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 NHS staff with “healthcare workers” (a larger and more nebulous number that includes NHS staff), a lack of clarity about whether the NHS staff who have died are front line workers or not, the general problem with determining whether a person has died from or with COVID-19, and working out where they picked up the infection – was it at work? – are just some of the complicating factors. Following our analysis, BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme did its own calculation last week. Estimating the UK’s working population (people aged 20-65) to be ~42 million and the number of NHS staff at 1.47 million, More or Less calculated that of the 2,145 people of working age who had died of COVID-19 at that point (16,509), between 70 and 85 of them should have been NHS workers simply by virtue of their being exposed to the same general risk as everyone else. As it turned out, exactly 77 NHS staff had died at that point. You can listen to the item on the programme here. (It starts at 17m and 23s.)
Is it still the case that NHS workers are no more likely to die than other members of the working population? Yesterday, Matt Hancock announced that 82 NHS staff had died from COVID-19. The stated deaths in hospitals for the same day was 21,092, an increase of 28%. Assuming everything else is equal, that means that by yesterday 98 NHS staff should have died, 16 more than are recorded as having done so. In other words, they appear to be less at risk of succumbing to the virus than other workers.
But there are various caveats I should add. For example, we have no idea what the variable risk is that NHS staff are exposed to, depending on their jobs. Have the 82 fatalities been exposed to more risk than the average NHS worker? In addition, NHS staff are likely to be largely fit and well – healthier than the average 20-65 year-old – and if they’re working in hazardous environments they should be wearing protective clothing, although there have been PPE shortages as we know. Consequently, it’s possible that NHS workers would be dying in fewer numbers if their daily work really does render them no more vulnerable to COVID-19 than other workers. Even so, there are still no statistical data showing that NHS staff are exposed to additional risk over and above the risk that all workers are exposed to – not any that I can find anyway. (Off-Guardian has also done an analysis, as has HSJ, and both have concluded that healthcare workers are substantially under-represented among those recorded as having died from the virus.)
In other news, both the Times and the Telegraph have interpreted Boris’s speech yesterday more generously than I did, detecting in it a signal that the lockdown is about to be eased – and it looks as if their political editors have been briefed to that effect by Downing Street. The Times reports that shops selling “non-essential” items will soon be allowed to reopen if they can keep customers two metres apart, people will be permitted to mix with a limited number of people outside their homes, Premier League football games will resume behind closed doors (although the Government can’t mandate that) and people arriving in the UK from abroad are likely to face two weeks in quarantine. The Telegraph claims garden centres will reopen in the next fortnight and – glory be – rubbish dumps and recycling centres may throw open their doors as soon as this weekend. Both say the fleshed-out proposals will be announced in the next few days.
At last Friday’s Downing Street coronavirus summit, according to the Telegraph, Boris quoted Cicero’s motto: “Salus populi suprema lex esto.” This has been widely translated as meaning “the health of the people should be the supreme law”, but a reader of this site begs to differ. He points out that the Latin word salus means a lot more than physical health. Among other things, it also means “a sound or whole condition, welfare, prosperity” (Lewis and Short, Latin Dictonary). In other words, the wellbeing of every aspect of human society, not just physical wellbeing. Cicero’s motto doesn’t mean physical health should take priority over everything else, including the economy.
Rachel Shabbi has taken a pop at lockdown sceptics (and me in particular) in the Guardian, describing us as “the right’s angry culture warriors” and linking us with Brexiteers. (My own experience is there’s some overlap, but the Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle.) She dismisses the argument that continuing lockdowns across the world will result in a greater loss of life than the pandemic as “nonsense”, which is a bit odd given how often she has repeated the dubious claim that the UK’s austerity programme of the last 10 years has resulted in 130,000 unnecessary deaths. “Strikingly,” she writes, “these sceptics don’t engage with the actual issue with the lockdown: that it came too late, causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, even while many scientists and the World Health Organization were imploring swifter action of the like being taken by other countries.” Shabbi appears to be unaware of one of the central planks of the sceptical case, namely, that lockdowns don’t in fact reduce COVID-19 fatalities. In other words, there’s no evidence the number of UK deaths would be lower if the Government had imposed a lockdown sooner. As Lyman Stone points out in his sceptical essay in Public Discourse: “We don’t need to have a national debate about whether the economic costs of lockdowns outweigh their public health benefits, because lockdowns do not provide public health benefits.”
In addition to the economic cost, there is the continuing toll that the lockdown is taking on the most vulnerable members of our society, something you’d think Guardian journalists would care about. Amanda Spielman, head of the schools watchdog, has warned that the country’s poorest pupils are likely to suffer most from school closures. Addressing the House of Commons Education Select Committee yesterday, she said: “Whether we like it or not, it is going to widen gaps, especially in the short term.” The Mail has the story.
For a robust statement of the sceptical case, I recommend this comment posted under ‘How Reliable is Imperial College’s Modelling?’ by Hugh Osmond, the founder of Punch Taverns, one of the UK’s largest pub chains. It’s a lengthy post that has prompted an interesting discussion thread and is worth reading in full. Hugh’s conclusion is as follows:
Headline-grabbing predictions by advisers such as the Imperial team were derived from inappropriate model inputs with unreliable early data. On the most cursory analysis, it was apparent that the model bore no resemblance to the reality and the Imperial modellers should have been quietly dropped from the advisory group. Similarly, even before the epidemic arrived in the UK, it should have been obvious from the experience in China and Italy that spread of infection by asymptomatic individuals within hospitals (and elsewhere) was an enormous problem. Ward segregations, compulsory use of PPE, testing of all hospital workers and other rigorous measures to prevent institutional outbreaks amongst the vulnerable should have been in place from the start.
Freddie Sayers, the editor of UnHerd, has written a thoughtful piece following his interview with Neil Ferguson on Saturday. He argues that which epidemiologists you believe in this crisis – the hawks or the doves, to invoke the distinction between the rival Cabinet factions – doesn’t come down to a choice between good and evil, as some lockdown zealots would have it. It’s much more complicated than that. “The expert that most resonates is unlikely to be entirely down to your assessment of the science — more likely a complex combination of your politics, your own life experience, your attitude to risk and mortality and your relationship to authority,” he writes.
Arch-sceptic Heather Mac Donald has written a good piece in Spectator USA about the Covid paranoia that has infected the US population. Among the points she makes is that the odds of catching the virus from a passing jogger are vanishingly small. “The chance of getting infected across a wide open, windswept space is virtually nil, even if the imaginary carrier were not moving quickly past his potential victim,” she writes. It’s delusional beliefs like this, she says, constantly reinforced by the mainstream media’s hysterical coverage, that will prevent consumers from going to re-opened restaurants or boarding planes in sufficient numbers to bring the economy back to life.
In the interests of balance, it’s also worth reading this piece in New York magazine by David Wallace-Wells on how many things we still don’t know about SARS-CoV-2. Wallace-Wells is a lockdown zealot, but he does a good job of reporting on the constantly changing medical understanding of how the virus is killing us and how best to treat critically ill patients. (He points out that hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir aren’t faring well in trials.) “The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week,” he writes. “Lately, it seems, by the day.” Reading about the protean ability of the virus to kill us in a variety of ingenious and horrible ways, it’s tempting to conclude it’s a genetically-engineered bioweapon – but then, conspiracy theories are always tempting when faced with something sinister and mysterious. This account by a New York nurse of what doctors are doing wrong in New York City’s hospitals is hair-raising, although it’s a second-hand report. And when it comes to the effectiveness of ventilators, a Consultant Anaesthetist with a particular interest in critical care has posted an interesting comment underneath ‘How Effective are Ventilators’ that you can read here.
If you think you’ve got it bad wherever you’re locked down, spare a thought for those trapped at the Tribal Gathering Festival in Panama. Midway through the festival, which was supposed to be an opportunity for Westerners to learn from local indigenous people how to “rebalance” their lives, Panama went into lockdown, making it virtually impossible to leave. As one reader writes: “Imagine being locked down indefinitely with this bunch of self-indulgent, woke, middle class, ‘right on’ wasters – hell on earth!” There are still 40 people trapped on the site. Vice has a video report of the calamity.
A number of readers have reported that the YouTube video of the two doctors in California making a number of sceptical points about the way governments have responded to the crisis across the world (which I linked to last week) has been taken down. If you click on the link, that certainly seems to be the case. Is this an example of YouTube applying its censorship policy whereby any content that is “medically unsubstantiated” or challenges the WHO’s recommendations will be removed? Confusingly, the second part of the doctors’ briefing is still on YouTube.
In case you missed it, one of the regular commentators in this site – RDawg – posted this comment yesterday: “Persons caught saying any one of the following phrases, especially when used in a morally superior ‘tutting’ way, are subject to a payment of £10 into the swear jar and a slap round the face with a wet kipper:
- ‘Self isolate’
- ‘Social distancing’
- ‘Flatten the curve’
- ‘Guided by the science’
- ‘The new normal’
- ‘We must wait until we have a vaccine’
- Any positive referencing of Neil Ferguson and his ‘model’
- ‘We risk having a second peak’
To which other commentators have added:
- ‘Oh, so you’re happy for old people to die’?
- ‘It’s worth it if it saves just one life’
- ‘Stay safe’
I’m sure you can think of some more.
Finally, if you feel like some light relief while you’re doing your daily exercise – and you can’t find anything better – there’s always the latest episode of London Calling, the weekly podcast I do with my friend James Delingpole. You can listen to it here. Plenty of sceptical chat, but we also talk about the embarrassment of having our wives write in last week’s Spectator about what it’s like being locked up with us. You can read those pieces here. My wife’s contribution is a tissue of lies, obviously.
A huge thank you to all those who donated to pay for the upkeep of this site in the past 24 hours. The battle continues, so if you feel like donating you can do so here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in the site, or have points you’d like me to make on your behalf, you can email me [email_obfuscator email=realtobyyoung@gmail.com]. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Hopefully we’ll know by the end of the week.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Hi Toby,
May I ask why you are now moderating all comments, before they are published? I agree inappropriate or vulgar posts should be deleted, but perhaps it would be better if such posts could be flagged up or reported rather than needing to be pre-approved?
PS – this is only intended as constructive feedback. I really enjoy reading (and being a part of) this blog every day. Your website has given hope to many people questioning the lockdown. Keep up the good work with this great journalism!
Whatever happens, I find comments get through the moderation very quickly.
As soon as I posted that, it didn’t need moderating and was published straight away ha ha
Comments have been generally of a high – sometimes extremely high – quality, unlike other platforms I could mention. There was just a sense that maybe things were slipping a bit, so for a period I turned on moderation for all comments, but it pretty much seems to have been unnecessary, so I’ve turned it off.
Thanks. Sorry for the little moan
Great round-up again, Toby. Rachel Shabbi’s piece is typical loud one-sided gibberish. And the politicizing is creating an unnecessary divide. I do not agree with Brexit (unlike you) or the vast majority of Trump’s “politics” (Johnson would be considered liberal in the U.S., by the way) – but I think the lockdown is the biggest overreaction of our time. And history/data will prove that.
I did appreciate the feather-light dis-ingenuousness of her reference to “other countries” that had done so much better.
She was, of course, advocating that the western democracies behave like the Chinese Communist Party and nail the doors closed on infected families’ houses, like the Europeans did during the Black Plague.
Shabby hardly describes it, does it?
As I said in my comment yesterday, my anecdotal experience is that lockdown zealotry is not necessarily a left vs right phenomena, the biggest zealots seem to be extremists of both sides. I think we can safely assume the Guardian’s support of lockdown is some sly strategy to trip the Tories up by their ‘wokey’ columnists who are in no economic danger whatsoever. I don’t know what other readers think but to my view a ‘lockdown’ is not particularly left wing. Off the top of my head, the likely consequences of lockdown from a socialist point of view include lots of divided, demoralised workers either trapped at home or working bizarre, anti-social shifts to maintain ‘social distancing’, and a greater push by companies towards automation and outsourcing (I.e. why pay someone to work at home in this country when you can have someone in a cheaper jurisdiction?) This does assume the ‘working at home’ experiment actually works as from what I see most of my colleagues, especially the child brigade, don’t seem to be doing much working…
I have observed that too, I’m really shocked by my right-on middle class leftie friends’ enthusiasm for lockdown, and I’m finding it increasingly disingenuous, and morally dishonest. I suspect they’ll bitterly regret campaigning for poverty. It’s a kind of identity politics, ‘Tories bad, boo hiss’ and therefore the morally ‘correct’ position is ‘save lives’. I’ve had several sane, intelligent people tell me in all earnestness, ‘the Tories decided to kill half a million people to save money’, and when I ask ‘you are saying a British government made a decision to commit genocide, where is that documented?’ and all I get is silence, or ‘mumble, mumble, universal credit, mumble, mumble herd immunity’. It’s bonkers.
It is simply impossible to have a sane conversation about ‘the economy IS lives’. They just tell me they ‘care about people’ and call me ‘right wing’ when I try to point out their hairdresser, or the bloke who fitted their kitchen, or tiled their bathroom is a ‘person’. I don’t share Toby’s politics, I’m also pro-Remain (but with increasingly less enthusiasm, I’d rather not be on the team that calls ex coal miners destroyed by Thatcher, ‘gammon’, and when they queue in the rain to vote Tory it is possibly wise to pay attention), but I’ve never voted Tory, I find it bizarre and baffling that this has polarised around left/right so quickly.
My background is the voluntary sector, I’m now a senior consultant with twenty years’ experience, my niche is the social and health outcomes of economic deprivation. I’ve seen up close what austerity did to a lot of communities already on their backside, and to watch soup kitchens, kids’ play schemes, mental health projects and the like go to the wall with alarming alacrity has been heartbreaking. Donors have all switched their funds to ‘covid frontline relief’ which means those little organisations doing good work, but work that is not directly related to feeding or caring for the vulnerable (say, really good drama projects for kids struggling with acting out in anti-social behaviour or, play schemes for the children of refugees or whatever) are just going bust. I cannot get one single lefty mate to care.
@BecJT Yes indeed. Thankyou for your great post. My experience of this grand delusion aligns roughly with that we saw following the Brexit vote. “We are the left. We are good people. We care about workers and poverty. But all you dirty racist working class people didn’t vote the right way, so you’re all stupid gammon. You were all too dumb to know what you voted for, therefore we shall officially correct you.”
There is definitely a similar rhetoric going on with the “Covidiot” line. Comfy middle classes sat at home earning their 80% whilst wagging their fingers at people who’ve dared emerge from their fifteenth floor council flat for a bit of
fresh air. Hell we’ve even got police here in Yorkshire fining Deliveroo cyclists now for doing their “key… But not so key” worker jobs. It’s all very…. elitist.
I know, I was lectured about Corbyn, told that if I cared about the poor I’d vote for Corbyn (I simply could not do it, I couldn’t vote Tory, I’m in a safe seat anyway, you could put a blue rosette on a horse and it’d get elected by a margin of 30k, so I spoiled my ballot). My social media was assailed for weeks about ‘the poor’ – I’ve come to see that they’ve almost fetishised the poor, it’s an identity, it’s deeply patrician, like a chirpy cockney chimney sweep or a ‘noble savage’ (my mum grew up p*ss poor, born in 43, they have no idea how utterly awful being poor is or how offensive that is!), ditto the Remain camp, tactical voting, vote Labour.
Twenty minutes after the press started calling it for a massive Tory landslide, both my right-on leftie mates and the Remain channels started calling those same people ‘Sun addled serfs’ and ‘gammon’ – I don’t think I’ve EVER been so embarrassed to be either a remainer or a middle class centre left softie, it was a snobbish disgrace, all of it. Plus if you’d actually cared about ‘the poor’ perhaps have a leadership candidate who has a hope in hell of winning an election, and stop wasting everyone’s time with gender nonsense or endless woke gibberish. That all brought me up short. Made me really think about what I actually believe, and what actually matters. So, sod it, I think leaving the EU is a mistake, but evidently lots of people don’t, and I most certainly don’t want to be on the team of indulged, entitled, cossetted posh people lecturing working class people who have a better grip on the realities of life than most about what is good for them. No thanks.
I think similar has happened with this, and it is the entitlement of lockdown enthusiasts that turns my stomach, they haven’t got the first idea about being scared, or insecure or unsafe, and I dunno, it’s almost like the poor are now the disease, keep those grubby serfs at home where they can’t infect me, me, me (with a massive dose of ‘it’s for your own good’). Meanwhile on the front lines, those little organisations putting a sticking plaster on a decade of lack of funding for public services, it’s a safeguarding nightmare, at risk kids not being checked, domestic violence and child abuse off the charts, children not getting fed, refugee women with no contact and no help, elderly day schemes closed, mental health problems spiralling. I feel ashamed actually. Truly ashamed that we’ve done this to people.
I just feel extremely angry. Turn your shame into pride – at least you care. Funny that. It’s always the people proclaiming loudest and with most vehemence that they care about others who, when it comes down to it…. Don’t really seem to care about others.
Your typical lockdown zealot seems to think that the only people suffering in this country are those suffering from Covid or treating those with Covid. LOOK AROUND YOU. You will see your unemployed neighbour. Your elderly neighbour who now feels completely isolated and helpless. Your neighbour whose kidney transplant was cancelled and who now fears for their life. Your neighbour who is too scared to go work at their zero hour contract job, but still has to go because theyre not entitled to furlough or sick pay and they want to eat sometime this week.
Oh wait. You can’t see any of that from
your gated community.
Exactly this, I don’t understand why they can’t see it. I’ve unplugged social media, I can’t watch anymore sharing of ‘yoga for lockdown’ videos or ‘reconnecting over Jenga’ family selfies.
Thanks all for your views, I’m glad other people are seeing this I thought I was going insane! I am from a working class background and have never had much in common with the champaign socalist set, despite now being a member I suppose of the middle class. Our only hope is that these ‘Guardianista’ types grow bored of it as it starts to crimp their lifestyles. There is certainly some hint of that starting to happen..
I’ve been praying for rain, no sunbathing, no fun dog walks, no queuing outside waitrose in your flipflops, I think it’ll take the shine off it pretty quickly.
Lol maybe it’s just that The Guardian always seems to be on the hysterical, unfounded (and er…. just plain wrong) side of any given issue – rather than a left v. right thing
(They are consistently ‘not very left wing’ — they just don’t know it)
I have witnessed the same, i.e. acquaintances on the left and the right zealously supporting the lockdown. Initially the greatest supporters I encountered were rich lefties however I dialled into a local Conservative Party (West Berks) Zoom call last week and all they wanted to discuss was “giving thanks” after lockdown to those who had helped. I said I felt we were not addressing the elephant in the room, i.e. the damage the lockdown is doing and the fact there is no evidence in favour, however the majority of people on the call were in fervent support of the lockdown. I had a call with my MP (Conservative) also and she just repeated the party line.
I had an email from my Tory MP yesterday (I know him through a local campaign a group of neighbours and I are involved in, he’s alright) and he had the absolute temerity to compare the death rate to civilian casualties in the second World War! When we’ve actually installed a fascist dictator in a European country with this lunacy.
Would have agreed with you if the labour party of yore, we’re to the fore.
This rabble abhor the working man/woman on so many levels.
The latter have judiciously abandoned them in equal as evidenced at the ballot box.
With half -wits such as ‘Shabby’ doling out patronising bile they forever will be in opposition.
Take it from me they are loathed by the working people of the North.
Good article in Spectator US regarding this.
Agreed. I have heard lockdown scepticism from friends on both the left and right. Strangely, all the people I know who have criticised the lockdown all have underlying health conditions and are over sixty.
“…to my view a ‘lockdown’ is not particularly left wing”. Basques, as well as everyone else in Spain are suffering what’s probably the toughest lockdown in Europe. Well, you’d be amazed if you saw how the Basque radical left supports it. I (like many Basques) would have never believed it, they completely agree with the Spanish Goverment’s policies! Even nationalist trade unions have been calling for a total closure, because “they care about people’s health”, not the economy.
Most of my friends would consider me ‘on the left’ – I’ve never voted Tory in my fifty years of voting life. Actually what I want is for everyone to be given a fair shot, in short a fairer society. Seems to me that the left has more concern for the poor than the right, but I’ll listen to the other point of view. I am absolutely, rampantly anti-lockdown and appalled at the hysteria which has driven this particular agenda. Fear is the best way to control people, so keep ’em frightened, get out there with the disinformation and the ‘fake news’. I trained as a journalist in the 1970s (NCTJ) and packed it in after six months as it seemed to me no-one was really interested in telling the truth. Well it hasn’t got any better. ‘Stay at home to save lives.’ Feel free to have your cardiac arrest, your stroke, your epileptic fit, your acute anxiety hysteria, your suicidal depression in the comfort of your own living room. And do not dare to call the emergency services unless you have a touch of the Covid. My mother is 96 and has now endured six weeks in isolation where, in her warden assisted flats (for warden read Nazi), they are not even permitted to sit in the (private) garden six feet away from each other but are condemned to stay indoors. Last I heard Vitamin D from sunlight was absolutely necessary in the fight against respiratory conditions. The peak of this ‘thing’ seems to have been around 8th April so why are we still under house arrest? I can’t get it out of my head that this virus (wherever it originated and I don’t know) provided a massive cover for an experiment in social control, but then I’ve read 1984 too many times.
Thanks Toby. Brillant as ever. This blog and London Calling are helping me stay sane right now. Please don’t worry, I’m not one of your stalkers.
I tried to read the Guardian piece linked to. Only got so far as it’s just SO badly written.
Off now for my daily drive + longer walk with the dogs. It’s raining out, so hopefully they’ll be less folk about than of late and more like a ‘normal’ Tuesday.
On a local Facebook group that my wife follows, someone recently put ‘it’s like some people out for a walk have only just discovered this thing called the outdoors’.
On another forum I read, someone had asked what (positive) aspects of house arrest people would continue with after its finished. My answer was simply ‘Nothing’.
Mine is eating meals with my family. But that’s the only thing.
One (negative) aspect of lockdown I shall be glad to be rid of is neighbours, who would normally be out at work, being so again.
As a stay-at-home wife, I’m irritably ready for the newly minted Betty Crocker types to go back to work and stop buying all of the cleaning products and baking ingredients.
I had hoped that Boris’s return to No 10 would herald an end to the absurdity that is the Covid-19 Lockdown, but alas he has been co-opted by the ‘Illiteratti’ who have infected Western media intent on perpetuating fear above facts.
With little else to do there is plenty of time to peruse the data coming from around the globe as well as the opinions of the hordes of experts pontificating on TV and the web, so why, oh why is time given to the most idiotic of them all who has proved to be serially inept.
Hardly a day goes by without Neil Ferguson being given time or column inches to expand his ridiculous, fear-mongering models that are as accurate as Ray Charles the sniper. Not just wrong but absurdly so. Stevie Wonder could more realistically describe a rainbow than Ferguson the effects of disease.
The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440. His opinion of Covid is almost equally ludicrous.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Ferguson is some kind of ghoul getting his kicks fantasising about mass death but why would anyone give his views house room? One might as well put Pol Pot in charge of education.
His track record is woeful enough and he is an embarrassment to his employer, but he is now doubling-down on his imbecility in the face of and despite all the available REAL WORLD data, a commodity to be ignored or doesn’t exist in Fergusonland. He is now claiming that there will be 100,000 deaths in a second wave. He is delusional or in denial – in either case he should be ashamed and ignored.
The sad fact is that there is indeed some likelihood that there will be a spike in deaths once lockdown is relaxed but this will not be due to Covid but because of the measures put in place to combat it. This lockdown is inevitably undermining and weakening our immune systems and the longer it goes on the weaker they will become. Without our natural defences built by contact with benign pathogens we will be subject to the ravages of the less so. No doubt Ferguson will spend his days on his own with a box of Kleenex should that happen.
One could be forgiven being fearful at the outset of this disease for it was novel and little known about its virulence and lethality, prudence, it could be argued, was therefore the best policy. Now, however, that is patently absurd. It is clear from every independent study of the actual data, rather than ego-fed models the only explanation for which is that they were written by blind monkeys randomly striking keyboards, that the “enemy” being fought is Quixote-esque, it is mainly in our heads and it is no more lethal than flu even if it probably may spread more rapidly.
It is worth considering the daily or hourly reports of victims with which we are bombarded, even if not designed for the purpose, they have the effect of instilling fear. It is my contention that that is exactly their purpose for it appears to be in the interests of the proponents of the lockdown that the death toll due to Covid is maximised.
In the UK the virus is ‘reportable’, much like Anthrax, Botulism and Typhus, but not interestingly Influenza, so that all cases both diagnosed and SUSPECTED must be reported. (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/notifiable-diseases-and-causative-organisms-how-to-report Accuracy of diagnosis is secondary, and since 1968 clinical suspicion of a notifiable infection is all that’s required. This status means that every person who dies in the UK with the disease or suspected of having it will be reported as such and will therefore almost certainly therefore appear in the data as being a “Covid death”. It does not in any way mean that Covid was the actual cause of death, indeed it is inconceivable that a large number of the 21,092 deaths recorded up to this morning were not in fact caused by Covid but by other pre-existing ailments. 21,092 people have died WITH Covid not FROM Covid.
Let us take a look at the comparison with flu. Since flu is not reportable it is certain that either the official count of flu cases and deaths is accurate or if not, then the error will be in the direction of under reporting of the fatalities.
(www.fullfact.org)
If there is an error in these numbers it is likely that the actual number of deaths is higher. For example, someone with cancer who dies at home but contracts flu in the days before death will certainly be recorded as death by cancer rather than flu. This is unlikely to be the case were the same person even suspected of suffering from Covid-19, since Covid is reportable any death while suffering from it, or indeed suspected of suffering from it, will be recorded as a Covid death. This along with the unreliability of the early RT-PCR tests inevitably had the effect of over, rather than under-stating death due to the virus, especially so since only suspicion is required to report. Despite this, the number of deaths is in line with a bad flu season, one where the selected vaccine was wrong.
To illustrate the point, take the recent headline that referred to the death of a twin who “died of Coronavirus” … 100 years after Spanish flu took his sibling. How many comorbidities were likely to have been present?
Equally, I am not sure whether the victim referred to in the The Sun headline of 22 April was counted as one but it does illustrate the mindset – Driver who ‘ran over woman’ charged with murder after she died from Coronavirus in hospital. It matters not, the point is that the danger, effect and lethality of this pandemic is being spectacularly and gratuitously over stated.
The average age of Covid victims in the UK was, up until a few days ago 79.5, in Italy it is over 80, it is inconceivable that the majority of these victims did not have significant co-morbidities that were in fact the primary causes of death. The number of healthy people under 50 with no preexisting contra indicated condition or not subject to very large viral loads, that are being killed by this virus is small, very small.
All of the above is in addition to the secondary effects of this Governments’ policy that will ultimately result in far more deaths than Covid:
It seems self evident that the actions designed to prevent Covid will, when the numbers are finally added up result in significantly more deaths in the UK than Covid could ever have caused, but perhaps the most egregious and shameful aspect of Government policies around the world is the inevitable impact that the gratuitous economic damage being done will have on third world children. There is a distinct likelihood that MILLIONS will die in the near future as a consequence of the lockdown, I trust that anyone parroting the odious slogan appearing on our TVs at every break; “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” will be suitably ashamed. Perhaps it should be re-written; “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Starve Children in the Third World” it would be more apt and perhaps the collective shame that we all should feel for acquiescing to the this madness might herald a return to collective sanity from this Herd Hysteria.
It is likely that Governments around the world are committing history’s greatest crime against humanity.
Great point re Ferguson. One has to question is he entirely independent as a government advisor? His department has received funding in excess of $200 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is claiming the only way out of this is to vaccinate everyone. This of course is exactly what Gates is pushing. Coincidence?
It’s pretty ironic that these people are proposing or at least postulating a lockdown until a vaccine is available – there is no vaccine for the common cold and we’ve been looking for decades. What makes these fools think there will miraculously be one found anytime in the next 10 years? Or is that actually the point?
Or that anyone will agree to take it (plus the flu vaccine is about 36% effective because viruses mutate).
My concern is that it will be made mandatory – the pharmaceutical industry’s big lottery winning ticket if they can push it through; they’ve been trying for years. No up-to-date vaccine certificate? Then no bank account, driving license, credit card or passport for you!
My other concern is that there is a rapidly-closing window for the industry hit this jackpot; they run the risk of us plebs developing herd immunity before they can launch their product line. And a vaccine that is rushed through with inedequate testing may kill or damage more people than the virus.
And yet again, the “vaccine is our only hope” narrative continues to be pushed, as if the human species has suddenly lost its ability to develop natural herd immunity
You MUST watch this video on new Covid legislation. It made my blood run cold. It is the most disgusting piece of dystopian, Kafkaesque, obscene legislation that I can imagine in a western democracy and something that I never thought could become Law in the U.K..
Before you say “It’s to protect the public”, remember that you only have to be SUSPECTED of having a reportable disease to be deemed to have it; diseases such as
Anthrax, Botulism, Typhus… and Mumps, oh, and Covid-19, an infectious pulmonary disease no more dangerous than the flu.
If you don’t think that this will, sooner or later, be abused and consequently terrify you, then you have much more faith in the goodness of those who seek power than I.
https://vladtepesblog.com/2020/04/28/uk-new-legislation-for-covid-19-control-of-disease-act/
Whitty had millions from them too, when he was at the London School. As an aside, this is a great read, about listening to experts, ‘historians are experts too’ https://hnn.us/article/175087
Chris
Point well made. It seems though that we are powerless to act? Rational thought, dissent or questioning of the ‘consensus’ is almost considered a crime. We cannot protest and the justice system has shrugged its shoulders. It takes weeks to get a copy and paste reply from your MP.
Those responsible will no doubt escape justice and will ‘ learn a few lessons’ in the years to come. Even the ballot box offers no hope in that all sides backed the current situation. In the study of recent history I have often struggled to comprehend how evil regimes of all types can cower huge populations and inflict mass casualties through violence or even starvation. This episode of history has illustrated we have learnt little and that a seemingly free society with little more than scary headlines and simple propaganda messages will run and hide, shop there neighbours to the police, morally berate innocent people who have dared to do something they don’t agree with even if it is legal, clap for people doing their job when instructed etc etc. The mind truly boggles. The question remains – How do we do something to stop this madness and make sure it can never happen again?
The ballot box offers no hope, but you could write an anti-lockdown limerick on the ballot which all the candidates then have to read to agree it is “spoiled”. Enough of those might get parties rethinking their priority policies.
I would add to your point about the potential damage to the immune system of lockdown; the impact on the developing immune systems of children is an even greater unknown.
This is combined with the greatest experiment ever conducted upon the physical development of children. If the chief medical officer believes that 30 minutes of a Jo Wickes workout (credit to him for trying!), or something like a road run, can compensate for the total incidental activity usually undertaken by an average 11 year old, she is very misguided.
In my view it is an unethical experiment. I hope my concerns are mistaken. It would be truly terrible if a whole generation went into lockdown as an extremely low risk group and emerged far more vulnerable to the virus.
I’ve only just started the video but is this the two doctors? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkvkd10tJug
@ChrisH29. Just re-read your post. This is extremely well researched and argued. I wonder how the public opinion would be swayed if this was printed as the leading article in one of the MSM newspapers. Out of interest, what is your professional background?
Oh dear, now no one will read it.
I was a fund manager, before, I hasten to add the investment industry became a casino for the terminally immoral.
Excellent summary of where we are ChrisH29. Your comment is worthy of a much wider audience. Hopefully Toby can facilitate this?
Totally agree. It reads like a professional journalist’s work. Certainly much higher quality than the fear mongering hysteria being pedalled by the mainstream media.
Thank you. Very kind of you.
Thank you, most kind.
Great post Chris. Just to add that during 2003, an estimate of the number of deaths worldwide from SARS was 10 million. In the Cabinet Office publication ‘National Risk Register’, one of the ‘risks’ within it which the UK could be faced with is ‘New and Emerging Infectious Diseases’. At 2.40 :
“The Department of Health has developed a contingency plan for dealing with SARS and this
would provide the basis for dealing with any future outbreaks should the disease re-emerge. This builds on our generic responses to outbreaks of infectious diseases and the specific lessons learned during the SARS outbreak. The containment of the SARS outbreaks globally reconfirmed that traditional public health and infection control measures can be successful in containing a new infectious disease”. No Lock down recommended!
Over in the US, Ferguson’s mate Fauci also did an about turn from his previous response to H1N1;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/what_did_dr_fauci_have_to_say_in_2009_about_the_deadly_h1n1_pandemic.html
We started a public f/b group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/224650028639377/) which I’d like to share this on with your permission – please join and share if you’re into such things. Would that be OK? Cheers!
I think the third part of the slogan is not pithy enough and perhaps should be more general – how about “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Endanger Lives”. I’ve also found the NHS part of the slogan a little grating, as a taxpayer I have always thought the NHS was supposed to protect me.
Latest updated numbers from Sweden, now including a forward projection to try to address the reporting lag:
https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/
How are Sweden’s numbers any where near accurate if they say this on the Swedish Government Public Health site:
“The statistics of deceased persons are based on data reported so far to the Public Health Agency, differences with the regional reporting. The statistics show the number of people with confirmed covid-19 who have died, regardless of the cause of death.”
Source: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utbrott/aktuella-utbrott/covid-19/bekraftade-fall-i-sverige?fbclid=IwAR1cAsf0p3D40x7ExFOlcH_7IKoFTo6mEyOeaWb4XKmZKrSCAvwCFyfcbFk
So that means Sweden’s figure’s are also artificially high?
Total RIP to “lockdowns are essential” mantra!
Farinances,
It means they are completely unreliable. It’s amazing more people haven’t seen this.
I think the deadliness of this virus has been grossly exaggerated and miss managed globally beyond belief…
A while ago I tried to look into context for deaths of health workers in the course of their duties and came across a report in the Lancet that looked into patterns of mortality by occupation in the UK. I struggled with the concept of person-years and couldn’t really make head or tail of the report, but I’ll post a link anyway. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(17)30193-7/fulltext
Very interesting. It appears healthcare workers do have lower death rates than most of us. I think the report required the deaths to be while someone was of working age so it doesn’t look a life expectancy only death from 20-59. It’s really unexpected.
My first time commenting and as a bit of a centre-left softie, I’m joking with others that it comes to something when the only balm on the insanity of our current policy is Toby Young, Peter Hitchens and Brendan O’Neill. Then again, the truth is the truth, and I’m so sick of how this has polarised around ‘lockdown good’ and ‘economy bad’ I frankly don’t care.
Toby, are you following Dr Malcolm Kendrick? He’s a GP, trainer, author and blogger. The medical establishment try to dismiss him as a crank, but he’s just a maverick (i.e., he tells the truth) and he’s written a series of excellent blogs about this insanity (I found him several years ago as I’m one of those complex chronic illness patients chewed up and spat out by our national secular religion, the NHS). His latest piece is worth a read, it’s on the NHS policy of discharging Covid sick and positive patients out of hospitals and into care homes and hospices (yes, really!). He says:
It’s a travesty what we are doing to the old, what the NHS is doing. Also you might have seen it already, but there was a thread on Twitter yesterday by a Dr Chris Maclean RN about empty NHS hospitals also refusing to take Covid sick patients FROM care homes, even though they clearly need hospital care.
I never thought I’d ever say this, but keep up the good work Toby – I truly now understand how to lose friends and alienate people, and that is by questioning the lockdown.
The treatment of the elderly in this way – and the neglect of existing (and yet to be diagnosed) patients are the true scandals of this “crisis”. I say “crisis” not because it isn’t one but because it was largely manufactured.
We won’t even mention the economy.
I agree wholeheartedly, and even those we are keeping ‘safe’, we are locking very advanced dementia and elderly frail patients in their rooms, they get three meals a day, a 15 min clean once a week, and that’s it. No touch, no love, no company, no sing songs in the day room, no visitors, no sitting in the garden with the sun on your face, no routine (my dad has very early stage dementia, he’s gone off a ski jump since this started, he has a wide circle of friends and a little daily routine, he’s 85 and fit as a fiddle), it’s awful. I’m not blaming the staff, they can’t get PPE and they can’t cope, but we are killing these people with cruelty. Plus as Dr Kendrick says, he now calls care homes ‘incubators’.
As for the economy, I’m not sure what my right-on lefty mates think we are going to do with a massive national debt, a huge benefit bill, mass unemployment, no rates, and a collapsed tax base, how are we going to fund all the care we are going to need next year and the year after?
Question is whether pro-lockdown zealots can ever manage to care about the welfare of those still alive when they can virtue signal so much mroe strongly by weeping over the few dead.
I am not an especially numerate person, words are my thing, but I am baffled at the utterly rubbish reporting of data, and people’s limited grasp of what it means. I am also really shocked at the numbers of people willing this to be worse than it is, surely we should be celebrating ‘no worse than the flu, overall, thank heavens!’ but it’s quite the opposite.
I’m also a fan of Malcolm Kendrick’s. He has a new post about the importance of vitamin D in warding off viruses. He describes a study from 2008, long before covid, but the same principle applies. He says, “… if you do get infected with influenza, vitamin D (especially D3) has a potent effect on protecting endothelial cells. And damage to endothelial cells appears to be a key mechanism by which COVID creates the most severe, and potentially fatal, symptoms.” Since government policy ensures we can’t get much vitamin D naturally from sunshine at the moment, unless we have a garden, we would all be well advised to take supplements.
I like him too, his books are great as well and meticulously referenced. I had a lethal, treacherous combination of thyroid disorders including cancer, it was missed for ten years (‘in your head’ apparently despite begging several GPs and two endos for help, saved by a third brilliant German endo professor who was deeply unimpressed with what they’d done to me) and then the cure was worse than the disease (‘in your head’ too, German endo had emigrated by that point as he said the NHS was ‘barbaric’), Dr K has really advocated for thyroid patients, and been met by the usual scorn from the medical profession, and we’re all dismissed as a bunch of hysterical patients (9 out of ten of us are women, which is why no one cares), it’s shocking what’s going on. I take Vit D as a matter of course, but had upped it the last few weeks.
And for severe complications, the “vitamin D hammer” could be used as described here; it seems to work for flu and would presumably be worth trying in the current crisis, despite no large scale studies having been performed (who on earth would fund them?) The risks for a few days’ treatment would be minimal and a patient heading towards severe complications would have little to lose.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463890/
Another point – persons with dark skin have a harder time creating vitamin D at these latitudes. I read elsewhere that the health workers’ deaths are oddly skewed towards black/brown ethnicity – could this be a factor? (Especially if they contracted the infection before the recent sunshine kicked in.)
If Matt Hancock really has announced this £60k per NHS employee that has ( very sadly and tragically) died of Covid 19, this could open a flood gate of Armed Forces families whose husbands/wives died in the name of HM the Queen on foreign fields- and how far back does that go? If it’s right for one then surely it’s right for another?
Are all those who are not going to the clinics and doctors and A&E also going to be claiming when some have their lives shortened due to the basic closure of the NHS due to Covid?
At the same time- seriously? Has he really done this? I feel like Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movies- eye twitch and everything!
I think military personnel who die already (quite rightly) get death in service payments. ?
I actually see nothing with this re: health care workers in this context. Especially seeing, as Toby pointed out above, there probably aren’t gonna be very many of them
Your point about patients wanting compensation for neglect during lockdown though is a very good one. What a can of worms that could be.
I think the bereavement grant for military is 4 times salary. So, the family of a fallen Private earning £20,000 would expect £80,000… barely more than an NHS ‘zero’, sorry, ‘hero’. Applause! The end of what limited tolerance (respect long ago spent) we had for the NHS and police is about the only certainty coming out of this societal kidnapping.
Two points to make:
A) we should stop considering the deaths with/from COVID-19 argument, we should instead focus on counting only the covid-19 deaths of people who were previously (at least assumed to be) normally healthy and had over a decade of plausible life left. At that point we still don’t know for certain if covid-19 was what killed them, but it would be highly likely it was. And the number of such people will be a lot lower than the full death toll and a much better guide to risk for the average person to use as their origin point on the scale of how big the risk feels to them.
B) REALLY quite OFFENDED by Rachel Shabbi’s assumptions in that Guardian piece. I’m a proud Remainer, I’m heavily socially liberal, I’m economically for anything either side of the centre which works. I’ve always said the EU was good for liberty because it stopped the UK government from enforcing some of their more extreme illiberal plans. And to suggest we’re not commenting on the “lockdown came too late” argument, well I, and probably many others here, think that the less extreme social distancing measures did come too late, that if we’d done little things earlier it would have worked better than any lockdown could. She seems to assume that by being anti-lockdown we are pro-covid, we’re not, we just think other measures are more proportionate. She says there is no trade-off between health and economy – that might be true for no correlation between public health and whether the big bankers are doing well, but there is a definite trade-off between the productivity and jobs of the local economy and local health: studies have shown significantly shorter life expectancies in deprived areas where local industry and business has all shut down. The pro/anti-lockdown divide in society is not the old “culture wars”, it’s a new one independent of any prior left-right, Remain-Leave biases, it is the plainest demonstration of “everyone has a right to do what they will, if it hurts no-one” vs “everyone must do what the whole demands, however misguided the whole is”.
It’s still not clear that SARs-Cov-2 causes covid-19.
Covid-19 doesn’t have a unique set of symptoms and the Wikipedia page on covid-19 is lacking in references to primary research that prove association. The opening sentence on Wiki states that covid-19 is caused by SARs-Cov-2 and then references a MayoClinic webpage that has no proper references of its own. The SARS-Cov-2 Wiki page doesn’t reference its causation statement.
The study that everything seems to link back to is the Nature paper from February:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095418/
and this uses the term ‘associated’ speculatively in its title and is clear in stating that Koch’s postulates have not yet been fulfilled. If anyone comes across a journal article that gives the follow up causative evidence I would genuinely be interested to see it.
Hi Bob,
The (first i think?) fulfilment of Koch’s postulates for COVID-19 is here:
The Pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 in hACE2 Transgenic Mice
Source: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.939389v3.full.pdf
I’ve read it once but I’m no expert so have to read it again to work out what the finer details are but looks like they found Interstitial lung disease…
But the thing is, as I’ve said before in other comments, how do they know how many people are dying from COVID-19 and not underlying condition? In one paper it even questions certain scenarios of deaths, see here:
Understanding pathways to death in patients with COVID-19
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30165-X/fulltext
There’s something seriously wrong in the UK and around the world in the way deaths are attributed and then uploaded to the system!
There are many pathologists who question the cause of/events leading death too.
Thanks, Tommy, much appreciated!
No worries.
Hi Bob,
I’ve been reading a little deeper into this and Koch’s postulate doesn’t necessarily give proof of causation. Here’s the paper expanded on that:
Sequence-Based Identification of Microbial Pathogens: a
Reconsideration of Koch’s Postulates
https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/9/1/18.full.pdf
And some more reading, which supports the claim of not only the absence of disease, but the existence of the virus its self:
Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory version 7.2
Source: https://www.academia.edu/42632288/Flaws_in_Coronavirus_Pandemic_Theory_version_7.2
It very much does relate to the existing culture wars. If Brexit is about closing borders and curbing free movement, then lockdown is extreme Brexit.
Remainers believe in individual liberty and supported the EU because it granted British citizens the liberty to live and work in 30-odd other countries without having to engage with their immigration-related bureaucracy, and shielded immigrants from those countries from the UK’s illiberal Hostile Environment policy.
Brexiteers believe that everyone must do what the majority demands, however cruel that may be to the individual.
I’m a remainer, not sure that’s a fair analysis, and there’s is a deafening silence from the pro remain left (but then there’s been a totalitarian whiff from the left for a while) and all Starmer is doing is fiddling around the edges of doing lockdown better.
Eastberks44, I agreed entirely with your post before lockdown began. But since it has happened I think both the brexiteer and remainer camps have split themselves by pro/anti lockdown views. Right now I’d happily co-operate with brexiteers if it gets this lockdown gone, then we can all go back to enjoying our remain-leave arguments instead of this disgusting mess.
Hi Toby, do you (or does anyone) have any data on the health profile of NHS workers? Given the long hours, corresponding lack of time to exercise or prepare healthy food, I wonder if the assumption that NHS workers are healthier than the general working population is true? It wouldn’t surprise me if there are relatively high levels of (e.g.) obesity and its adverse health consequences. I understand the data clearly shows that those who are overweight or obese are at higher risk re: covid.
I know obesity is an issue amongst healthcare staff, only because family biz supply health care uniforms, and the ladies sizes, generally most popular size is a ladies 22, and we often sell them up to a size 36 (there’s some rag trade vernacular that I won’t share in polite company).
I can certainly confirm this. I used to be a nurse and as a size 8 weighing around 49kg I was definitely in the minority. I’d love to what the rag trade vernacular is for the larger sizes.
Haha, it’s rude and I don’t want to offend anyone, but XL sizes are called ‘fat b@stard’ so one XL is ‘one fat b@stard’ then double, then triple and so on. Don’t shoot the messenger!
There is much that is worthwhile here. But for Godsake, some unverified YouTube woman who is not the person but has “a friend” for him she speaks. She doesn’t even name a hospital where this “murder” is happening.
“They are killing them. They are not helping them. They don’t care.”
So Toby, you sent me and others to this. Do you agree with her? Do your really think that the whole of the medical profession apart from “a friend” of the poster has decided not to help sick people but kill them en masse instead. Really? Oh and this is a worldwide thing. Her claim is that there are drugs that work but “THEY” don’t want you to have it,
Your credibility as a journalist is really challenged when you post this crap. And it is real crap. It’s the stuff of David Icke. As for some other points, I agree with some of them. The quasi conspiracy crap and anti-science stuff and attacking SAGE is weak. It’s what the politicians do with the SAGE advice that matters. Yes other scientists get some differing results. The scientists you quote tend to extend in to policy. Nothing wrong with that but it’s not a like for like comparison. I’d refer you to Dr Birx who is very limited in what she can say – she’s a great expert but stands next to an idiot.
Hi BoneyKnee,
I appreciate you disagree with the consensus view on this site, and we’re not against constructive criticism, but I’ve noticed a few of your comments seem to be rather pugnacious, peppered with vulgarity and at times quite personal. Could you just try to tone it down a little please?
This is not terribly pugnacious. I don’t intend to be. I do like the debate here and the general thrust around pushing back on the lockdown. Not many people are and the government is doing a terrible job. I have pulled Toby Young up a couple of times when he follows lines that really are more attuned to the Icke school of enquiry and conclusions. I have “had a pop” here at Toby and on one other comment. I wouldn’t do this to a fellow commentator though. Toby is a serious journalist or claims to be so that is different.
I’ll try not to be pugnacious or vulgar. I really do not mean to be. We are moderated so I must be OK. But I take what you say. We don’t want the general slippage to the slanging matches that are so many sites today.
Thanks.
Hi Toby, I assume that you have come across this study from the Health Studies Journal that unsurprisingly reached more or less the exact same conclusion:
https://www.hsj.co.uk/exclusive-deaths-of-nhs-staff-from-covid-19-analysed/7027471.article?fbclid=IwAR2B7K_FrQ33XkaRxcEnUQd6r3_pvt59p3ci8FwZSH4pIhdb8OnRzv_H3u8
I’m geting rather tired of the fact-free nature of all this hero worship stuff. It’s all getting a little bit culty…
Absolutely fascinating research. Thank you for sharing. It’s amazing that the data has to be collected in that manner…you would think there would be an accessible NHS database for exactly this kind of research?
Agree. Fascinating. Raises so many questions.
Meant to say, I’ve signed up to YouGov, I’m a dissenting voice in the wilderness, they sometimes share the raw data after each question, it’s depressing, but I thought I’d do my bit and say what I really thought (I have no connection to YouGov or any other polling company btw) https://www.yougov.chat/ They do a daily Covid chat, today’s was ‘do you think lockdown should end’ (76% do not, although that’s come down from 90% over the last couple of weeks, keep praying for rain folks!).
Thanks for posting. I’m doing the same
Thank you! I am on YouGov, but I have never seen this chat before, despite trawling the site numerous times looking for something like this. I have answered the questions by following your link and would encourage others to do the same. It takes very little time. BecJT: how do you make sure you can answer every day?
They email me, I signed up.
Thanks for the link. Chat completed.
Like everyone else I’m feeling really quite powerless and desperate to get out of this. In America, a food producer paid to take out a full page ad. in a national newspaper because it was the only way to warn people that the supply chain was breaking. Well… Could we do something like that? Could we get something professionally done to just get the point across that lockdown is catastrophic and not science led. Could we crowd fund it?
Another idea : could we get the skeptical scientists to write a scientific paper together? Or to write an open letter that large numbers of them sign? And that could be published in the papers as an advert? Surely there is something that would penetrate the blocked ears of the decision makers?
Interesting about the newspaper advert. Do you have a link to that?
Totally agree about doing something to indicate dissatisfaction.
That’s a very good idea.
The latest mortality figures from the office of national statistics are high:
‘The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 17 April 2020 (Week 16) was 22,351; this represents an increase of 3,835 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 15) and 11,854 more than the five-year average; this is the highest weekly total recorded since comparable figures begin in 1993.’
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending17april2020
But mortality by age distribution seems pretty much normal.
Regarding healthcare workers: ‘…..the data does not clearly show that healthcare workers are dying at rates proportionately higher than other employed individuals or even the population as a whole.’
https://www.hsj.co.uk/exclusive-deaths-of-nhs-staff-from-covid-19-analysed/7027471.article
An overwhelming majority of ‘Covid 19’ deaths had several pre-existing conditions.
‘Of the 3,912 deaths that occurred in March 2020 involving COVID-19, 3,563 (91%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 349 (9%) had none. The mean number of pre-existing conditions was 2.7. The most common main pre-existing condition was ischaemic heart diseases’
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/deathsoccurringinmarch2020
So, if mortality distribution by age is normal, healthcare worker mortality rates are normal and 91% of ‘Covid 19’ deaths already have an average of 2.7 pre-existing conditions, mainly heart disease, what, precisely, is the problem?
It can’t be overall mortality numbers for the year to date because those are still below a couple of other years in the last 25 years and the population has been increasing net by an average of 400,000 pretty much every year during that period.
I’ve obviously missed something so I think I will play myself a little song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXnxTNIWkc
I clicked on your first link above. If you scroll down the ONS statistics, you come to point 11 “Strengths and limitations of the data” if you then click on the link “impact of registration delays release” scroll down to point 3 “The delay between death occurrence and registration has increased in 2018” and look at figure 2. Am I reading it correctly? I did not realise that there were such long delays in registering deaths these days and although this data only goes up to 2018, I don’t suppose the last two years would show any great improvement in the figures.
Likewise on the NHS England statistics page showing Covid deaths in hospital by date of death, deaths registered today go back as far as March 19th and are scattered throughout March and April according to the orange bars.
It makes me wonder WHEN the recorded deaths w/e 17th April actually took place.
Hope these help:
https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/blogs/understanding-the-data-about-covid-19-related-deaths
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-the-uk-could-be-over-the-peak-136757
If not, here’s a little song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE186w91YVU
Everybody who reads here, no matter what you believe or what you think or what you think you know, should read Michael Crighton’s speech on Fear, Complexity and Environmental Management in the 21st Century.
Here’s the most pertinent of a number of highly pertinent points he makes:
” … Now, Chernobyl started me on a new path. As I researched these old fears, to find out what had been said in the past, I made several important discoveries. The first is that there is nothing more sobering than a 30 year old newspaper. You can’t figure out what the headlines mean. You don’t know who the people are. Theodore Green, John Sparkman, George Reedy, Jack Watson, Kenneth Duberstein. You thumb through page after page of vanished concerns—issues that apparently were vitally important at the time, and now don’t matter at all. It’s amazing how many pressing concerns are literally of the moment. They won’t matter in six months, and certainly not in six years. *And if they won’t matter then, are they really worth our attention now?*
But as David Brinkley once said, “The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”
Another thing I discovered was that attempts to provoke fear tended to employ a certain kind of stereotypic, intense language. For example, here is a climate quote:
“”We Must Deal With Climate Change Now!””
“We simply cannot afford to gamble … by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say we are merely entering a period of climatic instability are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be ignored.”
…”
The kicker?
That quote is from Lowell Ponte, in The Cooling, page 237, published 1978.
IT’S ABOUT GLOBAL COOLING.
Learn the lesson or repeat the foolishness. The choice is ours. Not Boris’ and not Dr Ferguson’s, not Trump’s or anyone else’s.
This choice is OURS.
Has anyone seen this Knut Wittkowski video on why we should not be locking down?
https://youtu.be/lGC5sGdz4kg
Dr. Wittkowski received his PhD in computer science from the University of Stuttgart and his ScD (Habilitation) in Medical Biometry from the Eberhard-Karls-University Tuüingen, both Germany. He worked for 15 years with Klaus Dietz, a leading epidemiologist who coined the term “reproduction number”, on the Epidemiology of HIV before heading for 20 years the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University, New York. Dr. Wittkowski is currently the CEO of ASDERA LLC, a company discovering novel treatments for complex diseases from data of genome-wide association studies.
Yes I did, Facebook are now removing that video as ‘fake news’, I thought he spoke a lot of sense, and the whole ‘perspectives on the pandemic’ series was great.
It’s scandalous that anyone who speaks out against the lockdown measures is being labelled as “fake news”. How is this a free and democratic society if we do not allow freedom of speech from the opposition? This is not some crazed nutter; it is a man with 35 years’ expertise on fighting epidemics, who has an opinion and whose voice deserves to be heard. Why is Ferguson’s opinion more valid than Wittkowski’s?
I know, it’s dreadful. Facebook do it all the time, unfortunately, and twitter, and youtube are now deleting eminent opinions as well.
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/gemeinsamer-appell-von-prominenten-rasch-raus-aus-dem-corona-lockdown/25773378.html
This world is upside down. In the UK, the whole establishment is following the government directives like sheep. In Germany, which has one of the best outcomes of the covid-19 pandemic, the furore against the lockdown is growing by the day from all parts of society incl. prominent politicians, scientists, authors, philosophers and human right lawyers. They have come together as the link above highlights, with a frontal attack against the lockdown published in “Der Spiegel”
This is done from both a public health, economical and legal standpoint. One of the persons in the above petition is the Professor in Virology, Alexander von Kekule, Munich, who unfortunately this time around was the earlier advisor to Chancellor Merkel. He is a very prominent person, who early on in the pandemic, was advising for sensible wide range social distancing measure short of lockdown even before they were instituted in Germany.
I will give you a few sentences translated.
The lockdown is ruining our social, cultural and economic life. We must at the same time both protect our public health, economy and rule of law.
They argue that three main goals, economy, constitutional rights and life should not be competing objectives instead they are all interconnected.
Because of the enormous damages for our society done by the “lockdown” and the serious consequences for the welfare and health of our citizens we need to stop the lockdown as soon as possible.
In the UK? Silence.
I’m not sure they are silent here, just that nobody is listening. CEBM are doing some good work. Excellent Germany is starting to rouse, I saw a video (I don’t speak German, but the gist was pretty clear) of residents refusing to go inside. There was one police van, several hundred ordinary residents, some with face masks pushed down around their necks, police officer was shouting through a megaphone ‘go back inside’ but the police were seriously outnumbered, it was all very polite and muted, but people just said ‘no’.
I think the UK is very cowed at the minute, but for all the opinion polls, actions speak louder than words and the streets, roads and trains get fuller -I do think us Brits do quiet disobedience quite well. It’s rather funny that many of our cabinet members subscribe the ‘Brittania Unchained’ ideal, and here one of our traditional European rivals lifts herself out of the mire! I am very surprised the Deutschlanders have risen up first, I expected Spain or Italy to be the first domino but I guess they have rather a lot of paramilitary police to keep a lid on the dissent.
Germany spent years under Hitler, then half of it spent years under the Stasi, they know what dictatorships look like, they know how they start, they know what the result in. Germany since 1989 has been one of the strongest bastions of liberty, as they have recent memories of the alternatives.
I don’t get the impression that people are cowed; quite the reverse. A large number of people are militantly in favour of the lockdown. It seems to be some kind of populism of the left seeking redress for a couple of big national decisions that went against them.
The government plays along because, with the PMs illness, it currently is ‘out bleeding hearting’ the opposition, so retaining broad support, while it waits for the media narrative to turn. That narrative has switched already, to a degree, but will only become stridently anti lockdown once a crescendo of voices eventually reaches fever pitch regarding increased nursing home deaths, from non Covid 19 causes, and massive waiting lists (with inevitable consequences) for life threatening conditions.
The likelihood of such a renversement increases as the weather continues to warm, an effect on coronaviruses similar to that of sunlight on dracula………an opening of the curtains that will hopefully coax everyone out from behind the sofa.
Meanwhile, here’s a little song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HQMbQAWRc
Censorship of Covid origins, treatments and care (eg the NY hospital) is becoming more prevalent and quite disturbing. All the platforms are now busy discrediting anyone, no matter how distinguished, whose opinions vary from an agreed ‘Newspeak’. In the past, crazier theories have abounded with little censorship, because most people do the research and work it out for themselves. They should be entitled to believe what they want as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. Sadly, this nanny state will probably get worse, perhaps because people are becoming more aware that ‘Newspeak’ isn’t necessarily ‘Truespeak’.
And remember the 77th Brigade is involved, and their remit includes:
Audience, Actor and Adversary Analysis
Information Activity and Outreach
Counter-adversarial Information Activity
Support to Partners Across Government
Collecting media content
Disseminating Media
So, not shady at all.
As a clinician I don’t do mathematical models but can still have a opinion as good I feel as Fergusson the soothsayer and his entrails. I think the number of covid19 patients will continue to decline whether there is a lockdown or we are all released from out house arrest tomorrow. The first wave is over.
There will be a second wave whether we prolong this lockdown or not and it will start December of this year. All coronaviruses wind up in the winter , and this one won’t be going anywhere. The question will be whether we insitute another ineffective lockdown then for weeks/ months . I suspect the economy will be so dire then that Boris will just keep to ” social distancing “
I fully agree. We could end the lockdown now and the infection will die out in May and June as all coronavirus do. The big question then if it would be extinguished like the previous SARS virus or reappear, as you say, during the winter period. People or more seriously, politician, don’t understand the epidemic Farr’s law which is similar to the Bell curve.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-william-farrs-way-out-of-the-pandemic/
After the peak it will slide down as fast as it went up after the peak of infection which is not the same as the peak of detected cases by PCR. The only important thing in this outbreak is the peak of death. You can back calculate the peak of infections from the peak of death minus 21-28 days (day of infection plus incubation time plus disease progression plus ICU admittance and time of death). This table from Oxford Evidence Based Medicine is interesting
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/six-countries-three-quarters-of-the-covid-deaths/
Caveat the difficulty of defining the peak of death (see Belgium France with crazy statistics) it seems that Italy and UK made the lockdown too late to have any effect at all of flattening the curve and most likely the same with Spain.
The actual number of new infections was already falling even though the peak of PCR confirmed cases were peaking later (due to a bias of exponentially increasing testing to detect cases).
Prof. Ioannidis announces study results on SARS-CoV-2 infection fatality rate & mortality risk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns5BdJYq0Uk
I’ve made a petition
I need at least 21 people to sign it before they the petition team will check it to see if it can go ahead.
My petition:
Investigate the influence the pharmaceutical companies and vaccine industry has had on our government and their response to covid 19
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/318486/sponsors/new?token=g_lS82afU3vWimejdKpJ
On a similar matter – everyone keeps referring to Neil Ferguson as an epidemiologist but his linked-in profile and Wikipedia page says his degree is in physics. How does this qualify him to model the spread of an infectious disease?.
The first paragraph states he’s an epidemiologist. However, the citation for this takes you to an uncited profile page where his “specialities” include epidemiology.
https://acmedsci.ac.uk/fellows/fellows-directory/ordinary-fellows/fellow/Professor-Neil-Ferguson-0006236
When you select the link for your petition, it doesn’t state what the petition is for, it only asks for personal details. To that end we could be signing a petition for anything. If you can add the petition details you’ll probably get more people signing up for it.
It may also be good to add what monetary gains there may be.
The government’s petition site is a bit confusing. they say they need 5 people initially and then they need to get to 21 signatories before they will even look at allowing it to be an ‘officially’ accepted petition. When that is agreed what the petition is actually for will be viewable.
The petition calls for an investigation into the influence the pharmaceutical companies and vaccine industry has had on our government and their response to covid 19
Doesn’t surprise me his first degree was in physics – this is true of a lot of mathematical modellers you will find a lot of this ilk in investment banks, google etc. It does mean however that his expertise is very much on the simulation side and there are a lot of things he won’t understand about the immunology, biochemistry, structural biology of the systems he deals with. Which would be another reason he is often wrong. You can also bet he doesn’t do a lot of the coal face stuff these days – he will have teams of PhD students and postdoc minions to that for him, like I do.
Problem is that many mathematical modellers seem to think everything to do with life, death and the universe can be translated into computer code. ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ sums it up.
Re the video of the two doctors in California which seems to have been blocked by YouTube, here it is on another platform: https://www.bitchute.com/video/FCvpDocILWmf/
They seemed to have blocked that too, or bitshute is down
Both YouTube and BitChute now have the video… an hour of the most sensible stuff you will hear on this so do try to watch y’all…..
I think I have found the first part of the video clip of the “…two doctors in California making a number of sceptical points” here at bitchute. Lazily I have skipped a load of comments, any of which may have already pointed this out:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/u5LagTrnHltz/
One issue I’ve been thinking about lately is this ‘new normal’ that is pushed by certain cabinet members, including the lamentable Nadine Dorries (how she in the cabinet!!??) – at least I suppose she has engaged on twitter – (didn’t she have an exchange with James Delingpole the other day?) On that note, it would be interesting to get some views on what is going on in cabinet – the briefing to the media seems poor and plays to the notion there is a lot of division between lockdown lovers and sceptics…
A lot of the implication of this is we have to put up with some of this quasi-lockdown twilight existence and police control until a vaccine candidate is (possibly!) found. Where does the consent for this come from? I noticed Sturgeon’s ‘release’ document contains much of the same fluffy, wokey language, and threats of repeated lockdowns ‘at short notice’. Many of these measures will have a devastating social and economic impact. I am lucky, I can to an extent ‘work’ from home, but I’m and experimental scientist and the impact on my morale is devastating, and from a social point of view I am trapped separated from most of my friends, colleagues and family in a dreary London commuter-belt town. I can’t live like this long term, and I’m not financially poor!
We’ve found Zoom and Microsoft Teams works better than expected in my group, but we miss the casual in-person interactions where the best ideas fire up, and neither platform is ideal for large discussions or international interactions. Also, we are supposed to on-board new starters soon, how on earth are we supposed to welcome new, young members to our team and supervise them with months of this bleedin’ working from home???
What the flippin’ heck are Liberty and our lawyers doing? We need a legal challenge. Lord Sumption raised the alarm, I would hope there’s a JR in the offing.
Perhaps they’ve been ‘captured’ like everybody else
Indeed, what are Liberty doing. I wrote a longish e-mail to them last week about some treatments that have been suspended and I’ve heard nothing. I also wrote to three Human Rights firms and they’re not interested either. We’ve got to break through this wall and get the general public seeing the actual facts and really follow the science.
I wrote to Liberty twice, no reply. It’s so frustrating.
People might do better if they just organised themselves against lockdown and got on with life. If lawyers aren’t interested in helping the people then people will have to help themselves. It seems to have happened in Germany, there are reports on here where police entered a street said “go inside” and the outnumbering crowd just ignored them.
The US media are waking up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBLXdKB-PjI
Watched the documentary TrustWHO on Amazon Prime this evening. Our friend Prof Neil had a mention. It was in reference to his funding from the Pharm industry. Link to a trailer for the film here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB-VQ-dNxxs
Just been sent a thread on twitter, people are falling out with doctors over the death of their relatives who have died from clearly diagnosed illnesses, cancer mainly, being issued with a death cert that says Covid, makes quite upsetting reading (although I realise it’s anecdotal) https://twitter.com/theramaman/status/1255121553639038981
Huge thanks to people on this website, and to Toby for setting this up. I was shot down on Facebook by local people for having different views (ones based on evidence and facts, yet still compassionate). Somehow you’re a Nazi if you disagree with the unquestionable narrative.
I’m predicting a gradual, phased easing of lockdown in England and Wales, beginning Monday 11th May. I’m also predicting schools will return on Monday, 1st June, as this will be the first day of the final Summer half term.
I’m then going to suggest everything will be open (including pubs, restaurants etc.) by 29th June (but still with some restrictions and social distancing measures in place). By 1st September I’m predicting life should be as much of a return to “normal” as we can hope for, at least for the foreseeable.
What concerns me however, is what happens once normal cold and flu season starts to emerge around October time? How will Big Brother, sorry I mean the government, decipher between these normal symptoms and Covid?
Anyone else got any predictions/timetables of how things might pan out…?
I hope you’re right.
I suspect they’re gonna start associating more and more totally random symptoms ever more tenuously with Covid, so eventually anyone dying of falling off a building will have died of Covid!
Lockdown zealots scare the hell out of me. It’s clear that no amount of evidence could ever sway them; if pushed, they merely dismiss concerns about collateral damage and argue that lockdown should have started earlier! Their belief is total, cult-like.
Climate scientists constantly warn us that we are likely to see the more frequent emergence of new and dangerous pathogens. No doubt all the world’s microbiologists are on the lookout for these, hoping to become the next Christian Drosten. Are we going to be pushed into early lockdown as soon as one of these events is recorded? What about the next nasty flu strain? I’m afraid that governments worldwide will have interpreted the public’s response to the current pandemic measures as enthusiastic consent to an even tougher response next time.
The government tried to be reasonable but the pressure from external consultants (eg Ferguson) and MSM forced them to lock everything down. Imagine if all these deaths had happened without having taken drastic measures? Their popularity would have plummeted. So much of this is media fuelled public pressure – few governments can withstand it.
The measures are as much about fear as they are about being seen to do the right thing. Boris only changed his mind from the herd immunity response because he knew it would make him so unpopular and lose him votes. So much of this is politically motivated.
We shall go on to the end: we shall hide in the houses, we shall hide in the garden sheds and in the basements. We shall destroy tourism and hospitality.
And if, which for a moment I don’t believe all the evidence points to this lockdown being pointless we shall ignore it. We shall kill those who are too scared to get cancer screening, we shall kill women, beaten up by their parents. We shall surrender our rights that we invented.
I feel the media is completely ignoring how many 15- to 65-year-olds are currently dying in England according to EuroMoMo. It’s quite insane compared to the rest of Europe – including Sweden. So it’s impossible to be the work of the virus alone, the excess mortality is just wayyyyyyy too high. What gives? What’s going in England that’s not going on in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Sweden or even Italy?
Good spot, that is a strange anomaly! A few of the other badly affected countries have a minor blip (around 5 onthe Z scale (not sure what that represents), Spain has 10, the UK 30!!!?
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
@giblets It’s not even the entire UK – just England. Very strange indeed…
Another great interview by Journeyman Pictures with Knut Wittkowski who gets emotional at times and has a pop at a certain Prof Ferguson
https://youtu.be/k0Q4naYOYDw
Agree. The only one who at the start said the right things and has been proven correct.He is an epidemiologist and not a quack mathematician. On this site you have further comments from Wittkowski answering questions from viewers and clearing himself from smear from MSM
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/against-the-corona-panic-pt-v-a-hero-of-the-hour-dr-knut-wittkowski/#us
His idea of paying every nurse or carers staying in the nursinghomes with the elderly during the 4 weeks epidemic 1 million $ would cost nothing compared with the lockdown.
An interview with 2 US ER physicians criticizing the lockdown and the covid-response was on you tube and was viewed by 5 million people but was taken down by you tube as it broke their community guidelines not following WHO recommendations. It has just been reloaded on you tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zed_U257j4o&feature=youtu.be edited but not taking out anything essential. They were not promoting any extreme treatment or anything else. They just stated their views of the covid response .They argued that it was at the moment not appropriate as the actual death rate was coming down to severe flu season level. Anybody listening to that video would find nothing extraordinary or promoting bizarre treatment .Why did you tube take it down? See below
The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.
COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. Members of ACEP and AAEM are first-hand witnesses to the human toll that COVID-19 is taking on our communities. ACEP and AAEM strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Massihi as a basis for policy and decision making.
https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19/covid-19-articles/acep-aaem-joint-statement-on-physician-misinformation/
This is now an Orwellian nightmare
Thanks for sharing this re-upload. I’ve been ripping videos that could be deleted and storing them in the cloud.
I would say I disagree with part of your phrasing, namely:
“They just stated their views of the covid response .”
In reality, they stated the findings of their analysis of the available data, that the chances of dying from the virus are 0.03%.
But I’m just nitpicking.
It’s just simple maths though, not a “view”. For example the German study found infection rate 15% and IFR 0.37% Multiplying those probabilities together gives overall risk of dying from Covid 0.000555%
Another person who has never voted Tory and a keen ‘Remainer’ who is now being accused of being a ‘right-wing zealot’ and many other things by looking at statistics – my job – and forming an opinion (are we allowed one anymore) that is different to what the majority of Twitter or the Media is spinning.
People are going to die either way, there is no point sugar-coating it. My view is based mainly on a combination of the risk profile for the majority of the population currently on lockdown, and the consequences of extended lockdown to a range of other metrics and support the one I believe will result in the lower loss of life, and greater wellbeing to the overall population..
The additional costs of lockdown that jump out of the page are obvious; the reduction in cancer treatments, elective surgeries, mental health and the knock-on effect this going to have down the line. This ‘indirect’ list in inexhaustible unfortunately and with a longer-term outlook it goes so much deeper than simply the economy which is the usual retort received when saying it’s good that small businesses are getting support (in the form of a loan, they need to pay back!).
In my local community basic charity funding is down substantially, charities our workplace is involved in are crying out for help. It will mean in the short / medium and long term local wellbeing projects simply do not occur. The poorest and the most vulnerable will suffer. I’m shocked The Guardian aren’t picking it up (it’s my second click of the day, well it was, sorry).
As a highly sociable person who loves his local(s) and live music it is extremely sad to see almost every single venue and independent pub resort to crowdfunding to stay afloat. These are right at the back of the opening queue and is unsustainable for their future (and my sanity).
One thing for certain, I’ll be taking my two daughters to a local restaurant the first day I can.
In the same boat, I was also told caring about civil liberties is ‘right wing’
It’s not just funding that charities and community groups will be short of. These are often run by volunteers, many of whom are retired and over 70, the very group of people who would no longer be available if they have to isolate for longer. Bad news for both volunteers and clients.
It’s community fundraising as well, lots of community groups such as Rotary, Lions, WI, sports clubs etc raise money for charities, in the first week of lockdown charity income was down 50%, people panicked and cancelled direct debits as well (known to run on the ‘inertia’ principle, people just tend to leave them, this is really important income for charities as it’s ‘unrestricted’ and does not have to be designated to a specific activity, which is pretty vital at the minute)
Here is Sir Patrick Vallance talking about covid on death certificates even if that person wasn’t even tested https://youtu.be/TYA24SacyYY
Trump advicer Dr Birx basically telling us if you die of heart or liver failure etc etc it will go down as covid https://youtu.be/GGHp1GdOD4k
Dr Ngozi Ezike from the Illinois Department of Public Health letting us know if your in a hospice with a week or two to live but test for covid it’ll be covid on the death cert https://youtu.be/Tw9Ci2PZKZg
No wonder the numbers are high, they are literally inflating them, with other deaths
This is really interesting! Vallance’s comment contradict what the lockdown supporters are suggesting, that the number is a lot higher…but people haven’t been tested, in fact the numbers are being inflated because they have not been tested.
Have a look here https://twitter.com/theramaman/status/1255121553639038981
Trump knows that he has been conned by Dr Fauci and the Bill Gates cabal. He desperately needs as many deaths as possible and the CDC has been ordered to inflate the figures with the consensus from all Governors in the US. He would have egg on his face if the death rate was in the region of ordinary flu with 80 million unemployed in the “best” economy in the world.
Prof Neil’s crazy prediction of 2.2m Americans potentially dying is getting some attention in their alternative media https://youtu.be/MhRJ8mfyCv8?t=861
Good clip. How long until You Tube remove that?
Oh dear, another load of know-nothing slackers trying to make people laugh. We are supposed to listen to and trust these people over professors. “2.2 million people simply cannot die in the USA.” The code has been shared and Ferguson is not the only modeller in the world.
His modelling inputs have not been shared. And please tone down the snark.
Post after post from you supporting Ferguson. You do realise that neither his code nor the underlying data have been peer-reviewed, right?
And that other statisticians and epidemiologists don’t agree with his report’s findings, right?
He was asked about the inputs and he replied they were ‘in his head’.
Seriously? That’s not even funny
I see that certain newspapers are still referring to some kind of wartime national mood of resolution but a great deal of it outside the media seems in fact to be, rather, puzzlement over the preference for modelling over empiricism, perhaps even turning to whimsy. References to World War Two inevitably conjure up images from Dad’s Army, a programme that caught so many national stereotypes to the life.
What seems a great deal in evidence is the rise and rise, for example, of an ‘Chief Air Raid Warden’ culture, so many high viz tabard wearing exemplars of the traits shown to such disadvantage by the absurdly helmeted Chief ARP Warden Hodges. We see them everywhere, particularly in Northamptonshire, where the Chief Constable is a ‘dead ringer’
Clearly the country is being led by Sgt Wilson, aided and abetted by the health secretary as Corporal Jones and Prof. Neil Ferguson, or the minister for the cabinet office, as Private Fraser.
Parlour games while away the time…..here’s another one. We have the splendid ‘We’ll meet again…..’ as an anthem for the Second World War.
What should the lockdown anthem be, I wonder? Here are two or three tunes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZtJxhp7mUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLV4_xaYynY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkOiKy6sXfM
But, more importantly, what would yours be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdcS0Nbo7Ng
Surely the country is being led by Neville Chamberlain..? Instead of ‘going it alone’ we have decided to appease the WHO, Bill Gates, Imperial College, the BBC, the Guardian, the tabloids…
This song came to my mind weeks ago when all this kicked off
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aItpjF5vXc
Went to bed singing ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ last night – so thank you!
https://covidinfos.net/covid19/pour-le-pr-didier-raoult-la-possibilite-dune-deuxieme-vague-est-fantaisiste/566/
This is a you tube interview with Professor Didier Raoult , a very famous infectious disease specialist in Marseille, who has been vilified for promoting hydrochloroquine use in Covid-19. He published articles on that subject which has duly been criticized by media and medical establishment. This interview is in French (auto generated subtitles in French could help a little) but the main interest in the interview is his claim that a second wave is only a phantasy. This is a typical epidemic with the Bells shaped curve according to him. Early on in the interview he comments about a recent study from Singapore calculating the end of the epidemic and he quickly show several very interesting charts where they have calculated the end of the epidemic for the UK,US etc. I am posting this mainly if anyone could give any hints where we could find these original studies from the Singapore scientists. Singapore has a very high reputation for infectious diseases control and are world experts in SARS which makes it even more interesting to get hold of that paper.
Addendum. The Professor perhaps had a point about treatment! Look at this letter published today from
https://aapsonline.org/hcq-90-percent-chance/
This is not from a fringe group.This is a letter from the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons urgently requesting the Governor of Arizona to stop urgently all restrictions to prescribe hydrochloroquine. Very interesting.
Don’t know if anyone has posted this link yet. It is a very interesting read
https://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
Thanks for sharing this.
Toby
Your points (however unpopular) about health workers’ death rates are well made. I will endeavour to take some flack from you (petrol on the fire) by questioning your assumption that NHS and other care workers are healthier than the average. I work in health fitness and have qualifications in nutrition and can tell you that I have been so concerned about the state of NHS workers health that I have previously written to the Health Minister. Most of the front line staff work shifts (not a good start) are little more than sedentary (standing around and walking between patients does not elevate heart rates) no evidence that exercise rates are more than wider society and have at their disposal vast quantities of cakes, chocolates and other treats given by well meaning patients and families. The health service are aware of this. I once witnessed a packed canteen of doctors and nurses in a major hospital, where all manner of foods were available including a good selection of fruit, veg and salads. I lost count of the number of plates of chips, muffins and sugary tins of pop being consumed. The only green plate was being consumed by the cancer patient I was visiting and he hated salad!
I have since spoken to Drs, surgeons, nurses and paramedics and they all independently agree. This is not to say they are any worse than a cross section of society but I cannot find any evidence they are generally fitter and healthier. It seems counter intuitive but we know where just assuming A causes B gets us right?
I’m so glad to find this website – all across the Internet, I can either see ‘Lockdown Zealots’ or ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ – there’s no healthy sceptical discussion about lockdowns anywhere else.
As an Indian, I’m unable to make head or tail of our government policies at the moment – we have only about a fraction of the UK deaths till now, even though, our population is twenty times than that of the UK!
I can vouch for the fact that the Covid business has become completely political, and the exit process is going to be long and painful for all countries.
Since ours is a developing country, I shudder to think of the frightening second order effects of the lockdown, and strongly feel that the government has no ideas to help us get our economy back on track.
Scary times, indeed.
Another scientific masterpiece a la Ferguson posted for peer review on the 15th April based on computer projections calculated March about the health impact of Covid-19 in Sweden that dangerous non lockdown country
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1
Quote
“Findings: Our model for Sweden shows that, under conservative epidemiological parameter estimates, the current Swedish public-health strategy will result in a peak intensive-care load in May that exceeds pre-pandemic capacity by over 40-fold, with a median mortality of 96,000 (95% CI 52,000 to 183,000).”
On 29th April Sweden had 2462 deaths and the peak of deaths most likely between 8th and 15th April and declining ICU admittance each day.(Figures from FoH Sweden not the unreliable Wordometer). The epidemic is now going down and certainly there will be more deaths but conservatively that they should have 96000 deaths in May is completely absurd.
We should switch off their computers until they come up with a better plan. We must end the Ferguson calculation pandemic asap