The Sunday Times reports that the Strategic Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has been told that the British death toll from COVID-19 could climb above 100,000 by the end of the year if Boris Johnson eases the lockdown too much or too fast. These estimates come from researchers at the London School of Tropical Hygiene, the always-reliable Imperial College London and other places that have modelled the likely impact of of different exit policies. (Can we see the code please?) However, the paper doesn’t disclose whether this formed part of the advice given to the Government by SAGE when it last met on Thursday.
Boris Johnson’s address to the nation about “phase two” of the lockdown is expected to be at 7pm this evening. According to the Sunday Times, he will announce that:
- From tomorrow, the limit on one form of exercise a day will be scrapped, allowing people outdoors if they observe the two-metre social distancing rules. Staff at No 10 have been told that Johnson will begin jogging again this week
- Fines will be increased for those failing to abide by the new rules
- From Wednesday, garden centres will re-open
- The public will be advised – but not forced – to wear face coverings on public transport and in shops
- Within two weeks new arrivals in the UK will be required to go into isolation for 14 days, with quarantine centres set up for those who do not have a home where they can self-isolate.
- “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” will be replaced with “Stay alert, save lives”
On that last bullet point, it doesn’t look like Scotland will be ditching the “stay home” slogan. Sturgeon said on Twitter this morning that #StayHomeSaveLives “remains my clear message to Scotland at this stage”. According to the Mail, this has thrown Boris’s planned announcement into chaos.
I thought this would be a good moment to change the slogan of this website. It was: “Stay sane. Protect the economy. Save livelihoods.” However, given that more and more scientists and public health experts are warning that the lockdown will end up causing a greater loss of life than it prevents, I’ve changed it to: “Stay sceptical. End the lockdown. Save lives.”
It looks like Wales isn’t planning to abandon the “stay home” slogan either. Shame, but at least Wales has its very own lockdown sceptics website (no relation) called ‘We The People‘, or, rather, ‘Y Gwir yn Erbyn Y Byd’. Full of useful resources and links. Definitely worth a look.
Many of today’s papers have photographs of people enjoying the sunshine over the bank holiday weekend, suggesting the “stay home” message is beginning to lose some of its power in any event. Here’s one from the Mail:
The Prime Minister has given an interview to the Sun on Sunday‘s David Wooding in which he tries to lower expectations ahead of this evening’s announcement. He told the paper that the “descent” from a mountain is always the riskiest bit. “That’s when you’re liable to be overconfident and make mistakes,” he said. “You have very few options on the climb up – but it’s on the descent you have to make sure you don’t run too fast, lose control and stumble.” He added:
I said that we would turn the tide within three months. I believe we are definitely on course to do that.
The peak could have been colossal, we could have had an absolute disaster. We’re past the peak now but we’ll have to work very hard to get every step right.
We’ve beaten it, we’ve come through it, we can see the sunlight ahead and it is just a question now of making sure, as we come down that mountain, we don’t stumble. We mustn’t throw away the gains that we’ve made.
If everybody works together, we won’t. That’s the message.
Also in today’s Sun on Sunday is a poll revealing that nine in 10 people do not want Boris to ease the lockdown. Only one in 50 believe the restrictions have been in place for too long, with just 4% in favour of a gradual lifting of the lockdown starting this week. Almost a quarter – 24% – don’t want restrictions lifted before the end of July or until the virus has been completely eradicated. A reader has provided me with a quote that seems appropriate here:
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
As usual, the Germans continue to put us to shame. Yesterday brought news of thousands of people protesting on the streets of Munich and thousands more in Stuttgart to demand the lifting of restrictions ordered by the German authorities.
I was taken aback to see a Government-sponsored spread in the Sun advising people to avoid “quack” treatments, such as “UV lights” and chloroquine. Quite surprising, given that there’s now a lot of evidence linking Vitamin D deficiency to an increased risk of death from the virus, as reported in the Sun yesterday, and mounting evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for COVID-19, as reported in the Sun on April 29th.
As I noted yesterday, the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has decided to police social media to draw attention to fake news and conspiracy theories – and, embarrassingly, it refers to the hypothesis that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a “right-wing conspiracy theory” even though the same theory is being investigated by a consortium of Western intelligence agencies. Today, I’ve spotted that the ISD has done some work with Carl Miller, an employee of a left-wing think tank, for the BBC’s flagship technology programme, BBC Click, to identify the source of “disinformation and hate” about the pandemic on Facebook. And the culprit is… drum roll… “the global far right”.
If you watch the report Carl Miller has pulled together for the BBC with the help of Chloe Colliver, Head of Digital Policy for the ISD, you’ll see that among the toxic conspiracy theories they’ve identified is the claim that the virus was “engineered” and that chloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19. According to Miller, that last theory is “unproven and potentially dangerous”. Another dangerous idea, apparently, is the notion that the risk from the virus has been “overhyped” by governments and the media. Miller says the “disinformation” he and Colliver have uncovered could be “a lot more potent” than the disinformation pumped out by shady, far right organisations during election campaigns because it might “convince people to not listen to government advice about staying at home”. Miller concludes his report by telling us he passed on his findings to Facebook and received the following reply: “We have removed a number of links BBC Click shared with us for violating our policies on hate speech and the spread of harmful misinformation.”
If the BBC is going to employ left-wing busybodies to browbeat social media companies into censoring people who think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a biolab, that chloroquine is an effective treatment and that the risk posed by the disease has been overhyped, that’s one more reason to stop paying the license fee.
Yesterday, I drew readers’ attention to the robotic dog being used by the authorities in Singapore to make sure people follow the social distancing rules. Today, I bring news of an even more ingenious contraption, this one devised by a police force in India. Thanks to this over-sized pick-up reacher, the police can now arrest Covid dissidents without risking infection:
Good to see not all police officers are simply following orders and fining or arresting people for not complying with lockdown orders. A reader sent me this bitchute video of a US cop advising his colleagues that the constitutional rights of US citizens should not be suspended on the say-so of a mayor or a governor or a chief of police. “That’s not how this country works,” he reminds us. Well said, Officer Anderson.
One of the biggest stories of recent weeks has been the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). But what happens to this life-saving kit after it’s been used? One reader in Lincolnshire has found out:
Every time I go out on my bicycle round here I find bits of PPE scattered by the side of the road, usually the giveaway blue gloves. Here’s today’s find – a PPE mask evidently hurled out of a car window and decorating the verge near the village of Ropsley. Who’s the culprit? No idea, but it’s presumably a health worker of some sort who’s quite happy to chuck used PPE into the general environment rather than dispose of it safely.
And it’s not just here. A reader who lives in Malaga has alerted me to the same problem:
The first day we were allowed out everywhere was nice and clean and tidy. But every morning I go out there are masks and gloves littering the sides of the roads and in the hedgerows. I wonder what on earth goes through these twats’ heads. Clearly not very much.
It seems Lockdown Sceptics is gradually transforming itself from a blog into something more – although quite what that is remains to be seen. Yesterday, I published a follow-up by “Sue Denim” to his/her post about the shortcomings of Professor Ferguson’s code; today, I’m publishing a piece by Rob Lyons – real name this time – entitled ‘Public Health England: A Predictable Failure’. Lyons is scathing about the executive agency of the Department for Health and Social Care. Here’s an extract:
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that PHE is a less-than-dynamic organisation. Far from being staffed by the brightest and the best, innovative and entrepreneurial, PHE is run by the usual quangocrats. These are people whose CVs describe a merry-go-round ride of one job after another for which they are, at best, only moderately qualified. Having delivered uninspiring leadership in one organisation, they move along to ‘lead’ another, accumulating vast pensions and titles along the way.
I was pleased to receive this message from a Labour Party voter. It’s not just the Conservative Party which is causing disillusionment among its most fervent supporters:
I’m an avid reader of your website. I’m not ordinarily someone who would find myself in agreement with you about most things – I’ve always voted Labour and was a Corbyn supporter, voting twice for him as leader. However, I’m appalled by the strategy of ‘lockdown’ and also the supine agreement of the Labour Party to this lunacy. I will also never, ever, buy a copy of the Guardian again.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that coronavirus could kill up to 190,000 in Africa this year if it’s not adequately contained. My friend Aidan Hartley, Kenyan resident and Spectator Wild Life correspondent, points out that this isn’t very many in the grand scheme of things:
You are more likely to die of booze (174,000 cirrhosis) than Covid-19 in Africa (maybe 83,000 – 190,000 says the WHO had no measures been imposed – and some countries have been draconian). Africa’s traffic accidents will kill three times to a third more people than COVID-19. These WHO figures for virus deaths would rank just above “self-harm” in Africa, or at its worst, just above “interpersonal violence”. Africa’s main killers are still HIV, TB, malaria, respiratory diseases and dysentery, which kill 3.5 million combined. Those communicable diseases will now skyrocket as 100 million MORE Africans slide back into poverty due to the economic impacts of lockdown here and in the West.
A round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Statistician accuses ministers of failure to prioritise random COVID-19 testing‘ – Sir David Spiegelhalter has criticised the Government for not prioritising random antibody testing so we can build up a clear picture of how many Britons have had the virus, according to the Sunday Times
- ‘This care home carnage shames the nation‘ – Dominic Lawson berates the Department for Health and Social Care’s murderous policy of encouraging hospitals to discharge elderly patients back into care homes at the beginning of the lockdown, including those who’d tested positive for COVID-19
- ‘The virus that turned up late‘ – Post by Alistair Haimes for Hector Drummond’s blog in which he points out that the only difference between coronavirus and other outbreaks of nasty seasonal flu is that this virus turned up three months later than usual. Includes the great line: “When I complain about people fearfully embracing their incarceration I can no longer use the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, and that makes me angry.”
- ‘The strange case of the choir that coughed in January‘ – BBC story about a choir in Baildon, a village in West Yorkshire, that experienced a bout of a nasty, flu-like illness back in January that looks awfully like coronavirus. Was it circulating among the general population earlier than has been reported?
- ‘China Asked WHO To Delay Pandemic Announcement, Deny Human-To-Human Transmission: German Intelligence‘ – Zero Hedge on the German intelligence leak purporting to show that Xi Jinping asked WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Thebreyesus to cover up the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in January
- ‘Pandemic of Pillocks‘ – A Comedy Unleashed special devised by comedian Andrew Lawrence. Warning: Contains some smutty gags
- ‘Has our mad mass house arrest during COVID-19 saved even a single life?‘ – Peter Hitchens’ latest column in the Mail on Sunday
- ‘Locking up the elderly until coronavirus is defeated is a cruel mockery of basic human values‘ – Withering critique of the lockdown by Jonathan Sumption in last week’s Mail on Sunday. Can’t believe I missed this one
- ‘Wrecking entire economies: Lockdowns may be causing more harm than good worldwide, and especially in India‘ – Case against locking down India by Professor Ramesh Thakur in the Times of India
- ‘Toby Young on the Failure of the Lockdown‘ – Thought I’d give this a plug. It’s a YouTube video of me talking to the Post-Millennial‘s Nico Johnson about the biggest failure of public policy that’s ever happened during peacetime
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: ‘Eve of Destruction‘ by Barry Neil, ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next‘ by the Manic Street Preachers, ‘Steppin’ Out‘ by Joe Jackson (some hope) and, by way of tribute to the recently deceased Little Richard, ‘Whole Lotta Shaking Going On‘.
Thanks as always to those who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of the site. If you feel like donating, you can 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.
I thought I’d end today’s update with a poem sent to me by Tiree MacGregor. Called ‘The Back-Pedalling Autocratic Functionary’ it was inspired by the words of Chief Constable Nick Alderly of Northamptonshire Police who said on April 9th: “We will not, at this stage, be setting up road blocks. We will not, at this stage, start to marshal supermarkets and be checking the items in baskets and trolleys to see whether it’s a legitimate, necessary item. But again, be under no illusion. If people do not heed the warnings and the pleas I’m making today, we will start to do that.”
Officious fool in uniform, what need
We of your subtle threats and dour commands?
Zealous for order, at whose pleasure do
You think you serve? If it be government’s
Or monarch’s, then think: At whose pleasure theirs?
Who has “illusions”? – And “necessity”?For you, your weapons formed of Hobbesian dread,
Where is our gentle Shakespeare, whose high art
Demolishes the thoughts that shape your head,
And, brother, what high ardour forms your heart?In copperspeak, you’re nicked: for threats won’t wash;
The velvet-covered cosh is still a cosh.
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Toby, it would be great if you could look into the elusive ‘COVID vaccine’ that is touted as the last hurdle to fully lift the lockdowns/restrictions. Unfortunately any views that challenge such claims are forcefully ‘censored’, respectable scientists are smeared and their evidence banned by social media.
The following article “The Well-known hazards of Coronavirus vaccines” is a must read for all. https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/10/is-there-a-vaccine-for-coronavirus.aspx
• “Coronavirus vaccine development has proven very difficult over the past 30 years, as the vaccines create very robust antibody response, but when the patient encounters the wild virus, they become severely ill and often die — a reaction known as paradoxical immune response or paradoxical immune enhancement.
• To accelerate a virus’ evolution, you grow it in several types of animal tissue, such as pangolin kidney tissue followed by feral monkey kidney cells and mouse brain tissue.
• Each time you transfer the virus to another animal tissue, mutations occur. There’s also evidence showing these animal cell lines are contaminated with Coronaviruses and retroviruses, which end up contaminating the vaccines grown in them.
• Dangerous Coronavirus experiments led by Dr. Anthony Fauci went on in the U.S. until 2014 when President Obama ordered the work to stop due to safety violations at three biolabs. Fauci then moved the operations to the Wuhan lab in China and continued coronavirus experiments right up until the time that the COVID-19 pandemic occurred.
• The COVID-19 pandemic may have been generated to ensure that dangerous Coronavirus research would continue and receive fresh funding.
• Coronaviruses mutates rapidly
• Flu vaccination increase risk of Coronavirus infection (also in Northern Italy right before the COVID-19 outbreak, there was mass vaccination using a very powerful vaccine – anecdotal and no proof of a correlation)
• Anyone who has received a flu vaccine is likely to register as positive for SARS-Co-V-2 using a PCR test (most vaccines in the US are made in chicken cells or dog kidney cells that are contaminated with Coronaviruses)
• Possibility that Type 1 Interferon could be used against SARS-CoV-2 that is shown to shut down the replication of RNA viruses, including retroviruses and Coronaviruses”
Doctors over the world are successfully using other treatments saving the lives of patients that were hospitalised with Coronavirus such as:
• Intravenous Vitamin C
• Dr Marik’s sepsis protocol of Intravenous Vitamin C, Hydrocortisone and Thiamine (many people with Covid infection die due to Sepsis – also imagine if the NHS used this protocol how many toddler sepsis deaths or amputations of limbs could have been prevented)
• Hydroxychloroquine (the media says its dangerous, but what many people do not know is that it is perfectly safe and an effective treatment if used together with ZINC)
What can we do? We should focus on improving our immune systems, starting with optimising our vitamin D levels.
According to the BBC it is a myth that the vaccine will be compulsory.
Yeah right it won’t be compulsory, unless you want to go somewhere or do somethiing
I think I may have won someone over the other day by saying : “So you can save 10- old and probably already ill- people’s lives by crippling 10,000 other people with a hammer to the knees. Do you do it?”
Certainly a good metaphor for the lockdown.
The current rough count in the USA is 500 jobs lost per 1 Coronavirus death. That was last week so we’re probably higher now.
And the worst of it is the old folks AREN’T saved, they are stuck into a coronavirus incubator to ensure they catch it.
Hydroxychloroquine is being used successfully in combination with an antibiotic by Dr Didier Raoult in his clinic in Marseilles. He is one of the few French doctors, if not the only one, to take an “alternative” position on covid19, and marched out of the scientific council around Macron, slamming the door behind him, because he disagreed with the lockdown policy, which he considers to be like something out of the Middle Ages.
I listened to his interviews and their protocol is working. He and his colleague are frustrated because of the attitude of the French government and they actually restricted the use of Hydroxycloroquine even though it’s been prescribed for years for arthritis and malaria. Another scientist was saying that possibly some of the cases would have recovered anyway but this sounded like professional jealousy. Scientists are their own worst enemies and we are the collateral damage.
I’d be wary of using info from RJFK jr. I know we should keep an open mind but, it’s high on the questionable scale.
However, Coronavirus is unlikely to find a useful vaccine based at the very least on the fact we have tried unsuccessfully on SARS Mears and the group Coronaviruses that come under the common cold umbrella.
So waiting for a vaccine is probably going to be like Waiting for Godot.
I found him a bit interesting in the past https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b00zf8gfBGI
Don’t be suckered in by the ‘got to have vaccine’ nonsense. If one comes along, refuse it. There’s enough suspicion out there on that, it would be riots if anyone said it was compulsory for anything. I can’t remember ever having a flu vaccine for example.
Just take your chances with covid, they really are remarkably good .
ianp: Don’t bet on riots. They’ve managed to brainwash so many of the UK population about this virus, that the majority will be queuing up to get it rather than protest against it.
I’ve only had a flu vaccine once, about 20+ years ago. I’ve never had one since, and neither have I caught the flu. I’m not planning on getting this WuFlu vaccine either.
If I was going to bet on riots I’d be betting on people rioting to be first in line for the vaccine. Fear and anger are often found riding in company.
I’m retired, so I’m in a fortunate position,but I absolutely sympathise with your position, and firmly believe that this lockdown has now gone on too long, endangering the livelihood of people such as yourself.
And I’m starting to feel imprisoned, with the statement by Grant Schapps and his bicycle-loving plans for future travel being the final nail in the proverbial coffin. This government and half the country seem to have lost their collective minds.
Flu vaccines are available every year, but we still get thousands of deaths:
US: “CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.”
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fflu%2Fabout%2Fdisease%2Fus_flu-related_deaths.htm
The WHO estimates between 290000-650000 annual deaths, globally, from seasonal flu. The figure is not projected or estimated, but based on feedback through the international ‘flu-net’ monitoring service. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2017/flu/en/
“Fines will be increased for those failing to abide by the new rules”
This is the absolute worst response for a government that is finding people don’t take it’s laws seriously to adopt. All it will do is increase the feelings of bitterness and anger among the few who get picked on, while leaving the underlying problem of lack of credibility unaddressed.
Of course, the real problem is that the proper solution, of persuading people to their side, is difficult for them because they are so clearly living in a fantasy world in which we are faced by a fantasy “covebola” disease that is as infectious as flu but as deadly as ebola.
This means that despite the huge numbers seemingly willing to continue with a state-funded holiday, nevertheless every time they enter into any debate on the issue, hard reality is likely to intrude and make them look ridiculous again.
Why do I find proofreading so difficult?
its, not it’s. Oh for an edit option!
Mark: not helped by autocorrection by some devices. You can type it in correctly, and the autocorrect function will change it to be incorrect.
Yes, I’ve had that plenty of times – a real pain especially if it autocorrects to American. Not sure I can blame it here though….
To err is human, but it feels divine! [Thanks, Mae]
I do agree about the state funded holiday, and honestly I have really mixed feelings as a result. I think that the lockdown is a terrible idea and will trash the economy and not save lives. But I really like working from home and being free to manage my own time. I do as much work as ever, but also have time to do other things when I would normally be “looking busy” at my desk. It’s not quite a holiday, but it really feels like it. On that level I would rather stay locked down.
Actually I don’t mind about increasing fines for legitimate wrong doing; parties and suchlike; when it also comes with a clear direction that you can do other normal stuff like walk the dogs and let’s your kids play outside. Much as I don’t like the lockdown, if we must have one then taking the mickey should get you a smacked wrist, while honest attempts to adhere to it shouldn’t.
“But I really like working from home and being free to manage my own time. I do as much work as ever, but also have time to do other things when I would normally be “looking busy” at my desk. It’s not quite a holiday, but it really feels like it. On that level I would rather stay locked down.”
It’s not necessary to have a lockdown to be able to work from home. It should be your choice, on the assumption that your employer agrees.
I occasionally worked from home when my OH was unwell, or I’d had a bad night’s sleep and didn’t want to do my usual nearly two hour journey into work in Central London, or because I had a project to work on and didn’t want constant interruptions.
As for increasing fines for doing something that three months ago was considered absolutely normal is not something i agree with. It smacks of authoritarianism, and a level of social control that’s completely unnecessary.
Normal, healthy human social behaviour is now a crime. What does that tell us about the depraved minds that invented such a policy? Of course only a brutal totalitarian regime would come up with such an obscene idea. It is to the eternal shame of Western governments that they ever adopted something so profoundly at odds with liberal democracy. If we get out the other side – and I’m by no means convinced we will – there have to be serious consequences for those responsible.
Working from home is different from the people who are at home not working on most of the pay they get for working.
They say crises like this tend to encourage existing trends, and the move to teleworking is one that was already under way very slowly, but it has been given a huge boost by this crisis. Much as WW1 pushed issues like universal suffrage and women in the workplace forwards dramatically.
Though note that this has only been a huge crisis because of the decisions made by our governments, and in turn by the irresponsible fear-mongering response driven by our media and other opinion forming elites, that created the atmosphere of panic. It’s pretty much self-inflicted. If Italy and then other European countries, and the UK and US governments, hadn’t followed the authoritarian Chinese lead, we would have suffered far less than we already have, and immeasurably less than the costs to come.
The problem with saying that heavier punishments are fine if they are only used to deal with people who are genuinely behaving unacceptably is that we’ve already seen that our police cannot be trusted to do that at all. Why will they suddenly start to be reasonable when they weren’t before?
As deadly as Ebola.
Would it surprise you to learn that even Ebola isn’t as deadly as Ebola?
The CDC’s modeling predicted that 1.4 million people would die from Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone (around 2015 iirc).
The final death toll was less than 8,000.
No, it wouldn’t surprise me because unlike our government and all the panickers, I tend to actually look at the numbers properly before forming an opinion.
In this particular context, “deadly” refers to the ifr, not to infectiousness. The dangerousness of a disease is clearly a function of the combination of the two. Ebola’s ifr rages from 20-80% in studies I’ve seen. Imagine if this coronavirus did that to people. It would actually warrant the kind of response we’ve applied to this glorified flu.
Strictly speaking those are case fatality rates, not infection fatality, but in this case there’s not much difference because if you get ebola your disease is usually identified.
There hasn’t been much talk about seeing friends/family in the next phase of lockdown lifting, or even a point in the future when this might be possible. Aside from the ludicrously unworkable ‘bubble’ strategy, I would have expected more information on this, given that visiting friends, family, and partners would be a priority for most people.
Those Sun stats are truly depressing. I do hope it’s just a case of people polling that way in order to look virtuous, given that everyone I’ve spoken to in real life wants this hell to end. Of course there’s always the social media mob but what they fail to understand is that there’s nothing stopping them from voluntarily isolating themselves and then letting everyone else get on with life. It’s not as if they automatically get infected with Covid as soon as Boris makes any indication of phasing out the lockdown.
Polls always give the desired answer. Even so, did they really fix these results that much – it is certainly a sad reflection on the British if not.
I think the survey was manipulated at the last moment. I voted in it and every time I checked the skeptics were slightly ahead of the bedwetters
Why is nobody talking about Belarus? Their president had the best advice: no lockdown, drink vodka, sauna twice a day, go to work. Cases 2321/m, Death rate 4/m vs UK cases 3175/m,deaths 455/m. Their population is similar to Denmark around 9.5M. What did they do differently, or maybe the miracle cure is actually Vodka!!
Yes totally neglected. I highlight the country in my ConWom piece tomorrow.
Great look forward to reading it
Will, I always look forward to your articles (along with Hector’s and Toby’s stuff), but now it just raises feelings of anxiety and impotence. Is it just a matter now if sitting this pantomime out?
Only if you have a large bottle of Stolly …
Sounds a bit ‘far right’ – where do I sign-up?
Everything not radical far left is far right. Apparently.
I’m waiting and watching on Belarus. My suspicion is that Lukashenko has been the best leader on this (never, ever thought I’d be in a position to write that!), because his approach has basically been the traditional one, with a robust “keep calm and carry on” early C20th British spin.
The problem is that it’s hard to give any credibility to any information coming out of Belarus until a fair bit of time has passed and there’s a chance to separate truth from propaganda. And in this case there will be propaganda from both sides, but the anti-Belarussian propaganda will be far more slick and well funded than the government stuff. They’re up against both the ultra-slick US sphere media operations and the Russian one which has been catching up in recent years, and there will be plenty of people within Belarus willing to supply both the western and Russian propaganda operations with faked and exaggerated material.
But in the end it will be hard to disguise the difference between the kind of mass slaughter the covebola fantasists have been predicting and the kind of thing the actual death rates would suggest will happen (although I suspect the Belarus healthcare system isn’t the most robust in the world).
What a state we have come to when a thuggish aging Belarussian autocrat makes our entire political, media and social elite look like a bunch of scared, hysterical old women (with due apologies to all the sterling ladies of a certain age posting here).
The oneold women posting here are not the scared, hysterical ones!
The ‘bubble’ idea is some rubbish dreamed up by academic epidemiologists who don’t seem to understand normal human interactions…. Totally unworkable as you say.
My experience of people who go into such professions are those who don’t understand normal human interactions to start with, which is why they do what they do.
I’ve suggested to family and friends we ignore the silly advice and start meeting up again.
Great idea
You can visit 1 person per day outside your house. How does anyone know if it’s the first second third? It’s really simple to me, it’s the job if those who don’t have the fear of the virus to show the way for the brainwashed.
Step 1 – never ever wear a mask
I really do wonder about these polls. Am in Scotland, been on the Scottish Government covid strategy feedback and ideas site a few times in the last few days. Was expecting to see a lot of support for lockdown. Was really heartened to see lots of sceptical and critical voices, and I would say strong majority in favour at very least of easing it. Lots of upsetting posts as well from people really struggling with isolation and begging to be allowed to see someone. Glad to see that Scottish men have not changed much over lockdown…. loads of them banging on about wanting to get back on the golf course! And quite right too, such a waste of all the lovely weather.
I’m just not seeing where all these people who don’t want lockdown to end actually are in real life.
In Germany they seem to have got a new political party going: Widerstand2020 to oppose restrictions.
MSM seems to be reporting on it using language that questions its credibility.
It’s already their 4th biggest party.
Apparently the party often has quotes taken out of context in an effort to make them appear as conspiracy theorists or Nazis.
A-ha! I have family in germany.
Another contender for emigration!
Discrediting any dissenting voice is what they do
And then they come over all innocent and surprised when the people they demonise, delegitimise and discredit get rowdy towards them.
Coronavirus anger foments violence against journalists
Protesters from across Germany’s political spectrum are demonstrating against coronavirus restrictions. But their ire is also directed at established media outlets, making life increasingly dangerous for journalists.
https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-anger-foments-violence-against-journalists/a-53383927
Yes… This is precisely it. Angry about being fed fear 24 7
“Total nonsense, obviously – the ascent is far more dangerous.”
No, Johnson’s description of climbing is correct.
Whether it’s a good analogy for dealing with a virus is another matter
It’s especially nonsense when dealing with a virus. The downslope of an epidemic is a bit like a bonfire that has burned out because it’s run out of fuel. It’s rather easy and not at all dangerous at this point to pour a bit of water on it at this point and take the credit for putting it out.
Well, only if it hasn’t been successfully suppressed (unless the virus is seasonal or there’s some other reason why it might be less dangerous later on).
That’s perhaps the greatest irony of the lockdown suppression policy (as pointed out both by the Swedes and by the UK government before they panicked) – it’s unsustainable for long and if it’s successful you can’t end it, because you are no safer from an epidemic than you were when you started it. You can only end it safely if it wasn’t necessary or wasn’t effective and it became a mitigation and herd immunity strategy by default.
I suspect we are in the latter situation, as you suggest, but regardless we have to end it because we can’t sustain the growing costs much longer.
It will be your actions that end it, I wouldn’t suggest mass rioting as the problem isn’t really the government, it’s the people brainwashed by fear of a virus.
We just show the way.. Boris’s words were actually very Machiavellian.
Herd immunity has already been achieved, now cure people of their fear
If they wanted to cure people of fear they could very easily do so by publishing an estimate of IFR based on up to date evidence, as CEBM does. Then they could stop fudging the daily death stats and give the actual deaths for the day showing the clear downward trend. They could stop pushing pseudoscience such as anything based on the IC model and the mythical second wave. They could tell people the virus has likely been with us since November and they’ve all been exposed anyway. They could, in short, tell the truth. The only possible reason for not doing that and for keeping a lockdown in place is that they want to. The lockdown, I suggest, never was a means to an end. It is the end, to which the deliberate hype and hysteria around Covid was the means. Boris and the people around him have shown themselves to be bad actors.
Yup
In theory yes, but however much of the epidemic you have had, the easier it gets, because you have some herd immunity. The only exception to this is if you contained the epidemic in a small part of the country. In that case when you opened up that region you might get a catastrophic second epidemic.
I don’t think we can read much more into Johnson’s analysis than we could that of any intelligent 3-year old who looks at the graph and says “Ooh it looks like a mountain! Can we ski down it? Weeeee!” But looking at the geography is actually quite interesting.
I’ve been looking at the deaths per local authority region per unit population using ONS data and found it’s very evenly spread throughout the UK, with higher Covid PFRs in places where you would expect R0 to be higher (London, Salford, metropolitan areas). This is what we would expect to see after the epidemic had reached equilibrium (i.e. herd immunity).
I found this heatmap online: https://www.covidlive.co.uk/ which shows the general picture (although I would rather plot deaths than reported cases). But you can also see there it’s very evenly mixed.
If you look at Germany (where they also do a lot more testing, and have had fewer deaths): https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-05-09-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile, the maps on pages 2 and 3, there’s perhaps a little bit of a gradient from South to North, but this could just be due to the fact that places like MV in the NE and the former DDR generally are a bit quieter and less densely populated.
According to the Ferguson theory we’re somehow well below the equilibrium infection level in the UK yet it’s roughly the same everywhere. How did that happen? How did we manage to suppress the infection so well yet spread it so evenly all the way from Anglesey to the North East of Scotland? It would be almost impossible to do this if you tried.
That’s a good point, well made, about the spread, and interesting data thanks.
As should be clear from my earlier comment, I’ve never been convinced by the supposed efficacy of suppression, As I understand it, most credible epidemiologists always took the view that once a disease like this gets into the population in more than a minuscule way the opportunity for suppression is over. And the data doesn’t seem to support the mainstream narrative of a menacing disease successfully suppressed around the world by firm government action. So I’ve tended to assume that the decline of these epidemics has come about due to other factors, probably herd immunity at relatively low levels of prevalence (higher than the ones the government nonsense talks about, but much lower than the kinds of levels the fantasists were talking about at the beginning of the panic push).
Yes, agree. It has been suppressed in some places (Iceland, NZ) and perhaps partially suppressed in others (Germany, Austria) but everywhere we look that has had around a 0.05% or so PFR (UK, Spain, Italy, NYC, Sweden) pretty much the same exact thing has happened, in spite of greatly different lockdown regimes with different degrees of enforcement.
Seconded!
A. Mountaineer
There was the DUKE OF YORK study. It had 10 000 subjects
It’s not talking about the virus itself at all. This is all subtle meaning and subtext.
The virus is gone. Finished.
It’s how you de-program those who are still in fear
Why did he need to have a special Sunday slot to tell us this?! Basically no change other than garden centres can open and bang goes our tourism industry and your summer hols abroad…
He seems to have decided to give Wee Krankie a run for her money. I’m not sure now which is a less appetising sight!
Assume he did not want to do it before VE Day.
No… It was a big change. Read between the lines! It’s only really social distancing that remains but that will melt away soon enough once people wake up… Thank god as I keep on bashing into the stupid things at the local Tesco express.
They’ll get ripped down pretty damn quick once people just forget about the virus and carry on with their lives.
Life is a risk shocker and here’s a new one !
We will have to wait for the new regs. But it’s not remotely true to say only social distancing remains. We are not free to leave the house whenever we wish for whatever purpose we wish, we remain under Dr facto house arrest with a bigger stick. And democracy is still suspended and the economy is still in the bin.
Sturgeon’s comments today couldn’t be anymore Political Chess if she wrapped them up in wrapping paper that said Referendum 2021 on them.
Boris has allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by the Press and other parties, and whatever tonight’s announcement once looked like, it now is utterly pointless.
We have a ‘back to work’ meeting scheduled at work tomorrow, we perceived, hopefully, that there was going to be some good news to plan towards. Instead, it looks very much like one where we highlight the first people to receive their P45s.
Great work, guys.
https://youtu.be/ABA0UODeuS4
This is brilliant. Which pair of trousers would you most like to be murdered by?
Brilliant indeed. Thanks for the laugh and the clear perspective.c
Very funny. Have passed it on!
Great stats about trouser deaths vs covid deaths, shame that the presenter had to discredit imself (at least to a majority of viewers I should suspect) by bringing Bill Gates in to it at the end. We mustn’t let any suggestions about behind-the-scenes matters which may be true or maybe be pure conspiracy theory detract from the thread of our argument that lockdowns are harmful and disproportionate to the disease risk, which the first several minuets of the video argues SO well.
A lot of professional dialogue influencers out and about today.
Dear people of Britain. Here are the results from the latest Dutch antibody tests showing the fatality rate of Covid19 for under 70’s. Boris has thrown our economy under the bus for this.
@RishiSunak @simondolan
https://t.co/33jW3Pd1nN https://t.co/V9QF1dhZiv
https://twitter.com/WillowWyse/status/1259476923480182785?s=19
That is shocking! FFS, what are we doing, one assumes there’s someone in Whitehall whose job it is to collate all this?
As they say ‘never assume’….
Was it Boris ? Hindsight is great…, even though it was obvious to me months ago that the virus was not very dangerous. Or was it overwhelming pressure to follow every other country… UK was last to lockdown. And for very good reason
It was definitely “public” (ie media) pressure that pushed us into lockdown. It is also about 95% media pressure that is keeping us there.
Outlets like the Guardian have had coverage that is effectively one long petrified scream. They seem to genuinely believe that 1 covid death per day is 1 too many, and that the economy just doesn’t matter.
Quite why the PM doesn’t just tell them to sod off I don’t know, but this kind of hysterical coverage is really why we can’t leave lockdown.
I hope that the inevitable public enquiry takes a few moments to point out that the press were 100% wrong and should be ashamed of themselves. It’s not like reporters actually understand the science anyway, and their knee jerk to “everything the government does is wrong and evil” needs looking at.
The Guardian, like the BBC and The Times and so many others, has indeed acted disgracefully. So I was pleased to see they had actually published the following article, and the tone is suitably furious:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/06/millions-develop-tuberculosis-tb-covid-19-lockdown
My pious lefty friends are circulating a meme that reads:
Stay at home
Ignore the Tories
Save Lives
I’ve told them over and over about the CQC and discharging covid sick patients into carehomes to create free beds in hospitals, they called me a liar (Dominic Lawson’s piece in the Times). I say that carehome deaths have tripled and only half are due to covid – they say this is due to poor funding of the NHS (what?).
I’ve tried to explain that the best thing they can do to save lives is stop being wimps, get out there, sort out herd immunity and protect the vulnerable before winter comes. Deafening silence.
I’ve pointed out Ben Goldacre’s Oxford study – if you’ve not read it yet check out page 11 (quite why that isn’t front page news, no idea) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1.full.pdf and how if you are under 50 your risk is zero. Not a sausage.
I explain about the CEBM and how they need to look at data on the day of death, not the day of registration, and how the peak is passed, zip, nothing, zilch, nada, niet.
I’ve provided article after article of one expert after another (today’s Telegraph has two corkers), not a word.
I’m starting to think they just have such an irrational hatred, close to a cult like conviction, that ‘tories are evil and entirely to blame’ so the ‘opposite of what they say is good’, it’s some kind of topsy turvy morality. I’m also starting to think that they consider a few dead grannies actual, justified ‘collateral damage’ if they can stick the boot in and usher in the revolution (this, obviously in between baking their own bread, drinking boutique gin and doing fuzzy felt with the kids). I hate every single one of them. I’m not a nasty person, but I hope there are some tarring and featherings in the public square when this is over.
We are murdering our old, to pander to the worried well. I can’t bear it.
I’m not a lawbreaker, I’m soon to be. Sod this for a game of soldiers.
It takes time to re-evaluate your belief system. Keep at it. You might get through to one or two of them, but it depends on how honest with themselves and life they are.
Dr.Karlyn Borysenko was a firm Democrat-supporting leftie, but she saw a hate mob descend on someone for a fairly innocuous comment online, and realised something was seriously wrong with the far left. She’d voted for Clinton in 2016, but went along to a Trump rally, despite being warned that she’d be in danger.
In one of her recent videos she was wearing a #WalkAway cap, and has announced she’s voting for Trump. I expect her to wearing a MAGA hat any day now.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rlD7GuZjklo
Tell your friends to Google it themselves about patients being discharged back to care homes:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/15/discharging-coronavirus-patients-care-homes-madness-government/
“Discharging coronavirus patients into care homes is ‘madness’, Government told
Growing evidence that policy, which Health Secretary said would continue, is fuelling virus outbreaks and deaths”
https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-providers/adult-social-care/information-adult-social-care-services-during-coronavirus-outbreak#managing-covid-19
“There’s new guidance about safe discharge from hospitals to care homes. (8/4/20)
Read the new guidance: admission and care of residents during COVID-19 outbreak
It also gives guidance on social distancing in care settings.
It states that someone’s COVID-19 status will be confirmed during the process of transfer from hospital to care home. It also says tests will primarily be given to:
all patients in critical care for pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or flu-like illness
all other patients requiring admission to hospital for pneumonia, ARDS or flu-like illness
where an outbreak has occurred in a residential or care setting, for example long-term care facilities or prisons
The guidance says: “negative tests are not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home” and that those with COVID-19 may be safely cared for in a care home if the guidance is followed.
We encourage all partners to work as collaboratively as possible during these difficult times. If you have difficulties, you should contact your local authority to escalate to their local escalation meetings.”
Yes I read the guidelines, Dr Malcolm Kendrick flagged them weeks ago. It’s so sad. And don’t worry I’ve been on a bit of a political growing pains / reorientation for some time about the left, and have had some tangles with them on women’s rights (I won’t derail this page by getting into it here), but I’m honestly STUNNED. Just shocked at how they are all behaving.
I’d just give anything for a political grown up, I don’t care of what stripe right now, it’s the moral dishonesty I can’t bear. Nobody has a right to a risk free life, it’s rank entitlement to demand it, and it’s dishonest in the extreme to pretend you are doing it in the name of ‘saving lives’.
Thanks for your long comment, what strange days we are in!
These are the times of division, it seems. Now that Brexit is over, we have new labels. Lockdowners and Leavers! The good thing is that not all EU supporters are Lockdowners and vice versa.
That is one huge blessing indeed! I’m relieved us sceptics are a broad church, it’s gives us credibility for one thing, it can’t be a ‘right wing conspiracy’ if we’re a rag tag of all beliefs and none.
All the bloody mainstream media try to claim we’re the far right though, I’ve been a long term centrist libertarian and I’ve anti-lockdown friends who were Corbynites at the last election.
Interesting point, albeit USA focused not UK, about who the anti-lockdown movement are over there:
https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-reopen-protesters-really-saying-137558
Point 1,2 and 3 are some of the one which do translate, I think, to the UK viewpoints.
Interesting that the anti lockdown movement in the US includes people who question the ‘establishment’ viewpoint and are suspicious of the government’s motives. To be honest I was once a BJ fan but since this lockdown I’m starting to really question my judgement. What he says makes absolutely no sense and I’m disappointed.
This is why I think this whole pantomime is political. MSM is playing him and in a few weeks time they’ll start to beat him up with his own ‘figures’ to bring him down. Same in the US, it’s all about bringing Trump down,
Agree – once Trump is gone so will virus. Boris replacement- Sunak? Matt Hancock? (joke)
Probably Sunak. Boris was never in it for the long haul
Of course it is, always has been. In UK who put Boris in the no win scenario? Media.
Who has been peddling 24 7 fearothon? Media.
So actually who is responsible for the brainwashed masses ? Media
Who can de-program them? We can. There’s not as many of them as you think. Probably all reside on Facebook 24 7
I really despise Boris, have despised Boris since even before the prorogation scandal of autumn, but you’re quite right that the media are very much more to blame for this than he is. At the start Boris, for all the bad things about him, was planning a sensible herd immunity strategy. Lets not focus too much on how he buggered up by underfunding NHS testing capacity, it didn’t look good and made him more dangerously reliant on Ferguson’s foolish models, but herd immunity could have worked despite it. Now, If he’s impossibly utterly evil, and completely mad enough and anti-capitalist enough to want the lockdowns, then the media made it easier for him to begin a diabolical coup-d-etat by pressurising against herd immunity. Whereas, If Boris is merely the plausible amount of an arse that he appears to be, then it was the media’s crazed bellowing that forced him towards lockdown for political purposes when he would have rather kept the country running and not triggered the economic crisis which is sure to ensure he cannot win the next election. And he is in a no win scenario as he comes out of lockdown too, he can be confident he’ll get blamed for any future covid-19 deaths, the majority of them not preventable by lockdown extensions anyway, because he lifted too early. And then once people come to their senses about the true risk level of this pesky virus the media will switch round and blame Boris for a disasterous lockdown and all the economic, psychological and damage to liberties it has caused. He can’t win, so lets hope he does something honourable for once in his life and decides to try to act in the way that will save the country’s future, at least a little of it, rather than buckle to the first screams of a paranoid press.
“If Boris is merely the plausible amount of an arse that he appears to be”
classic
Trying my best (mostly alone) to do just that via OpenCorona on Facebook! I have invested in paying for an ad to help build the community but that’s obviously not sustainable. I am hoping once it has a critical mass it will grow on its own.
Thanks BecTJ, we were wondering the other day on here what Ben Goldcare would make of it!
The same goes for the SNP in Scotland.
I’m a leftie (lapsed) – very much like the person quoted in Toby’s intro (though I confess to giving up reading The Guardian – or any paper – over six years ago) I voted for Corbyn twice because I trusted his integrity and was sick of Blairites. I believe in freedom and have just resigned from the Labour Party. I like this site because people are talking sense and I cannot stand the authoritarian attitude of some of my associates (not pals) on the left. I’m writing this under my real name so I’m done for if there are any agent provocateurs hanging around ready to betray me to my (once) peers. I don’t care though, I think it’s important to stand up for what you believe in wearing your real identity. I have quoted Patrick Henry before so, at the risk of repeating myself ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ My sentiments entirely, but I can’t man the barricades on my own, my joints creak.. Still carrying old injuries from anti Vietnam war demos.
I started lefty 20 years ago, but it was always the civil libertarian side that appealed. Now it’s just the liberty that I hold dear but I retain my distrust of crony capitalists.
It’s a journey and now we find ourselves apparently in a small and socially reviled minority.
But, like you I won’t hide behind a pseudonym. I would rather be harassed and imprisoned then live in a world that I could not speak for freedom or fear of state or corporate control.
Well said A Meshiea
I’m a passionate believer in free markets. The freer the market the freer the people and I also abhor crony capitalism. The use of political power to serve the interests of business is a slope that leads to fascism imo and is as far removed from the free market and individual liberty as it could possibly be. I think the political system we are presented with is a complete con. One party concerned with social control, the other with economic control. The problem with control is that it always increases. It’s the nature of the beast.
I have a friend who also posted a gif that had the new “guidelines” go from:
Stay alert
Control the virus
Save lives
To
Back to work
Herd immunity
Save capitalism
She works for a bank ironically (or maybe not).
I should add that she considers her version a negative and a criticism of what Bozo said.
What a shame about her views, the only thing I can disagree with about
Back to work
Herd immunity
Save capitalism
Is how it fails to explicitly mention saving civil liberties.
Ok look, maybe I am a bit ‘zen’ here but the message is actually coded meaning:
Stay Alert – IE. Don’t fall for any media brainwashing about it killing newborn babies or the like – nope never will
Control the virus – it’s now a fear virus. Man up!
Save lives – save the quivering masses from themselves and their obsession with a virus that has already been defeated.
The rest of the terror – ometer is simply a replacement for the obsession with counting cases, and a desire to stay ‘green’ so you have conquered fear.
This is what it is all about.
Propaganda in… Then take that propaganda out…
She won’t work for a bank for long…….
Get off Facebook. Home of the narcissistic left loons who have been brainwashed. Ironic for their sudden compassion for the old when it’s actually me me me.
Instead look at some of the backlash to the fear mongerers on twitter, that’s the real opinion
Very simple to bring these snowflakes back to the real world, just go out there and don’t have any fear for yourself. You know you don’t have anyway right? I never did as it was obvious that this thing had been around ages.
Just go about your daily lives. Never ever wear a mask. Very clever of Boris to say it wasn’t compulsory. Given that they are actually more harmful for non frontline staff anyway
It will soon be blindingly obvious that those allegedly most at risk from the virus are the ones with the least fear.
Funny, when ebola was loose in West Africa in 2015 ish I was telling everyone that we should be worried and should be doing more to help because terrible viruses like that aren’t just a developing world problem, they could come knocking on our door too if we don’t help stamp them out. And yet when covid-19 staretd to build up in China I wasn’t scared, somehow it was apparent that this virus wasn’t the one we needed to really fear. I was taking sensible precautions since it first begun spreading in he UK, avoiding door handles before doing so was “cool”, proposing sensible ways among friends and colleagues to reduce the spread, without ruining our social and working lives, if (I thought when) one of us caught it on the way to national herd immunity, I was damn p*ssed off when the panic buying occured, but I was not SCARED of the virus at any point.
In a letter to Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) presents a frequently updated table of studies that report results of treating COVID-19 with the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ, Plaquenil®).
https://aapsonline.org/hcq-90-percent-chance/
Maybe the BBC should tell the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons that they’re wrong and spreading fake news, according to the very high standards that the BBC has set for the rest of the world. After all, we all know the BBC is never wrong about anything, ever, which is why they will never apologise about anything.
I am very disturbed by GOVERNMENT SPONSORED disinformation about treatments that could potentially reduce risk or save lives. This is now getting truly, creepily Orwellian.
I wonder if there is an official BMC /PHE set of treatments and that’s why?
I think that’s been part of the problem. NICE too. There are vested interests there too of course. The pressure on GPs to prescribe statins is a classic example.
Yup.
Once they have compulsory vaccination it’s not a huge step to compulsory statins. Then compulsory veganism.
Hydroxychloroquine is out of patent and costs pennies (literally) when bought up by the billion. Remdisiver costs hundreds per dose. Which one is going to get the backing of the media and politicians I wonder.
I just posted this on yesterday’s comments page just before this new (today’s) page came out.
Apologies if I am repeating myself.
I got told by my work (Manufacturing sector, But classed as non essential) on the 24th of March to go home, & at the time, it was said to be for 3 weeks. I
Was then furloughed on 30th of March.
At first I thought fair enough, I didn’t know then what I know now about this extremely exaggerated virus.
My work keeps us all updated by email every couple of weeks & it has been grim.
My work lost 80% of its income that first week of lockdown, due to the companies that it supplies shutting down because of this.
The emails have been stating that it’s a very tough time for businesses including the company I work for.
However, on Thursday, I received another email from my work & this one doesn’t read well,
It mentioned some of its customers are returning to work but on a very very limited staff basis & then they said this,
“It seems likely that we will not return to normal levels overall for a significant period”
Now, I am genuinely a-bit worried about that statement, & I feel that the longer this goes on, I doubt that I will have a job to go back to once this nonsense is eventually over.
Thanks Boris & all the rest of the lockdown lovers.
It’s a very well paid job also, well above the National living wage & because of this nonsense it’s not looking good at all for the future.
Sorry to hear, we own a business and we’re on 10% sales, every business we speak to is planning to come back on 40%, unfortunately this means we can’t keep all (most) of our staff, it makes no business sense. Lots and lots and lots of businesses in the same boat, and the staff are totally blameless.
I think the support for this lockdown will disappear overnight as soon as this furlough scheme is wound down. There are so many people who are completely shielded from the harsh reality of what this lockdown is doing
Thank you both for your comments, I agree, once the furlough scheme ends, there will be a lot of people who are currently treating it like a holiday, in for a massive shock. I cannot wait to actually go back to work, but after that email update on Thursday, I am unsure if I will still have a job to go back to.
What’s even more depressing is, prior to this nonsense & lockdown, my company that I work for was actually doing very well. & then pretty much overnight, it’s been more or less wiped out.
I agree that this is not the fault of the employees or the company itself, the blame for all of this lies squarely at Boris & his stupid decision to go ahead with this lockdown.
If it does turn out that in the end, I don’t have a job to go back to, I am seriously going to look to leave the UK, as it’s now well & truly screwed, now & in the future. It actually makes me sad.
We are thinking along the same lines as you, leaving the UK. At times, it has been a real struggle to just walk down the street anymore without seething with rage at people throwing themselves into oncoming cars to avoid being within 6 feet.
The question is, where to go? Much of the world has reacted in the same way as the UK government. Also, it’s hard to see which countries will be wanting much immigration after this, or at least which countries will be easy to get into. Asia is mostly open for business of course and I suppose there’s always somewhere hot and relatively poor to go to. It would certainly be a better place to live than somewhere with terrible weather that is about to get much poorer.
“Also, it’s hard to see which countries will be wanting much immigration after this, or at least which countries will be easy to get into”. Erm….UK?
I want to get out too. But where to, that’s the problem. What country defends civil liberties against globalists wanting to import Communist public health policies. Not the UK, not the US, not most of Europe. Ideas welcome!
I read in the Telegraph last night that the govt is expected to extend the furlough scheme until September. Heaven help us!
Don’t know if this has been flagged up before:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/asiatimes.com/2020/05/global-virus-lockdown-was-madness/
Love the understated last paragraph.
Thank you Toby for keeping this site going. You must be ready for a day off.
Can’t bring myself to watch the nonsense from Mr Bumble this evening. He’s such a disappointment.
This cheered my up today, the Corona Virus verse from Dominic Frisby’s excellent comedy tune ‘Maybe’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuYK1vkTpJk
The original full version is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Nf7N91lc8
Happy Sunday fellow Lockdown Sceptics.
Not watching Ballless. Ball-less? Either.
I’m just about to have a long hot shower and try to forget I exist.
The Boris Johnson verse in the original version obviously needs re-writing!
The fundamental question is all of this is : does lockdown reduce Covid-19 deaths?
I would argue that lockdown doesn’t reduce Covid deaths, it just defers them.
The only circumstances in which deferral reduces the death toll are:
(a) if deferral enables access to health care that would otherwise have been available (NHS overwhelmed), and
(b) if deaths are deferred until a vaccine or life-saving treatment becomes available (cavalry rides to the rescue).
The NHS is not likely to be overwhelmed given the amount of excess capacity created, therefore (a) does not apply.
The cavalry won’t arrive any time soon, so (b) does not apply.
Therefore lockdown does not reduce Covid deaths. Therefore lockdown does not save lives.
Lockdown does, however, cause non-Covid deaths (as well as misery and hardship).
Therefore, lockdown kills.
Scientific method is based on the falsification of hypotheses. Please, can someone tell me what’s wrong with that argument, with that hypothesis.
If the argument is sound, then the only question anybody should be asking the Prime Minister is:
‘Prime minister, why are you persisting with a policy of lockdown which is killing people?’
Your argument is sound but there is one another theoretical strategy/pipe dream among Guardian readers which is to reduce the number of infections to a low enough level that you can do test, track and trace.
This can work if you’re organised and do it early enough. It worked in Iceland (and some other places).
All the evidence is that the epidemic in the UK is basically over but if you still believe in the science-free assertions of Ferguson then only about 5% have had it.
So then you have to ask how many active infections are there likely to be at this point so that we can start tracing and quarantining them? Even if it’s down to 1% of the population after our (fortunately relatively half-arsed) lockdown that’s 600,000 needles you have to find in a haystack of 60 million.
If you look at the ONS regional data on Covid deaths it’s clear than the virus has become thoroughly established all over the country. You would therefore need a drive-thru (or walk-thru) testing centre in every town and village. You would need not 100,000 tests but at least 30 million, and all the staff to do the tests and process the results. You would need a Bluetooth app that actually worked, near 100% cooperation from the public, and to be able to organize a piss-up in a brewery.
I guess if the government started now it might be possible to roll out the program in ten years or so?
Yes Guy. I’ve never been able to fathom out how T, T and T works. If this were an STD then yes you could trace the physical contacts – but when the virus can spread indirectly by a person infecting surfaces as well as through direct contact with someone else?
Your other point that all the evidence is that the epidemic in the UK is basically over is my feeling as well. Looking at the graphs and numbers from other countries you do get the sense that the virus does its own thing, that something happens as the virus spreads to slow the rate of increase independent of what policy the Government decides to impose. The danger here though is that if there is no increase in the rate of infection they will just say – see, lockdown is working, can’t relax now and undo all the good work…
No…. It’s this mental obsession with cases that’s eating people’s minds now. Who cares how many cases there are? It’s needlessly obsessive dog chasing its own tail.
You might have it, you might not … But who cares ? If you have it, you night be a bit ill for a while then you’re fine. You probably got it, and got no symptoms, so then you’re fine as well.
‘ Infected’ is an insidious word. When you get a common cold you are infected right? No one gives a shit about getting a cold
Life’s a risk, live with it
John, after watching Johnson this evening I’ve come to the conclusion that it is utterly pointless asking any questions, fundamental or otherwise. There is nobody listening and the course has been set. I now only visit sites like this because it gives me some comfort in knowing I’m on the ‘right side’ of the argument.
Yes there’s The Narrative, and way over there is reality.
Yes, Mr T – profoundly depressing.
I too visit the site to maintain my sanity. I have this fantasy that on each and every occasion that they allow themselves to be questioned, the single question repeatedly asked is ‘Why are you persisting with a policy that is killing people?’ They might not listen, but the public might, eventually.
i don’t care what Boris says i’m not listening to this bad advice. We need to go out and see our friends, go to work and get back to normal. All these muppets sitting their with my tax money paying their wages can do one. Oh and if they fine me i won’t pay ever even if that means jail. At times like these it’s the common man that starts the revolution, it’s the normal punter that breaks the tyranny. New leaders and thinkers must appear for the people to get rid of these closeted public funded lunatics hell bent on destroying us.
Working in a supermarket has me exposed to thousands of people and this combined with vitamin d will keep my immune system strong all these people in their homes are gonna come down with everything when they step outside.
Spot on Biker,Boris can put his advice where the sun is never seen,he is such a benevolent leader isn’t he ?,weeks of this madness so far but we can go to a garden centre on Wednesday,great,thanks very much I feel so much better now,I’ve completely forgotten the crashing economy,the approaching tidal wave of mental illness,the out of control police forces and overbearing authoritarian busy-bodies,the endless media hysteria and the frightening feeling that my daughter has no decent future.I for one will not be wearing a mask or anything else when going shopping,we’ve managed for the past six weeks so I don’t see what the point is now,it’s just something else for the cowardly specimens that seem to make up most of the population of the UK to report other people for not doing.Sorry for the rant but I really am at my wits end with this madness.
Yeah.. simple. No mask no fear.
Boris did NOT say it was compulsory to wear one. That was very clever
One is reminded of Clarence Henry Wilcock, the common man/normal punter who told them where to put their “ID cards”.
His advice was actually pretty much that but could not be delivered in a way to freak out the fear mongerers. But you have to bring the people affected by the fear virus out of their coma bit by bit.
The actual virus itself is totally insignificant in the grand scheme of things
Excellent post, as always, with some great links too. Thanks for all you do.
This quote is from Hitchen’s latest. It sums up my feelings exactly:
The two specific competent actions which might have helped – protecting care homes from the outset, and properly equipping doctors and nurses – were bungled.
Here in Wales the lockdown rebellion is growing. Many examples yesterday. My partner (he of the rebellious lockdown breaking mother who has been out wandering the streets every day) owed a local guy some money for a muck fork (that’s how we roll in the countryside), so we all went for a drive (him, me and our three dogs) to find the farm where this man lives. My partner went into the farmhouse to give the cash to the man’s wife. She has a motor neurone type disease and is on the vulnerable list but welcomed him in, offered coffee and cake. She happens to be a retired consultant gynecologist so not unaware of any potential risks. Driving home down the lovely Welsh country lanes we came across a friend of ours who runs a local horse equipment/pet shop. She’s been open the whole time but quiet, however she reported that Saturday had been her busiest day since the lockdown started and people were behaving normally – no face masks, no gloves, trying on jackets and rummaging on shelves. She even had a shop lifter! Whatever Boris says shortly the people will decide. Those that want to cower in their homes can continue to do so and those that don’t will start to resume a normal life.
I like Wales. People are sound.
A parody song which might be a helpful anthem for us, to the tune of “Wherever you will go” by a whole variety of artists over the last few decades(2001, 2011…). Feel free to record an audio version if you like.
So lately, the government, claims it’s gonna keep us safe
They’re quite wrong, when liberties, are all so rapidly erased
When neighbours spy on all, like behind the Berlin wall
And harassed by police drones
Who’ll “make something up” you know
It’s falsehood
It’s no good
We’d already flattened the plateau
Well the spread’s high
But the death rate’s low
So is the lockdown worth it? No
So maybe, you find out, that you lost your job today
The economy, is all screwed, yet it must fund our nurses’ pay
As the people’s wages fall, and food prices rise for all
I’d better be someone who’s out there to
Restart our country for you
Your livelihood
Hasn’t withstood
This disasterous furlough
Rent’s sky high
No cash flow
So is the lockdown worth it? No
Best let surgeries start
Give the other patients hope
Desperate to see their young
I see now, it’s clear how, life and fun must still go on
Have no fear, in your mind
Without comorbities its mild
If I could
Then I would
Take a vaccine for the COVID foe
Candidates tried
But progress slow
So is the lockdown worth it? No
Until it’s vaccine time
I’ll take the risk, come on lets go
Catch it you’re probably fine
Is the lockdown worth it? No
Is the lockdown worth it? No
Dear Toby, you are obviously putting an phenomenal amount of work into this site and we’re all enormously grateful. But what with one thing and another you mayn’t have spotted in yesterday’s post that NERVTAG appear to have conflated Niall Ferguson, the well known historian, with the priapic beardy twat whose ZX-81 Program got us in to all this bother to start with.
“with the priapic beardy twat whose ZX-81 Program got us in to all this bother to start with.”
That made me laugh! And that doesn’t happen often these days…..
I bet he bakes his own bread, he looks the sort.
I spotted this too, did amuse me and he’s probably more idea than Neil.
Oh dear. How can the PM say all this when there is so much data available to show the complete opposite. Who the hell is advising him?
Also talking about a vaccine. No mention of the basic principles of herd immunity.
Again, we need MEDICS and SCIENTISTS to question this “vaccine” narrative in droves.
• If it is to be effective, it must be properly tested. So anything from 18 months to 5 years of lockdown/distancing
• It is also possible that NO safe or effective vaccine will be found. So….lockdown/social distancing forever
• WORST CASE SCENARIO: Rushed, inadequately tested vaccine pushed through for $$$ or to achieve forced vaccination while the populace is still compliant. This could be an absolute disaster with deaths, autoimmune illness and neurological damage produced by such a vaccine destroying more lives than any pandemic.
The sensible, risk free, cost-free, time-honoured alternative, NATURAL HERD IMMUNITY, has almost been whitewashed out of the narrative, and this is beginning to look quite deliberate.
People are being trained to be helpless infantilised adults; needing Big Daddy Government to protect them from nasty germs. Trained to have no understanding of their own bodies or how to optimise their own health.
That timeline is terrifying, I don’t know how I supposed to survive without seeing my family or friends for another 2 months, I’ve already been in solitary confinement for 10 weeks (had the virus before the lockdown) and the suicidal and hopeless thoughts are getting stronger by the day. This site restores some of my faith in humanity but I fear we are urinating into the wind.
Don’t let the situation get to you, it just isn’t worth it. There are some motivational recordings on utube, google resilience meditations they can change your mindset
Please check in with us daily, we’ll do our best to support you.
Hang in there, Paul – you’re among friends here. And there will be more and more coming to their senses in time. Judging by all the people who’ve been out enjoying the sunshine these past few days, it’s already happening: a kind of peaceful yet increasingly visible resistance.
Paul, my mother is 96 and has been alone that long. Solitary confinement is psychological torture and recognised by some government agencies as such. I give her a pep talk every day about ‘resistance’ and she’s buying it. Despite leaning towards the establishment and a lifelong Tory she swore at Johnson this evening and she doesn’t swear. (Not a mild word either.) Resist Paul. Defiance.
Hi Paul, hang in there. It will end. As BecTJ has pointed out, it is becoming less enforceable. They can’t police inside people’s homes. Can you find someone to join you in a quiet rebellion/return to sanity?
Paul, if you are feeling half as rough as you say, your friends and/or family ARE allowed to visit you, as a vulnerable person. Ask them.
This is simply about everybody getting used to the virus as just another thing to live with. No big deal, you had it? Yeah, I must have done as partner was laid low for a couple of weeks. No hassle, no symptoms so why worry about it.
The timeline isn’t about eliminating this virus, it’s basically to cure people of their coronaphobia. As simple as that for me. Get on with your life and others will follow.
The stupid social distance crap will go too, because that for me is the worst part by far.
Paul, I feel that I am the end of my tether too.
My missus is keeping me on the straight and narrow. I’ve had various real health issues that has made me face up to my own mortality (and my wife’s) and this illegally, unethical and pointless imprisonment isn’t helping.
The very real fact isn’t self-harm but of harming someone else, and, to be honest, it’s a target rich environment at the moment…..
My wife is aware of my feelings and she is explicit that I need to focus on the long term.
But it’s hard.
More than happy to listen.
Middle class twitter?
Rest assured that, as always, he is “driven by the science.”
Our only hope of a proper review of the evidence is Simon Dolan’s legal action.
Yup, that spectacle tells me we are going to court, and they are going to stand by it. How quickly does a JR actually materialise, are they gambling it won’t appear for a few months?
Beth Rigby on sky said before the PM speech that there are 16k cases daily still, that isn’t right is it ? Sure I see 3k.
I find it very interesting that Boris’ announcement mentioned absolutely nothing about seeing friends/family/relatives, when this is a top priority for many people. Something that important could not have been accidentally missed. Therefore, my theory is that that the reason why he didn’t explicitly mention these things is because it’s ultimately unpoliceable. It’s not the same as just breaking up a gathering in a town centre, taping down a park bench, or closing a shop. The ‘bubble’ strategy which was touted a few days ago as a solution for visiting loved ones is also useless for reasons which have been widely discussed. Boris has lifted movement restrictions now (unlimited exercise, and being able to drive for exercise) and I honestly think that’s a tacit coded message from him that one is (slightly) freer to go where one pleases now. I can’t see people not using the loophole in the ‘drive for exercise’ rule to see loved ones.
I also think that the new ‘Stay Alert’ slogan (which has been amusingly memed to high heaven already) is deliberately designed to be incredibly vague so that it undermines the lockdown and ends up rendering it totally unenforceable. The government isn’t going to lift the lockdown, we have to do it ourselves. They may have briefly distracted the public with their pretty traffic light system and speedometer dial but at the end of the day this is all show and placebo to make it look like they have a structured plan. The government will again be led by the public as to the speed of the lockdown lift, like they have done so far (bar any huge flare-ups of the disease which would send them veering back into total lockdown, it seems).
I just can’t see the public putting up with this. My heart sank when he basically said we’d lock down as many times and for as long as possible until we ‘get it right’. How long is that going to take?
Well said.
Is there any scientific evidence behind lifting one-a-day exercise restriction from Wednesday and not from tomorrow? What a pisstake, FFS, treating the general public like children again. If I’m treated like a child, then I usually start behaving like one and disobeying rules.
I can no longer stand to see or hear Johnson,it is one never ending piss-take,behave like good little children and you can have a little treat on Wednesday or in a few weeks time but not tomorrow or next week,it truly defies rational explanation,it does seem as if the lunatics are finally running the asylum.
I think we can safely say without needing a double-blind peer reviewed study that going out twice, or three or four times, for a walk or a bike ride etc makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to the transmission of viruses.
I see in the Guardian’s “Johnson address shows he has been swayed by hawks in his cabinet ” article worries which might as well be phrased as, “we’re all children who can’t be trusted. don’t give us any responsibility, no, no, no”. And to think that before this lockdown began I liked the Guardian. The fact is that for all their internal divides along every political line you can imagine the British people can be trusted to maintain simple hygiene measures that we should have gone to in the beginning without this damaging lockdown. Stop treating us like infants and we’ll prove we can do the right thing, and if by some bizarre chance it does not work then we’ll take the responsibility and accept that perhaps a few more could have been saved but at least we lived our lives to our ends rather than cowered in terror.
No, being trusted to make such decisions is only for grownup countries with grownup governments like Sweden and Japan, it appears.
And indeed, we must collectively accept that we get the politicians and the news and social media leadership we collectively deserve. This is not really a party political issue. and nor was the Guardian unusual amongst the mainstream media outlets in assuming that their task is to manage the opinions of the stupid people rather than to provide information, though they are clearly now not amongst the few showing signs of breaking ranks (Telegraph, Spectator. Mail and Express occasionally).
This is a sickness in our society that goes back decades at least, I think, and I don’t think there was a single mainstream media outlet that did not wholeheartedly subscribe to the “responsible reporting and informing” fear-mongering trope, back when it mattered in early to mid March.
Apparently it is to do with enacting the legislation in Parliament.
Public can now “sit in the sun in your local park, drive to other destinations, even play sports, but only with members of the same household” were his exact words. To me, that means we can drive where we want from Wednesday. Am I wrong?
Dunno Fred, have been driving wherever we wanted to whenever we wanted to.
Except there are no pubs – Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh !
Drinking and driving , eh!
With a designated driver, of course.
It’s clear that Boris isn’t going to move first. There is no bold exit from this. We will be lagging behind the rest of Europe, and our entitled population will be spending the next decade blaming anything but themselves for the fallout.
I do think we’ll be seeing lots of ‘socially distanced’ picnics next week.
I just made an analogy but I’m going to make another one. I love music. I hate the music of Ed Sheeran. Do you know how I ‘musically distance’ myself from Ed Sheeran? By not listening to his God-awful music, or buying tickets to see his shows.
Why can’t the same logic be applied here? For those of the population who believe Covid is the plague and they are at risk; great, self isolate and make sure all your family do too. That way you are safe from its grasp and free to live life as you have chosen. However, if I want to ensure I have a roof over my head and see some friends before I go completely stir-crazy living alone, I, and those who choose the same, are equally allowed to do that.
I know the answer to this by the way, there is no logic to be found.
I agree,I don’t like football so I don’t go to football matches but I don’t think that means anyone else must be stopped from going,if people are scared to death of the virus that’s their choice,if they want to hide away indoors forever that’s fine,it’s their choice but for goodness sake let the rest of us choose our own path through life and let us assess risks for ourselves and get back to at least some normality before we are all dragged down into despair.
I am hoping like you Poppy that the public won’t put up with this much longer but around where I leave it doesn’t seem likely,they appear content to have their thinking done for them by the government.Also,what’s next ? covid 20,covid 21 etc,etc… ?
But the public are putting up with it. One problem is, many people must know somebody who has had a severe case of covid19. A friend of mine in London for example has been totally spooked by what happened to a friend of hers, 49 years old, a bit overweight, who has been on a ventilator since the middle of March. My neighbour’s cousin, aged 69, was also put on a ventilator and now he is in rehab, learning again to talk and walk! My friend’s reaction is: look how dangerous this virus is; we must stay at home. My neighbour’s reaction is the same. I would say: should these people have been put on ventilators? They probably also received cortisone, which is anti-inflammatory and shouldn’t be used for a viral infection. Initial misguided treatments, as well as propaganda, is what is scaring people.
A colleague of mine (a doctor) got it very badly, the virus moved from her lungs into her kidneys and did damage there. It seems to ravage the body when it actually gets in. Luckily she is better now but still weak.
It’s the emotive bit of it that affects everyone in some way – they might know someone who may have had it and passed away. Could have been something else as well? But you have to be strong and see the greater good.
Boris initial approach was to say that ‘people will lose loved ones’ as part of shielding and distancing strategy until he was forced into the lockdown one as every damn country did the same. UK has not been as harsh though, as Spain or France.
If people end up criticising him comparing some premier League table of covid deaths then you know the media is out to get him. it’s as if the collateral damage of lockdown doesn’t matter at all
ALL of Boris’s message was carefully coded!! Very sly, not enforceable to a great degree other than stupid 2m thing so watch out for that. That will go pretty quickly too.
It’s about bringing the fearful out of their paranoid coma.
I sincerely hope that is true, an anti-lockdown friend of mine in meatspace phoned up to announce the good news and how she’d heard all the pro-sceptic dog-whistle notes in his speech. I’m just pessimistic that we are imagining subtle messages placed for us but that in reality everything has been placed there to appease the zealots’ side. Can’t tell what to think about Boris any-more, could be an Ig Nobel prize for rheology measurements on that man and how he’ll happily shape himself to match whatever container he wants to stand in today.
Stay Home is Lionel Messi. The best footballer in the world and the best way to stop people dying of Covid. Imagine though, having a team of Lionel Messi’s and realising that you are losing every game. Why? Because Lionel Messi isn’t very good as a midfield anchor man, he’s an even worse defender, and let’s not even talk about his goalkeeping skills.
That’s what we are doing right now. We are ignoring the thousands of other deaths that occur every day, the number of elderly people whose only reason to exist is social interaction and dare I say it, the economy. Life isn’t one attribute, it’s billions co-existing at the same time.
Yep, stop the lockdown is obviously Liverpool FC !
So nothing changes. We’re told, live on TV, that the economy doesn’t matter and only health does. We’ll, what about health which is driven by the economy? All of our health is driven by economy, every last persons. I cannot believe what I just heard. It seems like he’s just given up.
And I was desparate to go to the garden center. I’ll have to go to one in Wales then.
I think Garden Centres are opening?
But if they’re implementing this ludicrous distancing like the supermarkets you’ll end up with the queues outside etc. Will completely rob the joy of it all.
Yes, people seem to think that businesses that were viable in the old days like restaurants will simply carry on with slight adaptations in the New Normal. So we have stories like this:
“One restaurant in Leganes has already fitted the [plexiglass] boxes… Customers would wait to be seated at the entrance to a restaurant or bar, where they would then be met by a waiter wearing a face mask and rubber gloves.
They would then be guided to their table, passing by the other diners in their own plastic boxes.
This would allow each guests to enjoy their meal in a restaurant atmosphere without worrying about whether they would contract coronavirus from either the person sat in front of them or those walking past.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/11489258/spain-restaurant-plastic-box/
*No one* is going to pay money to sit in a plexiglass box with waiting staff wearing gloves and masks. Few are going to want to sit in a pub with wide gaps between the tables and hardly anyone in it, where they have to queue at 2 metre intervals at the bar.
If the idea is that we’re all going to clamour for Bill Gates’ vaccine just so we can go to the pub again, I reckon it’s more likely to just result in pubs going bust and people getting used to drinking at home instead. Once people get out of the habit, they may not go back. I could imagine many people getting a form of agoraphobia.
The description of the restaurant in the sun article is like something out of a comedy sketch. How much would it cost to install plastic boxes and would restaurants have the space to do this.
Be like having a meal in a nuclear power station rather than a restaurant!
Not in England
Nothing about opening garden centres in England. Except the few that have stayed open because they have a farm shop attached.
I took ‘if you can’t work at home, go to work ‘to be a quite broad statement (clutching at straws here).
I also got the same impression – he has given up. A lacklustre, ‘rather be somewhere else’, sort of performance overall, Obvious he is still suffering the after-effects of the virus but perhaps he may well now be thinking ‘this is not the job I signed up for – there are too many hard decisions to make, and that is not my style’.
Govt are in a hole. Kicking the coronavirus can down the road at the expense of the economy will go down badly with many backbenchers worried about UK finances as well as a good number of hawkish cabinet minsters – all of whom seem to have been ignored by Boris and his pal Dom.
What will the main Tory party donors be thinking tonight?
If ConHome is anything to go by, the majority will think what a brilliant speech. Very depressing.
They would say that, I reckon.
Economy and health is linked. No economy, no health and lots of misery.
Here is just one of the many comments on yahoo regarding Boris’s message
“ so everyone will have their take on interpreting what the Prime Minister has said. ‘go back to work If you can’t work from home. So what safety measures have the employers put in for keeping social distancing and testing all their employees for coronavirus just in case one person brings that infection in to the workplace? and within 24 hours! Nah I’m staying at home regardless it’s better to be safe than sorry or part of the next fatality list! For those who have been itching for this relaxation of stay at home guidelines -best of luck you are going to need it!”
I despair, I really do.
The public have been trained to think in binary extremes by the media. Stay in and live, or go out and die. People really believe it.
Sadly, you’re right. So many people seem incapable of using the brains they were born with. It’s not even as though all the relevant data re. risk is hidden from them: they could access it easily. But they choose not to. For them, fear has become both an addiction and a comfort blanket (with their spurious and hypocritical “concern” for the elderly and vulnerable being a convenient disguise).
All of them so happy to condemn their neighbours who needed two walks for their own sanity because “you’re murdering old people, you covidiot thug”. And yet none of the zealots, I would imagine, have ever bothered to pay their elderly relatives a visit to give them some company, and this has been the case long before those virtue signalling social media types had a pandemic to use for a “no grandma I’d rather you rotted away bored and alone because what if I came by and gave you a virus which even at your age it’s more likely you’ll recover from than die from” excuse. The more you look at it the more it seems the zealots would like to use this all as an excuse to let their elderly relatives be other people’s problems.
Unsurprising – probably someone on 80% or 100% pay with mortgage holiday, frozen loan repayments, hates their job etc – why would they want to go back to work when weather is good? Economy is the last of their concerns – Govt didn’t think about this happening, did they?
I’ve been hanging around this page for a few days and thought I’d join in. I’m increasingly concerned looking at the utter compliance of the British public through all this. I was listening to Robert Kennedy JR on the London Real interview he did, and am frankly very scared they are going to make this Gates vaccine mandatory. It’s worth a listen to see how money trumps life for these companies. Especially the problems regarding a coronavirus vaccine in particular.
I don’t think it will be mandatory. It’s just that without it you will not be allowed to leave the country, use public transport, enter government buildings or many private businesses. It’s a completely free choice.
Even when I get the vaccine, no way am I tolerating being asked by every busybody I encounter to prove that I’m one of the vaccinated.
Finding a vaccine will be very difficult especially as the virus continue to mutate. We need to be very scared of finding a vaccine where approval has been rubber stamped with no recourse to sue them for damages afterwards.
PM “we will be driven by the science and data”
Yeah well let’s see this science and data then.
We’ve seen it, it doesn’t say what he says it does!
It certainly doesn’t. It’s nearly 2 hours since the PM’s broadcast and I am still fuming.
Me too, I can’t focus on anything else.
This comment left under the telegraph article made me laugh:
“That has to have been the worst presentation I have ever seen, obviously whilst johnson had corrona he asked for a vesectomy, but the surgeons knife slipped.”
Following ‘science and data’ is just a smoke screen. Can’t understand why Johnson did not throw Ferguson under the bus (easy to do now) and lifted the lockdown.
Re: The Baildon Choir link. I had a respiratory infection with flu like symptoms from the second week of January 2020. It was memorable because it left me coughing beyond January 27th. The 27th is a key date because the illness resulted in the cancellation of a hospital appointment. The symptoms align exactly with what would now be described as Covid 19. I know of one other person who had the same infection.
I know several people who were ill in January. All had minor respiratory symptoms and general fatigue, ie classic virus symptoms. Except one healthy young woman who had a very high temperature that was diagnosed and treated as pneumonia.
Did you see the Mail and Times yesterday about team Kings saying the data is rubbish as there are two groups of symptoms, and this means they’ve underestimated infections by two thirds? Those symptoms are sore throat, upset tum, aches, tiredness, loss of smell. If so, my entire household (including my 85 year old dad) had that just after NYE. Nobody died. A colleague had a hacking cough for the whole of Jan, he couldn’t shake it, was in bed for a few days.
If they’ve underestimated infections by two thirds, that must mean that
• the infection fatality rate is even lower than previously thought
• we may be close to natural herd immunity
Mid-February saw me coughing dryly and being short of breath to the point my business partners told me to ease off on my workload and get some rest. I felt shite for a week or so, quit the gym and tried to sleep more. Not long after that my 20-year-old son was floored by a virus with a fever for 5 days. Both of my business partners, after returning from New York in early March, struggled with a virus-like illness.
Ask virtually anyone and they’ll be able to recall someone in their family having a respiratory illness earlier this year.
So the Prime Minister continues to disappoint with his message this evening.
Lockdown basically continues for 2 months + 2 weeks quarantine for international travel.
This will result in mass unemployment in the coming months. So many sectors of the economy are going to be ruined due to these measures. Don’t forget the furlough money will be running out at the end of June.
My children’s education is suffering and they will never get this time back.
My octogenarian parents are being prevented from seeing their family.
I am very bitter about the total mismanagement of this crisis by this shockingly incompetent government. I had hopes for the UK at the end of 2019, but those hopes have been dashed (not only due to the C19 crisis) and I see a very bleak future ahead for this country.
Sadly, it seems that various special interest groups are using the C19 crisis just to further their agendas and the government doesn’t possess either the skill or the courage to take them on. Instead they are prolonging the lockdown to make it look like they know what they are doing and that they hadn’t made a total hash of the crisis from the very outset.
But if you listen again, what he said is it cannot be policed and it cannot be enforced, not directly, but that’s what he said.
They might as well have changed ther slogan to “Stay at home. Trash the economy. Devastate lives.”
I am just so very angry. I had to listen to wake up by rage against the machine again, which bizarrely calmed me down a bit! When will people wake up from their slumber! I’ll be writing to my MP and the opposition leader again.
I just ranted at a friend for invoking and then conflating this with the sacrifices of those that won the war. So pious. So dishonest. She sanctimoniously told me I was prepared to sacrifice the old as ‘collateral damage’ as I was too selfish to stay at home. Well, hold my beer … I told her. I’m so angry, how dare these people call US selfish? They have no grip on the counter argument at all. As for the all the old gals and old boys currently rotting in care homes, who actually did win the war. How bloody dare she! I need to take up jogging or something to work off the rage.
Given the appalling attitudes towards elderly people anyway, I suspect that the lockdown actually provides many of these hypocrites with the *perfect* excuse for not visiting their aged relatives. Do you remember all those Age UK campaigns that showed how devastating loneliness and isolation can be for the elderly? This new-found concern for their …er… “wellbeing” just leaves me speechless.
A tiny green shoot, in the Atlantic.
“These facts may not be evident from the least thoughtful proponents of reopening, many of whom advance arguments that are uninformed, dismissive of experts, or callous. But the warnings of thoughtful shutdown skeptics warrant careful study, not stigma rooted in the false pretense that they don’t have any plausible concerns or value human life.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/take-shutdown-skeptics-seriously/611419
“These facts may not be evident from the least thoughtful proponents of reopening, many of whom advance arguments that are uninformed, dismissive of experts, or callous.”
If those words were to make a person want to punch the Atlantic writers and editors responsible for them in the face, would that make that person not a “thoughtful shutdown skeptic”?
(Asking for a friend.)
hahaha I know they’re so earnest, and tripping over themselves aren’t they. But it’s progress, even if couched ‘make you want to punch a liberal twat square in the face’ language.
Yes, you are right that it is progress. But they really are a bunch of insufferably condescending t**ts, for people who have been so demonstrably wrong in the way they’ve treated this disease like something it just isn’t and never has been.
Yup, I’ve been involved in a long running campaign on another woke issue, vis a vis women’s rights, I’ve been in the trenches with ‘the beards’ as well call them, they are insufferable, sanctimonious, not very bright and scarily totalitarian, and also hopeless at admitting they made a mistake.
* we all (typo)
We sceptics value human lfie more than the zealots, we value it as LIFE in all its colourful, joyous glory, they merely count it as a length however miserable the days summing up to produce it may be.
We can have unlimited exercise outdoors, but please stay at home. That should be this government’s epitaph.
Did anyone see that bizarre and rather sinister message from Tony Blair about having his team ’embedded’ in governments of the world helping them with their Covid strategy? https://twitter.com/ajcdeane/status/1259183738308767746?s=20
Yes, I did. Scary man Mr Blair.
Yikes!
More bulshit. WMD anyone?
CMO Chris Whitty giving a talk about Covid at Gresham Collage https://youtu.be/3BdPKpWbxTg
“At an individual level the chances of dying of coronavirus are low”
* Over the whole epidemic, even if there is no vaccine, a high proportion will not get it.
* Of those who do, a significant proportion (exact number not yet clear) have no symptoms.
* Of the symptomatic cases, the GREAT MAJORITY (around 80%) a mild moderate disease.
* A minority have to go to hospital, most need only oxygen. The great majority of these survive.
* A minority of those need ventilation.
* A minority of every age group sadly die with current treatment, but even of the oldest group most do not.
https://youtu.be/3BdPKpWbxTg?t=3126 – time stamped for the above slide in his presentation. Funny how he never says this stuff during the government press conferences.
This is the message that should be on the front pages of all the newspapers. Then LIFT the lockdown and save the economy and by doing so save lives.
I was ready to be depressed by Boris’s address this evening, but I was not ready to be totally sickened by Toby’s reporting of the Sun on Sunday polling. That polling suggests there is a huge mountain to climb for us sceptics. The government is only going to drop this nonsense when the polling wants them to. It’s not leadership, but it’s a fact.
I think I will pour another drink.
Don’t be. Boris speech was genius, and full of subtextual encoding. The real virus has gone. The only virus left is the fear of covid which afflicts many people out there. Never me , never you I hope
Remember who pressured him into doing a lockdown when all the recriminations start though.
Just had a quick look at the Grad’s summary of Bojo’s speech. Here’s some news that could be cause for celebration:
“The view of Boris Johnson’s speech from senior police sources was that key parts of their role in enforcing the lockdown were in effect over. ….. One source with close knowledge of the police’s efforts enforcing coronavirus rules, asked how easy the new rules would be to enforce, said: “Not a chance in hell.” ”
Or it could be the chance to use those 20,000 troops that I don’t think are here to do covid testing…….
This, I think is the key point, it cannot be policed and it cannot be enforced, so it’s down to the public to set the tone. Which I’m quite ready, willing and able to do!
Lead on!
I live in Scotland so have been told by Nicola not to listen to Boris as she will decide what is best for us, but i am very confused by something Boris said. Hes allowing people from England to travel. He never said though if you had to return home the same day so we could have people from England travelling to Scotland say in a campervan doing unlimited exercise and staying over. Something that we in Scotland are not allowed to do in our own country. Same applies to Wales. I feel like all the leaders now instead of trying to work together in figuring out how to get us out this mess they are all trying to out smart each other and score points.
I feel sorry for you having wee Jimmy Crankie as your first minister, I really do.
I’m beginning to think Ms. Sturgeon is the embodiment of a four letter word contained in ‘Leviathanistic Absolutism’ (apologies Thomas Hobbes). Not impressed with her behaviour re Alex Salmond either.
Have they really decided not to do away with the insultingly patronising and completely scientifically unsupported 2m distancing rule, despite it now being common knowledge that they only brought it in because they thought the British people are too stupid to understand a shorter distance?
I mean, clearly the kind of people we elect to be MPs is admittedly strong evidence for the stupidity case, but still.
we have been all turned into Ernie from K-PAX mowie!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eynxrj7iCg
mask, gloves, paranoia
It would seem we’re not the first society to do our level best to annihilate our way of life when a disease comes along. John Franklin, who died in 1847 on his disastrous voyage to find the NW Passage, made an earlier trip between 1819-22 to northern Canada. I recently came across this astonishing passage in his account of that journey which was reading on my way home from Australia about seven weeks ago. Franklin encountered the Chipewyan tribe of Indians who had destroyed their livelihoods:
‘There was an utter neglect of cleanliness and a total want of comfort in their tents; and the poor creatures were miserably clothed. Mr Frazer … accounted for their being in this forlorn condition by explaining that this band of [Chipewyan] Indians had recently destroyed everything they possessed as a token of their great grief for the loss of their relatives in the prevailing sickness. It appears that no article is spared by these unhappy men when a near relative dies; their clothes and tents are cut to pieces, their guns broken, and every other weapon rendered useless if some person do not remove these articles from their sight, which is seldom done.’
John Franklin, Journey to the Polar Sea 1819-22, 14 March 1820.
There was a forecast some weeks ago stating that the virus would follow a path similar if not identical to every other respiratory disease and decline to zero in 71 days. At least that is what I recall. Does anyone have a link to that or know whence it came?
Knut Wittowski, Perspectives on the Pandemic, and also the Israeli space programme dude.
This was the israeli guy Bec mentioned:
https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/04/24/israeli-professor-says-coronavirus-covid-19-has-a-life-of-about-70-days-then-disappears/
Thanks Mark & BecJT,
I have looked and found a reference to the paper in the Times of Israel so if you are interested it is here:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-end-of-exponential-growth-the-decline-in-the-spread-of-coronavirus/
We’ve still not had the PHE antibody study result yet have we ? Sir Patrick Vallance said on the 9th of April at the daily press briefing we was days away from the result. Matt Hancock on the day he hit the test ‘target’ said that 3k of them test were antibody tests. Not a peep and press don’t bother asking about it wonder why ?
Yes where on earth is it, why is it never mentioned and why is no one asking?
Computer said immune is my guess. Holland: (just right click, translate to English) https://esb.nu/blog/20059695/we-kunnen-nu-gaan-rekenen-aan-corona
When are the results of the UK randomised antibody testing studies due out?
I don’t know but that it’s mid May and we still don’t have these is nothing short of scandalous.
I suspect the tests came up with the “wrong” answer – loads of people immune and they don’t want that knowledge getting out
How come noone is conducting any tests independent of gvt? Universities? Research institutes? i don’t get it. I’d’ve thought Oxford at least would be willing to wade in here to back up their reports
Maybe they would lose their research grants?
I have been pleasantly surprised by CEBM
https://www.cebm.net/oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/
my previous experience was with the smirking ape David Nunan and his anti-low carb bias. Carl Henegan has a lot more sense.
A lot of academia is infiltrated by vegans/Seventh Day Adventists and others with agendas. Harvard may be the worst example. You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can’t tell him much.
Precisely this, did you see the Dutch data, if we are like Holland, then whoopsy, IFR of 0.02
I find the Sun polling astonishing.
So only 2% of us find this lockdown to be wrong headed?
I look around my friends and random I speak to and there’s a lot more personal anecdotal evidence that people have had enough or are just plain suspicious that we are going too far.
Who are they polling?
Is it rigged?
It makes perfect sense. 98% of Sun readers are shall we say, not the sharpest tools in the box. I don’t think that comic, sorry newspaper, is a good gauge of public opinion across the entire population. Yes it may be the most popular newspaper, but that’s only because it appeals to the base common denominator.
PS sorry if I’ve offended anyone by that comment. But most of the content it covers is just not news. Celeb gossip and sensationalism. Sad to say.
They do some good campaigns, the Sun, highest circulation also, I’m really surprised at their stance. Polls are also self selecting for people who can be arsed to do a poll (and are reading online).
True. I just don’t find them very reliable. They are self-selecting and thus it’s very difficult to get a truly random and thus representative example of popular opinion.
The Times (the Times!!) was worse ‘what matters more, public health or the economy’, how dishonest is that?
Even the FT was banging the Corona drum at one point. I think they’ve eased up a little now they realise their share values are going through the floor
Something I emailed to a friend a few days ago regarding the rabid stay-at-home brigade, whether they read the Sun or the Guardian or the Times or whatever:
The supposedly well-educated can be more dangerously dogmatic: parading their newly-discovered concern for “protecting the vulnerable”, smug in their assumption that whatever they’re being spoonfed by the BBC, or organ of their choice, is unassailable. In their world view, it is acceptable to criticise government policy – but only on the basis that lockdown should have been stricter from the outset.
The hysteria virus truly cuts across the social divide.
So we can enjoy the outside more, just when the weather has turned cold and windy. Nice.
Ok, so what is the law in England now going to be on sports activity outside?
I’m interested because my hobby is sword fighting (the historical kind), and we always did that indoors, mostly because it avoids any frightened members of the public calling the police, but at the moment all the indoor venues are closed and who knows when they might reopen. So a couple of us are thinking of getting together now for some training sessions outdoors.
The only reason for being concerned about the law, tbh, is that if we are caught doing something that is against the law, there’s a high likelihood the police would confiscate the gear and it’s quite expensive to replace.
The way I interpret the Prime Ministerial Jackass’s words, as reported, is that from Wednesday we can meet up for sports provided we maintain the stupid 2m distancing requirement (which is perfectly feasible if we are doing practice drills rather than sparring). Although it might be that only family members can do sport together even if they stay distanced (as if two people on opposite ends of a tennis court are going to infect each other. Via the tennis ball, presumably!) But I assume his words will have to be drafted as regulations, and the precise wordings might well make all the difference between what we can get away with and what we can’t.
I’ve had to rely on reports of the announcement because, frankly, I can’t bear listening to these literally stupid politicians condescending to tell their betters, in precise detail, just how they are going to be ”allowed” to spend their time. It’s just insufferable. And I was broadly a Conservative supporter and willing to give Johnson the benefit of the doubt before this covebola panic came up and changed everything.
Anyone know how this is going to work? And anyone know any anti-lockdown criminal practice solicitors who can advise?
I took it as tacit acknowledgement that it’s unenforceable and cannot be policed, so I think the public mood will decide, ie what you can get away with.
I’d happily take a fine, and indeed for myself I treat these laws as illegitimate anyway. But getting a lot of expensive kit confiscated is a risk too far for some of the younger club members, so need to be more careful with this.
I reckon the main thing would be to be on private land, Mark.
You could go the extra mile, and ring up your local nick to find out what they say ? In my (limited) experience, they appreciate the advance notice and are usually quite sensible.
(What sort of sword fighting ?
)
My problem with private land would be they might claim we were visiting someone rather than going out for exercise, and in cities there’s still a lot of snitching culture around. It’s a bit of a minefield, tbh. That’s why i’d quite like to take some legal advice, but I’d rather use a solicitor who’s already sensible on the whole lockdown thing.
Normally if I were going to do any outdoors in public I would definitely talk to the local police beforehand, but atm i’m pretty sure they’d just say no. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, as they say.
As for the swords we do (or did back in the days of liberty), it’s mostly this kind:
https://youtu.be/xruM1DylSZE
and this kind:
https://youtu.be/a_bsk08qclY
and this kind:
https://youtu.be/S-NqH1-L5x4
(But mostly with more enthusiasm than skill …
)
Excellent, thank you. I can see why you’d be a bit nervous practising on your local footie pitch.
I’m usually a big proponent in asking for forgiveness rather than for permission – but if sports activity is now permitted, I can’t see any reason plod could object.
Good luck with finding a lawyer – there was one advertising on this site, wasn’t there ?
No snitches ain’t gonna mess with you Mark if you’re wielding a claymore, just get on with it in my view.
Well that’s cool. The sword fighting. I’ll take some lessons.
I’m not an instructor. But I do know some…
I feel so depressed and disheartened. We are facing a lockdown on some level for at least a year. I have a small toddler, and can hardly bear it. Thank god for this site.
Interesting graph for lockdown sceptics
https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1259114161809883136/photo/1
The comment of Scott Gottlieb “Comparison of U.S. reopen states with European nations also reopening. Many reopen states are in line with European countries in terms of reduction in spread, epidemic density, positivity.”
What he forgets to mention is (as you see in the graph) that Sweden is as good as all the European countries in the circle which all had lockdown! The evidence that lockdown was a catastrophic choice both for the economy and for the public health.(Scott Gottleib previous FDA chief very influential in the US response)
According to Bojo, we are still at level 4 (orange) on the COVID Alert scale and only started moving towards level 3 (yellow). How so? Level 4 is the level where NHS has to operate above its capacity and the R number is above 1. I thought that we are at level 3 now? Am I missing something?
You’re looking for intelligence in something Boris said ? Good luck.
Like most on here I couldn’t face listening to Boris ‘s speech which was disingenuous. The 500,000 deaths avoided he must know is nonsense.
We are now encouraged to go back to work . Well I haven’t stopped going to work and being on the” front line” unlike the media presentation I can tell you it has been ” all quiet ” . You may remember earlier in this saga the retired GPs and Hospital consultants being ” called up ” . Well that idea has been quietly abandoned although I am sure the BBC can find one or two for its role of state propaganda service.
Anyway what annoys me now is employers will change the work environment no doubt with flexi glass to make sure all workers are socially distanced. We have all survived so far crammed into the small sitting room for coffee ; if they put some flexi glass in there I might sabotage it.
On a final note I would say a majority of care homes have covid cases not just a 1/3. Interesting for me are the large number of residents who have tested covid19 + ve but seem totally asymptomatic. I saw a 94 yr old last week covid + happily eating his care home lunch.
I must say I really enjoy your posts Peter. They give me hope. I don’t know many medical professionals personally (well enough to chat to anyway) – but the only one I have encountered thinks this is bullshit. Was on the phone to my dentist today and he has swallowed it hook, line and sinker – denouncing the locals in his area who went out to the park on friday as idiots.
Very interesting. So what is PHE going to do about this dangerous fit 94 year old? Isolate for 2 weeks and retesting on frequent intervals. The whole thing is a grotesque charade.
Please write a letter to the editor of a notable newspaper, even if as ‘name and address supplied’ we need doctors to speak out. What we are doing to the old needs to stop, we’re cutting them off from everything that makes life worth living.
Boris has made twitter post stating that the “alert level” will be a sum of the R value and the number of infections. Pretty clear he doesn’t mean that, but after falling for Ferguson’s model we can see he lacks mathematical competence, as in all scenarios the number of infections far outweighs the 0 to 4 range in which R can ever plauislby lie for this kind of virus. So there’s going to have to be some pretty substantial weighting factors on the equation:
Alert level (1 to 5)=K1*R+K2*NofInfections
and manipulating K1 and K2 can easily change the story. Question is which directions the manipulations will be performed to make the alert level vary in. Lets hope Boris has seen sanity and is now looking at making the figures reduce public panic, after spending two months fiddling the figures to cause terror.
Plus surely as they ramp up the tests even more they are bound to find more cases – and this in turn will then bump up the fabled R number.
If you’re looking for something, you find it. :/
Basically now deaths are going down – and they can’t deny this – they’ve moved from deaths to cases as the justification for the lockdown
I didn’t watch Johnson’s speech but I think I get the message: go out, stay at home, remain alert and if you see any viruses rush to the nearest garden centre. But what’s the legal status of it all? Didn’t the existing legislation expire on Thursday and has it been replaced with anything?
I assume the police will still be as heavy-handed as ever despite having been told we are basically free to do whatever the hell we like (bar a rave) outside now.
Well, heavy-handed or completely absent. There’ll be no in between. That’s kinda a return to normality then I suppose heh
Looks like they might be absent!
https://twitter.com/WYPF_Chairman/status/1259582027038326787
It was renewed for another 3 weeks on Thursday. That takes us into June… which is why BoJo ain’t in no hurry to reveal any strategy of a proper exit and long term plan. Now fingers crossed for Simon Dolan’s lawyers.
I can think of two professions whose expertise might be very useful in the coming months: psychotherapists with experience of dealing with germophobia; and cult deprogrammers.
“Coronaphobia” is already a recognised mental disorder:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134790/
That says a 20% mortality rate ?
Oh… That’s BIG … Acknowledges the need to remove fear of it that has gripped everyone
And Job centre staff.
I haven’t noticed it before but does Boris always talk in clichés? I suppose they are easy to remember after the never working so hard in their lives civil servants feed them to you.
Have Germanise rates risen again? MSM seem to be saying so?
“Germany’s”
Slightly I think but this is to be expected, from what I’ve read, it should level off and drop quite quickly.
Looking at Germany’s death and case data, it’s gone down or I’m missing something. Twice the media have claimed R has gone up when I can’t find and numbers anywhere to support this or quotes from any relevant German scientists/politicians.
From RK Institute daily situation report yesterday: Since yesterday, the estimate of the reproduction number R is greater than 1. The interpretation of this development must take into account that these estimates are linked to a degree of uncertainty as reflected by the prediction interval published daily together with the reproduction number. Due to statistical fluctuations, which are amplified by the overall lower number of cases, it is therefore still not possible to assess whether the decreasing trend in the number of incident cases observed over the past few weeks will continue or whether case numbers will again increase. The increase in the reproduction number R makes it necessary to observe the development very closely over the coming days.
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/Gesamt.html
The R number seems to be estimated daily but, unusually for the normally-methodical Germans, they don’t seem to be correcting for the rather obvious weekly reporting cycle, i.e. weekend effect, which is why the R keeps creeping above 1 each week.
I’m sure this will get corrected for at some stage, e.g. using 7 day averages for positive tests.
Check https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/ to see what I mean.
I actually looked at the statistics from the ONS. They’re fairly heavy going, but the bottom line is that the death rate for people under 35 is completely unchanged since the beginning of January. And for 35-39’s it’s hardly changed – up by about 30 in the worst week out of a total of 18,500 deaths that week.
I also compared the death rate for those aged 15-44 this year to that for the same period in 2017 (more detailed stats weren’t published) – virtually identical up to the last three weeks, but the recent (small) increase is nearly all down to people over 40.
And whilst anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence the fact that nobody I know is personally acquainted with anyone under 40 who has died from this – or even been admitted to hospital – after the two to three months that the virus has been circulating reinforces my personal view that for people under 40 there is virtually no risk at all.
But it’s these people who are both crucial to the recovery of the economy, and suffering the most.
My strategy, therefore, would be to re-open the schools immediately, and release the lockdown completely for under 40’s. This would get the economy back on its feet, and enable many sporting fixtures to resume, as the vast majority of participants in any major sport are under 40. The chances of a young, super fit Premier League player succumbing to the virus to any more than a nuisance extent must be minimal. I’d also advocate that fans under 40 could be let back into sporting venues. There’s no harm in advising them to be sensible and avoid close contact with others, but the two metre rule has no evidential basis, and is derived from a study carried out in 1939! The WHO say one metre is enough, so if it’s good enough for them …
And for the remainder of people who are at a demonstrable degree of risk – those over 40 – they should be advised of the statistical chance of someone of their age being seriously affected and then allowed to make their own decision about the degree of exposure they’re willing to accept. They are responsible adults, and many elderly people may prefer to take the chance of dying than to spend what may be the rest of their lives under house arrest. They should be allowed to make that choice.
Obviously, if such a relaxation did result in a high number of new cases there may need to be a reimposition of restrictions, purely to avoid the hospitals being overburdened, but I’d be pretty confident that any such increase would be limited to older members of the population.
That the largely obese, lager-swilling, wheezing under-40 year old football supporting masses are suffering the most, and are most likely to save the economy needs a bit more thought I would suggest. Unless of course….
However, I applaud the idea of applying sports logic – let’s drop means testing, furlough and benefit schemes immdeiately and start with compulsory BMI and VO2 max tests for everyone. Anyone outside acceptable limits gets quarantined and boot-camped until meeting standards, or just has to stay home indefinitely.
Think how much that would improve the social distancing problem – probably get twice as many people onto public transport, and into the shops, bars and restaurants.
Thinking up policies is a piece of pish actually, innit ?
It wasn’t in the headline but there it was as the second word in the first sentence of the scare story. What word? The good old get out of jail free word: the conditional verb COULD. It’s a favourite of scare mongers because it allows them not to be definitive, excuse their pathetic self-serving pronouncements when they are ultimately proved to be false and use scare headlines. Anything “could” happen, but they don’t bother to be that honest do they?
It’s also either “scientists” or “experts” without definition too isn’t it. The good old appeal to authority trick used by the climate scare mongers. The consensus of “scientists” and “experts” was that Galileo was wrong, ’til he was right; the consensus was that Einstein was not only wrong but certifiable, ’til he was right. So-called “experts” and “scientists” need to be probed and questioned and be required to demand their data and how and where it was collected at every turn.
Skeptic thought of the day:
It seems like the government is basing the removal of restrictions on the mysterious ‘R value’. The BBC is churning out articles on how important the R value is, as if people don’t know how exponential growth works…
So this begs the question, how is the R value calculated? Well obviously we can’t actually calculate it without daily blanket testing of the whole population. So it turns out that we rely on the ‘science’ ( aka simulations ).
But hang on, there are scientific articles all over the place estimating all kinds of distributions and values for the R value, based on their specific assumptions on ifr/levels of infection/levels of social interaction etc etc. So the R value can be cherry picked to any value that fits a narrative.
I suppose that this is why they have moved away from caring about the rate of new infections and death rates, so that they can keep the ‘science’ in like with the public opinion. After all, what kind of politician tries to go against what 80% of the population seem to want? (Hint: not one with long term plans)
R is whatever they want it to be – all about arse-covering really
R is modelled. That’s all you need to know.
Yup, which is why when they wheel it out, they need to be forced to justify it. Plus if the sane number crunchers are to be believed, it tanked to .4 when we all started washing our hands, and hasn’t budged.
We seem to be the only country that never reports healed cases of this disease. Surely if the number of cures is higher than the number of new cases, r is irrelevant as you are reducing the spread come what may.
Ooh that comes perilously close to sacrilege!
Yes according to The Narrative we don’t actually have immune systems so we can’t possibly get better. And worse, no discussion on how to make our immune systems work properly.
Your link for the Nico Johnson Toby Young interview does not seem to be working very well worldwide. Here’s the URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oLZiErTKfk
A short description what happened in the good old days when we had flu epidemics before the lunatics took over the public health response. We had a very crude surveillance system which worked very well. GP consultations for flu like illness, work place absenteeism, school absenteeism, telephone consultations for ILI (influenza like illness), hospital admission and sporadic testing of specimen of actually isolating the virus and growing it (not with PCR which is really more an indirect test).
When the flu epidemic came all these surveillance measures were going up and would ring an alarm bell. Public health could perhaps discuss school closures, cancellation of surgeries etc but otherwise just let the hospitals be ready for the inevitable. The few swab specimens taken would now come back as flu virus positive in an increasing number as the epidemic progressed. Then we stopped testing for flu.
We knew what we had to do. We started with isolating the first cases coming in to hospitals but very soon with the flood of patients coming in, adapted to reality. Actual testing of hospital cases was not necessary and a waste of money. Occam’s razor, something having flulike symptoms was most likely to be a flu case during a flu epidemic. That was noted as diagnosis in the records. GPs never took a flu sample but sent home most flu patients either with medicine and they were better after 7 days or without medicine and they were better after 1 week. They certainly isolated themselves at their home as you were really not fit for work in that condition. If anybody suggested contact tracing and isolation of contacts you would be considered insane.
We were never interested to get the diagnosis of every flu case. Complete waste of time and money. After the epidemic was over, the statistician went in checked the registration of total mortality, hospital records etc and then afterwards we had the calculated numbers of cases deaths etc for flu. All historical data all over the world for flu epidemics is calculated by this manner.
Early on in the Covisd-19 pandemic many in US and Germany were surprised that daily % positive Covid-19 tests versus new daily tests were not skyrocketing like it did in the flu epidemic (as it should do in an exponential phase of the epidemic). Instead it was hovering around around 24% https://coronavirusbellcurve.com/
and the same pattern in Germany. With massive increase of testing, we got a nice exponential curve of detected cases but were we really in an exponential phase of the epidemic or was it not an artificial effect due to massive exponential increase in testing?
It was easier in the good old days of flu epidemics without this obsession of testing. And we didn’t have lockdowns.
Agreed. This repeated mantra “testing, testing testing” is a ruse wrapped in a farce.
If you buy the testing idea you buy the track and trace and you buy the notion you can defeat the virus.
All bogus.
The end game is herd immunity or it is the never ending lockdown.
This is how UK dealt with Hong Kong Flu back in the late 1960’s then?
I ask simply because I was a teenager at the time and most folk were unaware of it even happening. Fast forward to 2020 and the world grinds to a halt for something similar (or less deadly?) than HK Flu.
I asked my husband if he remembered anything about 1968. We were both at secondary school then. He said he didn’t and asked why. I said that apparently 80,000 people died under our very noses from Hong Kong flu In the U.K. but we didn’t notice anything- and that was when the population of the U.K. was about 10 million less than now.
Someone made a good point on one of these pages that the media, particularly social media, is run by youngsters who have no historical perspective.
Perhaps someone should now read to them the story of the Emperor’s new clothes!
Plus we never had the media spread at that time. Three TV channels and a limited number of newscasts. Plus a printed press more interested in the global unrest and uprisings all over the place. If you Google 1968 Black Power, Nixon, Apollo 8, worldwide student unrest, Democratic convention, Vietnam and My Lai and Robert Kennedy assassination were prominent. No flu mentioned. Now it’s Covid, Covid, bloody Covid. I was a teenager too back then and at boarding school and don’t remember a major plague of youths confined to dormitories.
Yes, I suppose so though I was in Sweden during that time. That was the common approach all over the world. Common sense, something really missing in this new generation of politicians
I seem to remember that we were told that we are all going to catch this virus eventually but we all told to stay home to slow the rate of infection or ‘flatten the curve’ so that the NHS would not be overwhelmed.
Well, the NHS are clearly not overwhelmed so why don’t we just all go ahead and catch the virus and get on with our lives? Lets open everything up and get back to normal for the sake of the 99.95% of the population (or 66,529,000 people) in the UK who have NOT died from the virus.
Just in case quite a few of us do get sick we have a couple of very large empty temporary hospitals available if needed.
Agree. ‘You can’t stop a virus. The virus will mutate.’ We will have to learn to live with it. An optimised immune system will help protect us.
I agree completely. Yesterday, though, I was talking with a a friend’s son in London who believed that we needed to keep the lockdown because although he, young and healthy, might be all right, he could pass the virus on to others who were less young and healthy. This is probably because he actually knows somebody middle-aged and fat who has been on a ventilator for two months. I didn’t want to get into a controversial conversation – I’ve already lost friends because of covid19 – but it is depressing to think that this intelligent, expensively-educated young man should unquestioningly do what the government tells him – in his case, out of misguided compassion – without even asking himself questions such as: how many millions of people have to be deprived of a normal life for every critical case? How many people die of respiratory diseases in Britain each year? (Answer, around 60 thousand.)
In many cases it’s simply a failure to grasp the proportions involved – the sheer scale of the costs of lockdown is not really understood by even apparently intelligent people.
In large part that’s because there has been so much emphasis in media bot news and social on pushing the emotive aspects of the disease and its consequences and little or nothing on the costs of the lockdown, because it’s seen as counterproductive to the goal of encouraging “responsible” behaviour, and also it has been successfully demonised (like the whole concept of herd immunity) as heartless and selfish.
And in turn the triumph of that management of opinion reflects an inherent immaturity and sentimentality in our modern culture.
Yes. People just haven’t understood any of the proportions – like the fact that every year about 57 million people die, worldwide.
When people seem incapable of applying the most basic criticality, I wonder what the long-term antidote is? I sometimes speculate on my ideal hypothetical school where, from a young age, kids are taught the handling of logic and statistics. We need a new generation of logically-minded, numerate, questioning and ever-curious adults. Because so many among the current crop are somewhat disappointing…
In Scotland, straight after Boris’s impassioned speech, complete with fist-pumping and bombastic exhortations, we had a lovely little interview with our Dear Leader, the First Minister of Scotland.
There she stood in St Andrew’s House, a Stay at Home logo splashed across a screen behind her left shoulder. She strained every sinew in her public speaking muscle group to convince the Scottish public that the Prime Minister doesn’t get to tell us what to do. That’s her job.
Yes, she admits, Boris is the UK’s prime minister. But she, our Dear Leader, will make the important decisions for us, the Scottish people. She will determine how to ensure our safety. Her judgement will be the one we will trust and believe.
How does she know what the Scottish R-number is, she was asked? Well, she replied, the estimate is that it’s between 0.5 and 0.9. An estimate. A guess. She’ll err on the side of caution to protect us.
Why can English construction and manufacturing firms return to work, but their Scottish brethren can’t, she was asked? Because, she replied, she hasn’t seen data that it’s safe for her to allow them to do so. She must, therefore, believe that the best way for Scottish firms to compete in an open market is to keep them safer. For longer. While English firms can once again make and sell stuff, Scottish firms need to continue not making and selling stuff.
But isn’t the data she’s seeing the same data that the UK government has seen, she was asked.
Well, yes it is, however, she explained, it comes down to how it’s interpreted.
Ah, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s about interpretation.
And like any interpretation, a lens is required. A lens of bias, whether we like to admit it or not. Data – numbers, figures, charts etc – doesn’t tell any sort of story. First, a lens must be applied to the eyes and the mind of the person perusing the data. And then the data can be interpreted to mean whatever the peruser wants it to mean.
The overall vibe from Dear Leader’s interview, according to my lens of bias, was that she’s scrambling hard. Very hard, to keep her little fist wrapped around the lives and the future of every Scot in her kingdom. The assumption she wants Scots to hold in their minds is that unless all the devolved nations are in agreement with the strategy of the UK, the UK is – by default – wrong. Not the other way around. 5 million lives in Scotland trump the 60 million lives in England.
The meme doing the rounds from Scottish nationalists is “Stay at Home, Listen to Sturgeon, Save Lives”. It seems the nationalist movement has gone from trusting numbers and data from the oil and gas industry (at one time extolled to mean Scotland is financially viable on its own), to simply believing whatever comes from the mouth of Dear Leader, data be damned.
Can you even imagine what life is like in the Scottish Borders right now? You could live 2 miles from the border, on the north side, and are expected to live by an entirely different set of “rules/advice/guidelines” than your neighbours a couple of miles south.
How long can her “Stay at Home” message continue once the furlough money sent from Westminster and the UK’s Treasury into the bank accounts of Scottish workers dries up? She’s dangerously close to following the path used by Communist dictators (starve yourselves, comrades, for the greater good).
How long can her “Stay at Home” message continue as the published numbers of deaths and ICU admissions in Scotland falls off a cliff (39 CV19 patients in all of Great Glasgow’s ICU wards)? She lied last week when she said Scotland has 26,000 CV19 positive cases. Her own government’s website says it’s below 13,000.
How long can her “Stay at Home” message be in place for while she uses “deaths in care homes” as the qualifying reason? Doesn’t she think her followers will eventually figure out who the customer base for care homes is; elderly people at the end of their lives?
Perhaps it truly is in her best interests to keep people apart in Scotland for as long as possible. This way the cracks and tears in the fabric of Scottish society won’t soon become apparent. Control how viable a face to face conversation or debate about her policies are by never allowing the population to speak to each other ever again. After all, the golden goose (or the golden calf) has now been sacrificed in front of her Stay at Home podium. Oil and gas is now not what she told the Scots it would be: a means of safe passage into an independent future. Her golden ticket to achieve her sole political objective has been torn up by her very own hands.
Yet somehow it’s worth it. Because she now gets to tell us that we listen to and obey her. Not Westminster.
We live in France, but are intending to visit family in Scotland at the end of June, arriving on Easyjet at Edinburgh Airport. Will Dear Leader Krankie insist on quarantining us for fourteen days, maybe on Inchcolm Island beneath the Forth Bridge, even though arrivals from France in the rest of the UK are to be allowed to go about their business?
Nicola Sturgeon’s designer jacket is on a very shaky peg. Just imagine, a family enjoying a picnic in the park are lifted by her state Stasi for something that is perfectly legal in England. The press will have a field day. She’s desperate to keep the pandemic on the front pages as she knows what replaces it (Salmond’s book) will lead to her downfall and removal from public office
Very disappointing from the Prime Minister last evening, both in tone and in content. He looks a broken man, hunkered down with a few acolytes having erected barriers against the world around him, and thus having lost touch.
Looking back on this whole affair, to early March and before, I can’t recall a single thing this government has got right in dealing with it. Everything they touch seems to turn to disaster; every policy or initiative they suggest immediately proves flawed or ill-advised.
The virus does its thing, pretty well regardless; the NHS does its thing, pretty well unaffected by, or even in spite of, central government. And so the epidemic works its way through, no more avertable than a tide flowing among rocks.
If anyone can suggest anything useful the government has done I’d be genuinely interested to hear.
Their original herd immunity idea was spot on – it actually settled my nerves about the virus. It acknowledged that the virus was serious and unstoppable but most of us would be OK. That leaving the house and risking catching it was actually part of the plan. It didn’t pretend anything that wasn’t true; it treated us like grown-ups; it held out the prospect of everything being back to normal within a couple of months.
The U-turn created an absolute disaster that we haven’t even begun to understand. The dystopian future has really arrived. Possibly because of one man: Neil bl**dy Ferguson. I wonder if he realises that he may enter the history books? (if we still have books)
Good to see someone else think the same as me. Clueless govt yes, but the catalyst for all this was Ferguson and his crap modelling. I had some involvement with modelling a few years ago – was not impressed as I have an engineering background.
Yes, I have an engineering background and have always been sceptical of most ‘models’. Maybe the catalyst was Ferguson – but a catalyst only precipitates something that is ready to happen anyway. I can’t understand how Ferguson got the prominence he did – that’s the real question now, I believe.
a perfect storm!
‘The U-turn created an absolute disaster that we haven’t even begun to understand.’
Yes, that’s spot on I think. We haven’t even begun to comprehend what’s been done, and where it ends.
I should say I think it’s wrong merely to blame Ferguson. The whole of SAGE, and probably beyond, has to take responsibility. Ferguson mustn’t be a convenient fall guy for serious wider failings.
Not sure if anyone has seen this, which is truly disturbing but confirms my suspicions that this was never just about “the virus”
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/10/covid19-the-big-pharma-players-behind-uk-government-lockdown/
Thanks for sharing. It makes a grim read, but well worth going through it.
I tend to dismiss most conspiracy theories, but after seeing PM lying to millions of people, and reading the polls suggesting that 98% of British people support the lockdown, I can no longer keep my optimistic view that the government has peoples best interest in mind.
This a quote from the first part of the article:
”This is a profit-driven corporate complex harnessing the “humanitarian” sector to lend credence to the claims of philanthropy, or more realistically, philanthrocapitalism.”
I’m starting to look at Gates Foundation in a different light. I’m hoping that something proves me wrong.
My only hope right now is that the virus will disappear by itself as quickly as it emerged. It is possible, and it has happened before.
What about Macron’s threat to close the border with France if Boris didn’t take more stringent measures? If that had happened it would have damaged the food supply chain. I think that was the final nail in the coffin that brought about the U turn.
Interesting idea, which probably needs probing. I can’t remember the actual date of that threat. Also I don’t know how much food comes via France. And – as I so often find myself saying – what about Sweden? Why should Macron threaten the UK and not Sweden?
It seems that it was on the 22nd March, the day before the lockdown according to the Telegraph, Mail etc.
The Imperial College report was dated 16 March, and (as I understand it) was discussed at SAGE on the 18th, during which Cummings reportedly asked why we weren’t already on lockdown. Maybe the Macron threat was the final straw, or maybe it was cover for where the government was drifting anyway.
Well there’s obviously a lot less direct traffic between France and the UK than between France and Sweden.
But I recall there was some talk threatening the Swedes with closed borders over their failure to go along with the general panic, but the Swedes seem to have handled it without caving in like our numpties.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/finland-considers-shutting-completely-border-with-sweden/
BUT, Ferguson was chosen by this useless government to be on SAGE despite his appalling record with virus epidemics. I should love to know how they could even try to justify that. ‘Experts’ are not chosen to provide advice, they are chosen to justify pre-determined policies.
No surprise he looks down really is it ? He is an intelligent man, and must have intelligent advisors alongside the multitude of muppets, fear-porn and number-theatre experts – and those intelligent ones will be telling him he blew it.
Back in 2019 (and long before) his dream was to run the Tory party, and the country. And by Dec 13th it must have felt like every Christmas had come at once – lots of posturing, buffoonery, orating and celebrating. How it must have felt to break the red-wall, and next to eye the breaking of the EU…..
But then came Feb 2020 and the sneaking up of international events, and into March to make his fatal errors of judgement, and capitulation followed by a near-death experience.
April arrives and the cracks begin to widen, and now all around him the rugs are being pulled away.
He cannot even bank on manipulating the home-ground, as data now literally floods in from around the globe to disprove him claims and validity of policy.
His SAGE committee is in disarray, with his modeller gone, his statistician calling the data “number theatre” and others coming out to question the data on which apparently all his decisions have been based. He can no longer control his devolved governments, especially wee Krankie, and the media balance starts to shift against him too. How telling that apparently he spent much of Sunday morning trying to understand what the press had written in advance of his speech.
As observed and reported my many his performance lacked the Boris we know, and looked like that of a beaten man. Not beaten IMOH, just someone who realises the dream is over.
We need to keep the faith that the pressure we are involved in is gaining real momentum now, and next will be the turning of public opinion as the furloughing fades, and the crisis of 250,000 businesses collapsing hits home to those keeping their blinkers and rose-tints on.
I used to believe he would be best man for the job, as I am an out and out “leaver” and capitalist – but I think the future lies elsewhere now, and this guy’s time is up – and he knows it.
Every PM eventually hits a crisis, where their mettle is tested. For some it’s the making of them; others it breaks. Johnson’s has come very early in his premiership, and he seems to be breaking – not only him, but those around him. He was always going to be tested, and his true ability and resolve found out.
Very good summary BrianJR. The next political crisis will be the management of the mass unemployment that is now an unstoppable train coming down the track. I no longer see BOJO as being capable of holding this country together and leading it to a successful future. I would be surprised if he makes it as PM to the end of next year. let alone the next GE.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he went much earlier – within the next few weeks, in fact. Ill health will be his get out of jail card.
Sadly, Johnson has no clue how to improve his immune system, this is critical after having been hospitalised and at deaths door.
No, again, it was there. PM is going to go out jogging…
Ianp it is crystal clear that you think Johnson/the Government is doing a great job despite lacking a strategy, no coherent message and that it is MSM fault. I do not agree, they have their own spin doctors and PR companies and could have and should do much better. In addition, it is not MSM that came up with the panic message that we were all going to die unless you stay at home. (Note: you have now made a lot of the same comments today trying to tell us how great Johnson is and how great his plan is. Is is possible that you work for him and try and change opinions on this page?)
Going out jogging at this stage is not going to improve his immune system. In actual fact not a good idea for someone who has just recovered from a major illness as it will put too much pressure on his weak body.
But how would one get rid of him – and with what (I’d go with Owen Patterson, but he has been demoted to well below his level of competence)? Currently we are on No 6 of a dreadful series of PMs (after Major/Bliar/Brown/Cameron/May), I see little hope for a better No 7!
There’s only one great no. 7: Matt Le Tissier!
Unfortunately Patterson is a huge GMO foods supporter, not a good choice.
This is pretty much spot on, I think. Like you, I thought he was probably the best man for the job, at least among the plausible candidates. No longer. This has been the final straw for me, that puts him beyond the pale as an acceptable figure to support, like Blair’s Iraq war or Cameron’s Libya war.
As I’ve noted before, the shame of it is that this was his opportunity to be genuinely Churchillian, which is what he always thought of himself as, and what some of us at least hoped he might choose when tested. Towards the middle of March there was the massive push towards panic that resulted in this lockdown. It would have taken a brave man to have stuck to the rational course in the face of all the forces pushing towards panic, but Boris’s instincts should have encouraged him in that direction. It was the direction aligned with all that is good about traditional Britain – courage, fortitude, stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on, trusting the British people.
Instead he caved, and went along with the fear-mongers, the paternalists and the continental authoritarians.
It was the direct opposite of his finest hour. A tragic failure of leadership and of courage.
Agree. I never liked him in the first place (well not as a PM, he would have made a good Top Gear presenter), but if he’d shown some sense over this I might have changed my mind.
Clearly, on this I must concede that your judgement of his character as a potential leader has proved to have been better than mine.
(I agree about the Top Gear presenter role as well).
I agree entirely but also think he has made a despairing attempt to exit or ease restrictions. I think his message yesterday that we can now go out at will, travel, etc was a veiled but piss poor attempt to say to those of us with half a brain that we need to try to get back to normal – it was as if he was saying he wants us to do it but he’s too scared to say it. He’s still having to pander to the lockdown zealots, he’s been so in bed with Ferguson et al that he simply can’t or doesn’t know how to get out of it. He’s petrified of the consequences of having to reverse public opinion, as the only way him and his idiot cabinet can do it is by admitting they have made a colossal mistake and the ultimate price of that is something he cannot contemplate – resignation/no confidence vote, etc. Therefore, he’s in a massive Catch 22 and at the mercy of SAGE lockdown zealots.
For me the only way to try and exit this catastrophe is for him and his cabinet to systematically switch off from what the likes of ICL, etc keep bombarding us all with and allow those epidemiologists with common sense and a brain cell to have more influence. These people in SAGE also need reminding they’re advisors only, what they say is rough guidance, not fact. There has to be those in SAGE who can drive home the message that the destruction of the lockdown makes deaths/illness as a direct results of Covid 19 insignificant.
I actually think its too late for him, I think he genuinely wants to get the economy moving, get back to normality, but he’s surrounded himself with the wrong people entirely and any move he makes that doesn’t suit the agendas of SAGE based lockdown gimps, his political enemies and the media is jumped on immediately and its become to ease for them to expose the mistakes the government has made. He needs something miraculous to go right for him, but I can’t see anything at all that could do this. He’s in too deep and is dragging us with him and his cabinet of cowards in capitulation to the media SAGE’s manufactured fear.
I wonder if the same is true of all the political leaders of badly affected countries ( with the exception of Sweden and Belarus). How are they coping with persuading their people that it is now safe to go back to normal, having terrified us all into submission? (with the exception of everyone on here, of course)
I’ve been following the Swiss Propaganda website section on facts about Covid. It seems that the natives have been restless in Europe too.
There’s also a New Zealand website run by medical and academic experts called Plan B (sorry I’m hopeless at copying in links!). It really takes Jacinda to task for what she has done- she has really painted herself into a corner re quarantine regulations and has destroyed NZ’s tourist industry (and a large part of its economy) at a stroke. Boris is not the only one in trouble!
Probably been answered on here already but could someone explain again why UK has adopted 2 metre social distancing when the WHO recommendation for Covid19 is only 1 metre (3 feet).
A lot of the practical problems re social distancing in the workplace, shops, restaurants etc would disappear if 1 metre was adopted.
Am I missing something?
Apparently we are all too stupid to understand 1 meter.
It is remarkable that it is still in place, given that the shameful way the 2m rule came in has been out in the open for a few days now: basically there is no science behind it, it was brought in because the government thought the British people are too stupid to understand a shorter rule. And the only justification I’ve seen put forward for not abandoning it now is, again, that it will “confuse” the poor dumb British people.:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/07/government-has-terrorised-britons-believing-coronavirus-will/
So all the damage done pretty much gratuitously by this literally stupid and counterproductive rule can be laid directly at the feet of the government advisers who made these arguments and the government figures personally who took these decisions. Frankly, in an older time the proper response would have involved ropes and lamp posts, but we live in more civilised times now, so they should just be named and shamed, and hounded out of public life so that they are never again in a position to do such damage to the nation.
If we elect and accept as government advisers people who regard us as stupid and view it as their job to lie to us to “manage our opinions” for our own good because we are too stupid to make such decisions ourselves, then democracy is a sham and we frankly collectively deserve what we get – which is the kind of self inflicted disaster we’re living through right now. This “covebola” panic has perfectly illustrated the core problem with the paternalist idea. It seems superficially sensible that our leaders (which, in their own eyes, includes the people who run big news media) know better than us and should manage our opinions and govern our actions for the “Greater Good”. It falls apart when you understand that these people are not our “betters”, they are just people who happen to be in positions of authority for various reasons. They are just human beings, and in many ways are by no means the best of us.
And when these people are given authority and get their hands on the levers of opinion management without even the limited controls that at least an ideal of truth-telling rather than management for the Greater Good would impose, we can be as grossly misled as we have been in this panic – “managed” into a fear-filled lather of panic, with all the disastrous consequences that has for decision making. They lie to us, and feel good about lying to us, because they are doing Good, in their own eyes.
You are absolutely right to ask this question as it is this arbitrary 2m rule which is killing this country.
Remember that old expression – social space? This is the western world convention that you don’t get right in the face of anyone not from your immediate family or very close friend. Anything closer than 0.5m and you are deemed to be “invading my social space.”
So, how about a new rule which says that social distancing should be reduced to 1m? In that way much of the issues regarding transport, workplaces etc would disappear. Would it make life dangerous? Well, as long as you don’t cough and splutter over anyone – how can it?
Which takes me to my other frustration. If R is pushed up by infections in hospitals and care homes then it must be much lower in other environments, such as outside. But until someone can tell us that R for the open air is only 0.001 then we’re being told to be behave outside in the same as we would be in a care home or hospital.
R shouldn’t be tracked geographically – it needs to be tracked by activity, and the safe, no risk interactions should be unlocked immediately.
“R shouldn’t be tracked geographically – it needs to be tracked by activity, and the safe, no risk interactions should be unlocked immediately.”
The way to do that is the way Sweden does it – let the people on the spot who know the details make the decision rather than imposing a one size fits all dictat from a central government that first, doesn’t and can’t know the context of every interaction, and second, is in any case evidently run by buffoons and self-serving numpties.
Coronavirus : 14 day quarantine for entry into UK
Yesterday, in Boris Johnson’s TV address to the nation, he “gave notice” “that it will soon be the time – with transmission significantly lower – to impose quarantine on people coming into this country by air.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-10-may-2020
The proposed measure was being reported ahead of Johnson’s TV address, with claims that the Republic of Ireland would be exempt.
The ROI remains a member of the EU and so, being exempt from quarantine on arrival would mean that EU citizens arriving fin the UK from Ireland, would not need to isolate for 14 days.
At the time of the announcement yesterday, reports state that all other travellers arriving in the UK would need to isolate for 14 days on pain of being fined.
The aviation industry has responded stating that this measure would be the end of flying for both business and holiday fliers. Who would be able to stay at home for a further 14 days after returning from a foreign holiday ?
Unless employers are going to allow their staff who can work from home to do so for 2 weeks after flying back to the UK, this measure will effectively end flying as an option. If employers do allow this, then they would also have to allow it for staff who could not work from home.
Today we learn that in addition to the ROI, France will also now be exempt.
BBC online reports that change here : Coronavirus: French passengers exempt from UK quarantine plans
but fails to mention the same reports from BBC TV News this morning, which stated that the reason the UK exemption was extended to France was because Macron objected to being left out by the UK, after he had made provision for similar exemptions for all Schengen countries and the UK.
The Daily Mail reports that the quarantine requirement will not apply to some key workers.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8302255/Travellers-quarantined-TWO-WEEKS-face-1-000-fines-break-rules.html
So, if reports are to be believed at the moment, everyone arriving in the UK, apart from those arriving from ROI & France and possibly some UK key workers, will need to quarantine for 14 days or else face a fine.
Ever since this alleged pandemic began and up until yesterday’s “notice”, there has been no blanket requirement for those arriving at UK airports to go into quarantine. The media have carried many stories about the 1000’s arriving at UK airports, unscreened, untested and not quarantined.
Now that we are seeing the start of easing of the lockup restrictions and thoughts for many are turning to their summer holidays, we get notice of the intention to quarantine.
Soi far, nothing has been said about arriving on ferries or by car or train …
This latest edict giving the ROI and France exemptions proves that these are self-evidently, political decisions and have nothing to do with the so-called science …
We can go back to work, but cannot visit family.
This has nothing to do with any so-called virus.
MG
Yes. Did you notice lower down on the BBC website ( where I read the above) that it was actually on March 13th that they stopped the quarantine requirement for passengers coming in from Italy and China?
Agree 100%. Absolute farcial not connected with reality.
Would Greta Thunberg be allowed in if she comes on a boat?
Gold medal for hypocrisy? Fauci exposed now wearing mask for 14 days.Watch video Fauci saying masks are useless.
https://twitter.com/NikolovScience/status/1259712235993088000
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/10/sage-committee-split-heated-arguments-scientist-reveals/
This article says the Sage papers were released yesterday, unredacted and in full. Anyone found them?
Sage and Nervtag have been fighting like cat and dog, and I bet they were as we went into this.
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response
Goodness me “There is robust theory and evidence that adherence is likely to be high as long as (i) perceptions of the risk of Covid-19 to self and others are high, (ii) the perceived effectiveness of restricting activity is high, iii) confidence in your ability to restrict your activity is high (e.g. if there is adequate support and access to essential supplies), and (iv) the perceived costs (e.g. unemployment, financial insecurity, loneliness, boredom etc) to self and others of adhering are not too high. ”
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/884013/28-easing-restrictions-on-activity-and-social-distancing-comments-suggestions-spi-b-01042020.pdf
But all of them aren’t there? Maybe I missed it, but I can’t see the one on risk of transmission outdoors (24 March/9 April).
Yeah I’m confused about this too, not sure where I should be looking?
Adding the appropriate songs is Pet by A Perfect Circle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrEP3RPgEao
I just read that Dom Raab said this morning “If you’re out in the park and you’re 2m apart… and use some common sense and you socially-distance, you can meet up with other people.”
If only they would stand back and look at what they are actually saying. It doesn’t sound anything like common sense to me.
If people want to meet up. and they are not petrified that they may die by breathing the same air, then I think its common sense to ditch the social distancing and just get on with normal life. If enough people do this, then social distancing will start to look like a very weird and strange thing to be doing.
And why again the literally stupid (and openly admitted as such) 2m figure?
And what about people with hearing loss totally dependent on lipreading.How are they going to interact with people wearing masks? Isn’t that an clear example of severe discrimination and should be illegal?
LOL! That’s a great one. i always love it when the nanny staters can be hoist on one of their own politically correct petards.
Agree – seems like we are having a pre-matinee performance of the coronavirus pantomime already today
Raab …. you can meet grandparent in the park 2 metres apart etc
No. 10 – oh no you can’t – medical advice for over 70″s etc
This is deliberate! To make it utterly confused and ridiculous. To stir people into indignation
To make the masses of sensible people to rise up and ignore it. Its not enforceable.
The UK government IS on your side
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00173017
The Physiological Impact of N95 Masks on Medical Staff
“Detailed Description:
Wearing N95 masks results in hypooxygenemia and hypercapnia which reduce working efficiency and the ability to make correct decision.
Medical staff are at increased risk of getting ‘Severe acute respiratory syndrome'(SARS), and wearing N95 masks is highly recommended by experts worldwide. However, dizziness, headache, and short of breath are commonly experienced by the medical staff wearing N95 masks. The ability to make correct decision may be hampered, too. The purpose of the study was therefore to evaluate the physiological impact of N95 mask on medical staff.”
Wearing face masks can mean not getting enough oxygen, and breathing in too much of your exhaled carbon dioxide, causing mental confusion.
So when you’re out and about not wearing a face mask and someone else complains, tell them you don’t want to get hypercapnia (too much CO2) and hypoxia, and brain damage.
I guess hypercapnia and hypoxia are particularly useful when driving. We see lots of masked drivers around here, even when alone in their cars.
I wholehearted agree – I have been required to wear a mask (an N95 one issued by my employer) while on site at a Data Centre and it makes breathing difficult, my glasses steam up and you get tired very quickly
I’ve been discussing this a lot with friends, as we remain dismayed at the ‘I don’t care what the government / science / experts say, I’m staying at home’.
I think the only way we are going to change this is:
1. It becomes ridiculous (in the true sense of worthy of ridicule), absurd, embarrassing, laughable and subject to mockery to continue to gibber like a lily livered neurotic hypochondriac in the face of such miniscule risk. I think our only hope is to take the piss.
2.It becomes unpatriotic. Your country needs you to do your duty, get a grip, and get on with it with fortitude and courage. Refusal to do so gets you two white feathers. If you care about the old and vulnerable, then get out there, and crack on before flu season comes.
There is so much irrationality, and self centred gibbering, it’s entitled, selfish, and indulgent. It also needs to be socially unacceptable.
Agreed. I also think that social distancing is a very unnatural and totally weird thing to be doing – and people who do it should be laughed at, in my opinion. However, in the interests of respect for our fellow human beings, we have to go along with social distancing. Or do we?
One idea I had is that those people who think social distancing is a joke should identify themselves somehow (maybe a high viz band or something). That way, when we are queuing outside Sainsbury’s, those people wearing the band can confidently stand next to each other like normal human beings.
Seen this? https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1259740021445312515
Plus we now know the intention was 1m, not 2m, they just thought us too thick to know the difference. Plus he’s pretty much told the police there’s no way to enforce or police it (a view confirmed by senior police officers). I am hoping, this along with Raab’s clarifications, means they are leaving it up to us to change the mood.
I am now of the opinion that complete contempt and piss take is the one few ways to help me cope. Whenever I see someone walking towards me, I point blank refuse to move. If someone gives me a wide berth when out walking, I now shake my head and say and audible obscenity and move towards them as I go past.
If I see someone in a car with a facemask on (this winds me up to a level of extreme rage), I scream at the car and make myself as psychotic looking as possible. If I’m in my car and am level with a mask wearing gimp I stare and sadly shake my head, beeping if necessary to attract their attention.
I don’t want to scare people, just make them feel stupid, laughed at. I am trying to think of another example, going to the shop if your pyjamas (last encounted that in the co op, a woman in full night gear including slippers and dressing gown buying 48 cans of cider), smoking indoors, spitting, going outside naked, fly tipping etc.
I know, but social conformity is a two way street, we hate being laughed at. We don’t need to be cruel, people just need to feel silly, you know ‘It’s elf and safety gorn maaad!’
I don’t think you need to apologise for saying brilliant – I’m flattered!! I know its not nice to be laughed at and people are insecure, but sometimes it takes something a little more harsh and brutal to wake people up. If people really think waiting in the bushes for me to pass them on a 10m wide path is normal, I’m not going to pander to their insecurities, not any more. People have to wake up, or before you know it we’ll be sleep walking into a totalitarian state, which is a real risk. I can tolerate a lot of peoples foibles, I have many myself, but manufactured fear which has been thrust upon people by the state is something I cant abide. People need to fight it, which just isn’t happening.
There is definitely moral superiority. I was with my daughter outside a mini Morrisons last week, sitting on a bench with no one within at least 20ft. A youngish couple walked past and the woman glared at me and my daughter, for the entirety of about 30 yards, turning her head to sustain the glare as she finally went past. I didn’t refrain myself from asking who the hell she was looking at and received no reply. If people are insecure, fine but there’s no need to have some pathetic moral high ground and I can’t allow myself to be intimidated for doing something I vehemently believe is harmless – sitting on a bench.
I think the NHS clapping thing, for me at least has been a way to meet our neighbours – simply to get out. I certainly don’t believe in it or deifying the NHS, but for the older people in my close and the kids, its a way of simply letting off steam, seeing and speaking to someone else.
You can see and speak to someone without clapping. I endorse all your comments here and do much the same but I won’t be reduced to the level of a performing seal because it seems to me that is just another unsubtle method to induce compliance.
I should add that my idea would be vastly improved if the social distance lovers identified themselves instead. Then everyone else can get back to normal life and just stay clear of those people.
Maybe in due course masks will serve this purpose, to some extent?
Masks, along with sunglasses, will be needed by the resistance when we are monitored by facial recognition software in all public spaces.
In Hong Kong they are using lasers against the facial recognition cameras
Perhaps it might help all the people who think they are going to die by breathing anywhere outside their homes, to let them know that they could be suffering from a serious mental illness and may need psychiatric care:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134790/
If you just behave completely normally and let them recoil away from you in disgust, and then smile and don’t let it change your behaviour, eventually they WILL start to see that they’re the mad one. It just needs enough of us to keep behaving normally and eventually we’ll socially reprogram them
“Who has “illusions”? – And “necessity”?”
I’m reminded – every hour, in these days – of the quote from William Pitt the Younger, from a speech he gave in the House of Commons on the 18th November of 1783:
“Necessity is the plea for every breach of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
This naturally led me to think of another famous quote, this time from Frederick Douglass, former slave, who on August 3rd 1857, said:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Surely it has been truly observed that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. My preferred corollary being that we few who do remember it are condemned to watch the rest repeat it.
Who now in England remembers the words of your youngest Prime Minister? Do any see the most striking contrast with the words of your current Prime Minister?
Who now in the West remembers the wisdom of Frederick Douglass?
Americans are learning anew that their Constitution does not at all restrain their government from arbitrarily breaching their lawful and customary rights and freedoms.
No, it is only the resistance of the people that can ever do this.
Will the people of England remember, or will they be obliged by bitter experience to re-learn?
Great quotes – I shall probably use those!
Ditto!
I’ve been reluctant to say this but the more I read https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ (last updated May 6th) – and I have been studying it from the outset – the more I can’t help thinking this is a coordinated coup. It’s outlandish I know, and I am no fan of David Icke, but if you look at the overwhelming evidence of the real dangers of the virus from experts who don’t get heard in the MSM and the fact that virtually all governments are ignoring them then what other explanation is there? Johnson’s proclamations last night seem to bear this out. Nothing’s really changing despite the certainty that the economy is wrecked beyond repair, so what can this be but an exercise in social control enabled by inadequate, clueless politicians backed up by born again Nazis in police uniforms? To those who say (I was amongst them once) this is too big to be coordinated, my reply is: okay, then it’s a gift well harnessed by totalitarian tendencies. And their instincts have been borne out by the wilful stay-at-homes who are happy to give up their civil liberties. You can all shout ‘conspiracy theorist’ from the rooftops, I don’t care. I don’t care about name calling, I care about truth and if it’s true that 80% (or more) really want the lockdown to continue, then resistance is futile. We’re well and truly bollocksed. Can someone tell me what is the point of living if we are living in captivity and there is no quality of life? Because I don’t bloody see it. My vague (and it’s the tiniest sliver) glimmer of hope is that people might wake up. In which case some of us have to put our heads above the parapets.
After watching on Youtube the creepy English language videos from China, right at the beginning of January, creating panic when they can’t possibly have known at that point there was any need to panic, I too am beginning reluctantly to wonder if there is something deliberately coordinated going on here. Why, the Chinese even have clapping for their equivalent of the NHS!
Jane could you possibly post a link to one of these “English language videos from China”? I didn’t know about this and would be fascinated to see it.
Like you, Nige, I am apprehensive about the future. If people don’t wake up there may not be much of one for any of us.
There seem to be three strands to this
1) The Fear Porn. Everything hinges on this. The masses still think the Black Death lurks outside their front doors and that the disease is 100% fatal. If the true IFR was known the other two strands would immediately lose their relevance. Us “little people” can do our bit – I’ve found Dr John Lee’s interview to be excellent in presenting the reality in a calm, clear, very “British” manner – but the heavy lifting will have to be done by our doctors and scientists (the ones without vested interests)
2) The Compulsory Vaccine. If this is going to take flight it must be rushed through while the populace is still terrified. But a rushed vaccine is a potential catastrophe with deaths and disability on a scale far exceeding the virus, as a very real scenario. Again we are dependent on doctors and scientists to speak up.
3) Tagging/tracing/photo recognition and all the trappings of a police state, are using the “killer virus” as their entry point. Again, the relative non-lethality of the virus and our near or actual herd immunity could boot this into touch – but again we need doctors and scientists with some clout to get their voices heard.
We can only do what we plebs can do, and leave the rest in the hands of those who have the status to make a difference. And perhaps in the hands of our loving Source.
If we fail and the Orwellian state supervenes, I for one will have to admit defeat and learn to live within it as best I can. At my age, and with the majority of my countrymen blindly obedient, there would be nothing more I – or anyone else – could possibly do. It would be up to generations perhaps far in the future to claim their freedoms back.
Gracie, i think this is what we signed up for (metaphysically – I know you know what I mean). If you think there’s nothing we can do, how about paving the way for the future generations you mentioned?
Just an observation about the timing of this pandemic… there was very little talk about the novel coronavirus outbreak until the last week in January. I took particular note, because I was in hospital for a knee replacement and ended up on oxygen therapy for 7 or 8 days (very similar symptoms to covid19), with “Hospital Acquired Pneumonia”, they said. Anyway, my point is this, from 20th to 24th January there was a meeting of the great and the good, at a little place called Davos, and then following that, suddenly the world became aware of this growing epidemic. Coincidence? Maybe…
KH, join the resistance and make yourself known.
So when autumn and winter come back around and we start seeing spikes of flu/cold like illnesses are the Government going to move their alert up to the next level or is it just going to be for Covid19 ? What about flu and pneumonia are will just forget about them like they aren’t happening or are we going to get a alert system for that too and be thown into house arrest every winter ?
Whole thing is a complete mess and we are being led by a gang of donkeys.
Agreed, and if we would only just crack on with it now, we could have herd immunity in a few weeks and protect the old, protect the NHS before flu season arrives. So a decision to stay cowering at home is a decision to kill the old. I keep circling back to this is a war of messaging, and we need to change the script.
New blog post from GP Malcolm Kendrick (a Lockdown Sceptic from day 1)
‘How to make a crisis far, far, worse’
‘‘A slow and botched response’: how my eight weeks on the Covid-19 frontline taught me how the NHS made this crisis worse.
No PPE, no tests, no support. I work as a GP in care homes and a hospital setting, and watched in horror over the past few weeks at how the approach we took to tackling the virus caused my elderly patients to die.”
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/05/11/how-to-make-a-crisis-far-far-worse/
For those that missed them, he’s done a number of great posts:
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/03/29/a-health-economic-perspective-on-covid-19/
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/12/the-lockdown-is-not-a-way-of-beating-this-virus/
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/21/the-anti-lockdown-strategy/
He’s great, also highly recommend his book, ‘Doctoring Data’.
Matt Ridley’s new blog post
IS THE CHILLING TRUTH THAT THE DECISION TO IMPOSE LOCKDOWN WAS BASED ON CRUDE MATHEMATICAL GUESSWORK?
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/lockdown-and-mathematical-guesswork/
Hello fellow sceptics. This video suggests that Prof Lockdown’s title of world’s worst statistical modeller will be hotly contested this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naj3MeL9YKw&t=2223s
I fully expect to be in a minority of one on this, but what concerns me most about that front page is the little story in the top right. Is it not unprecedented for the Monarch to disappear completely from the public stage? Of course, given her age, she is more at risk from this virus than the general population but that is true for every seasonal flu virus. Staying at home doesn’t really cut it imo. The example the royals need to set is that of going to work. I also see no reason why a younger royal could not stand in at the trooping of the colour and why crowds could not simply be managed with ground markers and a ticket system. There have always been flu viruses but royal traditions have not been cancelled because of them. I feel uneasy. Democracy has been suspended (cancelled?) and the constitutional monarchy shunted out of sight. Is this the new normal?
I did wonder if an alternative explanation was she’s so appalled, that she’s doing a ‘not in my name’ and is refusing to play along with the charade visited on her people, but can’t say so?
I too was concerned about HM not being in public, and I do hope that your explanation is the right one! I’d love to think of her rebelling against all the hoo-ha
You’re certainly not in a minority of one. I am of this generation, we didn’t pack up and go home
80.000 + dead in UK. (I was in school – and the wrong country – so couldn’t go to Woodstock) https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/
We’ve known for a while now that “just” 10% of Covid-related deaths are in the working population aged 20-65. Should that fact not feature more prominently in the Government’s get-back-to-work strategy?
It is also significant that of the small number of those aged 20-65 whose death was Covid-related, around 80% had underlying medical conditions that made them especially vulnerable.
Andrew Neil on Twitter
https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1259786332534116354?s=19
Posted this on yesterdays update, very late, so will post again now that loads more of you are here. I have on here for well over a week now as had enough of what I was seeing quite honestly, wilful disregard for facts and and common sense. I did not get it at all but now seeing a bit more to the picture
More optimistic.
I feel the government and Boris have played an absolute blinder in the grand scheme of things considering the unbelievable amount of pressure he has been under from the media and other governments. Remember almost the ENTIRE world is in lockdown!
Project FEAR has of course been a deliberate strategy from the start (led from the media ?) when he realised that the sensible strategy of normally acquied herd immunity was shouted down by the press. But, and trust me on this, I feel that the UK has been put on a short sharp super high death curve from the beginning to achieve the goal of herd immunity. Plan B.
Project FEAR was always twofold – you have the terrified sheep who were always going to be fearful of the virus and were fed it constantly from day one, then those who never were fearful (us). But then part 2 was to make some the likes of us FEAR the dystopian future presented. I have been horrified by the ‘new normal’ and police state horror so was determined to take to the comments boards, I have always been out every day in the fresh air, in full view of folk who may have been cowering or maybe those not afraid but not wanting to be seen.
Our actions have given other people the courage to push back and get outside and will continue to do so in the coming weeks as the traumatised have to be guided from their fear tree.
We will have this role to play, and this was always our role.
It will be painful for a lot of them. Especially some of the millennials. Remember – no mask, no fear! Look at the mandatory mask rule elsewhere in Europe – they’re actually harmful(!), they will be the ones who prolong the agony. And this hilarious social distancing rubbish.
But… And I am very sure of this, the UK has probably achieved herd immunity (that’s always the end game for ANY new virus that goes worldwide) far quicker than any the country in Europe, except maybe for Sweden and the heroic Belarus.
Hence the 2 week quarantine for people coming in right now… In case they bring it to us. That will be lifted soon I hope, because, y’know, we have herd immunity anyway. This is all now a political game, and probably has been all along.
Unfortunately, we have had to sacrifice those who were vulnerable and too frightened to go to the hospital due to ‘covid’ , deaths at home, but the numbers will prove that a lockdown and being fearful was never the way to address this. And will not be ever again
There will be a recession, no idea how deep, but ours will be shorter I hope. Note the ‘green’ city cycle paths not mentioned yesterday but there will be some element of that to come with a transition to electric. There is a definitely a climate change angle to this (another subtle part of Saturdays narrative), HS2 got passed didn’t it…?
I think we are all reasonable enough to realise that current pollution levels cannot really be sustained, but not at the cost of our personal choices and freedom!
He couldn’t be Churchill, there was too much pressure from the media nitwits to do that. And telling people to ‘wake up’ would have given them a heart attack after the brainwashing. What else is to come out there I haven’t quite worked out yet but I now get what was done, when Plan A went out of the window, it was Plan B. A bit Agenda 2030 (?) for sure so keep an eye out for clues on that. I hope Gates and any of his insidious mega vaccine plans get totally shredded to hell, there’s huge suspicion out there and people would not accept it (and I am not an ‘anti-vacc’ by any means. Just sensible.
In the long run, he’s done the best he could have done and probably in the process dealt a death blow to some of the more left leaning media while he’s at it.
Expect to see those fucking cringey iPhone filmed ads disappear fairly soon, as will the odious ‘social distancing’ phrase too when the fearless (us) go out there and ignore it.
This won’t be as quick as we hope.. because we are switched on and a lot of the country is deeply traumatized ( as am I from being FEAR part 2 victim)
It will get there. Not quickly enough for the likes of us, but I think we can help the sheep by just going about our daily lives.
So… I do wonder when ‘The Matrix’ will be on telly instead of Outbreak or Contagion (fed the Fear narrative)
What a mindfuck
On the contrary, the only reason he couldn’t be Churchill was that he is NOT Churchill; Chamberlain, maybe!
It is probably Boris’ Dardanelles though!
My PhD friend who worked in respiratory viruses told me that ages ago, no way with a lockdown this leaky that the plan wasn’t herd immunity. Did you see Raab on the beeb? They have been clever, they are now saying you can meet your friends and family outside with distance. But they also said you can be out as long as you like, drive as far as you like, sit and loiter as long as you like (ie it’s unenforceable and cannot be policed, a fact reiterated by every senior policeman in the country by 9pm). It is a total mindf*ck, but I find your analysis convincing, I think that’s what they’ve done.
Just looked at a Twitter feed on this, with YOUNG people commenting hysterically “OMG! OMG! THEY WON’T KEEP 2m APART! THEY’LL SPREAD THE VIRUS! THEY’LL SPREAD THE VIRUS!”
Yes, indeed they will! At this stage, that’s exactly what we want! THAT’S THE WHOLE BLOODY IDEA!
Evidently the concept of “herd immunity” is not taught in GCSE Biology. A whole generation has been dumbed down big time.
Plus, what are they gonna do, police already said their role in policing and enforcing is over. I’ve let a couple of my sanctimonious lefty friends who are still clinging to my friend’s list have it with both barrels this morning, granny murderer shoe is now on the other foot. And yes as for virus spreading, that ship has sailed, which is why I think the fabled antibody results never appeared. Plus if team Kings are right, we’ve had it since Dec, and it has two groups of symptoms. God knows what the fallout will be, but I think IanP’s analysis is right. So I’ve just messaged sis in law, family meet up in progress.
No, it’s worse than that – the concept of herd immunity was intentionally demonised quite early on by the panic mongers as “heartless” and even “darwinist” (as I’ve had one person refer to it!), because it promoted a more relaxed approach to the whole thing rather than the panic and lockdown they wanted.
Remember back to early March, when almost overnight the government and government experts stopped referring to it and desperately distanced themselves from it whenever it was mentioned. And this seems to have been a worldwide phenomenon. The Swedish government experts have been almost the only ones to keep talking rationally about it, and even they were reduced to describing it as a “byproduct” of their policy.
I know, but why? I am so angry with the opposition, they actually have a bloomin’ job in a democracy. The point scoring is doing me in! I am starting to think that some of the more extreme activists actually want people to die so they can stick the boot in.
You should see my Facebook thread: it’s exactly that from the children of my mates who have ‘friended’ me on FB. They are beside themselves that these slightly relaxed guidelines are going to kill us all. Thank goodness we didn’t have social media in 1968, the world would probably have ended.
I hope you’re right, and we’ve ALL BEEN played!
Hmmmm…
I suspect it might be a sort of reverse Hanlon’s Razor, if it’s anything at all:
“Never ascribe to GENIUS that which can be explained by incompetence”.
OTOH if this strategy was, by any remote chance, deliberate, then Boris has indeed played a clever hand and has actually made a truly Churchillian sacrifice – knowingly trashing his career and reputation to minimise the damage to his country.
Yeah, maybe finally found a way out of the mess might be a better explanation.
Ok mind well and truly f**ked
And do you think Cummings and Lee Cain have been the driving force behind this because a plan so dastardly would involve having a half a brain and looking at the Cabinet, well….
Two twitter accounts to keep your spirit up in this Covid-19 mayhem
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1259679959209164803/photo/1
Not sure if this person is a genius or a crank but his almost daily updated chart gives you hope that this pandemic will follow the SARS going into oblivion in the summer
https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/1259072990383427584
This is a certified genius Prof Michael Levitt Israel the first to say something intelligent about the pandemic curves. A mathematician saying all the sensible things our public heath epidemiologists failed to do. He was the first to spot that there was some form of resistance in the population against Covid-19 as it did not behave really exponentially in the end. He did this calculation by pure mathematics and he is not at all an epidemiologist or biological scientist. Great source of information
.
Great respect for some of the things Levitt has said, but he was by no means the first, at least as far as I’m aware (although he was watching the numbers from January, so he might well have been saying it from the start and it wasn’t reported or I just didn’t see the reports.
I was watching this point as the epidemics progressed, and the first mainstream report I saw with a credible mathematical case was this Israeli mathematician:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-prof-claims-simple-stats-show-virus-plays-itself-out-after-70-days/
But the first mathematician I saw making the argument was a fringe “conspiracist” type mathematician called Andrew Mather who had a guest appearance on UK Column at the beginning of April:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdIvdhjrm20
I suspect, because of the lack of mainstream reporting, that these were independent observations by the individuals concerned. Imo, the fact that I had to find this on fringe sites because it wasn’t prominently reported here in the mainstream should be the final nail in the coffin for any argument supporting the modern censorship of dissenting views and sites being introduced everywhere by big tech and big media.
I should add, I use the term “conspiracist” descriptively, not pejoratively.
Some bloke on his couch saying “Imperial College plucked a number out of thin air”. This is clearly incorrect and a stupid statement. You can say their model has issues but it does exist. Zero credibility.
Zero credibility is also a good description of Ferguson’s model
That was clearly hyperbole, but in reality “plucking a number out of thin air” is not all that much distant from modelling based on guesses (that have proved to have been incorrect guesses that resulted in disastrously misleading results). Garbage in, garbage out.
But in any case, the point was that he spotted the trend for the progress of the disease to be quite independent of government responses, and to drop out of any real exponential growth phase quite early.
https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/1224722246243098624
He started 4th Feb already with the calculation with Hubei outbreak and I think there are some interviews with him in February discussing the issues
Fair enough. I wasn’t aware of early tweets about it, but anyway I suspect these were independent discoveries.
Its like a normal day before the lockdown outside my place, beautiful to see.
True, straight back to early March temperatures!
Same here (looks like London is getting busy as well). I’ve been out for a walk and there’s more people around and lots more cars on the roads. Loads of my mates went back to work today and loads going back next Monday.
I’m thinking about sending everyone back to the office on the 1st of June.
I’m starting to feel more positive. I think the lockdown will just collapse by the will/actions of the public
Can someone answer this question – or if not answer, give an opinion on it? (I seem to have been locked in to Lockdown Sceptics for two days now. Good job I’m self-employed, work from home and can bide my time.) Anyway, question: During the AIDS panic in the 1980s, after the usual hysteria of a few months or so, it was pretty much established that the virus was 99% inactive outside the body after a few hours or so as it dried up in the air. Since viral load is significant for infection (the more there is the more likely it is to score) which so-called expert suggested that this corona virus can survive up to 72 hours on surfaces? I mean, really? Does it have some special feature that prevents it from drying out? Is someone giving it moisturising cream?
There are too many scientists with opinions, mostly they seem to be utter drivel. It must be one hell of a virus, that comes with a coating of Johnsons baby lotion. Yesterday someone posted a short video by an ITU doctor who claimed that 18000 new cases per day were occurring, yet he admitted his ITU was absolutely fine, no pressure, he could even have a coffee and speak to his phone to record his message. Its things like this that cause contempt for so called scientists – 18000 cases per day? Every ITU would be dead and buried, as would the staff.
I’m a scientist, but if I’m not sure of what I’m saying and can’t provide adequate evidence for my conclusions, my peers and customers would remove themselves from my sphere of influence – I’d eventually become someone who they don’t wish to ask a question of because in short they’d think that I’m full of shit. Eventually, I’d lose my job. These simple rules apply in my private sector world at least – prove what you claim or shut up. They don’t in this coronavirus addled world.
Researchers have looked at this and it is surprising to me – but then I’m not a virologist. What wasn’t said (and probably would need another paper) was so what if it is still viable on a surface? How much? And does it come off the surface easily in sufficient quantity to spread? I haven’t heard anything on this.
I think we are used to being told that you can’t really catch much from a toilet seat or touching an ATM machine because bugs don’t survive outside for long. We don’t know with Covid and the transmission is still being studied. It surely can’t be that bad or everyone would have it by now.
Hendrick Streeck in Germany found very little evidence of this kind of transmission:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8182767/Scientist-casts-doubt-coronavirus-spread.html
“Research conducted by Prof Streeck in one of Germany’s worst-hit regions showed that the home of one infected family did not have ‘any live virus on any surface’, adding even more questions as to how the virus is spread from person to person.
……..
Prof Streeck said the virus had not even been found on door knobs or animal fur.
He told German TV that there had been ‘no proven infections while shopping or at the hairdressers’.
…..
Prof Streeck stressed there were still unknowns about how it is actually spreading.
‘The virus spreads in other places: the party in Ischgl, the club in Berlin, the football game in Bergamo.
‘We know it’s not a smear infection that is transmitted by touching objects, but that close dancing and exuberant celebrations have led to infections.’
He said Germany’s patient zero had only infected her colleagues and not other guests or diners at the hotel she had been staying at.”
Thanks this is great information contradicting the so-called lengthy survival of the virus. Lots of scaremongering stories to keep people scared
Sunlight zaps it in minutes according to the US DHS
https://www.scribd.com/doc/456897616
Soap and water breaks down the lipid layer on coronavirus just like on any other virus, so no indication that it has anything special to stop it drying out. There was extensive media coverage of 17 day old samples being found on the Diamond Princess, but that was only enough fragments of RNA for the genome to be identified, not a viable virus particle.
72 hours is mercifully short, and only that long on surfaces which aren’t being sun exposed, weatehr beaten or cleaned and are non-porous (porous surfaces suck moisture away from the viral particles). Norovirus can last weeks on a surface. Given this shrot lifespan on a surface we can see what an easy virus covid-19 is to control, and why the lockdown is the wrong decision.
An important starting point for looking at how to REALLY reduce deaths in pandemics by actually addressing underlying health factors (shock horror – what an extraordinary idea), rather than waiting for “Professor Bill Gates’ Miracle Vaccine Tonic”.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20087965v1
Coronavirus: ‘Loose’ lockdown rules ‘unfair’ on officers, police warn
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52618005
So bog off and stop enforcing them, fools!
In my and many others’ experience, you never have any difficulty or feel any shame in saying you can’t respond to real crimes because you are too busy. so when you get a patently stupid law like this, just ignore it and get on with your proper jobs.
Lol. So we’ve moved from guidance (not law) that was unfair to the citizen to guidance (not law) that’s unfair to police officers.
Sounds like we’re moving in the right direction to me.
(They deserve a little ‘unfairness’ after the way they’ve been treating us for six weeks)
They have probably been as paralysed by fear as many of the population! But still in a job
I would cut them just a little bit of slack. There will be normal people in there too
Here’s a rather basic question from frustrated, incredulous and increasingly cynical person up here in Sturgeon land: what will happen in border communities, as here and in the Welsh Marches.
Will those under severe lockdown sneak across into, say Shropshire or Northumberland for a bit of extra time.?
Will goodies be smuggled across the border areas?
How about, say, living in Berwick or Llandrindod Wells, but working in England? Or vice versa?
This is a recipe for chaos, and it’s turning into a deadly farce.
Surely the United Kingdom, if such still exists, could have finally got its act together for a unified strategy.
Is this too much to ask from our leaders?
“Is this too much to ask from our leaders?”
Is this a trick question?
Probably! Or a terminally p…..d off one!
Seems to me political opportunism from devolved governments. Based on recent news, they’re looking for anything to beat the government with. They are politicising the issues. Sturgeon does her daily press conferences earlier than England probably just to try be petty. We even have Andy Burnham trying get Manchester to have its own lockdown policies – let him if he wants and see how his people react if the rest of England is a little bit more liberated but Manchester isn’t. It will go down well I’m sure.
I’d like to see how they react when Furlough payments run dry, then the devolved governments will be delivering work edicts around like Stalin.
Yes I think you’re correct: the endless point scoring at a time when unity and common sense seem to have been discarded is a disgrace.
She who must be obeyed never misses a chance to have a pop at Westminster, and it does no good.
The last time I looked, Berwick-upon-Tweed was in England!!
My mistake!
There were times when it wasn’t
It’s a good point, in some respects Wales is less ‘separated’ from England than Scotland is, there are some fairly large urban conurbations in the borders, the most obvious being the Deeside region in NE Wales with lots of people working and having immediate family either side of the border. Some areas of Deeside are really suburbs of Chester!
From the BBC Live Coverage:
“Poland has tested 23,400 people in the previous 24 hours, a record high. About 5,000 miners from the state-owned coal miner PGG were tested by Sunday and around 500 miners tested positive.
Szumowski said 97% of infected miners are not showing symptoms, which increases the risk of them infecting others. Hot and humid conditions deep underground are good conditions for spreading the virus. Miners also cannot wear face masks due to the nature of their work.”
97% asymptomatic!
Absolutely stunning news. 97% 0f 500 asymptomatic. What happens if UK start to mass test let us say prisons in Wales and we have the same results? What happens then with the R factor and scientific assessment of threat level? Are we going to close down the country again because of that? Admit defeat. The virus has outsmarted us. Open up everything and wait for summer, any spikes or small waves along the way down the Bell curve can be handled by the NHS.
“Szumowski said 97% of infected miners are not showing symptoms, which increases the risk of them infecting others. ”
Or your test is useless. You’ve just identified that 10% of the population appear to have a common strand of RNA and trying to match any symptoms is “correllation is not causation”.
Much like what happened in Wuhan (if you listen to Wolfgang Wodarg and look at the data). Strange respiratory symptoms which causes PCR testing to be used (a non-diagnostic test). RNA strands are found but with no context – have they always been in the population? Have you tested people over many weeks and months to establish a baseline?
Association of symptoms with the RNA markers rather than follow Koch’s postulates. No link between markers and symptoms. Also depending on the amplification levels used in PCR you can get any result you want.
Fast track the test to WHO and voila! You have a meaningless test that can be used any way you want.
A test is only as good as its qualification, characterisation and calibration. Otherwise it’s “Doctor Doctor I’ve got a bone in my leg!”
Our leaders seem to have opted for cock-up rather than Koch’s postulates.
We should stop using their terminology and start using phases which have more negative connotations. For example, self isolation should be something like solitary confinement. Social distancing – inhumane separation. And we should never use the term new normal. Something with the word abnormal would be better. If anyone has any ideas then we can start using them in social media more and more and hopefully the wider public would start using them too
Thank you for this Stephen. I for one intend to adjust my speech accordingly. Let’s keep the alternatives coming.
Brave New Normal
Good idea:
Unscientific
Unevidenced
Inhumane
Illogical
Instead of economy – social fabric, social contract, life-enhancing interactions?
Instead of Herd Immunity – safety in numbers?
BTW not socially distancing is innate and hardwired in humans, to distance is unnatural
Masks are facial sanitary pads.
Where are the UK counterparts to the doctors in California and New York who are speaking up about covid19 v lockdown when the health and wellbeing of everyone is at stake? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may have bought – sorry, donated – its way into every institution and organisation (including BBC’S Click), yet that hasn’t deterred these people from doing what’s right.
The government’s initial reaction was born of panic. It, MSM and social media successfully instilled fear into the populous from the get-go. Then along came Santa, aka the Chancellor giving money out like sweets. Great, almost full pay for doing nothing. Blessed then by sunny weather is it any wonder too many are seeing this mess as nothing other than an unexpected holiday?
What a disappointment it was to see and listen to Boris Johnson last night. He even mentioned Neil Ferguson’s dire prediction of 500,000 covid19 deaths as his basis for this lockdown, and seemingly for its continuance. I don’t see leadership from him. I don’t have trust and confidence in this government. Just who are they listening to when it comes to science? Whatever happened to good old risk assessment where hazard/threat was considered against likelihood, and harm factored high? The harm to us all from this continued lockdown is far too high.
So sad to see polls suggesting most people agree with Boris and his government. So sad people are still clapping every Thurdsay for NHS workers who have nothing to do because the hospitals are devoid of patients.
People in other countries are protesting this nonsense. How can we do likewise? I’m trying to have factual discussions with others. It is difficult because I am a lone voice. I am that fish on a poster I once saw where it’s swimming in the opposite direction to the shoal; and the caption reads, “What if I’m right and you’re all wrong?”
So lone voice round here for now and like those doctors I have to do what I believe is right.
I have Facebook friends one generation below me – I’m in my sixties – screaming blue murder in their threads that no restrictions, none whatsoever, should be lifted and that we need to be locked down till Covid19 gets bored and drifts away. I’ve got news for them, ain’t gonna happen, anymore than the common cold drifted away, but I haven’t got the energy to say so. i don’t fear their vehemence (that ship has sailed) but I’m never going to change their minds. All politically left leaning too, which is where I thought I once hailed from. Seems I’m homeless, but at least comfortable in my own skin pursuing truth and eschewing bigotry.
All you have to is go about your daily life as normal. Have no fear. That’s all there is to it
But we can’t go about daily life as normal – I live on a once busy High Street, with very good cafes, restaurants, pubs, independent shops and lots of hairdressers and beauticians, all small businesses, all closed, only Tesco and the very expensive CoOp supermarket open….the small fruit and veg shop and the bakers are still open, yes, but we have to queue outside as we have to if we want to go to the supermarkets. Much as I I would like to carry on as normal, I can’t, although from day one I have taken my dog out for as long and as often as I wanted, so that’s a little bit of normal. First day of lockdown I saw a police man sitting in his police car, never seen before or since. One good thing – we live close to a large hospital and since all this the number of ambulance sirens blaring has reduced from one every ten minutes during the day to once every so often although they have begun to increase in numbers lately….Crazy, crazy world full of easily led people. Very worrying times indeed.
These are the consequences of mass delusion – reshaping our society in response to a fantasy. We are behaving as though we are facing an endemic disease that is as infectious as flu and as deadly as ebola, when in reality what we are facing is a disease that is as infectious as flu and as deadly as flu, more or less. But it certainly is endemic, it is not going away and it will reappear periodically and the less resistance there is to it in the population, the more rapidly it will spread when it does appear. So we can expect periodic panic lockdowns basically forever if we let this attitude stick.
Has anybody tried to quantify the long term loss of productivity involved in all this?
The workplace of the future: Factories and constructions sites reveal their new look with dozens of screens to protect workers, hand gel stations, one-way walking and ban on communal loos
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8307165/Coronavirus-UK-Factory-construction-workers-start-today.html
Well, that will be a waste of money won’t it. Unless you let it happen
“We are behaving as though we are facing an endemic disease that is as infectious as flu and as deadly as ebola, when in reality what we are facing is a disease that is as infectious as flu and as deadly as flu, more or less”. Agreed
And then what should we make of the WHO screaming ‘test, test , test’, when they were selling tests at $250 each.
Maybe more to the point, doesn’t it seem as if mass testing (which by now could have been well underway, and probably would have been if it was as deadly as ebola) should be possible, and well under way.
Is there a benefit to testing too little ? Yes, it means they can create an exaggerated death rate/CFR under which they can continue the mass illusion.
I ave just found Tobys web site after reading his article in the DT on Saturday. We are voices in the wilderness. How can we make more of an impact. I keep on sending letters into the DT completely in tune with this message. Her hopefully is my latest.
I FEAR “THE FEAR” MORE THAN THE VIRUS
The Government led by the science and Public Health England have done a wonderful job of keeping us all indoors by scaring us all witless by the constant simple message that we hear at least 50 times a day through one medium or another.
Then there are the 24 x 7 news channels led by the nanny BBC, the not much better Sky and of course the terrible LBC, especially their morning presenter. Their main goal (apart from the occasional good news story) seems to be to drown us in a sea of misery and dread. The fear is now becoming palpable – every time I turn now into a different aisle in the supermarkets, I see the red mist suddenly appear over the eyes of the person encountered.
Every day we hear two basic statistics – the number of deaths and the number of new infected cases. Why dont we hear about the number of recovered cases. Why is it that the UK is the only country now on the worldometer web site that does not show this statistic. We hear other statistics from PHE and the ONS such as NHS bed occupancy, “excess deaths”, and soon a breakdown about BAME deaths. Why not a breakdown by age? Why not a breakdown for those with underlying health conditions that have died? You come to the conclusion that a level of fear and doubt has to be maintained across the whole population. The level of paranoia is increasing week on week!
Here are a couple of statistics to consider. As of today there are 170,681 active cases in the UK of which 1559 are considered serious or critical. This is 0.9%. The worldwide figure is just over 2%. Let us consider another statistic. If we consider the working population of the UK plus the population over 65 – a total of just over 43 million, then if there were eventually 43,000 deaths (currently 30,076), then this would be just 0.1%. Of course every death is a tragedy but when you consider that the livelihoods of possibly millions in the UK could be affected for a generation, then we really must start to form a different perspective. This should be based on detailed analysis and NOT from feeling scared to death.
In a few days, I reach the magical age of 70. I will not suddenly become a high risk candidate. I am fit, I have never smoked and only drink the occasional G & T, and my diet is well balanced. My working life is at an end but I do fear for the livelihoods of my sons, their families and for the future even of my grandchildren. The PM is making key decisions today which he announces on Sunday. The mind set and the message must now change to GET BACK TO WORK / PROTECT THE ECONOMY / SAVE LIVELIHOODS. My concern is that it will be difficult to eradicate the level of fear now created in the population and that a more expansive approach will be roundly criticised.
I will then fear the economic fallout far more than the virus itself.
Interestingly, that critical case figure on worldometers has remained at 1559 now for weeks. It is never updated. I don’t know if that in itself is significant, but it is a fact.
Wearing full hazmat protection in case of contamination I ventured into the myopic world of BBC News this lunchtime. They are reporting with glee that the so-called R number in Germany has risen above 1 now that they have lifted lockdown – despite the fact that it is meaningless over such a short time span – implying therefore that Germany’s strategy has failed and by implication so will our (limited) lifting of restrictions. The news anchor almost had a smile on his face. Elsewhere each news item was saturated with mask porn making a point of trying to edit out, or gloss over, those in the frame not stupid enough to fall for such scams. I want my licence fee back.
Well I’ve long been a believer in ending the licence fee. Why should we all (all tv owners) be forced to pay for a channel that propagandises for particular opinions we certainly don’t all share, and actively censors views quite a few sympathise with?
This experience of the BBC being one of the most damaging of the panic-pushers ought to have made a few more open their eyes on this.
BBC News at lunchtime – that was brave of you.
Boris and the BBC do seem to be obsessed with the R number. I wouldn’t mind seeing some detail covering how they actually calculate this number. I wouldn’t be surprised if its foundation is extremely flaky and not sufficiently reliable to justify its repeated use as a measure of how successful the lockdown policy is. But they continue to use it to bamboozle the public.
Use of the R number to scare the public should fill a chapter or two in the public enquiry report we might see in 10 years time.
This Ro BS has got to stop. No matter what the rate infection of a respiratory disease (Ro) at the outset of an epidemic it has a decay profile and will inevitably decline in due course. If it did not a continuous Ro value of 2 would see the entire population of the world infected or immune in less than 21 weeks of the first, singular human infectee (assuming an infection period of 1 week). The UK would take just over 16 weeks from a single infected person.
There is nothing magical about any of this and as long as it does not kill its host, and this doesn’t harm the young, it will extinguish itself in a matter of weeks. Unless, that is we deliberately prolong the life cycle by “flattening the curve” beyond the length of immunity conferred by infection, which might be weeks, months or years. I doubt the proponents of Lockdowns will be keen to admit to being the cause of that particular outcome should we continue being the supine sheep that Joe Soap appears to have become.
I just sent the DoH&SC a Freedom of Information request asking for the methodology of calculating the R number. I doubt if they will reply but hey have to do something.
My licence fee was due to for renewal 30th April and I have happily cancelled it.
I don’t have an aerial and use subscription based channels and on-demand TV. I probably watched five things on iPlayer last year. I’ve deleted the app and await the inspection. £157.50 worth of beers in the kitty whilst I’m watching the FA Cup in my local, if it ever reopens.
The inspection rarely happens. And even if it does, you don’t have to let them in unless they have a warrant.
Martin again. Sorry I rushed my first post. I was so excited to find a web site with comments that I am sure will be along the thoughts that I have had since week 1 of lockdown especially as I started to study the worldwide staistics on the worldometer web site. We are being fed a very limited analysis of the data. It is what PHE and the Govt (which I broadly support) want us to hear to keep us ALL under control. The affects on the economy are being mainly ignored and if we continue with the current mindsight, then misery awaits. Boris must be far braver and emulate his hero, Winston Churchill who had the courage of his convictions when all stood against him! To make a difference and change the direction of the debate, we must mount some sort of campaign. This was my hope in sending numerous letters to the DT but they have not taken up the challenge. I am so frustarted not for me but for my sons and grandchildren generation. I am bursting at the seams. I do not use social media as often the debate is shallow but somehow we have to use different media to get heard. How can we do this? Perhaps kick off a petition to No 10??
Uh oh, the roadmap is out, opening gambit is ‘remorseless foe’ https://order-order.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/FINAL-6.6637_CO_HMG_C19_Recovery_FINAL_110520_v1_WEB.pdf
No haircut until 4th July
Yep, but if you ignore the guff about the actual strategy, what impressed me a bit with that document is how it’s finally laden with information about the impact of the lockdown, socioeconomic, health, education, disadvantage etc. That’s my professional niche (my family run a business, but i’m freelance as a consultant, doing something else), the health and social outcomes of deprivation and disadvantage (which is why I’m so opposed to lockdown, I know it’ll be carnage on those already unfairly at the bottom of the heap). Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that looked a bit to me like ‘your move labour’?
Just got my haircut today with my usual hairdresser. Just do it
I couldn’t face reading Johnson’s essay at the start. Love the “graph”, sorry “illustrative profile”, labelled Figure 1, obviously just drawn by hand this time without the help of Fergie’s ZX-81.
The good news is it is actually a herd immunity strategy with some drivel about how they’re going to do some half-arsed TTT and maybe there will be a vaccine one day but don’t count on it. See Figure 6 for example. If that isn’t an “illustrative profile” of herd immunity then I don’t know what is.
Hard to see how they’re going to please anybody with this, but it could be a lot worse.
VERY interesting discussion on health blogger Phil Escott’s YouTube channel, featuring a young British doctor who is questioning many aspects of the pandemic and how we are managing it in the UK.
https://youtu.be/HR8AMfSuKFY
Love him or loathe him Kavanagh in the Currant Bun is an opinion former and agenda setter. Knives out? https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11592292/trevor-kavanagh-lockdown-terrible-mistake/
It’s interesting to see the change in narrative from The Sun and other papers today. Comments posted below articles also seem to have a different tone. It feels me with hope.
Me too. Also I posted the government’s roadmap down thread, the map is rubbish, what is interesting is the supporting narrative about the cost of what we are going, it goes heavy on social consequences and deepening disadvantage, I wonder if if they are reversing the pressure, putting it back on Labour? They cannot keep campaigning for poverty and job losses for ever, they need to make a move (which all the faff about PPE avoids them doing).
Yes! I just read the Sun link on here and the comments. I must admit I thought “here we go, brace yourself!” But actually they were mostly pretty balanced!
On an earlier thread, I predicted that if The Sun got behind end the lockdown, public opinion might soon change.
The loony left might still control much of the narrative but The Sun has an enormous readership, and as we see, puts the boot in regularly without fear or favour.
Watch The Sun’s contributions,and I think we might see a change in public mood.
I’ve been baffled by their line, they are immensely influential.
They always have been and their headlines are second to none for punning and sheer in- your-face cheek
I know, not my cup of tea, but do have a healthy respect for their reach.
Kavanagh hit the nail on the head with this:
“The nation’s long-term physical, mental and economic health is being held to ransom by a bug which has virtually no impact on children, young adults and most people under 50.”
And yet it’s the paranoid, coronaphobic under 50s who are most likely to be seen wearing the approximation of Hazmat suits!! WTF???
This proves, once again, that the enemy is NOT the virus, the enemy is the FEAR PORN. This must be stopped or our country will be down the toilet. And the fear porn mongers will have to suffer the same as the rest of us.
“The virus that turned up late” piece is so bad it really makes me question Toby’s data intuition, again.
Most serious data scientists noticed the first week they turned their gaze to ONS data that in every year there is a huge reporting lag over Christmas and New Year with a huge dip in week 52 and false peak in week 2.
The article he “rates” ignores the dips and uses peaks to come to totally flawed conclusions.
Be better informed read this…
https://medium.com/pragmapolitic/i-wish-for-4k-fewer-deaths-for-christmas-1b84ecd6382b
To be fair the article you say is ‘so bad’ and Toby refers to does show the dip in weeks 50-52 of the 2014-15 and 2017-18 seasons as does the Medium article. It also shows no dip in the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. perhaps there wasn’t a dip in reporting in these seasons? Do you know if there was? The Medium article you referred to doesn’t show data for these seasons. So at the moment and without the full data set you are comparing apples with pears and making a comment without any data to back up your statement.
I’m the author of the medium article. I’ve provided all the data to back up my claim that Hector’s article is flawed. The entire thrust of his piece is that Covid is “normal” like 2015 and 2018 and not an outlier year. My analysis proves at best he is talking about 2020 being a 1/25yr outlier, which is counter to the entire aim of his article.
The ONS only provide data back to 2010. All of them show the same pattern. If he’d cited his “source” for these two outlier years, I’d be happy to give them the same treatment.
As to what he does with these years:
1) When you line up data you line up the trend part not the peak, the 1998/99 line is placed 2k a week higher than 2020, and 1999/2000 about 1.5-2k higher. The only reason either peak is similar.
2) 1998/99 has a 2k dip in week 52, so I’d imagine in addition to the 2k of lining it up properly it would look very different if processed without agenda.
3) 1999/2000 was Y2K a similar period of fear and services grinding to halt (I lived through it). I can entirely believe there are a whole load of non-flu (neglect and failure to treat) related deaths mixed into that data. A similar outlier year, worth some serious analysis.
4) We now live in a time of very different healthcare and longevity expectations.
5) At best you could compare “respiratory” noted deaths with Covid, he does not. As to assuming variations in all mortality is “just seasonal flu” and comparing. Even the BMJ itself has raised questions over using any ONS data as a definitive guide to flu mortality…
https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2795/rr-6
This is not serious data science, it is agenda driven creative accounting.
Then you need top reconcile the 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 data with his before you say he is clearly wrong. You have not provided any data to claim his analysis is wrong. I think he is making a comparison with 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 and not with 2015 and 2018. Clearly there are issues with simply comparing peaks and he is illustrating a point which I don’t think anyone seriously doubts. The current fatalities due to Covid19 are broadly similar to previous flu pandemics and not anything significantly different. The real issue is the integral and the integrals are broadly similar when one looks at overall mortality and excess mortality.
Oh, stop using big words you don’t understand.
Hector’s assertion is this is “just a typical bad flu year like 2015 and 2018”. I’ve provided all the data and analysis needed to debunk this claim, stop claiming I haven’t.
Sure, 2020 might be a 1/50 year event like 1999-2000, big wow. He’s still citing all mortality data as evidence of flu, and processing the data badly. If you’d like to spend the time fixing all the flaws in his data processing for that one year to prove this worthless fact…
… go for your life.
I have ordered my face mask as advised by HM’s Government. Will it help to keep people at least 2 metres away?
https://www.partyrama.co.uk/boris-johnson-celebrity-cardboard-mask-single/
I quite like some of the below face masks – I may wear a different one each day and behave the creature it represents would. This should 1. keep people very, very away from me and 2. keep me as safe as houses from the devils own filth we know as coronavirus.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Halloween-Terrible-Disguised-Carnival-Christmas/dp/B07WWW5C8X
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Cheap-Custom-Made-Terrible-Oxen-Head_60523495933.html?fullFirstScreen=true
https://www.fancydressbash.co.uk/camel-full-head-face-mask-for-nativity-and-fancy-dress–sanc96642-10544-p.asp
https://www.amazon.co.uk/WBINGS-halloween-Plague-Halloween-Masquerade/dp/B07ZH48WF5/ref=sr_1_52?crid=12SGUGDA80W65&dchild=1&keywords=plague+mask&qid=1589208417&s=kitchen&sprefix=Plague+%2Ckitchen%2C167&sr=1-52
All threats coveted- see above unisex
Or for the feminine touch
https://www.amazon.co.uk/PartyCostume-Halloween-Horror-Cosplay-Costume/dp/B07K3VFQM3/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?dchild=1&keywords=Witches+mask&qid=1589208578&s=kitchen&sr=1-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExWlc4V0xVRUxSNEhNJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUExMDExOTc0M0JRNTROVFk3TjA5QiZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwMDQyODQ2MUwySFpSSFk2R0ZLTyZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=
Throw the mask in the bin. It’s useless to you
Very important study just released today – proves what many of us have been saying all along – the PCR tests are complete garbage when used on their own and should never be used for a diagnostic tool.
The study is from testing done to MLB ballplayers and employees, as listed below only 0.7% tested positive. This was a large test and while certainly not representative of the overall population that that number is so low suggests that we would see a tremendous drop off in numbers of “official Covid cases” AND “official Covid deaths” if both tests were applied to all of those tested and to those that died with what is “presumed” to be Covid.
Just 0.7% of Major League Baseball employees tested positive for antibodies to COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus.
The small number of positive tests, announced Sunday, was positive news for a sport pushing ahead with plans to start its delayed season.
Researchers received 6,237 completed surveys from employees of 26 clubs. That led to 5,754 samples obtained in the U.S. on April 14 and 15 and 5,603 records that were used. The survey kit had a 0.5% false positive rate.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, one of the study’s leaders, said the prevalence of the antibodies among MLB employees was lower than for the general population during testing in New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco area and Miami.
………
Antibodies are produced by a person’s immune system if they have been infected by a virus. These tests are different than the polymerise chain reaction (PCR) tests used to detect active infection.
“By using two different technologies, both PCR to diminish the active virus, as well as the antibody, the serology tests, that will give you better information and may even be able to alleviate some of the concerns with false positives,” said Daniel Eichner said of the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory in Salt Lake City. another of the study leaders.
“So I would definitely advocate if anyone was going to put a program together to get their sport of their work back, is to utilize both different technologies,” he said.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mlb-coronavirus-antibody-survey-finds-just-07-testing-positive-2020-05-10
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/who-can-blame-downing-street-cutting-out-nicola-sturgeon-brian-monteith-2848502
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52616029
She who must be obeyed is now stepping up the divisive rhetoric.
We need this like a hole in the head
This is very funny – and seemed right for the current times –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QECEv3ERyg0
This year’s flu season has ended at least 4 weeks sooner than ever before. I suspect flu cases are being written up as covid cases. Change the setting for the bottom graph to ‘Northern Europe’ for a clearer picture. https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTIxMzAwMzYtZWE4NC00YTU2LWE3MTUtMTI0OGY1ZjQyMWViIiwidCI6ImY2MTBjMGI3LWJkMjQtNGIzOS04MTBiLTNkYzI4MGFmYjU5MCIsImMiOjh9