IOM Covid removing restrictions

[cissolt]

It's odd that the modelling team was moved to GTS.  My experience of GTS is they have 6-7 highly competent staff and the remaining ones appear to be to meet minimum head count requirements.

[TheTeapot]

Quote

“It was quickly becoming apparent that there was absolutely no effective public health on the island”.

This is wild.

[Ramseyboi]

1 minute ago, offshoremanxman said:

Not sure they are. It’s not like a normal recess. I thought all MHKs are now basically unemployed until they get re-elected as of midnight on the day they packed up. 

Minister are still ministers.  They don’t cease to be so until the new ministers are appointed, otherwise no one would be in charge for weeks.

Its confirmed on all today’s news reports of the bishop mandating the GE

[Declan]

3 minutes ago, offshoremanxman said:

Not sure they are. It’s not like a normal recess. I thought all MHKs are now basically unemployed until they get re-elected as of midnight on the day they packed up. 

You're a minister until the CM replaces you and he's CM until the governor appoints a new one after the election. 

[Ramseyboi]

15 minutes ago, quilp said:

Blimey, we've topped the list..!

https://www.echolive.ie/nationalnews/arid-40357025.html

 

Everybody has to be good at something

[AlanShimmin]

53 minutes ago, wrighty said:

Well I'm named in this evidence, so I feel I should give my side of things.  I may as well do it here as I've not been asked by the PAC, and I don't do twitter.

I remember Dr Ranson calling the meeting of the senior medics of which I was one on the Sunday afternoon, 15th March 2020.  We agreed how serious the situation could become, and set out a series of things the government should be doing, immediately, to convey that seriousness.  At that time some people were still talking about holding TT - this was one of the suggestions we made.  The following day TT cancellation was announced.  We felt the message was getting through.  There were clearly some comms difficulties though.  The Gold/Silver/Bronze structure seemed clumsy, and as the clinical advisory group (CAG, sometimes including Public Health, sometimes not) we were unsure which group we should be feeding into.  Technically it was 'Bronze Command', but it sometimes felt like we'd agree a paper, pass it to bronze, and then hear nothing more about it.  Rosalind was frustrated by this, and was also under immense pressure feeling that as well as Medical Director she was also the de facto Public Health service and locum Chief Exec - Kathryn Magson was based in the UK at this stage, and Dr Ewart was on holiday.

At this point I should say that Dr Ranson deserves huge credit for pulling together and leading the response at Noble's and in Primary Care.  Without her grabbing the bull by the horns that Sunday afternoon I shudder to think what might have happened over here.

Moving on, I was asked to look at the rudimentary modelling that had been done.  I'm known as the maths geek, and am better qualified than most to do this sort of thing, although I'm not a professional epidemiologist.  I started from scratch, and made my own model, coincidentally completing the first draft on 19th March, the same day we got our first confirmed case.  The outputs were frightening.  Rosalind and I went to Government to meet David Ashford and Howard Quayle, prior to the briefing on 25th March.  By that stage it had been decided to lockdown, and showing them the model reinforced the decision.

Over the next few days I refined the model.  I was puzzled by the number of deaths in Italy and Spain, which seemed to be levelling off at numbers way lower than the 5-600000 predicted by Imperial.  I did some more sums, and extrapolated the death data coming out of various countries who had been hit before us.  I put their demographic into my model, and used it to calculate a key figure - the proportion of the population susceptible to covid.  This came out at 2.5% or thereabouts, way under the 80% used by Imperial.  This figure made little sense, but seemed to work to give the right sized curves.  Based on this, our numbers were coming out much lower than the initial horror stories, and I argued against the need to build a Nightingale style hospital at the NSC.  The group agreed to this at a presentation I gave on 1st April (I think) and we instead repurposed ward 20 to cohort positive cases from the community in an effort to prevent Nosocomial Amplification.  Apart from Abbotswood, this strategy worked.  Lockdown worked, we suppressed cases and achieved local elimination, and in June we were back to normal, except for travel.

Hindsight is always 20/20.  Rosalind couldn't accept, a few months later, that my model was correct.  Specifically the 2.5% figure I used for susceptibility.  She was right, in hindsight, but by the time we were arguing about it with more data that had come out, it didn't really matter.  The model was no longer relevant as we had local elimination.  When I made it, there was genuine doubt about how many were susceptible to covid.  There were plenty of papers talking about t-cell mediated immunity, and cross-reactivity with other coronavirus infections.  I thought 2.5% was very low, but the numbers worked.  In hindsight, 2.5% is what you get with an effective lockdown brought in just as you're getting your health services overwhelmed.  We locked down before anyone else in Europe (even though it could have perhaps been sooner) and consequently had fewer hospital admissions and deaths in the first wave.

If that's tl;dr the summary is this:  Dr Ranson showed great leadership at the outset, but was under immense pressure even though supported by the senior medics in the hospital.  Her issue later on was that she couldn't just 'let go' of something and move on.  Everything had to be right, with all i's dotted and t's crossed.  Even at the expense of pragmatism as the issue was no longer pertinent.  And this led to some difficulties in her working relationship with both her bosses and some of the senior medics.  She got us through the first wave though, and for that she deserves much credit.

Fair play to you @wrighty

 

Thank you for that.

[Roger Mexico]

3 minutes ago, offshoremanxman said:

Not sure they are. It’s not like a normal recess. I thought all MHKs are now basically unemployed until they get re-elected as of midnight on the day they packed up. 

No, Rameyboi is right.  Ministers (and the CM) remain in position up to the election and until they are replaced - which won't be till late October I think.  There are all sorts of restrictions to make sure they can't abuse their positions for electoral purposes (this is sometimes called 'purdah'), but they still remain the legal Ministers until they are replaced or unless they resign, in which case the role will usually go the the CM.

[NoTailT]

4 minutes ago, Ramseyboi said:

Everybody has to be good at something

Not sure why but this came to mind..

 

[Out of the blue]

1 hour ago, quilp said:

Blimey, we've topped the list..!

https://www.echolive.ie/nationalnews/arid-40357025.html

 

Which just highlights the worthless nature of our current border controls. They need to be removed.

[wrighty]

1 hour ago, Declan said:

 

It's not a bad trait when talking about statistical models during a pandemic though. Nor is pragmatism. Her comments about wrighty and his post here don't look like a major conflict.

In the main there wasn’t much conflict between us.  Polar opposite personalities in terms of decision making though.  I’ve got a surgical mentality, which means quick thinking, cut it out first, ask questions later.  If I encounter unexpected bleeding during an operation I can’t form a committee to work out the best way of dealing with it, I sort it out.  Rosalind has a lawyer/ethicist mentality - everything is reflected on, it has to be spot on 100% right. Things take time. 
 

Both viewpoints are valid and each has its place, but they often clash.  In those early days of the pandemic we needed some surgical decisiveness.  The inquest was always going to happen though, when everything we did was pondered and considered at length with the benefit of hindsight. It’s just how it is. 

[Banker]

1 hour ago, quilp said:

Blimey, we've topped the list..!

https://www.echolive.ie/nationalnews/arid-40357025.html

 

Manx Radio mentioned that Kazakhstan topped list worldwide but took great delight in highlighting we were number 2 !!

[Cambon]

5 hours ago, Ramseyboi said:

Sadly Mr Ashford’s large fan club won’t read the full transcript or even consider changing their opinion and so will vote him back in.

His PR is something else.  This seems another example, and I have heard many, of top politicians ignoring the advice of the people whose jobs it is to advise them.

What causes behaviour like that? Why would people with no direct experience in and area (specifically DA and HQ) ignore and overrule the experts who are there to advise them?

 

But, did they simply ignore and overrule the experts? This whole thing was and is a balancing act between health and the economy. Experts from all sides were consulted. 

[NoTailT]

20 minutes ago, Cambon said:

But, did they simply ignore and overrule the experts? This whole thing was and is a balancing act between health and the economy. Experts from all sides were consulted. 

Judging by outcry from the Chamber of Uselessness and business community as a whole, I'd argue despite the economy generally staying relatively strong that they've also messed up the economic front too.

[Cambon]

11 minutes ago, NoTailT said:

Judging by outcry from the Chamber of Uselessness and business community as a whole, I'd argue despite the economy generally staying relatively strong that they've also messed up the economic front too.

That is just it. Every "expert" is screaming. 

 

[WTF]

i can never understand why experts don't all agree , the fact they don't makes you wonder how they can all be experts.