The Times says the teaching unions are advising their members not to return to work if primary schools reopen in June. “The National Education Union (NEU) said it was unconvinced that there was any scientific basis behind government guidance issued yesterday that teachers didn’t need PPE equipment to keep them safe,” Rosemary Bennett reports. She continues: “Many parents are also sceptical that the guidelines would keep their children, family members and the wider population safe.” I was quite surprised to read that, given the recent slew of evidence that children don’t transmit the disease. But the real jaw-dropper is that Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, told the Times she would keep her six year-old son at home unless the Government provided evidence to show that going to school would not risk harming others. Does she not realise that children under 10 aren’t infectious? Across the entire world, there hasn’t been a single case – NOT A SINGLE CASE – of a child under 10 infecting someone else. What more assurance does Anneliese Dodds need?
I wonder if the shadow chancellor has signed this Change.org petition demanding the Government give parents the option of keeping their kids out of school if they reopen in June because “many of us… feel it is too early”. So far, it has had over 500,000 signatures.
The news broke this morning that the UK economy shrank by 5.8% in March, the largest month-on-month fall since records began in 1997, according to the Times. The economy shrank by 2% in the first quarter, the sharpest fall since the final quarter of 2008, when Britain was in the throes of the financial crisis. The story continues: “Official figures are likely to show a much sharper contraction in the second quarter of the year as the data will capture the full effects of lockdown, which was introduced on March 23rd. Analysts said that the latest data suggested that the economy contracted by 21% after the lockdown was imposed.”
On its front page, the Telegraph splashes with a story based on a leaked Treasury document it’s got its hands on that estimates this year’s budget deficit will be £376 billion. “The Treasury’s own ‘base case scenario’ for its budget deficit by the end of this financial year is £337 billion – more than £280 billion more than pre-pandemic forecasts,” write Gordon Rayner and Anna Mikhailova. And remember, that’s “base case”. The Treasury’s “worst-case” scenario is for a deficit of £516 billion, although in the most extreme case it could be as high as £1.2 trillion. How’s the Government going to pay for this without plunging us into a sovereign debt crisis? Tax rises, freezing public sector wages and abandoning the “triple lock” on pensions, according to the Telegraph. This would break the “tax lock” included in the Conservative Party’s last manifesto, promising not to increase the headline rates of income tax, National Insurance contributions or VAT. As one senior Conservative MP said to me at the weekend, “I’m beginning to think we may not win the next election.”
By way of confirmation, the latest YouGov poll has Keir Starmer’s approval ratings climbing above Boris’s – and Starmer made a decent fist of Prime Minister’s Questions today, skewering Boris on care home deaths. Ladbrokes is currently offering 11/8 on Labour winning the most seats at the next election, although you may get better odds elsewhere. Worth a punt, I’d say.
In other polling news, YouGov reveals that a majority of Britons have found being imprisoned in their homes during lockdown a “positive” experience. 56% of respondents think it’s “positive” compared to just 11% who think it’s “negative”. Could it be connected with the fact that Tequila sales are up 175%? To help readers understand this curious phenomenon I thought I’d post a picture of a typical Briton enjoying lockdown:
Not every country is as reluctant to resume normal life as the UK. The Swiss have accelerated their exit plans, bringing them forward by three weeks. Under the original plan, bars, restaurants, gyms, schools, museums and libraries weren’t due to reopen until June 8th, but they reopened on Monday instead. Minister of Health Alain Berset thinks bringing the timetable forward “is a good way to learn to live with the virus”. You can read more here. On the plus side, some British golf clubs will be reopening tomorrow and Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks MPs should return to the House of Commons to “set an example”.
In case you missed Matt Ridley and David Davis MP’s joint piece criticising Imperial College’s modelling in the Sunday Telegraph, Matt has reposted it on his blog. They focus on the shortcomings of the code, drawing in part on the review published on this website last week. The two parliamentarians also make the point that if critical Government decisions affecting all our lives are going to be based on computer models, the code powering those models really ought to be made public:
When ministers make statements about coronavirus policy they invariably say that they are “following the science”… In this case, that phrase “the science” effectively means the Imperial College model, forecasting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, on the output of which the Government instituted the lockdown in March. Sage’s advice has a huge impact on the lives of millions. Yet the committee meets in private, publishes no minutes, and until it was put under pressure did not even release the names of its members. We were making decisions based on the output of a black box, and a locked one at that.
A reader has flagged up an excellent presentation by Numis Healthcare Research Team – a real tour de horizon of what we know about the pandemic. Lots of great graphs, including the one below. Orange lines for countries that have lockdowns, black lines for those that don’t:
The Telegraph has published a very damning piece by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. His assessment of the Government’s response to the crisis is withering, and much of it is based on an email he received from a “Covid cardiologist at a top London hospital”. Here’s Ambrose’s summary of the email, as well as some direct quotes from it:
Basically, every mistake that could have been made, was made. He likened the care home policy to the Siege of Caffa in 1346, that grim chapter of the Black Death when a Mongol army catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the walls.
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did. We discharged known, suspected, and unknown cases into care homes which were unprepared, with no formal warning that the patients were infected, no testing available, and no PPE to prevent transmission. We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable.
“We let these people die without palliation. The official policy was not to visit care homes – and they didn’t (and still don’t). So, after infecting them with a disease that causes an unpleasant ending, we denied our elders access to a doctor – denied GP visits – and denied admission to hospital. Simple things like fluids, withheld. Effective palliation like syringe drivers, withheld.”
“The striking thing is how consistently the government failed, in every single element of the response, everywhere you turn (the Army excepted),” writes the doctor. “This is probably the most expensive series of errors in the country’s history.”
Reading this doctor’s email helped clarify for me that the case against the lockdown isn’t just that the loss of life it will bring about from other causes will be far greater than the number of people it has supposedly saved from dying of COVID-19 (if any). It’s also that the lockdown itself has exacerbated the loss of life from COVID-19. The fact that NHS hospitals discharged elderly patients diagnosed with coronavirus and sent them back into care homes is an appalling scandal. As Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times, it shames the nation. Heads must roll.
Izabella Kaminska wrote a terrific piece for the Alphaville section of the FT yesterday in opposition to the censorship of Covid dissent by big tech companies like Facebook and Google via the use of algorithms. She refers to this as “censortech” and the title of her piece is ‘From Fahrenheit 451 to “censortech’.” You need to register with the FT to access Alphaville, but it’s free once you have and it’s worth it just to read this piece. (Jemima Kelly, another Alphaville writer, is also top notch.)
Kaminska points out that not only is content on Facebook and YouTube being removed if it challenges the official Covid orthodoxy, but our private messages are also being policed. (Facebook has just shut down Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine, an anti-lockdown digital group with 385,000 members.) WhatsApp, for instance, has made it impossible to share controversial clips with more than one person in an effort to limit the dissemination of “fake news”. And what counts as “fake news”? Any newsy content that’s gone viral, apparently. Kaminska found that out when she tried to share a clip of former Swedish chief epidemiologist Johan Giesecke defending Sweden’s response to the pandemic on Sky Australia’s Outsiders programme and received a message telling her she was only allowed to send it to one person. “You can dislike Giesecke’s views,” she says. “But you shouldn’t suppress them. Dissent is essential in a democracy, as is criticism of national policy via respected peers. What are we supposed to do? Pretend Sweden suddenly doesn’t exist?”
What’s so good about Kaminska’s piece is that she doesn’t just rely on standard free speech arguments to criticise “censortech”. She also tries to engage with those who believe that allowing genuine “fake news” to circulate in the public square is dangerous, such as theories linking 5G masts to coronavirus. She points out that suppression is always self-defeating – it pushes the conspiracy theory underground where it can grow unchecked by rational scrutiny and evidence-based rebuttal. Here is the kernel of her argument:
The population doesn’t want to be treated as moronic imbeciles. Most of us have the capacity to differentiate real wingnuttiness from fair and logically set-out criticism.
Besides, fake news and conspiratorial dissent operate much like viruses themselves: there’s often not much we can do about them. Sometimes, rather than suppressing them, the best way of dealing with such content is to let it circulate and die out of its own accord, due to its obvious absurdity.
Like a virus, if the content is too obscene, wacky, or obviously dangerous, it kills its own chances of long-term survival because it can be so easily debunked or argued against. Society will eventually push back with anti-fake news arguments that appeal to the logic of those infected by the false tales, or by “vaccinating” the yet-to-be exposed with measured and controlled exposure to the mistruth, albeit in the correct factual context. This is why the most destructive conspiracies only ever marginally veer away from the truth. The more logical, believable and seemingly benign they appear, the far more likely they are to survive and propagate.
Suppression of a highly persuasive conspiracy theory – say by making it more difficult to spread, or by its becoming too controversial to even mention in polite company – is rarely an effective strategy for keeping it at bay. All that does is make it even more difficult for society (in the style of an immunological response, if you might allow us to extend this metaphor) to challenge its assumptions, as then it retreats to secretive echo chambers where opposing views cannot be directed at it. This, in turn, allows such “fake news” to penetrate deep into the minds of the exposed, and indoctrinate them on a potentially irreversible level.
That last paragraph reminded me of a similar point made by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in a panel discussion organised by Spiked a couple of years ago about why censorship is self-defeating. He even uses the same metaphor as Kaminska, saying that far-right ideology is more likely to flourish underground because if it isn’t challenged in the public square people won’t have the antibodies to resist it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Bad news from the Emerald Isle this morning: the High Court has refused to give permission to John Waters and Gemma O’Doherty to legally challenge the constitutionality of the Irish Government’s response to the pandemic. The judge ruled that the burden of proof fell on the litigants to show that the Government’s reaction was disproportionate to the threat posed by the virus and they hadn’t done so. Does this mean the Irish Government is legally entitled to suspend rights enshrined in the country’s constitution, and underpinned by the European Convention on Human Rights, unless the people whose rights are being denied can prove that it’s not necessary for public health reasons? Surely, the burden of proof should be on the state? Next stop: the Court of Appeal.
Good explainer here on what the Ro number means and how complex it is. An Ro of >1 doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in trouble, and an Ro of <1 doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods. For instance, you could have a country in which only half a dozen people are infected. If that number increases to 13 the following day, the country would have an Ro of >1. Not a catastrophe, particularly when you factor in that the infection fatality rate is probably ~0.2. Germany’s Ro creeping above 1 for three days in a row wasn’t a catastrophe because the number of new people infected in Germany each day is quite small – about 1,000/day, compared to 20,000/day in the UK. And it returned to below 1 yesterday in any case. When infection numbers are low, a small outbreak somewhere – such as in slaughterhouses, which is what happened in Germany – can push the Ro number above 1, but that isn’t cause for alarm. The BBC’s Science Editor, David Shukman, explains it well here.
Less impressive is this piece by Robert Cuffe, the BBC’s Head of Statistics. He reckons the real death toll from COVID-19 on May 1st was over 50,000. How did he get that figure? By adding up all the “excess deaths”, i.e. the number of deaths in the year to May 1st over and above the five-year average for the same time period. Trouble is, that involves lumping those that haven’t died of COVID-19 in with those that have. He doesn’t even consider the possibility that the lockdown itself may have caused some non-Covid excess deaths – something Sir Ian Diamond, head of the Government’s Statistical Service, drew attention to in his interview on Marr a couple of weeks ago. Must do better, Robert – and you could start by investigating why the piece of work Sir Ian said the ONS was doing on this and would be published “in the next few days” still hasn’t appeared yet. That was on May 3rd.
The German-speaking reader who has been helping this site cover some of the big Covid stories in Germany has read the report by an auditor in the Ministry of Interior that was leaked to Tichys Einblick, a right-of-centre online magazine. It’s now referred to as “the BMI report”, short for Bundesministeriums des Innern. Here are some of the highlights:
Tichys has released the full report. I’ve skimmed through chunks of it and the conclusions and recommendations are uncompromisingly clear: the global threat of the virus has been massively over-estimated, the “collateral damage” caused by lockdown measures is, and will be, “gigantic” and “given that much of this damage will occur in the near and mid-term future, it can no longer be avoided, merely reduced.”
On the lockdown measures still in place, the report says: “The state measures, together with the many social activities and initiatives originally designed to protect the population, but which as causes of the collateral damage have in the meantime lost all purpose, are in the main still in force. This report recommends urgently that they be completely removed in short order to prevent further damage to the population (in particular further unnecessary deaths).”
The report regards the panic over coronavirus as a false alarm and identifies the absence of an adequate feedback loop as the reason the over-reaction wasn’t corrected: “A major reason for the false alarm remaining undiscovered for weeks was that the framework governing the handling by the crisis team, and the wider general management of a pandemic, did not include any processes designed to detect changes in data that might point either to a false alarm, or to the threat of collateral damage – in particular where that involves a threat to life – becoming greater than the risk to health and lives posed by the virus.”
Der Spiegel was predictably dismissive of the report yesterday: “The Interior Ministry led by Horst Seehofer is having to deal with a tricky in-house issue. A researcher in the Ministry has authored a paper – without commission – on the coronavirus crisis that completely contradicts the Ministry’s position. The paper, a good 80 pages long, was (according to Spiegel sources), distributed to a large number of internal colleagues as well as externally. Last weekend it fetched up on on the right-wing site Tichys Einblick, where the researcher is being lauded as some sort of whistleblower.”
Germany is often held up as a model of how to respond to the pandemic, with politicians and commentators citing the country’s lower death rate as evidence that Boris has mishandled the crisis. But this leaked report suggests that, below the surface, the German Government made many of the same mistakes as ours: wildly over-reacting in a blind panic, convinced that if it didn’t do something hundreds of thousands of people would die – which turned out to be a “false alarm”, in the words of Interior Ministry employee. As Andrew Mahon pointed out on Hector Drummond’s blog on Monday, it’s like a remake of Crimson Tide in which the paranoid nuclear submarine commander prevails and starts a nuclear war: “Gene Hackman got his way in almost every country in the Western world.” Where’s Denzel Washington when you need him?
I’m planning to write a book about the catastrophic error governments around the world made in locking down their citizens and have been discussing titles with the pseudonymous author of the piece I published yesterday on this site called “COVID-19 and the infantilisation of dissent“. The three I’ve come up with so far are Burning Down the House, The Model that Gobbled the World and Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Part 2. My correspondent thinks the first one is the best:
Brill titles, all of them, but my vote is definitely for Burning Down the House. It has a timeless feel to it. I guess for me the issue with a word like madness is whether we are talking about madness in the strict social psychological sense of the word, or whether this whole debacle is driven by something a little closer to textbook clinical anxiety. Le Bon’s mad crowds were driven by irrationality and active aggression. But what I see during this lockdown are crowds driven by anxiety; that is a form of hyper-rationality that causes total passivity. People who are rational (i.e. clinically normal) see risk and are prepared to live alongside it (“Okay, I COULD die of BSE; but I’m still going to eat beef because I like it”); but people who are hyper-rational (i.e. suffer from anxiety) can’t let go of that slim statistical chance that they might be the one tragic case to die/suffer from X. So rather than mad crowds full of violence and action, we’ve ended up with hyper-rational crowds that don’t want a fight… they want to hide! You can deal with mad crowds by bringing out the army. But how do you deal with hyper-rational crowds? Reasoned argument won’t work, because ultimately, they can turn any fact, model or statistic around and show you that, actually, statistically, they’re very vulnerable and could very well die/suffer at any moment. This type of thing has been bubbling away in millennial cancel culture for a while now (to “cancel” of course being to undertake an entirely passive action that prevents engagement with anything you perceive as having the potential to “harm” you). For me, what’s changed during this coronavirus outbreak is that governments have suddenly started to feed this hyper-rational anxiety like never before: “You could die. You might die. We understand. It’s okay to wet yourself. But wear PPE. Sure, stay at home. Hide. Under the bed if it makes you feel better. Here, have some free money. Bleach your carpets. Cry. Sob too. Buy a ventilator. Ebay do them. Stay safe. That’s an order.” And what’s resulted is an utterly dysfunctional society that will give some people a free pass from being proper members of society for years to come.
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- “Masks-for-all for COVID-19 not based on sound data” – Two experts on respiratory protection say masks shouldn’t be recommended for everybody
- “The coronavirus cure is now worse than the disease” – Interview on Fox News with Dr Scott Atlas, Senior Fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, on why the cure is worse than the disease
- “Opposing lockdown is NOT “profits before people”” – Kit Knightly in Off-Guardian reminds us that economic contractions kill people just as surely as deadly viruses
- “Rand Paul Exposes BRUTALLY Honest Truth About Coronavirus Around Country” – Facebook post featuring the Senator for Kentucky making the case against lockdowns. Watch it before Facebook deletes it
- “World will be same but worse after ‘banal’ virus, says Houellebecq” – The jaundiced French novelist describes COVID-19 as a “banal virus” with “no redeeming qualities… It’s not even sexually transmitted”
- “How apocalyptic is now?” – Oxford political philosopher John Gray compares the coronavirus crisis to the Russian revolution in a cheerfully gloomy piece for UnHerd. “Accelerating a trend that has been underway for decades, the remains of bourgeois life will be swept away,” he says
- “One in three small firms may shut for ever, warns FSB” – Report in the Times based on a survey by the Federation of Small Businesses that seems to bear out Gray’s hypothesis
- “The new battle in libertarian thought” – Peter Franklin in UnHerd thinks a schism has emerged among freedom-loving conservatives during the lockdown, with “visceralists” like Peter Hitchens, Laura Perrins and me on one side, and “rationalists” like Matt Ridley and Tyler Cowan on the other. Last time I checked, Matt and I were pretty closely aligned
- “Will Britain end up following the Swedes?” – Yes, says Freddie Sayers, editor of UnHerd
- “The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself” – Three journalists for the Los Angeles Times have woken up and smelt the (Brazilian) coffee
- “Lockdown sceptics unite!” – Kathy Gyngell, Editor of the Conservative Woman, gives a nice shout-out to James Delingpole and me and our latest London Calling podcast
- “Get a grip, we cannot stay suffocated by the state in lockdown forever” – Great piece by John Longworth
- “Come on Boris, tell a frightened nation that its fears are out of proportion” – Another fantastic column from the always-dependable Allison Pearson in the Telegraph
- “Transcript of Sumption Interview” – Someone has kindly transcribed Jonathan Sumption’s recent interview on Radio 4 and passed it on to Peter Hitchens. Sumption is the Lord Acton of lockdown sceptics
- “Boris must not allow Britain to be sacrificed on the altar of the NHS” – Ted Yarbrough, co-founder of the Daily Globe, has had enough
On Monday, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area – all the more urgent in light of the latest forecast of the Federation of Small Businesses, which says that up to a third of small businesses in Britain may close as a result of the lockdown. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those small businesses that have reopened near you. Should be fairly self-explanatory – and the owners of small businesses are welcome to enter their own details. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “Ball and Chain” by Social Distortion, “Land of Confusion” by Genesis and “Flying Saucer Attack” by the Rezillos.
Thanks as always to those who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It’s a Herculean task, let me tell you. 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, email me here.
I’ll leave you with some cheering news. In Spain, a 113 year-old lady has recovered from a bout of coronavirus. Maria Branyas was born in 1907 in the United States, where her father worked as a journalist in San Francisco. Among other things, Branyas experienced the pandemic of the Spanish flu of 1918, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship. She married a doctor in 1931 and has three children and 11 grandchildren.
Stop Press: John Waters, one of the litigants in the Irish legal challenge that was knocked back by a High Court judge today, has sent me this quote:
Gemma O’Doherty and I have been refused leave in our application to obtain a Judicial Review of the Irish Government’s lockdown legislation by Judge Charles Meenan at the High Court in Dublin.
We weren’t surprised to be shot down at this stage, especially given the clear attitude of this judge, who conducted the Leave hearings with little grace and mounted a series of irrelevant and personalised attacks on us in his Judgement.
His Judgement reads like a series of splenetic tweets.
Ireland currently labours under a deeply corrupt caretaker government which has now been unlawfully occupying office for more than three months, having been booted out in an election on February 8th. The judge in question was appointed by Fine Gael, the party usurping power. Our job was to demonstrate prima facie unconstitutionality, which by asserting we failed to prove disproportionality, the judge tacitly admitted we had done. Yet he denied us access to a process — Judicial Review — of which the purpose was to explore, in the first instance, the issue of constitutionality at a deeper level. At that stage, at full Judicial Review hearing, we would need to demonstrate unconstitutionality to a higher standard of proof. The State would then be obliged to show that its breach of the Constitution occurred for reasons that were proportionate, unavoidable, urgent, etc. This, clearly, is the stuff of a full hearing, not of the Leave process, which is supposed to have a low bar — ‘arguable case’. The judge flipped the onus of proof, asserting that we had failed to show disproportionality. This is nonsense, not least because we did not submit any arguments on disproportionality, anymore than the other side offered arguments as to proportionality. It just wasn’t part of the hearing.
We’re looking at our options, which include an appeal. But the judge has postponed the issue of costs, inviting submissions, so that option is delayed. There are others, however. We are determined to take this all the way. Even though the Irish legislation has a ‘sunset clause” (a date when it lapses, November 2020) we need to expunge it from history so that no one ever dares to attempt anything like this again.
Discussion
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https://shirtinator.co.uk/design/personalised-t-shirts/?userdesign=46233567
Here’s my suggestion for a logo that’s not overtly provocative but would provide an identifying symbol (would require a higher definition image to get the design less blurry, but it shows the basic idea)
I’ve just watched the daily lie update. Good god. Grant Shapps – I’m speechless. A high order twat if there ever was one.
Why are they persisting? After a man from Plymouth asked his question, you could see him laughing at the answer.
On the question of antibody tests, what use are they aside from disease prevalence data? Since we’ve already been told to get back to work, what good is confirmation of potential immunity? Surely its pointless as we have to work whether we’ve had the virus or not. Considering I don’t care about social distancing, does a positive test suddenly give someone who does care confidence to rip off their mask and dance down pavements?
Tonight at 8:02pm. MASS TWEET
Step One: Tag @BorisJohnson, @DominicRaab and @MattHancock on Twitter.
Step Two: Type, “This lockdown is destroying our lives and our economy. There is no scientific justification or legal authority to allow it to continue. We demand our freedom be returned now.”
Step Three: Add the hashtags #EndLockDown #WeWillBeFree
Step Four: At 8:02pm, thousands Tweet it and it trends on Twitter. 👍🏼
MORE INFO AT twitter.com/WeWillBeFree82
We’re going round in circles affirming what we already know.
This battle is lost, we have a war to fight. A war where no blood should be spilled but a war against woke, against the subjugation of facts over feelings, a war for freedom of speech where ideals are refuted by better ones and not no platformed.
Are we up for the fight?
Good post Paul.
This is not, nor imho never has been, about a virus. It is a coup against democracy, freedom, and our way of life.
To fight it most effectively, I would suggest we need , first and foremost, an accurate idea of what we are in the middle of.
It’s fairly easy to point out errors in the handling of the virus, the lockdown, the MSM’s behaviour, ‘ppe’, tests, masks, R, vaccines, ‘how other countries are doing’, etc. etc. Which, again imho, deflect our best and brightest from opposing the coup.
Has Trump always been lockdown sceptic ? Telling reporters ” this is a disease that attacks age, attacks health” he wants the schools reopened so the country can reopen “young children and students just look at the statistics”
https://youtu.be/WK9aFqmBytM
He’s kind of flip-flopped about, sometimes saying good stuff, sometimes bad, repeatedly getting set up by the media who hate him. Pretty much as usual.
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-one-chart-exposes-lie-behind-universal-lockdowns/
looking at Dutch reports
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/league-of-nations-the-race-out-of-lockdown
And another good one
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-r-number-a-flawed-measure-
Really good article by Dr Waqar Rashid about the reliance on the R number.
He also mentions genetic variations in the immune response, which partially answers one of the questions I posed in this morning’s comment.
Protect us from the uninformed that gets quoted in the newspapers. Headline in Guardian “Coronavirus must be ‘eradicated in every continent’ by Gordon Brown.
Gordon, you cannot stop a virus. They have not been able to eradicate the flu virus for a very long time, how do you think they will eradicate the coronavirus?
Always reassuring to find Gordon Brown on the other side of an issue.
‘The Coronavirus’, all coronavirus’ or one coronavirus in particular?
I’m getting really tired of ill-informed ‘celebrities’ opining on something they know nothing about….
2020 with Covid19 is approximately as dangerous as living in 1971.
——————————————————-
Bear with me.. this is not an article from The Onion 😉 The is a fun but perhaps illustrative perspective that occurred to me. If anyone spots a flaw in the logic, let me know.
At every point in our lives we have some probability of dropping dead from any cause. See [1] for probability table for the UK.
At 44.5 years old I have about a 1 in 279 risk of dying of something within the next year. That’s the risk we are all living with every year and obviously it increases with age.
Covid approximately doubles this risk at each age group for the duration of the main covid spread.
Since 1971 the mortality rate at all ages has decreased by nearly half due to improvements in medicine and wider society. (graph in [2])
So you are as much at risk of death from Covid in 2020 as you would have been of dying at your age from living in the UK in 1971.
References
1. Table 1 here: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html
2. Figure 2A here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/827518/Recent_trends_in_mortality_in_England.pdf
I assume everyone has seen this?
https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/over-25-of-the-uk-likely-to-have-had-covid-19-already/
The Manchester team reckon 25% of UK population has already been infected!
I’ve run the numbers based on this and get an overview IFR of 0.2%. The age group breakdown would be:
0 to 44 – 0.005%
45 to 74 – 0.167%
75 to 84 – 1.222%
85+ – 3.568%
Dr Heald; “We show how effective Social Distancing and Lockdown has been. Though this is a tragedy, it could have been far worse”.
Well done, sir! A fine affirmation of the Official Truth dogma.
Good puppy! A pat on the head for you!
In which case, if 25% of us have been infected, then we are at herd immunity already. Didn’t Prof Whitty say the other day that the herd immunity level was considered to be lower for this virus and not around 60% after all, but 10%? He reckoned we were nearly there. Of course that brings up the question as to quite how they can know the immunity level is so much lower than other viruses . . . unless it’s another example of how “they” want us to unlock ourselves!
In any case you get from 25% to 50% (if that’s where you’re headed) very quickly. Assuming an R0 of 2.4, and herd immunity at 58%, once you hit about 5% the rate at which the number susceptible decreases shoots up.
Reading the media you would think this virus spread like a mofo and killed people exponentially but that for some reason getting to any level of herd immunity is some kind of massive struggle and we’re always miles away from the 80% or something they’re saying we need.
But if infections are growing exponentially (which they do at the start) so obviously does immunity because that’s all it is.
Thanks for the link. They actually conclude 0.2% IFR themselves at the end of the paper.
Basically they looked at how many people presented at their GPs with Covid, tracked this over time, and found the only pattern it matched was that of herd immunity growing in the population. So basically, it’s over, and the lockdown made hardly any difference.
I was looking for something similar in a much cruder fashion when the lockdowns started in Spain and Italy expecting to see some discontinuities corresponding to when they were imposed, but couldn’t find anything. But I was just using the Mark I eyeball. If I had found something it might have meant something, but absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of absence. What they’ve done is considerably more scientific.
It would be rather interesting actually to give all the Covid data from everywhere to a statistician and ask her if she could figure out from it when the lockdowns started and in what countries. For many of them she would probably say, “lockdown, what lockdown?”.
After 10 weeks of failing to exercise any common sense, BJ is now telling us to exercise common sense! Faced with nonsensical and contradictory rules that would effectively allow a stranger into my house but not a member of my family I think the common sense approach is to just ignore the rules altogether. I mean, who on earth writes this stuff? You couldn’t even make it up! I was in a shop yesterday and was asked to ‘step back’ while they scanned the large items in my trolley. When will this insane social experiment end, it’s so demoralising?!
In one of our local supermarkets there is sign instructing customers ‘not to linger in front of the cashier and to proceed quickly to the packing area of the checkout’,the stupidity of this is the fact that the card machine is fixed next to the till so you have to go back and ‘linger’ in front of the cashier !.Also,before you have even packed your bags they are spraying the whole checkout with disinfectant and the staff are wearing gloves and full face perspex visors that look as if they are doing a bit of welding between customers.Perhaps I am being touchy but I am finding this sort of thing to be quite insulting,treating customers as if we all riddles with bubonic plague or something.
Well here’s something that will cheer you up. I was standing in a small queue outside a supermarket today when I noticed a man (late 50s?) get out of his car, not far from the queue. He approached another car where a woman got out, they greeted one another and he kiseed her on the cheek. Twice. A man got out too and the two men shook hands and started chatting away, at a normal distance, without a care in the world. It was delightful. When I came out of the supermarket they were still at it. It didn’t seem like anyone had challenged them.
I was particularly pleased as I’d been ticked off 3 times in another supermarket a few days ago for standing in the wrong place!
In Ireland I have heard that if you go into a supermarket they bark over the tannoy ” No Browsing”
That spray could contain chemicals that is not good for us. Always ask for the ingredients or read the label, then tell them they are poisoning you.
He was telling you to go out there and speak to people, simple as that. Pretty soon the masketeers will be a minority. They certainly are where I am… but I don’t know if they are just hiding in their house and haven’t crept out for days/weeks. Might be an idea to knock on their door?
This has got a hell of a long way to go, that’s for sure. Almost the entire world has been brainwashed.
But watch every day as media starts turning out ‘lockdown is bad’ articles. Totally orchestrated.
Follow the money…
Honestly I used to enjoy food shopping, but I now actively dread it. I think these extensive jobsworth measures will be eventually ignored not because people stop being scared of the virus, but because they’re such a dreadful hassle and will make life an expensive, joyless labyrinth of rules.
idea for a T Shirt or badge slogan – How about D not R
https://dailysceptic.org/2020/05/13/latest-news-29/#comments
Just in from the DT
Ignore above. Copy and paste blunder
My small act of rebellion. Our local authority — Labour run Birmingham — very reluctantly opened our recycling centres after lots of reports of fly-tipping and rubbish piling up on the inner city and suburban streets. The re-opening is hedged with a list of do’s and dont’s as long as your arm — including a one in one out system which is causing queuing chaos on local roads next to the tips. Basically they don’t want to be open, and they don’t want people using them — they’ve even been turning people away who do not bring what is deemed by them as “essential” waste Out here in leafy Sutton Coldfield — we are fortunate to have a large garden and early on in the gardening season we have generated a lot of compostable material. We have 2 large compost heaps and various bins, but we are still overflowing with material and now have nowhere left to store it. It’s beginning to rot and pong a bit so I’ve been looking for a solution and yesterday had a moment of clarity. I’m now the proud owner of a shiny 90ltr galvanized steel incinerator. It’s been going full pelt this morning… Read more »
Oh braaaaaavo that man! Having lived in Sutton myself I can just imagine the “Considerably richer than yoww” brigade going nuts at your insubordination! Love it! More please…..
Actually maud I loathe bonfires and have frequently railed against neighbours doing it in the past — we live quite close to the local recycling centre so no excuse normally to not go there in my opinion. And like most keen gardeners we’re actually very attuned to the environment, recycling etc. But my hackles rise when our local political masters impose stupid, pettifogging rules to satisfy their power grabs thus making life as difficult as possible for the people that pay them. I’d have needed to make at least 4 journeys to get rid of all the green waste with all the attendant emissions — not to mention the interminable queuing. 2 hours stoking my bonfire was just reward!
Good for you,we need more acts of rebellion !.The council here couldn’t shut the tip,and bizarrely the town cemetery,fast enough a few weeks ago.After a lot of complaints they very grudgingly opened the tip but insisted residents book a slot online before being allowed to go and very predictably being a council endeavour the website crashed very early on.
Blimey! Your poor neighbours.
Interesting point about conspiracy theories, as I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist many times now for daring to suggest there may be something more to our comedy response other than sheer bungling and incompetence. I have to say it: what other possible explanation could there be for the hysterical over-reaction by our politicians and their egregious clusterf**k of decisions that have often directly contravened the opinions and advice of many highly respected experts? Do we honestly believe they could be so stupid? It does not make sense at any level and I’m not buying it.
The automatic labelling as “conspiracy theorists” and the belittling those who think dark figures drive certain situations is actually the biggest threat to modern liberty it’s possible to have and generally driven naivety and self-preservation (“Noooo….? They wouldn’t do THAT to us, surely?! Gasp!”). Since when did mankind not conspire? Would we have had the Hillsborough disaster or Alderney Children’s Hospital situations investigated or WMD/Blair if “conspiracy theorists” didn’t exist? These people would (and have) got away with murder, but it shone a light on their potential hoodwinking and for the better. If those cases happened now would we silence and shame those who called… Read more »
“Sound, bright people do not behave like this, Boris Johnson is not this stupid. Incompetence would be a great way of explaining it and make us all feel a bit warmer and fuzzier inside, but it is naive to believe undue influence has not been placed upon those who make policy and decisions.”
The maxim “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” is actually a pretty good one, but it can’t be denied that there are malicious people around and there certainly are conspiracies. The question then is: are there conspiracies on the kind of scale you imply here. My experience of life suggests that’s unlikely, because human organisations are just not competent to manage such without a lot more fallout then we see.
That said, there clearly are both shadowy and open groups of very powerful people taking actions all the time, both covert and overt, in their own interests. And plenty of those spend their time thinking up ways to influence governments in the directions they prefer.
“Sound, bright people do not behave like this”
This is exactly how such people behave – when their reason is overcome by fear. That’s what panic is,… Read more »
Good points and thank you Mark, but I’m not really talking about malice for most of it…I am simply referring to the possible reasons why seemingly intelligent people have chosen such a disastrous path, and who has been manoeuvring around in the background to have potentially influenced this, hence I referred to gain as being the main driver.
You are right about the “grip of fear”, but as we know Boris is not a man who is easily frightened. He is not given to flights of fancy of stories of bogeymen and never has been, it’s his once-held pragmatism I find hard to stomach disappearing.
I have followed Boris’s journalism and writing for years and having done so (as many have not who criticise him) I have noticed a total sea-change in his approach and philosophy. My question is whether this is driven by others or his own brush with death, which would support your fear assertion. Regardless, he is acting acutely out of character to his traditional Libertarian, free-market self and I think many of us are just wanting to know why.
I am definitely not defending Boris. but when my children were newborn I was far from rational in my approach to risk assessment. I think this and his own near miss must be key factors in this. It looks like conspiracy because it is not how we would have expected him to govern but in fact it’s just downright old-fashioned bad luck for us.
Others around him will all be pushing their own agendas and those are always up for debate.
I think we are where we are by Ministers know nothing about science listening to Ivory Tower scientists who know very little about the real world. This is revealed in The Telegraph article about the leaked lecture by one of the SAGE group scientists. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/13/revealed-educated-guesswork-uncertainty-lead-britain-lockdown/
“At the moment, we’re having to do it by making educated guesswork, and intuition and experience, rather than being able to do it in some kind of semi-formal way,” Prof Medley told his audience.
“But a half good answer given before the decision is made, is infinitely more useful than a perfect answer given after the decision is made.”
None of the official models relied upon by ministers yet include critical data on how Covid-19 might be spread in shops, pubs, gyms and hairdressers, he said.
“If we want to get an idea of when, for example, in the United Kingdom, we’re going to be able to open pubs – we’re going to have to understand how people might use them.”
Professor Medley and his team are also in charge of calculating the national ‘R number’, the most important of five tests that must be passed before the UK can begin to return to… Read more »
What , and become neighbours to Greta?
I rather agree with that view – not least because it is hard to see why Sweden would be able to stand against such a great conspiracy whilst so many other countries have failed.
Sweden is the only country I’m aware of that let the scientists lead. I also learned recently that Norway went into lockdown against the recommendations of their scientists. It’s highly likely all lockdowns were politically motivated in the sense that no leader wanted to be responsible for the deaths that were sure to come.
If we let “scientists” like Ferguson lead, we’d be in lockdown until Christmas (2021!). Sweden were lucky in having a sensible scientist in charge rather than one with a sim-city model with rubbish code!
Maudboggins,
You make a good point about the prevalence of conspiracies against the common man throughout history. My problem with the Big Pharma idea is that there are plenty of other “Bigs” in the game – Oil, Aviation, Farming, Entertainment etc etc. So why would they let Pharma get away with trashing the world economy. Unless this is a conspiracy of all of the “Bigs”
Maybe you meant Alder Hey children’s hospital, Maud ?
As for
“Ask yourself: Why do we have MI5 and MI6? We have them precisely because our foes continually and insidiously conspire against the UK in more ways than any of us would ever know …”
Imho, we have MI5 to monitor us, infiltrate us, organise false flag events, and if necessary, blackmail us or expunge us.
You may not agree with this viewpoint, but if you’re going to analyse our current situation correctly, you should at least be aware it exists.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/come-boris-tell-frightened-nation-fears-proportion/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter
Allison Pearson is definitely a lockdown sceptic – hopefully the tide is turning as more people question the ridiculousness of the situation.
Great article. Love this quote: “Do our leaders really not understand how people think or how they live? All I can say is you know that men are in charge when the golf clubs are open and the hairdressers closed.”
I thought it was a plot to get the men out of the house.
I think this is an interesting thread for some of the bigger brains on here (me not one of them) to look at. Theory that we are experiencing the second wave now.
https://twitter.com/IcyApril/status/1258090533311991811?s=19
“Phylogenetic estimates support that the COVID-2 pandemic started sometimes around 6 October 2019–11 December 2019, which corresponds to the time of the host-jump into humans.”
Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1567134820301829
Some doubts I have about this:
Why are we having a second wave if we already had one, but didn’t do any restrictions, and it was winter then so would have been worse? We should have just had one big wave.
The countries he identifies as having had bad flu seasons this year which might have been the candidates for a first wave are the same countries (UK, Spain, Italy) who seem to have got their asses kicked the most by this second wave. If there was a theory that Germany, who seem to have too few deaths, had had a first wave that would seem to explain more. Isn’t it more likely that those countries are just worse at dealing with flu for some reason, have older populations, or other factors like that?
I think the idea that Mimi suggested that we’re looking at the end of the first wave (I think probably at least the back 2/3 of it) might be the case. We have some evidence of these earlier cases, and we just would not have noticed if people had been dying in the winter when were still assuming Covid was just something bats got in China.… Read more »
Can some enlightened person explain to this bear of very little brain why it is that if this virus can survive on a surface for up to 72 hours (ha ha ha) then how come we’re now permitted to share basketballs and tennis balls with another from an alien household but it’s prohibited to have a cup of tea with your parents or kids in the garden if you don’t live with them?
The best explanation I can come up with is 42
That what they want you to believe. I am sure the test was done in a controlled environment.
I happened to see a clip on TV in which they were saying that in the current approach to tennis only one person was allowed to do serving and handle the balls – the other had to use his racket to retrieve the ball and send it back to the server!
You couldn’t make it up !
Well, you unless you were a MSM reptile , or government PR operative, trying to confuse and frighten people even more.
So New Zealand is now a police state
https://t.co/vjmELFZmw6
Interesting historical perspective on the madness of the lockdown for healthy people:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/disease/the-stupidity-of-politicians-who-listened-to-neil-ferguson/
“Why would any politician listen to Ferguson alone? Not a single economist was asked what would happen if they locked everyone down on Ferguson’s recommendation.
Throughout history, NEVER has any government EVER been so foolish as to lockdown the entire economy…..”
Good article. Thanks.
Interesting read. Many thanks.
Great prescience from the WHO on page 39…
https://apps.who.int/gpmb/assets/annual_report/GPMB_annualreport_2019.pdf
Ooer. Some ‘interesting’ stuff in there.
“In addition to a greater risk of pandemics from natural pathogens, scientific developments allow for disease-causing microorganisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories. Should countries, terrorist groups, or scientifically advanced individuals create or obtain and then use biological weapons that have the characteristics of a novel, high-impact respiratory pathogen, the consequences could be as severe as, or even greater, than those of a natural epidemic, as could an accidental release of epidemic-prone microorganisms.”
Accidental release???
Remember when the government bought millions of antibody tests but found they ‘didn’t work’?
https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/16/uk-spent-16000000-coronavirus-tests-didnt-work-12567736/
What do we think to the possibility that when they tried them on people who had tested positive with PCR while infected, they found that they didn’t show any antibodies afterwards? Either the antibody tests were faulty, or it created a new possibility: infection does not necessarily equal antibodies. (Or the PCR tests were faulty).
Either way, this would be a tricky thing to explain – seeing as the government had implicitly assumed that Neil Ferguson’s model was correct, and had been touting the tests as a ‘game-changer’.
That’s exactly what did happen:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/15/uk-coronavirus-antibody-test-validated-results-show-under-40s/
However, there are other reasons that the tests could have failed to pick up antibodies, including insufficient sensitivity, or seroconversion time.
I haven’t read any studies that have specifically tried to test whether people who are exposed necessarily develop antibodies; but there are preprint studies focused on detecting antibodies among PCR confirmed cases (e.g. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.30.20085613v1). It’s very possible that someone who has innate immunity won’t develop antibodies.
Facts which should lead our eminent science led government out of their self-inflicted disaster
Nobody knows if symptomatic or asymptomatic infection always leads to an immune response in the form of antibodies
Nobody knows how important cell mediated T cells derived immunity is for immunity to Covid-19 hence people without antibodies could be protected by the T cells derived immunity (In vaccination against Hep A ,another RNA virus like Covid-19,even persons without detectable antibodies is protected against disease by the primed cellular immunity producing antibodies when exposed)
Nobody knows if the other 4 circulating corona virus we have give any form of cross immunity or mitigation of symptoms
Nobody knows if there are other factors in the population which gives a resistance to infection like genetic factors even blood groups (some RNA norovirus has that feature)
Nobody knows if the flu model used with R 2 and 60% herd immunity required to end the outbreak is also relevant in Covid-19 other scientist question that high figure of herd immunity in Covid-19
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03085
Nobody knows if super spreaders, so common in SARS, is not an important feature in Covid-19 and nobody knows how much that would affect the famous R factor
… Read more »
great post
It will be ironic if the ‘second wave’ that swamps the NHS is the accumulation of patients denied early diagnosis, intervention for non-Covid conditions who become serious/critical, and the second wave of deaths is theirs.
Also: quarantine has to be complete to stop transmission of infection; social distancing, gloves, masks, is as much use as carrying water in a colander on the grounds that not all of it has holes.
Pandemic means prevalent throughout a population. Exactly where it extends, who is/has been infected is unknowable, success or not unmeasurable, so ‘flattening the curve’ of infections during pandemic is like playing whack-a-mole with invisible moles.
But whacking those invisible moles is a great way for the boot to practice stamping up and down on a human face forever…
And surely it is time to call it what it is: anti-social distancing.
Oops, Norway west of Belarus…
Yep and destroy the future for the young.
Surely the Belarus situation sums it up. Belarus has had 146 deaths from Covid19 in a country of 10 million with no lock down or social distancing. Norway, about 700 km to the east of Belarus, has had 223 deaths with 5 million people and a full UK style lock down and a lot of social distancing.
In other words, a poverty stricken country with a climate and homogenous population similar to Norway, has a LOWER mortality rate per million citizens. A brutal, dictator therefore has more common sense than all of the uni educated, polical morons in the West.
It would be interesting to look at this in relation to the demographics of each nation, how many elderly with morbidities are packed into care homes in Belarus for example? I’d be willing to wager a good deal fewer than in the UK…
Dangerous to lean too heavily on the Belarus figures, too soon. Once we do so, I have no doubt we’ll very quickly start seeing stories about hospital chaos, cover ups, popular unrest and mass deaths in Belarus, And we’ll see those stories whether or not there actually are any of those things (caused by the disease) on any major scale.
But yes, if the present situation holds up, Belarus will join Sweden as a standing rebuke to the hysterics. Bearing in mind that latter category includes (rather surprisingly imo) the Russian president as well, that’s going to be quite a dangerous position for old Lukashenko to be in ….
I reckon he’d have cleared any response with Putin.
Great summary of data about asymptomatic cases:
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-now-know-majority-contract-covid-19-asymptomatic-changes-everything/
That’s great ammunition. Thanks
How long before govt relax the 2metre social distance rule? As others have pointed out, this is the key factor for avoiding economic armageddon.
New college of policing guidelines (they provide guidance to forces how to interpret the law) have told them only to enforce the actual law, social distancing is not law, it’s unenforceable. I am hoping this was a deliberate move by the Gov to make it impossible to uphold so those of us minded to can get on with it. Ditto the deliberate loop holes and contradictions.
For businesses the problem is unlikely to be the police, but in the first instance HSE and local government enforcers, and possibly later insurers, as well as potentially scared customers and members of the public.
But yes, seeing the back of that rule must be the first tactical priority.
Might be worth being mentally at least prepared for the idea that you might ultimately want to fight it in court, possibly with support from other antilockdownists if it becomes a cause celebre (like say the metric martyrs).
That’s not necessarily a good thing, but if you do end up going down that route, having excellent records of all actions and communications from the beginning might be very useful.
Absolutely, being a cause celebre isn’t something to be welcomed unless you’re the kind of person that thrives on attention, and it certainly doesn’t always end well. Best avoided if possible, but if you do end up in a confrontation best to be as well armed as possible. I hope none of this comes to pass and you manage a smooth return to business without any harassment at all from the authorities.
You should be running the country. We need an anti-boxticker to work to principles of getting things done rather than the cowardly jobsworths today who, when asked, all fall back on the Eichmann defence: “I was only following orders”.
“… as someone said (on this site I think), better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”
He’s woken up after a couple of millennia if he is on here – ’twas Euripides. 🙂
Just wanted to second what Mark said – switch your phone onto record and/or video for all dealings with EHOs. Another real person as witness even better.
I have just visited my local town. Plus side, very few people wearing masks and gloves but the downside is still the palpable fear of breaking the 2m rule. My local butcher, fab guy who has been extremely sensible and stayed open through this whole thing but his employees are anxious and swift to enforce their 2m rule. At the end of the day, I might realise that there is no evidence to support 2m but until the government says otherwise it’s not fair to expect a shop assistant to do anything other than what the government tells her is safe.
As for Ku1485, I think you might be doing a public service if you lead the way back to normality! Difficult in practice, you have my sympathies.
I had a lovely chat with the head gardener in the park today and commented that he didn’t have to leap 6 feet away as he passed me. He said he knew that he couldn’t catch anything that way but, as he was wearing his official logoed gear, he had to be seen to be “doing the right thing” or some busybody would no doubt make life even harder for him. We consoled ourselves with the fact that at least he doesn’t have to wear a mask while working.
Agree. As we know it should have been 1 meter (but due the the fact that we are too stupid to understand that they increased it to 2 meters). It makes it very tough for employers and businesses to ensure adherence of this arbitrary rule.
“Should” have been 1 yard, but for our supine acquiescence to the imposition of the Napoleonic system. 🙂
Watch and share this video of professor Dolores Cahill’s view on Covid-19 hoax. With owners permission. https://youtu.be/Avc6_ftzk3w
“Kill the vulnerable. Ruin the young. Destroy freedom.”
There, that should do it, shouldn’t it?
Or: Your country needs you to …. GET A GRIP?
Yes I’m trying to do that on a post, below. We need to brainstorm, it has to be gentle though, or sensible.