8TH APRIL: PREDICTION Within a few weeks opening UK schools will become a political battleground. Initially the RW ignored Covid19, the propaganda machine focused on telling us it was scaremongering When the truth dawned, they were left rudderless for a while.
After the media tried to sell us #Herd_Immunity telling us Britain was more nuanced without scrutinizing the policy, I thought the govs u-turn would being common sense But they ruined it within an hour by doing this.
The gov swung from Herd Immunity to announcing a lockdown, but the change from keyworkers to work from home makes me believe that they decided to risk the spreak of infection to keep more of the economy going. I think Herd Immunity is still the strategy
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In the article above I predicted the emergence of 'alternative facts' to reopen the economy (at risk of a higher death rate) This was after the Oxford uni report saying most ppl were already immune It wasnt peer reviewed and was published by a PR company linked to the nudge unit
We then got the 6% fall in GDP will mean more people die from the recession There are a lot of assumptions in the report,principly that the only choice after Covid 19 is another decade of austerity But now I hear commentators mentioning that 6% as if it's a certain cliffedge
How accurate are the death toll estimates? How dependent are they on our actions? Any calculation is complete between the two is complete speculation. But it has become a 'fact'. The media have started asking us the public to start weighing x GDP loss against y deaths
Toby Young was quick off the mark with a long rambling thread (bit like this I guess) his y was 250k as was Charles Moore. At the time they were outliers but a weeks a long time Media now asking how big a fall in GDP can we take?they've stopped putting a number on the deaths
Last week certain commentators were trying to sell us that Sweden was persevering a form of #HerdImmunity and they questioned if we were too hasty with our lockdown Sweden now having second thoughts, watch the data that comes out of there this week, it will be worrying
A few days ago for the weekend papers a government advisor was quoted in the papers that we may need to go back to #HerdImmunity The papers then backed his statement with evidence. Oxford uni says many more may already be immune, 6% fall in gdp means more dead, look at Sweden.
See how this goes? You only need a few flimsy building blocks and a lot of mouthpieces to build a narrative, once the chorus starts up enough of our journalists start following the herd and get lax on fact and source checks These 'truths' are given equal weight, climate change?
This is the one that really annoys me and many educators,the BBC on Tuesday with a headline that makes it look like a fact that school closures have a marginal effect. This one article was repeated by nearly every media outlet Its a total misinterpretation
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