Latest legal opinion appears to be that impeachment can't continue after the 20th. Wonder if enough republicans will help force it through before then versus those that will filibuster/delay?

My understanding is that impeachment will happen now - that's the Congress part; and that it's just the actual prosecution (the Senate part) that the question is about(?)

There seems to be a few experts or casual COVID professors on here. So can anyone have a guess at what the true death rate of this virus is yet ? My amateur stab in the dark is between 0.2 % and 0.3 % .

What is your definition of "true death rate"?

Do you mean case fatality rate?

[and]

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The interesting bit will be late March when deaths could be below 100 a day but cases over 30,000 a day we saw in Dec, should the lockdowns be eased as deaths are lowish  and declining or kept as cases are high.
...

Obviously politics an always get in the way but in general government policy has never been about keeping deaths low (or cases low for that matter) - government policy has all been about keeping hospitalisations low.

In practice that usually means keeping cases low but in theory if we have high cases, low deaths and low hospitalisations then that would suggest less restrictions.

I would guess we're more likely to have high cases, low deaths and high hospitalisations though.

I make bread now and again anyway but I haven't made souffle for about 20 years so this was pretty much learning how to do it from scratch again

Click to see full-size image.

It wasn't perfect, I might have lost some points if it was a Bake Off technical challenge - but pretty pleased it worked so well after all this time.

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I think you are a bit rude calling me disingenuous, as the death toll is truly shocking, and neither I nor the person I quoted said that the around 600k deaths we will see this year were just Covid deaths...

Easy now, you used an awful lot of words to explain how they're serious numbers when I was never disputing that and ended my post with explaining how a "low" number like a 13% increase is actually a "huge" number in the context given.

I was more expressing my opinion about his use of communication - his thread very much seemed to be criticising people using "dishonest" manipulation to dazzle people with numbers but he then ended his thread with "honest" manipulation to dazzle people with numbers.

But maybe he has more experience of this and knows that the only way to get the point across is to be dramatic.

Having tens of thousands of deaths from a global deadly pandemic doesn't particularly seem surprising or shocking to me, I apologise if I offended you, I didn't appreciate how sensitive and easily shocked you were.

[with]

...https://mobile.twitter.com/NickStripe_ONS/status/1340412018076110849

Given current weekly numbers of deaths, we can sadly assume that there are likely to be over 600k deaths registered in E&W this year There have only been 600k+ deaths registered in a single year once before – in 1918, the year of the “Spanish” flu pandemic

As people will point out, we have a bigger population than then, but we also have enormous advances in medicine, so if is still a bit shocking.  ...

I agree with the gist of his thread about misrepresenting statistics - but it's pretty disappointing that he chooses to end it like this.

This is just trying to dazzle people with big numbers.

The UK population in 1918 was a bit less than 40 million (so ignoring that includes Scotland) 600k deaths is 1.5% of the total
The UK population now is a bit less than 70 million so 600k deaths is 0.8% of the total.

So just brushing past that by saying  - but medical advances - seems a bit disingenious. Having approximately half the mortality seems like a pretty good measure to take into account medical advances.

Plus he ends up saying that the excess deaths is in the region of 70k  - this is a lot - but a 13% (ish) increase in deaths has decidedly less impact than saying 600 thousand deaths.

On the other hand -  -  -

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The response, to stop a few hundred thousand people dying some years before their time, is utterly ridiculous from any perspective.
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a 5% increase in excess mortality would make headline news and probably lead to an enquiry - so in this context 13% is pretty huge.

And this is with all the measures that have been taken.

It doesn't really matter the number of people or when they would have otherwise died - if your death rate is expected to change by 1 or 2% a year and then it suddenly tips into double figures, that will decimate your economy. Having a 13% increase instead of a 20/30/40% increase is really not something I'd see as an over reaction.

Why is it going up?

I saw a comment from some Republican politician piling in on how unseemly Trump is being - he said something along the lines of that every US election has irregularities because they're big and complicated affairs. But that they make barely any difference to the overall result.

I'm guessing Trump is hoping that if he casts a wide enough net he'll manage to get something that actually makes a difference somewhere that is really close but realistically I think he just wants a narrative to say that he never lost, it was stolen and even the courts were in on it.

To give an idea of how pointless most of the legal challenges are, one of them that has been thrown out was disputing about a stack of ballots which had a total of 56 votes in them.

Golf, tennis and swimming in line for reprieves from Thursday's Covid ban

s

Surely it's time for a country to actually try something different..

Sweden tried something different and there deaths rate per 100k is 10x the number of there nearest neighbours. and the scientists there now saying they got it wrong and pushing for a lockdown

think covid has everyone on back foot unless you can isolate all movement (like you pointed out NZ and AUS)

TBF, I don't think Sweden tried something very different from most of the ROW, they made a superior effort at treating people like grown ups but the essence was the same as (nearly) everyone else keep your distance, ban large gatherings, work from home if you can.

The net result of them treating people like grown ups is their fatality ratios, deaths per m is better than some and worse than others. The only thing they might prove in the long run is that more legally enforceable restrictions make no fundamental difference to the long term outcome.

Sweden have constitutional difficulties in forcing things like lockdown. They could have forced it through but it's actually a big deal in Sweden compared to the US where it was just the lunatic fringe who made a big deal over enforced restrictions.

Worth bearing in mind as well when thinking about comparisons with the UK - the UK is about half the physical size of Sweden with about 6 times the population; so however badly Sweden was hit using their approach, it would have been much worse if the UK had followed suit.

!

Police will enter homes and break up Christmas dinners if families break lockdown rules, predicts police commissioner https://trib.al/eRo0JuK

Daily Mail link warning - I didn't really get far into the story itself because I was bombarded with so much advertising and having to block the Daily Mail from providing me with notifications

After areas in the North have spent weeks/months in Tier 2 equivalent restrictions we finally get some mention of support now the rest of the country is catching up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54639713

I don't really see the relevance of the North being under Tier 2 restrictions for weeks/months when they were still being protected under the original furlough scheme.

Isn't the announcement now just because the original job retention/furlough scheme ends at the end of October rather than because other areas are catching up?

Sure they could have cleaned up the implications of the replacement scheme before it was announced, but amending it before it's launched doesn't really seem like a bad thing does it?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-54631524

I wonder what actually transpires in cases like this - payment or jail, payment scheme, family forced to pay, other ? Made me wonder if students should have the right to add this to their student loan

Flat fines are stupid. Should really be somehow means tested.

I had a look, the £10,000 fine is only applicable for people who instigate situations where other people break the law - mainly employers who force people who should be isolating to go to work, and people who organise parties.

Most legal fines take into account the ability of the person to pay but this is fixed - so I had a look at the law in general.

If you can't afford a fine you basically appeal the amount of the fine based on affordability - the court then has to take into account your ability to pay and can reduce your fine accordingly.

Seriousness of the crime as well as affordability is usually taken into account when fines are set, so I wouldn't necessarily expect those students to be shown much leniency.

And installment schemes are set up to pay fines, so there's a chance their fine will be reduced to take into account affordability but they'll most likely just end up paying it off over several years even if it is reduced a bit.

Seems like a political own goal to offer 60m in negotiations and then only give 22m when the negotiations breakdown. This is a bad look.

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It appears they have climbed down, Johnson has just announced £60m in Parliament.

It wasn't £22m instead of the £60m (according to the BBC yesterday).

The £22m was always being provided as part of 'everyones' funding for the epidemic control - it's for things like testing and track and trace.

The government specifically said the £60m was never off the table - that's additional funding for the economic aspect.

EDIT: this is the article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54622293
"Health Secretary Matt Hancock later told the House of Commons that a £60m offer previously made to local leaders remained "on the table"."
and
"The £22m mentioned by Mr Johnson - which is for expenses such as local enforcement and test and trace - is separate to the £60m that Mr Hancock spoke of."

cover what I wrote

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274

As Johnny Nash sang, “There are more questions than answers”

If it’s all about the students, how are Oxford and Cambridge managing to stay at around the 100/100,000 level?

Are the soft southern types really so much better at following guidelines than folks oop North?

Is the excess deaths figure still rising? It’s not getting mentioned much lately.

There are 130 universities in the UK - at the end of September there were 45 with cases of COVID19, and the media have only been reporting on about 4 or 5.