But the scientists on sage are purporting a range of views. It is the politicians who are deciding which tack to take
It's interesting that you have information on the range of views purported by a scientific group whose membership is not publicly declared (except by those who have chosen to identify) and whose minutes are not made public. More generally though, I never implied that the scientists on SAGE had a single unified view on all matters - indeed I would be concerned if they did, particularly given the dynamic situation of a pandemic caused by a previously unknown virus about which we hadbecause that implies "group think" - but I do trust them to consider the range of views expressed by its membership and for them to then have an evidence-led debate before drawing well-reasoned conclusions and recommendations. It is the whole
process followed that leads to good quality recommendations being made, in combination with the talents of the members, that makes it trustworthy.
You are also looking at this through only one eye of the telescope - preventing covid spread. Who is to say that is the great threat of the day? What about non covid deaths, job losses, economic stagnation, suicide, making ourselves poorer etc. ? As long as no one gets covid though - the "killer" virus most people are unaware theyve even had!!
Well that is a balanced decision that needs to be made by those in power. Most responsible democracies have trodden similar paths given the risks to their population and in particular the limited capacity of healthcare systems to cope with rapid, widespread transmission. You are surely aware of the initial difficulties faced in Italy when hospitals became overwhelmed with Covid patients, the modelling done by Imperial College around March-time which showed that UK excess deaths would be in the hundreds of thousands if nothing was done to prevent transmission etc.? You are of course most welcome to disagree with the decisions taken and vote out the government at the next election (in fact, please do just that), but decisions have been taken by our government in the declared interest of public safety and preventing harm and assuming you're a law-abiding citizen it's part of your contract with the state to respect these restrictions in order to protect others. Or by all means move to the USA or Brazil where they didn't follow the same path if you disagree - things are going well there, I hear.
Yes but... did we need to lockdown the country and economy to achieve this? Swedish evidence says no. It was clear early on who were the most vulnerable yet we locked down the healthy too. There is nothing wrong with saying "we got this bit wrong and that bit right".
And our recording of Covid deaths appears to be inaccurate
No we have a parallel Sweden instead that shows with minimal, almost none in fact, intervention you achieve an almost identical level of mortality.
Information on Sweden taken from here:
Is Sweden's coronavirus strategy a cautionary tale or a success story? - firstly it's important to recognise that whilst Sweden has not had enforced compulsory lockdowns in the same way as other countries, there is plenty of evidence that there have been significant voluntary changes in their behaviour to limit community spread. Their cases of Covid per 100,000 population are also running about double ours and higher than other neighbouring countries, with much higher deaths per population compared to neighbours as well. Their economy has taken a significant hit, less than the European average but worse than some other European countries who did have compulsory lockdowns. So the evidence from Sweden compared with other European countries is mixed. Bear in mind also that Sweden has a population density less than 10% of the UK and I suggest a much more compliant population (remember the public's response here to impending lockdown was to cram into town centres and pubs on a Friday night?), I think to draw evidence from Sweden as being directly relevant to the UK should be done very cautiously. I fully support an independent public enquiry to draw out such comparisons and learn lessons. Covid deaths being inaccurate? You're not wrong - due to inadequate testing in the early stages amongst other things, the official figure is at least 20% down on the true number from analysis of ONS data on excess deaths.
Andrew Wakefield was one doctor, not a scientist, whose crackpot assertions were shut down immediately by other scientists. It was the media that was at fault there.
The scientists I have quoted are not crackpot loners and they have sound data and experience to back up their claims, some of them are quite literally in charge of their countries pandemic responses.
EDIT: At least one I quoted is a Nobel Prize winner. So please don't bring up people like Wakefield as a straw man to bolster your poor argument.
Forgive me, but I don't see a single quote in your posts on this thread. If I have missed any, then please highlight them. Wakefield's paper was published in the Lancet; his co-authors didn't issue a retraction until 6 years after publication. It's very easy to highlight someone as a "crackpot" after the event, but if he was always identified as such then why did a respected medical journal publish his paper? I'm sure you can find respected scientists who disagree with consensus on points - scientists are fundamentally sceptical people who question things. I'm sure I could equally find respected scientists (with or without accolades such as Nobel prizes) who generally support the measures that have been taken and probably ones who argue we have not gone far enough. The point I am repeatedly making is that, as attractive as it might be to pick out dissenting voices that agree with your viewpoint (particularly if they appear well qualified), there is a reason why the consensus view of people who know what they are talking about carries so much weight.
Something else to consider with testing, false positives.
I don't have an accuracy figure for the UK test as I wasn't able to find out what we are using but I have seen the accuracy for the German test and it is 98.2%. I have seen figures of 97% and 99% for the UK test, but I also saw a figure of only 70% accuracy.
So for the sake of argument I am going to say that our test is 98% accurate to keep the numbers simple and that is probably a fair number as well.
The UK is currently doing approx 200k tests per day. Therefore the number of false positives per day would be around 4,000. The number of positive cases in the UK yesterday was 1,508. Draw your own conclusions from that.
Here you are suffering from a logical fallacy. The accuracy of a test is determined by sensitivity (the rate of false negatives) and specificity (the rate of false positives). All the information I have seen on Covid tests is that the sensitivity is much worse than the specificity (i.e. the rate of false positives is much lower than the false negatives, which is the "accuracy" you will see commonly quoted if not qualified with which measure it is referring to). I have seen specificity figures for many of the tests developed at better than 99.8%. Furthermore, the specificity would not change with time - we see clear trends developing in our case statistics that are strongly indicative of real virus spread (clusters of cases, for example). If positive cases were mainly associated with errors in specificity, then the statistics would mainly be noise - we don't see this.
All very interesting, but you don't have to be a genius or have a degree to comprehend that something, practically everything about the whole covid thing stinks.
A illness with a 99.6% recovery rate shuts down the world.
Millions poured into developing a vaccine while many more serious afflictions are ignored.
The virus is so deadly you have to have a test to see if you have it.
It's so contagious that you must wear a face covering, but you can throw that contaminated face covering in the bin or on the ground and it's no threat.
So the whole world has given itself an enormous economic shock because of a conspiracy to line the pockets of vaccine developers? Or hand gel manufacturers, perhaps? You think that Trump and co. are hoping that this is doing them some favours in an election year perhaps, because it's making them look great compared to their peers? Please. This line of argument doesn't stand up to even the most basic scrutiny.
Have I stumbled across a meeting of the flat earth society?
I say let’s wait and see.
Quite possibly!
We have members all around the globe.
Very punny.
I don't believe you ................ I say this because my video continued to work, they said it wouldn't but it did.
"They" weren't trying to sell you a DVD player at the time were they?
