Today’s Telgraph says a majority of the Cabinet want Boris to accelerate the timetable for ending the lockdown.
Boris Johnson is under pressure to ease the lockdown restrictions causing “massive damage” to the economy, with the majority of the Cabinet understood to support a major “back to work” drive next month.
Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, is among ministers who have expressed concerns about the long-term “scarring” to the economy being caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Provided there is no unexpected increase in the rate of virus infections over the next 10 days, they want the Prime Minister to allow as many businesses as possible to reopen in order to get the country moving again.
According to Gordon Raynor, the Telegraph‘s political editor, the three most hawkish members of the Cabinet – remember, in the current vernacular hawkish means cautious, not bold – are Matt Hancock, Michael Gove and the Prime Minister. But the doves seem to be gaining ground. Conservative peers Baroness Noakes and Lord Dobbs have both chastised the Government for being over cautious, with Dobbs saying “lockdown means poverty”.
The former Tory work and pensions minister Baroness Buscombe urged the Government to be “proportionate” in a House of Lords debate yesterday and reduce the social distancing rule to one metre, calling for schools to reopen “to free up the workforce and to stem the tide of this, frankly, with respect, cultural and economic suicide”.
Meanwhile, the Times reports that the Treasury borrowed more last month than in the whole of last year (£62.1 billion). According to the Office for National Statistics, the Government hasn’t borrowed that much in a single month since records began.
Public Inquiry-Induced Paralysis
According to Fraser Nelson’s column in today’s Telegraph, a new joke is going round Whitehall:
When an awkward question about Covid comes up, someone will say: “Well, tell that to the inquiry.”
But as Fraser points out, this isn’t funny. On the contrary, the paranoia gripping members of the Government and the Civil Service about how they’re likely to judged in the forthcoming inquiry is preventing them from taking decisive action in case it has adverse consequences and they end carrying the can. “I know one Cabinet member who is keeping meticulous, exculpatory notes of his actions with a dateline starting in January,” writes Fraser.
Normally, we’d expect the Prime Minister to be the one mobilising the English language to stirring national effect but instead he’s starting to look like the most cautious leader in Europe. Perhaps he is stung by the failure of the lockdown to limit deaths and thinks he cannot afford another political risk, especially if he plans a high-stakes Brexit gambit. Perhaps he worries an early move to reopen the economy would be too divisive – contravening his pledge to reconcile a country torn by the referendum.
The Prime Minister tells colleagues that they’ll be forgiven for mistakes going into this crisis, but not for mistakes coming out. He’s right. But if he’s late out of lockdown, he will be walking straight into that second mistake.
YouTube’s Red Pen
Yesterday, when linking to Freddie Sayers’s interview with Sunetra Gupta on UnHerd, I said, “Watch it before YouTube takes it down.” That was intended as a joke – surely, YouTube wouldn’t take down an interview with the Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, however much she dissented from Covid orthodoxy?
But then I discovered that YouTube had removed Freddie’s interview with Professor Karol Sikora, Dean of Buckingham University Medical School. According to Freddie, the video “violated” YouTube’s “guidelines” and his appeal for it to be reinstated was rejected. Freddie tweeted about this last night, several people weighed in to criticise YouTube’s decision (including me), and the video has now been reinstated.
Will the interview with Professor Gupta be removed? You’ll recall that she made news back in March when her team at Oxford – long-standing rivals to Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College – published a preprint arguing that many more people could have been infected than we previously thought and herd immunity might be achievable without paying the price that Ferguson’s team claimed, i.e. 250,000+ Covid fatalities. At the time, this was summarised as “coronavirus may have infected half of UK population” – and widely scoffed at – but that isn’t what the paper said. Rather, it hypothesised a range of estimates, of which that was one.
In the interview, Gupta doesn’t defend the 50% figure, but stands by the idea that herd immunity can be achieved without hundreds of thousands of deaths:
In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with [our] model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.
She is careful not to directly criticise Ferguson and his team. Rather, the Government was at fault for acting as it did based on the team’s prediction:
The Government’s defence is that this [the Imperial College model] was a plausible worst case scenario. I agree it was a plausible — or at least a possible — worst case scenario. The question is, should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting, that case is becoming more and more fragile.
In the most controversial section of the interview, Professor Gupta says she thinks the long-term harm caused by social distancing will outweigh the benefits. Why? Because protecting ourselves from exposure to pathogens in our day-to-day life makes us more vulnerable to killer viruses, not less.
Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50 million people.
Does that mean she’s in favour of dispensing with social distancing altogether and just returning to normal? She doesn’t quite say so, but that appears to be what she thinks.
I think it is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population.
Great stuff, obviously, and history will almost certainly look more kindly on Professor Gupta than Professor Ferguson. But I’m not going to make her ‘Sceptic of the Week’ because, it turns out, she’s wary of being lumped in with libertarian types like me.
So I know there is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown have had our voices added to that libertarian harangue. But the truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries. It’s a very serious crisis.
Infection Fatality Rate is 0.26% – CDC
Regular readers will know that I’ve been tracking the infection fatality rate (IFR) throughout the crisis, convinced that it’s far lower than the 0.9% estimated by Neil Ferguson and way, way lower than the 3.4% estimated by the WHO. My prediction has long been that it will turn out to be slightly higher than the IFR of seasonal flu, which is 0.1% in an average year and 0.2% in a bad year. Although I’ve never been quite as bullish as Sunetra Gupta, who told Freddie she thinks it is somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.
On May 15th, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US published its official estimate – 0.26%, although it doesn’t come right out and say it. Rather, it estimates the case fatality rate (CFR) for different age groups:
- 0-49 year-olds: 0.05%
- 50-64 year-olds: 0.2%
- 65+ years-old: 1.3%
- Mean CFR: 0.4%
The CDC estimates that 35% of people who’ve been infected are asymptomatic, so to get the IFR from the CFR you have to multiply it by 0.65 – 0.4 x 0.65 = 0.26%.
Hats off to the Ethical Skeptic, the anonymous Twitter account which estimated the IFR at 0.26% more than two weeks ago. Using data from seroprevalence studies, he calculated that 32,768,000 Americans had been infected up to May 8th and divided that by the number of US fatalities, which was 86,469 at that point. That gave an IFR of 0.26%.
On May 15th, I discussed a New York Times article that criticised lockdown sceptics for circulating the Santa Clara serological study and highlighting its IFR estimate of 0.17%. According to the Times, the signal boost the study received from anti-lockdown wing-nuts on Twitter led to “a surge of misinformation”. Trouble is, that “misinformation” has turned out to be more accurate than the IFR estimates of the WHO and Professor Ferguson.
Incidentally, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Harvard and the lead author of the Santa Clara study, has a new preprint out in which he estimates the IFR by looking at 12 seroprevalence studies in which the population sample size >500. His conclusion is that it’s “in the same ballpark as seasonal flu”, i.e. between 0.1% and 0.2%. Daniel Horowitz, a senior editor at the Conservative Review, says the mean IFR estimate based on these seroprevalence studies is 0.2%. “That is 17 times less deadly than what the WHO originally predicted and 4.5 times less deadly than the Imperial College study,” he writes.
So it’s official, folks: We’ve imprisoned over a billion people in their homes, laying waste to the global economy and causing untold misery and death in the process, to mitigate the impact of a virus that’s no deadlier than a bad bout of seasonal flu.
Did the New York Times Smear the German Anti-Lockdown Movement?
While we’re on the subject of “misinformation” pumped out by the New York Times, I asked my German-speaking correspondent to look into the Times‘s front-page story claiming the anti-lockdown movement in Germany is being manipulated by the AfD. This was his verdict:
The German media also treats the protest movement against lockdown restrictions in Germany as being driven by various fringe groups that are increasingly influenced by “the right” and AfD usually gets a mention. In a commentary on May 19th, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung describes the protests against lockdown restrictions literally as a “festival of delusional slogans”. The demos are described as colourful gatherings that attract all sorts of esoteric types, anti-vaxxers, left-wing extremists and anti-capitalists – and “increasing numbers of right-wingers”. The reporter Thomas Holl is bemused by the seeming contradictions at play – while international virologists and epidemiologists praise Merkel’s successful handling of the crisis and Germany’s relatively low death toll, there seems to be a stronger anti-lockdown protest movement in the country than elsewhere. Like the New York Times, Holl points the finger at AfD – the right-wing party’s showing in the polls dipped in April and the assertion is that they are looking to exploit the protests to recover lost ground.
I couldn’t see anything about AfD’s influence in Bild, but it carries an emotional story together with a video from the German network TV station ARD that pits a younger protestor against an older gentleman, Alfons Blum, who attended a protest in Gera. The pensioner is there because of how he has been personally affected – he has been unable to visit his wife who lives in a home for the past eight weeks and he breaks down in tears in the interview. A younger participant gets mixed up in how his emotional story is being exploited to distract from the bigger picture and starts shouting at Blum, citing earlier flu epidemics that claimed far more lives and that he should not allow the mainstream media to “make fun” of him on television. “If you listen to the network channels you will have practically lost control over your life!” he tells Blum. The commentary concludes by contrasting the two: “[C]itizens like pensioner Alfons Blum are suffering because of the measures – others believe that the media and the Government are being oppressive.”
Incidentally, there’s now a 7,000-word English summary of the leaked document written by the senior civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. The translation is by Paul Gregory, a German-to-English translator.
More Praise for Governor DeSantis
USA Today ran a piece yesterday by opinion columnist Glenn Harlan Reynolds criticising New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and praising Florida Governor Ron DeSantis:
It’s interesting to compare Cuomo’s approach, in which infected (and infectious) patients were deliberately sent to nursing homes, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s policy of protecting nursing homes first.
As the Palm Beach Post notes, DeSantis forbade the discharge of infected patients to nursing homes and long-term care facilities. As a result, only 3.5 per 100,000 nursing home residents in Florida contracted the disease, compared to 27 out of 100,000 in New York.
Thanks to Cuomo’s mishandling of the crisis “more than 5,300 nursing home patients in New York have died from COVID-19, and as an Albany Times Union account notes, critics blame this policy,” says Reynolds.
These mistakes led to a giant “Cuomo Killed My Mom” sign being erected off an overpass in upstate New York. Possibly unfair but certainly indicative of how some New Yorkers feel.
Round-Up
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:
- ‘Do Lockdowns Work? Mounting Evidence Says No‘ – Good summary of the case by Ryan McMaken on the Mises Institute blog
- ‘Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say‘ – Report by Amy Hollyfield of ABC7 News. Includes this quote from Dr. Mike deBoisblanc, head of trauma at the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek: “We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time. I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
- ‘Theatre stands on the brink of ruin‘ – West End producer Sonia Friedman says 70% of performing arts companies will close by Christmas if there is no government rescue package
- ‘Liberate London from lockdown now‘ – Brendan O’Neill with a good suggestion in the Spectator
- ‘Lockdowns are as contagious as Covid‘ – Paul Dolan, Professor of Behaviour Science at the LSE, tries to understand the mass hysteria that gripped governments around the world in March
- ‘How coronavirus and lockdown could make OCD more common in children‘ – A few days ago I published a comment by a psychiatric nurse pointing out the similarities between coronaphobia and OCD. This is now confirmed by Dr Bernadka Dubicka, Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, who says there has been a surge in children and adolescents presenting with OCD
- ‘Universities battle to balance the books‘ – Article in the Times by Rosemary Bennett about the financial crisis facing Britain’s universities. The sector has asked the Treasury for a bailout of £2.2 billion, but to no avail
- ‘Lockdowns and Human Rights: A British Perspective‘ – The Australian blogger Richard Smith draws attention to how historically unprecedented the wholesale suspension of our liberties is
- ‘Britain is sliding into a deflationary death spiral‘ – The Telegraph‘s Jeremy Warner being his usual cheery self
Theme Tune Suggestions
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “Trying to Survive” by Harvey Scales and the Seven Sounds, “The Whole Damn World is Going Crazy” by John Gary Williams and “Madness They Call It Madness” by Madness.
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
Last week, 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. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have reopened near you. 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.
The list of shops and services that can reopen may be longer than people imagine. On May 13th, the Government issued revised guidance and it’s now permissible for the following retail businesses to reopen (this is in addition to those we already know about, such as garden centres and rubbish dumps):
- Dental services, opticians, audiology services, chiropody, chiropractors, osteopaths and other medical or health services (including physiotherapy and podiatry services), and services relating to mental health
- Bicycle shops
- Homeware, building supplies and hardware stores
- Veterinary surgeries and pet shops
- Agricultural supplies shops
- Off-licences and licensed shops selling alcohol, including those within breweries. Come on, Majestic. What are you waiting for?
- Laundrettes and dry cleaners
- Car repair and MOT services
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. If you feel like donating please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here. The site’s total page views have now passed one million and it’s averaging 54,000 visitors a day. We’re making an impact!
And Finally…
It’s another shameless plug I’m afraid, this time for my latest column in Spectator USA. In this one, I blame China for unleashing this pandemic/panic on the world, although WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is a close second. My argument is that if the Chinese Communist authorities hadn’t silenced the Wuhan doctors who raised the alarm at the end of December, the virus might never have made it out of Wuhan:
Would the emergence of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan at the end of December have led to a global pandemic if the Chinese authorities had acted more quickly? Almost certainly not. A group of researchers at the University of Southampton looked at what difference it would have made if the travel ban and other non-pharmaceutical interventions had been put in place three weeks earlier, as soon as the doctors raised the alarm. They concluded that cases would have been reduced by 95 percent. In all likelihood, the virus would never have made it out of Hubei.
No doubt China will be judged to have mismanaged this crisis in a number of ways when the official inquiries get under way. There are already a flurry of lawsuits seeking compensation from the Chinese government, including one launched by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who claims the state has suffered tens of billions of dollars in economic losses as a result of China’s negligence.
But perhaps China’s biggest sin was to stop those Wuhan doctors exercising their right to free speech. Had they been allowed to raise their concerns in the public arena, instead of being silenced and publicly shamed, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of people across the world would now still be alive. At the time of writing, there have been 4.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 283,000 deaths from the disease.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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CDC have reported estimates of symptomatic illness and death for flu from 2010-11 to 2018-19.
The average is around 29 million illnesses and 37,000. deaths
Dividing 37,000 by 29 million give the CFR rate of 0.1%. They make no estimation of asymptomatic infections for flu, and so 0.1% is not the IFR as you claim. The CDC estimates therefore make coronavirus 4 times more deadly than the flu.
CDC’s modelling of the IFR for coronavirus, puts it at 0.26%. This indicates 11.5% of the US population has been infected.
This seems very high, even New York State, which has seen almost a third of the total deaths, has only shown 14% infected and that was from actual serological testing, not modelling.
CDC have report estimates of symptomatic illness and death for flu from 2010-11 to 2018-19.
The average is around 29 million illnesses and 37,000. deaths
Dividing 37,000 by 29 million give the CFR rate of 0.1%. They make no estimation of asymptomatic infections for flu, and so 0.1% is not the IFR as you claim. The CDC estimates therefore make coronavirus 4 times more deadly than the flu.
CDC’s modelling of the IFR for coronavirus, puts it at 0.26%. This indicates 11.5% of the US population has been infected.
This seems very high, even New York State, which has seen almost a third of the total deaths, has only shown 14% infected and that was from actual serological testing, not modelling.
kh, I’ve been grieving all day!
I realised that when my friend comes over to visit me (at last!) we won’t be able to go to our favourite tiny little independent cafe in a nearby village. There’s no way on Earth they’ll be able to do the ridiculous 2m rule. It’s so tight in there normally that you dread a fatty coming to sit at an adjacent table. It’s (was?) a wonderful place with excellent home-cooked food and great coffee at ridiculously reasonable prices. I’m sure it will be gone for good now.
Then I thought about the village itself. There’s a co-op but otherwise it’s (was!) mostly a thriving mixture of independent shops and cafes. I can’t see most of them surviving. This will completely kill off what was a busy village, seven miles from the town centre and a breath of fresh air in an age where all high streets are dominated by the same old chains.
Welcome to the new abnormal.
Cummings
If you think he was wrong then it would appear that you agree with the lockdown.
If you think it was irrelevant, then you seem to be supporting the ability of intelligent people. with a reasonable knowledge of the facts, to make an informed choice. I thought that was what this site was all about.
Or do you just want to kick the government?
You are the third person here to be making this bizarre case that for some reason we should forgive Cummings his shamelessly hypocritical behaviour because to expect him to follow the rules is to “take the lockdown seriously”. You, Mike Smith in the comments below, and Brendan O’Neill, apparently, from the link given by Mike.
Let’s be absolutely clear here – hostility to Cummings and requiring his dismissal are fully justified by two simple facts: first he was a major part of pushing this lockdown insanity upon us (and that, frankly, is more than sufficient to condemn him), and second, as someone responsible for pushing the policy he then demonstrate a hypocritical disregard for it himself.
Nothing in that requires any respect for the lockdown itself. Still less does it need one to be motivated by “Remainer revenge”, as Brendan O’Neill rather pathetically suggests. I’m certainly no remainer – I’ve always been a fervent anti-internationalist and I’m pretty confident I was anti-EEC when he was still a communist.
It’s not lockdown sceptics calling for his head for being a lockdown prime mover and a hypocrite who need to explain themselves. Rather, it’s those who claim to be lockdown sceptics and… Read more »
I personally don’t have a problem with what he did. My view is that there are probably plenty of people who haven’t been sticking to the letter of the law. Cummings and Calderwood et all are unlikely to be exceptional cases. I’ve been round my parents a few times, they’re both over 70, and not always for technically legitimate reasons (I washed their car for them once).
However they got caught and because they are relatively high profile they’re going to get flack for it. Some people will try to make political capital out of it. SNP will definitely be thinking how unfair it was that Calderwood had to quit so he should too.
There will be differing opinions on it. We’re not the Borg all thinking as one on here. The difference for others is that they’re not necessarily in a position to be telling everyone they need to follow the rules to the letter.
You didn’t inflict the lockdown on other people, he did. Totally agree with Mark.
That’s essentially what I was saying in my last sentence. If he was a regular Joe nobody would care. It really doesn’t bother me what he did because it’s probbly something I would do myself if I thought it was appropriate.
Just watched the daily punch and judy show for the first time in weeks.
The Q&A is essential viewing. Apparently, you’re able to lockdown ‘in the most practical way you see fit’, according to little Granty Shapster.
I’ll buy that!!
My little boy often stops his home school lessons and politely tries to plead with me to let him back to school. “Mummy, I like lessons with you but I really want to be back at school, please can I?” it’s heartbreaking. My older son is missing a golden last term at his much-loved school after years and years of working diligently to improve himself.
Still does the job for me, kh. Well, with a ciggie afterwards. 🙂
‘honey and lavender ice cream’ – heavens, what IS the world coming to?
Thanks for the hopeful picture. Chocolate ice cream is a winner for sure.
““Watch it before YouTube takes it down.” That was intended as a joke – surely, YouTube wouldn’t take down an interview with the Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, however much she dissented from Covid orthodoxy?”
Both Wittkowski interviews were deleted, with malice. A man with two PhDs and 35 years experience. Dr. Erickson seems to have a life-ban from appearing anywhere on Youtube.
Why not delete another Corona Denier?
Her video is still up on YT.
He’s here, but twas back in April https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ou2TqKo_wk
“Although I’ve never been quite as bullish as Sunetra Gupta, who told Freddie she thinks it is somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.”
More randomized-full-population studies have come in under 0.1% than above it.
Dr, Ioannidis by late March was saying “0.01% to 0.1%” was likeliest from what data we had by then.
Putting another cat amongst the pigeons, from the onset of virus to death is on average 4 to 5 weeks, then approx 1 week min to register death- approx 5.5 weeks total. Therefore from lockdown we would have expected the number of deaths to drop from the 30 April. However the drop in the death rate started around 14th April, too early for the lockdown to have had an affect. However after 30th April, when we would have expected to see a more dramatic effect on the death rate, we have seen a more gradual fall off in the number of deaths instead. This also happened in other countries such as Spain and Italy.
Maybe before lockdown the virus was infecting huge numbers, probably from January, at the same time increasing immunity and causing the death rate to drop in the middle of April. However the lockdown probably slowed down this increase in immunity and resulted in more deaths, whilst extending the length of time for the virus to die down. Which means instead of the end of May, it will be the middle of June before the deaths will be be down to double figures or less.
Just a… Read more »
A lot of those later deaths were in care homes which they only started including in the figures at some arbitrary point which I’ve lost track of.
Disgraceful. These people must really want old people to die.
In today’s Times magazine supplement, George Osborne describes Neil Ferguson as the “professor with what seems to be the most accurate model in the world”. Do George’s current employers know how good he is at assessing models? I hope he has never been in a position to use any models as a basis for spending other people’s money…
According to the article, George is living in a rented house in Somerset which seems a strange location for the principal residence of the editor of a London newspaper.
Just got back from an errand at our local shopping mall. I had a package that I could return in person, so I thought it would be instructive to see what the mall looks like.
I know malls were in danger before the COVID, but this has got to be their death knell. It was extraordinarily unpleasant. Signs everywhere ordering people to stay apart. At the store I visited, I was greeted by a staffer who ordered me to stand on the blue tiles and grab a mask. I was like, “do I have to wear it?” and she said YES, in rather unpleasant terms. With the plexiglass barriers on the counter, I could scarcely hear the girl running the cash register as she spoke through her mask. When my return was complete, I was ordered to pick up the items myself and drop them in this cardboard box – I suppose they’ll just throw them away, the awful contaminated things.
This store is staffed entirely by 20-somethings, or maybe even teenagers. This is in a state with 419 deaths total, over 10 weeks or so. It’s beyond ridiculous.
In Macy’s, some of the customers were wandering around without masks,… Read more »
I haven’t been to our big local shopping centre, but I have been to various garden centres locally. I will only use one of them from now on – the one that is nice and relaxed and just paying a bit of lip service to the distancing regulations. The marks are on the floor but nobody bothers about them. The cashier is behind plexiglass, but they are using face shields instead of masks so that I can at least lip read, and laugh with me when I deliberately get the check out system all wrong. A sense of humour is a necessity nowadays. Shopping must be made pleasurable at least.
Sense of humour always has been, is now, and always will be, a necessity.
Out and about today causing trouble with the sheeple. Found out from friends who run takeaway the scam the EHOs are running by basically conning them into voluntarily restricting their operations “as per guidelines” so that the EHOs an councils do not have to follow the laws on notices etc and o not have to pay compensation so asked this on the gov.uk/ask website:
Guidelines have no legal force in law. EHOs are going round and basically scamming premises owners into following “coronavirus guidelines” by insinuating they are lawful and telling owners they cannot open or continue to trade without following them and the owners then run their operation under voluntary restrictions. Under the “coronavirus” legislation to restrict a premises’s operation there are strict rules and a system to follow including paying compensation. Are the councils and EHOs only doing this as they know owners do not know the law and so they do not have to pay compensation?
Don’t expect an answer though. Letter to the Federation of Small businesses I think next time I’m bored.
The press conference is not going well, and Grant ‘Nice but Dim’ Shapps is not able to dig his masters out of the mess. Cummings is toast – and good riddance!
Throw Shappsy a bigger spade – keep digging fella….
Cummings seems to be Boris’s comfort blanket – and, even if I cared for Boris’s well-being, I would have to say that Cummings has to go; preferably to be followed rapidly by Boris.
Agree. Just watching Sky. Anita Boeteng (Conservative adviser) trying to defend Cummings and getting very shouty. The normally very shouty Ayesha Hazarika (Labour adviser) is calm and making sense. Can’t believe I am saying that. Cummings needs to be gone by tomorrow.
I don’t think it is actual law so I would check that out.
The government really do believe it in what they’re doing. They’ve just announced transport funding for buses, trains, trams so social distancing can be done more safely, £280 odd million. Their lockdown policies are here to stay, guaranteed, even if this country becomes an outlier, government will still believe this is the bubonic plague, regardless of evidence. We’re fucked and only a change in government of some kind will stop this. Since that won’t happen, we’re doubly fucked.
No as time passes it will become indefensible
At this point it comes across as trying to buy forgiveness to me.
Don’t despair. They are building visions of an unsustainable future . We will win.
Yes, I think we will win, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory as the country will be french-connectioned!
One has to wonder how long they are thinking (planning?) for social distancing to continue, if they’re spending this much money on measures..
My wife has just phoned her son and his family in Lithuania.
They are in a restaurant ! A fucking restaurant !! In Lithuania !!! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh !!!!
Thanks Boris. We are now the banana state that people point at and laugh at. We can’t go out to eat, drink, or see family. Whereas Lithuania – that glorious land of pine forests, mushrooms, and, err, more pine forests – is leading the way.
I’m quite peeved. I shall need to chainsaw many logs to calm down today.
Welcome to the new Second World.
Cummings – what a twat. So ill, but still able to drive. And then piss the neighbours off playing ABBA at full volume and prancing around in the “isolation garden”
I really really hope that the scruple-less scummy media actually go after him hard on this – find someone in London whose family died near Durham and didn’t travel beacasue of the rules – and get them on TV, crying and wailing about how unfair that was,then ask them what they think about Cummings and his brat.
Have to be honest, it really makes me smile to think how Bozza must be feeling at the moment. Such a highly regarded leader…….
Either Cummings has him tied up in his basement, or he has secreted himself away in a dark room because he knows PRECISELY what he’s done.
Read somewhere earlier Bozza is “enjoying” a whitsun weekend !
I wonder if he actually does realise, or even care.
He realises. He doesn’t care. The dark room is simply to help him block out his hindsight tinitus.
Yes, I’m not sure if Boris is a sociopath or a psychopath, but I am certain that the only thing he cares about is himself. Carrie had better keep her wits about her!
Agree completely. My suggestion is that he, and Ferguson, go and explain themselves to the lady interviewed on Sky at around the same time they both broke the lockdown. She lived in the block opposite Grenfell, with three young boys, two of whom were autistic. It made me cry.
I think my dream will materialise – Nick Robinson and Alistair Campbell getting agitated on Twitter, so hopefully some editor somewhere hungry for clicks will get their monkeys running on this with a 5pm deadline – pour some spoliers on the daily briefing
“She lived in the block opposite Grenfell, with three young boys, two of whom were autistic. It made me cry.”
We know of several children who have been severely damaged by lockdown. The effect on a parent, seeing your children become increasingly disturbed whilst having literally no break and no support network, is incredible. Even within a 2 parent household it is so hard. What makes it worse is not knowing when it will end.
Discovering the risks to children are so low makes the suffering seem so pointless.
James, I have read some of your posts on here, and I cannot even imagine how difficult it is for you and your family. Your post yesterday was heartbreaking, and I hope your boy has seen his nana/will see her asap. The suffering is pointless, as we all know on here. The ‘leaders’ of this country need to hang their heads in shame and we all need to remind them of their failures at every opportunity.
Agree 100%
Just returned from a very wet and windy Glasgow Green. There were a small band of stalwarts but again it was great to meet up with sane, liberty loving people.
No journalists ansd minimal police prescence.
I know there are many of you out there in the area so please join us next week at 12.00pm.
We are the solution.
Rant:
Why are shops getting more – not less – draconian with their Theatre rules?
Where I went before it was fine, no queues and now – boom!
Tape on the floor
Employees wearing ill-fitting masks some pulled down from their nose
Constant blaring of Government Guidelines
Queuing outside with a disinfecting station.
My pet peeve – the perspex shield from human life
None of this happened for months and here we are with nary a soul departed enduring this.
Will these measures last forever?
Why aren’t they being relaxed?
Are shops enjoying getting a kick out of being draconian c***s?
I do not understand at all and it makes me mad. Are people going to stand in the snow, rail, hail and miserable grayness queueing for hours on a Saturday when they have to go back to work and only have a couple of days off?
I thought the research was clearly showing this is nothing apocalyptic yet it feels like the shops are doubling down.
Thank you people of the internet, this corner keeps me sane
Agree, they should be *relaxing* measures, not adding to them at this stage, since the virus is clearly on the decline. Here in Sweden, I went to my local IKEA today, where up till now the only measures in place have been that the restaurant and bistro are closed and that 2 of each group of 6 scanning/payment machines have been taped off (to allow spacing of people paying). Today, however, they were marshalls at each door to allow only a certain number of customers in, and social-distancing marshals in the entrance area and round the tills. It was a total joke – there was no need for queuing to get in (reduced footfall in shops since March, so no need to restrict numbers of shoppers) and there was actually nothing for these marshals to do, because people here are behaving sensibly (as ever). It was depressing to see that IKEA are doing this now, despite us being well past the peak over here. As I left the shop, I took the opportunity to press the angry face on the feedback machine, and to write a negative feedback comment; amongst other things I wrote that IKEA were wasting money employing… Read more »
I always ‘accidently’ kick any perspex booth on the way to the till or whack it with my basket.
Local supermarket checkout today. I offered a £10 note. “Just put it on the counter please” – then she picked it up. Who knew that viruses could jump from one finger to another at such speed?
Local council has coned off half of a large section of a two lane road and provided specially made signs to tell us this is to provide a new cycle path. The new cyclepath runs parallel to an existing cycle path! They have also commissioned and erected two new roadside signs displaying “NHS Thankyou Rainbows” prominently placed on
main route to the local hospital.
The Council is, of course desperately short of money and has been paying below “true cost” fees to care homes
and home care agencies for the last 10 years.
What a wonderful world.
But all that virtue signalling is worth every penny!
Most shop assistants have been sound, but I do keep cash handy for when I spot one who is clearly a zealot nutjob, you can see the sneer under the mask. I hand the cash straight to their hand, then annoy the fuck out of them by asking for a receipt as well, even if I have spent less than a fiver
So now Macron has followed through with his threat and slapped on a 14 day quarantine period for UK travellers. This is now beyond insanity meaning if you fancied had a long weekend booked in say – Nice in July – you would be looking to spend a toal of 28 days in quarantine either side of it.
It is the politics of the nursery playground.
Hopefully Macron will be helping us in making Johnson realise that the whole quarantine idea is just plain ludicrous at this stage, when we desperately need to get the country up and running properly, including the airlines and travel industry. But then I won’t hold my breath . . .
This is to prepare for the so called ‘second wave’ which doesn’t exist. And they don’t implement it until about June 8th so what’s the agenda here? Is the virus on a sabbatical until the 8th?
It does make me worried that there are plans to release another virus into circulation in the autumn…
We booked our three week summer 20 holiday to France last year. Insurance won’t pay back deposit on apartment as we’re “not covered” for a pandemic and the English owner won’t pay it back or forward on to next year. Sigh…
Shame the owner on Facebook. That’s what my brother did when he had to cancel his honeymoon apartment and they paid up.
Absolute insanity… I have elderly family in Europe, so I am now in between not seeing them at allor doing 28 days quarantine bullshit in total with potentially no work in that period on top of it. Maybe Priti Patel will help out financially!? I was going to write the Human Rights Council but how else can one fight this? For months we have had people come in and not quarantining for goodness sake so why now? I guess it comes down to who has balls and goes first by scrapping the quarantining rule, somehow I feel it won’t be BoJo. Maybe the Donald. And those dumbass politicians better not get themselves caught out hopping to XYZ to conduct talks without doing the exact same thing…
Will UK MPs with second homes in France be exempt? Expect so..
I see the BBC health correspondent had Coronavirus symptoms in January and tested positive months later. He’s convinced he was asynptomatic because the official first case came weeks after his symptoms . Well mate; it was in France and Italy in November, so any model assuming it didn’t get here until January is likely bullshit isn’t it? The groupthink and wilful blindness is incredible.
I read that too and was a bit surprised, especially as it was on the BBC News website that I read about the positive tests for CV19 done on a patient near Paris who was ill in December. I thought it was pretty well accepted now, even by lockdown zealots, that the virus has been in Europe since at least mid December, if not earlier?
Nope. Then they would have to admit their models are wrong. They are incompetent. I was reading before the lockdown that Italian virologists had established the virus was in Lonbardy in November. Hasn’t filtered through. But it will, oh it will. The MSM has to give it a but of time after their hysteria, but they will destroy the government when the penny finally drops.
I’m starting to wonder about a really nasty, chesty cough and cold which did the rounds at
my work in December. Half the office off sick (nobody seriously unwell though) at one point or another and took a good while to shake off.
Yup same thing. I am in constant amazement at how people just follow the fear porn and not once stop to think they may have been exposed to CV but their blissful ignorance protected them at the time and they got on with their lives. I had a friend telling me this AM he isn’t sharing our car with us for a ride and not using public transport under any circumstances. The psychology of it all…. unbelievable.
Many are innumerate and require thunking to be done for them. Easy for the government to manipulate
Possibly. Although a dry cough seems to be more common. Do you work in London? I am sure it went around here.
We came through HK airport from Australia on 11th December. I developed a chesty dry cough on the evening of Xmas day. It hung around for a couple of months and eventually my wife made me go to the Dr early March. She gave me a nasal spray (with me these things tend to end up as sinus related). TBH It was never more than an irritation – worse in the morning and night or after exercise. More I think about it the more I suspect I had it.
The MSM will only react when *their* personal freedoms are removed/restricted, or when members of their families go bankrupt or lost homes – at the moment they seem to be getting a free pass. It amazes me the number of journalists who are out and about, when they could work from home..
He also says he spent Christmas in Brussels, with mmm high death count…
I notice that The Guardian put up a very long rebuttal of sceptic behaviour and comment. Pretty much trashing everyone both past and present who have had contrary opinions to those telling the ‘truth’ – as The Guardian sees the truth. What was astonishing was their complete omission of any scientific evidence supporting lock-down, whilst saying the contrarians are the ones who omit any real scientific evidence. Dah!? I think the problem all along has been for Government Policy to be attributed to ‘scientific evidence’, whilst not sharing that evidence and the decision process with the rest of us. That has left us feeling that the rules are full of holes, anomalies, paradoxes, and contradictions. Generally, full grown mature adults don’t respond well to being treated like a 5-year-old. It’s now feeling more like Government Ministers covering their arse as they realise this whole thing is full of good news and we are coming out of a crisis that was 10x to 100x less worse than they said it would be. Although we are grateful its proving to be less life threatening; we are also going to be mighty ‘excited’ about the mammoth bill this will leave, with knock on… Read more »
The Guardian isn’t even fit to use as bog paper – too much ink comes off. It’s obvious from reading the comments section that it’s a paper for the pampered public sector who are very happy to sit at home doing fuck all.
“Generally, full grown mature adults don’t respond well to being treated like a 5-year-old.”
Sadly, I have to disagree on that point. I think the evidence if the past few months has demonstrated pretty conclusively that a significant majority of the UK population, at least, absolutely loves being treated like 5-year-olds.
There’s been a decades long campaign of infantilisation… since at least 1997, the balance has been shifted inch by inch away from individual responsibility toward blind following of arbitrary rules dictated petty authority.
When the need and the desirability of using individual initiative is whittled away do the point of being vestigal, you can’t expect people to all of a sudden start figuring things out for themselves.
Thus this crisis has been an acid test of who has clung onto their own free will, and who has acquiesced to the ever-escalating nanny state.
‘mature’ though?
I never thought that this day will come – I am watching Fox News and agreeing with Tucker.
“For millions of healthy people, coronavirus lockdowns are a life-changing disaster”
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6158453868001#sp=show-clips
Same. For decades, I’ve thought Fox News was the devil. Now I thank heaven for Tucker Carlson and Brit Hume, and for the National Review, and the Wall Street Journal. The NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc. have been outrageously irresponsible in their reporting. I mean, how hard is it to acknowledged that taking all things from all people will hurt them?
I’ve realized that, though I’ve voted Democrat for 20 years now, I don’t actually have any political allegiance. And at the moment, Democratic leaders are taking actions that are actively destructive to liberty and to people’s lives and futures. Republicans are the ones considering costs and looking for ways to limit them, and who are pointing out that the COVID is maybe not the deadliest plague of the century. I can vote Republican if that is now the party of sense and freedom.
Taki Mag and City Journal are also very good, intelligent, and in the case of Taki, often very funny. Both put our U.K. newspapers and magazines to shame – our MSM is childish by comparison. All U.K. tv is now, of course, Blue Peter lite.
Taki Mag is fantastic…. Theodore Dalrymple, Jim Goad and Taki himself? Just put that Spectator in the bin.
Also good is Kurt Schlicter at townhall.com
And Fred Reed at unz.com
I just watched Ben Shapiro talking about lockdown restrictions in California. If what’s happening in the UK is insane, then listen to him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDuWbdTd5Ec
Never understood what the big deal was about Fox. Imo, those who moaned about it being politically and culturally biased were just ignorant of how dramatically biased and dishonest the BBC and all our mainstream press are. Some people are only just now waking up to that as they see the BBC actively lying to us over the coronapanic.
As for Tucker Carlson he was great I remember back at the time of the Republican presidential race. If my memory is correct he was one of a relatively small number of Republican leaning commentators who was properly sceptical about the US’s aggressively militarist foreign policy, and reasonably open to the libertarian arguments on the right. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s alert and witty.
It’s funny you say that. My brother in law is a republican and he’s always been saying that I don’t realise how lucky I am to have a non-biased news network like BBC.
I always disliked Fox for their bias, but also because I always supported democrats.
Having said that, I know where to put my political allegiances to side and focus on what is being said rather than who is saying it. Otherwise, a lefty like me wouldn’t even be here.
I think the point is that the people who generally establish the “received opinion” about bias are the same kinds of people who, by and large, have been setting the “received opinion” about this coronavirus, and they can’t see any bias in the BBC because the BBC is “their” propaganda outlet. Your brother in law is to be commended for seeing the bias in his own side’s outlet perhaps, but he’s clearly deluded on the BBC.
Welcome to the wonderful sane world of Tucker Carlson. His book ‘Ship of Fools’ is cracking.
If I get one more email with “stay safe” in the signature line I am in danger of throwing my IPad out the fucking window. Stay safe from what, you cretins?
Reply with ‘Stay sane’
Stay sane stay sceptical….!
I’m the same. I take great pleasure in smiling at people in the street and generally acting as if it’s business as usual.
Snap!
Yup, same crap politicians destroying lives as they plod along!
Me too and deliberately veering towards them.
From flying iPads?
I got the same homily from a mask wearing mini-cab driver when paying my fare (after being cordoned off in the back seat by a crappy perspex screen.) This is after he nearly broadsided a car coming onto a roundabout when other car had right of way.
I really feel this is an issue that has to be addresed. Face masks reduce the amount of oxygen to the brain and also lead to a build up of carbon monoxide.
Surely they should be banned when driving.
if that is the case – which I didn’t know – then yes.
If the media put the same effort into questioning the science etc like they are with this Cummings story, lockdown would be over
Have you listened to the ‘key’ journos though – you would need to send them back to pre-school for a full reprogramming!
I’m disappointed that Cummings’ behaviour has been condoned by No 10. His ‘justification’ could perhaps make sense if he and his wife really were too unwell to care for their child but that’s not the point. The point is that the entire public has been told for two months that going anywhere near family who don’t live with you is tantamount to murder and totally wrong, especially elderly/vulnerable family members, and yet here he is breaking that tenet.
His conduct is being deemed ‘essential’ as well – but who’s to define what’s essential other than the individual himself? I would say that any trip to see family is classed as essential because it’s such an important part of a normal human life with physical contact. Again it’s something that is impossible to define because what might be deemed inessential to one person would be essential to another, which is why the lockdown is a total, unenforceable failure.
I wonder if this is just some 5D chess move from Cummings anyway to try and chip away at public support for the lockdown, seeing as it’s now impossible to row back on the hysterical fear the government have whipped up.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the police have been enforcing an arbitrary interpretation of the law and the guidelines against us plebs, which has often involved them massively overstepping their authority.
People will rightly suspect that if they had done a mercy dash to the other end of the country. they would have been been cut no slack at all by over-zealous plods, so it’s seen as another case of one rule for them and one rule for us.
If this ignites the latent anger that is growing among the public (at least on here anyway) then it could turn out to be a good thing.
Indeed, which is why I believe it’s a deliberate move from the gov because they think that leaking stories of high-status lockdown breakers is the least politically risky way to get us out of this mess, because then the public will feel empowered to ignore the lockdown and then the blame is shifted from the gov onto them. It’s revealing that this happened in late March time but the story is only being revealed now. No 10 has been sat on this information for months.
Very astute observation.
I agree with what you say, and being naturally suspicious of timing (why did it happen now and not two weeks ago, etc?) you will be aware of the senior appointment to the Cabinet Office yesterday – Prince William’s private secretary, seconded to run the coronavirus response. Something is going on behind the scenes. With Ferguson out of the way, Cummings, as the person reporting to Boris from SAGE, also had to go now. He was one of the key architects of lockdown, and was charged with interpreting ‘the science’ – we should show him no mercy.
I think they are going for Boris and Cummings now because of the fast approaching deadline for seeking an extension to the Transition period..
The MSM have sat on this for months.
I think you credit them with more guile and competence than they have shown any evidence of possessing.
Yep, that’s my view as well. If they were that competent we wouldn’t be where we are.
Well said….That works both ways doesn’t it…. BoJo in ICU has the country in hysterics and not even opening the front door, Cummings sneaking about makes them feel tough and ready to face the street….
I was thinking just that when I heard about it.
I agree, but it surprises (and worries) me that people are not also making the connection that the virus cannot be as dangerous as they are telling us, if the elites are not worried about breaking the lockdown.. They seem to be more wound up about people in power breaking ‘the rules’, instead of stopping to think what that rule-breaking actually says about the justification (or not) for there being these rules at all..
Maybe it’s not some smart chess move, but they realised that they can’t keep sacking people every time story like this gets out. There will be more. I bet that majority of those elitist arrogant halfwits thought that can get away with it as rules don’t apply to them.
Like that Chicago mayor who was defending getting a professional haircut by saying that she needed one more than other people because she is a public figure.
They are just an elitist cabal sneering at us plebs.
“All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.”
You are so right. This kind of stuff is ALL over Twitter. https://mobile.twitter.com/potters30/status/1264124498011357185
There seem to be widely different reports about what DC did, but as I understand it, he had suspected covid-infection. The guidance on that was very specific: once you have it you MUST stay home and self-isolate. Maybe I have got the wring understanding, but, if not, surely it is an open and shut case and he should go.
Drat, for ‘wring’ read ‘wrong’!
Particularly as he drove to visit elderly – therefore vulnerable – parents.