If June isn`t too late for the flowers, I`d go with foxgloves in front of hydrangea petiolaris for a north facing wall.
North facing wall is not going to get a lot of sun, and may well get rather dry. It is difficult to get a lot of flowers in such circumstances.
I have dicentra "bleeding heart" that does well in such a position, but a hardy perennial rather than a shrub. A berberis may do well in such conditions and can have good autumn colour too. Ribes Sanguiam is pretty tolerant of conditions and grows fairly quickly to size, with quite a long flowering period.
What would today’s reported deaths have been without social distancing then?
I sense your doubt. Today`s reported deaths are likely to have been the same if we didn`t have lockdown as social distancing won`t have kicked in quite yet.
Social distancing MUST reduce virus transmission and strain on the NHS - this is obvious. However, this does not necessarily mean that the eventual death tally from Covid-19 will be reduced by social distancing (unless a vaccine is found).
We are running the risk that we are merely delaying infections. My hunch is still with me that we almost all will catch this virus at some point; lockdown is just delaying the inevitable. Sure, the smoothing of NHS demand is a BIG PLUS of the lockdown policy - but - wow - the economic and loss of freedom costs!
The government system seems incapable if increasing the number of test at an adequate pass, and had been beaten by Germany USA and even Italy, Yes there are reasons, there are always resons, the wrong sort of chemicals, just like the wrong sort of leaves on the train line. but some how the privet secter find ways of getting around problems.
One approach the government have not used is asking the privet sector to help, when they asked for help making venterlaters, with a few days lots of companys form F1 teams to Vacuum makers where working out ways of doing it.
Well at least one privet Lab is now also offering tests, for you or to gift to an NHS employee.
I have a feeling some will object, but the real let down here is that the government is not using this resosers, and the worst outcome would be nobody make use of this supply of test kits
The problem is we have no idea how accurate that test is they are selling. There have been 14 or 15 different private companies in the UK alone selling test kits and they all seem to be limited to a particular period during in the infection or really not accurate enough.
I really doubt this is purely financial, given just how much money the UK is willing to throw at everything else. There isn't much evidence they are trying to penny pinch.
The Welsh government were promised 5,000 test a day from a private company and they bailed on them.
We also have to be very wary, a number of other countries have got totally duff stuff. Loads of dodgy middle men have been sniffing around offering non-existent or substandard ventilators.
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
Anybody trying to draw conclusions from the Chinese figures are wasting their time. They have been lying from the start.
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
What would today’s reported deaths have been without social distancing then?
I sense your doubt. Today`s reported deaths are likely to have been the same if we didn`t have lockdown as social distancing won`t have kicked in quite yet.
Social distancing MUST reduce virus transmission and strain on the NHS - this is obvious. However, this does not necessarily mean that the eventual death tally from Covid-19 will be reduced by social distancing (unless a vaccine is found).
We are running the risk that we are merely delaying infections. My hunch is still with me that we almost all will catch this virus at some point; lockdown is just delaying the inevitable. Sure, the smoothing of NHS demand is a BIG PLUS of the lockdown policy - but - wow - the economic and loss of freedom costs!
If June isn`t too late for the flowers, I`d go with foxgloves in front of hydrangea petiolaris for a north facing wall.
North facing wall is not going to get a lot of sun, and may well get rather dry. It is difficult to get a lot of flowers in such circumstances.
I have dicentra "bleeding heart" that does well in such a position, but a hardy perennial rather than a shrub. A berberis may do well in such conditions and can have good autumn colour too. Ribes Sanguiam is pretty tolerant of conditions and grows fairly quickly to size, with quite a long flowering period.
Foxglove can take dry shade. Woodland plant. Dicentra is a good choice - but Matt specified 600mm - won`t reach anything near that. Mahonia could work if soil type matches. I`d definitely go with hydrangea petiolaris - everyone should have one if they have a north-facing wall - superb plant.
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
I am not sure I follow the logic of your time line.
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
The government system seems incapable if increasing the number of test at an adequate pass, and had been beaten by Germany USA and even Italy, Yes there are reasons, there are always resons, the wrong sort of chemicals, just like the wrong sort of leaves on the train line. but some how the privet secter find ways of getting around problems.
One approach the government have not used is asking the privet sector to help, when they asked for help making venterlaters, with a few days lots of companys form F1 teams to Vacuum makers where working out ways of doing it.
Well at least one privet Lab is now also offering tests, for you or to gift to an NHS employee.
I have a feeling some will object, but the real let down here is that the government is not using this resosers, and the worst outcome would be nobody make use of this supply of test kits
You should read the news - for example NHS Wales had contracted with a private company for tests. The company withdrew from the contract. Probably shortages of the reagents mentioned at todays press conference.
The problem is what I called the "Turnips are not Tigers" problem when I was proposing my history research - a surprising number of people, including economic historians, think that production is completely fungible.
This is not so. Nothing will turn a turnip farm into a Tiger tank.
For example, in 1940, a brilliant British officer seized and smuggled out of Belgium the specialised machine tools for machining the barrels of 20mm cannon. A single lorry load of cargo. Face value maybe a few tens of thousand of pounds.
This prevented a delay of at *least* a year in getting the weapons into production in the UK.
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
How credible are they as a source? (Genuine question - never heard of them)
Well somebody in the government briefed the Mail over the weekend of them and TV5 in France apparently ran a very similar story last night (at least for Wuhan, the number being x40).
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
Well looks like we have plateaued in tests and therefore cases.
Until UK gets the chemicals we will never know if we have actually plateaued.
Deaths are probably a better proxy.
I agree but its a lagging one.
I dont get the comment from one of the experts that the number of new cases is levelling out. Is that not an obvious thing that is bound to happen if our tests have levelled out.
They are looking at a lot more data than just tests. Traffic, public transport, footfall and the like all go into the model. It's those factors that give them confidence that infection is slowing, but as it lags cases it won't show up just yet.
If June isn`t too late for the flowers, I`d go with foxgloves in front of hydrangea petiolaris for a north facing wall.
North facing wall is not going to get a lot of sun, and may well get rather dry. It is difficult to get a lot of flowers in such circumstances.
I have dicentra "bleeding heart" that does well in such a position, but a hardy perennial rather than a shrub. A berberis may do well in such conditions and can have good autumn colour too. Ribes Sanguiam is pretty tolerant of conditions and grows fairly quickly to size, with quite a long flowering period.
Foxglove can take dry shade. Woodland plant. Dicentra is a good choice - but Matt specified 600mm - won`t reach anything near that. Mahonia could work if soil type matches. I`d definitely go with hydrangea petiolaris - everyone should have one if they have a north-facing wall - superb plant.
Yes, foxgloves do seem pretty tolerant of shade. Mahonia is as tough as old boots, and flowers very early. Its spikes are a good deterrent to people sneaking over the wall too, as is pyracantha.
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
The figure seems to have been revised upwards to 393. Even more disturbing is that according to Sky they included 28 patients with no underlying health conditions, one of whom was a 19 year old.
Many young people are dying from this around the world. A 12 year old girl in Belgium today too. If you infected every adolescent and under 30 with this virus in order to develop herd immunity, you would still be looking at many of them dying even if the % is a lot less than for the elderly. That part never seems to get mentioned. One of the biggest global communication mistakes early on was that this was just a disease of the elderly.
This is why the Toby Young comments are so stupid. Really I sometimes despair at the quality of journalism in the UK.
Young is a columnist, he barely qualifies as a journalist.
He's basically a bloke with a blog who's got it syndicated in a national paper. No one would give a shit what he said if he didn't have the prestige of being published in a paper.
His opinion is valid and discussion is welcome.
We don't want to get to a Man made global warming situation were a group tells us no discussion is allowed.
But he is not disputing the facts of the disease. Nor is he saying fewer people are likely to die than the official claims. Those would be valid debating points.
What he is saying is that it doesn't matter if those people die because they are old and comparatively worthless. He is saying that the wealth of those who survive is more important than the lives of those who die. That is an abhorrent position to take and not one that should be considered worthy of debate.
To use your analogy it would be like saying that all the global warming claims are true but it doesn't matter because only poor non-white people will die.
Yes, no lockdown people means "dying in hospital car parks" as you put it very effectively to me the other day. But the Peston question was why is it not possible for dying covid patients to go home for their exit from this world.
People here are saying this is an utterly stupid question that he disgraced himself by asking. I disagree. I think it is a perfectly OK and interesting question. More than that, I think it was a GOOD question. I think many people would have appreciated it being asked and answered.
If June isn`t too late for the flowers, I`d go with foxgloves in front of hydrangea petiolaris for a north facing wall.
North facing wall is not going to get a lot of sun, and may well get rather dry. It is difficult to get a lot of flowers in such circumstances.
I have dicentra "bleeding heart" that does well in such a position, but a hardy perennial rather than a shrub. A berberis may do well in such conditions and can have good autumn colour too. Ribes Sanguiam is pretty tolerant of conditions and grows fairly quickly to size, with quite a long flowering period.
Foxglove can take dry shade. Woodland plant. Dicentra is a good choice - but Matt specified 600mm - won`t reach anything near that. Mahonia could work if soil type matches. I`d definitely go with hydrangea petiolaris - everyone should have one if they have a north-facing wall - superb plant.
Yes, foxgloves do seem pretty tolerant of shade. Mahonia is as tough as old boots, and flowers very early. Its spikes are a good deterrent to people sneaking over the wall too, as is pyracantha.
Mahonia makes me think it was genetically engineered for Victorian cemeteries. Almost as bad as spotted laurel.
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
How credible are they as a source? (Genuine question - never heard of them)
Well somebody in the government briefed the Mail over the weekend of them and TV5 in France apparently ran a very similar story last night (at least for Wuhan, the number being x40).
I wasn't convinced by the logic cited in the crematoria data. It didn't seem to allow for people dying of other conditions, oc which there would be many.
The actions taken by the Chinese government shows that it was a very serious outbreak needing radical action, but that much was obvious at the end of January.
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
I am not sure I follow the logic of your time line.
You need ventilators as you approach the peak as so many get it you need to reduce the death rate, once the number of cases recedes as the lockdown takes effect you need mass testing to reduce the number of cases and contagion in the future
(As it happens, the author is a very good friend of my brother-in-law, and so I know him quite well).
There was a very strong belief in the mantra that 'the bomber will always get through', and a lot of planning was done on this basis. So they thought cities within range would be entirely defenceless. It was one reason why Chamberlain was so stubbornly set on appeasement. Of course it turned out quite differently; fighters were much faster than the bombers and the bombers didn't always get through, far from it. Daytime bombing was soon found to be impractically dangerous, and night-time bombing was difficult.
I might have a read of that, I enjoy reading about that time period.
Will 'The bomber always get though' well yes and no.
It was defiantly the prevailing theory in most places both the UK and to some extent Germany in the late 1930s. and may explain why fighters where to some extent neglected, relative to bombers.
A lot of books I read tent to ridicule that thought, but looking at the numbers the bombers nearly always did get through. in the Battle of Britten, on a good day Fighter command could shot down 3% on average it was a bit below 2%. so largely the statement is correct. the problem for the bombers, was they were not as effective as expected and as popularly remembered and needed to fly a lot of missions, to achieve there aim, a 2% change of being shot down is manageable as a one off, a 2% change every mission ones or possibly twice a day for weeks or months is something else. for Command, on top of this was a damaged % normally close to or slightly over the shot down % so 5% a day was not unusual.
The problem with the 'boomer will always get though' is not that the stament is totally incorrect, but that it focuses on one mission not a campaign, and there for not a helpful planing focuses.
A bit like saying, 99.8% of healthy people will recover OK form COVID even if they need an ICU Bed, forgetting that this % may not hold when there are lots of people wanting to get in to ICU beds.
Those figures don't seem to square with these, from Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure they're right:' Bomber Command crews suffered an extremely high casualty rate: 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4 percent death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war.' While 'killed' didn't necessarily mean their plane was shot down, being a PoW did.
Think of the attrition rate over a 30 mission tour of duty. If you have a 2% attrition rate, you have a 98% chance of coming back. From one mission. You have a 0.98^n chance of coming back from n missions. That means you have a 54.5% chance of completing your tour - 45.5% would not.
We were taught that getting that attrition rate up to 5% was lethal for an aggressor in an air war. That rate meant that they would lose half their force in a mere 13 missions - and if you have 3 missions per day, and you start on Monday, you aren't going to make it much further than Thursday without losing half your force.
Keith Park (supported by Dowding) made it his principle that the German bomber would get engaged all the way in and all the way out (disagreeing with the "Big Wing" mantra that would have allowed the bombers all the way in while forming up the Big wing to attack them on the way home). The morale effects on both the aggressors (who knew quite rapidly that they would have no respite throughout the mission) and those being defended, who frequently saw the air defence, was colossal.
What would today’s reported deaths have been without social distancing then?
I sense your doubt. Today`s reported deaths are likely to have been the same if we didn`t have lockdown as social distancing won`t have kicked in quite yet.
Social distancing MUST reduce virus transmission and strain on the NHS - this is obvious. However, this does not necessarily mean that the eventual death tally from Covid-19 will be reduced by social distancing (unless a vaccine is found).
We are running the risk that we are merely delaying infections. My hunch is still with me that we almost all will catch this virus at some point; lockdown is just delaying the inevitable. Sure, the smoothing of NHS demand is a BIG PLUS of the lockdown policy - but - wow - the economic and loss of freedom costs!
I suspect that you agree with me Isam
To be honest, I don’t know. I am quite happily complying with the governments advice, just have a kind of nagging doubt it may be overblown, and mild embarrassment/worry about the level of (a) obedience to authority and (b) vitriol poured on anyone who pauses for thought.
To be fair, I have worked as an odds compiler in gambling for years and it’s almost ingrained to be sceptical/bearish of headlines and public momentum. They’re normally sure signs of a mug punter
Yes, no lockdown people means "dying in hospital car parks" as you put it very effectively to me the other day. But the Peston question was why is it not possible for dying covid patients to go home for their exit from this world.
People here are saying this is an utterly stupid question that he disgraced himself by asking. I disagree. I think it is a perfectly OK and interesting question. More than that, I think it was a GOOD question. I think many people would have appreciated it being asked and answered.
There is a risk to the rest of the household, carers and morticians so would seem unwise, much as folk would prefer to die at home.
In other news my 2 weeks if face probation were up today, so bought a beard trimmer and have trimmed off the wild edges so that my zombie beard looks like it's intentional and not just that I stopped shaving.
The figure seems to have been revised upwards to 393. Even more disturbing is that according to Sky they included 28 patients with no underlying health conditions, one of whom was a 19 year old.
Many young people are dying from this around the world. A 12 year old girl in Belgium today too. If you infected every adolescent and under 30 with this virus in order to develop herd immunity, you would still be looking at many of them dying even if the % is a lot less than for the elderly. That part never seems to get mentioned. One of the biggest global communication mistakes early on was that this was just a disease of the elderly.
This is why the Toby Young comments are so stupid. Really I sometimes despair at the quality of journalism in the UK.
Young is a columnist, he barely qualifies as a journalist.
He's basically a bloke with a blog who's got it syndicated in a national paper. No one would give a shit what he said if he didn't have the prestige of being published in a paper.
His opinion is valid and discussion is welcome.
We don't want to get to a Man made global warming situation were a group tells us no discussion is allowed.
But he is not disputing the facts of the disease. Nor is he saying fewer people are likely to die than the official claims. Those would be valid debating points.
What he is saying is that it doesn't matter if those people die because they are old and comparatively worthless. He is saying that the wealth of those who survive is more important than the lives of those who die. That is an abhorrent position to take and not one that should be considered worthy of debate.
To use your analogy it would be like saying that all the global warming claims are true but it doesn't matter because only poor non-white people will die.
It is both morally and logically repugnant.
I agree but maybe it's not repugnant to TGOHF666
The argument can be restated so that it is not about money, though, money being merely a reflection of available resources generally. Most people (including most 80 year olds) would rather that an 80 year old, or even a large number of 80 year olds, died than that a 4 year old died or lost a parent. It is not obviously mad and evil to extend the argument to ask: should the 80 year old live if the pay off is that a 4 year old grows up in poverty when she otherwise would not have done?
(As it happens, the author is a very good friend of my brother-in-law, and so I know him quite well).
There was a very strong belief in the mantra that 'the bomber will always get through', and a lot of planning was done on this basis. So they thought cities within range would be entirely defenceless. It was one reason why Chamberlain was so stubbornly set on appeasement. Of course it turned out quite differently; fighters were much faster than the bombers and the bombers didn't always get through, far from it. Daytime bombing was soon found to be impractically dangerous, and night-time bombing was difficult.
I might have a read of that, I enjoy reading about that time period.
Will 'The bomber always get though' well yes and no.
It was defiantly the prevailing theory in most places both the UK and to some extent Germany in the late 1930s. and may explain why fighters where to some extent neglected, relative to bombers.
A lot of books I read tent to ridicule that thought, but looking at the numbers the bombers nearly always did get through. in the Battle of Britten, on a good day Fighter command could shot down 3% on average it was a bit below 2%. so largely the statement is correct. the problem for the bombers, was they were not as effective as expected and as popularly remembered and needed to fly a lot of missions, to achieve there aim, a 2% change of being shot down is manageable as a one off, a 2% change every mission ones or possibly twice a day for weeks or months is something else. for Command, on top of this was a damaged % normally close to or slightly over the shot down % so 5% a day was not unusual.
The problem with the 'boomer will always get though' is not that the stament is totally incorrect, but that it focuses on one mission not a campaign, and there for not a helpful planing focuses.
A bit like saying, 99.8% of healthy people will recover OK form COVID even if they need an ICU Bed, forgetting that this % may not hold when there are lots of people wanting to get in to ICU beds.
Those figures don't seem to square with these, from Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure they're right:' Bomber Command crews suffered an extremely high casualty rate: 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4 percent death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war.' While 'killed' didn't necessarily mean their plane was shot down, being a PoW did.
Think of the attrition rate over a 30 mission tour of duty. If you have a 2% attrition rate, you have a 98% chance of coming back. From one mission. You have a 0.98^n chance of coming back from n missions. That means you have a 54.5% chance of completing your tour - 45.5% would not.
We were taught that getting that attrition rate up to 5% was lethal for an aggressor in an air war. That rate meant that they would lose half their force in a mere 13 missions - and if you have 3 missions per day, and you start on Monday, you aren't going to make it much further than Thursday without losing half your force.
Keith Park (supported by Dowding) made it his principle that the German bomber would get engaged all the way in and all the way out (disagreeing with the "Big Wing" mantra that would have allowed the bombers all the way in while forming up the Big wing to attack them on the way home). The morale effects on both the aggressors (who knew quite rapidly that they would have no respite throughout the mission) and those being defended, who frequently saw the air defence, was colossal.
It's worth considering the psychological effects. Beyond 5% casualties per mission a unit would rapidly collapse into ineffectiveness. 2% is sustainable at the cost of burning out the survivors at a fair rate - you need a lot of new aircrew to feed into the meat grinder.
Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have paid generous tribute to the Labour leader and, since Covid-19 has suspended politics-as-usual, there’s an argument that Corbyn’s critics should keep a gracious silence in his final days in office. No one likes to kick a man when he’s down.
Well, I do. When it’s this man, I do. When it’s this poisonous cynic who has done so much to antagonise British Jews, this banal egotist who has set back centre-left politics in this country for a generation, then I’m more than happy to strap on my steel toe caps and put the boot in.
I've noticed there's a certain type of right-winger that has a weird fetish for driving the conversation into the arena of pricing lives, or more generally of making "tough decisions". Like, yes, well done dude, you've signalled your hard-headedness, you've reminded us of your rationality aesthetic, I'm sure you've triggered some libs, now can we please go back to what we were talking about?
I think it is (with the type you refer to) exactly that and Tobes is one of those types. Cummings without the brain? Sort of. Eugenics likely to appeal too for the same reason. In fact it does appeal, so I hear. Ooo I'm hard and rigorous. Ooo I'm not PC. Ooo I'm very very worldly.
(As it happens, the author is a very good friend of my brother-in-law, and so I know him quite well).
There was a very strong belief in the mantra that 'the bomber will always get through', and a lot of planning was done on this basis. So they thought cities within range would be entirely defenceless. It was one reason why Chamberlain was so stubbornly set on appeasement. Of course it turned out quite differently; fighters were much faster than the bombers and the bombers didn't always get through, far from it. Daytime bombing was soon found to be impractically dangerous, and night-time bombing was difficult.
I might have a read of that, I enjoy reading about that time period.
Will 'The bomber always get though' well yes and no.
It was defiantly the prevailing theory in most places both the UK and to some extent Germany in the late 1930s. and may explain why fighters where to some extent neglected, relative to bombers.
A lot of books I read tent to ridicule that thought, but looking at the numbers the bombers nearly always did get through. in the Battle of Britten, on a good day Fighter command could shot down 3% on average it was a bit below 2%. so largely the statement is correct. the problem for the bombers, was they were not as effective as expected and as popularly remembered and needed to fly a lot of missions, to achieve there aim, a 2% change of being shot down is manageable as a one off, a 2% change every mission ones or possibly twice a day for weeks or months is something else. for Command, on top of this was a damaged % normally close to or slightly over the shot down % so 5% a day was not unusual.
The problem with the 'boomer will always get though' is not that the stament is totally incorrect, but that it focuses on one mission not a campaign, and there for not a helpful planing focuses.
A bit like saying, 99.8% of healthy people will recover OK form COVID even if they need an ICU Bed, forgetting that this % may not hold when there are lots of people wanting to get in to ICU beds.
Those figures don't seem to square with these, from Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure they're right:' Bomber Command crews suffered an extremely high casualty rate: 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4 percent death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war.' While 'killed' didn't necessarily mean their plane was shot down, being a PoW did.
Think of the attrition rate over a 30 mission tour of duty. If you have a 2% attrition rate, you have a 98% chance of coming back. From one mission. You have a 0.98^n chance of coming back from n missions. That means you have a 54.5% chance of completing your tour - 45.5% would not.
We were taught that getting that attrition rate up to 5% was lethal for an aggressor in an air war. That rate meant that they would lose half their force in a mere 13 missions - and if you have 3 missions per day, and you start on Monday, you aren't going to make it much further than Thursday without losing half your force.
Keith Park (supported by Dowding) made it his principle that the German bomber would get engaged all the way in and all the way out (disagreeing with the "Big Wing" mantra that would have allowed the bombers all the way in while forming up the Big wing to attack them on the way home). The morale effects on both the aggressors (who knew quite rapidly that they would have no respite throughout the mission) and those being defended, who frequently saw the air defence, was colossal.
It's worth considering the psychological effects. Beyond 5% casualties per mission a unit would rapidly collapse into ineffectiveness. 2% is sustainable at the cost of burning out the survivors at a fair rate - you need a lot of new aircrew to feed into the meat grinder.
Not just air crew, but machines. The British replaced both planes and crew a lot faster in the Battle of Britain, finishing with even more planes than we started with, while the German bombers were heavily depleted. It was a successful battle of attrition.
Just Rewound "We do not have the right type of chemical reagents" was his answer to why we are stuck at 10,000 or less
So he did answer the question but how come everyone else does?
A guess - they are not manufactured in the UK.
Hardly anything is these days TBF
Sad indictment on Govts of all persuasions
Agreed, and it is something like this that brings it home to people. A thriving financial services industry is sod all use when push comes to shove.
I hope that if and when we come through this we learn some of the lessons and seriously consider what we need to produce within the UK and not be dependent on others for. For years we have been guilty of letting our own capabilities wither in pursuit of cheaper options.
If we really are unable to ramp up testing because we are dependent on other countries for the chemicals then serious questions will need to be asked. I also understand that we can't get hold of Paracedemol because it is primarily made in India and they are, not unnaturally, hanging on to it for themselves.
Who was who suggested it didn't matter if our farming industry disappears post Brexit?
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
How credible are they as a source? (Genuine question - never heard of them)
Not very, to be honest. They’re full of liars who will say anything if they think it will be popular. That being said of course, I think we all know the Chinese government are worse.
But I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them. I mean, don’t you live in the UK? How do you manage that without having heard of the UK gover...
Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have paid generous tribute to the Labour leader and, since Covid-19 has suspended politics-as-usual, there’s an argument that Corbyn’s critics should keep a gracious silence in his final days in office. No one likes to kick a man when he’s down.
Well, I do. When it’s this man, I do. When it’s this poisonous cynic who has done so much to antagonise British Jews, this banal egotist who has set back centre-left politics in this country for a generation, then I’m more than happy to strap on my steel toe caps and put the boot in.
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
I am not sure I follow the logic of your time line.
You need ventilators as you approach the peak as so many get it you need to reduce the death rate, once the number of cases recedes as the lockdown takes effect you need mass testing to reduce the number of cases and contagion in the future
I follow that logic. The bit that I don't understand is why there has not been more ongoing testing to date, particularly for medical staff.
This is not a criticism of the great man and his government, it is surprising to me that the boffins advising government are comfortable with current levels of testing across the board.
Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have paid generous tribute to the Labour leader and, since Covid-19 has suspended politics-as-usual, there’s an argument that Corbyn’s critics should keep a gracious silence in his final days in office. No one likes to kick a man when he’s down.
Well, I do. When it’s this man, I do. When it’s this poisonous cynic who has done so much to antagonise British Jews, this banal egotist who has set back centre-left politics in this country for a generation, then I’m more than happy to strap on my steel toe caps and put the boot in.
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
I am not sure I follow the logic of your time line.
You need ventilators as you approach the peak as so many get it you need to reduce the death rate, once the number of cases recedes as the lockdown takes effect you need mass testing to reduce the number of cases and contagion in the future
I follow that logic. The bit that I don't understand is why there has not been more ongoing testing to date, particularly for medical staff.
This is not a criticism of the great man and his government, it is surprising to me that the boffins advising government are comfortable with current levels of testing across the board.
My theory, which I've put forward a few times, is that the tests aren't accurate enough. Too many false negatives for front line HCPs. Therefore it is better they self-isolate at home.
Any excuses to get more money from taxpayers, the USPS is a dysfunctional system. This should be its best opportunity in years lots of people wanting things they cant get to shops to buy. Time for privatisation.
The best available evidence we have, in my view, is that the virus is just deadly enough to warrant taking the action we have taken, but it's quite close. Given the uncertainties, then, it's possible that it will look like a mistake with hindsight, but you can only make your choices when you make them with the information you have at the time.
(As it happens, the author is a very good friend of my brother-in-law, and so I know him quite well).
There was a very strong belief in the mantra that 'the bomber will always get through', and a lot of planning was done on this basis. So they thought cities within range would be entirely defenceless. It was one reason why Chamberlain was so stubbornly set on appeasement. Of course it turned out quite differently; fighters were much faster than the bombers and the bombers didn't always get through, far from it. Daytime bombing was soon found to be impractically dangerous, and night-time bombing was difficult.
I might have a read of that, I enjoy reading about that time period.
Will 'The bomber always get though' well yes and no.
It was defiantly the prevailing theory in most places both the UK and to some extent Germany in the late 1930s. and may explain why fighters where to some extent neglected, relative to bombers.
A lot of books I read tent to ridicule that thought, but looking at the numbers the bombers nearly always did get through. in the Battle of Britten, on a good day Fighter command could shot down 3% on average it was a bit below 2%. so largely the statement is correct. the problem for the bombers, was they were not as effective as expected and as popularly remembered and needed to fly a lot of missions, to achieve there aim, a 2% change of being shot down is manageable as a one off, a 2% change every mission ones or possibly twice a day for weeks or months is something else. for Command, on top of this was a damaged % normally close to or slightly over the shot down % so 5% a day was not unusual.
The problem with the 'boomer will always get though' is not that the stament is totally incorrect, but that it focuses on one mission not a campaign, and there for not a helpful planing focuses.
A bit like saying, 99.8% of healthy people will recover OK form COVID even if they need an ICU Bed, forgetting that this % may not hold when there are lots of people wanting to get in to ICU beds.
Those figures don't seem to square with these, from Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure they're right:' Bomber Command crews suffered an extremely high casualty rate: 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4 percent death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war.' While 'killed' didn't necessarily mean their plane was shot down, being a PoW did.
Think of the attrition rate over a 30 mission tour of duty. If you have a 2% attrition rate, you have a 98% chance of coming back. From one mission. You have a 0.98^n chance of coming back from n missions. That means you have a 54.5% chance of completing your tour - 45.5% would not.
We were taught that getting that attrition rate up to 5% was lethal for an aggressor in an air war. That rate meant that they would lose half their force in a mere 13 missions - and if you have 3 missions per day, and you start on Monday, you aren't going to make it much further than Thursday without losing half your force.
Keith Park (supported by Dowding) made it his principle that the German bomber would get engaged all the way in and all the way out (disagreeing with the "Big Wing" mantra that would have allowed the bombers all the way in while forming up the Big wing to attack them on the way home). The morale effects on both the aggressors (who knew quite rapidly that they would have no respite throughout the mission) and those being defended, who frequently saw the air defence, was colossal.
It's worth considering the psychological effects. Beyond 5% casualties per mission a unit would rapidly collapse into ineffectiveness. 2% is sustainable at the cost of burning out the survivors at a fair rate - you need a lot of new aircrew to feed into the meat grinder.
Not just air crew, but machines. The British replaced both planes and crew a lot faster in the Battle of Britain, finishing with even more planes than we started with, while the German bombers were heavily depleted. It was a successful battle of attrition.
The aircraft were almost trivial - the British system of rotating pilots out of the front line to training units was alarming for trainees (watching your instructor have an episode of 'twitch' in the air....) but meant that experienced aircrew survived. Often they returned to operations later
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
I am not sure I follow the logic of your time line.
You need ventilators as you approach the peak as so many get it you need to reduce the death rate, once the number of cases recedes as the lockdown takes effect you need mass testing to reduce the number of cases and contagion in the future
I follow that logic. The bit that I don't understand is why there has not been more ongoing testing to date, particularly for medical staff.
This is not a criticism of the great man and his government, it is surprising to me that the boffins advising government are comfortable with current levels of testing across the board.
My theory, which I've put forward a few times, is that the tests aren't accurate enough. Too many false negatives for front line HCPs. Therefore it is better they self-isolate at home.
That is a fair point and one that has been borne out across Europe. Will testing be accurate enough after the lockdown ends? Troubling.
Just Rewound "We do not have the right type of chemical reagents" was his answer to why we are stuck at 10,000 or less
So he did answer the question but how come everyone else does?
A guess - they are not manufactured in the UK.
Hardly anything is these days TBF
Sad indictment on Govts of all persuasions
Agreed, and it is something like this that brings it home to people. A thriving financial services industry is sod all use when push comes to shove.
I hope that if and when we come through this we learn some of the lessons and seriously consider what we need to produce within the UK and not be dependent on others for. For years we have been guilty of letting our own capabilities wither in pursuit of cheaper options.
If we really are unable to ramp up testing because we are dependent on other countries for the chemicals then serious questions will need to be asked. I also understand that we can't get hold of Paracedemol because it is primarily made in India and they are, not unnaturally, hanging on to it for themselves.
Who was who suggested it didn't matter if our farming industry disappears post Brexit?
The best available evidence we have, in my view, is that the virus is just deadly enough to warrant taking the action we have taken, but it's quite close. Given the uncertainties, then, it's possible that it will look like a mistake with hindsight, but you can only make your choices when you make them with the information you have at the time.
Blair is probably right, but sadly he needs to invent a time machine and talk himself out of getting involved in Iraq if he wants Labour to listen to him.
Blair is probably right, but sadly he needs to invent a time machine and talk himself out of getting involved in Iraq if he wants Labour to listen to him
...or anyone else to listen to him too, unfortunately.
The mail would love that: 'Gove to kick Granny to be kicked out of ICU, to die at home'. Luckily, Gove and the technocrats weren't born yesterday.
I can well imagine. Whichever way you go you will get some flack. But the question is IMO a perfectly reasonable one to ask.
I rather agree. I have thought about this quite a lot, and it wasn't immediately obv to me what the right answer is (other than, as Foxy points out, the unsayable "we're gonna triage Granny so she never gets in in the first place.")
Lord Sumption asked the question. Those with all the data and the knowledge in this area reluctantly decided that yes it was the right thing to do. Indeed they got to that point after first trying a more light-touch approach. The public agree with the new strategy. What's the problem?
Oh yes. Peter Hitchens, the man that thinks cannabis causes people to become terrorists, thinks its a bad idea. Lol.
On Chinese case and mortality figures. None of us know for sure what the actual figures are and what level of manipulation there the authorities took. However I think we can say:
- It's a country of two parts: Hubei, where the system appears to have collapsed and was as bad as Italy; the rest of China where infection rates have been low, on a par with other Asian countries. - Social media backs this up: that Hubei was bad and there was relatively little incidence elsewhere. - The epidemic is currently largely contained across China.
A couple of further points. It may not be meaningful to complain of cases being under-reported 15-40 times. The guesstimate for the UK on the government's own admission is underreporting by a factor of ten. Secondly figures can be wrong because people on the ground don't report everything or because they have been directly manipulated when aggregated. My suspicion is that there is more of the first than the second.
It's a salutary thought that this daily death rate is more than three times the peak death rate in China (based on confirmed cases) and that the number of confirmed cases in the UK is only about a third of the number of confirmed cases in China at that time.
How credible are they as a source? (Genuine question - never heard of them)
TV5 France last night for example,16 crematoriums each with 8 ovens in Wuhan working 24/7 since early Feb,warehouses full of individual boxes of ashes,still to be delivered to relatives etc.
Lord Sumption asked the question. Those with all the data and the knowledge in this area reluctantly decided that yes it was the right thing to do. Indeed they got to that point after first trying a more light-touch approach. The public agree with the new strategy. What's the problem?
Oh yes. Peter Hitchens, the man that thinks cannabis causes people to become terrorists, thinks its a bad idea. Lol.
Indeed, the risk was 500 000 deaths from coronavirus in the UK on the worst estimates without lockdown
Lord Sumption asked the question. Those with all the data and the knowledge in this area reluctantly decided that yes it was the right thing to do. Indeed they got to that point after first trying a more light-touch approach. The public agree with the new strategy. What's the problem?
Oh yes. Peter Hitchens, the man that thinks cannabis causes people to become terrorists, thinks its a bad idea. Lol.
I just couldn't resist the flippant pun. I know it has been riffed for days by PB's resident Puntastic Punsters but hey ho.
I follow that logic. The bit that I don't understand is why there has not been more ongoing testing to date, particularly for medical staff.
This is not a criticism of the great man and his government, it is surprising to me that the boffins advising government are comfortable with current levels of testing across the board.
But the Great Man - as @bigjohnowls has been known to mention - did promise more testing than has in practice transpired.
Was that the last gasp of "Boris being Boris" before he truly got it and de-clowned?
My favourite winter-flowering shrubs, which are also scented - and the scent is usually very powerful are:-
1. Daphnes - these come from Nepal, don’t mind the cold and have wonderful scent and blossom in winter and spring. Choose where you plant them carefully as they don’t like being moved. Slow-growing but absolutely wonderful.
The tallest is Daphne bholua Jacqueline Postill. A gem. Other daphnes to consider are daphne oDora Aureomarginata - which is evergreen and scented and equally gorgeous.
2. Viburnum - eg bodnantense Dawn. In winter comes to its own it’s lovely white pink scented flowers. Nothing to write home about the rest of the year but you will have lots else to look at instead.
3. Mahonia - dark, evergreen, with shiny sharp leaves but with beautiful yellow flowers - scented. The soft yellow against the green is lovely at a time when there is not much else to look at. If you planted several of these against the wall you’d have a lovely green tableau for that wall and it would discourage burglars.
4. Cotoneasters are also good for this. Not scented though. As is coronilla Valentina glauca - evergreen with lovely yellow flowers in spring.
5. Hollies - especially if you get standard hollies and space along the wall. The ones I have in my garden are ilex “Silver van Tol” which are female, self-fertile and have lovely variegated leaves and bright red berries. Ilex Golden King is also good.
6. There are quite a few winter-flowering clematis around - clematis Armandii (flowers in early spring) is good. Taylor’s clematis is a really good nursery for them with loads of advice and you can put in exactly what you want - north facing, winter flowering and/or scented and then pick what you want. They deliver.
7. Finally, don’t forget sarcococca confusa - Christmas box. It is a small evergreen - so for the front of the bed or near doorways - but it has the most incredibly strong vanilla-like scent in winter from tiny white flowers. I have it in my front garden and it can be smelt from across the street. It is so cheering on a cold winter’s day.
You can also have a Camelli x vernalis “Yuletide” which has red flowers from November onwards. I have had it in flower at Xmas. Not tall and needs to be in a pot as it will need ericaceous soil (assume your garden is clay) but it can be nice to out a pot in the garden with a beautiful plant in it. If you have a lovely tall pot that as well as the plant can be a feature to draw the eye in winter.
Young merely points out that governments put a price on life all the time. If they didn;t every health service in the world would have unlimited sums to play with. But they don't of course because there is the acceptable and the unacceptable spend on the saving and the letting die. Even though nobody admits it its patently true.
Young goes on to artgue that these lives, as opposed to others that we might save instead, are extraordinarily highly priced. Stratospherically priced.
We might let these folk die and save a whole bunch of other people at a tiny fraction of the cost. And we would still have a functioning economy.
That is Young's point. Where he is wrong is he ignores the point the health service will be overwhelmed if we did that. But once we have the capacity to cope with any CIVD surge his point is a valid one. A very valid one.
But the point he has ignored - that the lockdown is to stop the NHS falling over - is THE point. If you gloss over this and just talk about "lives can and must be priced" you are left with something true but quite banal. Indeed I did a post of quite considerable banality on this exact issue the other day, so we don't need Toby.
Well quite. The whole point is to stop the NHS falling over with too many cases. Once we know it can cope, we need to change strategy and look at the economy.
My wife, a GP receptionist, took a call today from a lady who told her of a young male colleague who developed symptoms and self-isolated. While isolating he took his own life, fearful about money and being jobless apparently. Neither may have been true but he felt it. Maybe a negative test might have helped him if available. Who knows.
Believe it or not, people under 25 can read bar charts and see where data has been manipulated to present a false picture. And what that reads to me is that if you're under 25, or under 35 and otherwise healthy you'd have to be 1 in 1000 shot to be hospitalised, 1 in 10,000+ shot to die. I'll take those odds.
My wife, a GP receptionist, took a call today from a lady who told her of a young male colleague who developed symptoms and self-isolated. While isolating he took his own life, fearful about money and being jobless apparently. Neither may have been true but he felt it. Maybe a negative test might have helped him if available. Who knows.
I fear we will hear many stories like this. Those screaming for an early lockdown did not know what they were talking about.
It is bad but the trend could be worse. I feel quite optimistic today. I definitely sense that social distancing has taken root. Just got back a few minutes ago from my Boris Break and people are staying well away from each other. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. The virus will not be spreading so easily now. It will be hacked off and on the retreat. That will take some time to work through into the numbers but I think that one month from now we in the UK will be breathing a little easier.
That will be because the ventilator has arrived....
Very good news given there are only 25 000 coronavirus cases so far in the whole UK
I think everyone can agree if we spend some hundreds of millions of pounds creating a stockpile of ventilators we never use, it was at least an interesting method of keeping people in paid employment.
We could always send/sell them to other countries....
Indeed, at the moment the focus must be ventilator production, once the peak passes and lockdown ends then the focus must be mass testing
I am not sure I follow the logic of your time line.
You need ventilators as you approach the peak as so many get it you need to reduce the death rate, once the number of cases recedes as the lockdown takes effect you need mass testing to reduce the number of cases and contagion in the future
I follow that logic. The bit that I don't understand is why there has not been more ongoing testing to date, particularly for medical staff.
This is not a criticism of the great man and his government, it is surprising to me that the boffins advising government are comfortable with current levels of testing across the board.
From what was said today at the briefing, they are having problems sourcing reagents, Which might suggest they’re imported ?
I don’t think they’re comfortable at all; just unable to make things happen faster.
I find the inability of the authorities to ramp up test numbers a little odd.
They have managed to expand NHS bed capacity, looks like we are getting new ventilators off the production line already (and orders for 60,000 to come), new CPAP machines, seems like they have had a lot of PPE stashed away down the back of the sofa, they have already talked to oxygen suppliers to quadruple supply, AI computer system for load management and getting retired staff back in...all good stuff. And seems well organized.
Plus the stuff like the food boxes, which my elderly folk got today and are very pleased with. Not big fans of Boris, but said they had to give government credit for this.
I don't think it is financial, as willing to literally spend money like it is going out of fashion on everything else. And ramping up testing is small beer compared to most of the measures.
We know we don't have a many PCR machines as US or Germany, but there are reports that universities have a load of them sitting unused. And then the claim today was not enough of the required chemicals, but Peston, caveat emptor, claims the chemical industry says the government never spoke to them and have been sitting on their hands.
So what's going on?
The only thing I can think is that they thought they would have these millions of anti-body test by now and that they could use those to quickly go through the likes of the NHS staff to find the plague survivors, rather than constantly testing and retesting all those with flu like symptoms.
Young merely points out that governments put a price on life all the time. If they didn;t every health service in the world would have unlimited sums to play with. But they don't of course because there is the acceptable and the unacceptable spend on the saving and the letting die. Even though nobody admits it its patently true.
Young goes on to artgue that these lives, as opposed to others that we might save instead, are extraordinarily highly priced. Stratospherically priced.
We might let these folk die and save a whole bunch of other people at a tiny fraction of the cost. And we would still have a functioning economy.
That is Young's point. Where he is wrong is he ignores the point the health service will be overwhelmed if we did that. But once we have the capacity to cope with any CIVD surge his point is a valid one. A very valid one.
But the point he has ignored - that the lockdown is to stop the NHS falling over - is THE point. If you gloss over this and just talk about "lives can and must be priced" you are left with something true but quite banal. Indeed I did a post of quite considerable banality on this exact issue the other day, so we don't need Toby.
Well quite. The whole point is to stop the NHS falling over with too many cases. Once we know it can cope, we need to change strategy and look at the economy.
And hear the cries ofr u-turn.
Lot of focus on Young today but Dom Lawson made same points about Quality of Life calcs in Sunday Times this weekend.
What the govt should do, when they relax the lockdown, is tell people to expand their isolated group to a dozen or so but to keep that bigger group isolated.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
I last travelled on public transport on March 16th - Mrs Stodge on the 19th and passenger levels weren't far off normal then. They remained strong through the following weekend when the weather was good and panic buying was in full flow.
The tail off really only began with Johnson's announcement of the Lockdown this time last week. Since then, the fall has been dramatic especially on public transport but there's no doubt the roads are quieter too - operating at 25-30% if normal numbers.
I note today's Cabinet took place by Zoom - 25 participants so well done on strong connectivity. I'm still on Teams which works for my meetings.
My favourite winter-flowering shrubs, which are also scented - and the scent is usually very powerful are:-
1. Daphnes - these come from Nepal, don’t mind the cold and have wonderful scent and blossom in winter and spring. Choose where you plant them carefully as they don’t like being moved. Slow-growing but absolutely wonderful.
The tallest is Daphne bholua Jacqueline Postill. A gem. Other daphnes to consider are daphne oDora Aureomarginata - which is evergreen and scented and equally gorgeous.
2. Viburnum - eg bodnantense Dawn. In winter comes to its own it’s lovely white pink scented flowers. Nothing to write home about the rest of the year but you will have lots else to look at instead.
3. Mahonia - dark, evergreen, with shiny sharp leaves but with beautiful yellow flowers - scented. The soft yellow against the green is lovely at a time when there is not much else to look at. If you planted several of these against the wall you’d have a lovely green tableau for that wall and it would discourage burglars.
4. Cotoneasters are also good for this. Not scented though. As is coronilla Valentina glauca - evergreen with lovely yellow flowers in spring.
5. Hollies - especially if you get standard hollies and space along the wall. The ones I have in my garden are ilex “Silver van Tol” which are female, self-fertile and have lovely variegated leaves and bright red berries. Ilex Golden King is also good.
6. There are quite a few winter-flowering clematis around - clematis Armandii (flowers in early spring) is good. Taylor’s clematis is a really good nursery for them with loads of advice and you can put in exactly what you want - north facing, winter flowering and/or scented and then pick what you want. They deliver.
7. Finally, don’t forget sarcococca confusa - Christmas box. It is a small evergreen - so for the front of the bed or near doorways - but it has the most incredibly strong vanilla-like scent in winter from tiny white flowers. I have it in my front garden and it can be smelt from across the street. It is so cheering on a cold winter’s day.
You can also have a Camelli x vernalis “Yuletide” which has red flowers from November onwards. I have had it in flower at Xmas. Not tall and needs to be in a pot as it will need ericaceous soil (assume your garden is clay) but it can be nice to out a pot in the garden with a beautiful plant in it. If you have a lovely tall pot that as well as the plant can be a feature to draw the eye in winter.
I must say I am enjoying these garden exchanges. A light in the dark. Keep it up you two!
Young merely points out that governments put a price on life all the time. If they didn;t every health service in the world would have unlimited sums to play with. But they don't of course because there is the acceptable and the unacceptable spend on the saving and the letting die. Even though nobody admits it its patently true.
Young goes on to artgue that these lives, as opposed to others that we might save instead, are extraordinarily highly priced. Stratospherically priced.
We might let these folk die and save a whole bunch of other people at a tiny fraction of the cost. And we would still have a functioning economy.
That is Young's point. Where he is wrong is he ignores the point the health service will be overwhelmed if we did that. But once we have the capacity to cope with any CIVD surge his point is a valid one. A very valid one.
But the point he has ignored - that the lockdown is to stop the NHS falling over - is THE point. If you gloss over this and just talk about "lives can and must be priced" you are left with something true but quite banal. Indeed I did a post of quite considerable banality on this exact issue the other day, so we don't need Toby.
Well quite. The whole point is to stop the NHS falling over with too many cases. Once we know it can cope, we need to change strategy and look at the economy.
And hear the cries ofr u-turn.
Lot of focus on Young today but Dom Lawson made same points about Quality of Life calcs in Sunday Times this weekend.
Lord Hague also expressed some disquiet. Especially consequences for business after end of April
What the govt should do, when they relax the lockdown, is tell people to expand their isolated group to a dozen or so but to keep that bigger group isolated.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
Where am I supposed to find a dozen people who want to spend time in my company?
What the govt should do, when they relax the lockdown, is tell people to expand their isolated group to a dozen or so but to keep that bigger group isolated.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
The problem is those who have not had the virus or been tested will be in fear of the "second wave" later in the year.
I'm just back from my risk-assessed constitutional, which involved delivering a body-thermometer to a house-arrested tenant (more house-arrested in than I am), and a check on a mum's-estate-owned property (grandma's old shop in the family for 150 years) I had to pull from auction because mum died first and we are now stuck with empty until probate and post-virus so we can sell it.
The thermometer from China ordered around March 20th is fun - the triple site thermometer (rectally-orally-armpitally) turned out to be 3 identical ones that now need very careful labelling - but it means I had a spare to give away.
Watching what people have in their gardens here doing well with flowers there are Forsythias (have one in the back), flowering currants, magnolias (which will take decades to flower), something with dark red leaves, and something with really bright red flower-like things that may actually be leaves or bracts - will go back with an iPad later this week. And also something with germoline pink flowers.
I will be putting some snowdrops in, as I miss those.
What the govt should do, when they relax the lockdown, is tell people to expand their isolated group to a dozen or so but to keep that bigger group isolated.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
The problem is those who have not had the virus or been tested will be in fear of the "second wave" later in the year.
My wife, a GP receptionist, took a call today from a lady who told her of a young male colleague who developed symptoms and self-isolated. While isolating he took his own life, fearful about money and being jobless apparently. Neither may have been true but he felt it. Maybe a negative test might have helped him if available. Who knows.
I fear we will hear many stories like this. Those screaming for an early lockdown did not know what they were talking about.
Apart from the fact they wanted to save countless lives...they knew that bit...
What the govt should do, when they relax the lockdown, is tell people to expand their isolated group to a dozen or so but to keep that bigger group isolated.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
Where am I supposed to find a dozen people who want to spend time in my company?
Plenty of people don't carry dogs on the underground...
Lord Hague also expressed some disquiet. Especially consequences for business after end of April
So we come back to the fundamental questions about the value of individual life or lives set against the economic health of the economy and the various health problems further dislocation and disruption will cause to individuals and their families.
What the govt should do, when they relax the lockdown, is tell people to expand their isolated group to a dozen or so but to keep that bigger group isolated.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
Where am I supposed to find a dozen people who want to spend time in my company?
Lord Sumption asked the question. Those with all the data and the knowledge in this area reluctantly decided that yes it was the right thing to do. Indeed they got to that point after first trying a more light-touch approach. The public agree with the new strategy. What's the problem?
Oh yes. Peter Hitchens, the man that thinks cannabis causes people to become terrorists, thinks its a bad idea. Lol.
Indeed, the risk was 500 000 deaths from coronavirus in the UK on the worst estimates without lockdown
In the end it was a question only the elected politicians could decide. Is it worth trashing the economy and curtailing civil liberty on a massive scale to save 1000s of lives?
That call has been made.
But it is essential in a democracy that the alternative view be heard.
If by winter flowering, you are prepared to slip into the first couple of weeks of spring, try Erica arborea - the tree heather. The flowers are profuse, heather flowers, over the whole plant and they come out in March for me in south Devon. A stunning thing for early butterflies and bees to feed on. You can prune them severely, but if you want to fill a decent gap, mine grows up to about eight feet and very bushy.
The problem is those who have not had the virus or been tested will be in fear of the "second wave" later in the year.
Yebbut somehow it's got to be relaxed.
I don't disagree but it's the "how" and the "when". There are those who simply want to go back to what passes for normal on April 15th and others who favour a more phased return to normal life over a longer period.
Proponents of the former and opponents of the latter argue the economic damage will be exacerbated by maintaining the current regime of restrictions and that somehow getting us all back to being productive and consuming drones rather than sitting on our backsides at home would be a better outcome.
I find the inability of the authorities to ramp up test numbers a little odd.
...
So what's going on?
The only thing I can think is that they thought they would have these millions of anti-body test by now and that they could use those to quickly go through the likes of the NHS staff to find the plague survivors, rather than constantly testing and retesting all those with flu like symptoms.
Incompetence is normally a safe assumption but, as you say, the government have demonstrated a reasonable degree of competence in the rest of their response (though as an aside I think the communication has been surprisingly crap).
My best guess at this moment is that it's because the test is not really that good, and false negatives could give a bunch of people false reassurance - and crucially make them think they are safe to go out and spread the virus around.
So, why doesn't the government say they don't want to use the test because it's not good enough, instead of saying they are about to ramp up testing and then not doing so?
It could be the crap communication again, or it could be that they're right and it's too complicated an argument to use.
Lord Sumption asked the question. Those with all the data and the knowledge in this area reluctantly decided that yes it was the right thing to do. Indeed they got to that point after first trying a more light-touch approach. The public agree with the new strategy. What's the problem?
Oh yes. Peter Hitchens, the man that thinks cannabis causes people to become terrorists, thinks its a bad idea. Lol.
Hitchens makes a fantastic point about the link between ‘terrorists’ and cannabis actually.
Comments
I have dicentra "bleeding heart" that does well in such a position, but a hardy perennial rather than a shrub. A berberis may do well in such conditions and can have good autumn colour too. Ribes Sanguiam is pretty tolerant of conditions and grows fairly quickly to size, with quite a long flowering period.
Social distancing MUST reduce virus transmission and strain on the NHS - this is obvious. However, this does not necessarily mean that the eventual death tally from Covid-19 will be reduced by social distancing (unless a vaccine is found).
We are running the risk that we are merely delaying infections. My hunch is still with me that we almost all will catch this virus at some point; lockdown is just delaying the inevitable. Sure, the smoothing of NHS demand is a BIG PLUS of the lockdown policy - but - wow - the economic and loss of freedom costs!
I suspect that you agree with me Isam
I really doubt this is purely financial, given just how much money the UK is willing to throw at everything else. There isn't much evidence they are trying to penny pinch.
The Welsh government were promised 5,000 test a day from a private company and they bailed on them.
We also have to be very wary, a number of other countries have got totally duff stuff. Loads of dodgy middle men have been sniffing around offering non-existent or substandard ventilators.
The problem is what I called the "Turnips are not Tigers" problem when I was proposing my history research - a surprising number of people, including economic historians, think that production is completely fungible.
This is not so. Nothing will turn a turnip farm into a Tiger tank.
For example, in 1940, a brilliant British officer seized and smuggled out of Belgium the specialised machine tools for machining the barrels of 20mm cannon. A single lorry load of cargo. Face value maybe a few tens of thousand of pounds.
This prevented a delay of at *least* a year in getting the weapons into production in the UK.
Not that you need a source of any kind to know that the China stats are rubbish.
Mahonia is as tough as old boots, and flowers very early. Its spikes are a good deterrent to people sneaking over the wall too, as is pyracantha.
People here are saying this is an utterly stupid question that he disgraced himself by asking. I disagree. I think it is a perfectly OK and interesting question. More than that, I think it was a GOOD question. I think many people would have appreciated it being asked and answered.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/490326-fauci-predicts-another-coronavirus-outbreak-in
He’s not known for being a bullshitter. And is far from stupid.
The actions taken by the Chinese government shows that it was a very serious outbreak needing radical action, but that much was obvious at the end of January.
If you have a 2% attrition rate, you have a 98% chance of coming back. From one mission.
You have a 0.98^n chance of coming back from n missions. That means you have a 54.5% chance of completing your tour - 45.5% would not.
We were taught that getting that attrition rate up to 5% was lethal for an aggressor in an air war. That rate meant that they would lose half their force in a mere 13 missions - and if you have 3 missions per day, and you start on Monday, you aren't going to make it much further than Thursday without losing half your force.
Keith Park (supported by Dowding) made it his principle that the German bomber would get engaged all the way in and all the way out (disagreeing with the "Big Wing" mantra that would have allowed the bombers all the way in while forming up the Big wing to attack them on the way home). The morale effects on both the aggressors (who knew quite rapidly that they would have no respite throughout the mission) and those being defended, who frequently saw the air defence, was colossal.
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1245046542974750720
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1245046544501530624
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1245046546288259074
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1245046548486131714
To be fair, I have worked as an odds compiler in gambling for years and it’s almost ingrained to be sceptical/bearish of headlines and public momentum. They’re normally sure signs of a mug punter
Anyone else growing a beard as a hobby?
The major change between now and then will be potential treatments, ventilators and ability to rapidly diagnose.
Well, I do. When it’s this man, I do. When it’s this poisonous cynic who has done so much to antagonise British Jews, this banal egotist who has set back centre-left politics in this country for a generation, then I’m more than happy to strap on my steel toe caps and put the boot in.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-leaves-a-toxic-legacy#
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1245050873878851584?s=20
Agreed, and it is something like this that brings it home to people. A thriving financial services industry is sod all use when push comes to shove.
I hope that if and when we come through this we learn some of the lessons and seriously consider what we need to produce within the UK and not be dependent on others for. For years we have been guilty of letting our own capabilities wither in pursuit of cheaper options.
If we really are unable to ramp up testing because we are dependent on other countries for the chemicals then serious questions will need to be asked. I also understand that we can't get hold of Paracedemol because it is primarily made in India and they are, not unnaturally, hanging on to it for themselves.
Who was who suggested it didn't matter if our farming industry disappears post Brexit?
But I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them. I mean, don’t you live in the UK? How do you manage that without having heard of the UK gover...
Oh, sorry, did you mean Business Insider?
This is not a criticism of the great man and his government, it is surprising to me that the boffins advising government are comfortable with current levels of testing across the board.
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1244539332372967424?s=20
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1245048984340779010?s=20
Oh yes. Peter Hitchens, the man that thinks cannabis causes people to become terrorists, thinks its a bad idea. Lol.
- It's a country of two parts: Hubei, where the system appears to have collapsed and was as bad as Italy; the rest of China where infection rates have been low, on a par with other Asian countries.
- Social media backs this up: that Hubei was bad and there was relatively little incidence elsewhere.
- The epidemic is currently largely contained across China.
A couple of further points. It may not be meaningful to complain of cases being under-reported 15-40 times. The guesstimate for the UK on the government's own admission is underreporting by a factor of ten. Secondly figures can be wrong because people on the ground don't report everything or because they have been directly manipulated when aggregated. My suspicion is that there is more of the first than the second.
TV5 France last night for example,16 crematoriums each with 8 ovens in Wuhan working 24/7 since early Feb,warehouses full of individual boxes of ashes,still to be delivered to relatives etc.
https://twitter.com/TheSun/status/1245034078384119809
But please can we put that aside and just buy or make a huge number of these NOW!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ4mTVsOp8w
Was that the last gasp of "Boris being Boris" before he truly got it and de-clowned?
1. Daphnes - these come from Nepal, don’t mind the cold and have wonderful scent and blossom in winter and spring. Choose where you plant them carefully as they don’t like being moved. Slow-growing but absolutely wonderful.
The tallest is Daphne bholua Jacqueline Postill. A gem. Other daphnes to consider are daphne oDora Aureomarginata - which is evergreen and scented and equally gorgeous.
2. Viburnum - eg bodnantense Dawn. In winter comes to its own it’s lovely white pink scented flowers. Nothing to write home about the rest of the year but you will have lots else to look at instead.
3. Mahonia - dark, evergreen, with shiny sharp leaves but with beautiful yellow flowers - scented. The soft yellow against the green is lovely at a time when there is not much else to look at. If you planted several of these against the wall you’d have a lovely green tableau for that wall and it would discourage burglars.
4. Cotoneasters are also good for this. Not scented though. As is coronilla Valentina glauca - evergreen with lovely yellow flowers in spring.
5. Hollies - especially if you get standard hollies and space along the wall. The ones I have in my garden are ilex “Silver van Tol” which are female, self-fertile and have lovely variegated leaves and bright red berries. Ilex Golden King is also good.
6. There are quite a few winter-flowering clematis around - clematis Armandii (flowers in early spring) is good. Taylor’s clematis is a really good nursery for them with loads of advice and you can put in exactly what you want - north facing, winter flowering and/or scented and then pick what you want. They deliver.
7. Finally, don’t forget sarcococca confusa - Christmas box. It is a small evergreen - so for the front of the bed or near doorways - but it has the most incredibly strong vanilla-like scent in winter from tiny white flowers. I have it in my front garden and it can be smelt from across the street. It is so cheering on a cold winter’s day.
You can also have a Camelli x vernalis “Yuletide” which has red flowers from November onwards. I have had it in flower at Xmas. Not tall and needs to be in a pot as it will need ericaceous soil (assume your garden is clay) but it can be nice to out a pot in the garden with a beautiful plant in it. If you have a lovely tall pot that as well as the plant can be a feature to draw the eye in winter.
Which might suggest they’re imported ?
I don’t think they’re comfortable at all; just unable to make things happen faster.
They have managed to expand NHS bed capacity, looks like we are getting new ventilators off the production line already (and orders for 60,000 to come), new CPAP machines, seems like they have had a lot of PPE stashed away down the back of the sofa, they have already talked to oxygen suppliers to quadruple supply, AI computer system for load management and getting retired staff back in...all good stuff. And seems well organized.
Plus the stuff like the food boxes, which my elderly folk got today and are very pleased with. Not big fans of Boris, but said they had to give government credit for this.
I don't think it is financial, as willing to literally spend money like it is going out of fashion on everything else. And ramping up testing is small beer compared to most of the measures.
We know we don't have a many PCR machines as US or Germany, but there are reports that universities have a load of them sitting unused. And then the claim today was not enough of the required chemicals, but Peston, caveat emptor, claims the chemical industry says the government never spoke to them and have been sitting on their hands.
So what's going on?
The only thing I can think is that they thought they would have these millions of anti-body test by now and that they could use those to quickly go through the likes of the NHS staff to find the plague survivors, rather than constantly testing and retesting all those with flu like symptoms.
Then expand it beyond that likewise in increments gradually, all the while keeping away from people not in that defined group.
The graphic which struck me today was this:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/live-experience/cps/624/cpsprodpb/vivo/live/images/2020/3/31/a0c96836-d27d-4d6b-83b6-5ac34176aa38.jpg
I last travelled on public transport on March 16th - Mrs Stodge on the 19th and passenger levels weren't far off normal then. They remained strong through the following weekend when the weather was good and panic buying was in full flow.
The tail off really only began with Johnson's announcement of the Lockdown this time last week. Since then, the fall has been dramatic especially on public transport but there's no doubt the roads are quieter too - operating at 25-30% if normal numbers.
I note today's Cabinet took place by Zoom - 25 participants so well done on strong connectivity. I'm still on Teams which works for my meetings.
I really appreciate all the suggestions.
I'm just back from my risk-assessed constitutional, which involved delivering a body-thermometer to a house-arrested tenant (more house-arrested in than I am), and a check on a mum's-estate-owned property (grandma's old shop in the family for 150 years) I had to pull from auction because mum died first and we are now stuck with empty until probate and post-virus so we can sell it.
The thermometer from China ordered around March 20th is fun - the triple site thermometer (rectally-orally-armpitally) turned out to be 3 identical ones that now need very careful labelling - but it means I had a spare to give away.
Watching what people have in their gardens here doing well with flowers there are Forsythias (have one in the back), flowering currants, magnolias (which will take decades to flower), something with dark red leaves, and something with really bright red flower-like things that may actually be leaves or bracts - will go back with an iPad later this week. And also something with germoline pink flowers.
I will be putting some snowdrops in, as I miss those.
That call has been made.
But it is essential in a democracy that the alternative view be heard.
https://www.gardenista.com/garden-design-101/shrubs/tree-heather-shrubs-plant-care-growing-guide/
Proponents of the former and opponents of the latter argue the economic damage will be exacerbated by maintaining the current regime of restrictions and that somehow getting us all back to being productive and consuming drones rather than sitting on our backsides at home would be a better outcome.
My best guess at this moment is that it's because the test is not really that good, and false negatives could give a bunch of people false reassurance - and crucially make them think they are safe to go out and spread the virus around.
So, why doesn't the government say they don't want to use the test because it's not good enough, instead of saying they are about to ramp up testing and then not doing so?
It could be the crap communication again, or it could be that they're right and it's too complicated an argument to use.
0.5-1.5