All the best, keep on keeping on

Was watching a break from Jimmy White from the B & H at Wembley against Kirk Stevens.

Popped up on my feed and I always liked Jimmy White and Wembley was the only place I saw a snooker tourn live when I played quite regularly so got quite engrossed for 5 mins.

Barely watch a shot these days but in other sports the fact of people just getting better and better seems really evident. Bigger, stronger, faster etc.  Since ya'll watch the game, if you set aside consistency as a factor, are the best players today any better than the best players 40 odd years ago. Hard to believe anyone can play better snooker than someone like Jimmy White on his day.

Pockets  are much smaller nowadays, century stats higher, quality of playing field deeper imo

Pockets being smaller is something I couldnt have imagined. Guess the century stats are a pretty good indicator

Was watching a break from Jimmy White from the B & H at Wembley against Kirk Stevens.

Popped up on my feed and I always liked Jimmy White and Wembley was the only place I saw a snooker tourn live when I played quite regularly so got quite engrossed for 5 mins.

Barely watch a shot these days but in other sports the fact of people just getting better and better seems really evident. Bigger, stronger, faster etc.  Since ya'll watch the game, if you set aside consistency as a factor, are the best players today any better than the best players 40 odd years ago. Hard to believe anyone can play better snooker than someone like Jimmy White on his day.

Ffs. Bairstow, played 2 straight balls, missed 2 straight balls

Mostly good news again.

Firtly some bad news to get past.  The CMI have released their latest report and deaths were still 47% higher than expected a couple of weeks ago(this was age adjusted).  The good news is that was down on the week before, but their age adjusted figures are now showing over 100k exceess deaths in total, so I don't think there is much of an argument that at least 100,000 peole have died of Covid in the UK now).

On to all the good news.

Last week, cases were in the range 10k to 15k for the whole of the UK, right now they are very much about to go through 10k, so I think next week we'll see a string of reported cases in 4 figures.

The trend in deaths has been much more negative, with rates now falling by about 30% a week.  Deaths were probably below 500 a day in England this time last week.  There may still be some lag in that number, but the number today is probably very close to the level where lockdown 2 ended.  Some of this effect is likely due to vaccinations now, as the trend in the reduction is accelerating, and over half the deaths have been in the over 80s.

Hospitalisations are falling too, but slower than deaths.  The hospitalisation rate has fallen from 4k a day to 1.5k a day for the whole UK, but there are still 21k Covid patients in hospital (peak was near 40K).

ICU is where we are seeing the slowest reductions.  There are now 2,800 patients on ventilators, which is down from 4k at peak.

This is all in line with some predictions the actuaries response group made some time ago.  Cases fall most rapidly, followed by deaths, hospitalisations and finally ICU beds.  This may not be obvious, but it is due to middle aged people still having a fairly significant hospitalisation rate even if deaths amongst that group aren't that high.  Models can still be pretty good at this stuff (Hi Ivor).

We are now over 15m vaccinations too, and I still think the numbers are brilliant each week when I see them. 

Away from the UK figures, some of the Scottish figures are realeased quicker than those that are UK wide, in particular the deaths by age group.  There appears to be a noticeable falling off in mortality amongst the over 80s and those in care homes in Scotland.  Deaths in care homes in Scotland are now showing below average for the time of year.  I expect some of that will be data lag, but that is still remarkable.  I think it must be clear by now that this is down to vaccination (rather than HcQ, Zinc and split seasonality curves or whatever it was Ivor was claiming, but maybe there was a heat wave last week?)

https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1362036927294279687       

Some good news this week, but some worrying signs.

Firstly vaccinations. I guess there must be some supply issues, but vaccination numbers seem to be dropping noticeably right now.  The latest figures over the last week of figures are down about 25% on average.  I can't really add much, as I can't recall seeing any explanation (I haven't read much this week, as I was a bit relaxed about how we were going).

Cases:  The cases numbers are not dropping as much as I expected either.  For the last couple of weeks I have been expecting us to drop below 10,000 cases a day. but up until yesterday, we have only really been doing so at the weekend.  Cases seem to be falling by only around 10% a week now, which doesn't seem nearly enough to be comfortable.  I checked and there hasn't been a noticeable increase in testing, and as more lateral flow tests are now in place, you'd expect positives to fall on unchanged testing numbers (lateral flow tests are less sensitive).  Up until today, I was looking at the opening up roadmap and not really thinking there was likely to be much of an issue, now I am not sure.  Hopefully the vaccination levels can step up again in the next week or so.

Hospitalisations and deaths are still falling noticeably.  Deaths are still falling by 30% or so a week, which is very positive.  The vaccinations should keep this number falling significantly week on week.  Hospitalisations are likely to fall more slowly if cases don't start dropping at faster rates again. 

I don't do many Sweden updates, but their cases are rising again, and I don't think their deaths haven't been falling as rapidly as ours (the data lag is bad there).  You'd almost think they had found nirvana reading some people's tweets.  I don't know what we can learn from this.  The people of Sweden aren't entirely free right now either, but don't have vaccination rates as high as ours, and there is bound to be some seasonality in cases/deaths.  Their numbers must still be a bit of a worry though, given we are expecting to be heading into the end of all restrictions in a few months.

I think we just have to wait and see right now.  Maybe next week will be more positive again.  I am still quite positive, just not as positive as I was a few days ago.   

Should reasonably expect the correlation between cases and hospitalisations to shift somewhat in the coming weeks so that numbers of cases don't represent as much of a concern.

I spoke to a colleague in Italy today, he'd just booked his parents, both over 80, for a vaccination on 21st May. Incredible what we've achieved really.

As for irreversible, that's what it should be (although it's obviously a nonsense statement that Labour now parrot as well) - people have got to stop being so dramatic and risk averse - it's just not normal. The idea that when a mutant variation kills a few people more than an existing variant a new lockdown is triggered while we assess and wait for a newly engineered vaccine is tooooooooooo ridiculous.

I had to resist at least three poor taste alternative headlines for this story.



BBC News - Gender-reveal device explosion kills father-to-be
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56159731

How long have gender reveal parties been a thing?

The first I heard of them was about 2 years ago. Pretty sure they never existed back in the day when folks were more level-headed.

I think it's balanced out by those parents who keep things gender nutral until the child is old enough to decide.

Exactly, shame on the parents who guess what gender their kid is. Gender reveal should ideally be done at age 25.

I spent most of my adolescence trying to reveal my gender to someone.

Haha, didnt we all

All the best and Happy Birthday Ralph

I had to resist at least three poor taste alternative headlines for this story.



BBC News - Gender-reveal device explosion kills father-to-be
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56159731

How long have gender reveal parties been a thing?

The first I heard of them was about 2 years ago. Pretty sure they never existed back in the day when folks were more level-headed.

I think it's balanced out by those parents who keep things gender nutral until the child is old enough to decide.

Exactly, shame on the parents who guess what gender their kid is. Gender reveal should ideally be done at age 25.

Agree, the general direction (since vaccination became a serious option) seems mostly sound.

The small exceptions to this do still grate with me - ie freely associating outdoors is pretty much zero risk but there are restrictions. Also, quite a lot of hospitality and shop environments were very unlikely to be major areas of transmission but they're closed.

The lack of nuance, or maybe the lack of ability for people to deal with nuance - leading to restrictions for longer periods is a frustration to me and massively damaging to people and small businesses.

What is the logic to a gradual re-opening, open something, see what happens etc before we then open up further.

If vaccination doesn't massively suppress deaths/stress on the NHS to the point where it's a non story, or say similar to flu in story value, then where next. Lockdown and restrictions until what exactly ?

I guess with further, longer periods of restrictions you can notionally drive infection rates down enough to the point where testing really can pick up on tiny outbreaks. Or do we lockdown until we have 2 x, 3x the size of the NHS. Hope the roadmap sets out a few what-ifs with a decent amount of transparency.

Accelerate over 50s and open up in full a couple of weeks after they're all done.

At the very least the narrative should change from why don't we restrict more (zero coviders should be cancelled and locked away as bad for morale) to why don't we lift restrictions quicker

The "even" rig is the worst that they can do to you.  The cash out curse can be stopped by not cashing out and that's the behaviour they want from you, but the purpose of the "break even" rig is their way to get you to feel that playing is completely futile and give up altogether (after failing to enrage you by replacing rakeback with 25c spins).

Dry

In my defence: it was Tom's straight-faced reply as though the comment were literal which set me off.

Typical Tom, always starting something

Red Dog 10/10  ----- Food Banks - World Poverty is definitely on the increase - society trying to cancel out people who do not share their views (questions for another day).

Regulations - can have a damaging effect as well as a positive - if it is your hard earnt money or inherited you should be able to spend it on how you see fit - if you have a gambling problem there are many services out there to help you with your problem -

I'm generally fairly libertarian in my views and totally get this viewpoint but you do pick some strange examples - global poverty is palpably an improving metric rather than a reducing one.

Surely we need to compare problem gamblers to total UK gamblers rather than the full UK population?

I think there should be a threshold where you have to prove you can afford your losses.

Very good point from the highly intelligent Hopkin here