The Independent leads with the news that the NHS is about to pilot its new coronavirus detector app – known as the “NHSX app” – in the Isle of Wight. Matt Hancock is expected to announce at today’s Downing Street press briefing that the 141,000 residents of the island will become the first people in the country to test the new homegrown app.
But why has the NHS developed its own contact-tracing app rather than rely on the tried-and-tested approach developed by Apple and Google? According to this report in The Register, the British Government has rejected the Apple-Google approach because the US tech giants protect their users’ privacy too well. The Apple-Google approach is a tracing programme that relies on users consenting to their phones being used for data collection without creating a hackable data pool. The NHS app, by contrast, automatically sends that information to a central database on state-owned servers that creates a honey-pot for identity thieves.
Two concerns immediately spring to mind. First, if the app is being developed by the NHS, will it actually work? The NHS’s efforts to develop its own computerised patient record system had to be abandoned in 2013 at a cost of nearly £10 billion to the taxpayer. Second, will the NHS be able to protect all the data it gathers? Pooling data in one place is very bad practice from a security point of view and a group of 173 security academics have written a ‘we, the undersigned’ letter flagging up their concerns about privacy and medical confidentiality if the NHS app is rolled out nationally. (More on that letter here.) Two years ago the NHS became one of the most high-profile victims of the global WannaCry cyber attack that ended up costing the UK taxpayer £92 million. One of the reasons the NHS was particularly vulnerable is that it was using out-of-date IT systems, including Windows XP, then 17 years old. Incidentally, the Norwegian government developed it’s own Covid-tracker app and refused to publish the source code on the grounds that it would pose a security risk. Within a week, open source advocates had decompiled it, published their findings and identified numerous glitches. If, by some miracle, nothing goes wrong on the Isle of Wight, we’ll all be expected to download the new NHS app to our phones in the next two or three weeks.
Meanwhile, at yesterday’s press briefing Michael Gove said the British public must learn to live with restrictions on our movement for many months and would have to adapt to a “new normal” going forward. (As if to underline the point, several of today’s papers have said Boris won’t unveil an exit plan on Thursday as expected, but will now wait until next Sunday – and BuzzFeed‘s Alex Wickham has some detail on what’s likely to be in that plan here.) “Ultimately, unless and until we have a vaccine then I suspect that we are going to have to live with some degree of constraint because of the nature of the virus,” Gove said.
Does this mean we should start calling the restrictions the Government has put in place the “Forever Lockdown” after Joe Haldeman’s science fiction classic The Forever War? A reader has flagged up a quote from another science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, that is appropriate for the current time, given how little dissent from Covid orthodoxy is tolerated:
I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy . . . censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything – you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
If you’re concerned about the silencing of critical voices, someone has started a petition on Change.org calling for the resignation of Diane Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube whom the petitioner describes as the video publishing platform’s “chief censor”. You can sign that petition here.
At least the lockdown will be subjected to some proper Parliamentary scrutiny today, with a debate about the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations due to take place in the House of Commons this afternoon. Several Tory rebels are expected to take the Government to task – the Mail has more. Leading the charge will be Steve Baker MP, a former Conservative minister and leading Brexiteer, who’s written an op ed in today’s Telegraph in which he urges Boris to end the lockdown, which he describes as “absurd, dystopian and tyrannical”. (I always liked the cut of his jib.) Among other things, Baker says he thinks the lockdown laws may be unlawful:
A judicial review is being brought against the lockdown laws, claiming they are ultra vires – that is, that ministers have no legal authority to impose them in the way they did – and that they incur a disproportionate interference with fundamental rights and freedoms. There is serious legal scholarship supporting that view. I fear the present rules may be unlawful.
One of the most egregious examples of state over-reach Baker flags up in his jeremiad is South Yorkshire Police telling a father-of-two that he couldn’t use his own front garden in Rotherham to play with his children. “Families have been driven off their own outdoor property, against the law,” writes Baker. Yesterday, in a rare act of humility, the same police force apologised after it criticised a man for exercising while wearing jeans. Who knew that was against the rules? Yahoo News has the story.
Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the head of the Office of National Statistics (ONS), was interviewed on Marr yesterday. (You can watch it on the BBC iPlayer here.) They got into a number of interesting issues, including how best to calculate the UK death toll, which Diamond predicted is really around 30,000, not the 28,131 as of yesterday morning. This is if you add those deaths where medical practitioners have recorded COVID-19 as the cause of death on the death certificate but don’t have any test evidence to corroborate that. At present, as readers of this site will know, only those COVID-19 deaths where the patient tested positive are currently included in the Government’s official death toll.
Diamond went on to explain to Andrew Marr that of the excess deaths he and his colleagues at the ONS have counted, up to a third are an indirect consequence of the lockdown and other measures, adding that even more indirect deaths will occur in the future. He said:
…but I think we also need to remember that at the moment we are seeing the highest number of deaths each week that we at the Office of National Statistics have recorded since weekly records started in 1993… when we see these very high levels of death not all of them, not all of them are the result of Covid-19. The last week we had records for the excess was approaching 12,000 deaths of which, I would suggest, between eight and 9,000 were Covid and the rest were what we call indirect deaths. Those could be for example people who would normally have gone into hospital for some reason but the beds were not available. Just give you an example: in my late mother’s last couple of years of her life she went into hospital and back out again a few times. Had she not been able to go in one of those times she may well have died a little earlier than she did. So I think it’s important to recognise there are indirect deaths as well as the Covid-related deaths. We have a piece from the Office of National Statistics that we’ve done jointly with the government actuaries department, the Home Office and Department of Health coming out in the next few days which will show also a third group which will come out over the next few years where changes in the prioritisation of the Health Service, for example, reductions in cancer screening, will lead to deaths over the next few years. And the final thing I’d just like to say, Andrew: if we have a lengthy and deep recession then we know that can lead to increased deaths as people are pushed into lengthy periods of unemployment… the headline numbers that I started with need to be adjusted and added to by those indirect deaths.
Marr followed up by saying it sounded as if Diamond was confirming that the UK is heading for the worst death toll in Europe. But Diamond wasn’t having that:
I wouldn’t say that at all. And I would say that making international comparisons Andrew is an unbelievably difficult thing to do. We in this country have, in my opinion… I think we have the best reporting, the most transparent reporting, and the most timely reporting because we include death registrations and we’ve been pushing our deaths registration reporting as fast as we possibly can. And then even after you look at the actual deaths it is incredibly important to recognise that context. So deaths are going to be more concentrated, as I’ve already indicated, in inner cities. If you have a rural country then it’s likely that your death rates will be lower. I’m not saying that we’re at the bottom of any potential league table – it’s almost impossible to calculate a league table – but I’m not prepared to say that we’re heading for the top.
The fact that the ONS is about to publish data on the likely number of deaths caused by the Government’s strategy for mitigating the impact of the virus was news to me. From the point of view of lockdown sceptics, that data will be invaluable evidence in the case for the prosecution. (Thanks to Guy de la Bédoyère for transcribing Bob Diamond’s comments.)
An eagle-eyed reader spotted an interesting detail in a doctor’s diary published by BBC News yesterday. According to Dr John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary, the ‘clap for carers’ that takes place every Thursday at 8pm causes a small spike in Accident and Emergency admissions. (That’s ER admissions for our American readers.) Some people are jumping up on concrete bollards and letterboxes in order to clap, only to then fall off and hurt themselves. Ella Simkin, a health 23 year-old, went out with her parents to clap last Thursday at their house in south London and decided to jump on to a raised concrete flower bed. She missed her footing and ended up in hospital. And it’s not just young people. While some have been exercising more than usual during the lockdown, others have stopped exercising altogether, particularly the elderly, and problems can occur when they suddenly get up and clap. They may fall and break a bone, for instance. How long before clapping every Thursday night is replaced by the British Sign Language equivalent – basically, waving your hands in the air – as it has been at Manchester University Students’ Union? The reason for that daft bit of snowflakery was not to avoid injury, but because traditional clapping can supposedly cause “issues” for sensitive students.
The Times has some interesting detail on the YouGov poll that was reported in the Sunday Times yesterday, with fieldwork done on Thursday and Friday of last week. The headline figure is that that 55% of the British public remain scared about getting coronavirus. And, interestingly, this doesn’t vary much with political affiliation or how you voted in the EU Referendum (although ConservativeHome found that a third of its readers support the Swedish Government’s approach). However, it does vary between men and women: just 47% of men are scared, compared to 62% of women. Among different age groups, the most scared are not the over-55s, but 34-44 year-olds. Our older readers will not be surprised by that finding.
Indeed, one of these, describing herself as “Frustrated in Kent”, has sent me a marvellous rant about the supine cowardice of her fellow countrymen:
Today, walking my dog, I saw a young man zoom by on a bicycle, wearing what looked like a WWI gas mask with full goggles and, of course, gloves. This in the middle of the Kent countryside. Later this morning, in a queue outside Waitrose, I got into conversation with a woman behind me who was dead scared that her mask was not going to protect her inside the store. This afternoon, I ran into a neighbour while I was walking on a footpath across an orchard. He nearly fell into the apple trees in his scramble to social distance.
What is wrong with these people? We’re in the country, for God’s sake, and we’ve been distancing for weeks. Is everybody so unable to think for themselves that this sort of behaviour becomes the norm? I blame the news, the politicians and especially the media coverage – particularly the BBC’s sensationalism. Every story is designed to scare everyone into quiescent behaviour, with the implicit threat of fines and/or worse for nonconformism. Is this how fascism begins – when a quiescent population abjures the right of the individual to speak and think for him or herself and accepts the status quo without question?
I have always wondered how the German nation adapted to the hideous excesses of Hitler and his regime since Germans by and large are sympathetic and stoic and caring people. I happen to be married to a German and have been for 35 years. Now I have a more perfect understanding. If you accept something without questioning authority, then that authority takes ever more advantage of the situation and soon you have a population that is denied the opportunity to question. This is what is happening here and I am concerned that the nation is on the wrong track.
I’m waiting for the day I’m told that I have to wear a special marking on my clothing to show I’m over 70 so that I can be stopped on the street by the authorities for breaking lockdown and then I’ll be hustled on home (with a fine or worse).
Another reader has sent me a good quote from CG Jung about “psychic epidemics”, something we appear to be in the midst of. It was quoted by the late great Christopher Booker in his last book Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion:
It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, it is not microbes, it is not cancer, but man himself who is his greatest danger: because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes.
A quick round-up of interesting article I’ve spotted, or which readers have flagged up, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Freedom isn’t just another word‘ – Must read piece in First Things in which John Waters, one of the two litigants trying to fight the lockdown in the Irish courts, explains why he’s brought the case
- Interview with Anders Tegnell – CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviews Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the architect of its mitigation strategy
- ‘Warren Buffett sells all shares in major airlines amid $50bn loss‘ – The Telegraph reports that Buffet has liquidated his airline stock
- ‘Politicians Have Destroyed Markets and Ignored Human Rights with Alarming Enthusiasm‘ – Strident critique of lockdown policies published on the Mises Institute blog
- ‘Public opinion, not scientific advice, is what is keeping us in lockdown‘ – Another great column from Dan Hannan in the Telegraph
- ‘Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program‘ – More details on the ‘five eyes’ intelligence leak in the Australian Telegraph
- ‘It is time to take seriously the link between Vitamin D deficiency and more serious Covid-19 symptoms‘ – Matt Ridley urges the Government to take a look at the mounting evidence that there’s an inverse correlation between the body’s production of Vitamin D and susceptibility to COVID-19. Should we really be kept out of the sunshine?
- ‘Germany’s New Cases, Number Of Deaths at Lowest in Five Weeks‘ – Yet more evidence that Germany’s easing of the lockdown hasn’t caused a rise in infections
- ‘Why Sweden Has Already Won the Debate on COVID “Lockdown” Policy‘ – A point of view I think we all share, this time put forward by Patrick Henningsen on 21st Century Wire
- ‘The effect of human mobility and control measures on the COVID-19 epidemic in China‘ – Paper published in Science mag claiming the lockdown in China actually worked. Thought I’d link to it in the interests of balance.
I was recently interviewed by Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who’s been banned from Twitter for misgendering trans activists, about the lockdown and freedom of speech. You can listen to the podcast here or watch it on YouTube here. That interview took just over 40 minutes. If you want the short version, click here to listen to an interview I did with Kevin O’Sullivan on TalkRadio on Saturday.
Readers continue to suggest songs that would make suitable theme tunes for this site. The latest batch include ‘Every Breath You Take‘ by the Police, ‘Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes – Opening themes‘, ‘Behind the Mask‘ by Eric Clapton and ‘Fight the Power‘ by Public Enemy.
Thanks to those who donated for the upkeep of Lockdown Sceptics yesterday. I had been hoping to dial down my advocacy on Thursday when Boris was originally supposed to reveal his exit plan, but that’s now been postponed until Sunday and that deadline may slip again. So if you feel like donating, please do so by clicking here. (Every little helps!) And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, you can email me here. See you tomorrow.
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Who made these people the government? I will never carry their app, nor take their vaccine and nor will i wear a mask. The Government has lost the plot. We are a free live humans not some piece of meat to be monitored and shuffled from queue to queue to satisfy some people who’ve decided that they can boss me around like don’t matter. This whole thing shows we need to dismantle half the government. I’m not part of their community and their collective lunacy.
The government was made by 17.4 million people who voted to close borders and restrict freedom of movement, and were upset that this wasn’t getting done quickly enough for their liking.
Grow up. Brexit has nothing to do with this. Take your partisan comments elsewhere.
But no one who voted to leave the EU wanted to prevent free movement outside their houses. If this is some kind of payback by Remoaners, it is has gone on long enough.
This isn’t that. Plenty of remainers consider the lockdown mroe dangerous than the pandemic itself, I’m one of them.
As am I.
Me too, and Toby’s round up just said support for lockdown doesn’t fall into familiar political or partisan categories. It’s really important we keep scepticism a broad church, we are people ‘who wouldn’t usually agree’ who agree about this, as if we don’t, we’ll scare people off from speaking up. Doesn’t matter what your politics or views on the EU are, if you think lockdown is madness, come on in, the water’s lovely.
Hope you are now aware this is what you were supporting?
And others simply feel they’ve been robbed of what should have been the last chance to emigrate to Europe. Which has been confirmed by the government refusing to consider any extension to the transition to make up for the time when no work can be done to prepare for Brexit. Perhaps the government thinks we should all be grateful for being let out of our houses when – if – that happens, and will have forgotten how much freedom we used to have.
Once again you CAN still emigrate to Europe. You’ll just have to fill in few forms. (It will still be WAY easier than going to say the US or Australia – and plenty of people have been doing that for years.)
Maybe you could try somewhere that got decimated by EU austerity policy. Like Greece.
This site is about the lockdown – nothing else.
Look I really didn’t want to leave the EU, I lived in the EU for five years, it truly has bugger all to do with this problem we are trying to solve RIGHT NOW. If you want to be on team sanity for solving this nightmare, we are your tribe, if not, this is not the site for you. It’s just NOISE, it doesn’t matter, what does matter is getting people’s brains out of hock and getting them to think. Whatever your political stripe I think we can all agree that lockdown is just madness. Let’s just solve that big problem and we can all go back to bickering later. PS I have friends in Greece and Spain, if you think the UK is bad, thank your lucky stars you are not there! We are smart people, we are motivated, let’s lay aside our differences and get cracking.
<3 As soon as the sneering begins, I have to lockdown my brain lest I wade in like you saw there lol
Couldn’t agree more, I’m not wearing a gagging mask.
As is often the case in these maddening situations, reality has been flipped.
The ‘clean’ will be wearing masks, when apparently they’re only useful for stopping already infected people infecting others.
The healthy won’t be wearing masks – and in refusing to will attract abject cries of ‘DIRTY!!’ from those also-healthies who need a psychological safety blanket every time they step outside.
We were discussing in one of our lab meetings, now conducted on the cretinous Zoom, how poorly worn PPE is actually a hazard in itself. I have to use the stuff professionally and have to laugh when I see people using it incorrectly in the supermarket.
Another piece of health theatre I’ve learned about today is that our cleaners, who bless them are still working, have apparently been cleaning our office door handles with the same cloth they use on the communal toilet pans…
I won’t either: surreal scenes in a local shop today: we formed a patient queue while a large delivery was cleared and then:
the hapless assistant, whom I know quite well, was wearing a plastic helmet with full visor while stationed at the till.
Think of the gear bomb disposal operatives and biohazard teams wear.
She wears glasses- so do I- they steam up, so she has trouble seeing the till, her face becomes overheated and sore.
No plastic barriers which all other outlets have installed for their staff.
She told me that the head gear is obligatory while on the tills, but not on the shop floor.
2 customers disported rather shoddy masks.
This is bonkers!
― Sophie Scholl, see below, was executed by the Nazis for her resistance activities. One of the bravest and best, an exemplar of moral courage
“It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
Absolutely sums it up for me.
I will not take the app either, I’ll have the vacine but wait at least 12 months to give the vulnerable people who really need it places nearer the front of the queue (at my age covid-19 doesn’t class as a risk worth worrying about), I’ll wear a mask where-ever I think it will prevent facial recognition and if it helps reduce fear in those around me (fear hurts a lot more than covid-19, masks don’t do much to stop covid-19 but maybe people will get back their confidence when they see them in use). We really could use setting up a separate “country” of all of us who want to live free rather than exist in fear, a large enough group of us working to a libertarian set of laws and swearing our loyalty to an alternative government.
If someone were to offer me a vaccine I would give it to my mother so that I could then visit her and she could be allowed to see her friends in the same building.
FYI China has developed face recognition software that’s 95% accurate with the mouth and nose covered. To be sure of defeating it you will need sunglasses as well as a mask.
Wow. That’s amazing
Wearing a mask is a visual depiction of capitulation, of accepting the ‘party’ line that the virus is more dangerous than it is. Not to mention that masks generally don’t work. In the region I live in (thanks to BBC stats which are not prone to understatement) 1 in 1000 people have tested positive. Multiply it by 10 it’s still only 1 in 100, by 50 then 1 in 20. Given that 97% won’t need medical intervention what’s the point of a mask/ I have to ask, since I’m single: have people stopped having sex now? They didn’t during the AIDS debacle and that was far more deadly. No masks then, even when it was suggested (by the BBC Radio 4 no less, but this was the 1980s) that HIV would most likely turn into an airborne virus. Ever been had?
This a thousand times.
To those who think that wearing a mask will give others “confidence”: isn’t it more likely that a masked population will entrench and intensify neuroticism and ignorance? And why should the unhealthy needs of some pathologically risk-averse individuals trump those of the rest of us? If you’re doing this out of compassion, I believe it is very misplaced. If you’re doing it out of self-interest, because you think it will bring an earlier end to lockdown, ask what else you may be asked to submit to or sacrifice.
By not wearing a mask I will ensure the paranoid will stay much further than 2 metres away from me. It will also be a good way to get to the front of any queue.
Lily you say that ‘at your age covid-19 doesn’t class as a risk worth worrying about’. But you are prepared to take the vaccine. You really need to do some serious research on vaccines.
Precisely, nobody made unaccountable medics and scientists the government and I don’t answer to them and I will not be wearing a mask, agreeing to be tracked, or being injected, forget it. I’ll quite happily flush my smart phone down the loo too (just reading about facebook mobile app having some ‘off facebook’ tracking ability, so that’s been removed from my phone). As for our elected representatives, they do not have the legal power to do this to us, and I’m hopeful the courts will soon tell them that.
My second hand mobile is not compatible with tracking app technology- tee hee!
They’ll never catch me; I’m under the covid radar!
How do you find out which phones are compatible with the tracking app? I’m hoping my ancient iPhone isn’t otherwise I’ll be mothballing it.
Simple. Ditch your smartphone.
MG
Anything with bluetooth will be compatible. Which sadly is most smartphones.
Yep – mine is a decades old PAYG Nokia, only used in case of problems on car journeys!
They will when/if you ever want to get on a plane or ferry to go on your hols!
Interesting news from America, seems some justice has been done in regards to the Stasi callers:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-missouri-lockdown-breakers-details-online-st-louis-county-a9497271.html
The zealots who betrayed their neighbours, “friends” and colleagues are claiming that in having their names published they are being ounished for “doing the right thing”, well done Mr Totsch for recognising that such informing on innocent acts is wrong and doing your best to discourage such treacherous behaviour in future.
Hi Lilly,
Just a quick moderator’s note – please try to use the same name for posting comments in future. Pick one, and stick with it.
Also, have you considered reporting on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/03/coronavirus-health-passports-for-uk-possible-in-months
A dangerous government plan to use facial recognition apps to enable “identitifcation” by people who are likely to know you by sight anyway, and to enforce some unspecified testing regime. Can we expect gestapo thugs on every shop door demanding “your papers”. One has to wonder if the intent is more to test loyalty to the dear leader than anything relating to the transmission of viral disease.
Most shockingly the Guardian, off all places, is now talking about such oppressive surveillance entirely matter-of-fact-ly without so much as a hint of condemnation, and that from the paper which covered, only a few years back, Snowden’s revelations of government abuses.
The mere idea of this passport is shocking but not the fact it’s coming from the oh so woke Guardian. With the exception of Simon Jenkins none of the writers have been questioning the gov’ line in any way, shape or form. I actually deleted their app from my phone first week into lockdown as I couldn’t handle their own ads anymore touting their “independent journalism” only to read in the next article “79-year-old patient died of Covid-19, he was a lung cancer patient in his last stage”. This facial recognition app must be pushed back up into a very dark spot up the government’s backside.
This was all predicted, extolled and celebrated in this technocracy article back in mid-March. The article, in my opinion at the time, was so dark and discouraged my wide-awake 20-year-old son reading it. It’s now about to become reality:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/17/905264/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing-18-months/
Someone kindly posted this on the estimable Malcolm Kendrick’s blog – Neil Ferguson from 2006
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04795.pdf
I once considered writing a SF about a society in which everyone is implanted with a tracking device at a young age. The way things are going something like this could be seriously mooted in the near future.
Working as an MRI technician in a hospital would become a highly desirable job, no chip is going to survive repeated sustained contact with one of those superconducting magnets.
The Guardian says this about the passports: “proving which workers have had Covid-19”. I thought that even antibody tests aren’t foolproof, so the word “proving” seems wrong. Just another example of journalists being out of their depth writing about science or statistics?
https://coronavirusbellcurve.com/
Here is some good news. The risk of dying from Covid-19 if you get it is for a healthy person under 45 is 0.04%. Even with a health condition in that age group also not bad. But with a health condition (All health conditions in the table) 1 in 10 will die in the 65-74 group and 1 in 5 over 75. But if you happen to be a fit person, even in the elderly groups, not too bad.
Here is even better news. That Table is based upon 6% death rate in confirmed cases in US. But everybody now believes that the true death rate would be in line with severe flu (Asiatic flu 1957) in the region of 0,5 %, as we have at least 10 times more cases than detected so the figures above should be 10 times better. This is also probably the main stream line of thinking in the assessment of the pandemic.
But there is probably even better news. The amount of undetected cases has probably been enormous. Thousands of asymptomatic carriers have been found in confined prisons and also in homeless shelters in the US. In the shocking news yesterday from Russia with 10000 new Covid-19 cases in one day the really shocking thing was that 5000 were asymptomatic amongst them. There is now evidence of Covid-19 occurring in both France and Italy in the end of December. Most likely an enormous spread of both asymptomatic and symptomatic infection which was detected late with the new tests. The lockdown effect has been minimal or marginal in the total effect on the Farr curve as the peak was over well before the lockdown. Any sensible person must agree that it must be possible to protect the over 65 the last month of the declining epidemic (as the virus will extinguish typically in the summer month coming).All gradual opening is nonsense.If there were to be small spikes in the tail end of the curve they would come in the end of May with prepared health service and a natural decline of infectiousness in summer months.
Open with a big bang (whilst protecting the elderly) everything. Any gradual opening will just be prolonging the economic suicide.
Agree. I will also be smugly pointed out the asymptomatic numbers out to anyone who has challenged me on it in the past few weeks — which is almost everyone I have spoken to.
But if an asymptomatic person passes it onto someone’s grandmother, that’s murder! Stay home!
And herein lies the problem. Life is risk. Any day you leave the house, poke your head out from under your bed even, you risk something happening that can kill you. Technically if someone dies it isn’t automatically murder either.
The idiots who say that probably don’t realise that not having lockdown for severeal months during flu season also results in the same thing. While they’ve been enjoying their christmas gatherings and shopping they may have “murdered” someone.
The percent increase in total cases by state is … instructive. Almost all 0%!
I wrote a comment for yesterday’s post outlining some thoughts on the testing amongst other
things in which I was deliberately conservative in my approach, since no more aggressive stance
was necessary. However, having watched the increasing absurdity of comments in the MSM and
the apparently wilful ignorance of vast numbers of our fellow citizens if Twitter is anything to go
by, I thought that I would post an addendum.
The data being released by HMG includes a subset defined as, “Swab testing for health, social
care and other essential workers” a vague description to be sure so I will have to make certain
assumptions.
It is by no means clear exactly who these essential workers are but it is not unreasonable to
assume that the Government has been logical and are using the same definition as that for the
wider lockdown rules and so including for example policemen, delivery personnel, emergency
services personnel, transport workers, construction workers etc. it might therefore be considered
a representative sample of the entire population. Yes I am well aware that it is a giant leap of faith
too far to assume logicality in politics but let us try it anyway.
The second major caveat over the sample being tested is that we do not know whether they are
testing the same individuals each day, I have assumed that they are actually trying to glean some
knowledge from the exercise so am assuming that they are not.
With these caveats in mind there are some interesting conclusions that might be formed from, as I
said yesterday, the data and its progression day by day.
The percentage of infections is in rapid decline, which fits well with the expectations of many
eminent experts; Ioannodis, Levitt, Paunio, Wittkosski … as the virus passes through the
population. With the rapid decline in the numbers of infected on each day accompanied by the
knowledge that a large number of young people in the population are asymptomatic it is
irrefutable that the number of people who have been exposed over the course of the past several
months and are now immune is considerably higher than 5.3% and even 12.9% expressed
directly by the data. The next question is, how many?
The age of this sample will certainly be younger than the median of the UK for they are by the
definition provided, workers and their families so they must be on average younger than 40 years.
This relative youthfulness implies that a significant proportion of those who will have become
infected previously would have been asymptomatic or insufficiently ill to seek medical attention,
but they will still have attained immunity for at least a period of time. (See Graph below https://
massagehealth.co.uk/covid19_26/)
Studies in the USA have indicated that up to 90% of young people are not affected by the disease
and if that is correct it could be that the country is at or nearly at herd immunity with 80% having
DATE TESTS CONDUCTED PEOPLE TESTED POSITIVE RESULT % POSITIVE
30 APRIL 79,522 43,390 3,152 7.3%
1 MAY 64,894 35,047 2,056 5.9%
2 MAY 48,444 35,507 1,898 5.3%
CUMULATIVE
30 APRIL 289,929 201,560 31,199 15.5%
1 MAY 354,823 236,607 33,255 14.1%
2 MAY 403,267 272,114 35,153 12.9%
antibodies against the virus. Even if this assumption is overly optimistic and one accepts only half
the “pre-infected” assumption, it is extremely unlikely that the number of people carrying
antibodies is below 50% of the general working population. If that is so, the case for lockdown is
absurd and could only be propagated by an ulterior motive.
It would have been so much easier and more valuable had the Government thrown their
considerable money behind collecting real, accurate and useful data by widespread antibody
testing. With 200,000 such tests we would know with great accuracy whether either my
conclusion is correct and the epidemic is over and the lockdown a gigantic economic blunder, or
the fear mongering classes are correct and the suspension of civil liberties will have to continue.
I wonder why they haven’t? Answers on a postcard…
Oops, Sorry, it appears my formatting has not transmitted properly.
Key workers do include all those people you mentioned – but only if they have symptoms. I work in IT (and journalism- but as I’m freelance it doesn’t apply to me there I don’t think). My boss has sent us an email saying we are eligible for testing.
Would be a bit pointless though, so you get a test and come up clear, you could catch it the day after the test though. You might even catch it at the testing centre. At which point you think you’re clean but you end up spreading it.
Anti-body testing in the wider population would be useful, mail out several tests to each household and have an anonymous submission portal online where people can say if they are immune or not and manually type in a location accuracy of the first two letters of the postcode. But anti-gen testing isn’t all that helpful, unless we could all test at home daily it can’t keep up with the disease. And if we could all test at home daily then the only humane approach would be to rely on everyone to just tell thr truth about their tests and act responsibly, no draconian enforcement could be premitted by a civilised people.
Makes a lot more sense just to learn to live with the risk while we wait for a vaccine, the disease causes (at worst case, if spread is much wider than predicted then the death risk is much lower) a typical increase in risk of dying this year about equal to your risk of dying this year anyway. So it doubles the chance of dying this year, that chance is pretty low and if it takes two years to get a vaccine (and make sure it is an effective vaccine not just rush ahead with something half-adequate) then living two years in which your risk of death is (probably rather less than) doubled doesn’t sound a big threat to me.
Exactly, it’s dumb. The only test that’s of any use right now (except maybe to healthcare workers – who would still have to be tested literally every day for it have any use) is a serological test.
Oh no that would never do. How DARE you even think that anyone could become immune other than from the Holy Vaccine???
I suspect that is why antibody tests are being disparaged, nothing to do with their accuracy
What’s worse is getting tested and a false-positive result. And the effect this will have on any family or friends you’ve come in contact with: in Scotland, this is to mean a 14-day self-isolation (ie. no leaving their homes, at all) for them. For you – the false-positive person, it’s only 7 days.
“There has been no successful vaccine for ANY coronavirus.” Professor Hendrick Streeck, University of Bonn.
did he say that in German? I’d like to find the direct quote for attribution. Thanks!
Large scale UK-wide antibody testing would definitely settle things very quickly!
…which has to be precisely why they’re not doing it. The official objections I’ve seen to these tests is that they’re not always accurate. No one seems to want to discuss the highly inaccurate tests they’re already doing.
“Is this how fascism begins – when a quiescent population abjures the right of the individual to speak and think for him or herself and accepts the status quo without question?”
No.
This is merely the outward symptom of a virus that has been replicating internally for decades.
I read a really good blog post on this that suggested the “disease is our behaviour” and this whole exercise is to flatten, change, remove our behaviours.
Can you link?
This Is The Government’s Draft Plan To Ease Coronavirus Lockdown Measures In The Workplace
https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/alexwickham/governments-draft-plan-to-ease-lockdown-workpace-in-full?__twitter_impression=true
Basically, go back to work but keep the 2m distancing rule going. How long before this crazy unsubstantiated 2m distancing is consigned to the bin?
It’s depressing to hear so many in the media talking as though, whatever we do in the future, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives at least 2m apart, and so many of the public brainwashed into believing it.
And not even the WHO say 2m.
• Hairdressers operating 2 m from their clients. How does that work?
• Physios like me doing – what, distant healing?
• Optometrists no longer able to use ophthalmoscopes; lots of undetected eye disease slipping through.
• Dental hygienists doing scale & polish from 6 feet away; lots of tooth decay problems coming up.
• Tattooists using inked darts, perhaps?
• Un-inked darts for acupuncturists?
• Bespoke tailors using laser ranging equipment to measure inside leg.
• Chiropodists giving clients supervised instruction on how to extract their own ingrowing toenails whilst the practitioner shouts encouragement from the other side of the room.
• GPs doing all consultations by Zoom
• Do-it-yourself blood extraction kits to replace phebotomists
And so the insanity goes on…..and on…..
Someone really needs to do a comedy sketch with these
One wonders how mammograms would be handled
Speaking of which, good news from Michigan (!) where I live in a tiny town in the Upper Peninsula where there are more trees and bears than people: my hospital called me to make a mammogram appointment (which had been cancelled two months ago due to the coronavirus).
DIY gynaecology for the more adventurous: extended long distance speculum plus magnifying glass.
Yesterday I watched 1 x police officer and 2 x paramedics having a relaxing chat sitting on a wall outside a police station (no tasking) no PPE no 2m distance just good humoured banter by the looks of it. No criticism of them, normal behaviour, it illustrates the fact that many front line think this is nonsense too.
Ultimately, everything you need to know about what’s going on is contained in the following video, from 7.45 to 10.58.
It’s directed at a US audience but the message is global:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KLODGhEyLvk
(watch from 7.45-10.58)
All I’ve seen from lockdown zealots throughout this is “this isn’t like flu” and we shouldn’t compare it. Now though its fine to compare it from their point of view, “we shouldn’t end the lockdown too soon, the Spanish flu had a deadly 2nd wave”, even had the Hong Kong flu 2nd wave mentioned. What did SARs and MERs do, did they have waves ?
When someone tells me “it isn’t like the flu” I say “you’re right – it’s a common cold with brass balls”.
I’ve been meaning to get around to collecting a list of all the quotes I’ve seen from absolutely top people in the fields relating to this saying precisely that flu is the appropriate comparison, to throw in the faces of those who ridicule that comparison. Here’s the easiest one to hand (Google translation of German):
“I expect about 0.1 or 0.2 percent, the same mortality rate as with influenza. I think this virus is comparable to influenza, but it could be a little more dangerous. If influenza were a new disease, nobody had it yet, and it had suddenly come into the world, the reaction of most countries would be the same as that of the corona virus.”
Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO
https://www.addendum.org/coronavirus/interview-johan-giesecke/
If the shoe fits……
“those who ridicule that comparison”.
I think a key tactic in any sort of political dispute these days is for ‘them’ to identify any irrefutable argument that they cannot beat and to pre-ridicule it; make it a given that the argument is wrong even though no one has actually demonstrated that it is wrong.
The comparison between Covid-19 and flu is obvious – it is even described a having ‘flu-like symptoms’. It shares many characteristics including, it seems, flu’s level of approximate lethality.
The irrefutable argument is the one that says “You never even thought about flu in its previous outbreaks – even the ones that killed 80000 people – so what’s different about Covid-19? Why does it make sense to wreck the economy now, when you never mentioned it before for flu?”.
It is essential that no one be allowed to ask that question, because it isn’t one that can be waved away with scientific blather – it’s a direct question of logic and rationality. It shows the stupidity of this whole thing in rational terms. It calls into question the lockdown; the national holiday that many people are enjoying – for now; the virtue-signalling concern for Our NHS.
So, it has already been pre-ridiculed to prevent anyone using it. And if they do, anyway, oblivious, it triggers a shrill dalek-like rising voice of fury. “You CANNOT compare Covid-19 to flu!!!! It is not JUST flu!!!!”.
Exactly. This is why I make the common cold comparison because a) it’s actually technically a coronavirus so…. but more importantly b) it downgrades the threat even further and completely knocks them off base. Also forces them to think a bit before we even go into any details about how many just comparisons there actually ARE between this and a general flu season.
I think it counts as manflu.
Here are a few more I’ve added to my list:
“There is no evidence to show that the 2019 coronavirus is more lethal than respiratory adenoviruses, influenza viruses, coronaviruses from previous years, or rhinoviruses responsible for the common cold.”
Dr Pablo Goldschmidt, an Argentine-French virologist specializing in tropical diseases, and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry of the University of Buenos Aires and Faculty of Medicine of the Hospital Center of Pitié-Salpetrière, Paris.
– Interview on Clarin.com, 9th March 2020, quoted in https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/28/10-more-experts-criticising-the-coronavirus-panic/
“That is the main fear: the disease is presented as a terrible disease. The disease per se is like the flu in a normal winter. It is even weaker in the first week.”
Dr Karin Mölling, a German virologist whose research focused on retroviruses, particularly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). She was a full professor and director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the University of Zurich from 1993 until her retirement in 2008 and received multiple honours and awards for her work.
– Interview on Anti-Empire.com, 23rd March 2020, quoted in https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/28/10-more-experts-criticising-the-coronavirus-panic/
“Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic”
Dr. John Oxford, an English virologist and Professor at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a leading expert on influenza, including bird flu and the 1918 Spanish Influenza, and HIV/AIDS.
https://novuscomms.com/2020/03/31/a-view-from-the-hvivo-open-orphan-orph-laboratory-professor-john-oxford/
“If you take these numbers into account, they suggest that the infection fatality rate for this new coronavirus is likely to be in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza.”
John Ioannidis, Stanford University’s Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention, Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Population Health, and (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics; co-Director, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).
https://allergiesandyourgut.com/2020/04/27/coronavirus-19s-infection-fatality-rate-is-about-the-same-as-for-seasonal-flu-stanford-university-epidemiologist-dr-john-ioannidis/
Keep them coming!
Yes great stuff.
Only difference is that covid seems to be very specific in who it kills, flu discriminates less. How to not be one of those people would be a good plan.
Also, the models and even the legislation where all made for… you guessed it FLU!
I always point out, “but it spreads the same way as the flu. The flu kills people also. We don’t lockdown to stop it spreading.”
Or course, the typical response is “but there’s a vaccine for the flu”. So, why does it still kill so many?
There’s a vaccine for *certain strains* of the flu each year. Why do people not seem to get this??
I had the flu jab for three years in a row, and still ended up getting flu – or at least a very bad cold – during two of those three flu seasons. (Coincidentally one was 2018 which looks to have particularly bad). So…. pretty sure those jabs didn’t do me much good. As a result I have avoided flu jabs ever since and er….. no flu! So yeah. I won’t be taking any vaccine for any common seasonal disease again until I’m aged considerably.
This is interesting reading: Search Results
Imagehttps://www.bmj.com › bmj.m626
Web results
Tamiflu & influenza vaccines: more harm than good? | The BMJ
19 Feb 2020 · Does this mean that they prevent a significant proportion of all viral respiratory infections? … urging annual flu shots are mathematical estimates of deaths caused by influenza, provided by the CDC.
I’m sure many of the NHS staff who’ve died from corvid 19 will have been routinely having the flu vaccine for years as NHS trusts would aggressively coerce staff into having in their target drive. culture. I always refused as I was sceptical about the efficacy and didn’t want to be injected with something every 12 months. I’ve never had the flu and rarely have a cold.
I’ve noticed Professor Karol Sikora seems to be sending out quite sceptical tweets! Wasn’t he pushing pro-lockdown views until recently?
On another note last week we had a meeting in my lab group about getting back to work. I just can’t see how we can have a functioning society and economy with long-term social distancing. This is utterly insane, 2m separation everywhere… But this seems to be the line from the government with their sinister ‘new normal’..
The increasingly sceptical articles in the Torygraph might be a good sign that discontent is building within our governing party!
Yes, Sikora led the pro-lockdown side in the Cambridge Union’s proto-debate on the issue a couple of weeks ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wOU0GiQWog&t=104s
Thanks that was just the event I couldn’t quite recall when writing that!
Never thought I would agree with Peter Hitchens, but these are unusual times…
Indeed. On the separation distance it might be worth flagging this up to your lab group:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/two-metre-rule-being-reviewed-amid-hope-relaxed-restrictions-could-allow-schools-to-reopen/ar-BB13udcW?ocid=ientp
““Prof Robert Dingwall, who sits on the Government’s scientific advisory body New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, which feeds into Sage, said it “made sense” to reduce the distancing rule to 1.5 metres, bringing it into line with nations such as Germany and Australia.
“Standing in line two metres apart outside supermarkets does not make a lot of sense,” Prof Dingwall said.
“The two-metre rule does not have validity and has never had much of an evidence base. I’ve tried to trace it myself.
“There is a fairly solid evidence base for a transmission rate if indoors and within one metre of someone with a respiratory infection for 15 minutes, but that time detail has been lost somewhere along the way.
“It is extraordinarily unlikely that any transmission will occur in the few seconds you are standing next to someone as you both reach for the instant coffee.
“It means that people are worrying unnecessarily when a jogger brushes past them in the park, for example, when transient contact is not an issue.”
Some experts believe there is no airborne transmission outdoors at all, as larger droplets carrying the infection get caught on clothes or fall to the ground before they can be inhaled.””
Though I know common sense, even coming from experts in the field, rarely outweighs even openly absurd government guidelines, for employers and official groupings.
Thanks, I get a sense from the media today that we may be getting prepared for a new set of ‘guidance’ to come out.. I always suspected there was an element of ‘give the peasents a number’. I do fear as well these spacing rules will be the perfect excuse for the various flavours of trouble and mischief makers that infect most workplaces to cause strife and trouble….
The other missing factor is that it doesn’t matter how far apart you are if neither of you has it.
It’s rare in Suffolk and even less common in the south west but we are under the same heavy manners as London
Using the WHO’s 1m separation guidelines, productivity could be at least quadrupled!
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public
Exactly – we can have 2m distancing or we can have a fully functioning society – we can’t have both. Time to ditch the 2m rule.
Agree but would drop the word “fully”. Society cannot function in any meaningful way with everyone 2m away from everyone else. I think we must either drop this craziness or say goodbye to civilisation.
You could just show them this, from the WHO:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public
“Maintain at least 1 metre (3 feet) distance between yourself and others. Why? When someone coughs, sneezes, or speaks they spray small liquid droplets from their nose or mouth which may contain virus. If you are too close, you can breathe in the droplets, including the COVID-19 virus if the person has the disease.”
1m apart is a normal distance to stand from someone you’re in conversation with, assuming you don’t already have sex with them…
More crucial wisdom about pandemics to be found here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JSbT7JVNEU4
One problem we’re facing here is that journalists appear to honestly believe the COVID = deadly-plague-zombie-apocalypse-of-the-millenium story. I had a long talk with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal yesterday. The WSJ is actually a bit more sensible than the other U.S. mainstream papers, but even she came at the story from the “of course it’s deadly and everyone is unsafe” angle. She wanted to know my feelings about SC opening up, and whether I thought it was safe. I told her that I was coming at it completely from the other direction, and that I thought lockdowns mostly unjustified, the deadliness of COVID not remotely what’s being reported, the notion of locking down states with tiny numbers of cases preposterous, and my main problem with the way things are opening that it feels inhospitable to be served by people wearing masks and gloves.
Of course I fret that I didn’t make myself sufficiently clear, and who knows what she’ll report. But the thing is, if the people telling the story – and they are the ones with the actual power here – believe that COVID is worse than killer bees, then it’s nigh unto impossible to turn the tide. The journalists need to get convinced that it’s safe to get back in the water. IDK how that will happen, because piles and piles of evidence aren’t doing the job. Also, lots of our news comes out of NYC, where there is an actual problem.
But! One must have hope for the future. So…
I’d like my fellow skeptics’ opinion on my most pressing concern: will we be able to do our summer holiday in the Swiss Alps? We booked it for the second half of July. We can move it into August if necessary, but would need to be back to the U.S. by August 22. Thoughts? Switzerland seems to be making accelerated strides toward reopening, and they must need the money. One would think a holiday trekking in fresh alpine air would be the perfect viral antidote.
(I’ve been suspecting that environmental concerns are a major motivator behind lockdown support. See: https://news.trust.org/item/20200504113129-t4tcf)
I’ve no idea what the state of international travel will be for the rest of this year, but this has turned into a ‘business’ concern for us for various reasons, but word I’m hearing from Swiss collaborators seems positive and upbeat!
I love your username beyond all reason! And thanks for the upbeat message! Really helps!
Glad I can be of some help, hopefully someone else might have some more specific knowledge but I think in general most continental European countries seem to have some sort of concrete plan going forwards! This might ultimately tip the balance of the debate here in gulag UK if other countries start opening up without problems!
“Today on paranoia network news, broadcasting live from my bedroom. We bring you the latest reports of angry criticisms we’vre read on twit-book-gram and an exclusive investigation into what keeps scaring people who are picking up landline polling calls…”
Journalists won’t be reporting rationally until they go out into the street and see the people who aren’t afraid.
If the ONS start reporting the number of non covid deaths, it might give the media a different scaremongering story they can push, only thing that will make them move is something else bad.
Ref Alps this summer. We’re due to be out in the northern part of the French Alps (just south of Switzerland) in August. At present, I doubt that we will be going.
Saw the following the other day:
“French president Emmanuel Macron in a video call with other European leaders warned that the ban [on travel into Europe] could even run until September, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned people not to book summer holidays.
Leaders are concerned about the situation in countries including the United States, as well as the possibility of a ‘second wave’ of infections in Asia.”
From https://www.thelocal.fr/20200415/when-will-i-be-able-to-travel-to-france-again
Politicians in lots of pro Lockdown countries will be doubling down for some time to come I suspect. They need to ensure cover for their irrational decisions.
Or until their economies are sufficiently broken to justify pressing the big red reset button.
My guess? Unlikely. I have a son in NC and don’t expect to be seeing him in 2020….
I have a ticket to see Yes at the Royal Albert Hall next month? Will that still be on? Yes? No!
I am currently at work and it is grand.
A sentence I never thought I’d say in this lifetime.
Lucky you, and may we all be able to say that soon in our futures.
But I’m bored enough to be reading this:
https://policing-the-corona-state.blog/2020/05/04/2-3-may-update/
Scary stuff. I wonder how the police will react to any new ‘guidance’ they will be issued. Will they be issued ny new ‘guidance’ I wonder? Will they be allowed to drag us off if we’re not wearing a mask in the park, for example?
The talk of ‘social distancing’ enforcers in workplaces is giving me the willies.
“On Saturday, it was reported that the Crown Prosecution Service plans to review every charge brought under new emergency coronavirus laws after wrongful convictions were highlighted. The CPS has said this is the first time it has reviewed every charge under a specific piece of legislation.”
Good news.
Toby posted on his twitter an account from an ICU doctor detailing how busy the ITU was with covid19 patients ,This is valid for ITU s in some DGH s in London , Birmingham , Manchester etc but the ICU in my local hospital covering a population of 250,000 has 3 patients on ventilators and a staff of 1300 in the hospital trying to fill their time . As for masks I have worn them in ” line of duty ” for many years and find them highly uncomfortable ; can make people feel light headed and are totally ineffective . They are a placebo.
I call BS on any claim that ICUs are busier than normal. In Greater Glasgow (Glasgow itself has a population of 1 million) there are 39 CV19 patients in the numerous ICU wards.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-daily-data-for-scotland/
Fear is the main issue at the root of the problem here, I feel. We have become a fear-ridden society so scared of death that we cannot resist panic in the face even of objectively quite small risks. And the government, together with our social elites who set the agendas in our social and mainstream medias, have actively chosen to promote fear as a means of “getting people to take [more] seriously” a disease they assumed people weren’t taking seriously enough to satisfy the demands of their own fearfulness. Lord Sumption made the following astute observation in a recent interview:
“If you ask: what is the real difference between the Swedes and ourselves, in Sweden all the polls show that people are not frightened of covid19, whereas the polls suggest that a lot of people are very frightened here, and this is largely, I think, down to a difference in the tone of government statements on this subject. If you inspire panic and fear in people you are going to get extreme reactions.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqrR11HNFp8
What’s comical is that if you asked them separately from this issue, I’d be willing to bet each and every one of the fear-filled panickers, from Johnson and the rest of the top politicians of all parties, down to the lowliest “social media influencer”, via all the newspaper and TV editors and talking heads, would solemnly agree on the importance of not giving way to fear. But that’s exactly what pretty much all of them did when it came down to it.
What’s the betting any one of them would, if asked, disagree with any of the following admonishments from literature, culture and celebrity:
We have nothing to fear but fear itself
Fear is contagious. You can catch it.
FEAR is an acronym in the English language for False Evidence Appearing Real.
Fear is an insidious and deadly thing. It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. Worse, it’s contagious.
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.
Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Fear is the mind-killer
And yet these warnings have never been better proven than by the consequences we are all now living, of our government and our social, political and media elites falling foul of all of them.
I agree about the fear thing, that is the root of the issue. It’s weird but I fear the irrational reaction and outworking of the unnecessary fear that’s been created! I find the best antidote to be the worse of the apostle John, ‘there is no fear in love for perfect love casts out all fear’.
That should be words not worse!
Can I suggest that you put a link into your next newsletter to the Crowd Justice website to support Simon Dolan who is the guy seeking a Judicial Review ? There are a lot of interesting comments from donors on that website.
Let’s remember in this fight for freedom that the resistance in France (1940-1944) was a very small minority of the FRENCH population!
I’ve just been chatting elsewhere about risk. Could we create a risk list with Covid ranked in that list? I appreciate the IFR is different per age range, but it must be possible. So where in the rankings would covid be in comparison to:
– dying in a car crash
– slipping in the shower and breaking my neck
– choking on a peanut
– dying of cancer
– being swept away by severe weather events
– being kicked to death by a donkey
– being struck by lightning
– dying in a house fire
– being murdered (in the UK)
– dying of a severe reaction to hair dye
You get the idea ….
I think the more ridiculous and funny some of the list is the better (e.g. on the RoSPA website, it says 6,000 people die in household accidents, some silly number of people die putting their socks on by falling off the bed, or electrocuting themselves by accidentally drilling through a cable). Us Brits do have a wicked sense of humour, and a good sense of the absurd, and the macabre.
Can we make people just laugh at it? Years ago The Mary Whitehouse Experience used to do a spoof of BBC Watchdog (when they had that Scottish presenter, whose name escapes me). It went along the lines of ‘This banana could be a potential death trap! This pepper grinder could be pumping us full of diabetes as we sleep!’
I’m starting to think the way to end this is to take the p*ss.
That’s a good idea. Also severe reaction to hair dye – lol
Haha It happens, my hairdresser, if i haven’t been for colour for six months, makes me do a patch test, and I have to wait 24 hours to make sure I don’t die of anaphylaxis. Which is bonkers as they’ve been putting the same chemicals on my head for the last twenty years ….
But it’s a misunderstanding of risk (and maths) that is the issue here I think, people think the risk is bigger than it is, and it’s not contexualised at all.
My mum is a worrier, when I was in my twenties and living in London I came home for the weekend wearing a long woollen scarf, literally the first words out of her mouth were ‘you’ll get that trapped in a tube door and strangle yourself to death’ (before she even said ‘Hi, love’). When I said ‘I’m thinking of going to Thailand’, she said, ‘You can’t you’ll get murdered’. You get the idea. It’s become a joke in my family, my mum constantly emoting all these possible grisly ways we’re all going to die. ‘Here’s my new flat, mum’ and she’ll say ‘what are you going to do if there’s a fire?’.
People are scared, out of their wits, unnecessarily, like my mum to the power of a hundred. I reckon the way to relieve tension is to laugh at it. To come up with ridiculous scenarios we never worry about but that cause people to die, to right size it all.
Cricket ball hitting you in the head
Falling over because you clapped too hard last Thursday
Hahaha, fell off a post box bashing a saucepan with a wooden spoon.
Just googled, that’s happened: Death. During the afternoon session of the Sheffield Shield match between South Australia and New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 25 November 2014, Hughes, batting at 63 not out, was struck in the neck by the ball after missing an attempted hook shot to a bouncer from New South Wales bowler Sean Abbott.
Absolutely! See the latter of the two George Carlin videos I tagged in my posts above.
Love George Carlin.
Spuds can be lethal if allowed to sprout! Worthy of a health warning .
Being struck down by a murderous gull and sustaining skull fracture: don’t eat chips in public.
Unsuspected current surge while having electrolysis: pluck instead.
Choking on a throat sweet.
Loo lockdown: door jams, stranded for days, death ensues.
Coital exertions leading to death on the job.
That made me properly laugh out loud, we need more of this.
That reminds of a true story I read in the paper awhile ago. A larger lady got trapped in a portaloo at a festival. It wasn’t until the sanitation company had come and winched the all the hire loos onto the lorry, driven it down the motorway, got it back the depot, hauled them off again, and were emptying them that they found her, distressed, covered in effluent, and very embarrassed.
And in Greece, nursing care (apart from meds and vitals) are provided by the family, washing, feeding, dressing, loo. A friend of mine had to nurse her father in law in intensive care, where he was for a heart attack induced by having sex with his (much younger) Albanian mistress.
I think at some point the risk discussion has to be had but it is very difficult. Who dies and how matters a lot. We all accept that cigarette smoking is diabolically bad compared with not smoking. But we let people do that. Air travel is massively safe but it puts the willies up so many of us. With the virus, others behaviour change your risk like drunk driving. It will be a tough one to get across. I too find people crossing the street in rural settings bizarre. We haven’t got bubonic plague.
Caswell Bligh’s model has now been confirmed by researchers. This from the Speccie:
Research: Covid-19 vulnerabilities
How many people would have to fight off Covid-19 to achieve collective (or ‘herd’) immunity? So far, we have heard that it’s around 60 per cent. But this assumes a uniform population with everyone mingling equally and being equally at risk of catching the virus. A new study, led by academics at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, adjusts for the fact that they don’t and they aren’t. The virus, they argue, could quickly infect the more susceptible part of the population – which will then become immune and stop spreading the disease. As Matt Ridley puts it, ‘if the virus runs out of highly-susceptible segments of the population (elderly, hospital settings etc), it may struggle to keep going in the rest of the population’. Adjusting for this, says the study, and the threshold for Covid-19 herd immunity falls to between 10 per cent and 20 per cent.
That is definitely very significant, and probably explains why the epidemics seem to have started to slow down pretty uniformly from country to country before lockdowns even took effect.
Very interesting. Lot of suspicion that only 15% are suceptible(the cruise ship).Also the curves are bending globally and the last five days decreasing deaths in the world. Is the paper available in a link?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v1
Many thanks.Very interesting.The fixation of achieving 60% herdimmunity might not be relevant. The antibodies produced might vary significantly.Today saw paradoxically a scientist mentioning an asymptomatic patient with very high levels but a severe case with low levels. I think the distinguished Prof Levitt in Israel already was spot on in early February by just studying death data that there was unknown resistance in the population just by looking at the growth figures of the curves.
Over the course of this I’ve seen a number of commentators (mostly non-medics looking just at the numbers, interestingly) – observe that the epidemics seem to follow a pretty standard path, with an early downturn, regardless of state policies, which has always been counter-intuitive and hard to explain. This is one way to explain it, imo.
See, for instance, this guy three weeks ago:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-prof-claims-simple-stats-show-virus-plays-itself-out-after-70-days/
I have found this rather interesting graph about the outbreak which seems to mirror very much the SARS outbreak 2003. I have no idea really how accurate this is but it is plotted daily to follow the world curve and the US curve with his R values
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1257102409572265984/photo/1
See my comment below regarding the trend of Rt over time. Seems to fit with this hypothesis. If my calcs are correct, Rt has been falling since 23rd February in England. This is so early that it cannot be related to lockdown or even news coverage, surely?
From New Zealand: https://envirowatchrangitikei.wordpress.com/2020/04/23/an-open-letter-to-jacinda-adern-re-covid-19/
Varying Reactions to Disaster :Boccaccio writing from Florence in 1348 as the Black Death took its toll.
“…Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety“
“One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbour troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs.“
Just to put our current meltdown into perspective.
Yersinia pestis is still one of the most lethal pathogens known, and while it can be treated with streptomycin and chloramphenicol, it is developing resistance in some parts of the world.
My personal GOAT (and the only person or thing to whom I’d ever consider erecting a shrine to/statue of) Dante Alighieri often called liars and lies “diseased”, “feverish”, “delirious”. I’m sure he’d view the current hysteria and delusion as a far greater malady than any actual illness. Even and especially because he lived back when…. you know…. plagues were plagues.
I’d be up for some civil disobedience but the irony is there’s little scope for that, pubs and restaurants and closed, no sporting events. I could drive a lot I suppose but that doesn’t appeal.
The frankly bonkers suggestion of immune passports where those that have had it can go out and those who haven’t stay in (and presumably never get it) just shows how far from reality our politicians and their advisers have strayed.
In theory we could have a protest rally on any open space. But we’d be reliant on electronic media to organise it and get people to come, with the possibility and risk that we’re being spied on. Going out in our cars en masse risks backfiring if emergency vehicles get held up by the congestion.
Immunity passports could have a use; if people were generally allowed out to go to work and get on with their lives but vulnerable elderly people continue to be isolated, an immunity passport could show that you are safe to visit an elderly relative, or anyone who is desperate for some human contact.
Fraser Nelson, The Spectator’s Editor, suggesting today that Sweden’s R number is the same as the UK’s and therefore we could/should follow their lead. I reckon that Fraser is a fellow Lockdown Sceptic.
All in the magazine’s daily podcast https://audioboom.com/posts/7573430-could-a-return-to-normality-come-before-a-vaccine
There’s something a bit odd in the stats. Thoughts welcome.
Based on the NHS England data available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/
It is possible to do a crude forecast of actual end-state deaths per day (which becomes increasingly accurate over time, of course) and hence to calculate a crude rolling estimate of Rt. I did this by calculating a 7-day moving average and then dividing R(t) by R(t-6), assuming a 6-day contagion cycle. Obviously this would then need to be time shifted back around 3 weeks to estimate the true date of R(t).
Anyway, the odd thing is that the R(t) has been decreasing continuously since the peak R, which was 12.4 about 3 weeks before 12/03 (albeit too small a sample size for this to be a realistic true estimate of R) down to 0.72 “today” (i.e. about 3 weeks before today in terms of infections). It was 0.76 1 week ago, 0.84 two weeks ago, and 1.02 three weeks ago.
Why would R(t) be continuing to fall even now? I would expect, with people getting weary of lockdown and some gradual un-locking-down, that R(t) would remain constant and not continue to drop? And why did it start dropping long before the lockdown in the first place?
Maybe Something to do with the fact that the virus may be getting less….. virulent as time goes on? So not only are less people circulating and transmitting it, but even the level of transmission in…..viral load terms is also getting smaller and therefore it’s also less transmitt*able over time as a result. ?
This makes sense in my head lol – it’s probably complete bollocks
Improved the calcs a bit and corrected for the lag and the effect is even more apparent. Rt 3 weeks ago was about 0.64; 4 weeks ago it was about 0.73; 5 weeks ago it was about 0.79. Rt dropped below 1 on 21st March but the peak of Rt was on around 23rd February!!!
It’s not reliably possible to calculate Rt for more recent days because of the lag time so it’s conceivable it could start rising again of course, although if that was happening you’d expect to see leading indicators such as increases in hospital admissions, which we’re not seeing.
Anyone want to check my logic?
Would it make a difference if the virus was in the country earlier than previously thought?
It might make the peak a bit less peaky, especially if you assume there were some undetected deaths before the first detected ones, but in terms of the timing of the peak it seems the most rapid spread was around 23rd February regardless of whether there were some earlier cases.
It would be good if you could keep a track on this going forward and update us regularly. Thank you
R is never a single number but different for different sub groups of the population as well as varying over time. For the 75% or so of households who are wholly staying at home and complying with the lockdown, it is effectively zero. Any ongoing transmission of cases is among the 25% of people still “in circulation” where at least one member of the household is still going out to work. Your observed value of Rt applies to this subset only, and is falling as there are fewer susceptible people in circulation. A value below 1 would indicate that herd immunity has already been achieved within this group.
The question is, what happens when the locked-down majority, who are overwhelmingly still susecptible, are released back into circulation.
Hopefully a good proportion of them already were exposed in January/February. Hopefully.
Yeah I get that, but why did overall Rt peak sometime mid-late February? On 3rd March when the first death occurred it was already dropping sharply and by the time the ICL model was released on 16th March, and the news coverage went into overdrive, it had already dropped to around 1.5?
I would have expected Rt to have peaked around the time the ICL model was released because there was minimal social distancing before then, as confirmed by the Apple Mobility Trends.
Seems to me that the explanation is that only a small proportion of the population is highly susceptible, as per the other post about the LSTM modelling.
Earliest Covid 19 case in France now shown to be 27 December.
‘Dr Yves Cohen, head of the emergency services ward at the Avicenne and Jean-Verdier hospitals near Paris, says he went back through the files of patients who had been admitted with flu symptoms in December 2019 and January 2020.
“Twenty-four percent of patients had symptoms which could have corresponded to Covid-19,”
http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200504-france-first-covid-19-case-dates-back-to-december-flu-retest-shows-pneumonia
And what goes on in France is unlikely to have stayed in France.
There are anecdotal suggestions that Britain had Covid 19 cases as far back as November 2019…….
To answer your last question, because it was freely among us for much longer than originally thought. If we believe the claim that it spreads like wildfire, it was running amock amongst us for around 6 weeks prior to lockdown. As a result of that, plus the subsequent lockdown (and remember, most of us are still going shopping etc, hence being around other people) there are fewer people to newly infect.
I registered as a COVID-19 volunteer before the lockdown started to help out those in isolation and also to deliver medication between hospitals and pharmacies. I was able to use the system from the 4th April and respond to alerts in my local area, but since this date there has not been one COVID-19 alert to help anyone. Other people have also commented in Facebook groups asking if the app is working as they’re not getting alerts either, but everyone is seeing the same, there has been no COVID-19 alerts.
I’m a bit bemused bit it all as there is meant to be this huge crisis going on with all these people ill at home and self isolating with this great need for volunteers, yet in the 4 weeks that have been the peak of the disease we have seen nothing of the sort!
Well the peak of the disease was pretty clearly back in early/mid-March, based on the death numbers alone. Either they suddenly got dramatically better at keeping people from dying after early April, or the rising case numbers after that are just an artifact, presumably, of increased testing. Otherwise, something very odd is going on.
In yesterdays blog very late was posted this new report in English from Robert Koch Institute about the Covid-19 in Germany. It is a must read so I take the liberty to reupload the report.
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-05-03-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
Highest priority to put in front of Boris Johnson. Remember, the full lockdown in Germany was 22nd March and anybody reading the curves would see that was AFTER the peak of infection. There were notably very few cases in kindergarten, schools etc. The median age of deaths was 82 years and that is the normal life expectancy in Germany. 87 % of deaths were in over 70. And now the last thing. They had almost the double amount of deaths over 100 years compared to deaths under 40 years.
For heavens sake, it must be possible to protect and quarantine the elderly instead of quarantine the working population. This is insanity. End the lockdown now.
Might we have a referendum on Lockdown-exit, proving the polls yet again wrong?
You mean let the sheeple decide? I think not!
Is there any better way to truly split a population into mutually loathing portions than have a referendum? And on something which is directly visible in their lives at every second? The EU referendum got half hating half, and back, for a question on matters of high politics and distant supply chains, imagine what the fury would be like if both sides actions at every moment of their daily lives drove the other to fury. The only right way to ask the public on this would be to ask each of them, and let each of them make the lockdown/freedom decision for themselves, which funnily enough is what us anti-lockdowners have been saying throughout.
Read Matt Ridley’s article, do some sunbathing, take some Vitamin D and within days the country can get back to normal.
On Star Wars day (May the fourth be with you…) this Quote from Star Wars – The Phantom Menace is especially apt, given the lockdown and the cult-like clapping for ‘Our NHS’.
“So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause”
Another anthem for lockdown sceptics:
Gimme Some Truth
by John Lennon.
NYT had a great piece on how many corners we would need to cut to get to a vaccine in 2021 and not in 2036….
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html
Are people really willing to inject themselves or graciously first their elderly parents with a vaccine that hasn’t had enough longterm trials and testing to show it is actually working and protecting them from Covid-19 and not destabilising their immune system any further? No need to be an anti-vaxxer to have alarm bells ringing here.
Maybe we need Toby to start a follow up site http://www.antiwufluvaxxers.com
NO! Lets concentrate on opposing the dangers of lockdown and the dangers of surveillance apps. Saying anything against vaccines gets one tarred with the anti-vaxxer brush and makes it far harder to find sympathy for anything ele you say.
The point was made at the end of the article that after 40 years we still have no effective vaccine for AIDS, but the disease has been effectively controlled via drug “cocktails”. The authors suggest that something similar may be the best way forward for Covid19.
Yes, I would agree that oral drugs are VASTLY better than the horrendous potential fallout from a rushed vaccine (more lethal than the virus, probably), BUT….BUT….BUT…
It’s the friggin’ elephant in the room again! How about optimising people’s chances of surviving any infection (and in healthy under 65s, the fatality risk is tiny anyway) by such things as checking vitamin D levels and tackling metabolic syndrome / insulin resistance via dietary advice? This article, for example?
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/04/13/how-to-defeat-coronavirus.aspx
IOW get people friggin’ healthier! Do people REALLY believe that the secret of good health comes in a bottle from Merck or Glaxo?
According to my GP, they do. Explains a lot.
Because GPs will only look at symptoms and not the cause (i.e. vitamin and mineral deficiencies)
Do GPs actually get paid to promote a certain company’s pharmaceuticals.? I don’t know but this guy seems to think so…
https://www.patrickholford.com/advice/how-gps-are-paid-to-prescribe-ineffective-drugs
Yes indeed. It is the “underlying” conditions that increase the risk incredibly. If obesity weren’t such a problem and we (and the USA) were healthier as a population then Covid would be less of an issue.
Given that the first in the queue will be the quivering extendthelockdownistas I’m all for it as a means of cleansing society of this panicdemic
EXPOSED: The Man Behind the Overblown COVID Predictions! | Louder with Crowder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQeorYF9A-k
Coronavirus reinfection fears appear to be unfounded
It seems that the 263 South Korean patients had not been reinfected at all
Ross Clark
https://spectator.us/coronavirus-reinfection-fears-appear-unfounded/
The preventable suicides of these young people as a direct result of lockdown. How is the lockdown “saving lives”? This is heart wrenching.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/25/teenager-19-kills-fears-will-stuck-inside-coronavirus-12453434/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8280901/Student-22-kills-mentally-overwhelmed-coronavirus-lockdown.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/boy-15-takes-life-after-21827680
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/excess-lockdown-homework-blamed-13-year-olds-suicide-1677414
Saw the news about the Loughborough student in the below. Truly awful.
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/local-news/mums-plea-after-22-year-4099294?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
And that paper totally fails to include any argument about how ending or relaxing the lockdown could have saved the student’s life. The herd can see the problem but just aren’t willing to conciously recognise what it really is.
I’ve been watching live the debate on the coronavirusregulations and I am utterly dismayed that each MP (so far) has asserted that the lockdown is necessary and that it has “without doubt” saved countless lives and that “following the science” has been the right path to take.
This is the problem with Peter Hitchens’ argument that we should have these issues debated in Parliament. All it generally achieves is to remind us, should we need reminding, of the lockstep, groupthink inadequacy of our political class. You do get the odd maverick speaking up, of course.
Even the odd mavericks are extremely thin on the ground these days.
In fact, off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of a single one in today’s parliament.
Did Steve Baker not come up to scratch as Toby anticipated, then?
Watched his speech on Youtube, started so well, describing the dystopian totalitarianism, then let himself down by trying to claim it was necessary.
Ok, so the usual pseudo-“opposition”. Thanks for watching it so I don’t have to..
Sadly, the maverick used to be Boris….
Hi Edna,
Why don’t you stop watching ?
Watching only encourages them.
The MSM, New York Times and WHO are now suddenly looking at Sweden with admiration. They have achieved this trick by portraying the Swedish model as a “voluntary lockdown”, i.e. one that is not so different in practice from their own brilliant lockdowns. According to the MSM, it does not really pose a threat to the pseudoscience-based lockdowns of the USA and the UK. I think, therefore, that the UK should in future be compared with a definitely politically incorrect non lockdown country: Belarus.
Although Belarus has adopted a traditional public heath response, with isolation, testing (rather much) etc., there is no risk of a lockdown being introduced by the current regime. The dictator Lukashenko is not a big fan of social distancing. Quotations:
“You just have to work, especially now, in a village […] there, the tractor will heal everyone. The fields heal everyone”. At the ice hockey rink.” “it is better to die on our feet, than live on your knees […] sport, especially on ice, is better than any antiviral medication, it is the real thing.” “People are afraid. Thus, I want to tell them the following: not a single person had died from coronavirus in our country. Not a single one! They died from a bouquet of chronic diseases, which they had.” “Utter nonsense. Children can not wear these masks, especially in schools. There was no such requirement. If there are those who required it, they will answer for it. It’s better to open the window and let fresh air in.”
Football matches are being played and preparations for the Victory Day parade on 9 May are going ahead. Looking at the country’s COVID figures today, we may observe that the increase in the number of infections seems to be slowing down and is reaching the peak. In per capita terms, Belarus’s case load is two thirds that of the UK, but the death rate in the UK is 38 times higher. The pandemic is not yet over, but it will be interesting to compare the end result of the two countries. While Belarus’s economy may remain largely intact, Boris Johnson’s brilliant leadership may cause the UK economy to nosedive to the level of Belarus. Let’s hope for the best.
The reality is that the likes of Lukashenko and Bolsonaro (two very different regimes) have given better leadership on this issue than any senior member of our own regime. Which should tell us more about the quality of our political and social elites than anything else, I think.
The Gove thing is quite ironic, isn’t it? He was the one who originally said that ‘people were sick of experts…’.
I think two misinterpretations were made.
1. The standard Guardian type commentator assumed that he meant that experts were useless; the mob was right; populism was better than science.
2. People like me argued that, in fact, he had made a profound point: the people knew instinctively when politicians were hiding behind ‘experts’, using ‘science’ as a cover for controversial decisions; going so far as cynically hiring their chosen ‘expert’ to justify a decision they wanted to take. Gove was a man of intellect, principle and ideas who was offering something altogether better.
Hah! I was wrong. I read too much into what he was saying. He was making a minor, politically-expedient point.
In fact he’s just as pathetic as the Guardian commentators. He is under the spell of the ‘experts’ just as badly as Boris ‘Winston’ Johnson.
I never had any doubt about that, he’s a weasel.
Dominic Spaffings around the same time said “Accuracy is for snake oil pussies”. As in, facts are useless and it’s better for people to vote on the basis of lies spread by tabloids and social media.
New video from the two American ER docs who were previously questioning the narrative:
https://youtu.be/3f0VRtY9oTs
Thank you.
Can anyone tell me what is the official median or average age of those recorded as UK virus deaths? I google this question but can’t get an answer. Is it 60? 65? 70? 75? 80? A link to check the figures would be nice. Thanks.
You’ll find mean, mode and median here.
https://massagehealth.co.uk/covid19_24/
That’s interesting. I don’t know why the BBC or national news media haven’t reported the figures you show. Nor the ONS or the NHS etc. So difficult to find out such basic facts.
To be honest I don’t know what the difference is between Mean Age, Median Age and Modal Age Interval.
So from your calculations I’m guessing the average age of those dying with or from Covid is like 81 years.
Life expectancy for men is about 79 and about 82 for women. So Covid is the same as life expectancy?
Great comment underneath the video:
The new mantra should be ‘my rights do not end where your fears begin.’
The Gangelt antibody study was officially published today:
https://www.ukbonn.de/C12582D3002FD21D/vwLookupDownloads/Streeck_et_al_Infection_fatality_rate_of_SARS_CoV_2_infection2.pdf/%24FILE/Streeck_et_al_Infection_fatality_rate_of_SARS_CoV_2_infection2.pdf
They found 15.5% prevalence in a population of 12597 with 7 covid-positive deaths, which works out to a headline IFR of about 0.35%.
But before you cower behind the sofa clutching a blanket, the average age of those 7 deaths was 80.8 (sd +/- 3.5 years). Excess deaths in Gangelt compared to the year before was 48 compared to 45. If you assume all 3 of those excess deaths were because of Covid-19 you have an IFR of 0.15%, which is consistent with all the other seroprevalence studies reported so far.
Lots of other interesting things in the study.
And that’s a 15.5% prevalence in a rather rural area. Must surely be higher in places like London.
Might be pretty comparable actually in social meltpot terms – Gangelt is the town in Germany that had the huge festival in like….. January… with thousands of people criss-crossing over the Austrian border, and mixing in huge crowds.
It’s actually further north, on the Dutch border. They had an early outbreak there supposedly but it certainly looks now that there are more cases in the south. And yes they had a carnival which is what they think spread it around.
Lol stand corrected. Whatever nationality there were, they were all drinking beer and having a laugh whilst catching corona. Back in the good old days.
It was also some time ago but they had a bit of a lockdown after it.
It corresponds to an R0 of 1.2 which I find plausible as the natural level for a place like that.
For whatever reason the epidemic has basically died out there (and had at the time they did the study) which makes it easier to measure IFR than in the middle of the epidemic when the number of infections may be doubling in the space of a week and you’re trying to correct for the number of days after infection it takes for antibodies to appear.
Great comment below the video: The new mantra should be ‘my rights do not end where your fears begin.’
Interesting…
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/hoax-fox-news-john-roberts-caught-hot-mic-discussing-covid-19-mortality-rate-technician-like-flu-video/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons
But even more interesting is the comment from the technician ‘Everybody here’s been vaccinated anyway’. WTF? If this is true does this mean:
1) there is a vaccine
2) if there is, it implies that Covid19 has been known about a lot lot longer than officially advised
3) I don’t even want to say it but… has this in fact been deliberately released and those in ‘the know’ have already been vaccinated against its effects?
Any thoughts?
Watched it. Just speculation and gossip. They giggle around the hoax comment. Not serious discussion.
This you will not find on the BBC or MSM. Do we think it is more probable that this new pandemic virus suddenly occurred from mammals in Wuhan instead from a possible mishap in the Virology lab (just in the middle of the outbreak) doing the actual investigations too dangerous to perform in the US?
https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-research-to-wuhan/
https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/AwardDetail?arg_AwardNum=R01AI110964&arg_ProgOfficeCode=104
click on award abstract to see the interesting project Fauci was funding
“3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
Interesting that the Obama administration in Oct 2014 put a moratorium on that research which Fauci seemed to ignore as the projects above was funded and obviously outsourced to Wuhan.
https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf
In light of recent concerns regarding biosafety and biosecurity, effective immediately, the U.S. Government (USG) will pause new USG funding for gain-of-function research on influenza, MERS or SARS viruses, as defined below. This research funding pause will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new USG gain-of-function research policy1. Restrictions on new funding will apply as follows: New USG funding will not be released for gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route. The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses, unless the tests are reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility and/or pathogenicity
Pure politics. Blame the Chinese – sort of. Pompeo said it was definitely them but then again there’s no evidence to support that.
Gain of Function research? Who actually knows what that means? But let’s ban it because it caused Covid in China. Did it? Read around on the topic. GoF is not one thing.
Gain of function and the research was to create a transmissible virus from a batvirus to humans. The reason for this was to be able to create vaccines in the end. Nobody is saying this was a biological attack or any deliberate attempt considering also the havoc in Wuhan. However, this type of work is extremely dangerous hence the Obama administration moratorium on this type of work in the US. There are some virologists who are saying it should be forbidden even when it is used for a vaccine purpose. Too dangerous. It is perfectly legitimate to investigate a possible mistake and leak especially since there have been mishaps in China previously with the SARS virus. China and the WHO did not make it easier when they suppressed a report from Taiwan in the beginning of January that it was human to human transmission. It would have been helpful to have had that information. That is not politics. It is common sense.
I agree that we should trace the cause and the spread. This takes time. It is not the immediate concern. The current finger pointing from the USA is all about their domestic politics. Remember WMD? I am not saying the Chinese are innocent. I am saying we need a proper investigation. No Trump’s “A lot of people are saying….”. I think Trump is implying a potential deliberate act. See what Lou Dobbs is saying. This is the problem – lifting it out of a scientific risk issue to global politics.
I see one of your links says that USG lifted the GoF ban in 2017 so it could have been the US!. I doubt it as the clear view is a Chinese start. It’s not clear and needs proper investigation.
Correct they lifted the ban 2017.US and especially Fauci at NIH is heavily involved in this.He payed for bat research at Wuhan,the most important lab for that research.US can’t use the full stick against China as they are indirectly themselves responsible, if it was an accidental leak.Legal procedures has been started by requesting Faucis e mails
https://twitter.com/NikolovScience/status/1257510225369681920/photo/1
Fauci has of course denied suggestions of a leak. This is a very poisonus chalice for the US. They can’t use the stick full out.
The bottom line for EVERYONE is Human Rights, no matter your politics, etc. Those absolute basics we should be able to agree on. Without freedom of speech and freedom of assembly we haven’t even a shadow of a democracy.
The focus on silly police stories – of which there are very few – and the “It came from a Chinese lab” detract from the focus of understanding the correct measures to take as Covid spreads. I wish Lockdown Sceptics would drop them. Overall there are very, very few issues with the police and where Covid came from is history. It’s about the UK today and tomorrow.
I think the lockdown was the right move with the poor data we had at the time. We alsoe saw the mess in Italy and Spain. The data that we have now is much greater and still flawed. We must have a much better grip on who it strikes. Arguing about the lockdown in the past seems a waste of time. It has happened. We know the damage being done to the vast majority of people’s lives firstly because the NHS will tell you all the damage happening on the non-Covid health side. We know more about protection and transmission – not fully though. We know children are pretty much immune and could all catch it – the problem is not to them but to whom they pass it on to. There is a whole picture that can be built up to inform what we do next.
The blanket message of “you are all at risk from a deadly virus” needs to be changed. Talking about “saving our economy” or “our jobs” I think is a big mistake. It’s not the economy as an abstract idea of say GDP or the FT Index. It’s increased death, disability, undetected illness. There is way, way too much emphasis on the Covid deaths – is it 441 today or 467? It really doesn’t matter. The numbers aren’t that precise but we miss the real issue that others will die as we shut everything down including the NHS unless it’s for Covid.
The key question for what we do next is “What goals are you trying to achieve?” I am not sure the 5 chosen are quite right. The overall target must be that very difficult one to measure, “The best outcome for the most people.”
You won’t be calling them “silly police stories” when you have to show a policeman that you’re ‘immune’ before you can go anywhere.
And you really have to figure out what actually caused the outbreak to avoid it happening again.
“Where Covid came from is history” — Well yes. And you know what happens to people who don’t study history – it ends up repeating itself.
I agree that of course we need to work out where it came from and why – and look at how it was handled by China and the WHO. However, none of those things have anything to do with whether we reopen schools, distance 1 or 2 metres etc.
The stories about people being “told off” for wearing jeans or buying potted plants in the supermarket are silly. They are bizarre one off occurrences. It’s not the start of some super state. Now the tracing app could be a very different matter.
I agree with your statement that lockdown skepticism should not be seen as primarily about protecting the economy. This has led to the “lives versus money” polarisation which is ridiculous.
The focus should be on the possible disastrous HEALTH consequences – loss of life from undiagnosed / untreated illness (I think Karol Sikora predicted 50,000 unnecessary cancer deaths by year end, if lockdown continues), from suicides (see the comments above for tragic stories that have already happened), and from spousal and parental abuse; a likely epidemic of mental illness, and the ultimate disaster – collapse of the NHS from lack of tax revenue.
(And then, on top of all THAT – the economy will be buggered as well.)
Perhaps the strapline should be “protect the NHS – end the lockdown!”
I respectfully disagree. The Swedish epidemiologists sat down in January and found that there was not any evidence that lockdown was useful. There was only very small evidence that school closures was effective. Ironically the WHO published guidelines for pandemic influenza in Oct 2019 which clearly stated that there was no evidence for lockdown and large staged closures was not feasible in a new pandemic influenza. The Swedish response was the normal evidence public health response for a new respiratory virus. It was instead the rest of the world experimenting with the lockdown. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong did not do any lockdown when they were first hit by the virus. Why did Italy import the lockdown model from the authoritarian China? Now we have the pandemic of lockdowns far worse than the pandemic of the virus.
Exactly. The Swedish response is the refutation of the claim that coercive lockdown was “the right move…at the time”, just as the Swedish experience refutes the idea that coercive lockdown was necessary at all. As Levitt said:
“”I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. “
I would differ. It was a judgement call based on limited data. Most of the world called it one way, the Swedes went a slightly – not radically – different way. That’s not to say the majority are right but it does suggest that the cautious move was the more popular. The scientific evidence wasn’t unequivocally with Sweden.
Anyway, none of this matters for now. It is with the evidence and data today which is a lot greater. What do we do next and why? It could well be lockdown was a misstep but that’s not today’s problem.
Please inform me where I can find that evidence.The lockdown people used a previous untested theoretical model. The onus is now on them to prove that it worked. That is how evidence is found.
Yes. I agree that the evidence is on all to show what appears to have worked at what not. For me the big question in all of this is “What are you trying to achieve?”. Success measured against what? The first objective for the UK was to stop the runaway spread. We are there. What role the lockdown played exactly remains to be seen. I think it was a sensible thing to do to stop the spread given where we were. But…. what now. You cannot stay locked. I think any sensible analysis will show its doping more harm than good. You cannot go back to where we were. So what are the steps?
France has traced the first infection to December 2019. How far behind that was the UK with its first infections? We don’t know.
The point is, the virus was prevalent in the UK for a long time before the lockdown was introduced. If it had an R0 of 3 at the early stages of the outbreak, then it must have infected millions of us. Can’t have it any other way.
As a result, the lockdown came too late and wasn’t necessary. If the R3 is to be believed, 6 weeks (the amount of time between the first recorded infected case in the UK and lockdown starting) is sufficient time for huge numbers of the population to get infected. Did we see a massive, devastating spike in cases and deaths before lockdown? No, is the only answer.
Let’s face it. The UK got a lockdown on the same principle as applied by the panic buyers who stocked up on toilet paper. It was stupid and unnecessary, bur everybody else was doing it.
Can’t speak for others, obviously, but for me this almost entirely misses the point. Getting out of the lockdown is vital, yes, but it will happen over the next few weeks most likely because (fortuitously and no thanks to the lockdown advocates, who just got lucky) it seems likely this disease is self-limiting, at least for now. What matters is that it never happens again, either when this virus resurfaces or another one appears. And for that, the whole idea of locking down a nation instead of protecting the vulnerable in response to a disease needs to be discredited.
And no, the decision to go for lockdown on March 23 absolutely was not “the right move…at the time”. It was an irresponsible gamble with the entire economy of the country motivated by panic and fear of getting blamed for inaction, and based on a foolish over-attention to a few very poorly chosen advisers. We will be paying for it for years at best, and that’s assuming none of the systemic collapse possibilities arise. Just because you presumably agreed with it at the time doesn’t make it any less stupid. It just means you were part of the problem back then. You probably had an excuse of reasonable ignorance back then, as most people did, unlike the experts and politicians responsible for the decision.
Try not to be part of the problem again, now that you should know better.
Well said.
My point was that arguing about whether it was necessary or not right now is of no use. We won’t know for sure for a while once we have a better understanding. I could tell you that you would have “taken an irresponsible gamble with the health of the nation”. I am not sure that would help any. I can agree with you today that the next step needs to be taken with the data – all the data not just the recent deaths from Covid.
BY saying “you were part of the problem back then”, we head for division. I was at home. I wasn’t in government and nobody asked me whether to lockdown or not. So I was not part of the problem. The you add in I am ignorant. What use is that now? The issue is tomorrow. Name calling never helps.
Fwiw, I said that you “probably had an excuse of reasonable ignorance back then, as most people did”, which is absolutely not calling you ignorant as an insult. It’s just pointing out that you, like most people, presumably had no reason to know anything about the issues at the time. That’s what we think we have a government for, and it’s only when they let us down as badly as this that we need to educate ourselves on such arcane matters.
I understand your point that it is “of no use” arguing about whether it was necessary or not at the time. I just disagree wih it. Those responsible hope to get out of this with a general view that what they did saved us from worse, and they will get away with it if they are allowed to focus on dealing with today’s problems.
Have you never noticed that the first resort of a politician caught in the wrong is “let’s move on”?
OK. I think we are sort of on the same page. I would like to see a full public enquiry and some solid journalism & scientific investigation around this once we have more information. For me the let down is not the lockdown per se, it’s the piss poor response in terms of testing, PPE, clarity of mission and communications.
I am convinced the lockdown will go on longer than needed because we don;t have the PPE and probably more importantly the testing in place. Moreover the government has made everyone focused and obsessed on the daily death figures for Covid. What about all the other problems that the lockdown has caused? There’s death and destruction there. I am guessing that it’s death of younger more productive people with dependants. I don’t know. But that for me is the issue. Even here there’s arging about the lockdonw “Crap idea. We know because….” “Look at Sweden….” But Sweden is totally different from here. We know about here and what has happened over the last six weeks. That’s what matters.
Dream on, dreamer lol
Well there was some risible BBC melodic shit on earlier – you know the sort… ‘we’ll meet again’ ‘we’ll hug our loved ones again’… when I heard the now totally discredited kunsberg state ‘until we have no new cases of the virus’ … There you have it people: NO CASES. That’s the BBC line folks, you are paying your licence fee for that deranged way of thinking.
I won’t be paying my licence fee any more after this. Tbh I hardly watch live tv any more anyway
“I think the lockdown was the right move with the poor data we had at the time. ”
I don’t take that as a given. There were people even before it happened (me) who knew that it was a self-justifying policy that could not be lifted once imposed. For me, the lockdown was the ‘doomsday scenario’ and I felt physically sick when Johnson did his U-turn on herd immunity.
It would have been a perfectly reasonable strategy to have thought about what measures were tolerable in terms of freedom and constitutional rights and so on, and what measures the economy could reasonably have been expected to withstand. Testing of people coming into and out of the country, promotion of washing of hands, social distancing, temporary voluntary quarantining of the frail and elderly would all have been perfectly reasonable approaches, all the while being careful not to terrify the population so thoroughly that society stopped functioning. As we have seen, most people could be persuaded to go along with moderate measures without recourse to the keystone cops.
And then, just as with every other form of human activity that carries a risk (e.g. crossing the street, breathing during the annual flu season), whatever would have happened would have happened – that’s life. Had it been presented in a reasonable way, the public would have responded as they would respond to any other killer flu pandemic – tragic, but no one’s ‘fault’.
As it is, the government has taken the virus onto its shoulders, putting itself in the firing line to be blamed for every death – including the unknowable numbers that will follow as a consequence of the implosion of the economy. What idiots they are!
“For me, the lockdown was the ‘doomsday scenario’ and I felt physically sick when Johnson did his U-turn on herd immunity.”
Me too. I prefer the Conservatives to the other parties on offer and I was willing to give Johnson the benefit of the doubt generally. I was concerned in early March that we were already over-reacting even before the coercive lockdown, but I genuinely thought the situation might be one where Johnson’s strengths and his self-image as a protector of traditional liberties and attitudes etc could help. I hoped for a posturing, Churchillian courageous stand against the fearmongers.
When instead we got that catastrophic, rank panic reaction on March 22/23rd I was genuinely shocked and almost, like you, felt physically sick.
Along with the systemic societal problem,s we have, this was a very profound personal failure by Johnson, sad to say.
But what really matters now is to utterly discredit the whole notion of coercive lockdowns in response to diseases, for good. It must never happen again.
What a brilliant summation.
This just cheered me up no end.
COVID-1984 – Paul Joseph Watson on top form
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCc2JsAUkwU
The ‘new normal’ may be even worse than lockdown…
My jaw literally dropped when I read the government plans on how to ease out of lockdown. It’s like something out of a science fiction movie. God help us all! If this is what life will be like on the other side, I think I will leave the UK for good! Scary stuff.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/04/new-normal-may-even-worse-lockdown/
What makes you think leaving will be any use?
This is being rolled out globally in case you haven’t noticed?
Time for running away is over.
You must stand tall.
I’m kinda glad I got paywalled…..
I think this will be the next big fight after the primary ‘lockdown’ starts unwinding. But at least this is getting picked up in the media. And given how reliant the UK economy is on ‘services’ and leisure the lockdown ‘easement’ will still not resolve a lot of the problems..
And the reason this gibbering, raving, frothing-at-the-mouth madness is to be accepted and adhered to? It says so in the article:
BECAUSE OVER HALF THE POPULATION ARE STILL FRICKIN’ TERRIFIED OF THE VIRUS!!
For the love of God, can’t somebody….somewhere…..anybody (as long as it’s not Neil bloody Ferguson) step up to the microphone and say:
THIS IS NOT THE BLACK DEATH! THIS IS NOT THE BLACK DEATH! GET BACK TO BLOODY WORK YOU SIMPERING PUSSIES!
(Or words to that effect…..with a lot more “sciencey” phrases and with the orator wearing a lab coat and stethoscope.)
75th anniversary of VE Day coming up. Wonder how our weak-kneed, scared-of-their-own-shadow citizens would have reacted if they’d made up the population of this country in the summer of 1940. Probably dived under their comfort blankets, sucking their thumbs and clutching their teddy bears. Emerging months later into a fascist dystopian nightmare.
(A bit like 2020 then, really……)
Doesn’t help when top scientists and the BBC are actively misleading people with deceptive headlines and fearmongering false comparisons:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52473524
Well said! If you’d ventured out of your front door on 8th May 1945 to celebrate VE day the risk of dying or getting seriously ill from Polio, TB, or countless other things was way way higher than any risk from Covid-19 is now. At least you would have been escaping temporarily from your asbestos ceiling though.
Stop insulting pussies! If lions and tigers can catch coronavirus, then these vicious little predators could be spreading it along with the half-eaten mice they leave on the carpet.
One thought about this NHS spying surveillance app. We know the only people who will download it are the fearful sheep. I never will. Therefore only these idiots will be the ones that will end up quarantining themselves. I would love for the Isle of Wight to give it the finger and not download the fucking thing… But given the hysterical state of the the rest of this nation that’s a pretty forlorn hope
The good doctors from CA speak again, and my, don’t they sound reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f0VRtY9oTs&feature=youtu.be
And my good British friends, it appears that more than half of you are now state-supported, if you include state jobs, pensioners, the furloughed, and I suppose the dole. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/05/04/half-adults-now-paid-state/?utm_content=telegraph&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1588625847
That doesn’t seem…. sustainable.
Stateside, things are opening up, with maximum theatre but still. My cat has an appointment at the vet tomorrow! The human has to wait in the car; the assistant will come out to collect the cat and return her after examination.
Also, my dentist has opened, though we have to call the office from our cars so the nurse can come take our temperatures, and then we must cover our faces in the office. Which will make dental cleanings interesting….
What
This is not complicated – it’s a common cold. All the rest is atmospherics.
The common cold is a great deal more dangerous to the aged and infirm than influenza:
‘Unexpectedly Higher Morbidity and Mortality of Hospitalized Elderly Patients Associated with Rhinovirus Compared with Influenza Virus Respiratory Tract Infection’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5343795/
That being said, Britain has had, is having, a really bad ‘minor medical coronavirus epidemic’. Why?
SAGE? Too many cooks……and a new, relatively young and inexperienced government, poorly served by the state bureaucracy, state health administrators and state broadcaster.
The indictment: over reaction exacerbating a minor viral epidemic causing excess deaths in England amongst the 15-64 age group that no other country in Europe has suffered; either that or data manipulation; take your pick.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country
The setting up of an impartial, fearless, enquiry into this fiasco is now the imperative that will determine this government’s fate at the next election and beyond; for the next local elections the conservative party is already doomed.
What a shambles!
Prime Ministers don’t almost die in ICU from common colds.
You clearly haven’t read the reference:
‘Rhinovirus infection in the adults was associated with significantly higher mortality and longer hospitalization when compared with influenza virus infection.’
Reference above
‘A recent large study of patients of all ages hospitalized with respiratory illnesses demonstrated that rhinoviruses and coronaviruses accounted for 5.1% of illnesses’
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/185/9/1338/938156
The Prime Minister himself admitted a while ago that he was ‘pushing 17 stone’ which, at 5 foot 9 inches tall, would make him clinically obese.
‘We have demonstrated that adults that are underweight or morbidly obese are more likely to be hospitalized from an influenza‐like illness, regardless of the causative agent of the illness, than normal‐weight adults.’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6304312/
‘Obesity can alter the body’s immune response and lead to chronic inflammation, which increases with age, in addition to making breathing more difficult and increasing the need for oxygen.’
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802102406.htm
The common cold, including a number of coronaviruses and rhinoviruses, is deadly for the obese, no matter what their age.
Given that nicotine is an appetite suppressant and appears to offer some protection against coronaviruses, the punitive taxation of tobacco appears to have been yet another in a long line of expensive errors of judgement on the part of this country’s state health administrators.
Sorry. Your contention that covid-19 is a common cold is simply wrong. It’s your opening line. I agree with some of your other observations. There might well be an overreaction and the negative effects of the lockdown simply seem to be being ignored and not even talked about. That doesn’t require us to believe that the virus is just a cold.
So you believe him? He was in ICU, but was only on oxygen, via a face mask? But plans were being made in the event of his death? Ok, sure thing.
Or, putting it more briefly, panic, cowardice and stupidity.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/05/virus-of-mass-destruction/
Yes, I agree totally. There has to be inquiries, world wide into this. This bug was not dangerous and Big Brother has over reacted.
The IFR of Covid19 is the same as the flu and many humans are not susceptible to this virus for genetic reasons:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.024752v1. As other studies have shown, herd immunity can therefore be reached for many populations if only 20% or more are infected. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v1 The loss of life will therefore be low.
Any future similar viral outbreak must be met with evidence based measures and not result in the locking up of the healthy.
I wonder if Neil Ferguson sleeps at night. I suspect he probably does – he’s an oddbod. But if I were him, I wouldn’t be sleeping.
He probably created his model genuinely with the best of intentions. He probably wasn’t even aware of the conflicts of interest between Imperial College’s funding and the promotion of a vaccine.
But he now ‘owns’ this economic and societal disaster. For sure, it’s the politicians who really own it, but they are on record as saying they are being “led by the science” – specifically his science. They may have their own reasons for the sinister things they are doing, but they’re putting Ferguson in the frame for it.
Ferguson’s name is now well-known to the public in the UK and around the world. In a video yesterday, a US commentator was calling Ferguson ‘Patient Zero’, in the psychological pandemic that has changed everyone’s lives. At the moment, he is lucky that they mainly just ridicule him – they know his previous record of disastrous predictions. But does it occur to Ferguson that he, personally, may have ushered in the start of the true Orwellian surveillance society? Or a global depression the likes of which have never been seen before? War? Or even the fall of Western civilisation? That he may have temporarily saved some doctors from fatigue and having to make difficult decisions, but then caused the deaths of millions?
And that his name is known to everyone? That he will be recorded in the history books alongside Robert Oppenheimer and Lee Harvey Oswald?
What an incredible situation for him to be in.
“Following the science”
My friend said to me the other week, is it science in the first place if it hasn’t be peer reviewed ?
“Peer reviewed” is not a good test of whether something’s science, it’s just a count of how many friends you have. So Fergie doesn’t have many friends (except in the government)… but this attribute is shared by lots of good as well as bad scientists. You have to look at the actual method, results and conclusion and decide whether you agree with them.
A model is just a model and the outputs depend on the inputs. I don’t know if the Imperial code is wrong because I haven’t checked it, but we can see easily that both the inputs and outputs are pretty far off (the inputs they used are on github together with the source) based on current knowledge.
Somebody made a very good point yesterday though which is that he never modelled the effect of isolating the elderly. That’s a pretty big oversight when modelling strategies for dealing with a virus that so heavily disproportionately harms the elderly.
I think also because his model is so complicated it has an awful lot of inputs, but then you have to ask how do the errors in estimating all those inputs propagate throughout the model. When there are so many this becomes very complicated quickly.
This is why it may be better to use a simpler model with only 2 or 3 inputs (like a basic SIR model) and then run it under ranges of them to get a feel for where reality might fit in. This is more like what Gupta and those guys did in the Oxford paper. If you only have a couple of inputs you can vary them both across plausible ranges and just see what happens. If you have 20 inputs then even just trying combinations of “high” and “low” for them gives you over a million combinations.
With a regular SIR model you can also actually do the math to work out the sensitivity of the model to uncertainties in the inputs which would be practically impossible with Ferguson’s more complicated model.
Read your comment and, for some reason unbeknown to me, I started thinking about Rasputin – ‘The ‘mad monk’,… a wild-eyed sorcerer who steered Russia towards chaos‘…, ‘a con-man who preached a religious doctrine’,…. ‘reputation as a faith healer saw him summoned to the court of Tzar Nicholas II where he secured a place as the Czarina’s closest advisor’.
We all know what happened to Rasputin and the Tzar and his family, of course.
Just saying……
Oppenheimer was, at least, aware of the enormous damage his research could do to the world. Not sure this guy is even aware or bothered about it.
“In a video yesterday, a US commentator was calling Ferguson ‘Patient Zero’, in the psychological pandemic that has changed everyone’s lives.”
LOL! That’s very good.
It’s harsh and a bit unfair, because Ferguson was not the initiator of the panic, which in many ways was already baked into our cowardly and sentimental societies and was already being pushed by no end of media and celebrity and politician “influencers” long before his model came along and was used to enable the full panic reaction. But it has that sting of underlying truth about it that’s going to make it stick in many quarters.
But he’s basically safe. Like Blair on Iraq, too much of our political, media and social establishment have been complicit in this for him to be allowed to g down fully. Most likely, like Blair, he’ll not lose anything but reputation, but the last will haunt him to his grave.
This is a couple weeks old, hope we get the results of this soon, could be huge. Stanford University’s Dr Jay Bhattacharya who worked with Prof. John Loannidis on the Santa Clara study is working with MLB to get a nationwide study.
Still no results from PHE ??
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/sports/baseball/major-league-baseball-coronavirus-study.amp.html
Researchers in Paris say analysis of samples from 2 individuals hospitalized on Dec 2, 2019 shows they had #COVID19. Neither had traveled outside of France recently, & never to China. This pushes back the earliest non-Chinese case by well over a month.
https://t.co/RT05BNb4yU
https://twitter.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1257451607853334529?s=19
Beat me to it! But this really increases the need for a decent serotological study round Paris/ London, to understand how far it spread.
There are of course supposedly several strains of the virus, with the first ‘A strain’ supposedly less virulent. So could be this spread round before when the later strain arrived and did more damage
It could be that all the asymptomatic cases are because of cross-immunity from an earlier (very mild) strain. This could explain studies in homeless centres and prisons that found even higher than usual (for Covid-19) asymptomatic cases. If they had an earlier strain they probably would have all had it together.
Certainly these cases from December are interesting because as discussed the other day it’s hard to see how this virus can have started _that_ early. It’s only really possible if we were missing a whole bunch of critical cases and even deaths. But I guess we could have been.
It could aslo be said to demonstrate the detection of Covid-19 is subject to vagueries. Saying there are different strains is indistinguishable from saying it has common elements with other Corona viruses.
Fundamentally there is no unique Covid-19 signature – it is a case of searching for evidence to fit a preordained narrative. The test looks for a piece of RNA. A better test is to look under a Electron microscope at blood and see the celluar material. The PCR test is not meant to diagnose as depending on amplification levels you can get what you ever you want.
Celia Farber wrote about this a while back:
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/04/07/was-the-covid-19-test-meant-to-detect-a-virus/
It’s the same with serological tests – they are looking for a type of antibodies determined to be those from Covid-19. But if you don’t know what is Covid-19 then your test has large uncertainties.
All we can go on is the subset of people who have had acute respiratory symptoms. That is a small subset of people. If that could be called the Covid-19 Condition then track that. But as we know this hasn’t been done.
It’s all vagueries with vagueries. And because people often don’t challenge “the science” you get an environment ripe for fear
So France has announced that it’s first case of COVID was back in December. The real importance of this is that this case was due to a transmission IN France, the patient in question had not been outside of France. This must throw most of the models out, as well in vastly increase the number of people who have had the disease.
Good morning! I’ve been reflecting on the fact that it is VE Day on Friday and that we’re having a bank holiday (is there one for VJ day?). Anyway, I was looking forward to this as for years I’ve wondered why we haven’t had a bank holiday on 8th May, especially since other countries do, like France, for example. Now I have mixed emotions: pride at what our forefathers did to protect and win our freedom, yet shame to see that same freedom so easily abandoned over the past six weeks as people cower in their homes over the exaggerated threat of Covid19. I will struggle with the hypocrisy of all the rhetoric that we will no doubt hear from Boris Johnson et al, yet I will be quietly thankful that our current generation and government wasn’t around back then as I don’t think we’d have stood much of a chance!
BTW – still no news on the petition to Parliament, it is still pending review! I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt initially but I think it’s at least three weeks now so it seems decidedly suspicious.
My MP wrote to me comparing covid deaths to civilian casualties during WW2! I’m so angry, I’ve been able to construct a reply that doesn’t turn into a rant, but I will.
One thing I’m taking comfort from is before we got to the point where young men were willing to lie about their health and age so they could go and defend our freedom, we did go through a period of huge complacency, and the phoney war, after a period of trying to appease. It wasn’t instantaneous, that calculation that Brits made that being dead was a better outcome than not being free. I am hoping that still might be the case with this, that people will eventually see this for what it is.
*unable
Very good point about the phoney war, thanks.
Can’t believe they compared it to WW2 civilian casualties, that is so distasteful.
We got a thing through the letterbox this morning from some neighbours who’ve organised a VE day picnic in the garden. So on Thursday we get to go out and do our social conditioning exercises on the doorstep, then the day after we get to go out and celebrate those who died to ensure we never had to do such social conditioning exercises. Oh, the irony. The terrifying irony.
“Make sure to adhere to social distancing guidelines!”
Actually I think I’m gonna rechristen ‘social distancing’ ‘social conditioning’.
I’ve been an effort to call everything what it is instead of the buzzword they’re pushing. So ‘contract tracing’ is ‘Orwellian surveillance’. ‘Protect the NHS’ is ‘Dying to keep hospital beds empty’. ‘The New Normal’ is ‘The New Tyranny’.
I have just listened to Matt Hancock (interview on the radio) urge people to download the government’s app. Apparently this will offer us ‘freedom’. My breakfasts are becoming more dystopian by the day…
Oh yes, people will know to ‘do the right thing’! Yeah, I know I do, the right thing is to not download the app! I’m even thinking of buying a ‘dumb’ phone that I can take out with me in case they make it compulsory on smart phones! Oh dear, now I’m getting paranoid!
I’m quite willing to flush my smart phone down the loo. If you have facebook take it off your phone, there’s some jiggery pokery going on with their ‘off facebook’ tracking (in fact I think google maps also does that even if you have location turned off). I’m leaving my phone at home when I leave the house these days, and quite willing to do without it all together. I’m also suspicious that they’ll use debit card data, so back to cash for me.
I have already bought a Nokia 6310 – £20 on eBay. Expect the price to go up if there’s a run on them though.
Yeah, I was looking at one on Tesco yesterday but I couldn’t tell if it still had internet or apps, it was only a fiver with a top up.
I ditched my smart phone a couple of years ago for a Nokia 105. It’s great and just like the old days, the battery last for ages. May just get another one before they become ‘obselete’
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B081DDS4HK/ref=crt_ewc_title_huc_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
Matthew Hancock’s press conference was entertaining. Asked about the vaccine he couldn’t rule out to make it compulsory for children. Luckily for him there was an adult in the room from Public Health England who discreetly nodded to him and said that children were perhaps not at big risk for this killer virus. Matthew Hancock is a good example how a very young man in a remarkable short period of time can reach his level of incompetence.
Matthew Hancock is a good example how a very young man in a remarkable short period of time can reach his level of incompetence.
100%
Agreed mostly , ‘reach’? ‘Massively surpass’ seems more the thing!
“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them”
Oh dear! Check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMwXlOQLu44&feature=youtu.be
I think Mr Johnson has had to eat his own words!
As others have already pointed out re Boris – ‘Forget Churchill, he is more Neville Chamberlain’.
Agreed!
I think Grand Old Duke of York better fits the bill.
With Greta as his wife-to-be.
Great stuff. It’s posted on a left wing Youtube channel, though. Notice how confused the commenters are. They’re not quite sure what to say about it, because if they mock Johnson’s eventual capitulation to panic then they’re mocking their own ‘stance’ and indirectly applauding what he’s saying in the speech – and of course they hate that idea even more.
So in the end, it’s only people like us who can fully appreciate the irony, the utter lack of principles of the man, and the depth of the betrayal he has perpetrated.
Possibly the only things he has not been eating. Should the obese self-isolate?
Fraser Nelson is definitely a Lockdown Sceptic. He wrote the following on The Spectator site yesterday:
“[Imperial College’s] modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June. The latest figure for Sweden is 2,680 deaths, with daily deaths peaking a fortnight ago.” and “given that Sweden achieved what Imperial College had thought undoable, without the surveillance or the tech or the loss of liberty, its lessons are also worthy of consideration.”
The full article is behind a paywall but you can get access to a number of articles for free if you register.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-tames-its-r-number-without-lockdown
Cue someone saying that Sweden are really locked down in all but name – that their road traffic is way down or some such. It’s because they’re more grown-up than us, apparently. Their government didn’t have to get heavy-handed.
However, until a couple of weeks ago, the same people were furious with Sweden’s ‘reckless experiment’. When the disaster didn’t happen, they changed the narrative.
I agree that this is how the spin may well go from here.
Fraser Nelson has been sceptical for a few weeks on the spectator’s podcast. I think his wife is Swedish, which may give him some insights.
I’m probably being over-optimistic here, but I hope that if any publication has some influence over Boris then its the spectator as he was once it’s editor.
If Boris hadn’t caught it would we still be locked down? I doubt it.
My Swedish collaborators are preparing to go back to work and have already sent the kids back to childcare. They were a bit worried about their governments approach at first but looking at the mess in the UK and other countries they are grateful. There is still quite an economic and productivity hit due to a lot of Europe being hidden behind lockdown!
HOSPITAL ADMISSIONS
We need honesty about the relevant data, if we are to make a rapid escape from where we are now.
At yesterday’s Gov’t briefing, Jonathan Van-Tam referred to “steady but absolutely consistent declines” in hospital admissions in England; he then showed the chart linked here:
In fact, his chart shows the total numbers still in hospital, so doesn’t prove his point on the daily trend of admissions. He must have data on daily hospital admissions resulting from Covid (rather than admissions for other reasons but then testing +ve once admitted).
This data, analysed by age to identify those over and under working age (say 65), would help put into context the real cost-benefit analysis of business closure. [I know there are outliers but 65 is a sensible cut-off). I suspect it would show how small the peanut is, that the lock-down sledgehammer is being used to crack.
As for the many over-65’s of my acquaintance (ie most of my 70 fellow members who would come to the bridge club each week), those who saw themselves at risk were already self-isolating well before 23 March, without being needing to be nannied by the state.
EXCESS DEATHS
Still, my main worry is that nobody has adequately explained the appalling ‘excess deaths’ performance by England compared to every other country (significantly worse than France and Italy – only Spain comes close) on this link:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country
referenced in Tom Bidie’s post above.
I can’t believe that the stats are being manipulated, but it provides good evidence for lock-downers to continue ours far longer than everywhere else.
I do agree. Who is dying is very important. A 30 year old with a family to support losing many years of life ahead and a weakened family is very different from a 75 year old. So are their risk mitigation factors and exposure factors. The 30-year old is less at risk if she catches it and more likely to be exposed because of the young children.
All this is crucial in ending the lockdown. We get nothing from government.
I attempted to make that highly logical observation and was roundly accused of wanting old people to die.
The Sunday People’s front page was indicative of how this Nation seems to see Covid. Broadly an 86 year old in a care home had been “sacrificed” because of the government response to this. The Government handling aside how is an already unwell 86 year old dying of flu newsworthy? Gone are the days when we’d say they’d had a good innings but sadly the end comes to us all. We now seemingly expect everyone to live forever in the rudest of health in old age but have no care for the social, financial, mental or educational impact on those expected to pick up the tab.
I’ve experienced the same, countless numbers of times: pneumonia and variants used to be known as ‘the old man’s friend’, as a speedy death and release were virtually assured.
Now , we are incapable of accepting that it is entirely natural for the very old and sick to die before the young and robust. This is nature and we’ve become so divorced from it and so risk averse that we can no longer acknowledge that life will eventually end for all of us.
Lest I be denounced as a hypocrite, I have a living will and do not expect to be kept alive in a state of miserable and messy dependency.
Before this all kicked off, the MSM were endlessly engaged in reporting about the ageing society and how to manage it.
Now we’re all expected to live for ever like the Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels.
The fact that many of those who have succumbed to covid have been in the end stages of dementia, heart failure and general debility seems to have escaped the media’s rational faculties,if ever there were any.
Young and economically active people’s lives and prospects cannot go on being sacrificed in this way.
Read this for some context on z-scores and the timing of the pandemic: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30651/
Thanks for posting this. I’m not a statistician, so all this is a bit complicated, but is this article saying that the reason it appears we have so many excess deaths is that Covid 19 is like a late “flu” epidemic and had the deaths been spread out over the normal flu season we would hardly have noticed them? It would make sense to me if so, as according to ONS data, 9 out of the first 16 weeks of this year have had a lot lower number of deaths than the five year average for the corresponding weeks.
Pretty much yes. Also the deaths are in April rather than in the winter. Hence hysterical headlines about record numbers of deaths usually end up saying it’s a record for the last week of April or something. When you plot the whole year you get a bit more perspective.
The stats are being manipulated. I know this from a GP recording care home deaths. No matter what primary cause is = covid on death certificate
Now that there seems to be the beginnings at least of a general recognition of the superiority of Sweden’s approach, it’s amusing to look back on some of the most egregiously bad coverage of that country over the past few weeks. Mark Brolin should be thoroughly ashamed of the hit piece he wrote in the Telegraph less than three weeks ago:
Sweden has shown how not to tackle coronavirus, as it fights now to save face
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/16/sweden-has-shown-not-tackle-coronavirus-fights-now-save-face/
I just sent a reply to my MP, it included the following:
”Speaking ahead of post-Brexit trade talks on 3 February 2020, in Greenwich, London, the Prime Minister said this:
‘…and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then, at that moment, humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange…’
Whilst presumably trying to hint that his government would be the government to make the case for freedom of exchange, the fact remains that the Prime Minister did panic in the face of coronavirus and did make decisions that go beyond what is medically rational to the point that he has brought real and unnecessary economic damage on this country, not to mention the social damage that has been done.”
Not sure if I’ll get a response but I had to get it off my chest!
Well spotted – I have nicked that and sent it to my MP!
Cool, the full transcript is here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020
As have I! Thank you kvnmoore561.
No problem!
Boris then removed his foot from his mouth and placed it on the faces of his people.
Well, if Obama (BO to you and me) could do it to “British” Petroleum …..
Oh… my… god. Lockdown is good for you propaganda
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52535044
This daily health update should be a comedy series
Like a holiday…! Could the BBC get any worse? Keep checking as each day this shit gets worse. These fearful fools that think this is ‘utopia’ have got a nice little shock coming their way soon when their paid holiday ends.
Paternalists are just about tolerable when they are at least actual mental and moral grownups, but being “managed” by a bunch of immature, sentimental cowards is genuinely annoying (and hugely costly, as this coronavirus response disaster is demonstrating).
Are they now gonna start arguing that prison is a healthy environment?!
Given the prison testing statistics revealing huge numbers of the asymptomatic I wouldn’t put it past them
Latest news from the little fascist who is leader of the Scottish Government:
Fearmongers at work:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/04/uk-unions-criticise-guidance-on-returning-to-work-for-being-inadequate
It won’t be the first time that trade unions cost their members jobs in vast numbers.
The bit that made me laugh was ‘Labour threw its weight…’, that’ll make such a difference!! Not!
Excellent article
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/05/virus-of-mass-destruction/
‘The Internet has become an Orwellian chorus of shrieking, sanctimonious voices bullying everyone into conformity with charts, graphs, and desperate guilt-trips, few of which have much connection to reality. Corporations and governments are censoring dissent. We’re approaching a level of manufactured mass hysteria and herd mentality that not even Goebbels could have imagined’
Reminiscent of reds under the beds, and the Russians are coming
This fella is apparently close to the cabinet
He tweeted this
Better to run out of money than oxygen
https://twitter.com/MrMasonMills/status/1257640563723194369?s=19
Thats great to know, I’ll tell my family when we run out money its oxygen soup all round
Totally inane. Up there with “Brexit means Brexit” in meaningless phrases. How about “Bang a pan and save our NHS!”
He’s modest too, his twitter bio reads:
‘Once called a Modern Day Nostradamus. Listening carefully and keeping you informed.’
“Once called the Modern day Nostradamus”. I agree entirely Nostradamus was full of sh!t as well.
A while ago, a friend had sent me the following article from Global Research Canada:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/ncov-2019-coronavirus-time-line/5705776
It is an excellent overview over the muddling of the WHO from January until March / planetary lockdown. Please don’t be put off by the title that uses the word ‘fake’ pandemic as there are some really good facts in there…
But for me, it really is all about the timeline… As we are all busy staring at graphs and charts and arguing about decimals behind numbers, the fact of the matter is:
France has now officially presented the first Covid-19 infections as dating from December, so the first domino to challenge the official timeline narrative has fallen…
IF the dates, infection and transmission timelines given by the Chinese authorities are off by only a couple of weeks, every graph, chart and curve goes to smithereens pretty much immediately. The virus would have spread past Wuhan and China much much earlier. And since CCP tempers and censors virtually everything, why have we taken their information at face value to begin with?
IF the outbreak / transmission / lab escape (whatever it was in the end) happened in late October or early November, we can be almost certain that the virus, and its different strains were circling in Europe and America and in other places around the world during the entire winter… how many of us have by now heard from other people that they had Covid-19 symptoms as early as back in January and early February…?
And lastly, why would the CIA warn of a contagion from China as early as back in November as CNN alleges here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/us-intelligence-report-china-coronavirus/index.html (though of course that could be the US trying to save face…interesting nevertheless).
Whatever way you turn this, it seems so much bigger than just the problems of the lockdown. If more evidence surfaces that the virus was circling much earlier in the winter season of 2019/20, knowingly or unknowingly, the lockdown and everything that comes with it like contact tracing apps, facial recognition etc., just gets to sh*&^ and we know for a fact that there are ulterior motives at work.
Coronavirus: Scientists publish advice to government
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52542109
An interesting little admission in this item. Amongst the advice issued to the government is:
“Lockdown restrictions should be eased very gradually in order to maintain public trust in health policy”
So there it is in black and white: the disastrous lockdown is to be extended for longer than necessary in order to “maintain public trust in health policy”. At £2.4 billion per day, that’s quite an expensive face-saving exercise.
https://order-order.com/2020/05/05/10-problems-nhss-new-coronavirus-app/
Beware the app. Revert to old style mobiles: cue price gouging on Ebay for 2nd mobiles.
My second hand mobile is app resistant!
Yeah, I ordered two dumb phones today!
Mobile Luddites outwitting the covid police. Way to go!
CEO Heathrow about social distancing
Just one jumbo jet would require a queue a kilometer long.
Given that the largest A380 passenger plane seats 500 people, the notion that all those people could keep two meters distance as they board the plane just isn’t feasible
Forget social distancing, it won’t work in aviation or any other form of public transport, and the problem is not the plane, it is the lack of space in the airport.
The brightest brains in the UK are now eagerly trying to solve this self inflicted problem.Probably easiest to shut down Heathrow
https://theprint.in/world/israel-develops-key-covid-antibody-that-attacks-and-neutralises-the-virus-in-patients-body/414570/
The main vaccine syndicate must hate all these independent competitors. They have to trash/pay off each one as they occur, presumably.
And you can bet that the msm here will start denigrating and sniping at Israel- as usual.
Just out from University of Arizona (sent to Journal of Virology)
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-scientific-team-unique-mutation-coronavirus.html
Scientists believe that a weakened virus that causes less severe disease may have a selective advantage if it is able to spread efficiently through populations by people who are infected unknowingly.
That would be an argument to end the lockdown yesterday
Why use the NHS to develop a tracking app., despite their history of failed systems development? Obviously?because 1) we can give them even more money to use on whatever they think is a good idea 2) because NHS staff are so god-like that they know everything and can do no wrong.
Permanent lock-down? Of course-we can’t risk a second “spike” in infections because that might give the NHS some problems. However, where is the actual evidence that a second “spike” of any consequence has occurred anywhere?
Ah, the poor besieged NHS with all those scarce intensive care beds. Funny how the London “Nightingale” hospital (planned 4000 beds: 54 actually used) is being closed: those in Birmingham, Bristol and Harrogate have not been used (according to the Guardian), all at the same time as opening a new one in the North East. Still, it’s only money and generates employment(?).
By the way – how did they build them whist maintaining the regulation distance between workers?
So, to keep the paranoia going the NHS is now turning to this old ways to tell us that we need to exercise more and reduce obesity in order to help fight Covid. I am yet to hear that eating “five-a-day” will reduce infection rates but I’m sure that will come soon . And of course we will play with the statistics to show how bad things were/still are by counting as a Covid death almost any case where there might be even the slightest excuse to include a mention on the death certificate.
Cui bono – only the NHS.
Italy was in the middle of its worst flu outbreak for 14 years
https://www.thelocal.it/20200123/flu-outbreak-in-italy-half-a-million-people-struck-down-in-a-week/amp
Same region affected too
http://www.thelocal.it/20200103/flu-outbreak-in-italy-should-you-get-vaccinated
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/dna-could-hold-clues-to-varying-severity-of-covid-19-67435
Toby
You might like to note this article on the BBC Website this evening:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52553229
It says:
In mid-March, the maths showed the UK needed to change course or a quarter of a million people would die in a “catastrophic epidemic”.
Those calculations helped transform government policy and all lives.
This is of course as inaccurate as Ferguson’s modelling. The model showed it, because the model was wrong. Box’s Aphorism says ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’. You might like to update it to ‘All models are wrong, some are useful, but some are murderously toxic’.
Keep up the good work
I agree with trying to get rid of Susan Wojcicki, the feminist CEO of Youtube, but not exactly for the reasons given in this post – her censorship of disagreement with the WHO about the coronavirus. Her firing of James Damore for arguing that PART of the reason for the underrepresentation of women in software engineering MIGHT be evolutionary differences between the psychologies of the AVERAGE members of the two sexes is more significant. Also, she was backed by her SJW boss, the CEO of Google, the most powerful company in the world, and many of its employees. This rot in Western civilization can’t be stopped by the resignation of this or that aparatchik.
https://firedfortruth.com/