Liz Truss certainly seems to have a yen to spend large amounts of our money on wining and dining herself and those around her...
(I lived in Tokyo for quite some time. It's expensive, but it's not £2,000 expensive. Not unless you try really, really, really hard.)
Excerpt in previous tweet came from this Guardian article. (Couldn't fit the link into Twitter's character limit.) theguardian.com/politics/2022/…
Just a bit more about eating out in Japan, if you've read this far.
It can be eyewateringly expensive. But it can also be good value (more so than the UK) especially at lunchtime, when many restaurants have cheap set menus including a starter, main, dessert and drink for £10-15.
Of course, I'm not suggesting Liz Truss should have budgeted that low. But to scale up to £2,000+ over 3 days, for 4 people, takes quite some doing!
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When is it too early to draw lessons from a pandemic that's been raging for 2 years?
Could we learn about England's current situation by studying the peak last winter?
Last winter: cases in blue, hospitalisations in purple.
This winter: cases in red, hospitalisations in orange.
Last winter, cases peaked around 8 January (would have been reported in the daily figures between 9-12 January). Hospitalisations peaked a week later.
This suggests we have a lot of cases and an awful lot of hospitalisations to come as the effects of Xmas/NY mingling play out.
Of course, Omicron isn't Delta. History won't play out exactly the same. And there will be fewer deaths per hospitalisation thanks to the vaccine and better treatments.
But we have a strong indication that the worst:
A) Is already baked in
and
B) Has yet to manifest in the data
Gets worse! The BBC quietly amended the article on its website. Original (left) from the Internet Archive. Right is the current version. Anyone coming to it now will wonder what the fuss was about.
Here's the reality of the booster programme, which Boris Johnson claimed would boost everyone by the end of December.
The graph shows the number of eligible people (2nd doses 92+ days ago), boosted people and people still needing boosters.
There are 12,260,671 people to go.
So 2.45 million people need to get a booster shot every day between now and the end of the year.
On the very best day so far, 968,665 people were boosted.
In other words: "Ain't gonna happen".
It was always going to be a hollow promise. The numbers involved are just too high.
DATA SOURCES
The following data tables were used in making the graph (plus a bit of simple arithmetic):
cumPeopleVaccinatedSecondDoseByPublishDate
cumPeopleVaccinatedThirdInjectionByPublishDate coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/downlo…
The Express goes wild over the UK's amazing 2022 fishing deal with the EU, worth around £313 million for 140,000 tonnes of fish.
Of course, in reality our deal this year was worth £333 million for 160,000 tonnes, so we've actually thrown away £20 million. express.co.uk/news/politics/…
And here's George Eustice boasting about the remarkable achievement of managing to negotiate less fishing quota than the previous year (oddly, he doesn't choose to frame it that way).
Victoria Prentis also seems pretty chuffed at having negotiated away £20 million of fish.
The wheels are coming off! If you look at the detailed stats for covid patients admitted to hospital, you'll see that there were 926 new patients in England alone on 19 December. (And well over 1,000 for the UK as a whole.)
However, the summary stats only go to 17 December.
In other words the summary data (which the newspapers focus on) is still 24-48h from showing the sudden leap in hospitalisations visible in the detailed stats.
Why the delay? Because the summary requires data for all 4 nations, but there's no data for Scotland after 17 December.
Meanwhile...
"Ministers will not introduce any new Covid restrictions before Christmas in England, Boris Johnson has confirmed, saying there is not enough evidence to justify tougher measures."