Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis part 2 - Ireland

[eurotop40]

It's country first.

The results of the investigation of Labour anti-semitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission are not yet available (the investigation hasn't quite finished yet) and none of use know quite what it will say. However Labour anticipate it will be damning. In the last couple of weeks Labour have lost control of a local council (Brighton) because of anti-semitism of three Labour councillors.

Labour is such a repugnant party that any nation who elected them would in effect be destroying itself. It is not possible to support the people and values of UK and at the same time support Corbyn's Labour. Starmer is getting better PR, but until he can demonstrate he has rid the party of anti-semitism the reality is that it is the same awful party, just a more skilled leader.

 

[DiamondJoe]

It's country first.

The results of the investigation of Labour anti-semitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission are not yet available (the investigation hasn't quite finished yet) and none of use know quite what it will say. However Labour anticipate it will be damning. In the last couple of weeks Labour have lost control of a local council (Brighton) because of anti-semitism of three Labour councillors.

Labour is such a repugnant party that any nation who elected them would in effect be destroying itself. It is not possible to support the people and values of UK and at the same time support Corbyn's Labour. Starmer is getting better PR, but until he can demonstrate he has rid the party of anti-semitism the reality is that it is the same awful party, just a more skilled leader.

Yeah, same old Tories too..

Here’s 5 things you need to know about the Tories’ history of LGBT+ rights
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Opinion: Boris Johnson once called me a ‘shirt-lifter’ – decades later, has he built an anti-LGBT+ cabinet?

Not sure how you have the front to advocate for them tbh!*




* btw I'm not a Labour voter either

 

[Drifterwood]

Get up to date ! And find a life worth living lots of words must have taken a very long time to put together
Ps I once decorated a mans home in London from Greece
He said and I quote
There are no sharks in the Mediterranean because they are walking the land

 

[Drifterwood]

It's country first.

A country, is that the same as a United Kingdom, or a Nation State?

To continue from my factually correct analysis of the English, the development of England into a Nation State, was simply the determination of an ongoing process of vested interest. The vested interest of Henry VIII, and his ruling class was to develop a Nation State.

But then as now, the real question is, whose vested interests are served by the construct of States?

The English shires were persuaded, largely by foreign owned media, that the English vested interests were best served by abandoning the EU and reverting to the Nation State.

I am 90% persuaded that they are wrong. The majority of people are better served by the construct of a European Union. The time of little Kingdoms is past, but there are some very large vested interests that would have suffered through continued membership of the EU. The Shirelanders have been persuaded by flags and rah rah, and others simply by lies and prejudice.

The British are simply too lazy now, and too wedded to low initiative bland OK acceptance of the status quo, to go it alone again as they did in the past. England has performed the worst in the G7 nations through Covid, and our productivity remains woeful compared to those who have overtaken us economically.

The plebs have always been plebs to the people with the real power and big vested interest. This time the people have been thrown out to fend for themselves, but there will be a backlash and we've run out of serious Royal weddings. Perhaps a good Strictly series will see Boris through. Personally, I vote for pitchforks.

 

[dandelion]

The UK response to Covid19 has widely been regarded across the globe as disappointing and ineffectual - late into lockdown (which allowed the virus that Boris and co. didn't take seriously to rage out of control), late out (because of the resultant peak and strain on NHS), one of the worst outcomes in terms of mortalities worldwide, and now it seems that it has had the worst economic slump of all major economies globally - down almost 20% in Q2, twice that of the US or Germany.

The Uk started on a policy of attaining herd immunity through people catching it. A few even said so at the start, until the PR people shut them down because of adverse reaction. So it officially became 'flattening the peak'. this officially lasted until at least some weeks after lockdown.

At that point it changed from releasing once cases were low enough and there was capacity in the NHS to allow more cases and start getting more herd immunity. It somehow became eradication. At the start sage advised we could attempt to keep it out but once it had established this would be poinless. Yet it seems this is the policy we moved to after starting off on a policy of allowing big outbreaks.

i agree that doesnt make much sense: it isnt either trying to keep it out completely and so avoid deaths, or trying to get immune and so be done with it while accepting the lowest death toll you can mange.

I would however say a couple of things. The death toll is largely divorced from the general epidemic. It has mostly been deaths in care homes, so the total number critically depended on how well we cared for just 300,000 people. Similar things have applied across europe and the US. Not enough attention was given to this, because governments got carried away worrying what would happen to their 65 million ordinary citizens instead of worrying about the tiny number in care. yet in the end it was those in care homes or hospitals who dictated our perception of the epidemic, because it was them at most risk of death.

Experts at the start totally failed to understand how safe most people are and how high risk certain minorities are. using that information has always been how to address this epidemic and save lives.

As to the economic slump: so far the Uk government has not done anything much out of line with others. It is planning to start withdrawing support now, which is probably earlier than some others, but that has not really happened yet.

The obvious difference between the Uk and anywhere else is brexit. If you havea business in the Uk, you can look forward to just barely getting it back on its feet before Brexit will come along and knock it over again. Why bother?

The UK government had been collecting a war chest to spend on stimulating the economy after brexit, to address the expected Brexit recession. Its all gone now. Their best hope will be to blame everything on covid, but as you say we are already being seen as doing badly compared to others, and the obvious reason already is Brexit.

 

[dandelion]

This is unfortunately all jibberish.

What of what I said is incorrect?

The reason that the hospitalisations aren't as bad in Europe this time around is that it currently is predominantly affecting a younger demographic,

Sorry, where is there any proof of that? No one knows how many people in any country have been infected, so how can anyone tell if the age demographic has changed?All we know is that currently very few people are ending up in hospital.

We do know is that someone who recovers from the illness has developed an immune response - at least temporarily - and we can test for antibodies to demonstrate this.

We cannot test for antibodies to see who is immune. It has been demonstarted by studies on people who have had covid that most do not develop antibodies and do develop alternative means of immunity (t cells). we cannot mass test for these. Probably the reason antibodies have become the centre of out medical undertsanding is because they are easier to study. This is actually new science being explored, how we develop immunity to viruses.

Lockdowns were *only* intended to suppress the surge sufficiently (to avoid overwhelming health services) to switch to a test and trace approach with localised containment.

no. Sage talked about us getting as many peaks of epidemics as needed to attain herd immunity. Cant speak for what other countries advisors thought.

The only means we have as a species of this is to follow science -- which right now is still urging caution, wearing masks, social distancing, and all the other mitigation measures until vaccines or therapeutics are proven.

iIf those vaccines never arrive, then we are all dead. Westrn society is collapsing around us because we have stopped trade. The people dont see that because governments have borrowed sums never imagined as possible to borrow. The western financial structure is at best an illusion propped up by governments, but it becomes daily more illusory. We get back to work or die, just no one knows the dealine precisely. Might be too late already.

it is immoral to promote letting the virus run rampant when we know this will overwhelm hospitals and ICU beds

Sage said that in March. They said in fact it was already too late and this was going to happene whatever the Uk government did. All it could do was try to prevent the worst of it. But it never happened. it isnt going to happen.

The most likely thing is we already have significantly increased the proportion fully immune, and increasd the low level partial immunity of most people. this is because we have all been exposed to low dose covid, which is by now probably totally ubiquitous everywhere there are people in the UK (but at a very low level).

Studies in germany have suggested 35% had immunity before this ever began. The herd immunity target was therefore only 2/3 of 2/3 of the total population from the start, or 4/9. In the Uk thats about 30 million infections. Realistically we have achieved 20 million by now, we might have done better so are getting close.Add that to the likelihood there will now be far fewer serious cases as a proportion, and its pretty much over.

 

[dandelion]

Plus - I would add - is that this illness is not a simple flu, which is demonstrated by the horrendous number of medical/nursing staff who have died,

last I heard only a very small number of medical staff have died. No worse than the general population.

You may have noticed that a statistical problem with recording of deaths has been resolved.

Both having a 28 day cutoff after testing after which no death is counted as covid, and counting all deaths after a positive test regardles of whether someone recovered from covid and died from something else - are both absurd. The error now is probably smaller but hardly eliminated.

 

[Industrialsize]

We cannot test for antibodies to see who is immune. It has been demonstarted by studies on people who have had covid that most do not develop antibodies and do develop alternative means of immunity (t cells). we cannot mass test for these. Probably the reason antibodies have become the centre of out medical undertsanding is because they are easier to study. This is actually new science being explored, how we develop immunity to viruses.

Studies in germany have suggested 35% had immunity before this ever began. The herd immunity target was therefore only 2/3 of 2/3 of the total population from the start, or 4/9. In the Uk thats about 30 million infections. Realistically we have achieved 20 million by now, we might have done better so are getting close.Add that to the likelihood there will now be far fewer serious cases as a proportion, and its pretty much over.

T-cell mediated immunity is a difficult subject of which you have no understanding.

The study in Germany does not say what you think it says because you don't understand it. I've pointed out your error previously.

 

[Jason]

Both having a 28 day cutoff after testing after which no death is counted as covid, and counting all deaths after a positive test regardles of whether someone recovered from covid and died from something else - are both absurd. The error now is probably smaller but hardly eliminated.

Agreed.

The correction helps. However:
* 28 days is almost certainly too long. I understand 21 is used by some nations.
* deaths recorded through Covid 19 should be when this really is the cause of death.
* we need discrimination between death caused BY coronavirus and death WITH coronavirus.

The UK's figures are horrible but they are not as bad as we have been told. In particular the present daily death rate is well down.

The issue we're now faced with is whether the basic errors that led to the wrong figures were mistake or malice. The result has been:
1) decisions affecting the whole population have been made on the basis of figures that are wrong.
2) people have been frightened by the figures.

 

[dandelion]

* deaths recorded through Covid 19 should be when this really is the cause of death.
* we need discrimination between death caused BY coronavirus and death WITH coronavirus.

I am very interested in life expectancy figures for those who have died. There is an awful lot of difference between working to save someone like boris Jonson, who might hope for 20-30 years life expectancy, or someone already very sick who might have had no more than a month, and that with poor quality of life. The NHS has always considered such things when allocating limited resources (and they are always limited)

The study in Germany does not say what you think it says because you don't understand it. I've pointed out your error previously.

Well, you pointed out -cryptically- that you thought there was more to be said, and I provided you with a more in depth explanation. I dont recall you ever discussing the details?

Bottom line, 35% immune before we started. Maybe in the UK another 30% immune now from infection. Could be more. While the rest have probably increased their partial immunity, which will not prevent them getting infected but will result in a milder outcome, hence hospitalisations has crashed.

It seems highly likely this is the typical pattern for any flu type disease. a lot of people already immune from past infections, or past related infections. as it progresses the population picks up low grade immunity and so severe cases disapear first. But severe cases are also probably the biggest spreaders. so infectiousness also tumbles.

Truth is we have been lucky. Many are already immune because of exposure to related diseases, and the great majority can fight it off anyway from a standing start. If it had been handled differently we could have had a lot fewer deaths and generated immunity from managed low level exposure. Vaccination has always been a possibility, the old fashioned way, by exposure to a very low dose of the virus.

 

[Jason]

I am very interested in life expectancy figures for those who have died. There is an awful lot of difference between working to save someone like boris Jonson, who might hope for 20-30 years life expectancy, or someone already very sick who might have had no more than a month, and that with poor quality of life. The NHS has always considered such things when allocating limited resources (and they are always limited).

I think these figures are available for the UK, but in the small print and they just haven't been picked up by the media. Around half of UK fatalities are people with a life expectancy of under six months. It's a tragedy, but a different sort of tragedy to the one the media suggest. Presumably we will see in a few months deaths go below the usual trend.

Of course there's a separate issue for people who have a jolly nasty illness (and recover). In the UK we saw people like Dominic Cummings have it and recover. He managed to drive London to Durham in the hours before he succumbed, had a rough week, and was able to drive south immediately afterwards. This is a typical trajectory for someone of his age. Johnson is the outrider. It's actually odd that he was so ill. He's obese of course. And he might just possibly be on the magic mushrooms.

I'm increasingly feeling Sweden has the only possible approach. It has established a new norm in which its society can function. It has had deaths comparable with UK, Italy, Spain and France (and nowhere near as high as Belgium). The contrast is with Denmark, Finland and Norway, but it seems increasingly clear it is not all over in these.

 

[Industrialsize]

Bottom line, 35% immune before we started. Maybe in the UK another 30% immune now from infection. Could be more. While the rest have probably increased their partial immunity, which will not prevent them getting infected but will result in a milder outcome, hence hospitalisations has crashed.

The German Study that you are using to make that statement does not come to that conclusion. The bottom line of the Study:
"the role of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells for clinical outcomes remains to be determined in larger cohorts."
You probably don't understand what that means.
Please explain what cross reactive t-cell mediated immunity is and how it works.

 

[g0nz0]

Sorry, where is there any proof of that? No one knows how many people in any country have been infected, so how can anyone tell if the age demographic has changed?All we know is that currently very few people are ending up in hospital.

As luck would have it, a handy link for that appeared just today in my news feed...

Surge in Covid-19 cases across Europe linked to young people

We cannot test for antibodies to see who is immune. It has been demonstarted by studies on people who have had covid that most do not develop antibodies and do develop alternative means of immunity (t cells). we cannot mass test for these. Probably the reason antibodies have become the centre of out medical undertsanding is because they are easier to study. This is actually new science being explored, how we develop immunity to viruses.

People do develop antibodies, the problem is that they don't appear to last terribly long.

no. Sage talked about us getting as many peaks of epidemics as needed to attain herd immunity. Cant speak for what other countries advisors thought.

Fair point. That UK "superior scientific advice" was thrown until BoJo's red bus. I lose track, its pretty crowded under there.

Sage were wring then, and corrected their course.
As they should, if they claim to be following the science.

iIf those vaccines never arrive, then we are all dead. Westrn society is collapsing around us because we have stopped trade. The people dont see that because governments have borrowed sums never imagined as possible to borrow. The western financial structure is at best an illusion propped up by governments, but it becomes daily more illusory. We get back to work or die, just no one knows the dealine precisely. Might be too late already.

Nope, it is possible to manage the outbreaks. Many countries have demonstrated this. Difficult if not impossible to eradicate entirely, but certainly possible to manage.

But there us also significant confidence that vaccines will arrive. Vaccines look to be generating an immune response, and so are promising. Therapeutics aiming to alleviate or prevent the cytokine storm are also showing promise. In fact, this might be why O type blood naturally appears to have a slightly easier time with the virus.

The most likely thing is we already have significantly increased the proportion fully immune, and increasd the low level partial immunity of most people. this is because we have all been exposed to low dose covid, which is by now probably totally ubiquitous everywhere there are people in the UK (but at a very low level).

Studies in germany have suggested 35% had immunity before this ever began. The herd immunity target was therefore only 2/3 of 2/3 of the total population from the start, or 4/9. In the Uk thats about 30 million infections. Realistically we have achieved 20 million by now, we might have done better so are getting close.Add that to the likelihood there will now be far fewer serious cases as a proportion, and its pretty much over.

"Most likely" is not compatible with do no harm. Most likely is throwing the dice with people's lives, needlessly and heedlessly.

 

[Jason]

BBC has a view on T cells immunity and coronavirus, here.

This does not agree @dandelion 's figure of 35%. Rather it says 40-60%.

If this is correct then herd immunity is the correct approach. I appreciate that this is a big IF, but it may be that Sweden was correct, and for that matter the initial UK response was correct.

 

[dandelion]

And he might just possibly be on the magic mushrooms.

Naughty! you are moving into Brexit rather than medicine. There was however some talk he has a history of respiratory disease.

This does not agree @dandelion 's figure of 35%. Rather it says 40-60%.

The article says "Most people probably haven’t thought about T cells, or T lymphocytes as they are also known, since school,"

I really dont recall them being mentioned much in school! I dont recall them being mentioned by SAGE or any epidemiologists at the start of this epidemic. They did talk about antibodies, and trying to get national antibody tests to ascertain immunity. This was just as much a surprise to the experts as to everyone else.

Having said that, the article also reports experiments in 2011 with mice using SARS coronvirus - related to covid - which showed t cells were the immune response which cleared the virus. So if people had been paying attention, they ought to have been aware of this already.

I suspect that what happened is people concentrating on what they can measure, rather than what they cannot. It is possible to mass test for antibody, but not t cell. So...people have data about antibodies so they study that and not t cells.

The article also says that while there are related coronaviruses in circulation which are pretty harmless but cause colds, and they were studied a lot decades ago, there has been no interest in studying them in the modern era of such easy lab tests. So our information on this class of virus is somewhat dated.

Commercial antibody tests I have looked into seem designed to give a yes/no answer whether a person has enough antibody to clear a virus infection. They set a certain level of antibody and say if the person had more than that. That process is especially unhelpfull if antibodies are normally only contributing a small part to the total of immunity a person has against covid. A low level of specific antibody could tell us the system has been activated, so there must have been an infection and the person must have had a total immunity for all sources enough to beat it off, but they arent designed to do that.

It seems antibodies are only created in a bad case, so antibody testing is biased towards telling us about numbers of severe cases, as is the reltively easy to measure number of people going to hospital or dying. Antibody is telling us little about the total of people who have had a mild case, who arent being counted by any method.

It seems likely the classic model for predicting epidemics Susceptible -exposed -infected - recovered, is particularly unhelpfull in a situation where most people start off at a certain point on a variable range of immunity which can change their outcome from no effect to death. It needs an analog model, not a digital one, which can included the proportions of people geting no symptoms, mild, severe, and so can predict separately the proportions who wont need medical care and those who will. This is much more important than the total number of cases.

it needs to be able to define which age groups are at risk, allow for basic risk factors, for the deterioration of the immune system with age. But also, that the default position may still be that a healthy human (more likely if you are young) can beat off covid from a standing start.

The bottom line here is that there has been essentially no testing to tell us directly the proportion of people in the Uk who are now safe from covid because of either full or partial t cell immunty (and safe includes people getting a mild case)
It seems very likely the epidemic is essentially over, and while case numbers may go up again, community deaths will not.

General improvements to immunity may not have reached people in care homes, so they continue to need specific protection, although they may also have been mildy exposed and so gained immunity. But there must also be a risk that even amongst those there is disproportionate risk for anyone nearing their end anyway, and there will always me more of these coming along as time passes. (ie, if a very high risk at the start was people within 3 months of death, by now there is a completely new set of such people. This will always be true, and probably applies also to annual flu deaths)

 

[dandelion]

"the role of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells for clinical outcomes remains to be determined in larger cohorts."
You probably don't understand what that means.

I understand what it means, and i wrote you a longish post explaining. if you still have difficulties with some of the points, perhaps you might like to highlight them one by one and we can discuss it further?

Please explain what cross reactive t-cell mediated immunity is and how it works.

if you have the jargon, then you must already know? I didnt use such terms as it would be highly unhelpfull to confuse people with technical terms. Here is an article, which might be the research mentioned in the article jason posted. For variety, it comes from the US, whereas similar things have been reported from germany and sweden. https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30610-3.pdf

In the summary it says " Importantly, we detected SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD4+T cells in 40%–60% of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘‘common cold’’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2."

It means.. catch a cold and you may get a bonus of immunity to covid.

I would point out that simply by statistical probability, where people have a varying immunity and are exposed to varying infecting doses of the virus, there will be some who get infected and some not. But the people with lowest immunity are likely to both get the worst cases and be infected first. So it is likely - purely statistically and not assuming any changes from the starting point level of immunity - that as an epidemic goes on it will present with more and more mild cases.

Further, as we get fewer severe cases, then average infecting dose will fall, again reducing the number of cases able to reach the threshold to create an infection: averge immunity rising because we eliminated those least immune first, while average infectiousness falling because we had the most severe cases first.

And then we need to consider that apart from people becoming fully immune because they already had it, others are slowly building their personal immuntiy through low level exposure (assuming measures like masks have not hampered this too much).

Taken together, these effects might create a sudden collapse of cases and the virus just disappear (oh, that did happen in other examples)

Traditional modelling doesnt look at it from this perspective, it just assumes people are immune or not. It seems to have been a bad mistake to base protctive measures on such modelling.

 

[dandelion]

As luck would have it, a handy link for that appeared just today in my news feed...Surge in Covid-19 cases across Europe linked to young people

The problem is, all government testing around the world has been case led. And indeed, severe case led. In the UK testing used to be concentrated in hospitals, where obviously all the very sick people were taken. Cases in hospitals were the largest proportion for months, although alternative measures of cases such as the KIng's phone app were reporting millions more cases in the UK than officialy counted bu government. At the peak of the epidemic King's has somthing like x70 more cases than government. King's was measuring the real national epidemic, whereas government was measuing what was happening in hospitals, and then a bit later it added care homes.

We know from most studies of infections that the infection rate has always been fairly even across the population. Lower for kids and for pensioners, with most cases amongst adults. But the hospital cases have massively been amongst the oldest, steady rise with hardly any kids and many in the oldest age groups.

All across Europe deaths have disappeared and hospital cases too. Testing has changed, trying to identify where there are most cases to be found. It is now measuring community infections, where the profile has always been most cases as working adults, with a bias towards the younger end. That hasnt changed. There are no more severe case, so the detected cases is no longer following that profile of the older then the more cases.

It isnt a change to more cases amongst the young. Its a change away from deaths amongst the old, and away from deaths amongst anyone. Its dying out as a dangerous disease.

Sage were wring then, and corrected their course.

Nor is there any evidence SAGE changed its advice. What seems to have happened is a political decision to abandone herd immunity and go for suppression.

"Most likely" is not compatible with do no harm.

Closing down a nations economy is not compatible with 'do no harm'. Moreover, it is an active decision to deliberately do something rather than a passive decision to withold intervention. Its an awfully big harm.

 

[DiamondJoe]

The problem is, all government testing around the world has been case led. And indeed, severe case led. In the UK testing used to be concentrated in hospitals, where obviously all the very sick people were taken. Cases in hospitals were the largest proportion for months, although alternative measures of cases such as the KIng's phone app were reporting millions more cases in the UK than officialy counted bu government. At the peak of the epidemic King's has somthing like x70 more cases than government. King's was measuring the real national epidemic, whereas government was measuing what was happening in hospitals, and then a bit later it added care homes.

We know from most studies of infections that the infection rate has always been fairly even across the population. Lower for kids and for pensioners, with most cases amongst adults. But the hospital cases have massively been amongst the oldest, steady rise with hardly any kids and many in the oldest age groups.

All across Europe deaths have disappeared and hospital cases too. Testing has changed, trying to identify where there are most cases to be found. It is now measuring community infections, where the profile has always been most cases as working adults, with a bias towards the younger end. That hasnt changed. There are no more severe case, so the detected cases is no longer following that profile of the older then the more cases.

It isnt a change to more cases amongst the young. Its a change away from deaths amongst the old, and away from deaths amongst anyone. Its dying out as a dangerous disease.

Nor is there any evidence SAGE changed its advice. What seems to have happened is a political decision to abandone herd immunity and go for suppression.

Closing down a nations economy is not compatible with 'do no harm'. Moreover, it is an active decision to deliberately do something rather than a passive decision to withold intervention. Its an awfully big harm.

^ anther day, another wall of text.

I think it's fair to say yr not working atm. Is that why the current situation pisses you off?

 

[dandelion]

^ anther day, another wall of text.

If you spend more time reading the detail, then you might be better informed about the arguments instead of repeating the same mistakes?

There is no evidence in the UK based upon government pcr testing to say how many cases we have now or really have ever had. Nor in what groups this has happened most. This testing was never designed to find out case numbers, or where it is prevalent or what groups have most infection, but just to deal with cases as they arose. This morning someone was arguing we need to increase testing to 1 million a day. That has been the story from the start....never enough.

Just imagine, 1 million tests a day. if they cost £10, thats 10 million a day. £3.7 billion per year. For what, exactly?

 

[Industrialsize]

The problem is, all government testing around the world has been case led. And indeed, severe case led. .

Well you see, that's not true. I can get in my car, with no appointment, no symptoms, no doctor's note, and drive to the local drive-thru testing site in my City. (I'm going to venture a guess and say that you don't know how any government testing program works except, possibly, the UK)