire economic demand, that it keep the economy open to reduce its cost, ahead of the needs of people who died as a result of that decision.
When false economics doctrine costs lives it is time for it to be replaced, and for those who peddle it to be called out for their crimes. And yes, I know there is no crime that they can be found guilty of, but that does not stop there being a crime. The crime of indifference to the death of others arising as a consequence of your actions is one by which politicians should be judged. Sunak is guilty, in my opinion.
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Agreed.
It’s truly maddening.
My brother has been told to isolate as he has tested positive for Covid. He has been driving lorries from Ireland to the UK and became ill on the 24th. He managed to get back to Ireland at the weekend.
He has been telling me how the people he has been dealing with at British and Irish ports have not been wearing face masks and gloves (licking fingers as they flick through papers and passports!! ) and how the hard copy paperwork has ballooned because of BREXIT (surely enabling some form of transmission to take place). Speaking to him last night he was really poorly. He sounds rough. He’s on his 6th day with symptoms that include a metallic taste in his mouth (but nothing else – no taste or smells), aching all over and heavy phlegm coming off his chest, a sore throat and a headache.
He’s 54 . I’m stunned (he sent me a copy of his notification to my phone).
My kids go back to school today just like many others.
Good luck to him
And your children
Schools are going back today. You have predicted that this early ending of lockdown, couple with the extended gap between vaccinations, will lead to 500,000 extra deaths. When do you expect this horrendous death toll to start arising?
I have not said it would lead to 500,000 deaths
Equally, that is plausible if the death rate is eventually 1%
When will deaths start rising again? R will increase fairly quickly. Many in the NHS think the next wave hits from June on.
But every adult will be vaccinated by the summer so why do you predict a death rate so high?
Incidentally at my sons university there have been more suicides over the past year, 4 (last year there was none) compared to Covid related deaths 0
We are nit all vaccinated
To date very few people are
And escape mutations are likely, and already more dangerous, and likely to spread rapidly as a result of government policy which is way out of international line
Of course those deaths may not happen. Many much more knowledgeable than me are scared witless by the government’s actions
If on 21 September you reject the best science advice – from your own advisers, published in official documented minutes, – saying that the best way to prevent a further wave of infection, which would involve 10’s of thousands of deaths, is to have an immediate short sharp cicuit breaker lockdown , you are certainly guilty of deliberately killing thousands of your own citizens. This was ‘Black September’ . If the public begins to understand that – at least it would be a start.
“The crime of indifference to the death of others …”
Now apparently you can add to that list one or more members of the royal family obsessing about the colour of a baby’s skin:-
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/08/meghan-and-prince-harry-oprah-winfrey-interview-special-12-things-we-learned
What a country!
Wole Soyinka wrote a poem set in the 60’s called “Telephone Conversation”, about an African man phoning a landlady in order to book some accommodation.
Nothing has changed in certain quarters it seems. Here’s a few lines as she asks about his colour:
“HOW DARK?”…I had not misheard. …”ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?”
and when he understood what she was saying:
“ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?” Revelation came.
“You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?”
I was quite disturbed to hear a head teacher on the radio this morning, saying that he could draw confidence from everyone in his classrooms having tested negative. I’ve heard the lateral flow test described as a good “red light” test, but a poor “green light” test. Yes, he can drawn some assurance from any people testing positive staying at home (specificity is high, so false positives are rare), but given what we known about the sensitivity (something like 75% or 80% at best, and 50% or worse in the field) there will be many false negatives.
Given the current prevalence (still high, albeit much down from the peak) I fear we will see school bubbles popping all over the place in the next three weeks. We still have mid-September levels of infections (5,000-10,000 per day), and mid-October levels of deaths (200 or so within 28 days, but substantially more deaths mentioning COVID-19 on the death certificate). Hospital occupancy, although also down substantially from the peak, remains high, particularly intensive care.
It is hard to imagine a place more conducive to the spread of a respiratory disease like this than a stuffy classroom packed with boisterous, noisy children. We shall soon see how much impact that has on the R number, which was barely below 1 anyway.
We are by no means out of the woods, and I wish the Prime Minister would not keep banging on about how irreversible this all is, because I fear he may have to eat his words if this gets out of control. Yet again.
I agree with all that
The faith in lateral flow tests is absurd
Lateral Flow Tests are certainly a useful tool, but not something which will be a ‘game changer’ in any way. In a school setting, probably quite useful as the kids are going to be there regardless so if it can pick up some infections and stop some spread it is a good thing. They are more likely to return a positive result when the person has a higher viral load and is therefore most infectious so helpful in this regards and probably worth the inconvenience. However, it should be made clear to the kids (and the teachers, apparently!) that getting a negative result on one of these tests doesn’t mean you’re not potentially infected and infectious.
Quite. Just in case people are not aware, a “lateral flow test” is an immunochromatographic assay – like doing chromatography with blotting paper at school, or more accurately, like a home pregnancy test, if you have ever had occasion to do either.
You apply a sample (saliva in this case) to an absorbent substrate and it “flows” along laterally by capillary action. Somewhere along the “wick” are some chemicals that react with a target molecule from the virus (that is, an antigen) and make a mark or line if the test is positive (and then a control line to make sure the thing is working).
Anyone who has had to work out what a faint line might mean will understand the potential issue of false positives – any kind of reaction is a good indication of a positive test most of the time – but in this case it is the false negatives that are more of a concern. A false negative means (more or less) there is just not enough of the antigen in the sample to set off the reagent – perhaps because the tester has not been intrusive enough with the test swab for long enough.
By contrast, a PCR test uses the “polymerase chain reaction” to make billions of copies of bits of DNA or RNA, so it is sensitive to small amounts of the genetic material of the virus.
As always, there is a balance, because increasing the sensitivity so you miss fewer real positives will also increase the rate of false positives. No test is perfect, and you always have to be careful in deciding why you are testing, what a result might mean, and what to do with the information.
In this case, filtering out the positives is good, but the negatives need to continue with other measures. Like with the vaccination: the data suggests the rate of infection actually tends to go up in the first couple of weeks after the first shot, because people let down their guard. Such protection as there is only kicks in a bit later.
Thank you