Abandon Ridiculous Two-Metre Rule
I’ve written a piece in today’s Telegraph entitled: “For the sake of our economy, we need to scrap the absurd two-metre rule.” I point out that this and other over-cautious social-distancing rules will mean our economy is permanently stuck in second gear.
For most shops, the only way to keep customers six feet apart will be to introduce cumbersome one-way systems and force them to queue up outside. All very well when the only retail outlets we’re talking about are supermarkets and newsagents, but how will people observe that rule on the pavement when there are queues outside every shop?
For pubs and restaurants, due to reopen on July 4th, the two-metre rule will mean that many of them can’t resume trading and those that can will be forced to operate at less than 50% capacity.
I also point out that there’s no scientific basis for the rule.
What’s so absurd about this measure, which will decimate the hospitality trade, is that there’s no obvious scientific basis for it and many countries are much more relaxed. In South Korea, for instance, the acceptable distance in 1.4 metres, and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and France, people are only expected to stay one metre apart.
Indeed, the World Health Organisation says a distance of one metre is more than sufficient. In Sweden, which has had fewer deaths per million than the UK in spite of not locking down formally, there is no hard-and-fast rule. People are just expected to use their common sense.
Boris Johnson is reported to be reconsidering the two-metre rule. Worth reading in full, Prime Minister.
SAGE Member Does U-Turn on Lockdown
No, it’s not what you think. Yesterday, a member of SAGE gave a press conference in which he warned that the Government was easting lockdown too fast. This is how it was reported on the BBC News website:
A scientist on the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has suggested he does not agree with easing the lockdown at this stage.
In a briefing to health journalists Prof John Edmunds, from the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine, said that 8,000 new infections a day in England, as calculated by the Office for National Statistics, was “a very high incidence” level.
“Many of us would prefer to see incidence down to lower levels before we relax measures,” he said.
He said that with an “untested” test and trace system “we are taking some risk here” and “even if we keep it flat, that’s still quite a level”.
“Lifting the lockdown is a political decision. Lifting it now, means we’re keeping incidence at this level,” he added.
The Labour MP Richard Burgon was so over-excited by this news, he linked to the BBC report and tweeted the following: “So the Government is no longer following the science. It’s a political decision and we can’t trust this Government to make the right decisions with public safety.”
But hang on a second. Is this the same Professor John Edmunds who told Channel 4 News on March 13th that “the only way to stop this epidemic is indeed to achieve herd immunity”?
I guess he’s changed his mind.
Nobel Laureate Skewers Member of Imperial College Modelling Team
A few days ago I linked to a fantastic webinar, organised out of Brazil, in which a group of scientists discussed the reliability of predications generated by epidemiological computer models and whether those predictions should be used as the basis for government responses to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Among the participants were Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford and the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and Samir Bhatt, a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial’s School of Public Health.
One of my concerns as I’ve watched the British Government’s disastrous mishandling of this crisis unfold is that the people behind the Imperial College modelling that informed so much of the Government’s response will never be properly held to account. This webinar, in which Michael Levitt cross-examines Samir Bhatt, may be the closest we ever get.
If you have the time, I urge you to watch the whole thing. But if you don’t, watch it from the two-hour point onwards, in which Levitt begins to lose patience with the dissembling Bhatt. A reader has very kindly made a transcript of this part of the exchange. My favourite part is when Levitt – beginning to get angry – lays the blame for the coming global recession at the door of the Imperial College modelling team, whom he thinks wildly over-estimated the deadliness of the disease. “That is an error that has cost the world many, many trillions of dollars, but it isn’t a joke. I mean an error like that is not a small error,” he says.
Michael Levitt: I’m concerned by, there’s been a massive communications gap here and you know one question that I did raise which Rui didn’t pick up, is I’ve noticed that for example, that epidemiologists and I’m not talking about you guys, don’t think anything wrong about being a factor of 10 too high but are dead scared to be a factor of 10% too low.
I mean the number of deaths caused by lockdown is way higher than anything that will be caused by Covid, unless you assume exponential growth, forever. So, therefore this is a price that the world is paying for this asymmetry. In other words, I don’t know how we handle it, you know.
Sweden is not locked down. You guys are going to have a very hard time when Sweden plateaus at 6,000 deaths, which is 0.06, 0.6 per 100,000, and you can say well they social distance, they’re Scandinavians, they’re cold, there’s high population density. But, you know, the fact remains that the plateau rate of population reached by England, New York City, Lombardy, France is basically around one month of natural death. Ferguson said a year of natural death. That is horrible. That is an error that has cost the world many, many trillions of dollars, but it isn’t a joke. I mean an error like that is not a small error.
Now you could say, oh it’s our intervention, we intervened, Sweden intervened by itself, Italy was a very intervened country. Anyone who believes that Iran intervened is crazy.
Certain countries, there’s no doubt that the one place where there’s beautiful intervention is a part of China I call non-Hubei China…
In Hubei, the Chinese were out of control, but out of Hubei the epidemic is the most beautiful Gompertz function. It was so beautiful that everyone said they must have hacked my computer, except that New Zealand has the same distribution and other countries do as well. So I am trying to understand this.
There’s no doubt that once lockdown has been forced, everyone’s going to believe it was a good thing because otherwise why did we need to do it? But there’s no evidence for it.
Samir Bhatti: It’s not about believing if it’s a good thing. What mechanism do you conjecture for the plateauing of death in the UK that’s not lockdown?
ML: It reached one in a thousand. It’s nothing to do with lockdown. The UK policy led to early saturation. The whole country was infected before lockdown was done. The same thing was true of New York.
SB: No serological data supports this hypothesis.
ML: This is going to saturate at 20% serology. We know that already. You know this assumption that 80% based on R0 is basically nonsense. You guys don’t know what you’re doing to yourselves. You guys are going to end up being responsible for a hundred billion dollar crisis to the world and this is not funny.
And you start to use clean terminology. Don’t estimate herd immunity from an R0 value, which is completely meaningless. If the R0 value is 1.3 then I get saturation at 25%. The Diamond Princess, this wonderful experiment, saturated at 25% and you can say, “Oh, it was such good lockdown. We had shared air conditioning, it was an aged population.”
It doesn’t work. In other words, there needs to be sanity checks. Sanity checks come from looking at the data.
SB: OK so we’re going to talk about the data then. So you’re hypothesis is that infection fatality rate is much lower, everyone has been infected, that’s what caused the curve to bend. A massive serological study occurred just now in Spain, suggesting that with the 28,000 deaths, 5% of the population has been infected based on serology.
ML: And I think we’ve seen that the serological studies have serious shortcomings. We’re now seeing signs there may be T cell receptors.
Daily Mail Guide to Having a Socially Distanced BBQ
This illustration is in today’s Daily Mail, based on advice from Professor Patricia Riddell, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Reading.
Prof Riddell recommended asking guests to bring their own cutlery, plates and condiments to reduce the risk of virus transmission through touching the same surfaces, and having only one person using the tongs.
She also endorsed serving food on plates from a distance rather than everyone approaching the grill, setting out seats in advance for people to sit two metres apart, and sitting alongside each other rather than face to face.
Can’t say it looks like a barrel of laughs. Bagsy not sit next to the guy with the guitar.
Brazilian Scientists Challenge Concept of “the Science”, Defend Hydroxychloroquine
A group of more than 25 Brazilian scientists have written an open letter, questioning the idea that indiscriminately locking down whole populations, as well as other responses to the pandemic, is supported by “the science”. In particular, it challenges the idea that “the science” has concluded hydroxychloroquine shouldn’t be used to treat patients with COVID-19.
The letter has been coordinated by Marcos Nogueira Eberlin. He’s a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Campinas. Founder of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory and winner of the prestigious Thomson Medal (2016), Eberlin is recognized worldwide as one of the most productive mass spectrometrists ever, having published close to 1,000 scientific articles. He discovered the Eberlin Reaction during his work on gas phase ion chemistry, and he and his research group introduced EASI (Easy Ambient Sonic-spray Ionization), an ionization technique used in mass spectrometry. In other words, a highly-respected, mainstream scientist.
It’s not the usual dry, scholarly dirge, but an angry, impassioned screed. (The caps haven’t been added by me.) I’m going to quote the opening few paragraphs in full because they’re so good.
During this pandemic, the term “science” has been used “ad nauseam”, that is, has been repeated to exhaustion: “Science, science, science”, “I’m pro-science”, “For from the science, through the science and to the science I guide my decisions and acts” and “I am, therefore, fully right to do so”. It is clear that the intention here is to lead all of us to the idea of decisions based on something unquestionable and infallible, as scientific as law, as the law of gravity.
Groups of “science experts” or famous YouTube scientists, many of them still “beginners” in science, some of them with a minimal or no experience in fighting pandemics, are selected by the establishment and the media to give “scientific aura” for the lockdown and the condemnation of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as an ineffective drug; worse, as a deadly poison.
That disastrous apocalyptic simulations from the “Imperial College” – this pompous name that brings us to the idea of a center of excellence of infallible, omnipotent and unquestionable knowledge, an “College of the Empire” – are being used to place everyone at home, and then, to compare data as being the absolute reference of the truth. “We did something and as a result, we reduced those many deaths. Therefore: ‘blessed be the science!’”.
But what kind of “science” is that to which they are appealing? And who, in the name of this “science”, would be allowed to speak? Science (I know that there are controversies, as scientists even debate on its meaning) is “the dispassionate search for the truth about the Universe and life”. But ironically, we seek truths that we don’t even know what those truths would be like, or where they would be found. For this reason, sometimes, ironically, even when scientists find a truth that is indeed true, yet they doubt that they have found it. We literally zigzag in the dark, searching for solutions to our problems. Therefore, we sometimes say that: “eating eggs is bad, it increases cholesterol”; and sometimes: “eggs are good, eat at ease”.
Richard Feynman put it this way: “Science is the culture of doubt”. And I would add, “science is the culture of debate, of divergence of opinions”.
Rarely, there are situations in which we reach consensus in science, even a momentary consensus. Some defend the “Big Bang” and the theory of evolution, others, including myself, are skeptical of them. Some defend with data and papers the central role of men in global warming, others defend, with the same data and papers, that human activity is irrelevant. Scientists are human beings, therefore, skeptics and enquirers who can and should speak for themselves, like all scientists have the right to do, but NEVER A SCIENTIST OR A GROUP OF THEM CAN DECLARE TO BE AUTHORIZED TO SPEAK IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE!
Nobody, absolutely nobody is allowed to speak for science or declare that he is “been guided” by science! In times of pandemic, this impossibility is even greater, as we face an unknown enemy. Data is still being collected and researches are being performed and published by scientists divided by their worldviews, and by their political and party preferences.
Whoever said he acted in the name of science, dishonestly usurped science prestige. For what type of “science” is this, unanimous and consensual, that no one has ever heard of? Could someone give me its address so I can confirm its consent? Its phone, email and WhatsApp?
For defenders of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the next section is manna from heaven, ripping apart the studies that purport to show it’s ineffective or, worse, dangerous.
The Manaus’ study with chloroquine (CQ) performed here in Brazil and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) [1], is emblematic to this discussion of “science”. Scientists there used, the manuscript reveals, lethal doses in debilitated patients, many in severe conditions and with comorbidities. The profiles of the groups do not seem to have been “randomized”, since a clear “preference” in the HIGH DOSE group for risk factors is noted. Chloroquine, which is more toxic than HCQ, was used, and it seems that they even made “childish mistakes” in simple stoichiometric calculations, doubling the dosage with the error. I’m incapable of judging intentions, but justice will do it. The former Brazilian Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta quoted this study, supported it, and based on it, categorically stated: “I do not approve HCQ because I am based on ‘science, science, science’!”.
Definitely worth reading in full.
Incidentally, the recent HCQ study in the Lancet that led to the worldwide suspension of clinical trials of the drug and hospitals around the world yanking it from their treatment protocols has been criticised in another open letter signed by a group of scientists, this one addressed to Richard Horton, the Editor of the Lancet. It’s not quite as angry as the Brazilian letter, but almost. Also worth reading in full.
Trump Terminates the WHO
Donald Trump has said he’s “terminating” America’s relationship with the World Health Organisation (WHO), having already said the international body will get no more US funding.
The US president cited the body’s ties to Beijing as he made the announcement yesterday, saying: “China has total control over the World Health Organisation.”
Does this mean we’ll now be able to challenge some of the WHO’s wilder claims about the virus on YouTube? Interestingly, the WHO has just done another U-turn – is this number 657? – recommending against the wearing of masks.
As I’ve said before, if you’re the YouTube employee in charge of removing any content that contradicts the WHO’s recommendations about how to stay safe, keeping up with the organisation’s constant flip flops must be a nightmare.
Church Leaders Threaten Government With Judicial Review if Churches Aren’t Allowed to Reopen
A coalition of church leaders has written to the Government, threatening a Judicial Review if the ban on churches opening isn’t lifted. The pre-action letter supported by Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre argues that blanket ‘lockdown’ restrictions imposed on all churches are both unlawful and unnecessary, and asks the Government to prioritise the re-opening of churches as part of its exit-strategy.
The letter, which you can read here, says the blanket ban is disproportionate, given that lots of churches closed voluntarily and those that remained opened introduced social distancing measures. It also makes the argument that the ban contravenes the separation of church and state:
While the short-term practical difference between state regulation and church self-regulation may be limited in present circumstances, the principle of Church autonomy is extremely important in the broader constitutional context, and must be protected for the benefit of present and future generations.
Among the list of 24 claimants requesting an urgent meeting with the Government to discuss lifting the ban are Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, President, Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue (OXTRAD); Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, Senior Pastor, Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC); and Revd. Dr David Hathaway, President of the Eurovision Mission to Europe.
Pastor Ade Omooba MBE, Christian Concern’s co-founder and one of the claimants in the letter, says:
It cannot be right that at present it is lawful to go to a bike shop, B&Q, visit a chiropractor or dry cleaner, and not be allowed to receive Holy Communion or engage in silent prayer in a church.
Similar legal challenges have been successful in other countries. Last week, France’s Supreme Court ruled that the French Government’s absolute ban on religious gatherings as part of its lockdown restrictions is unlawful, and ordered the Government to relax restrictions on religious worship.
The Government should lift the ban immediately or face the consequences.
Government Publishes Chart That Inadvertently Discredits its Own Policy
The Cabinet Office Briefing Room issued a chart yesterday (see above) showing that the Government’s first “test” – “We must be confident that we are able to provide sufficient critical care and specialist treatment right across the UK,” in the words of the Prime Minister – has been met. This was part of the rationale for allowing up to six people from different households to meet up from June 1st.
But look closely at the chart and you’ll see that in the small print on the left-hand side is says occupancy of mechanical ventilator beds in the NHS peaked on April 10th at 41%. In other words, the risk of the NHS’s critical care capacity being overwhelmed – something flagged up in Neil Ferguson’s March 16th paper and one of the key reasons for locking down the country on March 23rd – was exaggerated. We didn’t need to remain in our homes to “Protect the NHS” after all.
Another embarrassing implication of that number – only 41% of the NHS’s ventilators used – is that it makes a mockery of the Government’s wartime-style drive to manufacture more ventilators. Just as well, since the entire effort – dubbed the “ventilator challenge” – was a fiasco from start to finish. Not that it would have mattered if there had been a shortage and the “challenge” was a success, since ventilators are almost completely useless when it comes to treating patients with COVID-19.
Six Reasons the Cure is Worse Than the Disease
In the latest anti-lockdown jeremiad by Professor Ramesh Thakur, the former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations lists six reasons why the official response to the pandemic will end up causing more harm that it has prevented:
- Lockdowns will have a negative impact on mental health and lead to more suicides.
- With elective surgeries and routine screenings suspended, many diseases that would be treatable if caught in time will end up killing hundreds of thousands.
- People have been so terrorised by the propaganda unleashed by governments around the world that people requiring crucial care have refused to go to hospital, whether through fear of catching the virus, or because being good citizens they don’t want to trouble a badly over-burdened health system.
- The lockdowns reduced the amount of time people spent in the fresh air and sunshine, with some people being cooped up in high-risk environments like congested living complexes.
- Elderly hospital patients infected with COVID-19 were discharged into care and nursing homes to deadly effect, accounting for more than half of all Covid deaths.
- The deadliest impact of the lockdowns will be on the world’s poorest billion people over the next decade along multiple sub-pathways.
Worth reading in full.
Rioters in Minneapolis Comply With Mayor’s Order to Wear Face Masks in Shopping Malls
I got an email from a reader in Minneapolis yesterday, the American city that was set ablaze by rioters on Tuesday night following the death in police custody of George Floyd, a 46 year-old African-American, and has been burning ever since.
We’ve been a bit busy here in Minneapolis dealing with the city being burned down around us. It was oddly relaxing to think about Chinese viruses. All of the businesses I service – my customers – are either in ashes, boarded up or looted.
Here is the joke: Why did Minneapolis police stand by and watch the looters and arsonists destroy hundreds of businesses? Because the looters were complying with the Mayor’s order to wear a mask inside retail establishments.
Interestingly, that order took effect Tuesday at 5p.m. When did the rioting start? Tuesday evening….
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:
- ‘YouTube Cancels Another Video for Coronavirus Wrongthink‘ – James Delingpole Ridicules YouTube for censoring my video making the case against lockdowns
- ‘The Delingpod: James Delingpole Interviews Professor Dolores Cahill‘ – A double-helping from James today. In this one he interviews the dissident Irish virologist
- ‘Scots pensioner went for five days without food because she was scared to leave her flat during lockdown‘ – We’ll be hearing a lot more stories like this unfortunately
- ‘The lockdown’s founding myth‘ – Excellent reporting job by Christopher Snowdon in the Critic, thoroughly debunking the narrative that has the Government initially ignoring scientific advice about locking down the country and only reluctantly agreeing to do it once it had paid attention to “the science”
- ‘Two thirds of people contacted through tracing did not fully cooperate, pilot scheme finds‘ – Report in the BMJ about a pilot ‘test-and-trace’ scheme in Sheffield in which two-thirds of the people contacted refused to cooperate. Why then roll it out nationally?
- ‘Monkeys ‘escape with COVID-19 samples’ after attacking lab assistant‘ – No, not the plot line from the next Planet of the Apes sequel. This actually happened yesterday in India. Are these monkeys available to take over from Boris and pals?
- ‘Why most Covid-19 deaths won’t be from the virus‘ – Excellent piece for BBC Future by Zaria Gorvett summarising the case against lockdowns. Welcome to the club, Zaria
- ‘Scientists are intrigued by lack of lockdown looting‘ – The Times reports that the Government’s scientific advisors have expressed surprise over the lack of rioting during the crisis. Let’s hope nothing happens to confirm their fears
Theme Tune Suggestions From Readers
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “Worry” by Blodwyn Pig, “When Will I See You Again?” by the Three Degrees (can’t believe we haven’t had that yet) and “Locked Up In Jail” by John Lee Hooker.
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A couple of weeks ago, 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 opened 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.
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. It still takes me about nine hours a day, what with doing these updates, moderating your comments and commissioning original material. If you feel like donating, however paltry the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here.
And Finally…
A reader made a slight adjustment to this Lord of the Rings meme. Works pretty well…
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Has anyone read the SAGE minutes yet? Does the Bloomberg story hold water / is it reflected in the minutes?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-to-u-k-s-johnson-pushed-scientists-to-back-lockdown
Haven’t read them but the story certainly reflects what has always seemed likely. The ‘scientists’ are just there as cover!
Of note is that 4 participants in SAGE meetings did not consent to be named when the minutes were released..
Announced by Boris March 23rd, led everyone to believe it started that evening, was not enacted into law until 26th march.
There’s nothing on March 23rd other than closing of schools, but I now can’t remember when we fully locked down?
March 23rd. Measures came into force on… 26th I think
I’m past caring and so should you.
Throw them all in the gulag.
I’m not entirely sure what the downvotes are for – Just being thorough.
FWIW I’ve read *some* of the minutes and SAGE are discussing nosocomial transmission and deaths caused by the “social measures” at a very early stage.
https://www.paulchaplin.life/blog-original/lockdown-boris-violated-sage-advice
An excoriating critique and timeline of the SAGE minutes (and the lacuna in same) leading up to the lockdown. Quote:
Interesting stuff as ever, again not really much covered in mainstream media alas.
One question to commenters out there if I may – the number of 8,000 new infections per day is being quoted as the current rate by Edmunds and others. Does anyone know how this breaks down – hospital/care home/community – and what the implications of this are for further easing of lockdown? And where they are coming from actually?
Thanks.
Worldometer says less than 2500 new infections
If you look at the graph on official website, it is actually around 500 cases a day! https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/#category=regions&map=rate
And this with loads more testing than at the beginning.a
Not surprised though that cases are being inflated. The deaths graphs is starting to make the inflation in the number of deaths obvious.
This is the ONS estimate for new community-only (non-hospital/care home) daily infections based on (small) recent samples.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52837593
So I would take it with a pinch or two of salt.
Cheers, this is very helpful; appreciate you taking the time to reply.
It’s in England, not the UK.
A cupful!
Although even if it’s reasonably accurate it’s hardly something to worry about.
It’s a legitimate estimate from the ONS as Marcus said, extrapolated from a sample of about 18,000 people.
I see no reason to doubt it.
The implications for the lockdown are that the virus is still spreading slowly in spite of it, as you would expect.
For TTT to work they reckon you need to get it into the 100s. This may even be true. But the only ways to achieve that are to wait several months with the current restrictions or to try to tighten them up (and hope that “works”). Neither is a realistic option. Oh and you also need a TTT system that isn’t a complete and utter shambles and that people will respect.
Relaxing restrictions may mean it goes up a bit. If it does that’s not a bad thing. The only viable strategy is the same as it always was: herd immunity and protect the vulnerable. I think the government may have finally accepted this.
Many thanks for this, much appreciated. Certainly helps to put that rather out of context original figure into perspective.
So I said no reason to doubt it but what they actually found was about 45 positive tests out of 18193 giving them their 0.24%.
Unless their test had a specificity of better than 99.76% many of them could be false positives.
When the thing you’re looking for has such a low prevalence the specificity of the test becomes very important.
Generally the PCR test is thought to have good specificity (its sensitivity sucks but that’s not a problem when prevalence is low) but it can sometimes pick up dead fragments of virus which are false positives in this context.
The claimed range for their 95CI is about 4800 to 12000, but the specificity of the test is likely to have been calibrated on never-infected samples, not on ones that may have bits of smashed up viral RNA floating around in them.
I read a report of a US paper that reckoned to be truly effective over a long period TTT would need to test 22-35 million a day – all frontline workers daily and everyone else at least twice a week.
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/13/21215133/coronavirus-testing-covid-19-tests-screening
That sounds a bit OTT and I imagine they were aiming for close to zero deaths. If you jusy want to control the spread and flatten the curve you’d need fewer. But I still imagine we’re a long way from being able to deliver that. It would cost a fortune, too.
The article I link to has an interesting sentence in it “test test test until the whole damn pandemic is over”. I wonder what they meant or even if they really know what they meant. Until it is not a pandemic any more? Aren’t we close to that point? Until it is completely eliminated – that will never happen. Until there is an effective vaccine and/or treatment? That could take a while.
I suppose we could stay locked down for the many months it would take to put in place effective TTT, but we’d then be stuck with TTT possibly forever.
So your conclusion seems obvious to me – herd immunity and protect the vulnerable. You’d have thought they would have realised that. Maybe they have always secretly known it but couldn’t bring themselves to break it to the public. Or they hoped for a vaccine miracle. Or evidence from other countries that everything would be OK after all, so they didn’t have to take the lead. Or maybe they really believed “flatten the curve”, overcooked the scare tactics and now find themselves needing to use smoke and mirrors to take public opinion with them in opening up again. But then why the roadmap document with its promise of perpetual emergency footing and social distancing? Whatever way you look at it, it seems like a failure of leadership.
The Mail picked up in the sage minutes that the community spread (as opposed to hospitals and care homes) was only 0.5 BEFORE lockdown.
Says it all I think.
(Tbh i think even that is bullshit, because I think the fabled R value is modelled bullshit)
It remains a disgrace that the ‘R’ figure is given as an absolute in any case, with no attempt to mark differentiation between community, hospital and care home figures, or even between regions. One of the ways in which a sense of doom is allowed to pervade the daily briefings and feed the media narrative on this.
Comrade Drakeford in Wales is fixated on his Rs, though he doesn’t know them from his elbow.
It’s been pretty much the same pattern in other countries. The R value was near or below 1.0 when lockdowns were impemented.
..which makes social distancing a complete nonsense!
Do you/they have a link for that?
It was in the actual paper today (yes my Dad buys The Fail, and I read it for Hitch but apparently he’s not in there on a saturday gggrgrr), so maybe it’s on the website. They didn’t quote which part of the sage minutes it was from, but they did specifically say R0 was discussed at 0.5 in March before lockdown
When they were telling us it was way closer to 1, I might add.
They were, and are, just boldly lying in those daily briefings
Hi Giles. I was wondering that aswell. I’m from Scotland and every week they give a breakdown of deaths and % of where they all occurred. Roughly 50% of deaths happen in care homes so surely its only logical to think 50% of new cases are in care homes too. I would also like to know how many have caught it in hospital.
The 8,000 figure comes from the ONS. Not known for its stellar leadership team nor is it staffed by the brightest and best. Goodness only knows how they get the figure of 8,000. Blind leading the blind comes to mind.
The 8,000 is roughly 54,000 divided by seven. 54,000 is ONS’s estimated number of new infections per week between 11 May and 24 May 2020. See here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/28may2020
Thanks for the explanation re where ONS number comes from. The internal goings on at ONS, however, cause me concern whenever an estimate is their basis.
It’s fine to ask, but none of these numbers justify lockdown.
One of the most fascinating things to observe during this period of mass insanity is the general acceptance by people of the curtailment of their normal liberties as though we were in a period of total war. I suppose during total war secrecy is of the essence .
The data on hospital admissions , bed occupancy , covid patients etc should be generally available especially now when there is so much good news, with the vast majority of hospitals in this country observably half empty . However the policy of the government is to keep these figures under wraps and officials are told in the strongest terms not to share data. How odd. It is as though the government wish to continue the policy of fear.
I think it’s obvious that’s what they want.
True. But I fsil to see how anybidy can read the guidance if sicially distanced barbecues without screaming with kauhter. And the Daily Mail,s little route map … ih my..
All you have to do I drive past any NHS facility with car parking facilities. Ordinarily you struggle to find anywhere to leave your car, not at the current time. Car Parks are quiet.
More and more people ain’t buying it anymore. The fear mongering masked loons don’t bother me, dwindling and getting more and more ridiculous by the day. It’s the apathetic that are pissing me off the most, too accepting and ‘confortable’ with it all, thinking it will all ‘blow over’. I’m ok, am furloughed, quite a nice holiday types… As our futures and freedoms are at huge risk
was at a beach front last night hundreds of people if not thousands all wandering around, no social distancing, drinking beer, playing songs, eating ice cream. The real people are sick of being told what to do and will no longer go along with the lunatics. F**k you if you want the lockdown to continue in any way. Nothing less than the full restoration of society now or the people will just do it anyway. This bollocks has to go.
I see the cops in Northern Ireland got a kicking last night when they tried to break up a group if 200 young people. Much more of this to come, if the government doesn’t bring a swift end to this farce.
Trying to find this…where did you see it posted? Thanks
Same in Manchester’s ‘student land’ last night. Bars open serving take away alcohol to lots of people standing on the pavement. Does this mean all the bed-wetters are cowering indoors frickened to death?
Most of them are sitting at home enjoying themselves drinking supermarket booze and watching pornography courtesy of the free money from the taxpayer.
the pubs where i was were open too. By the end of the night folk were sitting in the pub and standing at the bar. it was glorious
What region are you in?
Beaches busy here in SE Cornwall.
I’m very glad you dug up that mid-March John Edmunds interview – I still remember him saying vehemently that the only alternative to herd immunity was to eradicate every case of covid “in the world … IN THE WORLD!!” (his emphasis). He had certainly changed his tune by the time the online Cambridge Union debate (with P Hitchens et al) came around in late April – by which time he was arguing in support of lockdown.
More from Ko Ko, do add to it:
When the world regains its senses and the reckoning begins,
I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list
Of thugs and wimps and bullies who must answer for their sins,
And they’ll none of ’em be missed, they’ll none of ‘em be missed.
There’s the fornicating expert who despises his own rules,
The SAGES who despise us all and take us all for fools;
The servile politicians, solid wood from ear to ear,
The BBC, dispensing the pornography of fear,
And the morons and bed-wetters who on cowardice insist:
They never would be missed, they never would be missed.
There’s the shutter-off of playgrounds, paths and parks and even trees,
The joyless pessimist, I’ve got him on my list;
The neighbour who reports each normal person that she sees,
She never would be missed, she never would be missed.
There’s the vicious teaching unions who, in cowardice and spite,
Inflict appalling tortures on each hapless little mite;
There’s the spineless crawling bishops whom we’d do well to ignore,
The twit who puts a mask on when he creeps out through his door,
And the silly clapping seals who just don’t know when to desist:
They never would be missed, they never would be missed.
***
W,S. Gilbert had a sharp eye and a sharper pen for the absurdities of his age. If he could see the colossal absurdities we face, I think his pen would fuse to his fingers and he would spontaneously combust.
This is brilliant! Thank you.
Brilliant!!! Now if we could get someone to record this.
Genius!
Sad that topsy-turveydom is an accurate depiction of our world. G&S would be seen as realists were they around today.
“From every kind of man
Obedience I expect;”
Brilliant! I’ll commit this to memory!
I remember watching the channel 4 interview with Edmunds and the hysterical silicon valley loon and being reassured at the time by the calm, reasonable and realistic words of the epidemiologist who seemed to have a grasp of the obvious realities of the situation. He appears to have sold out.
I recall feeling the same up to 16 March when suddenly it shifted from relative calm sense to crazy panic. I still haven’t recovered from the sense of betrayal and that this has all been a baseless imposition on me.
Same, was feeling more than happy with our approach in the first half of March and couldn’t imagine the British ever accepting a lockdown, of course we’d just keep calm and carry on. Then around 16 March I sat at a table in a cafe working for an hour with two twenty something blokes at the next table talking utter tripe about the deadly killer virus and outraged that we weren’t following the lead of Italy and Spain and began to feel a creeping unease that I didn’t live in the country I thought I did.
Yes. This is the thing that’s most affected me too. At first I felt a lot of anger at the sheer stupidity, but it dissipated pretty quickly and left behind crushing disappointment. So…. I stayed here in this country (after having many opportunities to move away etc. Many friends abroad etc. Speak three languages etc.) because I love it. I voted to free it from the tyranny of a certain suprapolitical union for the same reason.
These are people I thought I loved.
It upsets me actually. It really does.
At least the Scandinavians seem to get it now. At least the Germans and the Spanish got angry. At least the Italians are starting to get mental. At least the Aussies were fairly laid back and now are ignoring their gvt’s crap. At least the Belarussians and the Tanzanians
gave no fucks.
What happened to the British?
Still bed cowering.
In your Telegraph piece today you conclude a calculation that the Covid IFR may be about 0.26 per cent compared with the IFR for seasonal flu between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent. Did this take into account the novel way of certifying death with/of Corona virus as explained by Dr John Lee in the Spectator? Perhaps the IFR is approximately the same as flu?
blob:https://dailysceptic.org/78b6e93e-288d-4817-8f0c-0b068d3f487d
Look at the state of this lotblob:https://dailysceptic.org/18fde204-b897-40b2-a54b-aed6b9dc63b9
Sorry, can these be deleted. Was trying to post a photo but it won’t work.
Levitt did well but they’re totally convinced it woz lockdown (or social distancing) wot did it so we need to up our game and really show in simple terms why that can’t be true. Examples, data, dates which prove it beyond doubt. Without that we’ll get nowhere with the fanatics who have a huge amount invested in it working.
The pre-lockdown voluntary precautions that people were taking probably did reduce R0. Seroprevalence _is_ low and this is probably due to a combination of factors, including some unknowns about innate and cross-immune responses, but also due to reduced R0.
The killer fact against lockdown is the just the number of actual deaths in the UK of the under 60s without pre-existing conditions, which is less than 300. Even including preconditions, it’s about 2000. Out of several million infections by any estimate. These were deaths “with” Covid but there’s no need even to quibble about that.
Whichever way you cut it it’s a negligible risk and there is therefore no justification for anyone of working age not to go back to work, school, the pub, the opera, the grand prix and the shops.
This does not rely on IFR estimates, fitting Gompertz curves or on how many people may have CD4+ T cells lying around matching funny bits of coronavirus orfeome. It’s just historical fact.
There is a real debate involving those considerations about whether there was a case for non-pharmacological interventions back in March. But the debate about whether to end the lockdown now is a very short one.
Doesn’t that by itself just justify ending it for people under 60? If social distancing is effective for reducing the spread why is the growth rate dropping before it starts, why is there no consistency in how social distancing affects it, why is there no new wave as social distancing is eased, and why is Belarus not the worst affected country in the world?
Any “social distancing” that reduces R to less than 1 has an almost identical effect. We know the epidemic started early (antibody tests of blood donors in Milan is the biggest smoking gun) and has low IFR (Iceland and multiple serology studies in non-overwhelmed places). Therefore by the time we even started washing our hands it’s likely we already had some immunity. That’s why just simple pre-lockdown measures were enough to cause the epidemic to peak, and why we see the same results everywhere regardless of their measures– provided they exceed the minimum required they will all look the same. Whatever Sweden were doing, and the UK before the “full” lockdown, was more than enough.
It may also be that even without any measures the epidemics would have peaked when they did anyway, but to be fair we don’t know that, and the serology numbers are a bit on the low side. So if we go right back to shouting in other’s faces in pubs when we have colds we might get a few more cases. But it’s not a big deal if we do.
If this theory is right then that’s also why there are no second waves– nobody has eased restrictions completely and even if they did, people are behaving differently because they’re still scared. Nowhere has gone back to how they were behaving this time a year ago. If they did there might be a few more cases (but any second wave would be much smaller than the first).
If you’re over 75 and/or frail then I think it is advisable to stay out of trouble until the epidemic has passed, which it probably has, but if we hadn’t had the stupid lockdown, we would know for sure, and those people would have had to “isolate” themselves for a much shorter period of time.
Why does Belarus have so few deaths? They don’t live as long as us in the first place, but I think most likely having seen how lockdowns are turning out for everyone else they’ve just decided to opt out of the whole thing, which means playing it down rather than exaggerating it.
I think that mostly sounds right. The question is what is the minimum needed to bring it down? Even Belarus has done some. Is it just keeping a bit of distance especially indoors and hand washing?
There is still a mystery though why the effect of starting social distancing is so inconsistent. If you look at the interval between a city starting social distancing (based on public transport use dropping off) and its deaths peaking or slowing down there is very little consistency – weeks apart in many cases. Why is that if it’s a minimum that’s enough? Conversely if you look at the interval between when deaths start to surge and when they peak it’s largely the same everywhere regardless of the measures taken or when. I think it all needs looking at in much more detail with all assumptions suspended.
The minimum is just staying at home when you’re symptomatic. You’re infectious for about 4 or 5 days. If you stay at home for just 2 or 3 (never mind 2 weeks) you cut R0 in half. That is enough to reduce herd immunity threshold from a hypothetical 60% to 20%.
I agree that it’s impossible to see the “signal” of lockdowns in the data, which does imply that they were all too late to make any difference (the “minimum” was already lower than normal life).
With other viruses, like the ‘common’ cold, people are often not very good at staying at home – a lot of people would go to work despite cold symptoms. Now we are doing more than that ‘minimum’..
They may only be reporting deaths of people who actually died from the virus itself, rather than ‘with’ the virus?
Wodka and saunas. Please keep up.
And those people under 60 are exactly the demographic that carried on working in busy environments, supermarkets, deliveries, hospitals etc. So why isn’t there a correlation between those people and higher deaths. Supermarket workers should have been dropping like flies, yet they are under represented in the numbers.
Well, whilst I generally agree with much of what you say, It is clear that it’s not just “pre-lockdown voluntary precautions” as they clearly can’t be responsible for the rate of growth diminishing even in late February (when the disease was barely heard of, and the govt were still insisting that there was no community transmission), and continuing to do so consistently throughout the epidemic despite a number of different things being trialed. The graph below shows that this is the case in a number of different countries too.
I’m not competent to suggest why this is, or what (clearly natural) thing has done it, but it clearly is the case nonetheless.
This is a great article talking about confirmation bias and actually looking at the data.
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/27/thaddeus-michaels-fixating-on-bad-evidence/
I can’t argue with that graph, except to say that small changes in R will be hard to see on a gradient of a log plot.
I guess the missing piece of the puzzle is likely to be that R0 is rather low to start with, probably because of the asymptomatic cases, which although infectious in theory, are likely to be much less infectious.
When I first started looking at these graphs around the end of March I was assuming HIT of about 50% and IFR of 0.1% or so which is how Iceland was turning out. They seemed consistent with those numbers. In other words, I was estimating prevalence from the IFR and the number of deaths.
But it turns out prevalence is much lower and apparent “IFR” much higher because of the nosocomial infection problem– infection rates probably around 80% in hospitals and care homes, but more like 10% outside them.
We know there was a huge nosocomial problem (more than half the deaths on most Western European countries are officially owned up to being in care homes), and we know from the low IFR, early onset, wide geographical distribution, the fact that prevalence is about the same everywhere, and graphs like the one you’ve just shown, that whatever the prevalence is outside the hospitals and care homes it’s likely to be at or very close to equilibrium.
Exposure will be a bit higher than seroprevalence (maybe 20 to 50% higher) because of cross-immunity and innate immunity, so this puts R0 around 1.25 or so– it will be a bit higher in London etc and a bit lower outside.
If 50% of cases are negligibly infectious that would halve R0 from a “natural” value of 2.5. But still, 1.25 is not particularly unusual for this kind of illness.
I think a lot of people are realising that the risk to themselves is minimal – what is keeping them scared to move about freely is the fear that they may catch the virus, be asymptomatic but inadvertently pass it to someone more vulnerable. This risk is often mentioned by the MSM..
But the same applies to any infectious disease including the common cold, which can kill very frail people. So if you employ the rational that people don’t move freely because they are scared of passing it on then the world stops forever.
I suspect it’s rather exaggerated. Although you can infect someone when asymptomatic it will be much harder. Even children (who are usually very good at spreading viruses) struggle to infect anyone with SARS2.
The high number of asymptomatic cases is probably a large part of why R0 is quite low.
What matters is the average. The press get all hysterical about how you might catch it from a surface that was touched 72h ago by someone asymptomatic etc but it’s unlikely, so it doesn’t matter. Any guidance designed to reduce transmission just needs to concentrate on what’s most probable and easiest to manage. So basically just stay at home when you’re ill.
The R number is of no consequence if most of the population are not at risk.
They have been talking through their Rs from the beginning.
We should have protected the vulnerable instead of murdering those in care homes.
Agree 100%. It’s still interesting to see what R0 is and how it all pans out, but the strategy is the same either way.
Guy, do you have an authoritative source for that ‘300 fatalities among people under 60 with no pre-existing conditions’ figure?
So much available data is/are rubbish. The killer argument, I think, is a different one, used by Sweden, that the data simply was not available to justify a lockdown.
That has recently been echoed by Norway:
‘The institute reported at the start of this month that the reproduction number had already fallen to as low as 1.1 even before the lockdown was announced on March 12.’
“The scientific backing was not good enough,” Stoltenberg said of the decision to close down schools and kindergartens, a policy her agency had not recommend even at the time it was instituted in March.’
https://www.thelocal.no/20200522/norway-could-have-controlled-infection-without-lockdown-health-chief
If the evidence was not there in the first place, and it most certainly was not, only a batty model, then, ultimately, given a just passably competent inquiry (unfortunately never a given!) then there should be no place to hide.
This is an interesting article re Denmark – so much is political: https://www.thelocal.dk/20200529/leaked-emails-show-how-denmarks-pm-steam-rollered-her-own-health-agency
With luck the tide might finally be turning around to favour our opinion, The Guardian has finally started publishing some stuff that is at least slightly anti-lockdown. Even a bastion of lockdown-foreverist-zealots has had to bow to reason in one article. Now we need to push home the point, get our old normal back, and get a hard ban enforced against governments ever being able to use such intrusive powers as lockdowns ever again.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/29/britain-shame-coronavirus-deaths-economic-collapse
There’s also an article in the telegraph, perhaps a satire one I can’t quite tell, but it suggests that Cumming’s breaking of illegitimate lockdown restrictions was a masterstroke of genius, and even if it is supposed to be atrie it’s arguments add up very well. Especially given how the Durham and Barnard castle reasonable excursions happened early during the assault on civil liberties, but the news only came out at the time when the Gov wanted to start getting our country off our arses.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/30/people-think-dominic-cummings-made-terrible-blunder-actually/
As far as I can see it, the entire SAGE panel need to be sacked. These unelected so-called “experts” have no clue what they’re doing and continue to take such a ridiculously over-cautious approach, they would prefer us to stay at home forever, wrapped in cotton wool bubbles.
To all the current SAGE members, every one of you can F**K right off. How are these lunatics holding our country to ransom? We’d get far more sense (and much faster) from a bunch of monkeys attempting to write the complete works of Shakespeare.
Health & Safety on steroids – Ian Botham’s comment sums it up ‘H&S gets in places where even water can’t’.
I even think they’ll try and take control from government, a SAGE coup. They all need telling to fuck off, but no doubt government will cave and we’ll be back to square zero next week.
The entire SAGE panel needs to be investigated up to the hilt, for links to Big Pharma. Forensic accountants should go through the bank accounts and financial dealings of EVERY member.
Have any of these so-called “experts” signed personal deals for big money from Gates & Co. in return for extending the lockdown until the trillion-dollar vaccine is rolled out?
If such is found to be the case, then such criminal “scientists” should stand trial for High Treason. Life imprisonment for the guilty.
Try THAT for a friggin’ lockdown.
Nah. They should be made to reenact Sisyphus for the rest of their life like some freak show and we the public could pelt them with whatever we want.
They deserve to be humiliated for the rest of their lives for the damage they have inflicted on us.
A bunch of monkeys pressing red or blue buttons would do better. At least they’d be about 50% right.
It’s good to get these updates everyday but nothing changes. If anything, the government seems to be doubling down. What do we have to do to end this nonsense?
Riot.
Believe me I’m getting close.
Things may change when the furlough scheme is tapered off and people lose their jobs..
When they end it, they know they will have to have a public inquiry……….
Let’s hope it’s an independent inquiry, with a wide scope. Let’s hope it ends some careers.
the opposite will happen – OBE’s aplenty
No chance – it’ll probably be Lady Whitewash!
And they’ll have to finally deal with the Brexit fiasco.
Oh it’s changing alright. I see it every day, far too slowly for my liking but essentially lots people just need to ignore the government and carry on as normal as much as possible. I know I have.
They know themselves that their guidelines are bollocks.
Took a bike ride to the larger Tesco today, deliberately locked it up in the queuing section. You should have seen the parting of the waves when I came back out, lept over the red tape on the middle of what was now a large queue to go get it. One idiot almost fell over trying to ‘distance’, it was equally joyous but profoundly sad at the same
* time
Professor Noakes was asked by the House of Commons Select Committee of Science and Technology to explain the scientific basis for the two metre social distancing rule. Her answer: the precautionary principle.
So apparently “it might be harmful” now constitutes science – and these are the people the government is relying on for scientific advice. This is beyond satire.
By that logic they really need to ban smoking, drinking and swimming in large bodies of water. And driving. And flying. And walking outside. And climbing ladders. And eating food raw. And eating food that might not be cooked enough. And contact sports. And extreme sports. And…. Sports.
AND F*KING EVERYTHING
Yeah. Ban living. Save lives.
Do these people have children who will be subject to the absurd new social distancing measures that will be imposed when schools re-open???
In 2019 from the week ending 15th March to the week ending 17th May (10 weeks) ONS statistics show an average of 1401 per week (200/day) died of respiratory diseases (ICD-10 J00-J99) ICD-10 v 2013 (IRIS). In the same period 2018, the figures were 1635 per week (233/day). Similarly for the following 10 weeks in 2019, 24th May until 26th July, an average of 1131 per week (161/day) died of the same causes. Again in 2018 for the same period the figures were 1116 per week (159/day).
By comparison in the last 7 days an average of 252 people per day have died from Covid 19 and the death rate is falling each week.
These figures indicate that deaths from flu and pneumonia do not vanish into thin air but continue week in week out, year in year out. Likewise with Covid 19 we can probably expect to see a similar situation for the foreseeable future.
The Government should now stop issuing the daily bulletins and giving daily updates, which only cause more anxiety and are in the main meaningless. The death rates for Covid 19 are down to figures that are no longer outweighing other causes of death and therefore should be treated as such.
We need to get our lives back to normal!
Yes, we just need the ONS to confirm we’re back in normal range, which will hopefully be on Tuesday or the following week.
“The Government should now stop issuing the daily bulletins and giving daily updates”
Totally agree. Not sure they should ever have been daily, and they should certainly have been presented with context – the excess over a normal week, or last year, so people could understand the relative importance.
But their function was to promote fear and compliance and feign transparency. Context and relative importance doesn’t come into it.
Not many have any confidence in the covid 19 infection data in Britain:
‘Some labs will however still need to keep using the PHE SARS-CoV-2RdRp assay in the interim and in keeping with the requirement for ongoing review of performance and validation of new/improved assays, some discordant results have been identified.
Summary of the initial results:
1. There is considerable diversity of molecular platforms, reagents, kits and assay performance conditions in PHE and NHS laboratories providing SARS-CoV-2 molecular detection
2. There is evidence of quality assurance difficulties for key reagents due to global supply chain issues
3. Shortages of swabs and transport medium have led to local variations in sampling practice which may impact on assay performance through the introduction of inhibitors into biochemical reactions
4. There is no evidence of viral genetic drift as a basis for altered sensitivity of assay
5. Enzyme performance from external suppliers has degraded compared with original validation performance.’
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zoki1xUKuY15JmPujZXd-mMjXn0K_2GM/view
That is, admittedly, a PHE document from 11 April, but given the overall performance of the state bureaucracy so far, on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is very confident, how confident can we be that all testing problems have been resolved by now.
That would be a big fat zero.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/will-life-look-like-year-today/
This is terrible, I can’t believe things like this are actively being written and put online.
Hopefully it will make some sheeple think for a change.
I have had no interest in anything the government has said about the virus since they changed the way deaths were being recorded.
The one thing I believe this government might do is take us out of the EU without a deal. And I’m not 100% sure of that.
We won’t be leaving the EU. They’ll come up with some covid related reason why it has to be put back, and back.
Maybe. But in that case why fight so hard to keep Cummings?
Anyway, we’ll see.
Because Johnson works for Cummings, not the other way around. This SAGE lot are the ones in charge and calling the shots.
The EU will collapse soon anyway.
Ah…. Now I think that is a strong possibility now. But then again with the turmoil in the EU with respect to the huge bailouts especially for the southern economies, I would think that the UK’s hand in trade negotiations is probably a lot stronger now
Had my first flat white in two months with the hubby and it was great, again lots of people milling about and no-one cared about social distancing. Not many masked zombies out and about.
Also had to go to Sainsbury’s to get some milk, bloke before me asked a staff member if there was any one way system. Staff member looks at him as if he was crazy then said “nah….just come in and go wherever” or somewhere along those lines.
Great stuff.
Tesco are one way with staff stood with little lollipops telling people off… they look at me very strange when I just wander where I feel! Morrisons have no one way system & is much nicer. Both still are imposing queuing outside tho, idiotic!
There is also a small Tesco in my area but the queues just put me off. Ditto Asda.
Morrisons, M&S and Sainsbury’s are more bearable.
Not in my Tesco. Must depend on individual stores.
Last week IKEA here in Sweden introduced the ‘social distancing marshals’ that you may have seen reported on the news. Crazy, because until then the only changes IKEA had made were that the restaurant was shut and that the opening hours were slightly reduced (opening time an hour later and closing time an hour earlier). Pleasantly today there was no sign of any marshals, so hopefully they have abandoned that idea now!
Either negative feedback must have led Ikea to abandon that idea. Let’s hope you never see them again.
They have one of those feedback machines where you press the appropriate ‘smiley’/unhappy face button, but you can also leave a comment, which I did last time. I suspect I may not have been the only one!
It does look like you’re not the only done. Well done!
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/18/us/coronavirus-time-risk/index.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
Wear a mask. Wash your hands with soap. Stay at least 6 feet from others. If you do gather with others, go outside rather than inside.
Still, there’s one more aspect to infection that has received less attention. Growing evidence suggests that Covid-19 infection, like with other illnesses, is related to prolonged time exposed to the virus. The longer you stay in an environment that may contain the virus, the higher the risk of getting sick.
Erin Bromage, a comparative immunologist and professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, summed it up with a short and sweet equation: “Successful Infection = Exposure to Virus x Time.”
don’t wear a mask, don’t wash your hands and get up close and personal.
All these things we’re meant to do are the state trying to break us down and turn us into drones. Sod that for a game of soldiers
No thanks, and now the WHO say you don’t need to wear masks. Not sure how the American media will handle that. It’s been so politicised there, no mask = murderer. Now what?
Almost Checkmate for the republicans Vs the lockdowner democrats is potentially what that is. But with this whole mess, who fucking knows
Working in travel industry and just thinking out loud but if a holiday was booked and was possible and you got notification from track and trace and were forced to then isolate for 2 weeks and were unable to travel, who pays? Insurers won’t touch it, holiday will be going ahead so tour op not responsible. Will the Govt. pay?
Whole scheme is also open to abuse as has been mentioned before. Neighbourly feuds, jealous ex’es or people who just want some time off.
School kids will have a lot of fun with it. Teacher you don’t like? Self-isolate him for a couple of weeks!
Good question for the daily press conference!
No balance whatsoever in BBC reporting this COVID pandemic.
Complete negative reporting, no reference to how deaths attributed to COVID are falling. You wonder whether they’re actually secretly willing the death rate to increase!
Weekly deaths attributed to those testing positive for COVID:
Week Ending:
03/05 3456
10/05 2879 (-577)
17/05 2209 (-670)
24/05 1701 (-508)
And all they talk about is the elusive R rate. I think Mystic Meg could make a better stab at it.
Now…. I think everyone knows me well enough on here to know how cynical I am. But this is not me being cynical, this is me being realistic and what I consider to be sensible, based on experience working with journalists.
If the meedja – especially the TV – pundits could guarantee their own personal safety and that of their immediate friends and family, they would quite happily have a huge death rate. Seriously. If you asked them and they were comfortable enough to answer with complete honesty (so…. ok a hypothetical situation ;p )- “Would you rather there be 1000 Covid deaths, or 10,000 Covid deaths?” – they would say *100%* – 10,000.
10,000 deaths rather than 1,000 is money, baby. They LOVE this shit.
And if a child dies, they crack the champagne out.
It’s like Drop the Dead Donkey (if you remember that) where Stephen Tompkinson’s character would always have a childs doll in his reports.
Ha, ha.There’s always a child’s doll or a shoe lying amongst a pile of rubble in those disaster reports.
I remember! And the reporter chucking a grenade into the crowd to ensure everybody looked terrified.
At the time, I laughed.
You are exactly correct.
I find myself unable to watch mainstream TV news at present because I am sickened by the talking heads’ barely concealed sense of glee.
They LOVE this and never want it to end.
I honestly think we’ve reached peak stupidity and that even the crazy scientists, drunk on hubris like Frankenstein, and the politicians who believe their own hype know the danger has passed now and are just taking the piss. I never, ever thought I’d ever seen in my lifetime (and I’m only 21 so I have a lot of it left to go) the state telling private citizens how to have a barbecue. It is nothing short of breathtaking insanity. It is so obvious that the government are engaging in political theatricality now to make it look like they’re in control of the situation and haven’t effed up enormously. It’s just a matter of waiting it out now. And the longer they keep the lockdown, the longer they procrastinate from the inevitable public enquiry…
I also wonder whether this lockdown would have been eased more quickly if the weather had been absolutely rubbish these past two months, or if this had happened during the winter – who would want to meet outside or host garden parties in the pissing rain and freezing cold? The sunny weather has also dampened any urgency to get back to work or reality and I think a lot of people like the lockdown because the state is effectively looking after them and it puts off their own responsibility for their life. I hope the arrival of the colder seasons, if anything, will put paid to social distancing and queuing like mugs outside shops and cafés, and winter months are miserable enough as it is without everything that makes life worth living cancelled (but I am a summer baby so I have always hated winter!).
On that note, although I feel optimistic that we are seeing the end of lockdown (sadly it’s far, far too slowly, but I have patience) every day I dread the collateral consequences that will arise from this folly of panic, which by their nature are invisible now and won’t become visible for a few months or years, long after Covid-19 has disappeared. Even if we do go back to the ‘old normal’ (which I am certain we will), I worry that many people will become unemployed in a very short space of time; shops and restaurants that we once loved will remain permanently closed and the high street will be a husk; public services will become shabby and inaccessible due to reduced tax receipts and less government money available after this period of profligacy; and we’ll see thousands upon thousands of deaths as a result of delayed or cancelled treatments, missed diagnoses, and deaths of despair from all the bad consequences I’ve mentioned – deaths which will dwarf the final death toll from Covid. And that’s just in the UK, not counting all those who will die in other countries due to destroyed economies that relied on tourism. I fear that the worst is actually yet to come and it will last a very, very long time. Maybe I am naïve to worry about this because I am young and haven’t got a lot of life experience, and I’m sure many other seismic events will happen in my lifetime, some of which may dwarf this and its effects.
The only comfort is that once these consequences occur, there will be a mighty reckoning. Our politicians must have IQs that match their shoe size if they honestly think that it is less politically costly now to ease the lockdown slowly and keep everyone ‘safe’, as opposed to the hatred that will flow from the public once they realise what our leaders have done and the consequences of the lockdown truly manifest. Political short-termism at its finest.
Take comfort from the fact that are clearly a very sensible, sane person, and will go far in life. It may be difficult being sane in a mad world, but it’s preferable to being mad.
Regarding how this has played out, if we didn’t have the magic money tree, so people just lost their income immediately, and we were in the middle of winter, and we didn’t have millions who can work from home, and we didn’t have Amazon and Netflix and Zoom, and online shopping, I can’t see how it would have lasted anything like as long as it has done.
‘Regarding how this has played out, if we didn’t have the magic money tree, so people just lost their income immediately, and we were in the middle of winter, and we didn’t have millions who can work from home, and we didn’t have Amazon and Netflix and Zoom, and online shopping, I can’t see how it would have lasted anything like as long as it has done.’
You’re basically describing 50 years ago with the Hong Kong flu, when there was no concept of home working, no internet, no state hand-holding, no lockdown and people just got on with it…!
Yes, I was at school during the Hong Kong flu epidemic, but I do vaguely remember it. We lost two children and one teacher. My mother was ill with it but got over it, yet neither my father nor I – in the same house – caught it or showed any symptoms. But everyone just got on with it. There weren’t the 24/7 news channels or internet then of course, the newspapers were still fairly newsy in that they just did straight reporting of facts, and nobody really blew it up out of all proportion. Most of the population still remembered WW2 and in many ways the HK flu was nothing when compared with that. We just expected people to plough on regardless. And everyone did.
I agree that the if the lockdown had occurred in the past even as recently as twenty years ago, there would be less tolerance of lockdown without the current technology which makes lockdown easier eg skype for communicating. Pre internet the only alternative to shops was mail order which was nowhere near as convenient as the internet.
You couldn’t get food by mail order!
I agree that lockdown might have been slightly more tolerable in winter because being stuck at home is not so bad when it is cold and dark. Being stuck at home is worse during hot sunny weather. The economic impact of a lockdown might have been slightly less in winter as many tourist dependent businesses do the bulk of their trade in the summer and not much in winter. If tourist dependent businesses had to close in winter but could reopen by the summer, the tourist trade would not have been so badly hit. A major problem with a summer lockdown is tourist dependent businesses are missing out on the critical summer trade.
Poppy, if at any point in the future I overcome my total disgust at the political system … you would be the stateswoman I’d vote for!
Thank you, I am flattered by your comment because I have always wanted to go into politics at some point…!
Please do it!
Other factors which make summer lockdowns worse than winter is that events such as music festivals, sports, agriculture and air shows etc are usually held in the summer months and if a lockdown happens in summer these events are cancelled. A winter lockdown with restrictions fully lifted by summer would avoid this. The cancellation of events can mean businesses missing out on trade. For instance, an airshow is held in a town near me which attracts many visitors in the summer who spend money in local businesses. If the airshow is cancelled this year businesses will have lost this trade. People are more likely to go on holiday either in the uk or abroad during summer rather than winter which means restrictions such as hotels not being able to operate and flights grounded means a summer lockdown means more people having to cancel holidays than would happen in a winter lockdown.
On the flip side, a winter lockdown would’ve meant people queuing outside shops in freezing wind and rain. I’m not sure the tolerance and patience would have lasted as long, especially watching NHS staff appear from nowhere, flash their pass and waltz straight in, while you’ve been stood there three quarters of an hour, soaked and shivering. Those finally waking up may have woke up and researched sooner.
I agree queuing in cold and wet weather would be a major drawback in a winter lockdown but I am sure there are people who are not keen on standing in the sun for long periods. I wonder how long people will tolerate supermarket queues. If you are in a hurry queuing takes up your time. Another problem with queuing is that you may have forgotten something and need to go back to your car but if this happens, you have to the back of the queue again.
A winter lockdown would be damaging for restaurants as they would miss out on the staff Christmas dinner trade which can be lucrative for restaurants. On the other hand restaurants and pubs miss out on the tourist trade if they can’t open in the summer.
It is all falling down. Take courage.
Hang on don’t forget the discounts offered to NHS staff, Morrisons is doing 10% What was the Tannoy announcement “our wonderful NHS staff”
Others who are in the .ine of fire and working for a pittance, lets say home delivery drivers who are meeting the public face to face every day, they can go and do one.
No offence to any hard working NHS staff who may be on here.
True, and I wonder how social distancing from loved ones would have gone down at Christmas – imagine spending the 25th alone with no family or friends, one of the most important things about the holiday season.
But a treacherous little voice mutters ‘Christmas without the mother-in-law… Even the worst situations have their compensations…’
I find it sad that we are discussing this as if lockdown is a normal and acceptable thing. Lockdown should never have been considered an option – this is not an open air prison !
Well said sir, they have slipped it into the narrative as usual.
The collateral damage is collosal.
The vast majority of the population just don’t seem to know what is in front of them.
I fear what is happening in America right now might spill over here. We saw what its looks like in 2011 when high streets, mainly in London, were looted. Handy thing to happen to divert us from the virus and to further militarise the police.
I do not think violence is the answer, but I suspect the authorities may be quite keen, sheeple will soon forget the nondemic when the windows of John Lewis are smashed and they cannot reopen,
What a travesty.
Please do fall into the trap.
I really like your posts Polly and you’re much more articulate than many university students I’ve taught, but back in 2008 you would have been about 9 and probably not aware of the global financial meltdown, although I’m sure you might have felt the aftershocks. Nobody, but nobody was held to account in 2008, so despite the fact that their IQs match their shoe size (nice phrase) I do not see any reckoning even though, as I posted somewhere else, a 1% increase in unemployment means 40,000 more deaths (quoted in The Big Short.)
You’re clearly not naive at all. You are right to be highly suspicious of the government’s blase attitude to the ruined economy, trashed businesses and its obvious reluctance to end the lockdown pantomine.
I too have wondered how they would have pulled it off back in February, with howling gales and floods. I don’t think people would have queued so compliantly in that weather.
Well said! As well as the picture Toby printed above regarding barbecues, did you see the BBC guidance on barbecues? A (somewhat sexist) quote: “If you think you’ve had coronavirus and/or you’re low risk, meaning you’re young, you’re slim, you’re female – those are the main variables – your behaviour at a picnic is probably going to be much more relaxed with regards to things like sharing the potato salad and using other people’s cutlery….If you are a man who’s older and overweight and don’t think you’ve had the virus, I would say bring your own cutlery and bring your own coleslaw.” The whole article is totally mad – if you want to read it, it is here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52848793
I recommend everone to read that, it’s a hoot. I’ve parodies that were less funny. How can he keep a straight face?
I don’t think I’d like to be a guest at one of his parties, and I wonder what kind of friends he has.
I read it to my Mrs and daughter while we were on our local common watching the youngsters congregate and get a bit drunk.
1. Who to invite
The first thing to do is think about who you’re inviting and what pressures that invitation will put on them – we are very differently vulnerable to this virus.
If you’re inviting overweight men who are older, they face a very different risk to young families with young children. If you’re inviting people who’ve had the virus that’s very different again. Think about the invitation and think about who you’re putting at risk.
If you’re thinking of inviting a 70-year-old overweight man, I would consider having quite a detailed conversation about the risks they were prepared to accept.
If you’re shielding you obviously cannot attend these gatherings.
2. How to arrive
If you are hosting an event and people can get into the garden directly, brilliant.
If they can’t and people are walking through the house, it would be reasonable to tell them to wear a mask, wash their hands when they get into the house, and then go straight into the garden. They shouldn’t touch anything. You need to get them to the garden as quickly as possible.
3. Social distancing
To maintain social distancing, about a quarter of a tennis court is what you need for a six-person gathering if everyone is from different households, which is massive.
If you had 12 two-metre by two-metre picnic blankets, you would each need to sit at the intersections where the blankets meet to guarantee that you’re two metres away from the other people in your group and two metres away from passersby. I don’t expect everyone’s got 12 picnic blankets but that is at least the distances that we’re talking about.
GETTY IMAGES
Image caption
One creative approach to distancing attempted in a Brooklyn park
You need to find some way of measuring. You could get a two-metre pole, a bamboo cane, a tape measure or a broom or whatever you can improvise with, hold it and spin around in a circle – everyone needs to be able to do that without knocking into each other.
In your garden, you could mark two metres out with blankets, chalk or masking tape to create little zones for people – no-one from separate households should be sitting next to one another on a bench.
When we talk about gardens, I look at mine and it’s a very small space. To have more than two people in it socially distanced would be impossible.
4. Food and cutlery
In terms of bringing your own cutlery, it’s difficult. Everyone through these sets of guidelines is going to have to determine how much risk they’re prepared to accept.
If you think you’ve had coronavirus and/or you’re low risk, meaning you’re young, you’re slim, you’re female – those are the main variables – your behaviour at a picnic is probably going to be much more relaxed with regards to things like sharing the potato salad and using other people’s cutlery. But of course you need to be doing everything you can to stop yourself being a carrier and making other people ill.
If you are a man who’s older and overweight and don’t think you’ve had the virus, I would say bring your own cutlery and bring your own coleslaw.
5. Washing hands
If you’re in the park you might not be able to wash your hands, so I would say bring hand gel, wipes and perhaps water to wash your hands with or identify a sink nearby.
If you’re having people in your garden, you need to do everything you can to signal to them that things are not back to normal and to help them feel safe and you feel safe.
Media caption
The University of Westminster’s Dr Adele McCormick demonstrates how to wash your hands
You could ask your guests to set their alarms for every 45 minutes or every hour in a staggered way, then everyone could wash their hands when their alarm goes off. If you’re hosting, say to everyone “we’re all going to wash our hands once an hour”.
You could also have a sign somewhere in the toilet that says “wash your hands”.
6. Using the toilet
There needs to be at least two minutes between people using the toilet.
You should flush with the seat down – a lot of people don’t bother with this but the spray from the toilet generates an aerosol and there is coronavirus in bodily fluids.
Once you flush, then you need to wipe down the loo. You need either disinfectant wipes in the loo, or you need a spray with some disposable towels.
You also need a fresh hand towel for everyone drying their hands so you’re not re-contaminating from the usual hand towel that hangs in the bathroom.
You want a pile of disposable towels and you want a large quantity of soap available in the bathroom. All the surfaces need to be wiped down.
Even then, remember it’s not a risk-free zone. Probably the toilet paper is going to be contaminated – you are definitely taking a risk by doing this.
7. Reunions with children
You’re not allowed to hug people and that’s the rule. But in my experience, if a small child wants a hug, it’s virtually impossible to stop them. For people with nieces, nephews, grandchildren, godchildren or other important children in their lives who they haven’t been able to see for a long time, if you’re going to a picnic in their garden, it’s going to be quite difficult to avoid contact.
I would say, if you do end up having a hug at least don’t grab the person and pull them into your face. A proper full-frontal hug is the most dangerous, but a child hugging your leg is much less dangerous.
The only safe advice though is not to hug.
8. Alcohol and time-limits
You should do anything you can do to signal that this is not a normal gathering. You are having a picnic or gathering at a time of a deadly serious disease circulating widely in the population. We still have a high level of transmission in the UK.
Alcohol does break down inhibitions and people get much more tactile when they’re drunk.
The other thing is the time limit. If you spend all afternoon in the garden with people drinking, that’s wildly different to coming over and saying we’re going to sit two metres apart for an hour and we’ll wear a mask on the way in.
Anything you can do to flag to people that this is not a normal gathering will make you and them feel safer.
9. The clean-up
The virus either moves through the air, or it moves through droplets coming out of people’s mouths and landing on surfaces and people touching those droplets. I would get out your household cleaning products and wipe down all surfaces once people have left.
This virus is unpredictable and dangerous – significantly more dangerous than other viruses that circulate in the UK. We have to have quite a high level of paranoia about it.
As Scott Fitzgerald put it (genuinely this time), ain’t we got fun?
Do you remember Pippa Middleton’s book on party planning, which was (by all accounts) hilariously bad and spawned much satire? Maybe this is an opportune time for her to write a sequel…
“You are having a picnic or gathering at a time of a deadly serious disease circulating widely in the population.” This is the sort of bollocks that makes me want to punch whoever thought this up.
It would be absolutely hilarious if the sheeple weren’t going to take it seriously.
I wonder if Xand van Tulleken believes his own nonsense, or if he’s about to pocket his author’s fee and retire.
Peak idiocy
Is there even a name put next to that nonsense? I shudder to visit the bbc these days, bad for my immune system..
“EH FATTIE YOU SUPPOSED TO BRING UR OWN COLESLAW!
LOL
It’s by doctor and TV presenter Xand van Tulleken, apparently
Maybe he was trolling them?
He will have been well-paid for this fear-mongering bilge. The last paragraph is particularly disgraceful. Wouldn’t it be great if people saw how risible it is and took absolutely no notice. Sadly. . . . .
You mean people really are going to host BBQs that obey these rules? Jeez, if you’re that paranoid you’ll still be hiding under the bed.
Well said Polly and I echo the sentiments of the others in this blog. You are thoughtful, intelligent and perceptive so please keep it up.
You are one of the people who give me hope that all is not lost with the young.
Poppy, hang in there you are not alone.
The meaning of the Emperor’s New Clothes is clear from the story. It is used in contexts where people are widely acclaimed and admired but where others question whether what they have created is of any value. Modern-day examples might be the highly priced work of conceptual artists or the more avant-guard products of fashion designers. Or Cv-19.
The phrase bears some similarity to another modern-day expression – the elephant in the room. An essential factor with both phrases is the willingness of people to engage into an unspoken contract to willfully disbelieve what they know to be true.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-emperors-new-clothes.html
We need to make a note of their names …
And put them on our little list …
…and then find a modern day jackal
Theme tune suggestion – Delilah by Tom Jones (for when someone driven batshit crazy by the lockdown takes matters into their own hands)
You could take this story as a positive sign that people are beginning to see sense, or as negative in that reinforces the idea that what we are dealing with is so extreme and unprecedented that we need to modify large parts of normal life, forever.
Coronavirus: Tory MPs call for change in 2m social distancing rule
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52861993
If we still need a facesaving distance rule, it must be 1m max or hospitality and much of the arts are dead in the water.
1m is better than two but I think we are not out of the woods until all talk of distancing is forgotten, otherwise this could drag on and we’ll be back to square one the next time we have a new virus.
It’s not a “rule”, it’s a guideline – another bit of brainwashing going on and on.
It was Robert Dingwall who said in paraphrase “it’s all crap”, widely reported for 1 day then buried:
https://www.rt.com/uk/486881-uk-guidelines-rule-thumb/
Indeed not a rule or law, but something that will be enforced or attempted to be enforced in schools, universities, public transport, eating, drinking and dancing establishments, sports and leisure facilities, function venues, museums, galleries, entertainment and cultural venues, offices, shops.
The commissars will ensure anywhere not complying will get their license to operate revoked, fines issued.
Just got an email from a leisure operator with whom I have membership – looking to re-open, but with masses of restrictions around numbers, pre-booking, length of sessions, no changing rooms, the need to distance. Aside from completely private non commercial places, and outdoors in the park, every aspect of life will be rendered commercially unviable and bloody unpleasant.
Everytime a subscription, club, company, magazine contact me about this and says “because coronavirus” I answer and basically ask “why?” and state facts.
I then decide if staying a member or frequent their business is worth it.
90% of the time the answer has been no so subscriptions cancelled etc.
Not one has answered me though, not one.
And there’s the problem! We can defy the guideline as much as we like, but the places we want to visit won’t be able to get away with employing the common sense that the government keeps telling us to use!
Vernon Coleman pointed out that a cough or sneeze can expel bodily fluids many times that distance … so the 2m stuff is utter nonsense, and we should just go back to the basic good manners of covering your mouth when you cough, and sneezing into a tissue.
So I went to the supermarket today. There is a one way system. I walked down an aisle to the end and realised I needed to get something from the other end that I’d missed.
What to do, follow the one way system by walking down another aisle to go full circle or reverse backwards up the same aisle? Either way is just as likely to not kill somebody.
The new abnormal.
Queued outside Waitrose yesterday, people were about 20m apart. I was the odd one out, hovering about 2m from the person and in front of me. In the store? Complete free for all. Utterly laughable. I was told to wait on leaving until someone coming in had entered safely as we use the same door – we were at least 4m apart. I politely told the queue manager (must be a whole new job in shops) to do one and walked out, horrifying the Waitrose zealots and in the process.
Our local Morrisons has got a ‘Social distancing Key Worker’ in a specially printed hi viz vest. Apparently, she’s happy to help. . .
Oh but . . . but . .. . but you can KILL people by walking past them in large doorways, didn’t you know?! One split second, and . . . poof! They are gone. Very naughty of you. Go to the back of the queue
My daughter, who is 9 was horrified by my behaviour. Although it was hilarious to see her reaction to me telling these gits to do one, my daughter, god help her, thought I was a monster. What a world of shit we now live in.
Keep explaining to her why and show how she is being lied to and lead, you have to break the conditioning the next generation are receiving from school, education and social media.
Long uphill struggle but worth it when they break free – been through it twice with my kids.
I simply pay no attention to any arrows, just don’t give a shit. Because distancing is pointless. Just do the same, no one stops you
Yes, I will queue…but
Once you are in, with less people about I am finding it a pleasant experience, get what I need to get about 3 times quicker because the compliant get out of my way.
And I normally hate going into supermarkets.
I hold a shopping list before my eyes and walk into people. I also sing as I go.
Is this to stop the horse getting the Wuhan bat flu?
Forcing the horse to subscribe to the NHS religion is disgusting.
I have a horse and she will NEVER be dressed up as an NHS performing seal, any more than I would insult myself and her by wearing a muzzle.
I have two, and they are keeping me sane every single day, they as flight animals, startle first and ask questions later, but I watch them assess risk and go back to a normal state of relaxation and herd / social behaviour as soon as the ‘threat’ has passed, and think if the world listened more to these peaceable, gentle, cooperative animals, we wouldn’t be in half the mess we are!
Is the horse wearing a patch over one eye because it has a lazy eye?
I think it’s a blinker, never seen it look like that before, but horses have 160 degree vision, they can see almost all the way behind, and almost all the way in front. I’m not sure what direction he’ll run, but it might be to help calm nerves due to a distraction on that side. His other eye doesn’t look very relaxed either! (I love horses, I’m not a fan of horse racing, I shall contain my rant for the sake of good relations
)
Now, who else we know of is wearing blinkers?
I see a Professor of Psychology is giving advice on virology now. Has Covid19 got cognitive dissonance? Is that why half the country seems to be barking mad?
Says a lot doesn’t it. Who better to know the empty gesture behaviours (rituals) that will assuage the fabricated fear? It’s OCD writ large.
This gets more ridiculous by the minute. I don’t want to watch horse racing, premier league football or any sport for that matter-I just want to be able to see and hug my grandchildren and my 96 year old mother in law!!
Yes indeed, what a load of nonsense
Please, just go and hug your grand children and your mother in law! I hear you, I read somewhere that all this social stuff is to try and un-scare the population so they’ll go back to work!
Unfortunately, I can’t yet as my d-i-l is scared to death about breaking the rules and as I posted before, my m-i-l’s care agency said they would withdraw her care package if we continued to visit her. Ironically, the day before full lockdown, they ‘phoned us to ask us to prepare her something for tea as they were short staffed!!
They would stop caring for her and let her die if you paid her a visit?
What shits. Are you sure she was ever safe with them?
Then what is keeping you?
My mum is 88 and very physically and mentally frail.
I am her sole carer.
I go to work, shop and have been at the past three meetings on Glasgow Green where there have been lost of hugs.
I wash my hands and use a hankie if necessary.
People die all the time and it may be too late by the time you decide to use your own free will.
Go and hug them, only thing stopping you is you and them of course if they cower away from you.
Be a rebel, but as it is not “law” the only thing you are rebelling against is authority figures trying to browbeat you into submission.
Consider this. What would you think if your MIL died of something else during all this?
Would you be glad that at least you followed the rules and weren’t to blame for her death? What would she think about that?
What would she think if you called her right now and said I don’t want you to die from this virus but feel free to die of something/anything else?
What would your children and grandchildren do if you called them up right now and said you were dying of something other than COVID-19? Would they rush round to your aid and therefor risk killing you with the virus or would they be too scared to help for precisely the same reason?
One thing about all of this is that nobody is even allowed to ask these questions because it’s been decided that we are incapable of making responsible decisions for ourselves.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/
“On Wednesday night, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg went on Norwegian television to make a startling admission: she had panicked.”
Wow, really?! Well done Erna Solberg! Truth from a politician and a prime minister at that. Now if only Boris would do the same . . .
What are the odds…….?
And I see that everyone there thinks school closures were a mistake with bad consequences.
I think schools reopening with the 2m distance ruling will have even worse consequences if teachers are made to enforce it.
Wasn’t there something on here about an Australian poitician saying that closing schools had no scientific basis, but was done to send a message.
Well at least she’s honest. No chance of an apology from any of our lot.
YES someone mainstream has reported it. Danish and German leaks next please. Come on Torygraph you know you want to.
Today is the first day since this madness began that has felt pretty close to normal.Went to visit our friends,sat in their garden at normal human distances and had a drink,looked at old photos,caught up and enjoyed the beautiful sunshine,brilliant,lifted our spirits greatly.
On the drive home I was very heartened to see lots of groups of people enjoying themselves,walking,biking,running and just soaking up the sunshine and being normal,no masks,no gloves and absolutely no distancing.I noticed that,purely out of spite,the authorities had closed the car parks at local beauty spots,no problem,dozens of cars parked on the verges instead with more groups at those locations.I really hope that this weekend is the turning point where the public has finally lost patience and realised enough is enough,please don’t let it be a false dawn !.
I think ‘spite, perfectly sums up the car parks issue. Also that of footpaths, playground etc.
Loos are more problematic since somebody has to clean them, but is the alternative more palatable?
The loos in my park have stayed open throughout. Sensible!
Or maybe the edict came from someone with a prostate problem….
Didn’t they clean them before Annie?
Well, at times I have wondered…
And you wonder about how high the possibility of a second wave is. Sometimes I think you only care more about yourselves in regard to being against the lockdown than about others
What second wave?
You’ve got to be kidding me, of the virus!. Its trending on Twitter right now Take a look at these search results: https://twitter.com/hashtag/SecondWave?s=09
When Professor Michael Levitt tells us there’s a second wave, I’ll believe there’s a second wave. Would you have us locked down for the rest of the year? Until there’s no economy left at all?
Levitt says the lockdown has achieved nothing. And people want to extend it?
The real tsunami (see the cartoons in the Twitter link) is the economic fallout. And that is certainly coming.
I dont doubt the damage that’s being done to the economy. I just feel your all being too ignorant of how other people feel. I dont want to see social distancing be a permanent thing in our lives (now that would be devastating), I just think your sl preoccupied with wanting to lockdown to be over you are missing the bigger picture
Anoymous (spelling) do you actually read this blog?
Maybe if we all just ignore this troll they might go away. Diverse opinions are, in principle, a good thing, but this person offers nothing that we can’t get every time we open a newspaper or turn on the TV.
No, I think most people here just believe that the lockdown is the bigger picture.
How long do you think lockdown should go on for? What’s your preferred exit strategy?
The thing is: we are are only too aware of how other people feel. How could we not be? The media, our Facebook and Twitter feeds, conversations with family members, etc … all of this means we are continuously reminded of what people are feeling.
But feeling is not the same as thinking, and the two should not be confused. The latter requires rigorous self-discipline; reading and listening to a huge variety of sometimes contradictory sources; applying rigorous analysis and forever weighing costs and benefits. And, yes, always being open to the possibility that someone may have a better theory that proves us wrong, or an alternative perspective that makes us reconsider. Thinking requires great humility.
To my Sceptic friends, I’d just like to add something. I truly welcome a diversity of views here, as an opportunity for civilised debate. Crude binaries of the “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” type are unhelpful and polarising. We’re not the angry pitchfork brigade who are out to burn dissenters. God knows, there’s enough of that mentality out in the wild just now.
I feel that ‘other people’ are mentally weak, selfish, narcissistic, and do not see the bigger picture. That good enough for you?
Bigger picture is “follow the money” and this is all leading back to Bill Gates and his merry cabal, loss of freedom, mandatory “Final Solution” vaccines that have immunity from prosecution and if he gets it right will lower the world’s population by 10-15% – all verified if you do a little bit of research.
The lockdown is just a corner of the puzzle.
You honestly believe that BS about Bill Gates!?!……….you are all lost causes here. It’s obvious you only care about wanting the lockdown ended for your own selfish needs than thinking of anyone else. Enjoy the second wave when it comes and it’s way worse than the first one and we are going through an even more aggressive lockdown. No wonder people I try to show this site to dont even bother to read what you loonies have to say
Oh and heres a video that debunks that nonsense
https://youtu.be/Gza1b3oVhMw
How many videos and research links do you want going back a long, long time with him and his “experts” stating it openly?
Bill Gates actually called his vaccine “The Final Solution” in an interview a month or so ago and had to be told by the interviewer to stop it.
Research Bill Gates’s vaccines in India and ask why his foundation was thrown out of there and is under investigation so charges and be brought against him for the deaths and damage done by his vaccines. Ditto in Africa.
He is filmed in an interview as saying if he gets his vaccine right the world population will drop 10-15%.
Look at the video I posted today with an interview from 1997 with Bill Gates predicting this, he may be rich but a clairvoyant or a prophet?
His bought and paid for side-kick Fauci, just after Trump was elected, actually warned tRump his administration would afce a pandemic situation – I will try and find the link to the actual video. Is he a clairvoyant or a prophet as well?
Anything else anonymous?
Busted!!! Where are your facts about a second wave? That’s right, you have none, predictive bullshit. Now find some facts about the cost in lives of a recession/depression directly caused by lockdown, because, yknow, we’ve had that before.
Your selfishness has been revealed
Just stay indoors out of the way the rest of us will crack on my grandfather who was as dunkirk would have 1 word to describe you “COWARD”
Some people have those views about Bill Gates, and other theories about the origins of the virus, others don’t.
I personally don’t and personally don’t think they are very important right now. The core of the issue is really about how governments and the media and our culture AND THE PUBLIC have reacted to it.
Most people who post here think that reaction has been wrong-headed and will cause a lot of damage, and we are trying to get our fellow citizens to consider different points of view.
“You are all lost causes here” – well, there are a few of us, and we have subtly different views on many things. To what exactly are you referring that makes us ALL lost causes.
Regarding a second wave, where’s you evidence?
Regarding selfish needs, I am a miserable git and my life has not been overly affected by this, but I can see how it affects others and how it does and how I think it will affect our society. Saving lives at all costs has never ever been what human societies have done, and it cannot be sustained, and will in fact end up ruining or ending early many more lives than it theoretically saves.
Make some specific arguments, maybe, rather than crude insults?
“I just feel your all being too ignorant of how other people feel”
People feel disproportionately over-anxious. Happy now?
So it has to be true then, if it’s on Twitter.
Twitter, eh? Must be true then. Please go away, troll.
Agree with you.
Appears out of nowhere, pro-narrative, cannot handle facts – either troll or 77th Brigade.
Getting more and more common on newspaper and website comment boards, social media on all platforms and so on so we must be striking close to home.
Is anonymous the new civic duty who appeared then I cannot recall seeing comment not since?
Can you point me to some statistics that demonstrate a second wave is here? Perhaps in countries that have eased their “lockdown” restrictions?
Wow, lots of people really are certain about a #second wave. Funny because the lockdown sure stopped the #first wave. And there have been so many #second waves in Italy, France, Spain etc. Stay at home you miserable cu#ts.
Oh joy, another one of these loons who comes on a site called Lockdown Sceptics to be surprised by what they find here
I’m curious to know what exactly do you think this second wave will look like.
Then if you think that you are just here for a sanctimonious hit and run and haven’t spent any time reading the reams of comments going back weeks, where we AGONISE daily and repeatedly about what this is doing to others. Buzz off you moralising twit.
You care so much about others that you are happy to see everything worth living for taken away, their livelihood destroyed, their healthcare system destroyed, etc to the point where even teenagers are killing themselves and we haven’t even saved the vulnerable – we have killed them off too. You must be one pretty fucking caring individual.
If Van-Tam is right.
He was pretty compelling today in what he said.
But then it struck me to ask why other countries who have lifted lockdown are fairing better already BUT Van-Tam is convinced that we won’t.
Is the UK a special case for any reason or is Van-Tam being told to stick to this line for another reason?
Doesn’t the same “spring in a box” apply to all countries?
The focus now should be on new hospital admissions as that’s where deaths would be expected to come from. If the infection level goes up or even the R rate it doesn’t mean that much unless people end up getting hospitalised.
Yes indeed confirmed cases are meaningless as different countries test differently.
Exactly. Who cares if there are 15 million asymptomatic cases?! As long as those 15 million people don’t suddenly all converge on the care homes and hospitals I think we can deal
Maybe other governments have not sold out to Bill Gates…?
Yes indeed, why would it be different here? From what I have seen, there’s little correlation between any “lockdowns” and numbers of deaths, one way or the other. But don’t take my word for it, or anyone else’s – do you own research and thinking. This is too big an issue to put too much trust in others.
From what I can tell France are recording more new cases per day than UK (according to Wordometer). This should mean that they are at even more risk by easing restrictions yet we don’t hear anything about second wave fears there.
All these medical ‘The Science’ talking heads are now lying as far as I’m concerned. If they (SAGE & PHE) indeed recommended more modest measures and didn’t support a full lockdown (according to Chris Snowdon even Fergus McFerguson didn’t mention a full lockdown in his Mystic Meg paper) then why are they now all seemingly properly on board with all this fear mongering bullshit?
My only conclusion is that they’re lying to protect their arses as co-conspirators in this disaster.
Well either that, or they are beyond
incompetent. Estimates range from criminal negligence to government bribes.
Maybe 500k did it?
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-coronavirus-herd-immunity
Somebody who thinks the measure of success is getting as close to zero deaths as possible.
For me the only relevant question is, if modelling had predicted 4k deaths in Sweden by this stage would that have been justification to wreck their economy.
I’d be really interested to see what the people predicting a catastrophy in Sweden have to say now. Are the humble enough to admit they were wrong or are they more likely to say that’s it’s still a bad result. I’m sure Lena Einhorn was one of them and it would seem she’s not able to admit she was wrong either.
The usual discussion about the Fergusson calculations based upon 60% herd immunity and deaths according to that. MSM is still discussing that level of herd immunity when everything points to a herd immunity much less around 20%. This explains why the pandemic is waning in many countries . The pandemic has now been raging for almost 5 months and still only 6 million cases and perhaps 10 times more undetected asymptomatic. This is still low compared to what it would have been in a new flu pandemic with the requirement of 60% herd immunity before the decline. There is a certain lower “roof” of immunity to Covid-19 in the population when the spread suddenly stops. Then it stops and decline in a very peculiar fashion almost identical in many countries. That doesn’t mean that there could be criticism in the Swedish approach. Stockholm made a big mistake in not protecting the care homes better and stopping visits to them first on 1st April. But that seems to be a common mistake everywhere. Otherwise the wired article is the usual MSM propaganda for the lockdown fanatics.
Interesting that Toby, like most other commentators, doesn’t bother to refer to what I would have thought waste ultimate killer quote on the 2m rule, the inside information from Prof Dingwall reported in the Telegraph on May 7th:
“Prof Dingwall said he had been told by a senior public health specialist that “we knew it was one metre but we doubled it to two because we did not think the British population would understand what one metre was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side“.“
Why is everyone leaving it out? Surely it would have been an ideal fit for Toby’s column in the Telegraph on the 2m rule, that he links today? Was it retracted or something and I missed the story? Or am I just over-rating its significance? It’s pretty devastating, isn’t it?
Quite – perhaps the government has placed a D-notice on it to cover their lies and incompetence. Roll on the inquiry!
I thought it was a glaring omission.
It’s a mystery Mark!
Why are we hung up on the ridiculous 2m rule? Businesses must have already spent a fortune altering premises etc to accommodate this arbitrary rule when even the government’s own guidelines say it is unnecessary when we reach action level 2. This clearly states “no or little social distancing”.
Am I missing something?
It’s yet another ridiculous anomaly.
The buisnesses should have done their own research.
In my shopping centre they have marked out directional arrows and little round circles 2 metres apart and people happily ignore them, walk along the opposite route and overtake each other.
I think Toby did mention it – a long time ago though. If I remember rightly it was the day when he quoted what Sweden’s Public Health authority website says regarding what is a safe distance (information I had given him!)
Yes it seems devastating to me, though I’d like us to get to a point where we’re not talking about 2m or 1m or about coronavirus at all. That’s when this will be over.
I have been tweeting this regularly.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u4xans895grbh84/TWITTER_Population_Fatality_Ratio_29May2020.pdf?dl=0
This is the latest posting from Prof Levitt. He is very concerned that already, in information published by China in Feb, it was clearly indicated the extreme age profile of deaths in Covid-19. In the end of March he informed Fergusson about this which could have influenced the calculations but they didn’t accept his figures. In this pdf you can see how predictions of deaths in US,UK, Diamond princess, Hubei according to Ferguson and everybody can see how wrong they are and how far from the real outcome. Why didn’t the SAGE group take seriously the actual death rate per age group in China?
There’s the umpteen thousand dollar question.
I hope he broadcasts widely that he informed Neil Ferguson and was ignored..
Remember the scientist dude in Mars Attacks, played by Pierce Brosnan ? Because all of SAGE wanted to be him, their moment of glory where they would save the world.
Iirc, he ended up spliced to half a chihuahua …
I think this is the key to suing them.
BBC website: “Domestic competitive sport back on 1 June”. Cue picture of someone carefully spray-sanitising a football. Jesus.
The bundesliga has been on… The mask on mask off thing is fucking ridiculous. Oh and for god’s sake, they held a minute’s silence for all Corona victims last week. In an empty stadium. Jesus wept!
Now, I do love watching football, but without spectators… It’s just not the same at all, sadly
Now, now. Man City play like that all the time.
Ha!! Love that, being a United fan I would not disagree
They just won’t give up, will they?
Question – where does the 8000 cases a day come from? A guess? And this statement: “And given that yesterday saw the highest number of cases reported globally ever”. Is that correct? I thought it was dying out in most countries.
But the last paragraph takes the biscuit: “He was not making predictions, he said, but intensive surveillance, large-scale screening, effective contact tracing, isolation of cases, quarantine for international arrivals and some residual physical distancing “is a possible new normal”, he said.”
Oh yes, a “new normal”. F OFF!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/29/covid-19-spreading-too-fast-to-lift-uk-lockdown-sage-adviser
It certainly won’t be my new normal. Ever.
Out of all the rags, The Guardian may well be the most toxic of them all.
The Grad pushes credulity even further than the government.
Ah… The guardian again. Even they must know they are in trouble now, being outmanoeuvred completely in this charade. Couldn’t happen to nicer bunch of tossers
How to deal with tracking and tracing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olG6FL43D0M
There is nothing they can legally do if we refuse to give names of people we have been in contact with..according to people who have been ‘trained’ to be contact tracers; and several lawyers have confirmed this..
Yup. My plan:
1 I don’t answer my phone when it’s an unknown number anyway so….. ignore their message.
2 Ignore their message
3 Ignore their message
4 If by some fluke they manage to get me on the phone, deny having talked to anyone or been at work or gone anywhere at all in the past two months because I was just *TOO SCARED*. Whoever told them I’d been in their company must have been with my twin sister Darkseid, not me.
Dr Vernon Coleman on top form today.
This video will be take down post haste I would imagine
https://youtu.be/kvlhVD5TunY
It should be broadcast on every British TV channel at prime time every day for a week.
Imagine the result.
After reading the open letter from the Brazilian scientists and the Levitt/Bhatti exchange, I’m now wondering what Imperial College thinks given they seem to be now the laughingstock of the world due to their apocalyptic modelling that’s more fit for the Book of Revelation than serious science.
If Imperial wants to salvage what’s left of their tattered reputation they should sack the department responsible for this whole sorry mess as they’ve pretty much brought the institution into disrepute. And blacklisted so that they can never work again.
Or maybe time to close the whole institution down.
They may not be bothered – haven’t they just had a huge donation from China?
Yeah I’ve heard of that and I think that’s the problem we’re having with many of our universities now – so desperate for cash that they have prostituted themselves to China. It’s like the LSE and Libya many years ago.
You wanna see how much bill gates ‘foundation’ has given them over the years.
I love the way they refer to ‘Imperial’ as a pompous name. Couldn’t think of a better adjective.
That did make me laugh and the sarcastic way they also used the word “empire” was spot on.
I hope they get sued out of existence
Most people are clueless unfortunately. They don’t know about ICL, they don’t know who funds it, and they don’t know that same person is funding the vaccine. When the same party funds both the problem and the solution perhaps even the most useless of journalists could start asking some questions.
Just checking you’ve all seen these.
Germany https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/29/german-official-leaks-report-denouncing-corona-as-global-false-alarm/
Norway https://www.thelocal.dk/20200529/leaked-emails-show-how-denmarks-pm-steam-rollered-her-own-health-agency
*SORRY, Denmark! I do know the difference, I promise!
Yes, that article on Denmark shows how politicised everything is..
Sobering stuff. Which leads back to the big question: Why did so many governments simultaneously take the same route?
Domino rally. As soon as one did it then others were compelled to follow suit. Imagine being the politician that didn’t lock down while your people are dying in numbers.
Or… Some other agenda. We don’t want to believe it but don’t discount it
Sheep.
We are under the total control of sheep.
Media pressure, since “New Labour” politics has been dictated by “Spin”, so no matter how much a policy makes sense, such as when the Gov tried to reform tax credits, and when there is a media backlash on it then the media always wins and the Gov do what they think is popular.
90% approval rating, frothing hysteria from the press who were selling papers like hot cakes, and even an opposition yelling to do it quicker and more severely, Macron threatening us if we didn’t do it, the WHO telling us to do it, I hope to God heads roll when this is over!
This “lockdown” thingy isn’t working and we need stronger measures.
It might seem that the only way to halt the spread of the affliction is to shoot everyone aged over seventy, but as a septuagenarian I strongly disagree.
We should shoot everyone aged over thirty, just to be on the safe side.
Yep. That was the strategy followed, based on the Imperial model, in the 2001 Foot & Mouth outbreak. Somebody eventually stepped in before every single cow and sheep in the country was killed. There was enormous suffering in farming communities and the inhumane slaughter of millions of perfectly healthy animals.
Yep… Another highlight of the Ferguson CV
Infamous, horrible, disgusting, will NEVER forget it.
Ferguson ought to have been culled at the time.
Still have grim memories of the smell of the burning pyres from the farms around my village.
I remember the foot and mouth outbreak well, as I was often at a local farm. It was so distressing and I’ve never forgotten it – huge pyres of burning cattle. My elderly farmer friends never recovered. Ferguson’s name was cursed.
Shooting everybody aged between twenty and thirty, with the exception of Poppy, would probably eliminate most of the bedwetters.
Can we include my 20 year old son in the “don’t kill” list? He’s been as sceptical as me from day one.
Yea, he, even he, shall be spared, for verily he is a Righteous Person.
I’m in my late forties, and judging from my Facebook feed, my generation are among the biggest bedwetters of them all. If anything, they’re becoming ever more neurotic and tunnel-visioned as the weeks go by.
(Bit unfair to *actual* bedwetters, mind you. After all, what happens in their sleep isn’t their fault, and is definitely not a conscious decision!)
Wasn’t it 40 in Logan’s Run?
Think it’s 40 in the film but 30 in the book. There’s a remake in the offing but not sure how far it’s progressed. I’ve always been a Jenny Agutter fan after watching Logan’s Run though.
I think it was 30 in the film. Horrifying. “Renew!”.
This seems quite detailed. Looks like it’s a couple of months out of date but should give a decent picture of what was happening early on in the pandemic:
https://www.ebmedicine.net/topics/infectious-disease/COVID-19
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.25.20112797v1.full.pdf
From New York City Houshold size the most important risk for disease.
“the average household size emerges as the single most important explanatory variable”
“The percentage of the population above the age of 65, as well as that below the poverty line, are additional indicators with a significant impact on the case incidence rate, along with their interaction term. Contrary to common belief, population density, per se, fails to have a significantly positive impact. Indeed, population densities and case incidence rates are negatively correlated, with a -33% correlation coefficient”
Good idea to have these large households locked down for weeks?Think of Gov Cuomo’s admission that he couldn’t understand that 60% of new cases for Covid-19 entering New York hospitals came direct from home even though lockdown inside home for weeks!
In such a closed environment among so many people grouped together, perfect condition for Covid-19 to spread.
King Cuomo is an idiot that is trying to prolong this situation as long as he possibly can for political purposes.
His Grace nearly reneged on his prior plan, but His Grace permitted certain parts of the state to enter, “Phase 2, ” reopening yesterday.
Sadly, this forward progress was blunted by His Grace’s new, “mandatory mask, ” order that applies to all places of business and work spaces.
“….watch it from the two-hour point onwards, in which Levitt begins to lose patience with the dissembling Bhatt. “
I don’t think Bhatt is dissembling. He genuinely believes that the epidemic has only just got going and so 95% of the UK remains to be infected; that the deaths so far are just the tip of the iceberg.
This is the fundamental issue. There are two alternatives:
Obviously (1) is the conventional, acceptable viewpoint; and (2) is only believed by heretics and cranks.
Evidence apparently supporting (1) can be found and explained. If we are at the tail end of the epidemic, where did the increase in cases and spike in deaths come from? Why does the serological testing only show 5% of the population has antibodies? “What about Italy?”, they wail. Really, it’s a slam dunk for (1) for most people, including scientific ‘experts’.
It’s only people with a nose for inconsistencies who would think to question it. And those with an ability to piece together subtle clues and see how the ‘experiment’ being changed half way through has created self-fulfilling results. They also need to be able to think of immunity as a continuum of response to exposure and resistance that develops with continuous exposure to a cocktail of viruses at low doses, rather than ‘SIR’.
I wouldn’t call the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford a crank. Or Nobel prize winners.
I’m being ironic.
Went to my local major hospital today. It was a Saturday clinic as part of the drive to catch up on 3 months of inactivity. This is an eye clinic. Folks were there to have a scan of the back of the eyes. It’s like sitting at a microscope for a minute, maybe less while the machine takes a picture. No pain, no intrusion.
Now for the Matt Hancock moments from my experience. I approach reception. Stand back from the hazard tape on the floor. I’m over 2 metres away from the masked-up receptionist. Other folks around, suitably socially distanced of course, sitting in silence also masked-up. Receptionist asks my name. I’ve pre-prepared an A4 sheet with my details because I don’t like all and sundry knowing these key identifiers; especially now that given the distance between us I have to speak loudly. I hold up my sheet for him to see. The goon proceeds to say out loud what he reads. As I’m not backward at coming forward I tell him not to do this as it kind of defeats the objective. We finish our interaction with him asking me to mask-up and sanitize my hands.
Next I go see the nurse so that he can check my vision – I have to read the lowest letters on the chart that I can. This involves me sitting in a chair, holding a plastic cover over one eye, reading the chart, then swapping over. For me to do this requires him to wear gloves, a plastic apron, a mask, and a visor. Didn’t do too well I fear, glasses steamed up due to the mask.
Next I go see the technician who operates the scanner. He is masked-up, has a plastic apron on and gloves. Over in matter of minutes.
I paint this covid-culture picture because it’s in sharp contrast to how things usually look and feel. The physical space is usually filled with chairs for patients, family and friends to wait. One can approach the desk and offer personal information to the receptionist almost privately sheltered by the background noise. One can wait in silence, watch the world go by, earwig interesting conversations, have a bit of banter, laugh a little maybe. Staff intermingle with the people. It’s people with faces and voices. Not so today.
So thank you for nothing Mr Hancock. You’ve made staff and patients wear PPE unnecessarily. The show of PPE, reception area, and socially distanced waiting I experienced today left me feeling like a number, a commodity on the NHS conveyor belt. If this is your template for getting the non-covid NHS up and running it’s a true reflection of you. Cold, heartless, sterile and vacuous. Whilst I’m here I must say that your speaking delivery at those ghastly briefings shows you would benefit from presentation and speaking skills training. Take perverse solace in the fact you’re not the only one.
Note that the PPE used for your session is no doubt on its way to landfill. No wonder there’s a shortage!
At least they didn’t make you take part in one of their “heartwarming” dance routines.
These people must gave sone sort of medical background. Did you ask them what they thought of the monkey rituals they have to observe?
As the DT article is behind the paywall I couldn’t read it however I have taken solice in the comments section. The comment at 8.17pm on 29th is spot on.
You tease …
Ha Ha. Rubbish comment by me think I deleted the first para I write by mistake! Toby wrote an article for the DT a couple of days back. About 80% of the comments are anti lockdown.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/29/german-official-leaks-report-denouncing-corona-as-global-false-alarm/
Remember the leaked memo from a department in Germany beginning of May saying the corona virus response was wrong?
“Initially, the government tried to dismiss the report as “the work of one employee”, and its contents as “his own opinion” – while the journalists closed ranks, no questions asked, with the politicians.
But the 93-pages report titled “Analysis of the Crisis Management” has been drafted by a scientific panel appointed by the interior ministry and composed by external medical experts from several German universities.”
Highlights from the report
A reproach could go along these lines: During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News.
Blimey! That’s amazing!! How much credibility does this have, do you think?
The actualy document is mind blowing. Very, very strong (I imagine even stronger in the native German but the person who translated still manages to capture the thoroughly pissed off tone). The guy takes no prisoners. If you go back on the comments pages there’ll be a link to the original document somewhere
A travel Vlogger I followed until today, posted a video today, this person explains why he is wearing a muzzle when he is not required to wear one. Because it makes other people feel comfortable. WHAT you like to restrict your breathing because it makes other people feel good.
What have some people become?
Cheeseus
Jesus wept.
It doesn’t make me feel comfortable when I see people wearing them, half the time I see them as virtue signalling twats (and yes I include my sister in this when she posted a photo of herself in a mask ditto her daughters).
I purposely did not post the link to the video as I did not want to give it views.
I am seeing very few people wearing face muzzles. Mainly side steppers round these parts, I walk to the side of the pavement or path, but do not divert off it. If people think passing someone is going to give then “the disease” I dread to think how they cope(d) with intimate contact.
Same here. As I’ve always said if people seriously think they’d get the virus just because someone walked past them then we shouldn’t be here, evolution would have stopped millions of years ago with the austrolapithecus africanus.
The ones in the muzzles tend to be the swervers.
Although I did come across a masker today – riding a bike along a country lane, alone, miles from anywhere.
Perhaps there’s an especially virulent rural mutation of the virus she’s concerned about, or is worried a passing vehicle driver could coronacough at her through a quarter inch thick car window, calculating windspeed and direction and adjusting the viral trajectory with a sniper’s accuracy.
Nothing against masks myself, but that was just plain daft.
A dose of Clap?
You mean cow clap?
Virtue signalling twats or true bedwetters. Not sure which is worse.
Sheeple with less understanding of science and math than the average medieval plague doctor thanks to decades of public schooling aimed at indoctrination rather than education?
I never thought I would speak in favour of orange man Trump, but he’s gone up in my estimation recently.
Had a peak at his Twitter feed yesterday after he said he would crack down on twitter censorship… Wow, loads of negative comments and plenty of brainwashed incredibly stupid sheep with respect to the virus. Way worse than the Uk. Went to work taking the piss out of a few of them – I could tell they were oh so confused at a Brit biting at them with some facts.
Now taking on WHO, and by proxy China as well, yes of course he has an agenda like all politicians but nowhere is the loony leftie lockdownista Vs common sense battle as visible as it is over in the States
Same here. Totally agree with Trump’s stance on the WHO. This organisation is a joke.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8372911/Boris-puts-Dominic-Cummings-chance-one-witness-admits-sighting-aide.html
So Robin Lees the teacher who grassed on Cummings having spotted him at Barnard Castle also broke the lockdown rules.
I once had access to an animated emoji showing a man literally laughing his head off, wish Incould use it here!
I have the complete Twilight Zone television series on DVD. But with the coronavirus panic and lockdown, I don’t need it to see science fiction. All I need to do is turn on the news programs.
Charlie Brooker needs to do a Black Mirror episode on pandemics.
Apparently he said he couldn’t have written this current situation if he tried (or words to that effect), there’s no job for him anymore.
He could do a parody by showing how we actually went back to the dark ages in how we responded to this.
Thanks to our host for his article in the Torygraph today, they are having a really good war, Janet Daly’s article is another must read.
I must also announce that I have taken the train, for the first time in three months. The feeling was one of utter liberation. Although hardly ‘full’ there was more people on than I thought. I went to Oxford and walked from Hinksey to Kennington and back with a work colleague via the city centre.
Observations:
In my local station, a busy London commuter station, there has been a vaguely pathetic attempt to set up a one way system with child-like arrows on the floor that won’t survive contact with the regular flooding whenever it rains. The gateline staff are their usual smacked a*se selves but were, shock horror, smiling and greeting people, as were the station staff at Oxford.
The Turbos and the Electrostars do not have blocked off seating (and hopefully this continues) but there are station announcements ‘it may not be possible to maintain social distancing during peak time’. Don’t know about the IET’s yet though. Atos Annie is still warning you to ‘see it say it sort it’ or whatever drivel she comes out with.
Stations have ‘social distancing seating’ blocks but the tape has been ripped off and I rebelled and sat in a social distancing seat.
There are *open* toilets with stocked hand washy stuff in Oxford station!
Oxford city centre dead, parks and Thames path rammed. People being respectful with social distancing. More masks than in my town but I guess one should expect this given the general wonkiness of the city.
Many coffee shops and similar doing take out trade, a pleasure to see.
The train driver gave us a really good acceleration out of Oxford, really opened out the old throttle, ROAAR.
Fortunately we are in driver only operated land so presumably less opportunity for the RMT to raise bother.
Forgot to mention – cyclists with Extinction rebellion signs making a nuisance of themselves on the Thames towpath…
cyclists .. nuisance … towpath …
Think I can see a solution here !
Just been on National Rail Enquiries, lovely message pops up when you use the journey planner:
Is your journey necessary?
Help us keep trains clear for those who really need them and follow the recommended guidance.
If you still have to use the train it is essential that we can keep you informed of any last minute changes, risks of overcrowding or alternatives you may want to consider.
You can choose how we keep you updated here:
Nice to make your potential customers feel wanted. Think I will buy a car.
Do it. Way cheaper.
Everybody muzzled??
On the train, no one!!
Now that’s encouraging news – but then I suppose only non-sheep would “dare” to take public transport in the first place.
It’s not a bad idea just to get rid of your cell phones. The evidence has shown for a long time that they are hazardous to human health.
You are soon going to need your cellphone for all purchases. Cash is almost defunct already. Cards will be next.
https://twitter.com/plaforscience/status/1266845269913731072/photo/1
Now with five countries,DE,NL,UK,SP,IT,SWE following exactly the same curve of Covid-19 deaths Only a constantly growing natural cause can produce this: HERD IMMUNITY
In no-lockdown, light lockdown, severe lockdown the same curve
I’ve just realised that there is no way that Micheal Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short etc) will not have a book out describing this current madness in a couple of years. It’s almost too perfect a subject given what he usually writes about. Lots of Mathy technicalities to explain, world-changing decisions made on the basis of different ways of crunching the numbers, little-know characters whose smarts and dogged determination to find out the truth regardless of the views of the majority lead them important discoveries (will Michael Levitt be the new Mark Baum from The Big Short, and Neil Ferguson the new Alan Greenspan?)
It’s going to be something to look forward to among all the economic devastation.
“No, it’s not what you think. Yesterday, a member of SAGE gave a press conference in which he warned that the Government was easing lockdown too fast.”
I’m really curious to know what the background is to this. Edmunds is clearly selling a particular viewpoint. He must know this is not the only opinion.
I have a degree in Chemistry, and maybe for this reason I’m a bit snotty about this crowd. Epidemiologists to me seem rather more like mathematicians and statisticians than scientists.
Of course, everyone knows that mathematics is a science. Well, I suppose they’re closer to science than the humanities, but epidemiology strikes me as somewhat more akin to the arts.
Edmunds and his ilk are to science in my mind as Hirst is to art. Well, I’m sure Saatchi would pay good money for it, but it’s not to everyone’s taste …
The SAGE minutes have now been released to Simon Nolan’s legal team
They will be torn apart.
The advsors know they are toast.
I might even donate a 2nd time now progress is being made.
good to read this – I wondered where epidemiology fitted in! You sound like me -you have developed a healthy disregard for various ‘scientific’ subjects and can smell BS a mile away.
Seems to me that epidemiology is more like creative accounting whereby they have some basic templates in which they try to make the data fit. The good ones will probably have some real life experience in dealing with epidemics and will be able to do more realistic modelling based on their knowledge.
As soon as I saw the modelling I thought it was bollocks. The modelling should be different for every town and city so how could you ever have a single model for a country that caters for all the differences.
Even the R number is an observed average. Each town or city will have a different R. So, as above, the R for a whole country is virtually meaningless. When they started talking about the R in care homes I thought they were having a laugh. I mean what are you going to do to control the R in a care home, shift some beds around or maybe close some doors? Absolute nonsense.
Epidemiology seems to be to medicine what economics is to science.
Kinda arty.
Michael Levitt (in the webinar Toby talks about) is an outsider commenting on the epidemiologists’ methods. He highlights that they have no ‘sanity checks’.
Reading and listening to these people, it seems to me that the epidemiologists have only a layman’s grasp of immunology, which is reflected in their ultra-simple SIR models and simplistic expectations of seroprevalence.
And the immunologists have no clue about the modelling and do not comment on it. Only an outsider, it seems, can see where the epidemiologists are going wrong.
What puzzles me is this: by definition, epidemiology needs to be multi-disciplinary, calling on multilayered strands of expertise to inform policy making. Yet I’ve been struck by the narrow, embarrassingly simplistic and woefully ignorant statements made by some within the field (e.g. see the Cambridge Union Debate from several weeks ago). Knowing how exponents work in a pure maths context is woefully inadequate, unless one combines this knowledge with virology, immunology and a whole host of related fields.
I forgot to mention that the only reason I can think of for talking about a useless R number in care homes was to make the R number for the country artificially high.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that the crucial point with the Imperial model, wasn’t so much the model itself but the assumptions upon which it was based, which may well be WAY off. I’ve not read the SAGE minutes in detail but there didn’t seem to be much questioning of those assumptions at the time and still not now, despite emerging evidence to the contrary.
It’s a worry that having made such a big bet on the worst case, there’s an unwllingness to say it was so wrong, in order to preserve reputations both from politicians and experts.
Have you spotted Vallance has a piece in the Telegraph today, paving the way for having got it wrong, and putting the blame firmly back on politicans? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/will-have-learned-lot-including-do-better-next-time-science/
I said the other day the scientists need to take control of the narrative. Maybe some of them are lurkers on here.
Fair play to them for making their voices heard. At least if there’s disagreement then the one way mirror of propganda may well get shattered.
I would lay more blame on the politicians – they are the ones who are there to make the final decisions and to consider the tradeoffs and the long term welfare of the country, not just rule on the narrow issue of one new virus.
But I don’t buy that all the scientists are open-minded, unbiased and incapable of trying to cover their mistakes.
But underneath it was this article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/31/second-wave-coronavirus-uk-winter-peak-covid/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr
Another lovely, sane filled afternoon on Glasgow Green.
Anyone worried about coming along please don’t. You will meet a new family including the police.
The government are now trying to throw the scientific advisors under the bus, where they, the government, all devolved governments and the NHS belong
The tide is turning.
.
“The government are now trying to throw the scientific advisors under the bus”
Are they? Can I help them?
(joke)
Are you sure it’s a joke (on your part)?
We need more buses.
(Also a joke – I think)
I’m not quite sure how the theme song is supposed to work, so please forgive me if these aren’t quite the business.
I’m playing “Come Back And Shake Me” by Clodagh Rodgers, which includes the unforgettable line “your old baby doll, your raggedy doll is waiting for you to play again”.
When lockdown is over babe.
I’ve also been dying to play “Love Is In The Air” by John Paul Jones in the presence of the masked ghouls …
Oops, that’s John Paul Young. (I’m an old Led Zep fan.)
You’ve definitely got the hang of it.
Here’s the one that all world leaders (with the honourable exception of Sweden) sing to themselves in their massive bathrooms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqJHoZBJYxI
This is probably of interest to the general audience here: http://www.protecttheherd.org
Long story short, I got so tired of having to argue with people, especially my fellow 30 year olds, that they should not be so terrorized and ought to consider or, at least, acknowledge the massive harms of total lockdown, that I ended up consolidating my arguments into a website that would spare my vocal cords further damage. Please help me spread the word.
This is what the idiots at Kingston Council have done. They’ve closed two lanes on Kingston bridge to allow more pedestrian space for “social distancing”. This sh*tshow has been up for a week now.
It’s causing chaos. Traffic backed up in all directions (more congestion = greater pollution), pedestrians arguing with cyclists (no change there then) and general confusion from all road users.
I despair!
lol, councils know no limits to being absolutely useless
I used to live in Surbiton and I know that hellish one way system well (or that’s not quite true, more than once ended up in a multi story carpark by mistake, by being in the wrong lane!). Sympathies!
Idiots!………yeah your a loony!
People need to extend civil disobedience into refusing to pay Council Tax as a form of protest. This extortion racket is never going to end until more people say no. We haven’t paid it in years and went to Court when a Judge told us you only have 6 reasons why you can’t pay and a protest isn’t one of them!
Wow
Apparently some shit went down again today in Hyde Park. Anyone seen any decent footage?
Guido had this covered – has youtube link
https://order-order.com/2020/05/30/breaking-piers-corbyn-arrested-again/
Danke shon
Is it true that as Media Guido has it the infamous anti-Cummings, pro-eternal-lockdown Maitlis monologue got over 40,000 complaints? If so, that is an astonishing number.
They stopped taking complaints after a few hours as well. When I went to have a look there was just a message saying “We’ve have a lot of complaints, please enter your email address and we will notify you of the outcome”.
I would imagine they did this so they can play down the level of complaints, as it would been in the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions.
That’s an incredible number – literally. Who were these complaining people? It was the most uplifting thing I’ve seen on the Beeb for months!
How does test and trace work if, as the WHO claim, 25% of infected persons never experience symptoms. Presumably you will only find out about the asymptomatic carrier maybe 14 days after they became infected when other people become affected. It might take you several days to get their attention…not everyone will respond to a text message immediately. By the time you’ve identified an asymptomatic carrier they might have infected 4 other people and with a 25% asymptomatic rate one of those will likely be asymptomatic as well.
Once you are out of lockdown the number of people needing to be contacted could be in the hundreds depending on the nature of the person’s work and social interactions.
I remain highly sceptical about the effectiveness of these procedures beyond the initial outbreak period, when you are dealing with a small number of potentially infected persons rather than hundreds of thousands or maybe millions.
Far more effective is social distancing, social isolation of the vulnerable and drumming into people the importance of basic hygiene procedures (hand washing, not touching your face with your hands). The Germans are germophobic and very assiduous in attending to hygiene and monitoring their health (famously their toilets have shelves so they can check their faeces for signs of ill health). That probably explains why they have not had a bigger outbreak so far. Let’s be honest, the British are not world leaders in hygiene.
It’s the Dutch who have the little shelves, at least that’s the only country where I’ve seen them.Ugh.
Some Germans do tend to be hypochondriac, though. Makes it all the more surprising that they’ve behaved more sensibly than us over the cold bug.But then, who hasn’t?
The toilet shelf was commonplace in Russia and Eastern Europe (don’t know if it still is…)
It seemed to work in South Korea, though there may be other reasons for their low mortality. I guess you don’t need to get EVERY case, just enough of them to stop the R0 getting above 1. That may not require that much, if it’s true that many have natural immunity.
It failed here the first time round, obviously the Koreans were much further ahead than we were in planning and execution. We’ll see whether we have caught up. Of course it’s not a true test as a lot have already had it, at least in London, but not elsewhere – but then again we go back to whether there is natural immunity meaning that herd immunity threshold is lower.
Not much sign of second waves happening in Europe, but am not aware of how good if at all their track and trace is. I know the Germans test a lot more, but it’s what you do with the data that counts. Certainly what’s happened in the UK so far doesn’t inspire confidence.
I did read about a US proposal for TTT that involved testing ALL key workers DAILY. That removes a lot of the uncertainty but it may be way over the top and far from achievable here in any realistic timescale.
You’d think this kind of information – the extent of natural immunity, how other countries have done TTT – would make appropriate subjects for serious journalists from TV news and print media, but I’ve seen none of it – they either print government propaganda or sensationalist crap or hightly politicised stuff.
The other thing we really need to see is the data separated between the community and hospitals and care homes. Tests done, whether the sample is random or not, rate of infection in the different settings, estimates for R0 by setting, estimates for where and how transmitted.
It doesn’t. It’s a ladder to climb down. They think they can continue pretending the virus is a major threat by rolling this out and lifting lockdown. They can’t and won’t escape the truth that this lockdown was a disgusting crime against human rights and good sense which will cause at least as many deaths as the virus.
My phone beeped loudly and a friendly message popped up from the local law enforcement community, telling me there’s a curfew from 8 pm
It’s now 9:20, and the crowds are just beginning to grow
I expect it’s a protest against the lockdown
Have you seen the video of the National Guard, replete with a lovely big tank, strolling through a suburban street shouting orders at people to “get inside”? When the group standing at their open front door filming the spectacle didn’t get inside quick enough, the order to “light ’em up” (straight from Call of Duty) was given and the people were shot with paint pellets.
https://twitter.com/ricburton/status/1266940057631387648?s=21&fbclid=IwAR1J2rPVa-Hfx-cZv9PWyaVGcEkHxH0n_9t2IqerXnEljqWG_ygXqHYFYew
It’s not even remotely shocking. It’s what lockdown enthusiasts have been masturbating over for weeks.
Hang on a minute – they’re dealing with proper rioting thugs and looters, euphemistically referred to as “protesters” ,over there. Nothing to do with coronapanic.
If you watch the video you’ll see it took place on a suburban street. The military were enforcing the curfew. My point was, military intervention like this was demanded by many lockdown enthusiasts.
Ok, but presumably it’s part of the response to the ongoing street thuggery in the US, not to coronapanic, isn’t it?
I suppose some might resist authority on principle, but others would surely take account of the context? I mean, if we here were facing the kind of thing Americans are facing, I’d support a strong crackdown here. We used to “read the riot act” in such situations.
Just been reading some of the SAGE documents. A consensus statement from 2 March shows that they were well aware of the age skew of the virus; the document presents estimates for CFR and IFR for different age groups. Minutes of the meetings on March 5, 10 and 13 show that they discussed “cocooning”/social distancing for the elderly and vulnerable. The strategy to be pursued as of March 13 seemed to be a combination of household isolation for the ill (and possibly their family) and social distancing for the elderly and vulnerable. After March 13 shielding of the elderly and vulnerable doesn’t seem to be mentioned; they switched to focusing on the effects of school closures.
The question needs to be asked: Why did they abandon the strategy of protecting the elderly and vulnerable, which to many (all?) of us seemed from an early stage to be the most logical approach?
For the same reason as Norway:
‘‘“I probably took many of the decisions out of fear. Worst case scenarios became controlling, and we kept thinking; ‘how can we be a leader?’ These scenarios mean that you could say ‘maybe we’re going to get hit harder than we thought’, but we shouldn’t actually hold back even though we’re not sure it’s going to be that bad.”
https://www.thelocal.no/20200528/norway-pm-was-it-necessary-to-close-schools-maybe-not
Leadership, as in ‘following the crowd’ in the hope of ‘herd immunity’
Scandalous. According to a BBC report this morning, in two thirds of care homes NONE of the staff have been tested.
What we have done to care homes is the reason why I’m here, and it’s the reason why I won’t be letting this go when it’s over. The rank, neurotic selfishness of well, fit, young, affluent people weeping over risk, demanding draconian measures, and that meant we all stood by and slaughtered the most vulnerable. I am not a vindictive or vengeful person, but I am not stopping until everyone who took part in this health panto fully understands precisely what they did, that includes members of the public who spent their time snitching, shaming and frothing about perfectly normal private behaviour, and insisted on worshipping at the altar of a false idol, the Holy Infallible NHS. And party politics aside, I think after that, we need a concerted campaign to sort out social care. My elderly parents are terrified of the end, not because they want to live forever, but because they are terrified of dying without dignity. It’s got to stop.
Yes we should insist on revenge through the courts.
Absolutely.
They took the people most in need of protection and flung them to the wolves. And the same, or worse, has happened in other lockdown nations.
And even in Sweden, but at least the Swedes have had the grace to say sorry.
And ideally through the ballot box though no MP or party comes out of this with any credit in my book. Every man and woman jack of them has been more or less complicit.
Because they did not want the embarrassment of pictures of overrun hospitals getting out across the world.
But according to the minutes a shielding-the-vulnerable approach would substantially cut mortality and hospitalizations! They already knew that young and working-age people don’t get hospitalized much because of this condition.
Exactly, and Dominic Cumming’s message deliberately focused on the NHS, just like it did with Brexit (laying aside all sensible reasons pro and con re Brexit, I frankly don’t care anymore!) because Brits (who, get pissed and rock up to A&E, to abuse staff and waste resources every weekend) get all misty eyed about it. Although, I have as much scorn for the left who made plenty of political capital out of it as well. It’s a disgrace, what we’ve done. And most carehome staff really care about their residents, and there they are with no PPE, often no medical support, on their own, left to sink or swim.
Good morning, dear sane and sensible friends.
I’ve been wondering about human rights lawyers and activists. They gather in swarms if an illegal immigrant stubs his toe on landing, but when the most fundamental human rights of 67 million people are chucked in the bin literally overnight, the h.r. fanatics do nothing?
Yes I have tweeted a few but no reply.
Annie
The court actions have started. 1st judicial review with High Court and some Church leaders have issued papers to GOV in relation to HR breech.
It had occurred to me that the leader of the “opposition” was a human rights lawyer. You’d think he’d have put up some powerful objections but he’s as bad as Boris’ lot.
A LITTLE DITTY FOR CHRIS WHITTY, MATT HANCOCK ET AL
Be our guest
Be our guest
Put “the science”
To the test
Take a look at our R number
Cos it really is the best
Death rates too
Just for you
Why we only serve to scare
Make it look like Armageddon
Don’t believe us, think we’re meddlin’
We can lie
With reliance
After all folks it’ “the science”
And the science here is never peer reviewed
So you just follow blindly
Stay alert and kindly
Be our guest
Be our guest
Be our guest
Should be After all folks it’s the science.
This is how stupid social distancing is in schools and why it won’t achieve anything.
I walked past my local park yesterday afternoon and there around 200 kids there from I’d say 8-18 years old, all in large groups not socially distancing, having a good times chatting to each other.
Yet, when they go back to school they will be kept apart from each other, but you can guarantee at the end of the day when they leave school that they will be walking home in groups, and that they will meet up in the parks or in town later on again in these big groups to socialise.
All this expense paid to put in these social distancing measure and it will be a complete and utter waste of time, and with reduced class sizes it will be harming children’s education for years to come.
I suppose the measures are simply being introduced to make the parents feel better about sending their children back to school? It doesn’t make them right though, especially if they are enforced. We are going to end up with a lot of angry, distressed and paranoid children.
I believe some schools have had to back down over these measures as parents and teachers have said that they won’t send their kids back if there was social distancing or they have to wear masks while teaching (which is counterproductive).
Now those are parents who really care for their kids!
The pointlessness of it all is one of the most infuriating aspects. Some poor council worker is still putting tape on the monkey bars that form part of the outdoor exercise trail on our common. Meantime bins go unemptied, and the youth snog in the bushes.
No wonder the rest of Scandinavia are closing their borders with Sweden. Everyone wants to emigrate there!
Insights from Scandinavia (Sweden honourably excepted) into the most favoured political leadership style across the globe. Far from following the science, political leaders simply gave in to good old fashioned panic!
Denmark:
‘In an email leaked to the Politiken newspaper, Per Okkel, the top civil servant at the health ministry, told Søren Bostrøm, the head of the Danish Health Authority to suspend his sense of professional “proportionality” as a public servant, and instead adopt a “extreme precautionary principle” when giving political advice.’
‘the government’s emergency law on March 12 had stripped powers from the Danish Health Authority, changing it from an “regulatory authority” to an “advisory” one.
This allowed the government to ignore the authority’s opinion that Covid-19 was not a sufficiently dangerous disease to permit the government to impose compulsory interventions on the public under Denmark’s epidemic law.
As late as March 15, the Danish health Authority, argued there was insufficient ground for banning public events and gatherings of ten people under the law.
“The Danish Health Authority continues to consider that covid-19 cannot be described as a generally dangerous disease, as it does not have either a usually serious course or a high mortality rate,” it wrote.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20200529/leaked-emails-show-how-denmarks-pm-steam-rollered-her-own-health-agency
Norway:
‘“I probably took many of the decisions out of fear. Worst case scenarios became controlling, and we kept thinking; ‘how can we be a leader?’ These scenarios mean that you could say ‘maybe we’re going to get hit harder than we thought’, but we shouldn’t actually hold back even though we’re not sure it’s going to be that bad.”
https://www.thelocal.no/20200528/norway-pm-was-it-necessary-to-close-schools-maybe-not
Plenty of bullying then but no real leadership at all, a bit like somewhere much closer to home.
‘As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.’
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid
Denmark and Norway showing us the way. The dam is starting to crack!
“Men [governments in this case] think in herds, it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one”.
Charles Mackay ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ – 1841
When I pointed out that Covid had been declassified, Malcolm Kendrick reponded:
“I am guessing this is to prevent various law suits. It has the look of a sneaky attempt to suggest that, as Covid is not that bad, you cannot sue anyone for getting it if, for instance, no-one gave you proper PPE.”
Sunday morning 6.50.. just watched BBC (why oh why do i bother) to see a film which was basically covid death porn designed to put the fear of God into the watching public and also to promote the BBC anti lockdown easing position by focussing on the probability of a second wave. Looks like it was the Casualty production team as it was all so dramatic featuring clinical staff who seem to find it a surprise that they have to deal with death and how upsetting this is for them. Maybe a wrong career choice.
Apologies but every day i get more cynical. But seriously, what is it with the BBC in keeping all this going? It is obvious they want lockdown to continue for ever.
More upsetting is the death of Michael Angelis, the great scouse actor and narrator of Thomas the Tank engine
Unfortunately we paid the bbc, through our taxes, to develop this style of propaganda!
‘‘New home, new life’ (bbc world service) is but one, albeit very significant, example of the use that DFID and other agencies have made of soap operas as a tool for conveying narratives intended to bring about change. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, UK development money funded the creation of soap operas to develop awareness and acceptance of reforms….’
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/358906/Report_How_Soap_Operas_Bring_About_Change_3March2009.pdf
The bbc know they have to get rid of this government if they want to avoid serious reform, slashed budgets.
The longer they can drag this out, the worse the eventual toll in lives cut short and economic damage to which a public inquiry will point…..
mjr, I started cynical, I’m now murderous.
Michael Angelis – Boys from the Black Stuff.
Lucian in the liverbirds
Giyus a job!
My tv license expires tonight. I’d been vacillating about renewing it for a few weeks now but Friday’s Newsnight featured a 45 minute documentary following the covid outbreak in a hospital in Northern Italy. Needless to say I didn’t watch it.
I think the timing was suspicious too, given that Boris had just given us permission to have barbecues – but only after we’d waited another week. Give an inch of freedom, incite terror immediately after.
Anyway, that was the decider and my licence will not be renewed tomorrow, as I refuse to pay for blatant propaganda when I can get it free from the Guardian.
I gave an update on this last month as I registered to be volunteer on the Government scheme for people suffering from COVID-19, and to transport medication and supplies between hospitals.
Since the 4th April 2020 when I could start receiving alerts, there has not been a single alerts in the area which covers 30,000-40,000 people.
I have spoken to the other responders in the area as I thought my app may be not working, but they too have confirmed that there has been no alerts.
If the virus is prolific as the media, Gov and NHS are making out then I can’t believe that no help has been required for anyone in the area who has been infected, returned home after being hospitalised, or self isolated after being confirmed with it.
One can’t have it both ways…..
Either the virus is/was super-infectious, that would suggest that it’s ripped through community and is now passed.
Or, it isn’t as infectious as first thought and so it isn’t a massive threat.
‘No lockdown, shield the vulnerable’ – I said that in March.
Since lockdown begun, I haven’t seen one ambulance in our large village with a main road running through it. Not one. Often there are several beetling about in “normal” times.
We’ve not really have them here too except for an instance where a neighbour with a chronic health condition needed it but that’s just about it.
Before all this horrible nonsense the ambulances used to be screeching away down our road about every ten to twenty minutes, sirens blasting from them as well as from fire engines and police cars. That all stopped almost completely when this idiocy started and is only now getting back to normal, although still nowhere near as much as before. So, no one having heart attacks or bad accidents….? Or were those sirens just totally unnecessary back in the good old days of 2019? Ambulance siren blasting is one of the many, many reasons why I loathe the nhs.
Well said i curse at the fools who use the sirens on the main drag in my village. There is simply no need for it, such childish behaviour
Both my neighbours are nurses at the District General Hospital. They say it’s half empty.
It is my neighbour’s job to take supplies to hospitals and he has been furloughed since the start so I don’t know why they would have needed volunteers in the first place.
As someone on the ” front line ” I can tell you that in some areas of the country …no names so the stasi cant come knocking on my door as the figures are kept very secret the ratio of employed NHS workers to Covid19 patients is of the order of 2000 to 1 . So I am not sure why they would even need the services of volunteers.
Same here – I registered as a volunteer and have kept the app open at all times (so always ‘on duty’ in their terms) – not a whisper of a call on me, apart from some vacuous emails thanking me for my support.
If there are 750,000 of these people out there, why on earth haven’t they used them for contact tracing etc etc (and no, at that stage I would have rapidly de-registered!).
My neighbour registered on day one.
Hasn’t been called up once – and we have an old lady who lives round the corner whose son is delivering food parcels to her because she’s one of the truly vulnerable. Why wasn’t my neighbour mobilised to serve her immediately?
It took him months to even find out that she was locked in her house and her son was having to feed her.
That’s very interesting! You could almost believe it was a hoax! By the way I don’t know of anyone who has had it!
Wanna hear a corona joke? You wont get it..
Ha ha!
One thing that makes me laugh, though, is the piles of Corona beer boxes that Tesco is desperately trying to flog.
People really are THAT stupid!
Same here, through my work I deal with hundreds of customers ans suppliers, I tend to ask the people who I speak to if they’ve had it or anyone at their company has had it, but the answer always comes back as a no! Some of these companies have up to 2,000 staff as well
I caught something about 2 weeks into lockdown which was very different any seasonal cold I have ever had before, and it matched the COVID-19 symptoms, but when I took an antibody test it came back negative.
I know someone who’s sister-in-law has just had it. She had severe flu-like symptoms for a few days and was very tired after, as is normal after ordinary flu but is now up and about again.
Wow! I’d like to see that on the BBC and the Gradian.
Just a question that someone may be able to answer here: if the current estimated fatality rate is 0.26% what is the legal justification for businesses having to implement measures that are so radically different than those in place for seasonal flu (0.2% FR)?
Fair point, but be careful: we don’t want them to say that we should start doing all this stuff all the time, for other infections like the flu. That’s what these lockdown loonies are likely to say in response.
Yes, though I suspect the lockdown loonies will be the most irate when the dreadful consequences of lockdown emerge in their full glory!
It’s worth remembering that the Chancellor has announced that should another lockdown be needed there will be no furlough.
Well that’s going to be a natural progression isn’t it, mission creep so to speak.
There may not be strict lockdowns again in future but I’m sure people will start saying things like “we should have been doing social distancing all along” for flu.
Nah. That won’t fly. Hopefully more people will stay home when sick though. If you can work from home then do it when you have a cold or flu.
I hope it won’t fly, but agree that people being more mindful of how dangerous flu can be, handwashing, protecting the vulnerable is not a bad thing.
But maybe LD Sceptics should start asking Government to produce Flu-Secure Guidelines and with the recent reported wave of mumps, MUMPS-Secure Guidelines. What about Measles? The list could go on. The Twats are already crumbling under the weight of their hastily prepared Guidance. Maybe the only way to end this none sense is for us all to refuse to come out of our bastions unless we all receive a personally addressed letter from Nanny Twat promising us that we are ‘Safe’ because ‘the science’ now says so.
Tut tut. Don’t ask sensible questions. Nanny just rapped your knuckles.
Your username gives me life.
Watch this video: James Delingpole talking to Professor Dolores Cahill. It’s dynamite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZdWXonPzA&t=4808s
Just did! Watch it while you can…no doubt it will disappear and it’s definitely worth a listen.
At what point will the “sceptics” become fully vindicated in the UK?
There seems to be the complete opposite happening in Europe in terms of lifting restrictions and returning to old normal, with much positivity and none of the wall to wall doom and gloom.
There was a Primary school teacher from Denmark on Radio 5 Live on Friday afternoon who said it took a month for her school to go from re-opening with social distancing and use of ‘bubbles’ to having no need for any restriction at all.
So this begs the question why and with our schools now starting to return how long it will take for us to do the same?
This website has been a source of relief for many during this ‘crisis’ but I do think we at a watershed moment, either the sceptics are right OR the sceptics are wrong.
If the sceptics are wrong from a UK setting what on earth makes us so different to elsewhere?
Would MSM really be able to sell a story that ONLY the UK is suffering such extremes and that we can’t do anything until a vaccine is found…..assuming it ever is.
“Would MSM really be able to sell a story that ONLY the UK is suffering such extremes and that we can’t do anything until a vaccine is found…..assuming it ever is.”
You’d think not, and I really hope not. The example of other countries, and people’s natural instincts to be social, and have a job, I am hoping will push public opinion far enough that the government feel they can quietly drop it all.
Dispatches – Ch4 Weds night
We shall see
Interesting. Here’s hoping it’s hard-hitting.
No. But they can fight it for months, doing incredible destruction in the meantime
Given the fact that everytime I show this site to other people they just shrug it off because your not considered an official source of information I assume vindication is never going to come to you
Sure, but facts talk and become indisputable. And as deaths from this wane and the collateral damage mounts, suddenly we will discover that everyone was a lockdown sceptic all along.
Quote from ages back not quite sure who said it first:
Truth Passes Through Three Stages: First, It Is Ridiculed. Second, It Is Violently Opposed. Third, It Is Accepted As Self-Evident
This site is a forum for those who are sceptical about lockdown and the government reaction in general to exchange ideas, information and moral support. But I for one would welcome those with different points of view as long as they are prepared to argue their case, use logic, cite facts in support of their view.
Obviously this site is not an “official” source of information, but what does “official” mean? I think I would rather use “reliable” sources of information. There may be some overlap with “official”, but not 100%.
People on this forum and Mr Young in his daily updates provide links to many sources of information. I suggest you follow these links, but also do your own research, from as many sources as possible, and try as best you can to understand the things being presented, so that you can make as informed a decision as possible.
If you think you’re not qualified, then neither is the PM or cabinet. All they are doing is looking at advice (actually quite a narrow set of advice) and making of it what they will, combined with their political and personal views and aspirations, and what they think the public will wear.
Articles like this just make the writer look like they’re incapable of critical thinking:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/23/europes-covid-predicament-how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-the-anti-vaxxers?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
I don’t see the need for vaccinating everyone. That doesn’t make me one of “The alliance of anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazi rabble-rousers and esoteric hippies”.
Agree. The only people who need to be vaccinated, assuming we get one that has been properly trialled and deemed safe, are those who ordinarily get the flu jab every year.
Nooooooooo!
Well, a Guardian writer: what does one expect?
The ChAdOx1 vaccine doesn’t even stop you spreading Covid anyway. It just (hopefully) means you get a less severe illness. There is therefore literally no point in giving it to people in low risk groups.
That article’s unreadable. Like the BBC The Guardian is unrecognisable these days. Founders must be turning in their graves.
Demonising the anti-vaxxers is ongoing propaganda to prepare everyone to accept a rushed-through dose of I dread-to-think-what.
Well that didn’t take long did it?:
https://www.covipass.com/#CoviPassEndorse
Look at some of the people endorsing it and some of tend dates, it’s not “new” as in released this week.
This is the company behind it:
https://vstenterprises.com
Gotta do something in the ever more likely event we cannot find a vaccine. It’s forthe best
Are you the same anonymous as before?
I was going to put some facts in for you but thought nah, why bother you don’t listen anyway?
He’s 77th brigade I would expect – traitorous in my opinion.
Do they fall foul of the terrorism act does anyone know?
Watching UK Column there are moves afoot to make any crime that has a 2+ year sentence come under the anti-terrorism legislation. Not sure how serious this is as not seen it anyhwere else. Will check.
Do something like what? What is “for the best”?
Don’t encourage him.
I met a local church minister on a walk yesterday and we had a brief chat from opposite sides of a wide path. She explained that it is “much much too early to open churches when the situation is still so dangerous and unprecedented”. I suggested perhaps closing churches indefinitely was far more unprecedented than any virus. (800 yrs ago was the last time in England that a government closed churches. I suspect many viruses have come and gone in that time).
There are countries in the world where people risk imprisonment and death to practice their religion. I’m sure we could manage a few very small sacrifices to meet. Compulsary hand sanitizer, choose to stay away if we know anyone vulnerable, a ban on coffee and biscuits, not practice communion (even though CofE/Catholics this is one of the main points of church), or even a bit of antisocial distancing if we really have to.
I guess the point is that people have two beliefs which can justify any policy programme, including removing civil rights such as freedom to practice/not practice a religion. Those beliefs are that we are living through a resurgence of The Black Death (I suggest medicine may well have moved on a little since then), and that any death from COVID-19 is completely unacceptable. Both beliefs have to change.
It’s a practical illustration of why the CofE is dying and deserves no less. Namby pamby, PC drivel, driven by the overpromotion of dullards who shouldn’t ever have been given the collar.
In the good old days the Church would have been the ones calling the shots and burning everyone on this site at the stake.
Goes to show that they don’t really care about their flock and the essence of Jesus’s message.
True, alas. They huddle on the Net with the few remaining faithful and wave timidly from their sculleries, but they don’t seem to give a damn for the people of England whose Church they supposedly are.
And then they crawl out of their burrows to pontificate about Cummings.
Who’s supposed to cast the first stone?
The idea (or more often feeling, as it is not usually explicitly defended, but rather rationalised when challenged) that any death is unacceptable is rather bizarre for a Christian, imo, but actually very commonplace among them nowadays – something that I think points to the profound warping of Christianity in the past couple of centuries into a sentimental worship of “love”, interpreted to suit the “politically correct” dogmas and the profound failure to deal with real life that dominate among the modern clergy.
Probably a reaction against the hard judgementalism that was predominant a few centuries ago, but no less harmful – in fact. as we are seeing now, probably more harmful in reality.
I’ve often thought that fearing death and being a Christian should be anomalous.
Interesting that the old monasteries used to be the hospitals.
A friend is asking if any other businesses have encountered this problem:
The business and pandemic/infectious diseases cover as part of the insurance policy.
They tried to claim and got turned down flat.
When questioned the explanation was that as it was a Government mandated and ordered shutdown the insurance was invalid.
If it had been done under the Public Health (Control of Disease) 1984 Act and followed the due process in there and the business owner could prove that an infectious event and taken place within 25 miles of his premises and that had affected the business they would have paid up.
As the shutdown did not follow the law but was a ministerial edict insurance not paying up.
Anyone else had these are problem?
I remember this being discussed in late March. Because the government invented a new law to shut down businesses, the insurance against pandemic was void.
While cogitating on the idiocy of the world and incompetence of nearly anyone in the higher echelons of public service and large corporations in the early hours of the morning trying to get back to sleep after an old man’s piss due to too much beer and wine with a curry in the evening I thought of the following scenario:
The devolved nations have lockdown laws that are enforceable.
England doesn’t, we just have unenforceable guidelines – including all the crap that shops are putting in voluntarily “to make you feel safe” as I was told the other day. My answer is not printable but very short a 2 words to the manager. Having EHOs insinuating to businesses that they are enforceable is very disingenuous and another matter.
Anyway, the questions I was pondering was this:
was this just incompetence by the people making the legislation?
or did the devolved Governments insist own this and England didn’t?
or was it deliberate by England so that they could say “hey, it was your devolved Government that screwed you, not us, look at England’s legislation” then they can point out that the devolved nations voted in the one-party nanny states and appointed wannabe totalitarian dictators to rule them and who have now shown their true communist/fascist/whatever colours and if the want rid of them feel free to say “get rid of devolution and return to the old set-up, your choice”.
Any thoughts out there in sceptic land?
In devolved Wales I think it was a mixture of panic, stupidity, anglophobia and plain lust for power.
I used to be a supporter of devolution, and I still think Wales has been stomped on in the past, but I have altered my stance. We complained about English oppression, they gave us self-government, and now we oppress ourselves a hundred times worse.
The performing seals have even been using our national anthem as part of their disgusting ritual.
I am becoming more English by the second. (By blood I am half and half.)
I also live in Wales and the laws in Wales are draconian. Wales depends heavily on tourism and as I have pointed out in other posts, tourist dependent businesses are missing the crucial summer trade due to the timing of the lockdown. Devoled governments having different policies creates problems. For instance, if one government relaxes laws but another government maintains draconian laws, resentment is going to build among those still stuck with draconian laws. There is a pressure group which wants to abolish the Welsh assembly. The actions of the assembly government in the coronavirus situation could give this group ammunition.
Ianric, round my way the businesses with the most to lose from the gulag, such as pubs and caravan sites, seem to be putting up the most grovelling NHS bumsucker messages. Is it the same with you? Are they trying to propitiate the evil spirit, or something?
On the bright side, more people are venturing out and takeaway signs are appearing. Just enjoyed an excellent takeaway Sunday lunch.
I have seen a few thanks the NHS signs for the same NHS which is refusing to treat non Covid patients with life threatening conditions and nurses are doing tik tok dance videos. The Welsh assembly are easing the lockdown at a snail’s pace.
Speed of their brains.
Interesting that we aren’t forced to wear masks (Drakeford doesn’t want any impediment to his gob) and that libraries are allowed to open (Drakeford got to the end of the first. MisterMen book and thought it was time to move forward).
Prophecy of foreknowledge, an interview from 1997:
http://stateofthenation.co/?p=12035
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/world/asia/japan-coronavirus.html?auth=login-facebook&searchResultPosition=2
(Paywall but you can get limited free access signing up with your Google account then again with a Facebook account)
Could controlling the virus really be as simple as the Japanese 3 Cs principle, avoid:
Closed spaces with poor ventilation
Crowded places
Close contact
‘Closed spaces with poor ventilation’ – sadly that includes most doctor’s waiting rooms and most hospital spaces!
2nd wave planned already? Important bit starts about 5:10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=176&v=BYPPY4IXgSA&feature=emb_logo
Will try and find the other interview where it says “wave after wave” and the threat is there that it will be continued until we are scared enough to take the vaccine, seems to have disappeared, not just deleted due to breaking community guidelines.
This has been the strategy from day one, as guided – in part – by MIT. This article was published on 17th March:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/17/905264/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing-18-months/
Predicts wave after wave, on-going social distancing, contact tracing apps, health apps, air travel becoming a thing of the past and that lockdown would run every 2 months, with 1 month off, until a vaccine is available. Everything is based around protecting the health care system. It was written fairly early in the pandemic before it was known who dies etc. But still.
I read it the day after it was published. Nothing that I’ve seen proposed in the MSM since then has come as a surprise.
Bill Gates has his grubby money all over MIT:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-connections-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations-ronan-farrow-2019-9?r=US&IR=T
I would suggest that if it weren’t for the healthcare system, there might not be so many dead.
They’re centres of infection, and sent it into care homes.
Based on the ICL model though
Update on the barriers around the exercise area in my local park. In the past people have climbed over the barriers to use the equipment and bars now they don’t have to as one of the barriers has been breached and people just use them as a door to come in and out the exercise area.
A couple of links for Anonymous as they are new here but they have been posted on this site before plus a new link showing what happened last time a rushed vaccine was pushed through for mass-inoculation:
If vaccines are so safe why these schemes and immunity from prosecution for the manufacturers:
https://www.gov.uk/vaccine-damage-payment
https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I0hIC6GqMc&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop
My wife almost died after the flu shot one year, NHS not interested and she took a long, long time recovering so I have research things in depth over the years.
At least back then journalists investigated things.
You should watch the Delingpole and Cahill video especially the bit about the flu vaccine.
I was so, so ill two years in a row after flu jabs that my boss gave us at work. Never worse. And I’m hard – I have some common allergies (tree pollen and a weird aversion to shea butter) – but I’m never ill.
Something is up with the flu vaccine and I’m not having it again.
I would never have a flu vaccine for two reasons, firstly I don’t suffer from flu and secondly, a friend who used to work in laboratories where they made vaccines said you would never have the vaccine if you knew what went into them!
Well it appears one of the prime architects of the imposition of the catastrophic lockdown policy on this country has had his position at the heart of government preserved, ironically in part due to the misguided efforts of many opponents of lockdown. For the moment, Cummings’ attackers have run out of new material to throw at him, and his most dangerous opponent, the Daily Mail, looks to have admitted defeat and turned its guns on the most noxious of his accusers. The Johnson government has paid a huge price for it, but they have kept him in government.
Well done. Now the man who was so dramatically incompetent or deluded that he thought putting the entire country into lockdown was a sensible response to a jumped up flu, remains in his position of power and influence, able to inflict more such idiocies on the country (as it is suggested he did with the poisonous quarantine plans). What’s more, he’s in prime position to continue with preparations for covering up the truth before any inquiry, and for influencing the formation of any such inquiry to ensure it is a harmless whitewash.
Short of somehow forcing Johnson himself to step down, it;’s unlikely we as lockdown sceptics will get another opportunity to force out of government any of the prime lockdown movers. It might even be that these Guilty Men will be able to cling to office, as Blair did after the Iraq disaster, for years to come, while obfuscating the truth and persuading people that the priority is to “move on”. And that will establish the precedent that inflicting a lockdown on this country is survivable. Politicians in future will consider that, and will conclude just as the Johnson government did in this case, that risking being held responsible for the result of not acting is the more dangerous course for them.
Whether lockdown sceptics are a significant enough force to have actually had any influence on this case is perhaps doubtful. But it certainly cannot have helped that many sceptics chose to defend him on the spurious grounds that forcing him out would somehow mean justifying the lockdown rules (that in any case are already on their way out), or that the particular charges against him were false or did not really involve a breach of those rules. They were simply wrong, because the damage that Cummings’ behaviour did to the credibility of the lockdown was in his behaviour itself, and to a lesser extent the government’s initial attempt to protect him, and not significantly contributed to by his survival in government longer term. Any continuing benefit to lockdown scepticism of him staying in place is hugely outweighed by the costs. And the real reason for forcing him out was never his particular behaviour in relation to lockdown rules, it was always for sceptics about his core involvement in what we must regard as one of the most damaging acts of government incompetence or malfeasance in modern history.
The survival of Dominic Cummings in government is a clear political defeat and setback for lockdown scepticism. A(nother) dark day.
He has agreed to step down after Brexit. I think you will be pleasantly surprised how quickly attention turns to the economic and medical catastrophe of the lockdown once things have been open a few weeks and there has been no rise in infections. The centre left are already becoming very lockdown sceptic.
I don’t see any comfort in that. “After Brexit” might as well be in a hundred years as far as lockdown scepticism is concerned. As I said, the precedent is being set that imposing a lockdown is politically survivable. Most future politicians, faced with another decision like the one faced by the Guilty Men in March, are likely to conclude again that the risks to them are far greater from inaction than from action. That’s the default position for men in office anyway. And changing that for this kind of issue must surely be the primary long term goal for sceptics. Never again.
My experience of the Iraq War leads me to presume that the government will be easily able to obfuscate, confuse and divert criticism on this issue so that any real costs to the perpetrators are indirect and delayed.
Make no mistake, this was a defeat, and a costly one.
I hope you’re wrong in the amount of importance you attach to Cummings surviving this. I’m not sure it makes much difference either way – I doubt any enquiry or post-mortem would ever go far enough to provide a real break with the madness of the past.
It’s decline and fall stuff.
Certainly assessing the scale of the cost is inherently speculative. We shall see.
What I think is beyond doubt is that this was a huge missed opportunity. I think a lot of sceptics simply don’t understand just how rare an opportunity like that is, to actually make a guilty senior government operator pay a direct political price.
I share your despair that this has become an acceptable political response. However, I think things will change very quickly and we are only at the beginning of the fallout. I am not sure the final verdict will accept this should ever happen again. As for the Conservatives, when they are viewed as weak on the economy they are screwed, like after Black Wednesday.
Regardless of Cummings, those waiting for the outcome of any public enquiry as politically sensitive as this one (where all sides of the political fence are implicated), will have a long wait. As a precedent:
Still, at least by the time the Covid-19 Enquiry report is released, Poppy is likely to be Prime Minister
I don’t think it is politically survivable because the economic knock on effects won’t allow it to happen again
We shall see. Hopefully you are right.
The risk is that the bedwetters and the Guilty Men manage to obscure and confuse the truth sufficiently to have enough people believing the problems might have been caused by errors in implementation (“we locked down too late”), or that it would have been worse if we hadn’t locked down, or that subsequent problems are because we didn’t spend enough money in the right ways to address the problems, that there is no clear consensus about it.
That’s pretty much what the advocates of the war in Iraq did after 2003, and the issues there were less complex and more clear-cut than the coronapanic issues.
It’s easy to come on this site and feel confident the truth must surely come out in the end, but out there in the rest of the world there’s more than enough delusion to allow politicians to do it again.
“The centre left are already becoming very lockdown sceptic.”
Well I’d welcome that, if true, but I’ve not seen any evidence of it.
Simon Jenkins’ latest column. John Rentoul’s tweets. Even Hodges is inching towards it. Blairites coming out for schools to go back. Starmer has kept his powder dry.
I’ll check them out, thanks
I’d endorse your sentiments, but I haven’t either
Yes there may be a quick shift of opinion, but that will not reduce the appalling severity of what is hurtling down the tracks.
No. We will have to try to comfort our selves with revenge, hopefully in the courts, and preventing this ever happening again.
I agree. Over on The Telegraph people don’t seem to be able to distinguish between the wrongs of lockdown in concept, and the wrongs of breaking it, not once, but three times. Even if we allow him the 250 mile drive to Durham and the subsequent drive to collect his wife and child from hospital on the ‘he was doing what any other dad would do’ defence, the third event – the drive to Barnard Castle – cannot be explained away as a child safety, or caring matter. What many do not seem to grasp, and I say this as a Tory and Brexiter, is that the ‘Barnard Castle Defence’ is so egregious, it adds salt to the wound of lockdown. It has been seen as such, particularly in the northern heartland that Mr Cummings, according to The Mail, understands so well such. Perhaps Boris is counting on people’s memories being short, but I think that is similarly insulting to the British public.
The one question I keep expecting to be asked, but haven’t seen it anywhere, is “does your wife have a valid driving licence?”
‘The Mail on Sunday can today reveal that a retired teacher who reported the No 10 adviser to police broke lockdown rules himself – while a supposed ‘witness’ who claimed Mr Cummings had made a second trip to the region admitted he made his statement up as a joke.’
“Interestingly, the WHO has just done another U-turn – is this number 657? – recommending against the wearing of masks.”
Seems like this is one of the more profound developments in this entire saga, yet you don’t provide a link and I haven’t been able to find any references to it anywhere online. I’m assuming this is not true until I see a story that corroborates the claim.
This took me 2 minutes to find:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks
“If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.
Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing.
Masks are effective only when used in combination with frequent hand-cleaning with alcohol-based hand rub or soap and water.
If you wear a mask, then you must know how to use it and dispose of it properly.”
Seems sensible – but Under The Bridge, how did you read this as recommendation against?
I would describe it as not necessary unless certain conditions apply, and if you do wear one, do it properly.
Thanks Andy. The reason why I read it as recommending against is because that’s how it’s written by Toby in today’s news: “Interestingly, the WHO has just done another U-turn . . . recommending against the wearing of masks.”
This reads as something that has changed within the last day or two, so I limited my search to only recent news items.
I’m also not convinced by the WHO’s rationale for wearing masks as written in the quotes. Even if certain conditions apply, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support masks, particularly the types of masks that are seen in public or even healthcare settings.
Indeed – and practically every mask wearer I’ve seen fiddles with it or wears it around their neck and pulls it up when in a train or shop, so they are probably worse than useless for these folk.
I carry a clean pair of underpants in my back pack so if any jobsworth demands I wear a mask I’ll pull these over my head.
I suffer from hayfever although its not too bad at the moment, am I expected to wear a mask then?
Of course. Don’t you realise that somebody’s grandhay could die because of you?
At least a mask will stop them photofitting you.
No. Well. It’s the excuse I give not to wear one in warehouses and it always works.
Can’t put a price on life they said:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/people-are-going-to-go-hungry-pandemic-effects-could-leave-54m-americans-without-food
And this is in a first world country. The greatest act of self harm the world has ever seen.
Its not really self harm, its harm imposed on many by a few.
And hundreds of millions will be very close to, and in many cases actually at, starvation in the 3rd world. Politicians around the world should hang their heads in shame (and there is a good case for us doing it for them!).
They should hang their heads in shame…but they won’t.
6% of the population are psychopaths, a too many of them are in positions of power.
I’m glad someone pointed that out. When it comes to seeking power psychopaths are at the front of the queue.
That’s a bit rich coming from The Guardian who support the effing lockdown
Remember what it said in WHO 2019 guidance:
Not recommended in any circumstances
UV light
Modifying humidity
Contact tracing – my highlighting
Quarantine of exposed individuals
Entry and exit screening
Border closure
James Delingpole talking to Professor Dolores Cahill is excellent if exhausting. The (not very) sinister black cat that appeared at the window when JD started discussing “tin foil hattery” was a wonderful bonus.
Its a pity Boris didn’t ask her advice instead of Neil Ferguson.
Fun cartoon: As it happens, my partner and I kind-of went to the pub last night. It was an informal gathering in the open air, somewhere off the beaten track in the Wild North West which we’d happen to notice in passing a few days ago. Everyone was gathered round the ‘bar’ – a derelict farm trailer. Everyone took their own booze and from time-to-time passers-by either joined in or called out ‘Good idea!”.
It was just like a proper pub in that there was a variety of opinions on lock-down, all 60+, plenty of local gossip, quick-witted ‘bantz’, dogs and even (surreally) a short appearance from a local pub landlord who clearly did not approve and is sceptical about re-opening upon 4 July because ‘people are not behaving themselves’. He’s a miserable git, unlike everyone else there and it was a life-enhancing experience!
On the way home we passed a local worthy on the way up to enjoy the sunset from a local hilltop with a mate, complete with bottle of wine. There is a little bit of hope!
heppen=happened. Drat!
Sounds like fun! There’s no chance of anything like that happening here they have really bought into the virus paranoia! One lady we just passed on our walk tried to walk into a hedge to avoid us!
Miserable git has already put himself out of business.
Apparently in Southern Ireland, restaurants will be allowed to reopen earlier than pubs – hence many pubs are intending to redesignate as restaurants!
A peanut and a pint of Guiness, please.
Back in the 1970s we used to frequent a pub that was able to stay open long after pub-closing time because it served food – pie and peas!
I’m very surprised at the attitude of the pub landlord,all the pubs where I live are desperate to open.There’s certainly some very funny folks about just lately !.
If you met this bugger, you’d understand!
After reading the Telegraph and deciding most of the commentators are barmy I have come to one of just a couple of websites that seem relatively sane. There is only so much of “we’re all going to die” I can take!
The trade talks continue tomorrow and I’ve heard Boris is to take charge, God help us! Barnier is threatening to walk away Ha! fat chance of that happening!
I hope he des.
Does.
Then they’ve only got themselves to blame. Or rather the member states will blame him not us.
I think its all theatrics, the closer we get to the end date the more hot air. I reckon Boris is firmly against going WTO and would do anything to get a deal, I’m not expecting anything great from Boris so I won’t be disappointed when he messes up, I’m fully expecting him to.
Yes, he has never yet failed – to disappoint!
I’m with you about Boris. But Frost is a beast. There is hope I think.
I was wondering if that was a missing ‘o’ or a missing ‘i’!
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/declassified-uk/
“It has only been leaks which have allowed the public to know the membership of the important SAGE group of scientific advisers addressing coronavirus and the report of a simulated influenza pandemic exercise in the National Health Service in 2016.”
If Norton-Taylor is right we may not have to worry our heads about information we are not supposed to have for much longer… I don’t know how the new laws might affect the rules about disclosures for judicial reviews but I imagine embarrassing revelations such as have just appeared courtesy of Simon Dolan may soon be things of the past.
Oh dear!
I’m sure everyone here would gladly order a flat white from you if we could. Good luck with the re-opening! Perhaps some snarky signage using the quote you mention would help get it into peoples’ heads that snitches get stitches.
I’d like to have a little word with the a**ehole that ratted on you !.Glad to hear that you are busy and the fact everyone is acting normally !.
You know someone could die because of that !,a grandma or a little kiddie !
How can you live with yourself?
If I lived near you I’d be there like a shot! Only 1 cafe open in our area and she’s only allowing 1 in at a time for take-away and wearing a horrible black mask. Nice woman, just bought-in.
I am sure that’s exactly the right attitude. Acting normall must be far more reassuring to most people than posing as a bank-robber or a surgeon. ‘Step away from the ice, cream; step away!’
The black masks make them look like sinister chimps!
Ha, ha. All together now – “YOU’RE KILLING PEOPLE”
You could be like Amsterdam and ask people to bring their own pot.
If the news didn’t give a daily roll call of death like a poem by Homer I doubt many would have even noticed that a few more people than usual were dying.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/29/german-official-leaks-report-denouncing-corona-as-global-false-alarm/
Good to see that protestors in central London today are also not giving a toss about social distancing.
Where’s your shop? We may all have to come over!
Print off the logo at the top of the page?
When all this is over, we should all make a trip to your shop and have a coffee
And cake. There has to be cake?
I used to live in N. W. Essex- Saffron Walden. They had nice cake there, I remember.
I’m pleased to see that, in Scotland, most people have given two fingers to Sturgeon’s rules. The half wits who decided to keep car parks and toilets closed are now paying the price. In Loch Lomond national park people are parking where they please and the cops are struggling to do anything about it. There’s no going back now – not unless the politicians want something similar to what’s happening in the USA.
I said the same thing to my better half last night as we sat in her garden and listened to the sounds of families in the neighbouring gardens having BBQs. And before I arrived at her house, a BBQ was taking place in a garden behind my flat where they had a paddling pool set up and there were around 12 people from it looked like 3 generations of the same family all gathered together.
And good for them!
Fun’s all very well as long as they observe safe toileting protocols.
Hence the ‘paddling’ pool perhaps!?
https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/nicola-sturgeon-warns-restrictions-could-18339430
Seriously? Unbelievable.
It’s for the safety of the people. But I remember everyone here is self centerd
You don’t know anyone here, ‘Anoymous’
Lol….you talk shit. It’s just a common flu virus Anonymous.
We know you’re 77th Brigade. What’s your name, rank and number?
Why don’t you declare who you are? If you think it’s for the safety of the people you have clearly been badly brainwashed. Do you know the common cold can kill the frail? How about the safety of the people then?
Well, you know thing about me, other than what I have posted. I would think you ought to mind your manners.
What is for the safety of what people?
“[T]he First Minister warned that the virus could “run out of control again”
What is the FM’s definition of the virus being “out of control” and when was it so before?
How does travelling more than five miles put someone else at risk but not four and three quarters? How mind mindbogglingly stupid is she?
Be careful or she’ll be bringing out the naughty step if she needs to tighten restrictions again.
I remember being on a CAMRA pubcrawl way back BC (before kids). We hired a coach and went to a nearby town with a wonderful selection of beers. One of our number took a leak up an alley, some do-gooder reported him and he was arrested.
The coach stopped at the holding police station and all the men got off and peed up the police station wall. Thanks to the delay however, it was a trial for the women on the way home. I think that’s the only time I’ve ever had penis envy.
Nowadays, because of the festival culture, various items are available that make things much easier for women. As Tom Lehrer taught us: “Be prepared!”
as song for these times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=girnJH7tvpM
Can anyone comment on the demo in London today at the US embassy?. Was it “social distanced” or are SJWs the latest group to prove lockdown is bollocks.
George Floyd death: Hundreds protest across central London
I’d be willing to bet almost all these virtue signalling idiots are fresh from vindictively hammering away on their keyboards typing lockdown zealotry messages on their social media accounts. But seeing an opportunity to more publicly display their eager adherence to Goodthink, too stupid to understand that protesting against police activity in another country is fatuous, and too self-important to even think of minding their own damned business, they’ve forgotten all their lockdown zealotry in favour of exactly the kind of mob gathering they were doubtless decrying as tantamount to murder a couple of days ago.
The last time I travelled extensively in the US was in the late 1990s, during the President Clinton era. I was struck by a rather unpleasant undercurrent of racism in the country – several BAME taxi drivers, for example, expressed considerable surprise that I spoke to them at all, let alone as ordinary human beings. I would add these were in largely Democrat cities and states (Washington DC, Minneapolis, New Orleans). What happened in Minneapolis was indefensible, however, to blame Mr Trump for it, or indeed to take to the streets to destroy BAME-based businesses in the local area is difficult to understand. There is much suffering in the US, and there is a limited safety net to prevent many families losing both their home and ability to put food on the table. The Democrats do not seem to be particularly minded to do more than emote and widen the divide, and there are many in this country following the same approach.
I don’t believe in interfering in, or getting worked up about, internal politics in foreign countries on principle (except where it relates to getting us involved in wars and confrontations), so it’s not an issue for me. Of course, these protesting t*ssers in this country are merely exploiting the deaths and misery in the US to try to score their own political points here anyway, in reality.
But if we are discussing the issues supposedly at the root of the disorder on a theoretical basis, police violence is almost always a complex topic and almost never the simple one portrayed in the mainstream media. They lie about all political correctness issues at least as much as they lie about coronapanic, and for the same reasons – to impose Goodthink conformity on the masses, for the Greater Good.
The US has an issue with militarised policing (we are following but quite some distance behind), though that is a matter for Americans not foreigners imo. The fact is that a lot more whites are killed by US police than blacks, though proportionately it’s much more frequent for blacks. Imo it’s a result mostly of a tendency towards violent confrontation in US black culture, and people who genuinely feel concerned about these deaths should be addressing that issue first. After all a lot of the inner city police departments responsible for a lot of these supposedly “racist” deaths are run by black mayors and staffed partly by black officers. In this case Minneapolis has a Democrat administration and St Paul is run by a black mayor.
It’s just Lockdown insanity springing up over any excuse. Yet another consequence beginning to be revealed.
The Democrats have been stoking the racism divide for years. All they have at the moment is identity politics, to divide and conquer. The far Left, Antifa, have been in a cold civil war since the election, and it may have just gone hot.
I’ve been to both Atlanta and Dallas, and I’m glad to say that I hadn’t noticed any particular undercurrent of racism back then (1990s). Much of this resentment and hatred was deliberately stoked by Obama. He weighed in to every contentious shooting before all the evidence was available, feeding the story that the police were shooting innocent black people, which was rarely the case.
Thanks Mark. Virtue signalling hypoccrites then. What a surprise.
There was no SD going on there! And the crappy wearing of masks?! Why bother at all? It’s a waste of a mask frankly!
My main observation is that there are an ominous amount of masks on display. (Though not by the police. Something they are not telling us?)
I tend to agree with Mark that the internal affairs of other countries are not our concern. We have enough problems of our own.
I think the right for people to protest about what is happening in THIS country is essential to a democracy as long as it is peaceful. I am not especially fond of protests that deliberately seek to inconvenience.
I am less sure about the right of people here to protest about what is happening in other countries should be quite so protected, though there is a long tradition of this and as long as it is peaceful and not deliberately vexatious I suppose it comes with the territory of being a democratic country with a big, international capital city.
What I find disappointing is that the protest against lockdown in Hyde Park saw police arresting people, while I can see NO reports of anyone at the George Floyd demo arrested, despite clear breaches of the Coronavirus Act.
I am not sure we really deserve to survive as a nation and as a civilisation, present company excepted.
For sure, no objection to the right to demonstrate about issues in other countries if people want to. Though for the left “demonstrating” often moves rapidly on to thuggish mob behaviour, as with the right to strike morphing into the right to bully other people who choose not to strike, or the right to “demonstrate” against political speakers whose opinions you don’t like morphing into attempts to intimidate and physically prevent those people from speaking or being heard.
And as I noted, in reality these contemptible people are not just engaged in virtue signalling, they are also exploiting the deaths and violence elsewhere to try to further their own political causes here.
There are interesting parallels between these kinds of virtue signalling issues and the coronapanic, though. For instance, the pretence of deep concern over the death of a particular stranger in a foreign country, when on average over 2000 strangers die violently around the world every singly day, almost every one of them a personal and family tragedy, and those deaths pass unnoticed and uncared about by these hypocrites if they don’t serve their political goals. And the way we suddenly get bombarded with images and accounts tailored to present the victim in the most favourable light possible, and to ensure we know whom we are to blame for this supposed tragedy.
I think the right to protest outside other Embassies (against Apartheid for instance) should be inviolable.
Yes, good point, especially outside embassies.
Just 200 sardines!
So this has to be a send up, and therefore officially, as we all knew, it’s all a hoax https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52848793
That BBC article HAS to be a send up, surely? Nobody could write that sort of stuff and mean it.
I sincerely hope you’re right which is why I posted as above
Xand van Tulleken – another name for the list …
It had us in stitches. I’d love to be at a party he’s hosting. Set your alarm clocks at staggered times so you can wash your hands. Priceless.
Oh my! You CANNOT be serious, as a certain tennis player used to say.
The contaminated toilet paper! Oh lord, the horror of it!
We ‘have to be paranoid’, do we? No problem for this pathetic little
squit.
Who’d want to go to his barbecue?
He is definitely not coming to mine, even if he brings his own food, drink, towels, toilet paper, hand sanitiser, muzzle, and spare nappies.
It’s not a send up, it’s how things are gonna be forever now. I don’t like it too but youd all better start getting used to this. It’s for the best you do
“it’s how things are gonna be forever now”
Maybe in your house, not in mine, or those of any of my friends. Too much of the nation went along with this panic, but many are coming and will come out of it.
Some for economic reasons, some will start to look at evidence from other countries, some will eventually conclude it was all a mistake just by looking at the facts, and some will just follow their instincts to live a normal life.
Human beings are social creatures.
Well that’s gonna have to change, since theres no chance of a vaccine and that’s the only way governments will fully get rid of social distancing. We have to adapt and learn to accept this now
No it’s not going to have to change.My goodness your intellectual acumen is challenged. Viruses burn themselves out like SARS and Hong Kong flu. Others, like AIDS, are contained and nothing much in society changed except possibly a greater awareness of safer sexual practices (probably a good thing).
Tt will, this is a huge change for all of us. I hate the idea of the new normal where social and physical contact is forbidden but it’s the sacrifice we all have to make to fight this virus especially once again, governments have said they will only get rid of it if a vaccine is found and I’m not expecting one anytime soon, if ever
We could get rid of ‘governments’ instead.
No it’s not. It wasn’t just now when I shared a drink with my neighbours in their garden, drinking from their glasses and – shock horror – using their toilet and hand towel. Oh and saying thanks in a physical way (that’ll keep you guessing) when I left
We’ve truly fallen down the rabbit hole and emerged in the heart of a Monty Python sketch.
I’d like to thank the Doc for his comprehensive guide. One thing he doesn’t cover is the shagging of farm animals which has always been the highlight of any barbecue I’ve ever attended. How can my guests, and of coursethe animals stay safe.
My local coffee shop has made a number of adjustments including installing perspex screens along the counters – is this actually necessary?
I wonder how many of these adjustments are being forced on establishments by “guidance”, and how much of it is about looking like you are “keeping customers safe”? Some of the changes look permanent.
You’re exemplary and I hope my local businesses behave like you
Fantastic to hear this. We all wish you well.
I enjoy reading your updates!
I wish I had a sane coffee shop here. I could buy a drink without feeling unclean.
Hello has anyone else noted the very soft touch by the police at today’s London demonstration as compared to their very heavy handed approach to anti lockdown protests? The police are not having a good virus are they.
Still think a second wave is crazy talk?
Fuck off you twat
Who is this Max Robespierre? Foot soldier in the 77th brigade?
From an unsourced post from a radical Jacobean leader, absolutely it is crazy talk.
Your bed sheets need changing again.
You are a bed wetting pansy pal…wrong website to come on, I think you would get on better on Yahoo or the BBC.
Twat.
Why are you on this site at all? Other than to pass the time in your boring narrow existence? Hopefully a block button will be added soon !
No, don’t block. Out-argue. Ir atleast let him//her/it be exposed to some common sense.
Wow a tweet with undeniable scientific accuracy tweeted by the mastermind of the failed Revolution Francaise. Stinks of troll around here
Well, no evidence I have seen for a second wave, so far, but open to argument if you can find any.
Believe what you want, but don’t expect others to without hard evidence.
Hide under yor bed until the end of time away from the second wave, but please, don’t expect the world to legislate so we all have to.
Look you moron. Get back under your sticky bedsheets and amuse yourself the way you usually do.
No, I don’t think it is crazy talk; I know it is crazy talk!
What is this image supposed to be? Proof of something?
For info – I have now heard of three people who have died with covid19 probably being mentioned on their death certificates. First was an 88 year old with failing kidneys and dementia who had been living in a nursing home for 16 years. The second and third were a couple, both of whom had been very ill for several years, who died in a nursing home. They were 88 and 90 years old. Just saying.
Very representative of most covid ‘cases’ I’d say.
That “tosspott” was doing it for your own good. Your putting people in danger
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