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4 Nov, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Here we go again. The government just released updated guidance for schools, a few hours before it takes effect as the second lockdown begins.
At the end of August the government updated (pretty much all of) their guidance for schools a few days before schools reopened after the summer. Leaving them with the bank holiday weekend to prepare.

And then in September they pulled the same trick on universities.

Based on their track record, I can't wait to see what new guidance on post Brexit trade rules they release for businesses on Boxing Day. 🙄
New advice on shielding "clinically extremely vulnerable" people finally arrived today as well. This also applies from midnight tonight.

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
6 Nov
Biden is almost 4 million votes ahead nationwide, but the outcome of the US election came down to a few thousand votes in 4 states.

Thanks to the electoral college, 33 of 50 states didn't get a single visit from either candidate.

There was no point even contesting most states!
It's not like this is a new problem.

The electoral college was a fine idea in theory, 230 years ago. But it broke down within a few years.

After two centuries of tinkering with local and national rules it's just a confusing mess that bears no resemblance to the original idea.
In an increasingly polarised two party system, where 48 out of 50 states give all their electors to the candidate who gets the most votes, it's horribly broken.

All the effort usually goes into fighting a handful of "battleground states" while everyone else is taken for granted.
Read 6 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
5 Nov
This week's Test & Trace report is out, showing cases continuing to rise last week, despite a dip in testing.

Test turnaround times continued to improve, but both testing and contact tracing are still performing far below the levels they need to reach to be effective. Image
The government claimed big increases in lab capacity last week, but the number of tests done and people tested in England actually dipped slightly compared to the previous week.

Despite this more people tested positive, leading to another rise in positivity rates. ImageImageImageImage
In fact, the only Pillar 2 testing that went up was "Satellite" tests, which is mostly regular screening of asymptomatic care home staff and residents.

If you strip repeat tests out, the positivity rate for people tested for the first time in the community reached almost 24%! Image
Read 16 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
3 Nov
A lot of covid sceptics are sharing this story today.

The first claim it makes (about a "dodgy hospital heatmap") is very obviously wrong though.

The Daily Mail is either deliberately trying to mislead people or (just as likely) doesn't understand what it's talking about.
They say 232 of 482 English hospitals had NO covid patients on October 27th.

But the vast majority of those have NEVER had covid patients, because they're private hospitals, mental health units, specialist hospitals etc, many with no general or acute care beds to put them in!
175 of the 232 hospitals without covid patients are private hospitals (including cosmetic surgeries and mental health centres).

Unsurprisingly, 170 of them haven't had a single covid patient in at least the last 3 months. Because that's not what private hospitals generally do.
Read 7 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
2 Nov
The government claims to have hit its target of expanding lab capacity to 500,000 "virus" tests a day.

As with their 100,000 tests a day target in April though, there's been a rather suspicious last minute surge to reach the target which, just a week ago, looked hopeless.
Back in April the government pulled this off by counting 40,000 tests they'd put in the post as "done", even though they hadn't been used and actually processed in a lab yet.

In fact, we now know they didn't really hit 100,000 tests a day until May 20th.

The latest surge comes almost entirely from Pillar 1 (NHS and PHE) lab capacity.

This hasn't increased AT ALL for 4 months, but now we're expected to believe it suddenly doubled in 4 days, just in time to hit an arbitrary target.

And oddly none of this capacity is being used.
Read 11 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
18 Oct
No, flu has not disappeared.

Covid sceptics are claiming that flu deaths have dropped from a normal 17,000 to 394 this year. Implying flu deaths are misreported as covid.

In fact flu deaths in England are normal this year.

They're comparing two completely different numbers.
The 17,000 five year average comes from this Full Fact article, which in turn is based on figures from PHE.

It's the "number of deaths associated with influenza", calculated by the FluMOMO algorithm.

So not a direct measurement OR direct cause of death.

fullfact.org/health/coronav… Image
But the 394 flu deaths for this year (up to August 31st) is the ONS figure for the number of death certificates which specifically listed influenza as the underlying cause of death.

People who died "from flu not with flu", as covid sceptics would put it.

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati… Image
Read 5 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
13 Oct
One of these women is a BBC journalist.

The other is the Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Spot the difference:
Tom Newton Dunn of Times Radio (and formerly the Sun) seems to have edged the field, managing to copy and paste the latest message from Dominic Cummings (sorry, Sr Guv Source) at 19:46.

Conservative Chair Amanda Milling came in second at 19:57.

Read 6 tweets

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