All the broadsheets lead this morning with yesterday’s announcement from Dominic Raab that the lockdown will be extended for at least another three weeks and, in all likelihood, will last for three months from the date it was first imposed (March 23rd), which takes us into June. Raab also set out five “tests” that will have to be met before the lockdown will be lifted: that the NHS is able to provide sufficient critical care to meet demand; “a sustained and consistent fall in the daily death rates from coronavirus so we are confident that we have moved beyond the peak”; “reliable data from SAGE showing that the rate of infection is decreasing to manageable levels across the board”; that the supply of tests and PPE is sufficient to meet demand; and, finally, that any “adjustments to the current measures” won’t risk a second peak of infections that overwhelms the NHS.
The first thing to be said about these five “tests” is that the first, third, fourth and fifth all relate to the capacity of the NHS and its suppliers and could have been combined into a single “test”; only the second is non-NHS related. Would two “tests” have sounded as if the Government wasn’t taking the crisis seriously enough? They’re also frustratingly vague. How is “a sustained and consistent fall in the daily death rates” defined? We’ve seen a “sustained and consistent fall” over the last five days (April 12th – 16th) compared to the previous five days (April 7th – 11th). Does that provide us with sufficient confidence that “we have moved beyond the peak”? Presumably not, but we haven’t been told what will.
As far as assessing the capacity of the NHS is concerned, it would be helpful to know if the Government is still using the March 16th Imperial College model which assumed the NHS’s ICU capacity would remain constant throughout the lockdown period at eight beds per 100,000 of the population. This assumption is represented by the red line below – Fig 3(b) in the Imperial College paper. However, the NHS has significantly increased its critical care capacity since the lockdown began, not least by building new hospitals. Last weekend, we learnt that 37,500 general acute hospital beds were unoccupied, that only 19 patients were being treated at the new 4,000-capacity Nightingale Hospital in the ExCeL, and at least one of the new Nightingales won’t be needed. One reason for that is existing hospitals have been able to double their ICU capacity, according to the Health Service Journal. If you factor all this in, the red line in the diagram below moves above the orange line, which represents the estimated demand for critical care in a less extreme lockdown scenario, with schools and universities remaining open. Based on this, Dominic Raab could have announced yesterday that schools would reopen after the Easter holidays, i.e. on Monday, without any risk of the NHS being overwhelmed. (I’m indebted to a reader, Mike Hearn, for pointing this out.)
The other critical assumptions in the Imperial College model are that <5% of the UK population has been infected and the infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.9%, both of which are looking increasingly shaky. New data from Robbio in Lombardy reveals that 10 times more people have been infected than was originally thought, with 22% of the population testing positive for antibodies, and a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments.
One key piece of evidence cited by lockdown zealots is the latest ONS data that show a steep increase in the number of deaths in Week 14 compared to the five-year average. But according to the Times, only half the excess deaths in the week of March 28th – April 3rd were attributable to COVID-19, with the rest due to other causes. The likely reasons for this are delayed referrals for patients with serious conditions (because non-Covid patients have been de-prioritised) and a reluctance on the part of seriously ill people to go to hospital, partly because they’re worried about catching the virus and partly because they don’t want to be an additional burden on the NHS. In other words, the lockdown itself is responsible for about the same number of excess deaths as COVID-19.
There’s also mounting evidence that the lockdown is damaging people’s mental health. An article in Lancet Psychiatry says it’s likely to have a “profound and pervasive” impact on mental health, with two surveys showing many British people had experienced heightened anxiety and fear of becoming mentally unwell since the pandemic struck and are struggling to cope in isolation.
What’s particularly disappointing about the Government’s decision to extend the lockdown – and not announce any scaling back of the extreme social distancing measures – is that it’s increasingly at odds with the approach of other countries. Yesterday, Donald Trump announced guidelines for “Opening up America again”, and Italy and Spain are dialling back their own lockdowns. More generally, those countries that have avoided hard lockdowns have recorded fewer deaths per million – Japan (1.2 coronavirus deaths per million), South Korea (4.3), Singapore (1.8) and Taiwan (0.3) – than those that have effectively placed their citizens under house arrest – Spain (397.6), Italy (358.2), France (256.3) and UK (193.5). For this last bit of data, I’m indebted to Professor Ramesh Thakur, who has written an excellent sceptical essay on the “global lockdown”.
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Maybe ,while they are at it , they can start surveillance on kids affected after their mothers or they themselves were Jabbed !
This is another example of the general woke pattern: Given a problem X, say, racism, the less harmful the actual effects of the problem become, the more hysterical the people making a living from manageing X act in order to distract from the fact that their well-paid positions have really become useless encumberances.
I was unaware until recently that there is a Chicken Pox vaccine. In the past children would be taken to Chicken Pox parties by their parents to be deliberately exposed to another child with Chicken Pox. The wisdom in this was that a child would be exposed to this virus early and develop immunity, which by and large is what happened, without much fuss. The reason I was given that children need the CP vaccine is that CP can be bad for some children.
That and society’s predisposition to believe that governments and experts must solve our problems.
And they’re not entirely wrong. Modern man has slowly degenerated into a soft, office bound creature that has few of the survival skills and sense of self sufficiency that our ancestors only a few generations ago had in abundance.
The most-recent example of surival skills I’m aware of involved a guy who was stationed close the ruins of Fleury in summer 1916 with his (German) army unit. During various earlier opportunities, he had grabbed a lot of gas cartridges and coffee powder. The men were all badly suffering from thirst and the only availble source of water was a large puddle with a rotting corpse in it. The guy with the gas and the coffee powder than started cooking bowls of coffee from this water so that they could safely drink it. But this probably wasn’t quite what you had in mind.
I would say that those with agrarian skills, of which there were still plenty in the mid 20th century, were pretty self sufficient.
Manual workers, of which there were many only 30 years ago, had plenty of confidence to do things with their own two hands.
As far as I can see, the physical skills of most young people these days are limited to their two thumbs.
That’s more what I was referring to.
People who engage regularly with the physical world are much less likely to be fooled or intimidated by our state bureaucracies and their invented or highly exaggerated dangers.
You seem to be living in a somewhat strange world. Neither farming nor manual labour of craftsmen have gone away. At the moment, there are 331 apprenticeships advertised in the small, rural German town (about 7700 inhabitants) my parents are living in. About 60% of these are certainly for jobs which don’t involve computer work.
I’m not sure if people without an account can see Twitter posts yet. Anyway, whoever put together this 7min montage of the usual UK criminals has done a great job. Just mind-blowing how it was all 100% blatant lies and there can be no justification from their perspective for the harms and tragedies which subsequently followed as a result of their flagrant deceit.
https://twitter.com/FunctionGain/status/1675247367899979777
We are still locked out Mogs.
I don’t know how long this is going to go on for. Musk says ”temporary”, but just how temporary is that? It’s a nuisance, everyone’s complaining about it because the number of tweets you view is is also limited.
Perhaps it is an underhanded way of pushing up subscriber numbers.
Ve vant names…
Remember this from 2022? The Human Rights Attorney Leigh Dundas talking at a Special Meeting of Board Supervisors of Orange County, California..the woman is on fire!
But she talks about ‘locking down for RSV’…and in the USA she says it has a death rate for children of 0.000004714.. or four one millionths of a percent….
….but if it saves just one life!!!!
https://rumble.com/v1ug65q-human-right-attorney-leigh-dundas-and-others-declare-never-again-to-orange-.html
I had a conversation the other day about the defibrillators that seem to have appeared in greater and great number. I was trying to discuss. 1. How many cardiac arrests happen close to one. 2.Would there be there anyone who can or is willing to have a go reviving a dead person 3. What happens when these things inevitably need servicing and or replacing, Is there some kind of benefit analysis, all of which was countered by ‘well if it saves one life, its worth it’. Well, how much are we prepared to spend.? Give everyone a defib in a backpack and a trained paramedic to accompany them about their daily business.? When compassion comes in the door, common-sense seems to go out the window.
Do you know which company makes them? If it is a UK one are we to become a “world leader” in this product? Very important to become a “world leader” where ever possible to our politicians, they think the electorate is impressed by “world leadership”.
Dr Mike Yeadon had a very good piece on this on his Telegram channel a few days ago – I haven’t really sussed the mechanics of Telegram yet – and he explained that to a large extent vaccination is a double edged sword and certainly where RSV’s are concerned, of which there are thousands, it is wholly the wrong way to treat and natural immunity is nigh on essential.
As I understand it the vaccination procedure basically undermines the body’s ability to fight and particularly so with RSV’s. Effectively, shoving vaccines in to children to protect against RSV’s is completely undermining their immune systems and they suffer more infections.
Funnily enough this is extremely profitable for Pharma. No…ooo I can hear you shouting. More bloody conspiracy theory.
Dead infants don;t take long to replace
Towards the end of 2021 I viewed a video clip from Ireland AM on One-Live TV based in Dublin. It showed a group of women eagerly demonstrating the application of face-coverings, these were home-made, to a doll. The aim was to practise getting “a nice tight fit” on a baby’s face and to “normalize and demystify” covering the face from childhood onwards. Viewers were encouraged to get their own small children to help and join in this exercise in interfering with the airways of babies. Viewers were also shown how to take nasal swabs of babies and make a habit of this risky business. I watched in disbelief and complained (in vain, of course) to my MP, even though masks were also mandated in Britain’s and NI’s schools around that time. There is an ‘ID with a mask’ setting on the I Phone and everyone knows how loathe to part with these gags the NHS still is. This article is chilling, because the first place it will lead is to covering the faces of our young, as night follows day. The vile and sinister practice of covering the human face is not going away.