This seems like the games and aptitude tests that some employers make you complete near the start of the process. There is a difference, currently most tests are critical thinking tests or personality quizes that may not match up to the skills you need for the given job. But the important difference is one of test design, not whether it is on the blockchain or not.
The UK's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (where people are put on furlough and the government contributes to wages) seems to have damped the creative destruction usually seen in recessions. To use a basic example, assuming there will be more remote work in the future compared to pre-COVID times, there will likely be fewer people who commute and fewer people who buy sandwiches at Pret.
Perhaps a better solution is to make furlough portable, so that workers can read the writing on the wall and be part of the reallocation we are soon to see. [1]
I'm aware this issue has been prominent in US politics. In the UK, hopefully a public inquiry on the pandemic response is held and the rules on public inquiry allow for such emails to searched.
I think it would be wise for guidance on ministers' use of private emails to be made law.(1)
OK. Insulin, then. Some academics got to play with puppy dogs and get paid by the public purse, then then went and donated their patents to a non-profit. What a waste!
This is a G7 agreement, so it seems the success of the policy will depend how much sway this will have with G20 countries. If it doesn't get the G20's agreement, what stops multinationals from simply domiciling themselves in another country like South Korea or Australia? It's currently done in Ireland, so this isn't a big jump.
Also, there are countries that are not in the G20 that could quite easily undercut an agreement, notably, Switzerland. It already acts as a tax haven for personal income (and corporate income), so an expansion of this haven seems forseeable.
Despite this, I don't think this is a reason to not act. There will be reasons why multinationals will not want to be domiciled in Switzerland.
It doesn't matter where they are "domiciling themselves". If the company is international and does buisness in any of the G7 countries, than those countries will collect the tax difference between 15% and whatever they are paying in Switzerland.
I recently found out about Summit Public Schools. By the sounds of it, this model aims to provide students with more autonomy than they would in a normal school. There is an emphasis on self-directed learning and teachers act more as mentors than lecturers. If your metric to measure success is admission to unviersity, it works! They claim 98% of their students are accepted onto 4-year courses and have twice the graduation rate relative to the US average. [1] Even if that isn't your metric for success (there are good reasons why it shouldn't be) it at least demonstrates ability.
Perhaps this is a good bridge between school and homeschooling as we know it. I'm sure you can tell from reading this that I only have surface-level understanding, so I'd be interested to hear from anybody who knows more about these schools or other schools that do similar things. Or indeed anybody who wants to shake up education/has some good ideas!
Taiwan had pandemic plans. Many suggest that countries cannot be compared. While this is true in some instances, it is not a useful observation in this case.
Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively. The UK had to start from scratch. The UK would be best served to have detailed plans in the event of distasters (not just pandemics).
>Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively.
To be clear - this is you speculating and correlating two things that may or may not be causally related. India is a good example of a country that had a very light initial COVID wave last year, but is now drowning. What's the difference? Government policy? Maybe but India isn't exactly famous for having a well run government bureaucracy. Deadlier COVID variants? Maybe?
What if how hard your population is hit really just comes down to the prevalent variant your population is exposed to. After all, there is evidence that the variants in Europe and North America were much more deadly and virulent than the strains in Asia.
My observation is that countries with detailed plans for rare, but serious, crises are more likely to be better-placed than a country that does not. I realise this is a fairly obvious one and other factors may change outcomes thereafter.
With regard to the more dangerous strains, it is highly plausible that if you can contain the spread, you can reduce the chance of more dangerous strains evolving and getting a foothold. In that case, one might suppose that despite the preparedness in Taiwan, they have been undermined by what's been happening in other parts of the world.
There are important things to be learned from India's experience, but I am not sure what - probably a combination of factors. AFAIK (which is not much) we are some way away from a unified model which explains all the variations in the progression of this epidemic.
Not only was the UK considered to have some of the best pandemic planning in the world prior to Covid hitting, there was pretty aggressive contact tracing and testing here early on, based as you'd expect on what the UK did to keep SARS and MERS out. The elephant in the room here seems to be Italy, which appears to have been reporting zero cases up until the point somewhere in the rough ballpark of 1% of their population was infected. This kind of early contact tracing and testing just doesn't work if you have no idea who to test or trace the contacts of, and being a major travel hub next door to a country with massive undetected community spread seems pretty fatal. Now, the UK did end up abandoning contact tracing around the time of the first lockdown, but that was long after it had already clearly failed.
Letting all the schoolkids and leafy surrey familes off on their ski holidays to Italy in Feb half term (15th-23rd) was probably one early bad decision, how much different that would have made in the mid term, but closing borders was never on the cards for any country - closing heathrow was unthinkable even in mid March.
New Zealand borders closed on 19 March 2020. Based on deaths and IFR at that time, there were likely 150,000 new cases a day in the UK on 19th March. Closing borders then wasn't going to stop the spread.
Maybe a strict lockdown after the Feb half term and a total closure of all borders - including lorry drivers, could have worked.
Would it be worth it? The age-standardised mortality rate for the UK in 2020 was 1,043.50 per 100k, the highest since....
2008, when it was 1,091.90 per 100k. That wasn't an anomoly either - every year from 1990 to 2008 was higher. Even ignoring ages, the crude mortality rate per 100k was higher for every year before 2003.
> Not only was the UK considered to have some of the best pandemic planning in the world prior to Covid hitting
While that is true, the UK "was considered" as such, both of those little words are key, especially _was_. This misperception has been overtaken by reality.
This feels like circular logic. The countries which did better of course did so because they had the best pandemic planning, and we know they had the best pandemic planning because they did better.
Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are. Even for established diseases and measures, like closing schools during a flu pandemic, the evidence is vague and contradictory.
Coming to conclusions about how good countries' pandemic planning is based on how well they've done is even less meaningful, because it doesn't even attempt to deal with confounding factors or simple luck. It's certainly very suspicious that so many Covid-19 success stories were in the same geographic Asia-Pacific area, despite having very different cultures, policies and measures.
> Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are.
> Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not.
That's not true. At the beginning of Feb last year I searched if there was any UK pandemic plan. I found the active pandemic flu planning documents. 80% of it was about dealing with dead bodies, with stuff like turning Hyde Park into an open air morgue and insisting that each council has a plan of where to put the bodies.
There was little else in the plan, regarding preventing/hospital management.
The impression that I got reading them was that it was all about managing the consequences, and very little about fighting the pandemic. Defeatism basically.
I should've been more precise in my wording. There was not enough detail where it really mattered, such as the example you give of 'preventing/hospital management'.
I think the most valuable thing we can glean from this is the failure of systems. The focus by the BBC has been on transient matters. What will happen to Johnson and Hancock for instance? I think the focus on this is misplaced. If 'lessons are to be learnt', we must focus on systems and their failures too.
Cummings mentioned the the example of PPE logistics. In February/March 2020, he asked what the plan was and an offical replied something along the lines of, "we should get the PPE shipped in a few weeks". Cummings said he was surprised that PPE was being shipped, rather than flown. PPE procurement had always been shipped, so the offical was simply following protocol even if it meant causing more deaths.
Another issue he identified was the scattering of authority. It was not clear who was in charge of pandemic planning. Ministers decided policy, but could not hire and fire civil servants or move people who could effectively solve these sorts of issues to where they would be most useful. He said if Bill Gates were put in charge on 1 March, he would find it a nightmare.
Obviously, this is one person's evidence and we should wait until hearing from more people before forming assigning blame. However, if we are to respond to the next big crisis better, we should look at our systems and not solely focus on the transitory state of politics.
>I think the most valuable thing we can glean from this is the failure of systems.
Is there a failure of systems? Government bureaucracies are huge with a lot of institutional inertia. They will never be able to move on a dime. And this was a situation where in a matter of weeks or even days, we had to realign not only the entire government bureaucracy but also the rest of the economy. Come on ... we have to give ourselves a little break.
You cited a screw up with PPE logistics. OK. Sure. But there was a shortage of PPE equipment in _every_ country in the world. And we got through it in a matter of weeks. Is that really that bad? I understand you can pick apart individual choices but in the big picture, it's not clear that things would have been different if PPE shortage was curtailed a tiny bit quicker. And yes, it would have been nice to be prepared for something like this, but then again, there are lots of things that can go wrong. Are we really prepared, for example, for a major solar event? And we know it's only a matter of time before that hits.
> Another issue he identified was the scattering of authority. It was not clear who was in charge of pandemic planning. Ministers decided policy, but could not hire and fire civil servants or move people who could effectively solve these sorts of issues to where they would be most useful. He said if Bill Gates were put in charge on 1 March, he would find it a nightmare.
It's done very simply in UK, and other countries who share UK's legal system.
A state emergency is declared, and executive fiat starts.
It's absolutely unbelievable that even cadre situation in the field was tied by legal formalities.
UK is a type of a country where you can get half a year no charge detention no questions asked, and they can't fire some nincompoops.
Very true, and young people too! I think these shops could reduce loneliness as customers may talk to each other. There's more chance of interaction with a shop than no shop. The concern is where technology is used in place of staffed-shops, but perhaps you would have to make small talk with the security guard instead.
Perhaps in cities, where there is more footfall, it might save money to employ one. But you're certainly right, in these rural Swedish shops, there doesn't seem to be.
