The Mirror leads with the preprint I flagged up yesterday estimating that by the end of April 29% of the UK population may have already had the virus (29% of 66 million is ~19 million). If we assume that roughly 50,000 people in the UK will have died from COVID-19 by May 21st – allowing for the three-week lag time between infection and death – that gives an infection fatality rate (IFR) of ~0.076%, less than half the IFR of seasonal flu.
Is a seroprevalence of 29% high enough for herd immunity? Yes, according to a summary of the evidence by Nicholas Lewis about the threshold that needs to be reached that I flagged up a few days ago. According to Lewis, the variation in COVID-19 susceptibility and infectivity between individuals, arising mainly from differences in their social connectivity, lowers the herd immunity threshold to 7% – 24% of the population, much lower than the 50% – 60% previously thought. His analysis draws on a recent preprint by Gomes et al entitled ‘Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold‘.
New data from London suggests the city has already obtained herd immunity. According to the latest estimates by Public Health England (PHE) and Cambridge University, as reported in the Telegraph, only 24 people a day are being infected in the capital and the R has fallen to 0.4. That means the number of new infections is halving every 3.5 days and London will have virtually eliminated the virus by the end of the month. It is Yorkshire and the North East that have the highest infection rate, according to the PHE/Cambridge analysis – double that of the capital. It’s ironic, then, that the local authorities in those areas are so paranoid about day-trippers from London infecting their populations that they’ve banned parking at local beauty spots. Turns out, it’s Londoners who should be worried about visitors from Yorkshire and the North East, not the other way round.
But it’s not all good news. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the second wave of the pandemic will be deadlier than the first. The Telegraph has interviewed Dr Hans Kluge, Director for the WHO European region, who delivered a stark warning to countries beginning to ease their lockdowns, saying that now is the “time for preparation, not celebration”. File this under the same heading as the WHO’s January 14th announcement that there’s “no clear evidence of human to human transmission”.
My Lockdown Sceptic of the week is Luke Johnson, former chairman of Pizza Express and Channel 4, who was on Question Time last night. He dared to suggest the lockdown will cause a greater loss of life that it will prevent and duly reaped the whirlwind. One of the points he made is that if you’re under 60 with no underlying health conditions you’re more likely to drown than die of COVID-19. You can watch Johnson firing off truth bullets here.
I was sent a terrific piece this morning by an occupational health doctor about the catastrophic consequences for the British economy of treating COVID-19 as a workplace health hazard, similar to asbestos. He rightly points out that there’s no scientific evidence that workplaces are more hazardous environments than any other environments when it comes to susceptibility to the virus. But over time, the risk of catching the virus has morphed from a hazard that exists in the general community to a hazard that’s specific to the workplace. This is a consequence, in part, of the Government telling people to stay in their homes to avoid infection. But it may also be related to the widespread belief that “key workers” are at greater risk of infection than others because they’re still at work – actual “fake news” and “misinformation” that’s pumped out by the mainstream media daily. And, of course, the Government’s unscientific gobbledegook about the need to maintain a distance of two metres apart in offices has undoubtedly played a part. The author points out that this will create a mountain of obstacles that businesses wanting to reopen will have to overcome if they’re to persuade people to return to work.
“You must put in place universal distancing and cleaning measures throughout every part of your operation,” he says. “You must issue PPE, with all of the regulations surrounding the provision of PPE. You must screen every employee with an underlying medical condition to determine if they are safe to even enter the workplace.”
That last task, in particularly, will saddle businesses with enormous extra costs:
Every single employee, returning to almost any workplace in the country, now needs to be risk assessed to characterise the risk to their safety. For many, this will be a quick process. But for many others with common, chronic health conditions (who will number several millions nationally), it will require significant resource to undertake assessments. As there is little guidance available and given the fear of a backlash from the media, unions, lawyers or the authorities, many employers will feel forced into excluding workers, even where there is little evidence that this is necessary. Employees may feel forced back in fear of their lives, whilst others will not be allowed back despite being desperate for a return to normality.
I have to confess, I hadn’t thought through to the consequences of branding the workplace a hazardous environment. But this occupational health doctor has and it’s clearly going to be a massive problem. Do read the whole piece.
The Government wrote to Simon Dolan’s layers yesterday, responding to his Letter Before Action. This is the update on his Crowdfunding page:
Just a few hours ago we received a detailed response form the Govt to our letter before action. Our legal team are currently considering the various points raised. The letter runs to some 13 pages and as you can imagine contains some highly technical points. We can confirm for now that they are however refusing to release the minutes of the SAGE meetings.
Will update further just as soon as the legal team have formulated their plan of action. rest assured, the fight very much continues. Expect another update in the next couple of days.
If you want to find out more about Dolan and what’s motivating him, I recommend this interview by my friend James Delingpole for the Delingpod. And I’ve published a piece today by John Waters, one of the two anti-lockdown litigants trying to take take the Irish Government to court. You can read that here.
More depressing polling news: A recent five-country survey by Kekst CNC found that British voters top the table in wanting their government’s top priority to be limiting the spread of the virus (73%) rather than avoiding recession (14%) That net 59-point “lead” for tackling the virus compares with net figures of 44 points (Japan), 30 points (US), 16 points (Germany) and 15 points (Sweden). Prospect has more.
A reader tells me about the difficulties he’s had trying to see a dentist:
Like many of a certain generation I have had the pleasure of getting to visit my dentist regularly and we are on first name terms. Once I experience toothache I usually phone up for an appointment and hope to get away with a filling but have on occasion had to suffer the expense and pain of a deep root canal filling. Since the middle of March the doors of every dental surgery have been firmly closed in the UK and the only treatment available is from emergency dental hubs. These dental hubs can offer you a choice of either antibiotics and pain killers and if that doesn’t work an extraction of the painful tooth.
I did write to my dentist at the beginning of April, initially by email, which wasn’t replied to, then by a hand-written letter explaining I had a lot of pain from a tooth. I had already taken a weeks worth of antibiotics and paracetamol My dentisit kindly did phone me, had a look at some x-rays from last year and said he could refer me to a hub for it to be removed, as that was the only option.
When the dentists open possibly in July they think that they will only be doing teeth extractions anyway. All the dental work involving ” aerosols”, i.e. drilling and filling, is not allowed and will not be available for months because of the need for PPE for all staff and a total refit of dental surgeries.
We have returned to the world of dentistry in the 18th Century.
This is quite shocking. Dr Jeannette Young, the Chief Health Officer of Queensland in Australia, has told the Brisbane Times that she urged the state’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, to shut down schools in order to send a “message”, not because she thought it was scientifically advisable. Here are the key paragraphs:
Dr Young told Ms Palaszczuk to shut down schools on March 26th.
She says while evidence showed schools were not a high-risk environment for the spread of the virus, closing them down would help people understand the gravity of the situation.
“If you go out to the community and say, ‘this is so bad, we can’t even have schools, all schools have got to be closed’, you are really getting to people,” Dr Young says.
“So sometimes it’s more than just the science and the health, it’s about the messaging.”
I’ve long suspected that senior civil servants think they know better than democratically-elected politicians and have no qualms about misrepresenting scientific or legal advice in order to manipulate them. But they don’t often brag about it in national newspapers, particularly not when still in post. One telling detail from the profile: Dr Young has a “no-smoking” sign displayed on her “trophy” wall, given to her by Health Minister Steven Miles after she helped to get cigarettes banned in national parks in 2017.
On the subject of schools, a reader has passed on a Facebook post complaining about the arrangements that have been made at Holywell Village First School in Whitley Bay to facilitate its reopening on June 1st. These apply to children in Reception and Year 1, i.e. aged four to six:
- Children to be isolated in bubbles of small groups
- To remain with one teacher in one classroom all day
- All toys, books and soft furnishings removed
- Children to work at desks 1m apart, all to face the same direction, and not mix, INCLUDING NURSERY!
- Desks etc to be continually cleaned throughout the day
- To be seated at desks all day. No sitting on the floor
- Children only to attend in clean clothes and a clean coat every day
- No hot lunch for Reception and Year 1, packed lunches to be provided by the school
- No outdoor equipment to be touched
- They will have to spend much of the day working independently (the teacher cannot help them)
- Set toilet times
- Toileting accidents – children to clean themselves up; if they can’t then the parent has to come and collect the child to clean them at home
As my correspondent says, “The psychological scars this will leave beggar belief.” The headteacher of Holywell Village First School would do well to read this piece by Rachel de Souza, chief executive of Inspiration Trust, or indeed this article that I’ve been sent by Christine Brett, a health economist, and which I’ve published today. Christine has crunched the numbers and concluded that the chances of your child dying from the virus, or infecting others, are extremely slight. To date, one child has died from coronavirus per 1.1 million children in the UK (12 in total). But even though the risk is negligible, Christine is far from cavalier about it. As she says in her piece, her own son Michael died at the age of 19 months:
In the interests of full disclosure, I fully understand the anxiety parents feel about their children. My first son was born with a congenital heart condition and spent the first ten days of his life on the cardiac intensive care unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital. He underwent eight hours of open-heart surgery at three days old. He had his oxygen levels, and weight monitored weekly. He was rushed back into the hospital after having his first set of vaccines. Ultimately, my husband and I decided that since he had survived, we wanted him to live. Yes, I was nervous being around people with a cold, but I wheeled him down the street choked with traffic fumes to take him to baby groups – yoga, massage, singing. We travelled on trains, buses and even planes to visit friends and family.
He died at 19 weeks – the post-mortem showed evidence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) is his lungs. CMV is a common virus that is usually harmless. Most people don’t know they have CMV because it rarely causes problems in healthy people. However, for people with weakened immune systems, it is a cause for concern. For Matthew’s delicately balanced circulation, it was fatal. I always knew he didn’t have a long life ahead with his condition, but he lived a short, fun-filled life
Christine’s article, which is very sober and sensible, is well worth a read.
Someone has sent me an interesting piece published in the New Scientist in 2007 saying the cause of the foot and mouth epidemic was a virus escaping from leaky pipe at a Government research lab in Pirbright, Surrey. Perhaps the theory that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology isn’t that far-fetched after all.
The New York Times has an article attempting to smear all lockdown sceptics as far-right loons and conspiracy theorists, focusing on the dissemination of the Stanford Santa Clara serological study by right-wing commentators on Twitter. That study, led by John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, seemed to show that public health organisations, such as the WHO, had under-estimated the seroprevalence of the virus and, as a consequence, over-estimated the infection fatality rate (IFR). According to the Times, the signal boost the study received from wing-nuts on Twitter led to “a surge of misinformation”. “By the end of the weekend, right-wing social media had passed around the study, often with hashtags like #ReopenAmerica, #FactsNotFear, #endthelockdown and #BackToWork slapped on,” writes the Times.
Trouble is, the estimate of the IFR in that preprint – 0.17% – has turned out to be more accurate than official estimates. If you look at this Excel spreadsheet collating the data from some of the major PCR and serological studies that have been done so far, the median IFR is 0.36. Admittedly, more than double 0.17, but bear in mind that was an estimate of the IFR in Santa Clara county. And an IFR of 0.36 is just over a third of the estimate used in the Imperial College computer model, which was 0.9%.
So which figure should be classed as “misinformation”? The one produced by Professor Ioannidis and his team at Stanford or the one produced by Professor Ferguson and his team at Imperial? I’m willing to bet my house that when the IFR of SARS-CoV-2 is a settled figure, it will be closer to 0.17% than 0.9%.
The Times concludes it’s analysis by saying that there are two internets, one interested in scientific evidence and governed by reason, the other a Wild West dominated by right-wing conspiracy theorists:
What this cascade of sharing behaviour reveals, based on our analysis of nearly 900 COVID-19 preprints, is a tale of two internets: one largely ideological, in which science is leveraged as propaganda, and one that consists of the kind of discussion and debate vital for academia — and democracy.
That’s kind of true, but the authors of the article – Aleszu Bajak and Jeff Howe – have got it backwards: it’s mainstream media organisations like the New York Times and the BBC that are disseminating propaganda, with the truth about coronavirus more likely to be found in little tributaries of the internet like this one. At the foot of the piece Bajak and Howe are described as teachers of journalism at Northeastern University. Make of that what you will.
A regular contributor to this site – anonymous, but one of the best financial journalist in the country – has done a bit of analysis based on the “response tracker” that Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government has created. This is a tool that enables you to compare and contrast different countries according to what non-pharmaceutical interventions they’ve put in place in an attempt to mitigate the impact of the virus:
The Blavatnik School of Government provides an estimate of Lockdown “stringency” (100 being complete lockdown). I put the numbers for a few countries into a spreadsheet. What you find is that there is no statistical relationship between the stringency of lockdown (at the end of March) and a country’s rate of COVID-19 infections and deaths (per million of population – numbers from Our World in Data). There is, as you would expect, a stronger statistical relationship between the degree of stringency and projected fiscal deficits (estimated by the IMF, and already massively understating the problem).
Never have some many sacrificed so much for so little…
In Austria, a new organisation called “Initiative for evidence-based information on the coronavirus” (ICI) has been created by a controversial doctor called Dr. Christian Fiala. (He has written papers in the past disputing that AIDS is a killer virus.) It’s an anti-lockdown organisation that describes itself as an “independent initiative” but, unlike Widerstand 2020 Deutschland, ICI has no ambition to become a political party. It says on the site that it isn’t affiliated to any existing party and rejects any form of political extremism. It helps to organise anti-lockdown demonstrations and offers pro-bono legal support to people who’ve been prosecuted for participating in protests or fined for breaking the quarantine. The website publishes an endless stream of academic papers contradicting what the site refers to as “prevailing corona-alarmist orthodoxies” – a bit like this one! The site claims ICI has three objectives:
- Facts instead of panic
- Back to basic rights
- Back to pluralistic discussion
One of ICI’s campaigns urges Austrians to wear face masks with the words “mund-tot” on them, which translates as “mouth-dead” or “silenced”:
ICI organised a protest in Vienna outside the Austrian Chancellory yesterday. It was forbidden by the police, but people gathered anyway. If you click here, you’ll see pictures from it. The text at the top of that page translates as: “We’re not left-wing, we’re not right-wing – we’re angry.”
I asked my always-helpful German-speaking reader to see what had been written about the group in the Austrian press and this is his summary:
The group doesn’t seem to getting much pick up in main Austrian papers. Couldn’t find anything in the Kurier or the Kronenzeitung. The one article I found in a major paper, Der Standard, is extremely hostile. It makes no attempt to understand the ICI’s purpose or arguments, but smears it by linking it to the right-wing nationalist organisation, the Identitarian Movement Austria led by Martin Sellner. Sellner has endorsed the ICI, clearly seeking to exploit it for his own purposes. ICI organisers were none too pleased that Sellner’s followers showed up at the demo – and said as much – but felt they couldn’t do much about it. Despite this, the article portrays ICI moderates as naive, ill-informed misfits and anti-vaxxers who won’t wear masks and feel no sense of responsibility towards the old and vulnerable. It points to the apparent irony of the group’s name, given that the ICI attracts people who clearly have no understanding of or respect for evidence-based health policy.
One thing I’ve noticed about ICI and Widerstand 2020 Deutschland is that both organisations are militantly pro-free speech. I am too, of course, and helped set up an organisation called the Free Speech Union earlier this year. I imagine a belief in the importance of free speech is something nearly all lockdown sceptics have in common.
Meanwhile, in Germany, the scandal caused by the leak of an 80-page impact assessment of the lockdown by an auditor in the Ministry of the Interior continues to rumble on. I’ve found this summary by German-to-English translator Paul Charles Gregory on an anti-deep state website. I’ve asked him to translate the whole thing for me so I can publish it on this site, but haven’t heard back yet. It’s quite an undertaking.
Slovenia declared an official end to its coronavirus epidemic yesterday, becoming the first country in Europe to do so. It was among the first to ease its lockdown – on April 20th – and saw no increase in infections. Public transport resumed earlier this week while next week some pupils will return to schools. All bars and restaurants, as well as small hotels with up to 30 rooms, will also be allowed to open next week. European visitors to the country will no longer be quarantined on arrival, although visitors from other parts of the world will be. To date it has had 1,464 cases and 103 deaths.
I get a lot of emails from readers like this one:
My neighbour’s father died three weeks ago. Elderly, unwell. Tested three times for Covid, all tests came back negative.
Death Certificate, Dr. put as cause of death “Covid”.
One thing that makes me slightly sceptical about these anecdotal reports is that I don’t get what the motive is. Why would a GP misdiagnose the cause of death? In the US, hospitals doctors have a financial incentive to put “COVID0-19” on death certificates because they get tens of thousands of dollars from the federal Government for each patient who dies of COVID-19. But there’s no equivalent incentive in the UK as far as I’m aware.
I also get a lot of emails like this:
I’m a huge fan of Lockdown Sceptics. Thank you for helping to save my sanity. At times this has felt like I’ve been standing in front of a lorry which is going to run me over. I want to move out of the way, but I can’t unless unless everyone else moves out of the way. They can’t see the lorry or hear me. It’s felt nightmarish and more isolating than lockdown itself.
I’m sure many of you know exactly how this woman feels.
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:
- ”Mayor bungee jumps to celebrate easing of lockdown in New Zealand‘ – Queenstown Lakes Mayor Jim Boult has done a bungee jump to celebrate the easing of he country’s lockdown restrictions. The Telegraph has video
- ‘Cats can infect each other with coronavirus, study finds‘ – According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, domestic cats infected with COVID-19 can transmit the virus to other felines. The good news is they’re asymptomatic
- ‘There Is No Evidence Lockdowns Saved Lives. It Is Indisputable They Caused Great Harm‘ – William Briggs, who describes himself as “statistician to the stars”, crunches the numbers
- ‘How extreme isolation warps minds‘ – Michael Bond on the psychological harm caused by extreme isolation for the BBC
- ‘Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza‘ – 2006 paper recommending against quarantining whole populations during a pandemic. The author writes: “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”
- ‘Calling the Government to Account For Its Woeful Handling of This Crisis‘ – Rob Slane lets rip for the Blogmire
- ‘Boris Johnson launches a new battle of the bulge‘ – James Forsyth reports in the Times that Boris has decided to go to war on fatties
- ‘Germany’s New Coronavirus Thinking‘ – The Wall St Journal editorial board praises the Germans for not over-reacting to the R number creeping above 1 for three days earlier this week. “A strange thing happened in Germany this week: COVID-19 started spreading a bit faster and officials and the public managed to cope,” they write. “It’s an important benchmark for other governments as they allow their own economies to emerge from viral hibernation.”
- ‘Remembering Huxley’s Warning: Propaganda and Totalitarianism‘ – James Black in Bournbrook Magazine reminding us that sowing fear and panic is the age-old political strategy of would-be dictators
- ‘“Covid-fighting” drug is imperilled by politics‘ – James Berry writes for the Conservative Woman about the political obstacles to the widespread use of hydroxycholoquine
- ‘Fear Kills‘ – Brendan O’Niell, Editor of Spiked, with more evidence that the cure is worse than the disease
- ‘Oldest working tailor in UK Elwyn, 96, beats coronavirus‘ – Heart-warming story about Britain’s oldest-working tailer, Elwyn Hughes, who has recovered from COVID-19
- ‘The risks facing Premier League players are negligible – it is time to stop appeasing and play‘ – Oliver Brown, Chief Sports Feature Writer for the Telegraph, let’s namby pamby footballers know what he thinks of their behaviour
- ‘Police urge people not to walk in the road and say crossing paths with others will not transmit coronavirus‘ – Police are worried that some people are so terrified of catching the virus they’re walking into fast-moving oncoming traffic to avoid breaching the two-metre rule
- ‘No, I Won’t Clap “Our NHS“‘ – James Delingpole at his curmudgeonly best in Breitbart
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, with a heavy metal theme today: “What’s Another Year?” by Johnny Logan, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day and “Don’t Box Me In” by Stan Ridgway and Stewart Copeland.
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It’s a daunting task, as I say in my latest Spectator column. If you feel like donating, you can do so by clicking here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here.
If you want a laugh, this Kevin James video is very funny. Stay with it – you’ll get the point.
And finally, I participated in quite a high-level discussion on Tuesday courtesy of How the Light Gets In, a philosophy festival that takes place in Hay-on-Wye each spring, but which has gone virtual for this year. One of the other panelists was fellow sceptic Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. These things are often quite adversarial but this one wasn’t. Worth a watch.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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Do people understand where the 19 million figure in the headline comes from? It wasn’t from testing people.
They calculated the reducing rates of reinfection, and found a vague correlation between different groups of people (different cities and so forth) that fit the best if the rate of infection was 150 higher than the number of positive tests.
But if you wiggled the line a bit, it would be equally plausible for it to be just 10 times higher (which seems more likely).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S8Js-tEmlg&list=WL&index=9
David Starkey fighting the good fight.
“The decisions that were taken were as follows- and they were taken to PROTECT THE FACE OF THE NHS AT ALL COSTS.
1) You stop all forms of surgery and diagnostic testing completely. Cancer, heart disease – the lot. The National Health Service becomes the National Covid Service.
2) You clear every bed that you can. This is when the patients, so-called ‘bed blockers’, get sent back to care homes.
3) You shut down all private medicine – and you do a deal to use their resources for Covid only.
The result of this is that Britain is spared that humiliation – we did not have the scenes they had in Italy or Spain. But- there is a terrible price to pay, because there’s the deaths of the people that should have been treated. Or are terrified to go to hospital for other things and are therefore dying in droves.
As the deaths go down in hospitals, they go up in care homes. Why were we so cavalier about care homes? BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT PART OF THE NHS. They’re not covered by that magic label.
That joke about the NHS being the nearest thing to a national religion has… Read more »
“I would sack Hancock, he would have to go”
Hancock is looking a shadow of his former self anyway now. He looks like a startled rabbit caught in car headlights, knowing that sooner or later he is going to be run over.
The ultimate covidiots: Scuffles break out as police lead away anti-lockdown activists in Hyde Park as hundreds attend protests against restrictions across the UK
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8326161/Police-arrest-activists-anti-lockdown-protesters-gather-Hyde-Park.html
Would be nice to have names for those responsible for the evident editorial decision at the Mail to keep on using the childish abuse term “covidiots” on their front page.
Still, useful to be reminded regularly that the Mail is a gutter rag at heart, however reasonable its politics might seem (assuming you are on the “establishment right” side of politics, obviously).
Some of “our guys” here at lockdownsceptics.org had said they were going to be at Hyde Park in London, so hopefully we can get some more honest reporting on it here later.
Loving the policewoman using a piece of cardboard as a shield
I’d buy the “freedom over fear” guy a beer.
Not so impressed with the “this is fascism” shouter – people are so quick to trot out the “f” word at these demos.
“David Samson, 50, who said he works in finance, told the PA news agency he came because ‘I never thought I’d see in my generation the suppressing of civil rights’ over a ‘fake virus’.”
Good man!
Things are getting more weird by each day
Bizarre EU-Funded Comic Book Predicted Pandemic, With Globalists As Saviours
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bizarre-eu-funded-comic-book-predicted-pandemic-globalists-saviours
Wowsers !!
Have they forgotten who the last lot of globalists were?
Why the flying fuck are the eu producing comics ?
Coronavirus: People playing football and sunbathing in groups can still be fined despite lockdown relaxation, police say
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/coronavirus-people-playing-football-and-sunbathing-in-groups-can-still-be-fined-despite-lockdown-relaxation-police-say/ar-BB14apZ7?ocid=ientp
From the Telegraph:
The coding that led to lockdown was totally unreliable and “ a buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.
“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led-lockdown-totally-unreliable-buggy-mess-say-experts/
If I had incurred a large financial loss as a result of the lockdown, I would definitely be tempted to sue ICL for negligence on the back of the reviews that have been done on the model itself. It seems that it falls far below the standards that one would expect of a model from an institution of that calibre. Especially with regard to basics such as reproducibility. Also in view of the fundamental errors in the report to the government itself, as per the review on this site.
Class action suit against them and the nutty professor
Why does common sense feel so revolutionary now?
– Farinances in the comments down-thread. That should be your blog’s motto, Toby.
*bows*
As more and more countries start opening up to be more like Sweden I’ve noticed a marked drop in news sources on Sweden. Sweden got it wrong but now we’re getting like them we’ll just ignore them because that would just be awkward.
How are you calculating the IFR as 0.076% in the opening paragraph? 50,000 deaths divided by 19 million infected gives 0.26%. Must be missing something. Thanks.
Well I nipped out the back door and across the park (one of those mentioned in the flyers, but not in London) before 12 to see if anything was going to happen,but no sign of any demo here, so came back in few minutes ago. If anything kicks off I’ll hear it, with the windows open, and go back down for a look.
A fair few people around just enjoying the park, a couple of police cars parked in an access road, and a couple of hivis jacketed patrollers. That was it.
I’m in Hyde Park in Leeds (even nearer than Sheffield). No bugger here lol. Although, this park is MASSIVE (one of the biggest in the country) so maybe people are spread out. Actually there are quite a few people here milling about just nobody is ‘organised’ or anything. Oh well ima plonk me deckchair down and read me buke.
Big nothing it looks like atm. Maybe London will see something happening.
The Mail Online are reporting protests and arrests in Hyde Park, London. Though whether you trust the Mail ….!
Well if there’s going to be any protest in any of these parks, that’s where you’d expect it to be.
Everyone in Leeds is too busy putting suntan lotion on heh – sun’s not even out!
Suntan lotion, in May on a day like this!? I prefer to let my skin soak up the UV and create some vit D. Mind you, I don’t usually hang around in the sun for more than an hour or so.
From the Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2820%2930314-5
Investigation of a COVID-19 outbreak in Germany resulting from a single travel-associated primary case: a case series
Quote
The present investigation enables us to determine secondary attack rates based on closely monitored high ¬risk contacts. The secondary attack rate thereby decreases with the intensity of contact: among members of the cohorted household, the secondary attack rate was 75%, but decreased to 10% among household contacts that were only together until isolation of the case. Although the experience with the cohorted family is based on a single observation, it shows the high risk of close household contacts—ie, sharing a room—of a case in home isolation and calls for strong measures within households to prevent transmission, particularly if susceptible people are present. Among 217 non ¬household high ¬risk contacts that were cumulatively followed up because of direct contact with a confirmed case, 11 were infected. The resulting secondary attack rate of 5% seems low, indicating little spread in this cluster.
What does this mean? High risk for infection in cohorted contacts. Low risk outside household.
When the lockdown started in the UK many were already incubating the disease. You can be sure of that the lockdown made it… Read more »
Well that was bourne out in New York city where a lot of cases were from people hunkering down at home.
The beginning of this video “newscast” from X22 explains there are more people fighting back than you think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgXl-8I_pkE
These guys have some very interesting videos as well:
https://www.youtube.com/user/NextNewsNetwork/videos
Have just spotted this comment in a facebook post asking for recommendations for roast dinner deliveries:
“Sorry, but I keep seeing posts about takeaways and restaurants. Surely it’s safer in this current climate to cook in your own home? Enjoy the excellent restaurants, cafes and takeaways we have to offer when this is over, I know I will.”
I just totally despair!
Very good article on Fauci’s history and career:
http://stateofthenation.co/?p=13812
Brilliant keep the pressure on, this will be exposed as the greatest con on the British people ever seen.
We are a nations of bedwetters with no challenge to the mainstream media with their constant and very successful mission of peddling fear and anxiety.
“The more the Government appears to be out of control, incompetent, panicking, to be placing the lives of the populace at risk, the more that populace clammers for the extension of the lockdown, for stronger measures, more intrusive solutions, for better protection from the invisible threat. Whether this crisis has been manufactured by the Government and its corporate clients and to what purpose should no longer be questions except for those who refuse to read the data and legislation I have presented and analysed in my last two articles: the question we must answer is how to oppose the totalitarian measures this crisis has ushered in”
This is a long read but a must read.
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2020/05/12/the-state-of-emergency-as-paradigm-of-government-coronavirus-legislation-implementation-and-enforcement/
Can anybody provide a view on why the BMA are backing the teaching unions that it is too early to partially open primary schools in England from 1 June as it is not “safe” (hate that word) to do so. I feel sure that this will mean a postponement until September. I thought the BMA (as compared to the teaching unions) are quite sensible, as a rule.
The BMA were sensible, about thirty years ago, but they’ve gone left-wing in recent years, just as the teachers have. It’s all part of the long, slow March through the institutions. Most younger doctors will also be very left wing because they’ve undergone years of indoctrination in our schools and universities. Finding anyone vaguely right wing in the education establishment is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. They’re out there, but they keep their heads down and opinions to themselves for the sake of their jobs and families.
It’s how socialism takes hold.
Same reason that all these quangos, association, companies, governments do these are stupidity – common purpose useful idiots.
It is not about what is good for the children but what these organisations think would be good in terms of political standing and what they can get out of it. Monsters!
Why don’t the cops just have the honesty to say they don’t believe this nonsense they are enforcing? “ The chief of British Transport Police in Scotland is facing criticism after making two trips from Glasgow to Yorkshire to visit his family home during lockdown.
British Transport Police (BTP) have confirmed to The Daily Record that Eddie Wylie made the 480-mile round trips between his Glasgow flat and his other home in Holmfirth”.
Please. If they didn’t all have double standards, they wouldn’t have any at all.
I think they are starting to backpedal, download it for when it gets deleted from youtube again:
https://youtu.be/adj8MCsZKlg
So why all the scaremongering and media hype?
As us un
Was this the briefing on 11th May? I don’t watch them anymore! Why aren’t the MSM running with this? My husband bought the Times today, so depressing, banging on about a second spine etc etc. I just don’t get it…
Yep so it says at the beginning,
I don’t watch them either but this was put on the off-guardian website apparently, my son sent it to me as him and his mates are having fun reposting things that are deleted from youtube and Facebook, winding up the sheeple and posting lots of the things I send him that shows it’s all crap. They enjoy winding up the censors as they are all furloughed as they are chefs in proper restaurants and destination eating pubs so it’s giving them somethings o do.
He was contacted by one of his old teachers on facebook who turned out to be a rabid pro I’m waiting for the vaccine nut. I sent the son a few links about Bill gates plans, how he has killed and maimed lots of people and the teacher never appeared again.
My son and his friends have learnt that beating them with facts is good fun as they sulk and disappear.
Well done, AG.
I remember Whitty saying all this last Monday. I don’t normally watch the briefings any more but this one, I did, as I wanted to see what they would say about raising the lockdown. My mouth dropped open when Whitty said this – at last, people will wake up and listen! Nope …. not one part of the MSM picked up on it.
There was a momentary glimpse of behind the curtain, perhaps, at 1.46.
Chris Whitty says “…this is perfectly open data; perfectly possible for people to get hold of if they want…” in a way that suggested that in his world the default is for data not to be ‘open’. He said it in a way that suggested we might be surprised to find that the data was open – because he knows that at the moment, openness and truthfulness from the government is very unusual. I took it to mean that the government is currently studying other data that reveals the actual truth, and that we cannot be allowed to look at that.
This is worth a listen, it’s 5 mins of a one hour lecture Whitty gave in 2018 entitled ‘how to control a pandemic’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBiGk4ORjhQ
Surely the only song that truly sums up all this is ‘I can feel the fear in the western world’ by Ultravox.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/15/we-could-open-up-again-and-forget-the-whole-thing/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
He is excellent.
“I frankly still cannot fully understand how our governments can be so stupid … And it is going on and on and on, just because governments are afraid of admitting an error. They are trying to find excuses.”
I honestly hope that it IS just stupidity and over reaction on the part of all the governments. And not something more sinister. Or whether it was initially over reaction and now the more sinister faces such as Gates have seen their chance and gone for it.
Me being a jaded and cynical awkward git, I think it is all planned and the governments either willing participants, bought off or threatened into going along with it. Probably all the independent research videos I’ve watched over the years.
Me too. 140 countries don’t act in unison unless some pretty serious pressure is being applied.
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1261454284488691712/photo/1
Somebody now classifying two type of deaths one with Covid-19 and one from Covid-19
Colorado. Good idea to do this in the UK?
This is from https://twitter.com/venivici27/status/1261377128186159105
Germany’s Robert Koch Institute: 84676 infected under age of 50. Of these: 83 died. CFR for under 50 ~ 0.1%. For people under 40, CFR is 0.01%. IFR is even lower than CFR at least 10 times according to antibody tests. Only 30 people under age of 40 died. https://rki.de/DE/Content/Inf
This information must be spreading like wildfire in Germany. Even politicians must understand (never admit) that they have made the worst mistake ever crushing the German economy because of this.
Right, so the IFR for almost everyone would be lower than that for swine flu (0.02%), which – rightly – no one panicked about, at least not to the extent of wrecking lives and economies worldwide.
Swine flu affected more young people as well, whereas SARS-CoV-2 barely touches this age group – and yet the CDC still didn’t recommend school closures in 2009! What on earth are we doing to our children in 2020? I was 10 years old during the swine flu pandemic and my school did not close, I was not confined to my house, and there was no lockdown. All I remember were those blue ‘Catch It, Bin It, Kill It’ public information posters.
If anything those “Catch it, Bin it, Kill it” posters were actually good because they’re more effective than face masks. Its a mystery why no-one has thought of bringing them back.
This is an absolute thing to view, two videos published by Michael Levitt just on you tube describing the epidemic curve with I think will have enormous consequences
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCgPf1SuPNY&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=65&v=Uw2ZTaiN97k&feature=emb_logo
Think if we had Prof Levitt instead of Neil Ferguson?
Instinctively it’s very hard for a virus to continue spreading exponentially. Models seem to assume we’re all uniformly stood side by side like chess pieces and don’t move. People will automatically take action to stay at home or whatever without needing to be told if they see that there’s a deadly virus spreading towards their area.
Now this is interesting: we detected SARS-CoV-2−reactive CD4+ T cells in ∼40-60% of unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.
https://twitter.com/carlheneghan/status/1261573795334303745?s=19
Raises a lot of potential questions about some of the info we’ve been getting.
This is very important. Explains why we never need herd immunity at 60% level. Also that the “roof “ to reach for the pandemic in each country is much lower than thought. Finally fits very well with Prof Levitt’s graphs for the pandemic. There is a resistance in the population and we don’t need that high level of antibodies in the population as predicted to stop the epidemic.
If this means what I think it means (that many of us have cells from the immune system which can recognize and kill Covid-19 because of the similarities between it and the common cold- another coronavirus) then this tells us why the epidemic is already petering out all over the world; it is running out of susceptible people to infect. We wondered why so many people had symptomless infection to a so-called novel coronavirus and this also explains that.
Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council has called the people planning to attend the gatherings in Glasgow today selfish, right wings bams. Yes this is the calibre of our public servants.
The council is of course in dire financial straits, which will only be exacerbated by this corono terrorism.
Scotland the brave? No, Scotland the quivering, bed wetting disgrace of a nation.
I would strongly recommend all of you to watch the coverage of this lunacy on UK Column, especially their report on SAGE’s behavioural insights group.
Please remember
A HUG IS HEALTH GIVE ONE WHILE YOU STILL CAN
It really grieves me to think that many old people will die lonely and without the human touch of their families because cowardly, ill informed families have been ordered by the government not to visit.
What sort of humanity is this!!!!!!
I would love to meet up with some of you when this madness is over. We could all gather at the Nightingale Hospital in London and at least put it to good use.
Brave hardy humorous Scots! What a joke! We have overweight public servants telling us what we can and can’t do; a bossy little person issuing guidance which must, by default, undermine the equally daft Westminster advice, and anyone who objects and displays independent powers of thought and deduction is automatically labelled ‘right wing’: the favoured go-to insult for the SNP’s cohorts, who supposedly promote independence-provided it’s their sort of independence.
This is pathetic.
On STV there is an annoying advert by a diminutive so called comedian ,who assures us that Scots don’t take themselves too seriously!
Agree. Did you see the faux caring chief nurse with Sturgeon? More chins than a Chinese telephone directory.
Yes Hammer, seeing her last night prompted my comment on yesterday’s thread. Coincidentally, not a few of the SNP contingent at Westminster are decidedly rotund.
I would give Wendyk ten thumbs up if I could. I would have a lot more respect for SNP politicians if instead of doing their compassionate routine they actually tried to take a stand against Westminster by getting Scotland back to work.
Thank you Jane
Again, here in France, we thought we could take all the garden rubbish that has accumulated over the past two months to the town dump. Not so simple. First you need to make an appointment and give them your car registration number. First appointment in two weeks’ time. When you turn up you have to present your identity card, you town dump card and your appointment number, and then they check you are who who say you are and you have the same car (can’t have people trying to get rid of stuff for their neighbours). Of course you must be wearing a mask and gloves. The town dump for heaven’s sake. These people work among dirt and germs all the time. How long is this madness going to go on?
She Who Must Be Obeyed is considering opening the dumps again, as, needless to say, fly tipping is on the rise, with associated rats and gulls.You couldn’t make this up!
It’s starting to remind me of ‘Blackadder’ and cunning plans
Yes indeed – when I think of caviare and Sturgeon, I often wonder if she is from a punning clan!
This madness will continue as long as they can get away with it, and until there’s serious pushback from people. Unfortunately, the majority have been so effectively terrified of this virus, I don’t see things changing any time soon.
I’d like to move to a US state where there’s a Republican governor in charge, but as I’m not allowed out of the house except for essential journeys, no flying, etc, that’s not going to happen.
Is your IFR calculation correct?? 50,000/ 19,000,000 as a % is 0.26% – about where many others have it.
The BBC a showing that the R0 is higher, therefore the disease will increase rapidly and spread quicker in the “community”. This is despite the government stating that R0 has increased purely due to care homes and hospitals. The BBC are even subtle with their misinformation and scare mongering. Its unreal. Pricks
aren’t even subtle
Time for some extensive Beeb reduction surgery!
The R0 has increased purely because the hospitals infected the care homes, just as they’ve done in other countries. Funny that….
This is what government use to “nudge” the population’s thinking:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publications/mindspace
Like reading all “manifestos” – Agenda 21/2030/new green deal/global warming/climate change/anti-brexit etc – you need to read what it means, not what it says.
There is a big difference at times between the 2.