rocket_scientist

In my experience and practise, I listen to various and then make up my own mind. This will depend on the credibility and credentials of the person or persons presenting the view but mostly whether or not the content rings true to my instinct and therefore the quality of the critical thinking and the structure of the argument are keys. I've already decided that there has been insufficient research into the possible health implications and I'm alarmed to see that these could be very considerable.

You don't need links. Just Google or search 5G on Twitter. It's full of alarming content, none of which I'd seen before.

Correction. Before Friday. These are horrible numbers globally. I hope these governments are capable of learning and will be better prepared in the future. I can't see that our country, being run by a failed journalist as we are can possibly do anything with competence and intelligence.

Spain joins Italy in the 10,000+ deaths count. USA will catch them next.

I know nothing about this subject and the little I have read suggests that there may be problems with it. So I need to explore it more, and not because of the wild correlation that some guy made between 5G and Covid-19, which sounds utterly preposterous to me. The little I did know was that Huawei are big believers in it but I couldn't believe that the UK would introduce 5G if there were any possible health risks. Then again, I couldn't believe that the UK would go through with Cameron's great plan of getting a foreign superpower to build new nuclear facilities so fuck knows. This week, people in China are cutting down 5G masts whilst some new ones are appearing in the UK. Essential workers? Any of you guys read about 5G?

Fuck me, weird just got weirder: - https://youtu.be/LU8U9zRyre4 For clarity, I'm not saying I agree with it. Not qualified to know but sounds absurd to me. Edit: Daughter watched it and reckons he's a whack job, for being anti vaccines, for extrapolating a lot from nothing and for making a wild correlation that fails to understand the basics about biology and radiation. Edit: She's shared that video with her scientist mates and they're all laughing at the idiocy of the guy. One made a good point just now i.e. how do we even know he was ex-CEO of anything!

By all decent accounts, the peak will hit in the next couple of weeks and the deaths thereafter won't be exponential and should then start to reduce.

What's "wrong" is that they are lying to us and given the millions of sources for information available to us all, it's only the gullible, lazy or stupid who can't see through the spin.

Can anyone tell me what this post means?

Massive change of tone today in the questions at the daily briefings. Even Laura Kuntsberg had a dig, making an excellent three-pronged attack which of course, like EVERY tough question they ever get, is met with a three-pronged defence in that they either lie, deflect against or downright ignore. Laura is a slut. She kept her fucking weird sideways mouth shut the whole time and only now that social media and Piers Morgan and more and more articles are highlighting the shitness of the government, she's coming over. Investigative journalists are supposed to lead, not follow. This secretary of state cunt is a slimeball, just like every single one of them. Jenrick got slaughtered again today, on Sky and by Piers. That cunt gets battered every time he appears, the Lancet editor guy disembowelling him last week on QT.

An example today (and I'm hearing many shocking individual examples EVERY day) was a district nurse instructed to look after one elderly patient in his home (North East) who had tested positive. In other words, they have decided not to admit him to hospital and have already decided that he should die. The nurse was crying when she consulted my wife because she has an asthmatic son and is NOT being provided with ANY PPE whatsoever. She doesn't want to go home obviously and so they have arranged accommodation for her in Aberdeen. The old man and his wife live on a farm and have been isolated for two weeks and with their son dropping off essential shopping at the door, it is almost certain that it took 14 days before he was sick enough to be diagnosed. It's the same the UK over. Elderly Parkinsons and neurological patients are going to be very lucky to see a hospital, let alone a ventilator and my wife's patients are already dying with Covid-19 in Grampian and the North. My daughter volunteered to staff the testing labs in response to a cry for help e-mail that the government and the NHS put out to qualified medical students and staff more than six weeks ago. She has yet to hear back, like every one of her peers who she knows similarly put their hands up. It's a shitshow now, just as it always has been under these cunts in charge. It was only 9 days ago that Blow Job jolly jested about Operation Last Gasp. The number of NHS staff who have been tested is an embarrassingly minute percentage of the total front line staff and our government have been lying to us EVERY SINGLE DAY. Hancock said that he had the military distributing that weekend and led us to believe that the country had swung into action. The NHS staff are telling us that they haven't been tested and they're not in receipt of the basic tools they need to do their jobs.

The Netherlands became the 8th country to trip 1,000 dead yesterday and Germany and Belgium will make it 10 before the weekend. I said 5,000 dead in April but I didn't anticipate it would be the first week in April which it will be given that we have closed March with almost half that. The "top 10" are all over 2,000 now but there's so much stuff out there on the internet, it's difficult for any open mind to swallow much of it. I don't know what to believe in so many respects. I know not to trust the UK and US governments however.

Peston on Twitter exposed Gove's lies yesterday about the reason for the pathetic testing rate. In terms of the botched lockdown, we saw pictures of tube travellers yesterday but this was a shock: - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8175857/Piers-Morgan-NHS-heroes-led-donkeys-Boris-overrule-experts-tests.html The passengers on the many flights still coming in aren't being screened. Well, it wouldn't really be a shock given this government but it is beyond belief that any competent country would fail to do anything with incoming people. This government STILL aren't taking it seriously enough.

544 deaths reported today. Now we are seeing exponential. Inevitably and tragically. Fuck the government. Edit: Yeah, 563 seems to be the number for most news outlets now. At least the quoted total today makes sense arithmetically for a change.

Michael Osterholm was interviewed by Don Lemon on CNN just now. He said that the projections of death rates are based on a model that may well be completely wrong. He also pointed out that the healthcare system in the US is considerably worse today than it was in 2005 when he published that they were hopelessly unprepared for the next pandemic which was inevitably coming. Given the Tory mismanagement of the NHS for ten years - mostly by design rather than simple incompetence - there are obvious parallels between the US and the UK. Osterholm said that the ONLY way out of this crisis is for the government to have a plan, something he was adamant that the US federal government did NOT have. There's another mutual failing between the blond buffoons.

If the "alternative views" that have been championed prove to be sound, Trump may well have been right when he said "the cure can not be more damaging that the disease" (not that he's got the intellect to think anything through by any average standard of semi-intelligent critical thinking). Given the unemployment figures that are due in the US and also the UK and the (currently) immeasurable damage to the economy resulting in the exchequer being starved of collectible taxes, and already borrowing trillions to fight the virus, the fraudulent "austerity" they imposed on us for YEARS will be a picnic in comparison.

You know that Boris fucked up when Trump called the herd immunity "concept" as "catastrophic" and pointing out the BIG U-turn that the Westminster government took. The WHO were screaming at us for weeks and other countries were in touch to warn us but when Trump is scoring political points at our expense, we know we have the wrong leadership. The NY Times were bang on about Boris. They nailed it: - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/opinion/coronavirus-uk-boris-johnson.html#click=https://t.co/ab91Q71L1I "The problem is that he has been preparing for the wrong part. The man came to power playing Falstaff, a double-dealing, comically entertaining, shameless rogue; now he is suddenly onstage as Henry V, the wartime king whose solemn judgment, intense focus, charisma and conviction must lead his nation in a time of crisis. Mr. Johnson does not know how to play that part, and it shows. This is not a rehearsal. His careless, inexcusable reluctance to track and halt the virus earlier will have cost lives".

It certainly was, as we said. Today's shocking number is tragic but what concerns me is that they are quoting 380 dead today and a total of 1,789 and yet the total dead yesterday was 1,415, which is 374 less than the new total. This has been happening daily, that the amount of daily deaths and the new totals don't follow mathematically from the total quoted the day before. I had learned that Sky and the Guardian and the BBC etc. will often have slightly different numbers - possibly due to the timings and whether or not they failed to take into account the daily fatalities in Wales, Northern ireland or Scotland - but I really can't understand the government making very simple arithmetical errors on MOST of the days in the last 3 weeks. This alone makes a (very slight) contribution to my (already entrenched) distrust of the UK Westminster government. Live right now, following on from the "green shoots" of false optimism they started spinning yesterday, they're selectively using stats and charts to attempt to provide a basis for their new-found optimism. This government are liars and the U-turn they've done on two major social impacts are proof enough to me that they're fucking useless.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think/amp?__twitter_impression=true Indisputably intelligent reasoning here too. Without testing, we have no real data. Without data, we can't know what to do.

This one hits my spot. We simply don't have enough proper data: -

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ Here's one such alternative view. Stanford University is one of the best seats of learning on the planet.

It's been interesting seeing the alternative views on the crisis, questioning the need for wrecking the economy and arguing that the cost of the lockdown measures aren't proportionate to the devastation of the disease. Lord Sumption's interview yesterday was picked up as being critical of heavy-handed policing and "a police state" would've blinded the "panic-buyers", the likes of Piers Morgan being the champion, but have we all been duped and into panicking about a virus that wouldn't prove to be that devastating anyway? Sumption makes some good points. It's a pity Peter Hitchens is his strong advocate but in Peter and Piers, it's quite sweet that we have two similarly unlovable pompous arseholes at either side of the debate. Trump said last week that the cure can't be worse than the disease but he's such a mad money-centric narcissist with an astonishing capacity to hold no empathy for other people, he's not a serious listen but even on this thread last week, there were some experts giving alternative views. Interesting extremes of strategies being put on the table now. As a non-expert on virology and epidemiology, I was inclined to swallow the mass-induced view and bought the need to panic but as a constantly-questioning open mind, it's going to be fascinating to see the alternative points of view grow legs, if indeed they do.

I was surprised that you wrote this: - Is that incompatible, being ahead of the UK in "taking steps to prevent" and you saying that we may be worse? It's probably my misinterpreting your words but I don't know the extent of the US overall lockdown, or at least how well or otherwise it's being observed. We watched Trump live again tonight. Not as car crash tragic as usual this time but he did manage to berate a couple of questioners for quoting him back his own words just as he did yesterday. He's a fucking walloper that cunt. The US is going to go stratospheric in the death rate this week I reckon.

1. I agree. It's too early to know. 2. I agree in that I understand your lack of trust in this government but trying to fudge the figures would be a big mistake, if they were stupid enough to try, which I'm not sure that even they are. I have been surprised that the daily death rates have been reported as 87, 43, 113, 181, 269, 207 and 180 for the last seven days. They explained the 43 as them cutting off the timing of the counting to 1 p.m. (for the deaths that day) but I certainly didn't expect the daily totals to go down two days in a row at this stage, so soon after a fudged lockdown that came way too late anyway. Why would they, given what we know about the virus and how it hit the populations in other countries at the same stages of the process? Now that the arsehole Sir is mentioning the at-home deaths as he did today, I too wonder if they're under-reporting these last 48 hours. It will wash out, I'm sure. 3. I did see that Blow Job was speaking about that but haven't had time to check out that article so will get round to it now.

As far as I can see - excluding the rich who paid privately - the only testing that is getting done is at hospital, the principal reason being to know who to isolate. The vast majority of our front line NHS staff have not been tested and therefore may still be acting as superspreaders. Testing is vital of course but the data tracking is how we learn how to manage it. Given the incredibly slow pace at which the UK continues to test very insignificant numbers, each day that goes by is another opportunity lost. Even 6,000 tests per day - which may well be more than the daily average this month - is one hundredth of one per cent i.e. 0.01% of the population and at that rate, that's 10,000 days of testing required to cover the whole population, which would take more than 27 years. For clarity, I'm not saying that they need to test 100% of all people in the UK but these numbers give some context of how bad we've been thus far in the crucial testing requirement. Deaths being lower for the second day in a row will hopefully prove to be a great sign but I think we need a few more days data before we can see any definitive trend.