Some people have been negative about everybody connected to the government but to me it seems like the current 'communication problems' they have all seem to have coincided with Boris Johnson coming back.

Even though he hasn't publically done that much himself it seemed like the government were doing so much better when he was off sick.

How did they think they’d get this one through? A big number on the day we moved from Alert level 4 to Alert Level 3, with a bit of 1.

https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1267498210609844224?s=21

If you were going to change the convention for how daily deaths are announced (grossly understated as they are). What would be the motivation for not mentioning that you were doing it?

556 for the U.K, on a day that Spain has had zero.

I’m not happy with the way the revised number was slipped out like a dodgy celeb in dark glasses and a baseball cap. But there weren’t 556 deaths in the day. You can’t run with the post-truth accusations if you are anything other than 100% accurate and truthful yourself.

FWIW I am getting tired of the manipulation of figures and reporting.

Good morning

The daily reported deaths have never been deaths from the previous 24 hours. They established the convention for how they report, they broke that convention and they need to explain why.

I'm a bit confused - he reported the deaths from the previous 24 hours, as they know them on the day.

The 'extra' deaths were the ones that were retrospectively added to a previous weeks total.

Wouldn't they have to change the convention to report those? Because this isn't the first time that they've revised past figures, I don't read all the footnotes all the time but I this is at least the third time previous weeks figures have been revised.

And it's an extra 400ish deaths covering a whole week - so about 60 a day. Why do you think it matters so much?

From a national point of view it doesn't matter if we had 110 or 70 or 200 deaths; what matters is if the trend is up or down or flat.

As I've suggested before, there are dozens of tables, dozens of charts and each one of them could be explained in the daily press conference and every footnote for every chart could be explained - but is that really a constructive use of time? Particularly as this data is all publically available for the journalists to analyse at their leisure anyway.

They have always added historic revisions in to the daily deaths, we have known this for weeks, (I’m a bit surprised if you didn’t know this) this time they didn’t. They could argue that 445 additional deaths yesterday would have been of no interest to anyone and so weren’t worth mentioning, it would be a bold argument to put forward.

The deaths weren't yesterday.

Weren't they a week's worth of deaths?

Do you mean add it to the bar chart/7 day rolling average? Or the actual figure he said? Because adding it to the figure he said would be wrong - as it was a week's worth not the days figures; I don't think they've added a weeks worth of extra deaths onto a daily figure before (have they?)

They have always added the total number of deaths that they have become newly aware of in the previous 24 hrs to their daily deaths announcement. They then additionally publish the actual dates those deaths took place. Yesterday, for the first time, they didn’t say a word about them in the briefing. I wasn’t expecting you to be behind Rick & PP (no offence intended to them, in fact credit to them for calling it how they see it), in tiring of the dishonesty.

There is a (very) different way still available to them. Be completely honest around the key figures, so honest that there’s no room for a suggestion that you’re lying (even if it’s lying by omission). Start with an explanation for yesterday’s deaths announcement and then the number of people tested daily, a figure they claim they haven’t known for 9 days.

Okay, I think I get what you mean now, it relates a lot to CF's point about the presentation. It was a bit confusing the way you said it, because it seemed a lot like you were saying they should say that over 500 people died in one day, when even allowing for future upward revisions it's going to be in the 100-200 range.

If you mean they didn't overtly point out the total figure had been revised then fair enough. But they have done before, and the figure is right there. You'd hope at some point the journalists wouldn't need every detail explained to them and could just understand it without  - but it's possible they were relying on the media just not bothering to look at one day's figure to the next (?)

It's the fact that they're trying to sell us "look! all the figures are going down! so easing the lockdown is ok!" whilst footnoting these 400 extra deaths.

I thought it telling the government went through the slides and the figures rather than getting the scientist to do it. Suggests to me there's a conflict there in the scientists would not have span it the way the government want.

Note also the R level was not presented. Nor was the threat level.

I agree, there could be an issue with presentation - it just wasn't that issue

If they added the extra historical deaths to when they happend on the daily bar charts and 7 day rolling average it would increase the previous figures while keeping the current figure the same.

The current figure might be 'upgraded' in a future revision - so adding those revised figures to anything other than just the total might be more misrepresentative than leaving them out it would look like the rate is going down faster than it is.

imo - that is; the way they did it seems liked perfectly good statistics to show an accurate trend. At some point if they are doing it all wrong they won't be able to hide the figures that show it's going wrong

How did they think they’d get this one through? A big number on the day we moved from Alert level 4 to Alert Level 3, with a bit of 1.

https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1267498210609844224?s=21

If you were going to change the convention for how daily deaths are announced (grossly understated as they are). What would be the motivation for not mentioning that you were doing it?

556 for the U.K, on a day that Spain has had zero.

I’m not happy with the way the revised number was slipped out like a dodgy celeb in dark glasses and a baseball cap. But there weren’t 556 deaths in the day. You can’t run with the post-truth accusations if you are anything other than 100% accurate and truthful yourself.

FWIW I am getting tired of the manipulation of figures and reporting.

Good morning

The daily reported deaths have never been deaths from the previous 24 hours. They established the convention for how they report, they broke that convention and they need to explain why.

I'm a bit confused - he reported the deaths from the previous 24 hours, as they know them on the day.

The 'extra' deaths were the ones that were retrospectively added to a previous weeks total.

Wouldn't they have to change the convention to report those? Because this isn't the first time that they've revised past figures, I don't read all the footnotes all the time but I this is at least the third time previous weeks figures have been revised.

And it's an extra 400ish deaths covering a whole week - so about 60 a day. Why do you think it matters so much?

From a national point of view it doesn't matter if we had 110 or 70 or 200 deaths; what matters is if the trend is up or down or flat.

As I've suggested before, there are dozens of tables, dozens of charts and each one of them could be explained in the daily press conference and every footnote for every chart could be explained - but is that really a constructive use of time? Particularly as this data is all publically available for the journalists to analyse at their leisure anyway.

They have always added historic revisions in to the daily deaths, we have known this for weeks, (I’m a bit surprised if you didn’t know this) this time they didn’t. They could argue that 445 additional deaths yesterday would have been of no interest to anyone and so weren’t worth mentioning, it would be a bold argument to put forward.

The deaths weren't yesterday.

Weren't they a week's worth of deaths?

Do you mean add it to the bar chart/7 day rolling average? Or the actual figure he said? Because adding it to the figure he said would be wrong - as it was a week's worth not the days figures; I don't think they've added a weeks worth of extra deaths onto a daily figure before (have they?)

How did they think they’d get this one through? A big number on the day we moved from Alert level 4 to Alert Level 3, with a bit of 1.

https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1267498210609844224?s=21

If you were going to change the convention for how daily deaths are announced (grossly understated as they are). What would be the motivation for not mentioning that you were doing it?

556 for the U.K, on a day that Spain has had zero.

I’m not happy with the way the revised number was slipped out like a dodgy celeb in dark glasses and a baseball cap. But there weren’t 556 deaths in the day. You can’t run with the post-truth accusations if you are anything other than 100% accurate and truthful yourself.

FWIW I am getting tired of the manipulation of figures and reporting.

Good morning

The daily reported deaths have never been deaths from the previous 24 hours. They established the convention for how they report, they broke that convention and they need to explain why.

I'm a bit confused - he reported the deaths from the previous 24 hours, as they know them on the day.

The 'extra' deaths were the ones that were retrospectively added to a previous weeks total.

Wouldn't they have to change the convention to report those? Because this isn't the first time that they've revised past figures, I don't read all the footnotes all the time but I this is at least the third time previous weeks figures have been revised.

And it's an extra 400ish deaths covering a whole week - so about 60 a day. Why do you think it matters so much?

From a national point of view it doesn't matter if we had 110 or 70 or 200 deaths; what matters is if the trend is up or down or flat.

As I've suggested before, there are dozens of tables, dozens of charts and each one of them could be explained in the daily press conference and every footnote for every chart could be explained - but is that really a constructive use of time? Particularly as this data is all publically available for the journalists to analyse at their leisure anyway.

It would be interesting if anyone was able to provide evidence in support of the ‘they (U.K gov) did their best on what was known at the time and were just unlucky’ narrative that seems to be a popular view in the thread.

https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1266423527739215874?s=21

This lady has good credentials to make a judgement.

Do you mean like,

"& oh wow- some of the conclusions they reached were way off. 8th SAGE meeting: 'When there is sustained transmission in the UK, contact tracing will no longer be useful."

When there is sustained transmission in the UK - why do you think contact tracing would be useful?

What, to you, is the purpose of contact tracing?


"15th SAGE meeting- March 13: 'SAGE was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress spread of COVID-19 will cause a second peak.' 'Community testing is ending today.' 'The science suggests household isolation...of the elderly and vulnerable should be implemented soon.'"

How is this controversial?


"16th SAGE meeting: 'The objective is to avoid critical cases exceeding NHS intensive care and other respiratory support bed capacity.'"

Again - isn't this kind of what the government was suggesting was the strategy all along? There may be a suspicion that it lead to some excess deaths because of the overwhelming focus on 'protecting the NHS' but what we had at that time was doctors in Italy basically choosing who was going to live and die because their hospitals were overwhelmed so I think that links quite clearly to making decisions based on what was known at the time.


Her tone seems to be very much "OMG" but none of what she's posting seems particularly surprising, unknown or contrary to general epidemiological knowledge.

I really enjoy your posts kukushkin88.  Think you and Doobs have provided really great posts, analysis, links throughout.  Keep up the good work.

Thanks 🙏, I have enjoyed contributing to this thread. If I stop, it won’t be down to the complaining of people who hold different values to me.

On a slightly related note. If people want, I am happy to stop calling Boris . Maybe with a minor explanation for why I think it’s OK but am willing to bow to the views of others on it.

I’m not sure what it means (or if it’s or DS?).

I think you should post what you want to (as long as it doesn’t cross the line) - other peoples issue if they don’t like your view.

Agreed, I complete the DT cryptic crossword every Saturday but had never figured out what the Jack of Diamonds meant.

This made me smile. It’s Dipshit Johnson, DeeJay (in my mind), . I thought it was obvious 😊.

It really wasn't.

I assumed it was a persistent typo.

More generally I'd go back to the idea that you can only judge what countries did at the time and whether it was reasonable.

In January a country might have stopped all flights from the affected area in China, or they could have had a testing and contact tracing team meet all those flights instead; or either of those decisions could have been applied to the whole of China.

That's 4 possible decisions on the back of a very simple starting point. All 4 of those decisions would be a reasonable response at the time but they could all result in different outcomes to a countries excess mortality at this point of time. If 4 countries made those 4 different decisions then they all "pass" the reasonableness test, they all did the 'right' thing - their actual mortality figures now are irrelevant.

FT analysis of data from 19 countries finds Britain hit hardest, ahead of US, Italy, Spain and Belgium

The data  compiled from national statistical agencies for 19 countries for which sufficient information exists to make robust comparisons. Cue Jon.


https://www.ft.com/content/6b4c784e-c259-4ca4-9a82-648ffde71bf0

The standard comparison is to age adjust them.

But primarily - it's not a league table; it's banding.

i.e. I don't really think there's any particular difference between 500 deaths per million and 1000 deaths per million; that whole range can basically come down to luck.

In terms of comparable countries the real difference still seems primarily to be Germany as the big outlier.


South Africa's doing well isn't it?

...

There is no legal framework to say that you have to tell the truth, there is no way that T, T & I will work.

T, T & I is the same framework that is used at the beginning of every epidemic. It's used when sporadic cases of notifiable diseases surface i.e. this isn't a new system - people are used to administering this, it's just unusual for us to need it at this scale.

Things like cross referencing where people travelled compared with who they might remember meeting (and where they travelled) would rule out almost all of the malicious behaviour. As in what you say has to be in some way likely for that to work.

Sam Coates on Twitter (sky) does not suggest that these 25,000 contact tracers have been trained in a detailed forensic manner, unless you count reading a PDF for an hour as extensive training.

I have not seen anywhere that says a person named as being a contact has a right of arguing that they were not with the accuser, if the papers run with stories of false accusations from day one then I fear peiple acceptance of the instructions won’t be enough to bring down R sufficiently.

It's true, most of the experience will be with the people administering it at the top end but I think when people aren't entirely truthful it will be because they aren't including a detail they should (because they've got someting to hide) rather than them being malicious.

And in normal circumstances contact tracing would establish that people crossed paths, it should mean that it would still have to be feasible to cross paths for any maliciousness to work. I have a low opinion of the general public but I'd still be surprised if there was any particular amount of this happening once it starts.

...

There is no legal framework to say that you have to tell the truth, there is no way that T, T & I will work.

T, T & I is the same framework that is used at the beginning of every epidemic. It's used when sporadic cases of notifiable diseases surface i.e. this isn't a new system - people are used to administering this, it's just unusual for us to need it at this scale.

Things like cross referencing where people travelled compared with who they might remember meeting (and where they travelled) would rule out almost all of the malicious behaviour. As in what you say has to be in some way likely for that to work.

I'm never keen on vox pops but I thought the answers in this thread give an interesting insight on how people from other countries are viewing the measures their governments are taking (nearly all of them are answering the question basically with - my one)
https://www.quora.com/What-country-has-the-most-insane-Coronavirus-strategy

Which only strengthens the argument for sticking to things that we can measure.

If we can avoid the temptation to try and stick things into league tables then a bit of broader knowledge of other countries might help give a more generalised perspective.

Left and Right echo chambers are easy to fall into, but the US/Europe echo chamber is very difficult to avoid.

Hearing what a few random Armenian/Indian/Argentians (etc) think can help increase your understanding of the world in a way that a random vox pop in your own country won't.

It reminds me of a book I read which used the same idea about literature, it was a book containing stories from writers from different countries to give an idea about their perspective on literature in their country. But I can't remember what the book was called so that's not too helpful a comparison I realise.

The international comparison tables aren’t going anywhere. It will be a unique opportunity in our lifetimes to identify what constitutes good governance.

Pokerpops will be along soon, to thank you for the fact that Quora polls with 25 responses, are now the gold standard for assessing government response to Coronavirus. He will also be delighted with the finding that they’re all the worst, by this measure.

  good to see you're really taking to heart the message about learning about others and trying to grow as a person

I'm never keen on vox pops but I thought the answers in this thread give an interesting insight on how people from other countries are viewing the measures their governments are taking (nearly all of them are answering the question basically with - my one)
https://www.quora.com/What-country-has-the-most-insane-Coronavirus-strategy

Which only strengthens the argument for sticking to things that we can measure.

If we can avoid the temptation to try and stick things into league tables then a bit of broader knowledge of other countries might help give a more generalised perspective.

Left and Right echo chambers are easy to fall into, but the US/Europe echo chamber is very difficult to avoid.

Hearing what a few random Armenian/Indian/Argentians (etc) think can help increase your understanding of the world in a way that a random vox pop in your own country won't.

It reminds me of a book I read which used the same idea about literature, it was a book containing stories from writers from different countries to give an idea about their perspective on literature in their country. But I can't remember what the book was called so that's not too helpful a comparison I realise.

I'm never keen on vox pops but I thought the answers in this thread give an interesting insight on how people from other countries are viewing the measures their governments are taking (nearly all of them are answering the question basically with - my one)
https://www.quora.com/What-country-has-the-most-insane-Coronavirus-strategy

... We objectively have one of the worst responses to it in the world. ...

There are nearly 200 countries in the world - how many of that 200 do you know what their response has been?

Ok. I don't know the response of all 200 countries. Fair enough. Of all the developed countries though we are near the bottom of the list on most metrics are we not? I don't see many reports citing our response as a success story.

I don't like over generalisations.

Technically what you said wasn't an over generalisation - objectively the worst could 'technically' mean one of the worst 100 (for example), but I sensed that wasn't exactly what you meant.

I think any kind of analysis can show how countries could have responded better, but in general I think countries can only really be judged on whether their response was reasonable at the time.

More than one response is probably reasonable at the time. So if comparable countries did different things, they might both have been behaving reasonably but with very different outcomes. The UK might well come out as one of the worst, but only as a matter of days - whether we could have done some things a week earlier for example.

But putting in place measures to stop the virus can work both ways. There are some countries which have implemented very strict national lockdowns when some of their regions have zero cases and travel bans to stop cases arriving in those regions - is it objectively good that they are forcing people to self isolate and destroying their livelihoods in those areas? There are some countries with legally, strict lockdowns but national politicians openly telling people it's an over reaction and to ignore it - which they are doing.

Excess mortality is always going to be the best way to measure the result, but as mentioned before, some countries were never going to be hit badly by this virus no matter what they did. Some countries having 100 deaths instead of 10 deaths will be a poor result.

Coming back to your original statement, the gist of it may well be correct, it just seemed a bit reductive and over simplified for a very complicated situation.