Isn't "Crazy" Nancy Pelosi making an error trying to remove Trump now.  He may be a complete moron, but an election is due and trying to remove him outside that just gives him a stick to beat you with.  Surely it galvanises his own supporters and makes the democrat supporters a bit uneasy?  And then don't thr Republicans just returrn the favour with Biden in a couple of years?

Trump is clearly a bit unhinged right now, and probably more so than normal, but it still seems a bad strategy to me.

 

My guess would be that her commission to look at the issue is never intended to invoke it.

Just have a month leading up to the election where the news can publically discuss his state of mind and fitness to carry out his job.

And it's not like it gives the presidency to the other side - it only gives it to the VP, who was on the same ticket for the election.

The BBC have confirmed the story now.

It's not exactly the error Tighty described but it was fundamentally similar other than this was a pretty small part of the system so suggesting they paid £12bn for an excel spreadsheet is probably a little bit misleading

The error was they used the xls format (maximum 65,000 records) rather than the xlsx format (over a million)

The data was provided in csv format but rather than import that into their system they imported it into excel templates then imported those.

I don't really think it's an issue about the pandemic at all - the error occurred in Public Health England - I think it's more of a reflection of public sector inefficiency. A lot of that is down to inefficiency in procurement but things like this show there are also operational inefficiencies.

[only]

Didn't think of staff, mebbe they do catch it from the wrong uns

From what I understood Sainsbury's announcement about safe places for black people was only about staff.

I thought it was along the same lines as when other employers declare themselves LGBT friendly.

I had the thought to actually have a look and this is a quote from Sainsbury.
"The “safe spaces” we created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement were online support groups that helped our black colleagues come together, share their experiences and support one another."

So that's pretty clear - it was for staff only and it was basically for online chats.

Cost £12bn
System Test and Trace
Database software: x
Spreadsheet software Excel. each case was a seperate column
Maximum columns reached !

16,000 positive cases unreported


man oh man

How did they reach the end for 7 days without noticing?  Wasn't it throwing off errors?   Hard to get the staff with so many unemployed and a budget of only £12bn.

Haha. Certainly a tight budget. It's bizarre if even close to true. When you consider what's available as standard It solutions and the cheap computing power available I just don't want to believe it.

Is it confirmed?

I heard a suggestion that csv files were used for transport and the records were lost because somebody opened them in excel when they should have just been imported into their system.

But that had no sources either so impossible to tell for either story whether it's got any merit or just people working out what "could" have happened given the evidence of the outcome.

There is more than one nuclear football to allow a nuclear retaliation - so it would have to be either related to another individual like Pence (in which case there's no need for a plane to take off unless it had one of these people on it); or it's talking about a Dead Hand system which would automate a nuclear retaliation in the event of the US being wiped out in the first strike.

The Soviet Union had this in the Cold War, it's a conspiracy theory to imagine that the US also had one then - it's the next level up to imagine they have one now.

...

It is just a series of big distortions.  I watched another couple of minutes and he went on to the 300 million people visited a pub in the UK, which relied on assumptions of 1,000 people a pub and a population of over 300 million. ...

To give extra context for that (because I happen to have recently seen the figure) - in surveys in 'normal' years about 40 to 50% of the population say they went to the pub in the previous week.

(I don't know how accurate it would be to extrapolate those surveys - but it gives an idea)

This site says 1980 for £1 a gallon

https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social_history/80s/how_much_did_things_cost.html

and this site says just over a pound in 1982 for cigarettes

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1609849/How-prices-have-changed-in-25-years.html

Thanks Jon.

No luck on the beef?

You were right about the mid 70's - but I could only find evidence for it from New Zealand.

I'd guess it was about the same in the UK(?)

This site says 1980 for £1 a gallon

https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social_history/80s/how_much_did_things_cost.html

and this site says just over a pound in 1982 for cigarettes

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1609849/How-prices-have-changed-in-25-years.html

I tried to Google when beef hit £1 per lb but I couldn't find the answer.

I'm guessing around 1975.


Also, when did petrol hit £1 a gallon and when were fags £1 a packet?

For 1975 for cigarettes
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/history/way-were-1975-last-eu-11509954

PRICES:
This was an era of rocketing prices as inflation reached 25% in the UK. The average house price was £11,000, you could buy a car for £1,840, while the average annual salary was £2,500. A loaf of bread cost 19p, a pint of beer around 30p, and a packet of 20 ciggies - socially acceptable at that time - around 42p

.... If you have a Huawei phone dont even bother downloading it, it will not work as Google/Apple (who own the technology used, which is what made me slightly less anxious about privacy) refuse to let it work on Huawei models.

To clarify - they won't work on new Huawei phones (or Windows phones) because Google Play Services aren't included on those models of phones.

If you have Google Play and if you can download it - then it will work.


EDIT: more accurately
"To install and use the NHS COVID-19 app, your phone will need Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4 or above and Operating System software Android Marshmallow, or iOS 13.5 or above". If your phone can't support it then it should either be not available to download or be marked as unsupported.

anyone downloaded the NHS app?

if not why not (out of interest)?

Nope, wasn't aware it was ready until now.   Will have a look later.

My wife was aware of it because her school was involved in discussions of how best to manage it in schools.

We were both a bit surprised that there wasn't more publicity to the launch.

I thought that maybe they were going for a soft launch to avoid servers getting overloaded - but most (maybe all) the processing is done on the phone itself and I think it would be pretty ambitious to think they would suddenly get several million people downloading at launch whatever they did for publicity. So all in all still a bit confusing why it hasn't had a bit more marketing.

.... How those things are policed is anyone's guess.

That's the most depressing part about the whole pandemic.

With a total lockdown there was almost universal compliance.

But with any measure in any way less than a total lockdown there's been widespread avoidance.

It's a pretty bleak reflection of the general population that most people's first thought seems to be 'how can I get around COVID restrictions' rather than 'how can I avoid spreading COVID'.

...
What we are picking up with the testing is obviously very different to the first time round though, surely that makes a difference? I'm not sure what the testing situation is in France, but I am assuming it isn't the same shambles it is here.
...

Context for the amount of testing.

Click to see full-size image.

...

I still havent worked out why at the very height of the situation we didnt have to wear masks and now when it is at its lowest we do ??

When everybody was social distancing and washing their hands, wearing a mask won't make a difference to your chance of catching or giving the infection.

But if they had made mask wearing mandatory, the false sense of security it provided might (probably would) have lead to much fewer people sticking to the rules about social distancing.

Now that less people are sticking to the social distancing rules anyway - that's why masks will help.

People who test +ve for COVID19 were TWICE AS LIKELY as controls to have visited a restaurant in the last week, in a CDC study.

Full paper at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a5.htm?s_cid=mm6936a5_w

"Eat Out to Help Out" looks a probable contributor to the current rising infection rate.

I don't know how far we can stretch this.  The restaurant group is only about 100 people total over the test population and the control, so that can be significant. 

The bar/coffee shop/church/gym/public transport sample sizes are only 20 across the test population and the control.  Hence any useful conclusion isn't possible, so I think it would be better not to publish those charts.   I expect many people could just view the picture and conclude bars are safer than restaurants and that is definitely not proven here.  FWIW I had to check the paper as it wasn't clear what I was looking at and I work with stuff like this; so am assuming most other people just make a bad conclusion.

As it is I think it just seems obvious that given the age ranges of the spike in Covid cases, and the correspenence with the bars opening and eat out to help out, that both have contributed to a rise in the Covid cases.  It is hard to say how significant the effect was because we don't have a better study to look at. 

I did smile a bit when they blamed the young people for the spread in Covid, and yeah they are partially responsible, but what the hell did you expect to happen when you reopened the pubs and ran the eat out to help out promotion? 

Would love to see a better UK bases study, but can't imagine our Government paying for a survey that shows eat out to help out might have had a downside. 

In addition to what you have said, I would have thought the fact that it is a US study makes it difficult to draw conclusions from for the UK. Primarily because of a lack of information.

This only collected data from 11 health centre's in the US. The US is very big and different states have had different rules with different levels of compliance.

The difference between those rules and levels of compliance doubly compounded against comparing it to the UK rules and UK levels of compliance just leaves too much variance. I don't see how you could infer any reliable meaning from this study as applied to the UK.

Imperial College have been studying the epidemic, so far they've only really broken it down down demographically. It would be handy if they added an extra set of survey questions like this to their analysis to give a UK based version (and their study is much bigger so hopefully wouldn't have any issues with sample size).