Coronavirus (2022) thread

[jaseirai]

Were we supposed to bake banana bread? Fuck, somebody should have told me!! I just sunbathed, smoked more weed than usual and shagged a lot.
Can you send me the ingredients please?

Banana bread baking can easily be substituted for another activity. Mine was/is booze.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Thank god for the tories steering us through it, never thought I'd say that.

Yeah, just imagine we we had a sensible government like Germany who have almost half the death toll we do and less economic fallout too.

What a fucking disaster that would have been.

Take the partisan stuff to the politics thread.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

I am, I was also asked to help out by the Government on Coronavirus modelling but they wouldn't pay me my daily rate unfortunately.

Lol. Fuck everybody, I knew when to lock down in 2020, they just wouldn’t pay me enough to tell them.

What an undercuntish thing to suggest!

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

That’s bollocks. Both “best” and “worst case” scenarios used case fatality rates from Delta for Omicron despite RSA data showing that to massively overestimate the lethality of omicron.

There is no Dr Hindsight needed, about a dozen of us were pointing that out in November and arguing that lockdowns were pointless and unneeded for omicron with a highly vaccinated population.

Omicron is doing a hell of a lot of lifting in your argument.

If it had been a severe variant, we would have been royally fucked.

Fortunately, it wasn’t.

A dozen soothsayers on this thread looking at trends in live South African data which showed signs of it not being as severe, without having the hospitalisation data 3-4 weeks down the line made your predictions before mid December dangerous, not visionary.

But yet again, you are calling our modellers out with the benefit of hindsight. It proved you right in the end, not during Omicron.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

Their best case model for omicron was for between 3000 to 10000 hospitalizations in England alone daily. The other two scenarios they did for omicron resulted in much higher numbers. We actually reached a peak of just over 2000 admissions. How can you say they modelled all scenarios, when the actual data falls well below their best case?

<citation needed>

 

[meltonblue]

They assumed omicron was as severe as delta despite the data from SA indicating it wasn't, they considered this data then dismissed it as not applicable to the UK. That was where they went wrong. Either way it was a mistake

And I disagree. Doing a projection with that assumption (and the caveat of the severity is very clearly called out) is one of the factors that led to the increased speed of the booster rollout, which has already shown to be worth it.

 

[M18CTID]

The clear winner of The Covid Doomsday Award goes to The Guardian:

The main headline just before Christmas was 'Scientists Predict 6000 Covid Deaths Daily'. The article went on to refer to this number of deaths each day with no detail as to how it was arrived at and no caveats about why this might not actually be the outcome.

What that actually referred to was a model produced by UCL in which the worst predicted outcome was that (the model itself was ridiculously pessimistic). I assume that worst case scenario was based on Omicron being far more transmissible than Delta (which it is of course), being as severe or worse (which it isn't), vaccines providing no protection whatsoever (they are very effective) and hospitals being completely overwhelmed, with carts rumbling through the streets picking up the dead as with the Black Death.

A lot of this is blatantly political so truth and objectivity goes out of the window.

The media have been complete and utter cunts throughout this pandemic. Be it left-wing, right-wing, or supposedly neutral, the lack of balance has been nothing short of astonishing. Often it would take the form of Doomsday scenarios and talk of severe restrictions but sometimes - if such measures did get introduced - they'd then go the opposite way and demand "Why have we gone into lockdown?"
As for the sensationalism of worst-case modelling such as the example you've cited - that's a fucking disgrace and has far reaching consequences in terms of fucking with people's heads.

 

[meltonblue]

I am, I was also asked to help out by the Government on Coronavirus modelling but they wouldn't pay me my daily rate unfortunately.

As part of SPI-M?

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

And I disagree. Doing a projection with that assumption (and the caveat of the severity is very clearly called out) is one of the factors that led to the increased speed of the booster rollout, which has already shown to be worth it.

Moaning about the modellers when we didn’t lockdown and did the correct thing in accelerating the booster program.

Either our government are visionaries (which we have seen that they are not), or they took the advice of our epidemiologists and modellers and got it right.

 

[meltonblue]

The clear winner of The Covid Doomsday Award goes to The Guardian:

The main headline just before Christmas was 'Scientists Predict 6000 Covid Deaths Daily'. The article went on to refer to this number of deaths each day with no detail as to how it was arrived at and no caveats about why this might not actually be the outcome.

What that actually referred to was a model produced by UCL in which the worst predicted outcome was that (the model itself was ridiculously pessimistic). I assume that worst case scenario was based on Omicron being far more transmissible than Delta (which it is of course), being as severe or worse (which it isn't), vaccines providing no protection whatsoever (they are very effective) and hospitals being completely overwhelmed, with carts rumbling through the streets picking up the dead as with the Black Death.

A lot of this is blatantly political so truth and objectivity goes out of the window.

I remember reading that article, they buried the more optimistic model in the same article too, which was already looking more like the more realistic one at the time anyway.

The one caveat is I do wonder how much pressure the government put themselves on the media to go with the worst case as by doing that they increased the likelihood of them not having to implement any restrictions themselves. If you take December, there was a huge shift in behaviour with Christmas parties being cancelled all over as well as things like increased mask compliance. That did also allow for the extra few weeks to get more booster jabs done.

Doesn’t make it right in terms of reporting though.