Labour MPs have expressed concern at the possibility of sweeping emergency powers to tackle coronavirus being put into force for two years without a vote, with some saying that despite the scale of the crisis, the measures should face regular review.
The comments will place pressure on the Labour leadership over how to respond to the emergency legislation, expected to be tabled on Thursday, amid speculation the party will allow it to pass the Commons without any votes being held.
The laws, some details of which were announced on Tuesday evening, include medical-related measures such as allowing recently retired or nearly qualified nurses, midwives or paramedics to work in the NHS, with protection given against negligence claims.
Other proposals are more broad, such as giving powers to police or immigration officers to detain people suspected of carrying the virus and “to take them to a suitable place to enable screening and assessment” for an unspecified period.
Other measures would allow ministers to ban gatherings or events, and to make it easier for people to be detained in mental hospitals, and for longer periods.
The powers, which ministers say would only be used if necessary, would be put in place for two years, with no provision mentioned so far for them to be reviewed in the interim.
Still no good art styles to go with it 
The Canadian government is still engaging in contact tracing. Is it just me, or does this seem like a waste of time? It’s fucking everywhere now. Trying to trace individual infections to the person it came from during an exponential growth phase is serious deck chairs on the titanic stuff. But the time they finish figuring out that Joe got it from Sally, there will be 1,000 more cases.
I understand that early on it’s important to get a handle on “is there community spreading” and “does it spread via airborne means or contact”, etc. But at this point I am skeptical that much will be learned by looking on single cases. People should be acting like everyone has it everywhere.
I do not know if it’s true, but just read something claiming that the way China got it under control was enforcing quarantine of everyone infected. So getting them away from their families, and also tracing contacts to get them isolated, even from family, as well. As I think someone posted here, the hospitals with seemingly little staff were perhaps for infected but not serious cases. And that without these measures then even Italy, France etc. will not be enough.
As I said I don’t know that that’s all true, but it was written on the internet.
More accurately, being confident that you won’t swamp medical capacity anyways is a prerequisite for taking dramatic curve-flattening measures.
I think tracing is still worthwhile.
Mass testing.
Mass contact tracing
Isolation and treatment.
These three seem to be the trifecta. Then add in mass mask wearing to reduce asymptomatic spread.
If you can’t test, trace and isolate everyone, then you don’t just give up. You scale this shit the fuck up. We went to the moon and defeated the Nazis ffs.
So feel fine this morning. Paranoia they destroy ya
Probably depends where that new case is actually located. Like where I live there are no confirmed cases yet so isolating out that first case and its contacts could still be effective.
Thanks @Rugby. This is helpful. My instincts were that the public health officials aren’t likely to learn a lot more by contact tracing, but I had not thought about the aspect of creating lived stories for the public about how person A got it from source B, so that people who are currently not taking things seriously enough might adapt their behaviour if they think “hey, if that happened to them it could happen to me”. And make no mistake - there are a lot of Canadians who are not taking this seriously enough yet. Because my spouse is a physician, we have a lot of physician friends. There are doctors who are still in the “this is just the flu, NDB” stage. That’s scary.
Still NBD from doctors? Incredible.
To be clear, it is the vast, vast minority. Like maybe 1 in 100. And uniformly it is the boomer white male doctors.
Fuck this racist shit about “cultural differences” from years of oppression. Chinese people don’t fuck with the government because they can be executed or sent to a concentration camp or fucked over in a million other ways if they fuck with the government. You would do exactly what you were told too if you were living in China without a Western passport to protect you.
A thought-provoking contrarian take from Ioannidis, who was instrumental in popping the fake-social-science bubble:
Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?..
This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.
Er yes, which was the point I was making if you take a second to think about it instead of blowing your top like a hothead.
I’m not sure I am buying into a narrative of “let’s all calm down, the death rate may only be 1%”. That’s still 3 million people in the US, aka the number the people that die in the US from all other causes. Not super comforting.
Also, looking at the Diamond Princess rate overlooks the issues arising from an overrun health care system.
Edit: Just to add to that - at this point I am not really that interested in these “Well actually …” takes. Contrarian views generally have value, but this a situation where having everyone pulling in the same direction as a team matters more than having all these people coming out of the woodwork with theories that things aren’t really that bad.
One thing that contact tracing can do is flag people who should be tested before they exhibit symptoms, slowing the spread of infection by getting them into isolation faster.
Since speed is important, this requires that contact tracing takes advantage of technology, as they are doing in South Korea. I’m fine with giving government that power. It also requires widespread ability to test, which the United States currently lacks.
Thanks, great points.
No obligations at all?
I wouldn’t even think of trying to come back to the US right now in that case.
A couple points:
- The estimate is that the true death rate is between .05% and 1%.
- Every single person is not going to get coronavirus.
- Regardless of how bad the disease is, calm down seems like a good first step. The alternative is just acting from panic and fear, which is what we’re doing now.