Month: April 2020

The Times leads with the news that remdesivir may be an effective treatment for COVID-19. Yesterday, Dr Anthony Fauci announced the results of a gold-standard trial showing the drug has a "clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery". In a trial run by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases involving 1,063 patients in hospitals around the world, the duration of symptoms was cut from 15 days to 11. The news sent the share price of remdesivir, an antiviral originally designed to combat ebola, through the roof. The Telegraph's front page has bad news, by contract. The above-the-fold headline reads: 'Johnson to dash lockdown hopes.' The paper reveals that the Prime Minister will use his first Downing Street press conference since his return to work later today to explain why the lockdown must remain in place. The Telegraph links this to yesterday's announcement that the cumulative death toll has reached 26,097, meaning the UK now has the third-worst death-per-head ratio in Europe after Spain and Belgium. The jump in numbers from the day before is partly due to the Department for Health and Social Care including non-hospital deaths from COVID-19 in England in its daily figures for the first time, bringing yesterday's total to 765. These are all patients whose death certificates name COVID-19 as ...

The story on the front page of today's Times is referring to the latest coronavirus data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for the week ending April 17th which showed a big jump in care home deaths compared to the previous week. The number of overall deaths in care homes for Week 16 (April 11th – 17th) was 7,316. That's 2,389 higher than Week 15, almost double the number in Week 14 and almost triple the number in Week 13. However, deaths from COVID-19 in care homes in Week 16 was 2,131, less than the number of deaths in hospitals (4,766). So what is the Times basing its story on? Turns out, this is the view of David Spiegelhalter, the Cambridge statistician. Here's the key sentence: "Professor Spiegelhalter said that it was possible that coronavirus deaths in the homes now exceeded those in hospitals, with both running at about 400 a day but heading in opposite directions." In fact, the average number of deaths in care homes in Week 16 was 304, although it may be larger now. The ONS data, which was published yesterday, seems to show we're on track for a big rise in excess deaths this year. The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending April 17th was 22,351, an ...

The Express leads with the minute's silence for NHS workers who've died of COVID-19 that was observed at 11am this morning and the fact that the families of front line NHS and social care staff in England who've died will receive £60,000 in compensation, which was announced by Matt Hancock at the Downing Street press briefing yesterday. Any death from the virus is tragic, and I can see the argument for compensating the families of workers who succumb to COVID-19 after putting themselves in harm's way. But why NHS and social care staff and not, say, bus drivers? Or supermarket workers? Or the owners of corner shops that have remained open during the crisis? Or postmen and milkmen? Is it because NHS workers are more likely to die from COVID-19 than other members of the working population? As readers will recall, I crunched the numbers on that last week with the help of Guy de la Bédoyère, a reader with a background in statistics, and concluded that, on the face of it, NHS workers are no more likely to die than other workers. I asked Guy to look at the numbers again to see if that's still true. Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on NHS workers is bedevilled by a number of unknowns. The constant blurring in the media of ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAax92GYr9o Boris made an unscheduled speech outside Downing Street this morning in which he announced... bugger all. For the time being, he said, there will be no easing of the lockdown. The message was the same as the one being peddled by Dominic Raab and other Cabinet ministers at the daily Downing Street press briefings: the lockdown will remain in place until the Government's five tests have been met and in the meantime it would be irresponsible to set out an exit timetable. According to Boris, the most important of those tests is eliminating the risk of a "second spike". If the easing of social distancing measures led to a second wave of infections that would not only be a humanitarian disaster, rendering all our sacrifices for nothing, it would also necessitate reimposing restrictions and that, in turn, would be "an economic disaster". So in order to protect the NHS, save lives and rebuild the economy, we have to remain under virtual house arrest for the foreseeable future. (You can read the full text here.) This was deeply unimpressive from the Prime Minister. Where's the evidence that phasing out the lockdown, but keeping more modest social distancing measures in place, would lead to a second wave? As Lyman Stone points out in an excellent essay in Public Discourse, the burden ...

Good news on the front page of today's Sunday Times: "Tory grandees" are heaping pressure on the Prime Minister to end the lockdown. "A pincer movement of Conservative Party donors, cabinet ministers and senior Tory backbenchers is putting Boris Johnson under concerted pressure to ease the lockdown," it reports. Another encouraging development is an exclusive on the front of today's Mail on Sunday revealing that the Government has ordered 50 million antibody tests that have been devised by scientists at Oxford working for the Rapid Testing Consortium. The newspaper claims the tests cost £10 each and give results in 20 minutes. Let's hope they're more reliable than the 33 FDA-approved PCR tests that infectious diseases expert David Crowe reviewed for Lockdown Sceptics yesterday. You can read David's article here. The Sunday Telegraph leads with a scoop of its own: anyone arriving in the UK from abroad — including British nationals — will have to self-isolate for two weeks under the Government's proposed exit strategy. This is already the case in Singapore, which has only recorded 12 deaths from COVID-19 to date. But won't that devastate the tourist trade? And what about British people who've already booked their summer holidays? Will they still leave the country knowing they'll have to self-isolate for two weeks on their return? It seems a little ...

Lockdown zealots like Piers Morgan and Carole Cadwalladr have exploded with delight at the Guardian's story that Dominic Cummings attended the Secret Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) on March 23rd, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown. "This may turn out to be the biggest scandal of the crisis," tweeted Piers, while Carole declared it "unfuckingbelievable". Ooh, mother! So are they – and the Guardian – suggesting the decision to impose a lockdown was, in part, a political one and not just based on the wise counsel of the Government's scientific advisors? That the Machiavellian Brexit mastermind had to infiltrate SAGE to browbeat the boffins into advising Boris to do what he judged to be in Boris's best interests, not the country's? Does this mean they've all done a reverse ferret and joined the ranks of lockdown sceptics? Not sure how the Guardian's scoop will sit with its columnists, who until now have tried to out-bid each other in their enthusiasm for the lockdown – "No I care about the NHS more." "No I do." "No I do." Hitherto, the Guardian's main criticism of Boris is that he didn't place the British people under house arrest even sooner. Now, apparently, the lockdown is just a piece of political theatre staged by Dominic Cummings. The statement from No 10 rebutting the story, ...

David Crowe, a Canadian independent researcher of infectious disease models and the host of a weekly radio show in Canada called The Infectious Myth, has analysed 33 of the PCR tests approved by the Food and Drug Administration and concluded they all have serious limitations, producing both false positives and false negatives.

The Times leads with Nicola Sturgeon's exit plan for Scotland. "The First Minister published a 26-page 'framework' for easing the lockdown and discussed plans for reopening schools, businesses and allowing small gatherings," it reports. Sturgeon didn't say when this might happen, but argued there should be a “better balance” between tackling the disease and protecting the economy. In addition, Arlene Foster, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, suggested that lockdown restrictions could be eased at a faster pace there than in the rest of the UK. Guernsey has already put an exit strategy in place, with gardeners, mechanics, estate agents and builders returning to work tomorrow. And in an encouraging sign, various senior Tories praised Sturgeon's initiative, including Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis and former Chancellor George Osborne who said we need to start talking about "the hard trade-offs". According to the Telegraph, Boris will return to work next week (as predicted on this site on Tuesday). Will he make an appearance at the Downing Street press conference on Monday and unveil an exit plan? Sturgeon apparently thinks so. After all, why start talking about her own exit strategy yesterday unless she thinks Boris is about to do likewise? She evidently thinks a big announcement is imminent and wants to make it look as though she bounced the dithering Prime ...

The Telegraph leads on Chris Whitty's depressing announcement at yesterday the Downing Street press conference that social distancing measures will have to remain in place until a vaccine or "highly effective drugs" are available to avoid a second wave of infections, which could mean well into next year. This bombshell came just moments after Dominic Raab had said there was now a "glimmer of hope". He didn't spell out what he was referring to – and he used the same phrase almost two weeks ago, so the glimmer hasn't got any brighter. But in his speech he referred to "the peak of this virus" three times and implied we're in the midst of that right now. The Government's position is that no social distancing restrictions can be lifted until we're past the peak and there is no risk of a second wave that will necessitate reimposing those restrictions. I have good news for Mr Raab in that case. There's growing evidence that the daily death toll peaked on April 8th, as can be seen on the NHS England graph below: That's the view of Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. Two days ago he said: “From an epidemiological perspective we can say that the numbers are consistent with the peak happening on ...

Why is there a furious row about the Government’s failure to secure more ventilators when the evidence is clear that ventilators are largely ineffective at treating COVID-19? According to this letter published in the Lancet, 86% of patients put on mechanical ventilation in a Wuhan hospital died. An earlier study put the figure at 97%. For patients facing certain death without ventilation, there's an argument for intubation, although it may just speed their demise when palliative care would be more appropriate. But for those not facing certain death, there's mounting evidence that mechanical ventilation does more harm than good. This is the kind of gotcha journalism that has seen the public’s estimation of my profession plummet during the crisis. Don't mean to single out the FT, by the way. Nearly all the papers have the story. The Telegraph leads with the shortcomings of the PCR test given to almost 100,000 NHS and social care workers and raises the possibility that some could have been given the green light to return to work when they were still infected, thanks to the high incidence of false negatives. Another risk is that those who tested positive – but didn't, in fact, have the virus – may now be going back to work, convinced they've developed immunity. (My 11 year-old son Charlie was tested ...