Good observations about socio-political feedback loops.
"An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement."
Fear is an exploitable energy source, like forest litter is the fuel for fires. Given an available energy gradient, or nutrients lying around exposed, something will come along to exploit it.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
Science teaches us to doubt.
Claude Bernard
Unfortunately, the British don't seem to be fearful enough to have embraced a lock-down that reduced transmission to a level that won't sustain an epidemic.
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The new cases-per-day-number is pretty much flat at around 4500 new cases per day. There doesn't seem to enough anxiety around to get civil servants doing effective contact tracing.
It's all looking very like the US.
Sir David Spiegelhalter may be a brilliant statistician, but he doesn't seem to be paying enough attention to what the lock down is supposed to be doing - and manifesting failing to do.
Or it could be that Breitbart is subtly distorting his message to fit the US right-wing idea that the working classes should get back to work, even if it kills quite a few of them.
There can be that vicious circle, but there can be /other/ vicious circles. Balance is needed.
For example...
OTOH we remember the Government's BSE "deny everything until you can't", where the attitude was, explicitly: - there's no need to worry since cows are ruminants and we aren't, coupled with - we don't know what is the agent nor how it is transmitted Go figure, and remember how that ended!
We also remember BoJo's happy-daze nothing-to-fear statements about Covid 19. Then his behaviour caused him to narrowly escape death. ("It could have gone either way")
Good observations about socio-political feedback loops.
Personally I'd ignore Breitbart since they will have a "not-well-articulated" agenda. Doubly so for the "lockdownsceptics.org" reports.
When I want to hear what Spiegelhalter is saying, I'll look at his twitter feed, his blog, or the article in The Guardian from which Breitbart snipped a few choice quotes.
Spiegelhalter is great at putting risks in context, and he points out that it is rational to take greater risks (i.e. micromorts) when you are older.
Balance we won't get. Gradients build, excess energy becomes available, and we get butterfly effect events.
The lockdown is building up huge unprecedented gradients of personal energy, boredom and poverty and fear and some anger. That will fuel cascades soon too.
EEs do dynamic simulations, but rarely the kinds that social systems exhibit. The superregenerative receiver has some things in common with the availability cascade, but even that is more predictable.
Public policy can't predict this stuff, but it could dampen the system and refrain from piling on to specific events. As if.
Looks like a total of under 300 human deaths worldwide. People knew for ages that one shouldn't feed cows with cow bone meal. Cows are vegetarians.
We are all thankful that he's back in action.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
Science teaches us to doubt.
Claude Bernard
Good observations about socio-political feedback loops.
That isn't what is happening in the UK. The lockdown is being obeyed by the vast majority of the population who are scared witless by it. A few teenagers here and there rebel from time to time but that is about it.
Look at any webcam in a major city or motorway and it is deserted. Wild animals like deer on the road during daytime is now a risk when driving. This sort of things normally only happens during the Xmas holidays.
The disease is however running rampant through the care homes and domiciliary care services (that look after elderly people in their homes). Neither of these vectors seemed to have been considered. Lack of PPE and inadequate testing until this month has left them very exposed.
Hospital admissions are coming down and we are notionally "Past the peak" but the daily death toll remains stubbornly high at 700-800.
He is commenting on the situation rather than making government policy. His heuristic description of the individual risk is reasonably accurate.
The other interesting statistic is that like with TB of old it is killing a higher proportion of those it infects in poorer regions.
It would be building up a whole lot less if it were done properly, and coul d be seen to rolling back the progress of the epidemic - as it is in Austra lia,and some other places, and clearly isn't in the US. Six weeks of lock d own should have stopped the epidemic in its tracks. Since it hasn't, the po pulation locked down has legitimate grounds for complaint.
Concentrating on the fact the being locked down is no fun rather misses the point that being locked down ought to be serving a purpose - and obviously isn't in the US.
Public policy ought to deliver what it promises. A lock down that isn't act ually getting rid of the epidemic is a fraud.
We'd be a lot more thankful if the UK lock down wasn't just as inept as the US version.
The problem seems to be the main point of a lock down is that it reduces so cial contacts enough to make contact tracing practical.
When this is done properly everybody who might have been in contact with an infectious person - including before they were visibly sick, or known to b e infected - gets told to isolate themselves for 14 days from the time of t he contact. This does seem to reduce new infections a lot.
If complacent civil servants imagine that enforcing lock down is all they n eed to do, they've missed the point.
So the place is locked down, but the link I posted ( below) showed that it hasn't reduced the R value to anything much below one. The UK has steady st ream of new infections, rather than a rapidly declining number of new infec tions
They might have been considered, but nobody did anything effective about it .
Sydney has one really badly affected old peoples home, and it pops up on th e news every night as another elderly resident dies, or another carer tests positive for Covid-19. It does seemed to have scared other old peoples hom es into doing better.
posed.
It's not that interesting - being poor is known to be damaging to your heal th.
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deals with lots of consequences of social inequality, and poorer health at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum is one of them. The UK isn't as bad as the US, but it's pretty unequal. High levels of inequality don't do anything positive for people at the top end of the spectrum either. They do much better than the poor, but they don't do as well as even poor people i n more equal countries.
And Cursitor Doom prefers people who share his irrational idiocies, and reg ards the relatively sane as biased against his favourite lunacies (as indee d they are - sane and reasonable people find it much easier to agree with o ne another that do nut-cases like Cursitor Doom).
t seem to be paying enough attention to what the lock down is supposed to b e doing - and manifesting failing to do.
the US right-wing idea that the working classes should get back to work, ev en if it kills quite a few of them.
That depends on your point of view. Tycho Brahe was perfectly happy with th at point of view. It doesn't make for easy-to-follow first year lectures, b ut - as the theory of relativity spells out - the way the world looks does depend on where you are looking at it from.
Brietbart wasn't linking to anything. It was reporting on what Sir David Sp iegelhalter had said. It wasn't a word-by-word transcription, and - as Jame s Arthur regularly demonstrates here - you can change meaning quite a lot b y deleting inconvenient content.
Gullible twits like you don't seem to notice when this happens, and happily rely on data from places - such as denialist web sites - that make a habit of it.
Cursitor Doom may be silly enough to think that this true.
In reality none of has any trouble working out where John Larkin gets his silly ideas - one of which happens to be that Brietbart is a reliable source of unbiased information - and the question was entirely rhetorical.
It isn't as if John Larkin is going to try to answer it, and more than you have.
There is absolutely no contact tracing occurring in the UK and hasn't been since March when they abandoned it completely. It was a bad mistake but they are only now trying to recruit contact tracers. Outsourcing it to the usual suspects (who will doubtless profit hugely from the contracts and make a balls up of it). To say that they have previous would be understating it - this from 2014:
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The skilled contact tracers were all made redundant in the post 2008 crash to save on local government overheads.
The advice was simple "Stay Home, Save Lives" and "Protect the NHS". It has worked to a very large extent.
Unwinding it is going to be tricky. The general population have really been scared witless.
The problem is that care homes were left as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter since their staff have to go in daily. When staff get sick or have to self isolated they use agency staff (typically on zero hours contracts who can't afford to turn work down even if they are sick).
The government insists that it is following all the scientific advice. But the scientists are not allowed to discuss any dissenting views in public and political advisors have been present at meetings of what is supposed to be a *scientific expert group*.
Their previous chief scientific advice David King now Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge is setting up an unofficial SAGE2 group that will not be muzzled by the politicians. He is concerned that scientists who are working for the government are being lined up to take the blame. (or employed by the government not free to speak up for the science)
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It has in the general population but not in the hottest spots which are now mostly inside prisons and care homes. Places where social distancing is virtually impossible by the design of the buildings.
I'd like to see evidence of that. They are still last on the list for getting scarce PPE. Even the hospitals are living hand to mouth.
Publishing the results of pandemic simulation Exercise Cygnus 2016 is about to be fought out in the courts (very slowly I suppose).
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Previous policy to free beds in the NHS system by making care homes take back suspected Covid-19 patients not in immediate danger has back fired.
A few wiser ones refused this request point blank.
He is trying to aid the public understanding of statistical risk and doing a reasonably good job of it too. The government propaganda is too heavy handed for the actual risk to healthy fit individuals under 50.
Their original plan of slowly developing herd immunity was probably the only honest game in town at present. The Netherlands and Sweden are the only countries still following that sort of path.
It is showing up as a factor of two difference between postcodes that are really quite close together but with very different income levels.
I'm not sure that is entirely true for the likes of the oligarchs that actually control how the country is run for their benefit. A very small number of people have become insanely rich by vulture capitalism.
Typically they own superyachts, private jets and small tropical islands.
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