Coronavirus
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Rod,
“Leaving economy issues aside (if only we could), there is also the argument that even from the aspect of general health and wellbeing, a lockdown is worse than the problem it’s trying to solve”
This statement is a crucial point in managed public health during any lockdown (and financial cost of health burden narratives should have no part to play).
The inadvertent social/health problems with any COVID restrictions should come into public health planning. Lockdown impacts on early diagnostic screening for serious health issues- screening attendance declines. In AOD (addictions therapy) people who live with substance dependencies experience disruption to supply, and some in lockdown, undergo very dangerous self detox (or receive helfty fines for breaching restrictions). Family violence episodes also increase- with increased risk of lethality. Suicidal ideations and serious mental health symptoms and their unmanaged morbidity increase too.
A total health response is required in public health policy. It involves interdisciplinary approaches (health sciences of the physical and the social/mental health and protective (D/V) sectors).
Many domains of health science frontline practitioners discuss this often- and money is absent from the debate. Long may it be so- or I might feel I have served in my own little way to reduce the health spend and its urgency (social costs). When health and social care become captured by economic burden capital interests of keeping the economy ‘open’ will always stand at the front of the line (adverse health outcomes become an acceptable risk or economic ‘friendly fire’)
Matthew: Lets put the money on the cart- and bid it farewell. Get that flu shot!
Be safe,
LB
“When health and social care become captured by economic burden capital interests of keeping the economy ‘open’ will always stand at the front of the line (adverse health outcomes become an acceptable risk or economic ‘friendly fire’)”
Collateral damage, indeed.
They can’t say they weren’t warned what would happen if they let the students travel all over the country to their universities. The lecturers union warned that this would spread the virus. And it has. And now they don’t know what to as they can’t led the students go back home now.
This government is proving to be a bunch of incompetents over this issue even from a capitalist standpoint. True, they are under pressure from sections of business and their delegates in parliament and as the traditional party of business they have to take this into account.
The move to reopen universities was an absolutely appauling one. Newcastle has a student population of about 50,000 students, all based in halls of residence and houses in mutliple occupation, mainly around the city centre, it’s the same in many other cities. Liverpool has three Universities, Leeds two, Sheffield two, all with student s based close to city centres. I’m sure the decision was based on bailing our the Universities which are big businesses now, a lot of them have their own halls of residence which contribute to their running costs, they make money on all the campus bookshops, coffee bars, coke machines, etc. It’s even worse for small university cities like Durham, it has a population of 48,000 and about 20,000 students in attendance.
We see increasing numbers of anti-lockdown protests globally but more ominous is the political boost such a stance it is giving the right
Despite downplaying the seriousness of COVID-19, Brazil’s president’s approval rating is at its highest since he took office.
Lockdowners versus Libertarians
interesting youtube link for those with a younger and functional brain to mull over: https://youtu.be/06yja21V7xg
More than 300 parties against covid distancing in Scotland alone last night.
And then, you see them crying like babies at the hospitals. I do not give a shit if capitalism goes down, I do not love the capitalists or their leaders before the emergence of this disease capitalism was already falling down and it was in crisis. This disease is serious it is not a joke
interesting youtube link for those with a younger and functional brain to mull over: https://youtu.be/06yja21V7xg
This is the person in the video:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weston_(politician)
There is an article in next month’s Socialist Standard on the populist radio station TalkRadio under the title Radio Ga-Ga.
Nowadays any piece of shit is a hero, and an example to be followed, there is not any critical analysis
Alien 1 listened to about 2 and 1/2 minutes of his talk and found a number of issues, couldn’t be bothered to listen to much more.
He doesn’t understand the difference between false positives, accuracy and or sensitivity/specificity and he doesn’t even go on to discuss the other side of the issue false negatives.
For a start he quotes government figures for accuracy (not specificity or sensitivity, which I’ll come back to later) as being between 0.8% and 4.3% and then states that he will take an average of 2.1%. Just to be clear 2.1% is not the average or the mean as he describes it, it is the median, the mid way point between two numbers, this is GCSE beginners maths, if he doesn’t understand that, he is obviously a bit of a duck egg.
He then goes on to use 2.8% as a figure to work out the false positives, however 2.8% (notionally accepting his figures) refers to the accuracy of the test. What he needs to know is the sensitivity/specificity.
Sensitivity measures the proportion of positives that are correctly identified (e.g., the percentage of sick people who are correctly identified as having some illness).
Specificity measures the proportion of negatives that are correctly identified (e.g., the percentage of healthy people who are correctly identified as not having some illness).
With the coronavirus test, reseach (Oxford University, etc) show that there are very few false positives (in one piece of research all positive tests were retested three times and found to be accurate). However levels of false negatives were running at about 5%, so the test was deemed to have low sensitivity, i.e. a relatively low percentage of sick people who were correctly identified.
The problem is that people are getting a negative test and thinking, all is ok, it might not be.
I know there are a lot of BBC haters out there, but the Radio 4 programme, “More or Less” is really well worth listening to, they are excellent at going through some of these statistical claims and pulling them apart, and for sad bastards like me, it’s half an hour of bliss listening to people talking about statistics.
Lucky there’s a statistician in the house. Here’s more:
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