Saturday 15th & Sunday 16th August 2020

[refitman]

Morning all.

[gilsey]

Good morning.

James Astill
@JamesMAstill
The (uk) Times has sacked its best political columnist apparently for being too critical of a hapless tory government presiding over the brexit fiasco its members engineered

Philip Collins is apparently too left-wing for the Times.

[RogerOThornhill]

Morning all.

And the Times has kept the insufferable Quentin Letts which tells you all you need to know about the direction of travel.

[gilsey]

Phil Bird
@PhilBird19

Pupils taking A level maths and further maths illustrate the flaws perfectly. Predicted maths grades were automatically marked down, but their predicted further maths grades stood, because less students took further maths, and there wasn’t enough of a cohort for standardisation.

The algorithm has given 1 in 30 pupils higher grades in Further Maths than in Maths.

This happens in 1 in 500 cases in exams.

Personally I'm surprised it's as many as 1 in 500, who are these people?

[AnatolyKasparov]

Morning all.

And the Times has kept the insufferable Quentin Letts which tells you all you need to know about the direction of travel.

Maybe even more to the point, it still has Breivik's favourite British columnist.

[citizenJA]

Phil Bird
@PhilBird19

Pupils taking A level maths and further maths illustrate the flaws perfectly. Predicted maths grades were automatically marked down, but their predicted further maths grades stood, because less students took further maths, and there wasn’t enough of a cohort for standardisation.

The algorithm has given 1 in 30 pupils higher grades in Further Maths than in Maths.

This happens in 1 in 500 cases in exams.

Personally I'm surprised it's as many as 1 in 500, who are these people?

The preposterous algorithm applied is produced an abomination and its results thrown out, reparations to all those adversely affected forthcoming.

[citizenJA]

Good afternoon, everyone.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Still hot today, though maybe slightly less than it has been.

[citizenJA]

Still hot today, though maybe slightly less than it has been.

Very mild here
cool breeze, at times
40 miles South of Manchester

[frog222]

Has been 39 previous week , now a civilised 21 40Nm SE of Jersey !

Housework, installing another workstation upstairs ...

[citizenJA]

Good idea. An upstairs workstation is better when it's cooler.

[frog222]

Good idea. An upstairs workstation is better when it's cooler.

We, well mostly my son! re-roofed over my bedroom half of the house so it has a foot of densely packed blown in cellulose. When outside is not cold my body heat warms it up !
Plenty to do outside before the winter, but have plenty of firewood ...

[RogerOThornhill]

Andrew Doyle
@andrewdoyle_com
Sorry to say
@Twitter
have locked
@TitaniaMcGrath
out of her account yet again.

I’ll keep you all posted. But I suspect she might not be reinstated.

We shall see...

Time to let it go...like most satire it's funny at first but then outstays its welcome and becomes tired and predictable.

[AnatolyKasparov]

And it was never *that* funny originally.......

[adam]

Phil Bird
@PhilBird19

Pupils taking A level maths and further maths illustrate the flaws perfectly. Predicted maths grades were automatically marked down, but their predicted further maths grades stood, because less students took further maths, and there wasn’t enough of a cohort for standardisation.

The algorithm has given 1 in 30 pupils higher grades in Further Maths than in Maths.

This happens in 1 in 500 cases in exams.

Personally I'm surprised it's as many as 1 in 500, who are these people?

I'm surprised it's not more - I get the impression that you only do Further Maths at A level if you're an off-the-scale maths genius in the first place.

[citizenJA]

---
I'm surprised it's not more - I get the impression that you only do Further Maths at A level if you're an off-the-scale maths genius in the first place.

(cJA edit)

thinking about Further Maths A level classes
I ended up thinking of LeGuin's, The Dispossessed

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Thank you Manchester City for giving so many a much needed laugh in these trying times.

[citizenJA]

"He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists.

To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing. “Well, of course,” Shevek said, troubled. “If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it.”

The boys went away unappeased, but polite. They were pleasant boys,with frank and civil manners. Shevek’s readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.”"

- The Dispossessed
Ursula K. LeGuin

[adam]

I was being a bit flippant about further maths but only a bit - I may be wrong but my recollection is that it has a higher highest grade pass rate than any other subject.

One of my PGCE tutors said that when the GCSE English system was briefly 100% coursework, and one of the pieces was a piece of creative writing 'in the style of a specific text or author', he used to give his class the opening of 'Finnigens Wake' which he said was the worst book ever written and get them to just write a few pages just like that, and give them all A grades.

[adam]

Interestingly (that's 'interestingly' on the usual terms that you wouldn't be here reading it if it wasn't) our post 16 BTEC students have done well out of this - the courses changed a few years ago to make them much more focussed on exams, with required passes and access to top grades requiring good exam performance, but the system for working out final BTEC grades has clearly involved reducing the significance of the exam components, and almost all of our students have done at least what we would have wanted them to.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

If we were to take ofqual's algorithm and apply it to football they would have awarded Man City a handsome win tonight. And that's the eternal problem with statistical forecasting, unlikely shit does happen, and while a statistician would say 'well of course there are always outliers and we model for those' in the case of A level and GCSE results those outliers will be in their thousands.

The libertarian right like to complain about tall poppy syndrome, well in this case a scythe has been taken to the best state education has to offer with the added bonus of a ditch to dump less able students into whether they deserve it or not. All that matters is the outcome fits the preconceptions of the statisticians. Who couldn't possibly be guilty of bias, oh no.

How anyone can defend a model that favours small class sizes, niche subjects and takes a massive shit on every student unfortunate enough to live in a less than well off area is beyond me. The parents and kids in Scotland were out on the streets in force protesting the similar SNP approach and rightly so, I've yet to see anything on a similar scale in England, which sadly doesn't surpise me. Maybe the GCSE results will change that.

[RogerOThornhill]

On a scale of 1 very surprising news down to 10 of not surprising at all, I'd say this rates a 10...

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Christopher HopeMemo
@christopherhope
·
1h
Replying to
@christopherhope
The new institute will bring together the science expertise at PHE with the scale of NHS Test and Trace's operation.
The model for is the Robert Koch Institute in Germany.
Dido Harding is tipped to run it, reporting to ministers and CMO Chris Whitty. More this week. 2/

Yes, that's someone running a scientific institute with no medical or scientific qualifications whatsoever. But is married to a Tory MP who sits on the advisory board of a thinktank that called for PHE to be abolished.

[citizenJA]

a society still depriving people and their communities of the best
depriving people of opportunities fulfilling their potential

[RogerOThornhill]

In other news...

Richard Adams
@RichardA
Wow - Ofqual has just REMOVED its new appeals policy and put out this statement:

“Earlier today we published information about mock exam results in appeals. This policy is being reviewed by the Ofqual Board and further information will be published in due course.”
11:15 PM · Aug 15, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Are this lot going for the title of Most Incompetent Government Ever in a contest that nobody knew existed until now?

[gilsey]

I was being a bit flippant about further maths but only a bit - I may be wrong but my recollection is that it has a higher highest grade pass rate than any other subject.

Passing it is one thing, getting a higher grade than in Maths is quite another.

Most people have a limit to their maths ability, mine was reached halfway through the further maths syllabus.

[citizenJA]

If we were to take ofqual's algorithm and apply it to football they would have awarded Man City a handsome win tonight. And that's the eternal problem with statistical forecasting, unlikely shit does happen, and while a statistician would say 'well of course there are always outliers and we model for those' in the case of A level and GCSE results those outliers will be in their thousands.

The libertarian right like to complain about tall poppy syndrome, well in this case a scythe has been taken to the best state education has to offer with the added bonus of a ditch to dump less able students into whether they deserve it or not. All that matters is the outcome fits the preconceptions of the statisticians. Who couldn't possibly be guilty of bias, oh no.

How anyone can defend a model that favours small class sizes, niche subjects and takes a massive shit on every student unfortunate enough to live in a less than well off area is beyond me. The parents and kids in Scotland were out on the streets in force protesting the similar SNP approach and rightly so, I've yet to see anything on a similar scale in England, which sadly doesn't surpise me. Maybe the GCSE results will change that.

Yes, ironic, isn't it? Bitterly ironic. These so-called libertarians nothing more than recipients of unearned privilege without the talent to get on without it. Their algorithm weapon a sick tool. I hope it does happen in England too. It must. Good lord, this can't be allowed to go on.

[citizenJA]

I was being a bit flippant about further maths but only a bit - I may be wrong but my recollection is that it has a higher highest grade pass rate than any other subject.

Passing it is one thing, getting a higher grade than in Maths is quite another.

Most people have a limit to their maths ability, mine was reached halfway through the further maths syllabus.

Same happened to me

[citizenJA]

Goodnight, everyone.
love,
cJA

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I'm struggling to remember, I was supposed to do O level maths (I was the final O level year) but because I was a bit thick and lazy my teacher told my parents they could pay for me to sit some other exam which if I passed it meant I got an O level grade C. It wasn't CSE, it was something else, and it was piss easy. So I ended up with a better maths O level than some of those who sat the O level and were much better at maths than me. I seem to remember it cost £30, which in todays money is worth...I don't know, let's see, if I take that away from this, then find the common denonimator before dividing by the obtuse angle of this triangle...£85.02.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetar ... calculator

[RogerOThornhill]

I sat O Level maths in the 4th year as one could in those days so the following year I was in the Additional maths class.

Let's just say I didn't really get the hang on it - differentiation & integration, area under a curve, that kind of stuff.

I just found it baffling.

I also found accountancy baffling for a few weeks but then got the hang of it - the rest, as they say, is history*...

* which I couldn't stand at school but developed a taste for later.

[PorFavor]

[youtube]fXi3bjKowJU[/youtube]

[Willow904]

In other news...

Richard Adams
@RichardA
Wow - Ofqual has just REMOVED its new appeals policy and put out this statement:

“Earlier today we published information about mock exam results in appeals. This policy is being reviewed by the Ofqual Board and further information will be published in due course.”
11:15 PM · Aug 15, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Are this lot going for the title of Most Incompetent Government Ever in a contest that nobody knew existed until now?

I do wonder how the government thinks they can use mock exams in this way when they're not standardised and not everyone takes them. Surely it's discriminatory against those who didn't take them and thus open to legal challenge?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I remember having to work out areas of curves in normal O level maths.

Were O levels standardised?

[PorFavor]

I remember having to work out areas of curves in normal O level maths.

Were O levels standardised?

Calculus was definitely on my O'Level syllabus.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I think basic calculus was always part of O level.

But I do remember shaded areas of curves that I was supposed to work out using some kind of arcane theorem.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[youtube]wsbR2dEmHGc[/youtube]

[PorFavor]

[youtube]yGiFGMgpz88[/youtube]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

That's one big torpedo.

[PorFavor]

[youtube]vkXsSXLREXc[/youtube]

[PorFavor]

Night night.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[youtube]iVusUjyby18[/youtube]

[PorFavor]

[youtube]hhkiAdPmu3o[/youtube]

[PorFavor]

[youtube]4vaIBZCLUQU[/youtube]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[youtube]DOonUWvxt0Y[/youtube]

[RogerOThornhill]

For some reason I can see behind the DT paywall for this so will post it all...

Whitehall's systemic failure exposed: why this was a disaster ten years in the making

When the UK Government finally got around to publishing its Covid-19 exit strategy in May, one paragraph above all others signalled radical change for Britain’s public health establishment.

Under the heading “Sustainable government structures”, the authors noted that as the Government fought Covid-19 it would “learn the right lessons from this crisis and act now to ensure that governmental structures are fit to cope with a future epidemic”.

“This will require a rapid re-engineering of government’s structures and institutions to deal with this historic emergency and also build new long-term foundations for the UK," they added.

Three months later and the game to determine the future shape of Whitehall is in full swing. Mark Sedwill, Cabinet Secretary and Britain’s most senior civil servant, has been dismissed for a duck, clearing the way for those Conservative ministers, MPs and aides best known for their “strategic vision” to step up to the crease.

Meanwhile, at the boundary and in the slips, permanent secretaries and assorted mandarins are playing the long game and aiming for “management and efficiency” tweaks rather than anything resembling the last great structural shake-up of the Civil Service that followed the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

Those changes - the Haldane reforms - were also prompted by “obscurity and confusion” in the functions of Whitehall. Among other things they ushered in the first dedicated UK ministry of health in 1919.

So what are the lessons of this ongoing crisis and what reforms might be expected?

While virtually all independent ­experts say it will take years for the dust to settle, the knives are already out for Public Health England (PHE), the executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care.

It is accused of being slow off the mark – “sluggish”, as the Prime Minister put it – when the pandemic first broke in January. Specifically, it is blamed for not having in place the testing capacity to track the initial wave of the virus, nor the contact ­tracers needed to stem its spread. More recently, poor data provision is said to have hampered No 10’s ability to respond promptly to local outbreaks.


In its defence, Duncan Selbie, PHE’s chief executive, told The Telegraph “the Department of Health and Social Care leads on all aspects of pandemic planning and preparedness, not Public Health England”.

He added it was “never at any stage our role to set the national testing strategy for the pandemic. This ­responsibility [also] rested with DHSC.

"Any suggestion that PHE ­monopolised, centralised and controlled pandemic testing, and even stopped others from developing tests or conducting them is not true.”

Iain Duncan Smith MP, the former Conservative Party leader and the brains behind Universal Credit, has said he would “abolish PHE tomorrow” if he was in charge, accusing the agency of “arrogance laced with incompetence”.

Others say the agency’s responsibilities are too broad, covering everything from infectious diseases to sexual health. Matthew Lesh, head of research at the Adam Smith Institute, is one of several calling for PHE’s responsibilities in the area of infectious diseases to be hived off into a dedicated agency - a UK centres for disease control or, as government sources propose today, a new National Institute for Health Protection.


Nick Davies, programme director at the Institute of Government, agreed PHE’s duties may be too broad. “I guess there are reasonable ­questions about whether campaigns to reduce smoking should sit with infectious disease control,” he said.

Whitehall will be delighted if reform is limited to the splitting of PHE. As Mr Davies noted, it was the Cameron government that “bundled” it up with the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in 2012, against the advice of civil servants.

The HPA - which sounds suspiciously similar to the newly proposed National Institute for Health Protection - was properly devolved and had dedicated responsibility for protecting England from infectious diseases and environmental hazards before the merger.

Mr Davies added it was “a nonsense” to say PHE was beyond the control of ministers. As an executive agency of the DHSC, it has “direct accountability to Matt Hancock,” he said.

“I think it’s fair to say the crisis hasn’t exactly been a good advert for what happens for services directly under government control. If you look at, for example, NHS test and trace – directly under the control of ministers – that’s clearly been a bit of a disaster.”

Michael Gove is another key player in the bid to reform Whitehall. As ­Education Secretary, he and his then aide, Dominic Cummings, took on the education establishment and scrapped continuous assessment in almost all GCSE and A-level courses.

Mr Gove won't be thanked for that by the current Education Secretary but now Cabinet Office minister, he has made clear he aims to tackle “group think” across Whitehall.

There can be little doubt Britain’s poor response to the pandemic will ultimately be explained by group think: a fatalistic and inflexible approach to pandemic planning that seduced not just Whitehall but much of Britain’s scientific establishment.

Today it is best seen in the excuse proffered by almost any minister, civil servant or government scientist you challenge about Britain’s response to the pandemic: that all would be have been well had we been hit by pandemic flu rather than a coronavirus.

Britain had a first-class influenza pandemic strategy – second in the world after the US for its preparedness – and would have performed well had it been another Spanish flu, so the argument goes.



There would have been no demand for masks, visors or droplet repellent PPE. Mass testing and track and trace systems would have been next to worthless. And there would have been no need for lockdown.

Why? Because an influenza pandemic would have been unstoppable. Just as was shown by Excercise Cygnus in 2016 when ministers simulated a flu pandemic, many tens of thousands would have died but there would have been nothing much to do, other than bury the dead.

This is the narrative pushed by Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary, and Sally Davies, the former chief medical officer, who were responsible for Britain’s pandemic planning, but it will never survive the scrutiny of the public inquiry to come.

As epidemiologists like Prof Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, have pointed out, past pandemic strains of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are extraordinarily similar. Both are droplet spread, if anything Covid spreads faster than influenza, both cause asymptomatic infections and both have similar infection fatality rates.

“SARS-CoV-2 behaves in most ways like a pandemic influenza strain,” wrote Prof Balloux in a recent Twitter thread. “The only major epidemiological difference between COVID 19 and flu pandemics is the age risk distribution, with influenza being highly dangerous to young children in addition to the elderly. At this stage, COVID 19 is really 'like pandemic flu', but not like 'seasonal endemic flu'[which is much less lethal]”.

Mr Lesh says the real problem in Whitehall was “failure of imagination” and a ­misjudgment about society’s tolerance for risk.

He said: “The thinking was, as with previous pandemics and Excercise Cygnus, you would let it run through and manage the deaths. They thought people’s tolerance for risk was higher, and that people would also be far less tolerant of social distancing measures.”

“If they looked at the SARS outbreak for example, my guess is they thought we would never accept that sort of mitigation in the west. So in some ways, you could say it was a benign assumption - that western publics would not be willing to make the sacrifices of the relatively more collectivist societies of Asia”.

Group think and western ­exceptionalism were certainly part of the problem but, as Mr Davies points out it was money too. The Institute for Government’s report on the pandemic finds that “failures in planning and funding cuts meant public services were not well prepared to handle the coronavirus crisis”.

Years of austerity overseen by former chancellor George Osborne saw the NHS protected but the capacity of its sister public health services dramatically cut.

“The Treasury is very effective at controlling spending but has historically been less good at understanding what it is getting for its money”, said Mr Davies.

“Also, the priority of governments since 2010 has been to keep tax as low as they can and - within public spending - to focus on efficiency over resilience.

"Those are perfectly reasonable political judgments to make, but clearly that has come back to bite us.”

[RogerOThornhill]

From the Sunday Times.

A political power couple at the heart of Downing Street has been linked with the award of a peerage to Claire Fox, a former communist who has praised the IRA.

Senior Tories claimed that Munira Mirza, the director of policy at No 10, helped to secure Fox’s peerage — an honour that sparked fury from the victims of Irish Republican atrocities, including the 1993 Warrington bombings.

NSS...

[adam]

In other news...

Richard Adams
@RichardA
Wow - Ofqual has just REMOVED its new appeals policy and put out this statement:

“Earlier today we published information about mock exam results in appeals. This policy is being reviewed by the Ofqual Board and further information will be published in due course.”
11:15 PM · Aug 15, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Are this lot going for the title of Most Incompetent Government Ever in a contest that nobody knew existed until now?

I do wonder how the government thinks they can use mock exams in this way when they're not standardised and not everyone takes them. Surely it's discriminatory against those who didn't take them and thus open to legal challenge?

The guidelines they had published said that schools would have to certify that the mocks were 'real' mock exams meeting all sorts of criteria - properly covering all course content, timed as real exams, not specifically prepared for, sat and invigilated under real exam rules, standardised marking... it would have knocked out a huge number of centres.

[Willow904]

It just makes it even worse, doesn't it? All these students all now thinking well at least they can get their mock mark on appeal only to be told their school's mocks don't count....

[AnatolyKasparov]

Whitehall will be delighted if reform is limited to the splitting of PHE. As Mr Davies noted, it was the Cameron government that “bundled” it up with the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in 2012, against the advice of civil servants.

And let me guess........that was at least partly a cost saving measure?

[howsillyofme1]

Howdy all

Hope everyone muddling through - seems to be about the best thing we can do at the moment

Just another of my witters about a couple of subjects - disclaimer my opinions only backed up by prejudice, bias and little expertises not to be taken too seriously - any debate engendered is welcome though

Algorithms and Data

Well what a mess this has been and shows us the danger of using this type of thing for things that really matter! I have a colleague of mine who works in this area and he is always coming up of stories where the machine learning/algorithm approach can come up with some really strange answers. As with all models the secret is within the code and how that behaves - all models that are used need to be openly available and up for challenge

The interesting thing that has not been discussed is that the use of these is pervasive now and we are not always aware of it - insurance, mortgages, job applications etc are all being decided using these methods now - and those of us who have seen them in action, see potential for them to help but are also very skeptical about how they operate in complex situations. I would not be surprised if universities already use them in some form to decide on target grades etc.

Can an algorithm really be written for something as complex as human behaviour/attainment with so many strange and confounding variables - the clever kid in a bad school for example or the person who had a bad day on the exam day.....surely they must be there to inform but decisions taken by people who can deal with the complexity of individual cases. The idea that we could use an algorithm alone seems naive at best!

I would also suggest (probably more provocatively) that the reaction to this shows now that prediction and basing things on it is dangerous. I would also add that the school A Level debacle is not our biggest challenge with data at the moment. This whole pandemic is using data to decide things - 400000 people affected by a seemingly arbitrary decision on 'cases/100000 people' which is also a data point. We have seen this week that PHE has had to modify the mortality data because of the poor quality of the data

I just wish those who are now vociferously complaining about the bad use of data in one context are also looking at how we use the data, particularly prediction, in others that are currently impacting on the life of millions of people - my view is that the A Level results issue is not going to be the decider on the life chances of those who suffer from it as much as the effects of what is happening elsewhere and that seems to be driven by little more than knee-jerk reaction

Epidemic

Just saw Roger's post from yesterday and the similarities between the CV pandemic and a flu one - as Belloux has said there are many things we could learn from both. I have my views which are just based on what I have seen and read

Firstly, the reaction at the beginning of the pandemic was probably understandable with the information coming out of China and Italy - knee jerk s probably all we have at that point although we could perhaps look back and say with hindsight, application of the hygiene, social distancing, protecting the elderly and other less harsh measures could have been as effective in controlling it. The evidence for the efficacy of lockdown is not particularly convincing looking back with hindsight - the biggest effect would have been to protect care homes and set up infection hospitals (which was how previous pandemics were managed) and also putting in place robust data gathering and measurement mechanisms

The question I have now is with all the data, especially hospitalisations and mortality why we keep jumping to these lockdown measures as a first resort - we will always have outbreaks and surely we can deal with them better than locking down whole cities? Some places (Liverpool for one) managed this well locally.

The issue with any of these crises is that we have two important pillars to understanding - science and data. Science (in form of the biology) takes time to produce results and often there are lots of differing opinions. One of the problems with experts (in my experience) is they sometimes forget that they need evidence to prove their hypotheses! The other way to do it is to look at the data - for that you need good quality information and the historic data can also be used to test the predictions and assumptions made. This is not necessarily in the hands of the scientists (who tend not to be very good at it in my experience) but mathematicians and statisticians. This is why you see a lot of the debate being driven by people analysing the data, comparing it to the assumptions and pointing out it doesn't really fit. In the middle you have epidemiologists who are a bit of both.

We have far more data now and the pandemic is looking similar to the pandemic flu of 57 and 68 in some respects and pandemic flu often has some similarities to seasonal flu - coronaviruses are also seasonal and so it is not that surprising and transmission is likely to be similar. There is a book on flu transmission by a British doctor called Hope-Simpson and it is a good place to start if you want to look at this possibility.

It is strange to me that the only pandemic we seem to use as a predictor is the 1918/1919 Spanish flu which is probably the worst example as it was post WW1, viruses were unknown, germ theory under-developed and no anti-bacterials. The evolution of the 57 and 68 flus seem to be rarely mentioned and none of these had a second mortality wave but became part of the seasonal flu endemic virus (although it is worth reading the book to get some more background).

One thing we do not know and we need to be cautious of is how the pandemic will re-emerge during the winter months - will it be like the 57 and 68 flus or will it be another big hit again, especially in areas not attacked this year?

The other thing we also know now as was mentioned by ROT is that this virus is very specific against certain age groups and morbidities - again data needs to be looked at in detail as the treatment has also improved and so has the shielding of the vulnerable which is seen in the mortality figures. If we have such an age-related virus then there is a need for us to see if we can use this to help with getting us back to something resembling the society we need to have

I am certain that if we ever manage to look back on this pandemic in detail (and believe me I see that the risk of significant economic and societal collapse is not negligible based on what I have seen this year - 20% unemployment, collapse in taxation base and so public services) some things we did will have been wrong. Thos people who are challenging the narrative do have some points worth listening to but most of it is coming from the libertarian right and very little from the left - we seem to have fallen into accepting authoritarian responses rather too readily and even if we get out of this situation, I imagine we have not seen the end of lockdowns as a tool of unscrupulous Governments


Edited to add this graphic where someone has put together the different pandemics on one graph

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