The Times leads with the news that remdesivir may be an effective treatment for COVID-19. Yesterday, Dr Anthony Fauci announced the results of a gold-standard trial showing the drug has a “clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery”. In a trial run by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases involving 1,063 patients in hospitals around the world, the duration of symptoms was cut from 15 days to 11. The news sent the share price of remdesivir, an antiviral originally designed to combat ebola, through the roof.
The Telegraph‘s front page has bad news, by contract. The above-the-fold headline reads: ‘Johnson to dash lockdown hopes.’ The paper reveals that the Prime Minister will use his first Downing Street press conference since his return to work later today to explain why the lockdown must remain in place. The Telegraph links this to yesterday’s announcement that the cumulative death toll has reached 26,097, meaning the UK now has the third-worst death-per-head ratio in Europe after Spain and Belgium. The jump in numbers from the day before is partly due to the Department for Health and Social Care including non-hospital deaths from COVID-19 in England in its daily figures for the first time, bringing yesterday’s total to 765. These are all patients whose death certificates name COVID-19 as the cause of death and who tested positive for the virus.
Another reason Boris is intending to keep the lockdown in place for the foreseeable future, according to the Telegraph, is the news that Germany’s transmission rate has gone up since the lockdown was eased last week. At yesterday’s Downing Street briefing, Dominic Raab cited this as evidence that a second peak was “a very real risk” if we scale back the restrictions. “Chancellor Merkel has made it clear that they might need a second lockdown in Germany if the infection rate continues to rise,” he said, although he didn’t explain why that would be more disastrous for the German economy than keeping the lockdown in place, one of the Government’s arguments for why a second peak must be avoided. Raab said no decision about whether to phase out the lockdown, or what form that might take, would be taken until the review of the data on May 7th by the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Any hope that Nicola Sturgeon would exert pressure on the Government to make an announcement before then was dashed last night when Scotland’s First Minister said on Peston: “I’m far from convinced that when we get to the next review point on May 7th we’ll be in a position to lift any of these measures because the margins of manoeuvre that we’re operating in are very, very, very tight.”
Is the infection rate in German actually rising? That’s a possibility sceptics need to take seriously because if it is that would suggest lockdowns are effective at suppressing infection. But it isn’t – at least, not any more. On Tuesday, Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced that the reproduction number (R0) for Monday had risen to 1, after having been as low as 0.7 in mid-April, although Lothar Wieler, the RKI’s President, later clarified that in fact it had risen to 0.96 so was still technically below 1. However, the latest data from the RKI is that the R0 has now fallen again to 0.75. In case Dominic Raab missed this announcement, here is a graph included in the RKI’s most recent bulletin showing a steady decline in the number of reported casts in Germany:
The latest official data in Germany shows that new cases of confirmed infections dropped below 1,000 yesterday for the first time in almost seven weeks, suggesting the easing of the lockdown has had no impact.
The blog Facts4EU has published a post on Tuesday’s ONS’s data, pointing out that COVID-19 is only likely to kill a fraction of the people killed by other diseases this year, such as cancer, alzheimers and ischemic heart disease. It also unearths this gem from the ONS’s website in which it explains that its definition of a death “involving” COVID-19 encompasses those cases “where COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, including in combination with other health conditions. If a death certificate mentions COVID-19 it will not always be the main cause of death, but may be a contributory factor.” So there you have it: the ONS records a death as being from COVID-19 even if it’s not “the main cause of death”. No doubt we can look forward to another clamour about the discrepancy between the ONS’s figures and those of the Government – even though the daily announcements at the Downing Street press briefings now include non-hospital deaths – when the ONS releases it’s data for Week 17 (April 18th – 24th) next Tuesday.
More on the model I mentioned yesterday created by the three Israeli professors, one an epidemiologist. According to their model, if a country adopts a mitigation strategy – social distancing as much as possible, including at work; 14 days self-quarantine for every person with symptoms; face masks, hand washing, etc. – then in most cases there’s no need for a lockdown. They caveat this by saying it only applies to those countries that have more than 60 ICU beds per million; those with less might have to partially quarantine high-risk populations for a short period. (NHS England is above this threshold and was before it increased its surge capacity.) Supporting their conclusion is the fact that the healthcare systems of countries that haven’t imposed general lockdowns – such as Japan, Sweden, Taiwan and South Korea – did not reach full capacity and in those countries that did – Spain, Italy, UK – infections peaked after mitigation strategies were adopted but before lockdowns were imposed. You can read the preprint here. (For a through demolition of the case for lockdowns, I also recommend this long essay by Ryan Kempber, a software engineer based in Santa Barbara.)
One of the more entertaining aspects of the crisis has been watching the world’s most eminent experts in infectious diseases fighting like cats in a sack. Last month saw the public spat between rival teams of epidemiologists at Oxford and Imperial – and thanks to Hector Drummond for unearthing the fascinating backstory to that dispute – and now we have the bust-up between Professor Ferguson and Professor Johan Giesecke, the Swedish Government’s ex-chief epidemiologist. When this is all over, Quentin Tarantino should make a film about epidemiologists. What should he call it? Once Upon a Time in Wuhan? Science Tsar Dogs? Ingloriuus Beardies? Suggestions please.
In the latest skirmish, Giesecke has hit back at Neil Ferguson after his dismissal of Sweden’s approach to managing the crisis in last Saturday’s UnHerd interview. Speaking to the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, Giesecke said: “I know [Ferguson] a little and he is normally quite arrogant, but I have never seen him as tense and nervous as during that interview.” He dismissed Ferguson’s prediction that deaths in Sweden will start to rise again, claimed the infection fatality rate is closer to 0.1% than 0.9% and said New Zealand’s draconian lockdown meant it would have to continue quarantining incoming visitors until a vaccine is found. Good to see Professor Giesecke – surely the hero of this saga – holding his ground in spite of attracting widespread criticism, including from 2,300 academics who wrote a letter last month calling for the Swedish Government to switch tack.
Sweden’s answer to Bruce Willis attracted an unexpected ally yesterday in the form of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which lauded Sweden as a “model” for battling the virus. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, said there are “lessons to be learned” from the Scandinavian nation. This, from the organisation that originally praised China for imprisoning everyone who tested positive for the virus in purpose-built hospitals, whether they needed hospital care or not, and boarding up in their homes those who tested negative. The New York Post has the story.
The Guardian reports on its front page today that NHS England is considering removing black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff from frontline roles, given that they appear to be dying in disproportionately high numbers compared to non-BAME NHS workers. Last week, I flagged up some preliminary research into whether there’s a connection between how much vitamin D a person’s body produces and their susceptibility to coronavirus – one possible explanation for why BAME people appear to be dying in greater numbers. Since then another paper has appeared, this one by a doctor in the Philippines who studied the relationship between vitamin D and clinical outcomes for 212 COVID-19 patients. His conclusion: “Vitamin D status is significantly associated with clinical outcomes.” You can read his paper here. (And here’s another paper making the same argument.)
Evidence continues to mount that the lockdown is taking a toll on our mental health. A blog called Mental Health Today ran a harrowing piece yesterday by Joy Hibbins, the CEO of Suicide Crisis, a registered charity which runs Suicide Crisis Centre. You can read that here. And photographer Laura Dodsworth has documented the loneliness that a variety of people are experiencing while being trapped in their homes in a piece for Spiked.
The Independent reports that police in Norfolk are hunting a man who takes daily walks in a Norwich suburb dressed as a “terrifying” plague doctor, complete with pointed beak-like mask. Nice to know there are still some freeborn Englishman out there who have kept their sense of humour during the crisis. No doubt he’ll be clapped in irons if the Norfolk constabulary ever catch up with him.
A reader flagged up an excellent comment piece in Derry Now by Anne McCloskey, a retired GP and a councillor on Derry City and Strabane District Council. She describes the ongoing lockdown on both sides of the Irish border as “non-evidence-based insanity”. I nominate Cllr McCloskey as my Sceptic of the Week.
John Rhys, a Senior Visiting Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, has referred me to a blog post he’s written that rebuts some of the assumptions underlying the sceptical case which is well worth a read. His best argument is that the economy would have taken a massive hit whether the Government imposed a lockdown or not:
Countries have taken approaches that differ in detail, but most have been essentially similar in their approach. Even where fewer formal restrictions are imposed, as in Sweden, actual behaviours and outcomes are not so very different. Tellingly, many in the UK were already modifying their behaviour, and creating their own forms of social distancing before formal lockdown was imposed. With a full-blown explosion of cases and deaths, and hospitals collapsing under the weight of new cases, it is inconceivable that we would not have seen massive changes in personal behaviour, seeking the same outcomes, albeit in uncoordinated and less effective ways, and very likely a degree of panic, with broadly similar damage to economic activity. The difference is that the damage would have been the result of individual consumer choice, not of government imposed restriction. Most of the economic damage therefore became inevitable as soon as the virus spread into much wider national populations. In reality there never was any way of avoiding the shock and its economic consequences, although there were and remain ways of handling the crisis well, badly or very badly.
I get quite a few emails from readers beginning, “My mum works in a care home…” or “My daughter-in-law works in a hospital…” followed by some hair-raising anecdote. But I thought this latest one worth passing on, given the hue and cry about deaths in care homes:
My mum works in a care home in Nottingham. They’ve had three deaths in the past two weeks, which is a normal number for them (they offer end-of-life care). The local GPs have recorded the cause of death as COVID-19 in all three cases, even though the people in question were showing no symptoms of the virus and had previously been tested and found to be negative. The residents of the care home are being frequently tested by Public Health England. No cases of COVID-19 have been detected so far. The care home manager was quite proud that their strict infection control procedures seemed to be working and is now quite upset that COVID-19 deaths are being recorded at the home. In this area of Nottingham at least, it seems that GPs are assuming the cause of death is COVID-19 without any evidence at all. I’m not sure how widespread this practice is, but if it’s even moderately repeated across this UK, this has obvious implications for the accuracy of the national statistics.
Some readers with a background in medicine or statistics may be shocked by just how poor their daily paper’s coverage of the crisis has been. But do they then turn to other parts of the paper and take everything else they’re reading as Gospel? If so, they’re suffering from what the late science fiction writer Micael Crichton called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Here’s Crichton explaining what that is:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Tim Bidie, one of our regulator commenters, asked for suggestions of theme tunes for this website. One reader has sent this YouTube video of ‘The Lunatics Have Take Over the Asylum’ by Fun Boy Three. And if you’re looking for some more light relief, I can recommend the latest video from Comedy Unleashed, the politically incorrect comedy club where I made my stand-up debut in February. (So far, YouTube hasn’t censored it, but it may not be long according to Tucker Carlson.) And if you’re really bored, you can watch my debut here.
A huge thanks to those who donated to pay for the upkeep of this site yesterday. If you feel like donating you can do so by clicking here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in the site, you can email me here. See you tomorrow.
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Okay. Somebody once said that when at least four people that you trust all tell you the same thing, then it is pretty much like a communication from the almighty.
So, Professor Spiegelhalter, President of the Royal Statistical Society, on BBC Radio 4 ‘today’ this morning:
‘Your chance of dying from Covid 19 this year is pretty much the same as your chances of dying this year anyway.’
Professor John Nicholls, Pathology Professor at the University of Hong Kong and expert on coronaviruses:
‘So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.’
‘HK has far more cleanliness (than China) and they are very aware of social hygiene.’ HK (Hong Kong) only 4 deaths from Covid 19
‘Australia and the southern hemisphere will not see any great infections rates because they have lots of sunlight and they are in the middle of summer.’ 06 Feb
Anders Tegnell, Epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, an independent body whose expert recommendations the government follows:
‘It is difficult to talk about the scientific basis of a strategy with these types of disease, because we do not know much about it and… Read more »
Lol – I remember saying to a worried friend in January/February when he told me he was worried – “Don’t worry, it’s basically the common cold that turn’s into pneumonia if you’re very, very unlucky or very, very unhealthy to begin with.”
I thought I my lay have understated it a little in order to be more reassuring but…… 😂
Source code for Covid-Sim, simulation used in report 9, is now public
https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim
I’m a software developer. I’ve just had a quick look at the code and it’s pretty appalling: unmaintainable and hard to understand. Overall, the style and (unusually for programmers) correct spelling in comments suggest it was coded by an intelligent but impatient person with no skill in or feel for software development.
Skip the rest of this comment unless you want technical reasons for my opinion.
* It’s written in C, despite C++ having been available for nearly a generation, and suffers from the consequent need for manual initialisation of everything because of the lack of constructors. The source files have the extension .cpp but I haven’t found any use of C++ features. Memory is allocated and freed manually. All in all this sort of programming reminds me of stuff I saw in about 1995 written by enthusiastic but unreliable coders.
* Bizarrely, all variables are declared, but not initialised, at the start of functions. Since C99, released in 2000, you can initialise variables at the first point of use in both C and C++, and that is generally best practice.
* Some functions are hundreds of lines long. For example, ReadParams in CovidSim.cpp.
* Copious use of global variables.
… Read more »
I know nothing about coding but having read your interesting comments, all I could think of was Dominic Littlewood and Cowboy Builders.
Maybe we can get the same people to write the government app to track us all constantly that we need. Apparently they don’t want to use the ones Google and Apple have already written because of concerns they may incorporate too much privacy.
Thanks! Actually quite an interesting model. There are some docs in the docs directory explaining how it works. It takes account of geography, partitions people into groups, models whether transmission takes place in schools, at work, etc., and can model the effects of various interventions (closing schools etc.).
The place where the rubber hits the road looks to be data/param_files/preUK_R0=2.0.txt. This contains all their assumptions about what proportions of each age group will have mild illness, “ILI” (influenza-like-illness I reckon), “SARI” (severe acute respiratory illness), and “Critical”. Then there are further tables in there for what percentage of people in each of those groups will die.
Not sure exactly what the age bands but it looks like they have around 3 or 4% of sort of middle-aged-ish people getting SARI (plus a few critical) and around 20% of that SARI lot dying, giving an IFR of around at least 0.6% for the middle-aged. This may have been a reasonable assumption back in February or whenever they set these numbers up but looks way too high now.
If you updated the inputs with current knowledge it looks like it might be quite useful, but as it’s so complicated there are all… Read more »
Well I’ve just been told I have no job to go back too once this shitstorm ends, fantastic !!
https://www.israel21c.org/lockdown-only-made-corona-crisis-worse-claim-experts
Sorry to hear that sir.
The first few weeks of this have been relatively painless for most thus far. Far too many folk seem to be quite content getting 80% of their pay to stay at home; they don’t seem to comprehend that that isn’t going to last forever and the ignominy of Universal Credit lies ahead for millions.
You won’t find quite so many sceptics of lockdown when they can’t pay the bills, their kids are hungry and they’re trying to survive on £900 a month with zero help towards their mortgage for the first 39 weeks of their claim.
Completely agree – I am in week five of furlough and my generous employer is giving me 70% of my regular salary, uncapped. Other than the fact that I actually enjoy my work and want to get back to it, this feels like an extended holiday, particularly when the sun shines. As you say, when the reality of redundancy and Universal Credit kicks-in, an awful lot of lockdown enthusiasts are going to quickly lose their zealotry, good!
Most staff are on 100% pay, the employer pays the 100% and claims back 80%, although most could do it for March and possibly April but can’t do it for May because you need the cash to pay and then wait. I think this will only change when people feel it in their wallet. Sorry about your job Oaks, that’s tough.
Yes, very sorry
We need a new slogan:
Go to work.
Protect the economy.
Save lives.
I’ve been using: “Be brave Boris; Lift the Lockdown” I like the assonance. It only works in the UK though.
Surely “Be Brave Boris, Lift Le Lockdown”…
Wouldn’t that be “Man-Up Macron, Lift Le Lockdown”?
I would rather live on my feet than die at home.
I absolutely love the “terrifying” plague doctor; just posted about it. Trying to recruit some in the US. Wonderful idea! Brilliant.
Apparently, our Police want to find him in order to ‘have a word’ and no doubt check his thinking…
I’d love to have a word myself!!
“Giesecke has hit back at Neil Ferguson after his dismissal of Sweden’s approach to managing the crisis in last Saturday’s UnHerd interview. Speaking to the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, Giesecke said: “I know [Ferguson] a little and he is normally quite arrogant, but I have never seen him as tense and nervous as during that interview.” He dismissed Ferguson’s prediction that deaths in Sweden will start to rise again […]”
_____________
Summary — Doctor Ferguson (a.k.a. “Doctor Frankensson”) clings to the apocalypse cult he helped create.
Ferguson has predicted that the flu-virus epidemic curve in Sweden violates all known rules of the progress of epidemics, reverses itself, and starts to soar again…real soon.
Trust him! The apocalypse is always around the corner!
But in reality, it’s wrapping up in Sweden, like this (from “Graphing the actual Coronavirus epidemic in Sweden vs. the predictions“):
Have you considered that both Giesecke and Ferguson have agendas to prove?
I’m all for finding the silver bullet that serology surveys are underestimating the spread and the projections as a result are off… but, please let’s not wildly misunderstand data and misquote it…
This plot in your post…?w=640
Is the data equivalent of a “misquote”.
Sweden has seen a 65% drop in commuter traffic and got it’s r0 to about 1.3. Just go and look at some moovit data for Stockholm. Sweden are plainly in a voluntary lockdown. They are in a suppression not just a mitigation strategy, like us, just not as much we are at 80%.
1) This drop in r0 from 2.5 has lowered their infection ceiling from ~60% to ~20%.
2) Fergusons projections in this plot were for “do nothing” and a “mitigation” strategy, which did not include anywhere near this level of commuter fall off.
So using either line to bash Ferguson relative to Sweden’s current course is just a “misquote”.
More so, the Swedish ONS equivalent that publishes the data in your plot continually revises recent days, so the tail off in deaths (and to a lesser degree ICU) recently is NOT a… Read more »
Hi Simon, thanks for this – I keep trying to point this out too – in fairness the distance between the two lines in your second plot increases (as you’d imagine) which means the week before last will I suspect see very little extra added this time next week – I’d be surprised if we don’t see a slight decline over time. It’s certainly not going up.
I have a number of friends in Sweden; they report that life goes on much as normal. Yes they are distancing, working from home, traveling less. But they are not under house arrest, forbidden from seeing friends and families, forbidden from meeting at pubs and restaurants, and the disease seems under control.
It seems sustainable, in other words, which our lockdown clearly isn’t.
For sure, anything before about the 17th is probably unlikely to change, but it does mean the plot always paints a “past the peak” message that is not real.
I don’t particularly feel under house arrest in the UK, although I miss the pub, and don’t understand why I can’t play singles tennis in the park. On the plus side, I go to the park much more than I used to with the kids, and there are always loads of people milling around too close together. Never actually seen the police telling people off.
On all accounts the police walk around in Stockholm telling people to stay apart too and tick cafe/restuarants off if they don’t have their tables far enough apart.
Same authoritarianism… slightly different message.
As sceptics, all we risk doing by trying to perpetuate the belief that there is some massive gulf between conditions in the two countries, is make ourselves look like loons.
The underlying boats are different.
If we look at new case growth in each country…
… we saw much faster new case growth ahead of our peak, probably due to being 11x denser.
If you look at the commuter traffic (which correlates very… Read more »
Paste error… second link meant to be…
https://portal.icuregswe.org/siri/report/corona.covid-dagligen
… blooming wordpress 2 seconds to edit policy…
Where do you get the data about ICUs in Sweden being pushed to the max? The ICU intake is dropping off slightly as of last week. How many beds do they have?
I’m skeptical of case growth as a useful metric – it’s partly driven by testing growth.
From their own health service portal…
https://portal.icuregswe.org/siri/report/corona.covid-dagligen
… ICU residency has gone up and not ever really come down.
Yes, case growth sceptisim is healthy, but not relative to themselves if there is little evidence of a dramatic change in testing approach or levels. Which for Sweden there is not.
For the UK this week an adjustment will need to be made. I actually wish all countries had published hospital identified cases separately. Would have allowed for much more meaningful case comparison…
Sweden’s new coronavirus-positive ICU intakes peaked in the two-week period between about March 28 and April 13 (41/day average; range: 32 to 49). For the next ten-day period (April 14 to 23), which is now complete data, it was down to 35. For the ten-day period after that (April 24 to May 3), I would expect as low as 25/day to be the final number for the period when data is final,say with the Friday May 8 update.
March 8 to March 17: 4 ICU intakes/day (10-day window)
March 18 to March 27: 27 ICU intakes/day (10-day window)
March 28 to April 13: 41 ICU intakes/day (peak; 17 days)
April 14 to April 23: 35 ICU intakes/day (10-day window)
April 24 to May 3: [25-30 ICU intakes/day?] (10-day window)
May 4 to May to May 13: [10-20 ICU intakes/day?]
Many of the ICU intakes from March and April recovered and were released. There has always had plenty of spare capacity; at one point they reported they were at 70% capacity. There was no “swamped hospitals effect.”
The vindication of Sweden is really at hand, because as of early May the data really is in. If not technically complete, it is… Read more »
I’m no great fan of Ferguson, I think his paper could have been much clearer. BUT, I care about accurate representation of the facts. He never said there would be a “horror scenario” under a suppression strategy, again you misquote, for what purpose?
Plus, why are you so fixated on this being a competition?
Each country has its own unique set of circumstances. Sweden is different enough from the UK to make what you’re trying to do a pointless exercise.
The plot above clearly show the UK had a faster rate of new case growth (higher transmission dynamics probably due to density) ahead of this, and clearly was going to need stronger measures to suppress r0 enough to lower the herd immunity ceiling of this first wave.
One size does not fit all… I’m sure they were right for them.
I also made not comment about Sweden having failed to provide the best care for everyone, I only said by looking at their own website…
https://portal.icuregswe.org/siri/report/corona.covid-dagligen
… ICU residency is at or around it’s highest level, peak around 558 on the 26th of April, down to 528 yesterday, but given the slight dip in new cases 2 weeks ago as… Read more »
I get your point about the differences being relatively minor. I still suggest that, outside of Stockholm maybe, life continues much as normal. Even in Stockholm, they have freedoms that we do not have.
“Sweden has seen a 65% drop in commuter traffic and got it’s r0 to about 1.3.”
You’re doing that circular argument thing. You have a pre-conceived idea that a lockdown reduces ‘R’. So if you see a low ‘R’ you say “See, it’s proof they’re in lockdown.”
It does not follow.
Well, that certainly is not true.
I may not be causal, but from my analysis it is correlated.
So “It COULD follow”, but there is certainly no evidence to say “it does not follow”.
Unless you’ve come to some actual statistical conclusion they are not correlated?
I totally agree correlation is not causation. There is never statistical proof of any cause, just a most likely cause. I apologise for not being more explicit about this.
BUT, I can’t find any other evidence of other data that is as correlated. Specifically, if you lag forward the commuter journey reductions by the average time between infection and test (2 weeks) they are very correlated to the decay in new cases in all places that I’ve assessed that had infections and have seen new cases tail off.
No one as yet has produced any concrete evidence to suggest that serology surveys are not picking up all those that have been infected. If real evidence, not rhetoric or anecdote, comes to light that people can be infected, resist the infection, not develop antibodies, and crucially then be in a situation not to be infected again, then I’m all ears.
… and I’ve looked a… Read more »
There are many mechanisms by which “R0” goes down, but the relevant point is that its decline is a natural process. Any flu strain has several curves that all tend to follow approximate bell curves. The transmission phase is one of these. It is not surprising at all that Sweden’s “R0” declined, as did Germany’s and Switzerland’s at about the same time, all before the Lockdowns of course.
No, the relevant point is the difference in initial r0. This will define the infection ceiling for the virus.
That they will both see a decay in the r0 to that ceiling is interesting, but ultimately confusing and irrelevant.
Two viruses with the same CFR, but different initial r0s will NOT see the same deaths. The one with the higher r0, will need more infections and deaths to burn out.
Take the 2018 seasonal flu, it had a CFR of 0.5, it infected about 5m in Germany out of population of 80m (I read a study on it a few weeks ago I can’t find right now), so burned out with NO changes to natural transmission dynamics (no lockdown) at 6% of the population. Which makes it’s INITIAL natural r0 like 1.1, so really low.
Even if Covid only has the same CFR of 0.5%, it is measured to have had a natural transmission dynamic of about 3, which means left to it’s own devices it would not have burned out till ~65% infection.
10x more deaths.
That the whole world has suppressed Covid’s natural transmission dynamics is the only reason we have set a temporary infection ceiling.
The question… Read more »
The Swedish death data is updated regularly. I have followed it for a while. There has not yet been a case where an update significantly changes the way the curve looks earlier than about Reporting Date Minus 4 Days.
The graph of the Sweden Observed Reality vs. Ferguson Predictions also does NOT include the most recent days (which are partial data) and solves the problem you mention.
See May 1 updated graphs here.
All indications are that Stockholm is at herd immunity, effectively, as of this writing, and may have been for quite a while already (the studies are already in on Stockholm). The rest of Sweden will soon follow. The epidemic is over. Deaths, the most lagging indicator there is, are in clear and sustained decline. There was no Corona Apocalypse; there was no need for shutdowns at all.
I believe you also misunderstand the mechanism by which “R0” declines. This is not some mystical force that requires extreme measures. Every R0 curve eventually declines on its own without any actions by (or knowledge of) the public. This also happened in Germany, where the decline predated the response measures.
Apart from the evidence staring you straight in the face above? e.g. on the 1st of May they revised the 18th of Aril up by 18% from 74 to 87 deaths?
Again, you’re comparing apples with oranges. Neither of Fergusons lines are for a suppression strategy, and Sweden is in one, so it is simply FAKE NEWS. If you remove the questionable tail from you plot it doesn’t look that wrong, but HE doesn’t think either of the lines will happen in a suppression strategy in Sweden either so you MISQUOTING him.
Further, you plainly don’t understand r0 or herd immunity dynamics.
Sure an r0 decays to 0 on the path to herd immunity for a prevelant transmission dynamic, big wow, it does not change the fact that what matters in the prevalent transmission dynamic.
Transmission dynamics are defined by behaviour. In normal times they led to an INITIAL replication rate of r0 =3. Changes in behaviour patterns have inhibited transmissions dynamics (e.g. people see each other less and pass it on less) which has led to suppressing the replication to r0 = 1.25.
If the virus finds is easier to spread, it takes more immune people getting in the… Read more »
I would love to see a curve that depicts COVID cases back-dated to January or December. If the virus was actually circulating then, and if there seriously have already been millions of cases that went unnoticed (mild symptoms, deaths classed as general pneumonia due to flu season), wouldn’t the peak be much higher and much earlier than has been described? And we might have started counting when the disease was on its downward slope? And it just took enough tests for diagnoses to rise up to meet the curve, at which point the graph would have to slope downward because that’s where the curve was anyway.
Has anyone with the statistical chops tried this out?
Not claiming anything close to full statistical chops but have looked at numbers, chewed pencils and played with SIR models. It’s an interesting hypothesis, but it needs a very low IFR to be true.
I can make it work with an IFR of 0.001%. In that situation we have 36% immune by 100 dead, and the peak of infections is at about 150 dead. So it’s possible in that scenario that by the time you notice it it’s already peaked.
But the IFR can’t be as low 0.001%. The debate now is about where it is between about 0.1% (“it’s just the flu stop worrying”) and 0.7% (“we’re doomed lock everyone up!”).
Under 0.1% IFR, we have only 1.1% immune at 100 dead. Under 0.7% it’s 0.2%. Not much observable difference. The differences in timings between these two scenarios are also only a few days.
(I would argue that the strategy for 0.1% and 0.7% are actually the same and lockdown is counterproductive in either case, which is why IFR is no longer the point really. It was perhaps more relevant when the alarmists were claiming it was 3% or so).
There is a lot of talk about IFR but there probably is no all-purpose IFR. Each population in each region (e.g., pollution levels) will react differently, and probably at different times (seasons, weather).
There was a study this week that found 0.08%. Other evidence points to <0.05% still being plausible for many populations.
I don't think anyone has found anything anywhere in the past month saying anything much above 0.2%. Who is still clinging to something as high as 0.7%?
Italian media reporting antibodies detected in patients from December.
https://milano.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/20_aprile_30/coronavirus-milano-donna-febbre-22-dicembre-polmonite-atipica-primo-caso-ora-hanno-trovato-anticorpi-covid-373f1624-8a56-11ea-94d3-9879860c12b6.shtml
Would not be surprised for this to be true. It’d be very strange for a wave of infections to randomly start out of nowhere, kill within 7 days and then vanish. It’s also implausible for a new pathogen to be discovered right when it emerges. If you take a look at influenza epidemics, they tend to infect the younger, healthier population in the beginning of winter to then cause havoc among the old and vulnerable at the end of it.
I for one was incredibly sick in late December as well. I can’t even remember having been more sick in my life. The same applies to a lot of people around me. Half of my colleagues were off sick in early January – a lot of them for a whole month. I’m sure Covid-19 has been in the UK since at least mid-December of 2019.
I was in agreement with the lockdown to flatten the sombrero and take pressure off the NHS. Now I’m told that we have to continue with house arrest to prevent the disastrous second wave? I can’t find anything to tell me why a second wave would be such a disaster. Can anyone tell me why? What will the third wave be like? No doubt we’ll need another lockdown for that too.
There’s an interesting article somewhere that there won’t be a second wave. I’ll try and find the link. Having said that, diseases could increase since forced lock down has compromised our immune systems so in a way the second wave could actually be a self fulfilling prophecy! Just like self isolating is self defeating!
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/politics/scottish-politics/2175148/coronavirus-second-wave-of-deadly-virus-described-as-very-unlikely-by-expert/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
This article credible evidence based says nobody knows
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-epidemic-waves/
This twitter site is very interesting every day it is updated and the current pandemic curve is very similar to the SARS outbreak 2003 which was extinguished during the summer as corona viruses are remarkably seasonal usually disppears summertime.However the author says a new wave in southern hemisphere during autumn could be possible
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1255647028442542086/photo/1
I can trust that there is the danger of a second wave – Fauci is saying so too in the US. However, I agree with your comment. The government is doing a very poor job in explaining what next and why.
Trust it based on what scientific evidence?
Firstly, the second wave panic, pushed by Prof Neil Ferguson is based on speculation. It’s not based on science. And this is very important, because, remember, the politicians who are making all the decisions about what our lives look like are claiming to be “led by the science”.
Pandemic models are not scientific. And what I mean by that is the established scientific procedures of ***test the hypothesis, demonstrate the hypothesis, falsify the hypothesis*** cannot be applied to a model.
A model is just a fancy way of saying “a guess”. So, at a guess, 100,000 people could die if the lockdown is lifted. But that’s all it is. A guess. It can’t be tested, proven or falsified. And the actual scientific data directly contradicts that guess.
What the scientific data shows is that the virus has a *low mortality rate*. This fact directly contradicts Prof Neil Ferguson’s guess, that it would have a high mortality rate.
The scientific data shows that 97% of people with the virus will only have mild symptoms and won’t need to go to hospital.
The scientific data shows that 3% of people who have tested positive will… Read more »
I did use “trust” to be specific. It’s not a belief. I have to trust Fauci and others who work in the field all of the time. I too posted that modelling is not really science – it’s simulation. It’s a tool for the scientists and medics to estimate responses – not predict the future. So we agree on a lot here.
Some of your facts might be correct but not the full story. Who it hits and how it spreads are key. How many people present in hospital at one time is very important so a dynamic model is required not simple maths.
Back to a second wave, there is no “evidence” for it because it’s new. We haven’t got that far. The virus experts says it is almost certain for a corona virus like this. I’ll go with them. The issue is really what that second peak looks like and what measures we need to take. I can agree with you than a full lock down is not the answer. I am not going to dismiss the probable reality. It is the response to the situation that is the problem for me.
Yes excellent stuff!
IMO there needs to be far more differentiation between those who are unlikely to be affected and those who are likely to die.
Age seems to be a big factor, diseases relating to hyperglcemia and hyperinsulinemia and anything else which destroys the immune system.
Then on the other hand are all the people who are going to die because of the lockdown because they can’t get cancer or other non-covid diseases diagnosed or treated or who are rightly paranoid about going to hospitals/GP surgeries.
Seeing as the first wave peaked before the lockdown (by the government’s own admission) lifting it completely is not going to result in a second wave.
There will be a few more deaths no doubt whatever we do but we aren’t going to “smash into a mountain even higher than the first” or whatever bobbins it was Johnson was spouting.
It’s just fiction so they can say later “look how great we are, there was no second wave”. Same rhetoric as “never mind the 20k or 40k deaths or so, we got it down from 500k!”. Anywhere that does have a second wave (because they were stupid enough to have measures that were effective and in time) will be compared unfavourably to the UK as having managed the epidemic worse. Which is ironically sort of true with hindsight because at this point it’s hard to see any endgame other than the virus becoming globally endemic.
Look up the interviews of Prof Knut Wittowski (produced by Journeyman Pictures, you’ll find them on youtube), he explains it. This is a bog standard respiratory virus, and all lockdown has done is dragged out it’s natural cycle, if we’d left it alone, washed our hands, shielded the elderly it’d have been and gone by now.
It is also worth pointing out that no epidemiologist or scientist worth their salt would ever claim that their non peer reviewed modelling inputs, and their completely unevidenced by any science whatsoever ‘lockdown’ caused a drop in numbers from 500k to 25k – as epidemiologists whose life’s work is infectious respiratory viruses are saying – all those numbers tell us is the hypothesis is incorrect.
However, from Boris’ speech yesterday, about saving half a million lives, it sounds like he and Ferguson (and the others who flanked him with a straight face as he said it) have made a pact to cover each others’ arses.
“However, from Boris’ speech yesterday, about saving half a million lives, it sounds like he and Ferguson (and the others who flanked him with a straight face as he said it) have made a pact to cover each others’ arses.”
Indeed. Why wouldn’t they? History is already being re-written.
Yup, all that tells me is Boris is shooting for popular and the scientists (who are human and ambitious, worried about their status, funding, professional future, rivals, and are as blinded by confirmation bias as everyone else) appear to be allowing him to do it. That he did it in the same breath as ‘the peak has passed’ – which can only mean peak infections were well before that, before we locked down, is quite mind boggling.
The Spectator has an article by Stephen Daisley, defending both the lock down and lock down sceptics. It contains the line:
“I am in the ‘at high risk’ group three times over and would quite like to go on living, if you don’t mind.”
In the BTL comments, Ken replies:
“If you believe yourself to be at risk, there is nothing to stop your on-going self-isolation. Meanwhile, the rest of us want to get on with life. My freedom doesn’t end where your fear begins.”
An excellent, concise argument against this madness.
The implied selfishness of people wanting to get on with their lives is stunning when it comes from someone who is selfish enough to expect everyone else not to.
To echo the complete fraudulent lies about number of covid deaths. A member of my family works in a GP practice and has confirmed that they have been told by the coroner to record all care home deaths as covid. 94 years old ? Terminal cancer?.. = covid death. When will people wake up, take the red pill, and realise that this pointless lockdown has done nothing but damage the economy, people’s lives and livelihoods and should never have happened in the first place. It was too late, it’s already happened. This is a media pandemic, nothing more… And the lockdown freaks are lapping it up. It astounds me just how many sheep there are out there. Just what on earth is the endgame here? That’s what worries me more than some stupid virus, which for the overwhelmingly vast majority of the population is so mild you would not notice it ( I have already had it).
Whatever happened to first do no harm? Why are doctors not speaking up about this? I don’t understand why they are not writing open letters to the papers?
Amidst the Piffle Paffle Wiffle Waffle at today’s ‘Press Conference’ was one amazing statement, which should be a Game Changer for this mess.
One of the profs, Whitty I think, said ‘As we move into the next phase, we will be using All Cause Mortality as the key measurement to see progress. It is the International standard’. (I may have slightly misquoted, but that was the gist.)
I haven’t seen the MSM pick up on this yet (not surprising), however if this is the plan then it should not take long at all before the whole ‘megadeath’ insanity begins to melt away in front of our eyes.
Leaving just the bombed out economy to be taken care of….
Best hopes
Bill
Looking at the data of all deaths in Germany so far this year, one might doubt coronavirus/Covid-19 even exists.
Graph (source: Wodarg.com)
I checked the official data and sources referenced in the image and it matches the graph.
Total deaths in Germany: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Sterbefaelle-Lebenserwartung/Tabellen/sonderauswertung-sterbefaelle-pdf.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
Covid19 cases: https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/covid-19-coronavirus-data
They must be attempting to accurately quantify and record ACTUAL Covid deaths over there, that’s literally the only reason I can think of as to why they’ve done so well on death rate. Because their figures are actually closer to being correct ;o)
No, the Germans do what everyone else is doing: any person who is test-positive is counted as a Covid death, regardless of the cause: https://translate.google.com.au/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fswprs.org%2Frki-relativiert-corona-todesfaelle%2F
Amazing. Should be on the front page of The Sun tomorrow. Somehow this type of material needs to get out there so that people get what is going on here.
Has there been any antibody studies like the Stanford University one, here in the UK ? Vallance said Public Health England did one but haven’t seen anything about it, pretty sure if the result is like results from around the world that questions the Imperial College model doesn’t it, or am I completely wrong ?
I’ve been looking, but haven’t been able to find any. The excuse seems to be that the antibody testing isn’t reliable. But my understanding is that the antibody tests they’re talking about are the portable kind that are being used in the drive through centres, or people could administer themselves. Like the (probably dodgy) swab tests currently being used to identify positive cases. Surely they can undertake proper serological tests using drawn blood administered by professionals?
Something tells me they might not want to get into that as it will take the IFR right down as it has done elsewhere in the world.
There were some done in Scotland. They found 6 positive matches on the 22nd march I believe, out of 500 in a random selection of blood donors. This is 1.2 percent. Extrapolated out gives you 50000 cases at that point. There were only a couple of hundred known about.
Wow. I’m torn on using blood donors. You’re told not to give blood if you’re not feeling 100% or have been ill recently – so you’re likely to get a disproportionately ‘healthy’ sample.
On the other hand, this means that all the sampled people *thought they were 100% healthy, and so had probably been relatively asymptomatic which IS probably representative of most cases.
Yeah, I’m not sure what the false positive rate was though, I do know that it was done by Oxford, and that it was a lab based test not a quick test.
This is the group of academics who did the test: https://twitter.com/EEID_oxford
There is a Dutch antibody study out there somewhere that also used blood bank sampling, and from memory came up with a very similar percentage. That study has been criticised on the same grounds, that blood doners will be a screened/self selecting group…
Let us stop hearing from incompetent fools like Johnson and Merkel about the second wave. They have no idea what they are talking about. Let us read from someone who knows about it from the The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-epidemic-waves/
“We do not know for certain whether COVID will recur in phases, or sporadic outbreaks or disappear altogether.
Conclusion
Making absolute statements of certainty about ‘ second waves’ is unwise, given the current substantial uncertainties and novelty of the evidence. As we cannot see the future and our understanding of this new agent is in its infancy we think preparedness planning should be inspired by robust surveillance, the flexibility of response and rigid separation of suspected or confirmed cases. These measures should stand for all serious outbreaks of respiratory illness. Better evidence and better understanding are needed. Covid 19 will focus our minds.”
The French doctor Didier Raoult has commented on the “second wave”:
“The second wave story is a fantasy that was invented from the Spanish flu, which started in the summer and has nothing to do with it.
“Usually an epidemic happens in one curve. I hate to make predictions, but this way of constructing it is fairly common for epidemics.
“In the past, epidemics disappeared long before we had the means to contain them. They disappeared anyway.
“Humanity didn’t die from an epidemic, that’s the way it is. Epidemics start, accelerate, peak, disappear, and we don’t know why.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1275573/france-coronavirus-latest-news-second-wave-covid19-lockdown-updates
It’s a bit late in the day to post this but The Times ran a sensationalist non-story today headed, ‘Scientists say virus as deadly as Ebola For hospital victims’. The quoted study is a perfectly reasonable collation of some of the hospital data so far and, as far as I could see from a skim through it, did not make this claim. The headline came from just one of the group of scientists involved in the study. The comparing of Covid to Ebola in this way i.e. only looking at those who are seriously ill with the virus is a bit like saying, ‘if you are involved in a car accident on a motorway then motoring may be deadly’. It adds zero to the debate and succeeds only in increasing the levels of fear and irrationality.
The poor level of journalism continued through the article with some unfounded, unstudied assertions hidden within supposed scientific reporting.
I subscribe to a number of different papers and have been disappointed by them all. If anything the analysis of the real data is becoming thinner on the ground and there is seemingly less critique of the government’s strategy the longer this goes on. So… Read more »
I cancelled my Times subscription this morning because of that article, admittedly been teetering on the brink for weeks, but that was the last straw.
Here in Spain, they’ve just announced the ‘rules’ for finally allowing adults out for exercise after 7 weeks of lock down.
We’re allowed out for one hour a day between the times 06:00 to 11:00 OR 20:00 to 23:00.
So…no vitamin D and let’s concentrate populations by time limits.
Ever get the feeling you’re being governed by incompetent fools?
Fortunately here in the UK we never feel like that.
The points raised by John Rhys are interesting. He talks about the hard choices ahead and cost-benefit calculus that we need to make. He observes that the UK has started to shut down of its own accord before the official lock-down came in. Businesses, people and sports teams had started shutting down. I’ll add that this is before anyone had heard the name Professor Neil Ferguson.
John’s point is that people behaviour is driving this. He thinks that the actual behaviour in Sweden probably isn’t that different to here. I don’t know. I do believe that most people run their lives according to a few principles and not the law. How many of us know what the Covid 2020 law says? I know the slogan and the radio ads. I don’t know what the penalty is for taking two walks in a day! My point is that there have been some obviously stupid decisions by a very few police. The official “degree of lock down” probably doesn’t matter that much. It’s what people actually decide to do that matters.
People’s behaviour is massively influenced by messaging, this is why companies spend billions on advertising and marketing. It was ‘sold’ quite well.
What people actually do matters for the epidemic. But in general it does matter a lot what the official degree of lockdown is and what the law says. Bad policing starts with bad laws. In a well-governed country most things that break the law are also wrong, police just enforce the law and the public respect it.
What we have now is some pretty daft laws, confused police, stories of people reporting their neighbours for technical infringements, and lots of perfectly harmless things suddenly rendered illegal. All a lot of unpleasantness we can do without. Thank goodness they put a “sunset clause” on them, and that we aren’t as bad as Spain, France or Italy.
I think there is some truth that Swedes have voluntarily modified behaviour but, as has already been pointed out, voluntary is a key word. Importantly, the data shows that the Swedish economy has not contracted anywhere near as much as those countries in lockdown. So it does seem to have been a voluntary and rational ‘slowdown’ in response to the unknown and not the equivalent of the draconian lockdown we have here.
I think you have a point, I’m all for self-moderation. If you want to stay at home, fine. If I want to go to the pub next door to my house, fine.
Sure, please do keep me out of the local nursing home. I have no plans to visit it. My Nan died, a knock-on of the Stafford hospital scandal (she had Parkinson’s) and I live alone.
To generalise, because there are obviously exceptions, people are inherently ‘good’. They are doing as they are told in the belief it is the right thing. The message has been delivered in such a manner that it is now completely disproportionate to the ‘threat’ society faces. This is a panic generated by the World’s media.
The pub is shut. It was shut by law. This is affecting my behaviour.
Yes. That part of the lock-down is clear. Businesses have been told. The law or is it rules for individuals is less clear so we have the sunbathing confusion, the driving “too far” to exercise confusion. The popular focus on cov-idiots. People who are doing things that seem fine but get lambasted. If we are to all live together longer term with the virus then we need to drop these aspects and get a grip of risk.
I think pubs are risky right now (a packed boozer) but having a jogger run past you is not. I think it’s a numbers game in terms of the amount of interaction I have and more importantly the interactions someone with Covid has to pass it on. Little of this comes across at present.
“I think pubs are risky right now”.
Short of a vaccine, what will change your mind? The scientific establishment claims that we are only at 2% immune or some such, and that we have to keep ‘R’ below 1. On that basis, there is no possibility of opening the pubs before a vaccine is developed in, say, two years’ time.
If antibody testing puts the country at, say, 15% immune, it will still not be possible to open the pubs because it would need ‘R’ to rise above 1 to provide the final push to herd immunity based on the ‘R0’ that the scientists have made up…, er, ascertained.
Bye bye pubs.
Hi,
I’ve just finished watching the PM’s address and I’m fuming! I just can’t take much more of the patronising propaganda and fear mongering. He even mentioned that 500000 could have died. How can we put up with this blatant lying? What can we do? Does anyone know why that petition to Parliament is taking so long?
Me too – although I only lasted 10 minutes. Had to give up after the Five Key Tests.
I haven’t watched it for a couple of weeks. A complete waste of time and energy.
I knew that they would claim a win whatever happened. 500k avoided though, that’s some spin!
My neighbour said that this whole “crisis” is going to be the biggest gaslighting operation in modern history or something along those lines. It made sense though, we were manipulated into this lockdown and we’ll be manipulated out of it. And the worst part is most people will believe that they really did brush death, that the lockdown was totally necessary and that 500k could indeed have died.
What petition is that? Where do I sign? Has anyone started one on the Gov Petition site?
There was a link to a petition in one of the first of these daily round-ups. It was removed for some kind of verification process. Toby mentioned keeping an eye on it.
I suspect the petition is taking so long because they are deliberately not approving it. The only way to test this would be to set up two new petitions with opposing agendas. One is anti lockdown, the other is for something completely unrelated. I wonder which one would be approved first?
Someone questioned them on the apparent success of that medicine – I can’t remember the name – and Whitty said something along the lines of: ‘We can’t make any rash decisions without the data.’
I nearly fell off my chair.
Today’s shoe hit the TV, and may have caused actual damage.
My jaw dropped when he used the 500,000 figure, I was quite taken aback. I just don’t know what we can do to stop this madness. I wrote to my MP this week and the reply, which I am grateful for, was pretty much what we hear on the news, protect ‘our’ NHS, etc. Will somebody please tell the government that the stupid five steps have all been met already for goodness sake!
I’m starting to find it funny now, probably my own immune response to extreme anger. The little posterings about how they know it’s causing collateral deaths, without actually admitting the scale of the problem, are kinda hilarious. It’s like watching a twitter feed of someone trying to address the counter argument whilst remaining bloody-mindedly committed to the cause.
“” We know loads of people are killing themselves, but nobody’s filming that #sorry “”
Yes, @Farinances I think you’ve got to be a little Zen about it and take comfort from the fact that you are not alone in thinking their policy making leaves a little to be desired. Chris Whitty is the only one who seems attuned to the wider impact of lockdown and the deaths, misery and suffering it causes but that recognition doesn’t seem to have any effect on the others.
I also find it astonishing that the media cannot nail them. All they do is bang on about operational deficiencies, grandstand and highlight specific regional angles. The token questions from the public are, naturally enough, narrowly focussed. There is only one question that is relevant: how can you Prime Minister justify a policy of lockdown when all the evidence suggests that it causes more death, suffering and hardship than it prevents? Like Paxo interviewing Michael Howard – keep asking the same question over and over.
Perhaps someone could design an, “End the Lockdown Now!” poster that could be downloaded, printed and taped to front room windows.
Our houses would be vandalised
I’m up for it. Although, I don’t want my front door egged.
We need T-shirts…
The police would absolutely love us
In the land of the free.Scroll up and watch a minute video Mother arrested in Meridian, Idaho for letting kids play in park
https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1252760509113344002
I’ve resigned myself to the situation not changing anytime soon here in the UK. We are led by cowards.
In an effort to understand how this mess happened, before it came to the UK, I’ve been reading up on China, The Chinese Communist Party and the WHO.
I’ve read a number of books on China/CCP (and have still more to read). So far, the best have been:
– Stealth War by Robert Spalding, and
– Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy by Bill Gertz
I’ve not read anything on the WHO yet but found the following informative:
– IEA. Covid-19: WHO is to blame? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOXgNi8qM4s
– TrustWHO, a documentary available on Amazon prime and other channels (it was free on Vimeo before being taken down)
Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge channel has had some interesting interviews.
– Trump, China, and the Geopolitics of a Crisis https://tinyurl.com/y9ss7ou2
– Victor Davis Hanson on Corona, California, and the Classical World https://tinyurl.com/yb8vuct7
Another source that nobody has mentioned is War Room Pandemic. This is run by Steve Bannon. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea and he’s been driving the lockdown narrative. However, they’ve had some very interesting guests on… Read more »
There is a documentary about the WHO on a french channel called ARTE, you might be able to find english versions on youtube.
– WHO: profiteers of fear
Thank you. Strangely, I can’t seem to find that documentary. Maybe deleted like the other one by The Ministry of Truth? Good channel though and luckily I speak French.
I’ve started listening to the Bannon podcast. He is really having a go at China on a number of fronts and scathing on the American elites. Over here, I listen to the Delingpod and London Calling which seem to try to be more entertaining than informative, but they often lead to some other sources that are worth checking out.
Sounds like my podcast feed! 🙂
”NHS England is considering removing black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff from frontline roles, given that they appear to be dying in disproportionately high numbers compared to non-BAME NHS workers.”
Given the role that gender, obesity and age play as risk factors, as well as ethnicity, does this mean that we can expect to see only young, slim, white women in front line roles?
We’ve passed the peak of the virus, but reached peak woke.
It’s clear to me Covid is a tool, and I’ve known that since February.
I don’t need any other graphs or experts’ words to see it’s a global scam.
It has been employed all over the world. That means there is something big going on, nations do not exist anymore, nor politicians or parties. It’s like it has fallen from the sky, in the sense it is a reality to which all humans are submitted. The gods’ will? Very likely…
No end to this madness anytime soon by the looks of it, even suggesting it may run to June. It seems the CMO Whitty has fear running through Downing Street.
I’m done !!!!!
http://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-boris-johnsons-spokesman-suggests-no-relaxation-of-lockdown-on-the-horizon-11981188
I think/hope it’s all just Johnson’s usual ploy of trying to have his cake and eat it and tell everyone what they want to hear. “Phase 2 lockdown” should mean basically no lockdown. I support ongoing recommendations (not regulations) to wash hands and go to bed if you’re ill etc. although no doubt it will all be much sillier than that.
Here’s a good song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZsfy8AD_S0
I would have thought that governments would be looking for ways to END the lockdown, not searching for excuses to prolong it. The lockdown was sold to us in the U.S. as a painful but necessary 15 days, which would flatten the curve. (Whatever that means and however it would work.) It was meant to be temporary – an unpleasant medical treatment but one that had clear benefits. It was urgent that the step be taken at that very moment, lest we be overwhelmed with COVID, our healthcare system collapse (whatever that means) and society itself fall apart.
My brother, a law professor, actually said that society would fall apart if we didn’t shut everything down. I was like, it sure looks to me like it’s fallen apart already – no schools, no jobs, no freedom – but you know, that’s because I don’t care if people die.
All those initial goals have long been forgotten. Remember ventilators? I’ve heard nothing about them for weeks. It’s now lockdown for its own sake. American governors are instituting increasingly draconian measures even as the epidemic dwindles. There is less scientific basis than ever – in fact, the rhetoric has returned to where… Read more »
Staggering figures from the US today – 30 million now claiming benefits with another 12 million jobs lost in last month or two but people unable to claim. Over 20% unemployment likely in next few months. Will UK fare any better?
30.3 million official jobless plus 12 unofficial plus 56.6 million K12 students plus 20 million higher ed students: that’s one third of the U.S. that’s lost its daily employment. With no substitutes offered and no stated end in sight.
And the Spectator actually has an article about “saving the lockdown”. People have seriously lost the thread.
This is interesting: https://ukaji.org/2020/04/28/the-emperor-has-no-clothes-a-sober-analysis-of-the-government-response-to-covid-19/
Here in France, the government is leaving it up to parents to decide whether they will send their children back to school on 11th May when we start to come out of lockdown. Instead of reassuring parents that school children have virtually nothing to fear from covid-19 and the vast majority of deaths are among the elderly and unwell, followed by the middle-aged and overweight, the government puts out alarming messages between radio or television programmes and on the health service website, about how the virus can live on surfaces for three days, how one infected person can infect three more, each of whom can infect three more, and so on, to give the impression of an invisible killer striking at random. Parents are understandably terrified. As you say, you would think a government would be trying to reassure people so that everyone can go back to a normal life, but not a bit of it.
Has the government there planted the story of Kawasaki disease into the narrative, with photos in the papers (with saturation turned up to maximum) just to scare parents even more?
Exactly what I thought. I suspect Boris wants to be famous for having the world’s longest lockdown and they will stick at nothing to achieve this. Those pussies in France and Germany gave up far too soon, and don’t even think about Sweden or Belarus. IMO the consequences will kill far more than the virus ever did.
By mistake uploaded on yesterday’s blog so reupload today
I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the most politically incorrect country in the world, Belarus, and see how they are dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. All information is from Wikipedia and the actual epidemic curve is extremely informative and much better than Worldometer.
The first case was an Iranian student 28th Feb but very quickly there were sporadic and increasing cases in clusters indicating local transmission but the real explosion was in the beginning of April. Different from neighbouring Russia which had a more “Western European” style epidemic with tourist coming back infected and then the explosion of cases.
Belarus did ambitious testing and closed borders, quarantine of cases, contact tracing and isolation of cases. The only social distancing was prolonging the ordinary spring break in schools with two weeks but no other social distancing at all. A WHO delegation in April noted, in a very diplomatic report, the very ambitious old-fashioned approach with testing, contact tracing early on and isolation but recommended social distancing measures school university closing, stopping mass gatherings etc.
Not something for Europe’s last dictator, Lukashenko.
Quotations” “You just have to work,… Read more »
So the last dictator *isn’t Orban? 😉
I think it will be very interesting to follow the number of deaths per capita in Belarus indeed. Can you imagine the thing if it will be exactly the same or very close to other numbers in Europe? What if the Oxford study a few weeks back is true and most of the people were contracted the virus even before the lockdown and the lockdown might not change anything just damaged the economy. What do you think is there anybody out there who is brave enough to write it down?
I doubt it will be Neil Ferguson
Indeed… Belarus are probably laughing at everyone else. But as ever with statistics, there will be some fake news about underreporting
I was hoping to share some info on this, but what I found in the US media is that unfortunately they are poking like children at Belarus. People in the US are brainwashed by the supposed Russia election propaganda controversy. So liberals just claim any statements are fake/propaganda if they don’t like the findings. If Belarus comes out well, the US libs will simply claim they were playing with their numbers. US libs dismiss https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ as propaganda also due to the globalresearch connection. Any editorial, they just claim the author is “playing fast and loose with the facts”. Slippery, dishonest.
So. Let’s start discussing some of the looming realities of what will happen once lockdown is, finally, over. (Will it ever be over? 😭)
What does everyone think of this tracing app? I think it could possibly be a very interesting flashpoint in the ‘my life’ versus ‘life’ (credit: Bec) cognitive dissonance that lockdown zealots seem to be having trouble getting over.
No doubt most people will just blindly download the thing and keep their Bluetooth on like good little data points. But surely there must be a significant minority who will either not want to make the effort, or who will actually have privacy concerns. What do they do, and where does it leave them in the argument that they’re the virtuous protectors of life?
My personal view is over my literal dead body. Given the NHS’s abysmal record, I don’t trust them with my location data as well as all the other stuff they have on me. I REALLY don’t trust the government not to sell that stuff to the likes of Amazon etc.
Not that Amazon would need it. 😉
I certainly won’t be downloading the app but no doubt plenty of idiots will regardless of where this might be leading. As someone who will probably decline the coved -19 vaccine when it’s available I’m certainly not giving the NHS the means to track me. I’m even thinking of not taking my phone out with me or switching it off if I do.
I won’t be loading up any app. Indeed, I stopped using my phone outside the house weeks ago. We all need to start getting used to living again without our mobile phones. Freedom!
I’m doing this too, leaving my phone at home. I’ve gone back to writing pen and ink letters, and I’ve deactivated social media, it’s actually a relief!
What’s an ‘app’? I don’t seem to be able to download such things on my old Nokia. Perhaps I will have to be implanted with one of those ‘chip’ things instead.
I started using my card in the local shops where I used to use cash (I expect a lot of people all over the country are doing this). It got blocked for “suspected fraud” when it was actually me going shopping. Three times now.
If this is the level of competence that is going to apply to tracking apps we are doomed.
Refuse to use card, force cash on them. It is for their own good, all local firms would be forced into bankruptcy in a fully cashless economy. Cash is safe to use in a pandemic, just don’t touch your face after handling your wallet. Cash transmits viral particles only between a small number of people, card terminals spread it between many more. Though one does start to wonder if given what we know about covid-19 survival times on different surfaces that we’d have been better with paper notes than the new polymer ones.
Good point! I’m just trying to be kind to the people who have been told to avoid cash. Do I want the bank to know how much I spend in the butchers? They might alert the Vegan Police.
Will never be downloading anything like that to my device thank you very much
Ditched my mobile 2 years ago…best idea ever!
I posted this earlier today on the previous article before today’s article was uploaded…
Finally…170 scientists and researchers have got together and issued a joint statement concerning the deployment of the NHSX contact tracing app.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uB4LcQHMVP-oLzIIHA9SjKj1uMd3erGu/view
Maybe we can approach them to band together to address other concerns or use that kind of template to do that ourselves?
A couple of points/questions arising from Toby’s usual excellent update:
1 I thought/hoped that yesterday’s apparent modification of the fifth test meant that controlling R had stopped being the overriding aim. Apparently not. So what am I missing? What possible reason is there for wanting to slow the progression of the virus (other than not wanting to overwhelm the NHS and buy time before a vaccine/treatment) given the costs involved in doing so?
2 I’m struggling to understand whether the R value is an observable number that can be measured, or whether it is a modelled number. I looked at the RKI reference above which says ‘R can only be estimated
and not directly extracted from the notification system’. If it is modelled rather than ‘real’ then what are implications. At the very least I would have thought it’s a number that you can’t simply take at face value. If I’m watching my fuel gauge I’d prefer to rely on a system that actually measures how much fuel I’ve got left, rather uses a model to calculate how much should be left. It may be that they give the same result but I’d want to know how reliable the modelled… Read more »
Very good point. It must be modelled, to a large degree, mustn’t it?
Because the only way to know for sure is to literally test everyone in the ‘active’ population every day at the same time and see what the change in infection is. Surely you can’t even estimate an R factor if you’re only testing a fraction of people?
Another thing that interests me is…..How do they model the thing going forward from this point, when we’re in such a massively different situation now re: the number of people allowed to mix freely outside their homes (I. E. Not many) versus the number had we not locked down. Projections were made on us not locking down, which is what the policy decisions have been taken from. But is anyone remodelling now
Surely if they’re gonna work off models, they’ve got to continually keep doing them to adjust for accuracy, not just keep working off the old model indefinitely. I’m no mathematician as you see but it just seems bonkers to me. Working off a two month old model when there’s ACTUAL.SCIENTIFIC.DATA. now available.
Likewise, there doesn’t seem much point in knowing or estimating R unless we know where the current infections are taking place. For example, it could be that R in public spaces is 0 as we know that the virus dilutes very quickly in the open air. And as (most) schools have been shut for several weeks then R in schools must be close to, or at 0, too.
However, until we know where the current infections are taking place we can’t make sure that lockdown is only applied where it needs to be. This subject was touched on yesterday by one journalist at the daily briefing, I think in regard to garden centres, but he was fobbed off with the standard “It’s still too early to be making those decisions…” response.
But if, for example, it turned out that R is high in hospitals and on public transport but low in shops and factories or building sites then we could move on at little or no risk.
I think it was Chris Whitty who clarified it a bit today. As you say @Farinances it is modelled to a large degree. He couldn’t say what the value was now – between 0.6 and 0.9 I think, which is huge range. He said they would be moving to make it more measured than modelled by doing random surveys. But how is that going to help with deciding what to do now? As far as I can work out, they’ll say something like: our model says R = 0.6 now, the model says that doing X will add 0.4 to R, so we can do that and nothing else. Would they then do some sampling later to see what R is after doing X? There’s a really good on ‘How reliable is Imperial College modelling’ on this, which I’m trying to get my head round..
I think your question ‘is anyone remodelling now?’ is important. As is the question ‘how well does the model predict the past? As is ‘has anyone run the model with different assumptions?’. As is ‘are there teams of modellers crawling all over it’
Another thing. How can you possibly know how many people one person infects? Surely that’s only possible if you’re dealing with something that’s transmitted person to person like STDs. A person can directly infect a person they come into contact with by coughing in their face say but they will also infect unknown other people by the virus they leave on door knobs etc. Am I missing something here?