BC GOVERNMENT
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

This is the exact problem with our government's thinking & response- despite this strategy of 'tolerating deaths' and half-way measures having spectacularly failed, it's quite amazing that our govt still hasn't learned anything, & continues to promote a policy of death. Thread

 Had we adopted an elimination strategy early on, rather than one of tolerating a certain level of infection, we wouldn't be here now. The reason we're here is because the govt never committed to elimination.
We eased lockdown in May when infection levels were much higher than when other countries in Europe did this. The govt was warned about this, but did this to 'help the economy'. Not only did this lead us into the 2nd wave, the need for further lockdowns harmed the economy further
It's very clear from global evidence that we cannot 'tolerate a level of community transmission' and maintain 'R at or just below 1', which has been our governments policy for a long time. This isn't sustainable & very rapidly gets out of control, leading to exponential rises
Coupled with late action to contain these surges, not only does this lead to many more deaths, and much more morbidity with Long COVID, it also creates a fertile ground for viral mutations to accumulate with a greater risk of adaptation, which is exactly what happened in the UK
And Esther McVey's tweet about 200,000 deaths from lockdown. This is absolutely false. We have >80,000 excess deaths in the UK, and it's very clear that the vast majority of these are clearly due to COVID-19.

https://t.co/VPqJBbkFik
So the idea that there are a huge number of indirect deaths from lockdowns (and these exceed the deaths from COVID-19) is absolutely false, and it's disappointing to see the govt actively spreading false information, and misinforming the public in the midst of a pandemic.
In fact, what is very clear is that the late action and half-way strategy of govt has left to a very high death toll from COVID-19. The UK has one of the highest mortality rates in the world - 1100/million compared with 0.29/million in Taiwan.
UK policy for COVID-19 has been an utter failure. The fact that the govt is still talking about 'tolerating deaths' is terrifying. When does the govt acknowledge that this isn't working & change course. This destructive ideology has led us here & will cost many more lives.
The new variant & its rapid spread further emphasises the huge risks of this approach. It's clear that the only way forward now is elimination. A policy of half-way measures does not work - and is destructive to our society & our economy. The evidence is clear. Please stop this.
And if you truly want to prevent indirect deaths due to the NHS being overwhelmed, the best way to prevent these is also *control COVID-19*. It should be obvious that an NHS service overwhelmed with COVID cannot provide routine care.
If you're concerned about the NHS, invest in it rather than cutting funding, and enacting policies that have led to huge NHS shortages. If you care about mental health of communities, invest in this. Cuts in mental health services predate COVID-19 & have caused a lot of harm.
If you're worried about the impact of lockdowns, *prevent* these by following an elimination strategy, and basing policies on scientific evidence - which does not support the govts current policies. If you care about impact of lockdown on communities, support them.
Spreading disinformation should violate the ministerial code. We're at a point where MPs in govt are actively spreading disinformation in the midst of a pandemic.

The govt has completely failed us & their continued pursuit of pseudoscience will cost many more lives.
Talking about 'tolerating deaths' at a point where vaccines are available is even more irresponsible. Every single death from COVID-19 is preventable- had the govt thinking reflected this, we would be at a very different point now.

More from Deepti Gurdasani

Deepti Gurdasani
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
I've been seeing a lot of discussion around the dosage gaps recommended by government for the Astra/Oxford & Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. My thoughts on the potential benefits & risks of such an approach, and the need for much greater transparency around these decisions. Thread.


The UK govt announced recently that both the Oxford & BioNTech vaccines would be now administered with a gap of between 4-12 weeks (so prioritise administration of first dose, given limited resources).

What is the basis of this?

The basis that's been discussed seems to be that
1) the first dose is likely to confer some degree of protection against disease, so better to roll this out as fast as possible, and
2) that for Oxford/Astra efficacy may be higher when the gap between doses is greater.

I discuss some of the technical details around the Oxford trial below for those interested in these. If you'd just like a summary of this, please skip to the summary tweet titled 'SUMMARY'.

What does published evidence show? The Astra/Oxford data are a bit messy because of protocol changes during the trial. This is because the trial was originally planned as a single dose trial, but a booster dose was added when developers realised that this would likely help.
GOVERNMENT
Deepti Gurdasani
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).
SOCIETY
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Deepti Gurdasani
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
Thread on the recent report on the possible risk of increased death associated with the new UK variant (B117)- with a discussion of the evidence around this, and what this means.

First, there is strong evidence to support increased transmissibility of B117 - current estimates of increased transmissibility range between 30-70% - from epidemiological evidence examining the differential rate of growth of B117 with respect to other variants & increase in R

There is also evidence from PHE contact studies that the risk of transmission from those carrying the B117 variant is ~50% greater than with other non-B117 variants.

Increased transmissibility, even if a variant has the same fatality rate can increase deaths substantially, because the rate of growth of cases is higher- & more cases means more deaths.

Increased fatality rates also increase deaths- but do so


So how was risk of death with the variant studied?
We don't routinely sequence all samples for the virus. We've found that the variant has a particular deletion which means that some PCR tests on samples with the variant give a different read-out when the variant is present.
SOCIETY
Deepti Gurdasani
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
I'm honestly at a loss as to understanding what our government is thinking & what evidence they're considering in enacting gravely negligent policies that will almost certainly lead to tens of thousands of deaths in the coming weeks. Thread.

To recap - NHS capacity is critical in many places. Hospitals have reported oxygen shortages, and doctors are talking about having to choose who to put on ventilatory support. We have rapidly rising case numbers, >50,000 daily reported cases & 981 deaths reported yesterday.

Let's remember that the impact of socialising over christmas hasn't even begun to show in our numbers yet. And that hospitalisations are indicative of infections that happened ~2-3 wks ago (since then we have been seeing exponential rises in cases).

This means even if we act today, and bring R to below 1 right now, hospitalisations will continue to rise for another 2 wks or so - in line with exponential rises in cases over the past 2 weeks. And deaths will continue to rise for 2-4 wks after we act.

Given current doubling periods, this means very conservatively, 20-30,000 deaths over the next 4 weeks or so, which we sadly can't do anything about now, because most of those who will die during this period have already been infected.
GOVERNMENT
Deepti Gurdasani
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
My thoughts on the govt announcement yesterday regarding a new viral strain potentially driving an increase in cases in London. The claim, at least from listening to the daily briefing seems to be based on the strain increasing in frequency more recently. 1/N

Cases have been rising exponentially in England- much of the increase being attributed to the South, although declines have slowed even in the North following easing of lockdown. Much of this is anticipated, and expected, given the behaviour of the virus. 2/N

SARS-CoV-2, like any other viruses mutates as it multiplies (albeit slower than influenza). Mutations occur randomly and most are 'neutral' - i.e. have little to no effect on transmission, ability to evade the natural or vaccine-related immune response

Having said that, few mutations have been shown to be less likely to be neutralised by plasma from patients infected by the usual (wild-type) virus. Whether this translates to a lower response to vaccines or higher risk of re-infection is unclear at the moment.

Also worth noting that just because a variant becomes more frequent in a region doesn't necessarily mean it offers a fitness advantage to the virus. Many mutations rise to different frequencies in different regions due to random processes. The frequency of strains varies globally
GOVERNMENT

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IMPORTANT MASK INFORMATION

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The Government has FAILED to conduct a Risk Assessment of the risks to the individual members of the public for the harms caused to them by mask wearing- or wearing a face covering.
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Geoffrey York
Geoffrey York
@geoffreyyork
South African science was crucial in helping UK discover its new variants; but then the UK govt claimed (wrongly) that the SA variant is more transmissible. No evidence to support this, according to @krisp_news

From the Times article: SA scientists "were the first to recognize the importance of a genetic change in the spike protein, something that allows the virus to attach more easily to human cells, making it more infectious than the original version."

The SA discovery was shared on Dec 4 over the WHO’s Covid-19 Evolution Working Group. “Our British colleagues were able to go back to their own databases and interrogate them as a result of the work we shared,” Richard Lessells, an infectious diseases specialist at Krisp, said.

More from the Times article by @janeflan: "While working on a much smaller budget than their British colleagues, the South African team, experienced with work on HIV, have the skills to decode the genome of viruses."

"They started work on samples of the Covid-19 virus soon after the first cases reached South Africa in March. In October they identified the first example that had changed significantly."
GOVERNMENT
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Mikey Kay
Mikey Kay
@MikeyKayNYC
Abbott is pushing a lie to protect incompetence. There is no Federal oversight of the Texas Grid, ergo fewer regulations (sound familiar) - so point one: state legislature needs reform. 2/


2. Point 2: there were clear signs the grid would get overloaded under extreme cold conditions. Why? Due to a vacuum of regulations mandating winterization of turbines and power generators. This from sources, in Texas!

3. Point 3: Of the power shortfall that hit Texas, over 80% was due to problems at coal and gas fired plants. Power generators were just not winterized. Decisions to do so have been ignored since the 1990s.

4. Point 4: these are winterized wind turbines in Denmark. The ocean is frozen. The turbines are generating.


5. #Texas| the main issue is: catastrophic governance at the State level (no Federal oversight of the Texas grid) failing to allocate funding to winterise the Natural Gas, Coal and Wind Turbine elements that contribute to the grid. (~ 80/20
GOVERNMENT
Crystal moth
Crystal moth
@Prolapsarian
THREAD: British people are so thick that they will watch the government make exactly the same mistake for a fourth time, and carry on cheering. Ok, yes, you're being lied to in the press. But the opposite of "opening up as quickly" is not "lockdown forever". Here's why: 1/

In fact, opening up as quickly as we can will lead to more lockdowns, and worse restrictions over the course of the next year. Or to put it another way an extra week of lockdown now saves us from an extra month of lockdown in the Summer or Autumn.

How does that work? Right 2/

now the number of infections is declining quite fast. But the number of cases is still quite high. If they are still quite high (or even medium) when we lift restrictions this will lead very quickly to a massive spike in cases, and then we will have to lock down again, 3/

probably for a long time.

Sounds familiar doesn't it. It's exactly what we did in November through to now. First we went into lockdown, then we released it too early (at the beginning of December). As a result, cases spiked. By the end of December there was an enormous wave 4/

of infection, which killed tens of thousands of people. In the first weeks of January the government put in the current lockdown restrictions. They didn't really have a choice: about 80% of the British public supported restrictions. But here's the thing: after six weeks of 5/
GOVERNMENT

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Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
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Keep dwelling on this:
Further Examination of the Motif near PRRA Reveals Close Structural Similarity to the SEB Superantigen as well as Sequence Similarities to Neurotoxins and a Viral SAg.

The insertion PRRA together with 7 sequentially preceding residues & succeeding R685 (conserved in β-CoVs) form a motif, Y674QTQTNSPRRAR685, homologous to those of neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) and Bungarus genera, as well as neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains

(20) (Fig. 2D). We further noticed that the same segment bears close similarity to the HIV-1 glycoprotein gp120 SAg motif F164 to V174.
https://t.co/EwwJOSa8RK


In (B), the segment S680PPRAR685 including the PRRA insert and highly conserved cleavage site *R685* is shown in van der Waals representation (black labels) and nearby CDR residues of the TCRVβ domain are labeled in blue/white
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa


Sequence Identity %
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Y674 - QTQTNSPRRA - R685
Similar to neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) & Bungarus genera & neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
T678 - NSPRRA- R685
Superantigenic core, consistently aligned against bacterial or viral SAgs
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1. “Who Are Ireland’s Members Of The World Economic Forum Implementing The Great Reset In 2021 ? 🧵1/28

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2. In previous threads I have looked at 🇮🇪 key players in the Trilateral Commission as well as 🇮🇪 people who have attended the Bilderberger meetings. I also looked at the 🇮🇪 in the Young Global Leaders which is a site run by the WEF. You will see a lot of crossover between them.

3. The purpose of this thread is to compile all the Irish members into one thread for ease of access and reading rather than having to dive through the WEF site. This is by no means definitive and I will be adding more over time when they pop out of the woodwork.

4. Ireland’s WEF members are drawn from all walks of life but can be split into 2 separate areas. The WEF calls the first category “people” and the 2nd one “agenda contributors”. In total Ireland has a minimum of 61 members. Some of the names will be familiar and others will not

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Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

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So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

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