Coronavirus: David Norgrove gives 'em both barrels

[Ever Bluer]

Sir David Norgrove (Thornton B 1959-67, Senior Grecian), chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, omits to mince his words in a letter to the Health Secretary about the inadequacy of the government’s stats on coronavirus testing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52889103

Hugh Pym of the BBC writes:

"Official correspondence on statistics can be dry and opaque. But Sir David Norgrove…pulls no punches and makes it abundantly clear that he thinks the presentation of testing numbers in England is unacceptable.

"The government has not so far explained how many home test kits sent out to the public have actually been returned. Figures for the number of people tested as opposed to the number of tests carried out are not currently available…

"[T]he message from the stats watchdog is that public confidence will be undermined if the numbers are not transparent."

Full text of Sir David’s letter:
https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/ ... ting-data/

[Katharine]

I’ve been cheering him on! Presentation of statistics was something I used to teach at one stage, and I have difficulty following HMG’s efforts.

If Sir David is anything like his elder sister, Jane, 6s not sure of the dates, he’ll be a terrier for facts! We couldn’t get away with anything if she was questioning us! She was better known outside the house as a superb sportswoman.

[sejintenej]

Good for Sir David. I did not Matt Hancock's reply:

As you noted in your letter, COVID-19 measurements will need to evolve to ensure they remain meaningful

Remain meaningful??? They had to be meaningful to remain so and IMHO they have never, despite the months since Wuhan, been meaningful.

Yesterday a major newspaper (poor rockfreak; it was not the Red flag) devoted a lot of space to illustrating statistics of covid-19. this went down to town level infections and deaths and then more generalised to sex (sorry but hermaphrodites were omitted!), race, where people died (hospital, care home, home)- medical, care home staff .....you name it.
OK so it was almost too detailed but infinitely better that the goggle box pushing figures together.

[MrEd]

A few weeks ago there was a Matt cartoon in the Telegraph, a civil servant in the corridor is grabbed as he goes past an office and is told that to meet the target, he's going to be tested 37,000 times (or so). This is called the gross output indicator approach, beloved of Stalin's 5-year plans: Have to make 20,000 tonnes of nails? 2 nails weighing 10,000 tonnes each will do, you can tell Moscow that you have met the target. Make a blast furnace out of wood? (They actually did, Robert Conquest reported that).

I read somewhere that a swab in the buccal cavity and one up the nose on the same head count as two tests.

[Jabod2]

Stats is one of my major blind spots (I discovered at Uni) but I have been following the official figures with interest and am pleased to see them being effectively challenged by David. I was cynically not surprised when the 1000 tests per day target was miraculously and momentarily achieved on the last day of April. Yesterday the number of tests coincided with the 'testing capacity' number, which presumably means that no improvement can be expected in the near future. I had been doing my own daily look at a nominal number of duplicate tests (tests minus the number of people tested) which has now fallen by the wayside as they have been unable to state the number of people tested for the last fortnight!

I've been intrigued as to what the current infection rate is - the global site www.worldometers.info/coronavirus shows us at just over 0.4% of the population and the UK being the only country unable to provide a count of people tested. The daily test stats show the number of people tested as positive per day is around 1500-2000 which is rather at odds with the 5000-8000 daily infection rate quoted in the press. If at work I was unable to provide the KPI metrics that I was responsible for, my job would have been under threat, especially after more than a week! And yet we have this mythical R value which applies across the whole country, amalgamating densely populated cities with rural isolation...

I've always disliked artificially created targets which result in behaviour that 'moves the meter' rather than achieving anything real and tangible.

If you can't measure it, you can't control it.

[sejintenej]

Stats is one of my major blind spots (I discovered at Uni) but I have been following the official figures with interest and am pleased to see them being effectively challenged by David. I I had been doing my own daily look at a nominal number of duplicate tests (tests minus the number of people tested) which has now fallen by the wayside as they have been unable to state the number of people tested for the last fortnight!

I think one problem was that they were sending kits out to third parties to use for tests and including those as having been tested. It would have been honest to count the numbers of tests which actually went through the examining labs.
I think the DTs and Mr eds idea is not too far off the mark; NHS staff working in covid wards are tested but I suspect that in fact they are each tested regularly

I've been intrigued as to what the current infection rate is - the global site www.worldometers.info/coronavirus shows us at just over 0.4% of the population and the UK being the only country unable to provide a count of people tested. The daily test stats show the number of people tested as positive per day is around 1500-2000 which is rather at odds with the 5000-8000 daily infection rate quoted in the press.

Any decent sized company in the UK should have contingency plans for any possible event. (My own company specifically included an aircraft strike 10 years before 9/11) A week into Wuhan I was preparing; why was the government so unprepared even when Italy was in a bad state? Sack the Civil Servants involved for incompetence
Apologies to David but our Civil Service (rather uncivil) is so inefficient that such failure seems par for the course.
Aside, I do wonder whether it is more a question of sitting in meetings discussing tomorrow's canteen menu or whether Barbados beaches are superior to Southend on Sea. My wife and I each have relatives/friends closely linked to the civil service and hear horror stories.

If at work I was unable to provide the KPI metrics that I was responsible for, my job would have been under threat, especially after more than a week!

And so it should be.. I got into hot water (and was within a whisker of being sacked) on at least two occasions. Company policy was that men wore a suit, tie and black leather shoes.Working as a cashier anything below the waist was hidden from the public but my manager noticed I was wearing sandals; it was deemed an offence that the night before I had broken a few toes and had my foot in plaster so I couldn't wear formal black shoes. The other one I remember was even more stupid; one evening, outside the bank , I was talking Spanish to someone but other staff members nearby could not understand!!!! Definitely sackable

[Pe.A]

it was deemed an offence that the night before I had broken a few toes and had my foot in plaster so I couldn't wear formal black shoes. The other one I remember was even more stupid; one evening, outside the bank , I was talking Spanish to someone but other staff members nearby could not understand!!!! Definitely sackable



How did you manage to break a few toes...? And with regards to the speaking Spanish 'offence', where was this...?

[loringa]

Any decent sized company in the UK should have contingency plans for any possible event. (My own company specifically included an aircraft strike 10 years before 9/11) A week into Wuhan I was preparing; why was the government so unprepared even when Italy was in a bad state? Sack the Civil Servants involved for incompetence
Apologies to David but our Civil Service (rather uncivil) is so inefficient that such failure seems par for the course.
Aside, I do wonder whether it is more a question of sitting in meetings discussing tomorrow's canteen menu or whether Barbados beaches are superior to Southend on Sea. My wife and I each have relatives/friends closely linked to the civil service and hear horror stories.

Though I have never been a UK Civil Servant I am going to write in their defence. I have worked for, alongside and overseen a significant number of Civil Servants including on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as with and for the Foreign Office, and the various agencies and departments of the Ministry of Defence, and other agencies involved in security.

Barbados beaches (or anywhere exotic for that matter) have certainly rarely been a topic of conversation. Why? Well, mainly because Civil Servants are not well paid and most couldn't afford this sort of holiday in a month of Sundays. It was popular to use statistics a few years ago to proclaim / complain that the Public Sector was better paid than the Private Sector. And there is a reason for this: tens of thousands of industrial grade Civil Servants were TUPE'd across to private companies in the late 1980s and 1990s so obviously the remainder of clerical and managerial grades were, relatively speaking, the better paid. The issue is not the 'high' pay of Civil Servants but low pay in the Private Sector (which persists with many businesses paying minimum wage and relying on the Government to top up incomes with 'in-work' benefits).

Around 2011, I was a group head at DE&S HQ in Abbey Wood. Working for me I had a C1 grade Civil Servant (nominally, if not actually, the equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army). His wife was a similar grade in the NHS and he declined to seek promotion because he didn't want to lose the child benefit that would soon only be payable to basic rate taxpayers. This individual was one of the best engineers I have met; industry was always trying to poach him with offers of salaries well over twice what he was getting in the Civil Service. His expertise was absolutely essential in getting ships out of maintenance(specifically from refits carried out by Private Sector companies) yet he was paid less than the higher-rate threshold. Overall, I definitely felt that the Civil Service gave good value for not much money.

I would also like to mention the perceived benefits. Again and again I read of gold-plated pensions but a guaranteed percentage of not very much is still not very much! My brother-in-law was complaining that his long-invested in private sector pension was only going to pay out about £17k per annum. I could assure him of one thing: there are relatively few Civil Servants overall who will get a pension of that much.

The Civil Service work for the Government; some are good and some are less so but that is true in any enterprise, including the Private Sector. This country was not ready for Coronavirus but nowhere else was either. Did we respond appropriately, with hindsight perhaps not, but was business any better? Many Private Sector companies had to rely on the Government to bail them out because they have paid all their spare cash out to their shareholders in dividends, and let us not forget it was the failings of the Private Sector that let to the long-lasting recession that kicked off with the financial crisis when, once again, business was bailed out by the Government.

Normally if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. The Civil Service may pay peanuts but most of its staff are most definitely not monkeys!