I’m not going to say much about this story on the Telegraph‘s front page except to say: You read it here first. I pointed out that children under the age of 15 were more likely to be struck by lightning than die of COVID-19 on May 23rd.
Remember folks. If you want tomorrow’s news today. read Lockdown Sceptics.
Nature Joins the Resistance
Nature, Britain’s leading scientific journal, has enthusiastically endorsed a campaign calling for academia to be “shut down”. More specifically, the campaign wants Stem subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – to be “shut down”.
Crikey, I thought when I first read it. I know I had a crack at Neil Ferguson’s latest paper in Nature in yesterday’s update, but I wasn’t expecting the editor to react by calling for the closure of Imperial College, along with every other British university. The paper wasn’t that bad. Couldn’t Nature just retract it and move on?
Turns out, it was just a way for the editor to signal his support for the Black Lives Matter movement which, among other things, wants to “dismantle capitalism”. Phew. For a second there I thought Nature had abandoned its commitment to the pursuit of truth and joined the radical Left.
How Does Imperial’s New Paper Account for Sweden’s Low Death Toll?
Readers will recall the above graph showing the number of deaths from coronavirus that Imperial College’s model originally predicted would occur in Sweden if the authorities did nothing or stuck with the mitigation strategy. As we know, the Swedish Government did stick with its original strategy – unlike our own cowardly-custards – and the number of people who actually died fell somewhere short of Imperial’s apocalyptic prediction.
Which begs the question, how did does Imperial College’s new analysis – the one unveiled in Nature on June 8th – account for the fact that Sweden’s rise and fall in infections and deaths has largely mirrored that of the other 10 countries studied in the paper in spite of the fact that they all imposed full lockdowns and Sweden didn’t?
Imperial’s latest paper is closely based on an earlier one – Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team – Report 13 – which models the course of the pandemic in the same 11 countries as the new paper, including Sweden. In that paper, published on March 30th, Sweden’s infection rate, or Rt, is estimated to be around 2.6 after accounting for the various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) made by the authorities, including encouraging infected people to self-isolate on March 10th, banning public events of over 500 people on March 12th, encouraging people to remain a metre or so apart on March 16th, and the closure of schools for those aged 15 and over on March 18th.
The implication of this is that deaths in Sweden would continue to rise strongly – with each infected person infecting an average of 2.6 people, and so on – until most of the population was infected and tens of thousands of people would die. As we now know, that didn’t happen. After mid-April, Swedish COVID-19 deaths ceased to increase, which suggests its Rt had fallen to below 1 about three weeks earlier. Indeed, if you adjust for the lower number of daily deaths in Sweden than in the UK, the trajectory of the pandemic in both countries is remarkably similar.
So how do the boffins on Imperial’s modelling team explain this? What happened in Sweden between the end of March – when the Rt was ~2.6 – and mid-April, when the Rt clearly fell to <1? The answer is buried in a table in the paper entitled “Extended Data Fig. 4” which shows the different NPIs introduced in the 11 countries, as well as when they were introduced.
This above table shows “Public events banned” in Sweden on March 29th. Contrast this with the same table in Report 13, which shows “Public events banned” in Sweden on March 12th.
What’s going on? Why has the little round flag representing Sweden in the “Public events banned” column moved from March 12th to March 29th? True, Sweden did roll out its prohibitions on large gatherings in two stages, banning gatherings of over 500 people on March 12th and over 50 on March 29th. But why make no reference to the first ban in the more recent paper? Was it that they thought it might look a bit awkward to include two little round flags in the same row? Or is something else going on, namely, that they want the second ban on March 29th to do all the work in explaining why the death toll started to decline in mid-April?
The answer is contained in the supplementary material to the June 8th paper, where you find the following estimates of Imperial’s new, revised model for Sweden.
As you can see, the various NPIs Sweden introduced between March 10th and 18th, including the ban on public events of over 500 (now airbrushed from history), had virtually no impact on the Rt number; but banning gatherings of over 50 people on March 29th had a dramatic impact – so dramatic, it was sufficient to bring the Rt number to <1, even though Sweden introduced no other restrictions.
Does that strike you as rather convenient?
Nothing wrong with our original model, guv. If Sweden hadn’t imposed more restrictions on social gatherings on March 29th, armageddon would have certainly befallen the Scandinavian kingdom, just as we predicted. But because it banned gatherings of over 50 people, the Rt immediately plummeted to <1.
Note to the thick-skulled: This isn’t an actual quote from the Imperial College press release that accompanied the publication of the June 8th paper
You can see what’s going on here, can’t you? The authors of the paper don’t want to acknowledge that their original model wildly over-estimated the number of deaths from COVID-19 that would occur in the absence of full lockdowns – 510,000 in the UK and 2.2 million in America, you’ll recall. So they’ve effectively pretended that Sweden imposed exactly the same restrictions as the other 10 countries they’re looking at, as if banning gatherings of more than 50 people is completely indistinguishable from closing restaurants, bars and high streets and imprisoning people in their homes. Needless to say, Sweden didn’t do any of that. Apart from football games being cancelled and nightclubs closed, life carried on pretty much as normal.
There’s another sleight of hand you’ll see in the tables showing what social distancing measures Sweden imposed. Both the table in Report 13 and the new paper have “School closure ordered” in Sweden on March 18th even though Sweden never closed its schools. Yes, it closed high schools, which in Sweden means schools for children aged 15 and older. But all schools for those aged 15 and under remained open. So in addition to not really banning social gatherings, Sweden didn’t really close schools either. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at Extended Data Fig.4 in Imperial’s latest paper.
Are there any lessons we can usefully draw from Imperial’s latest paper? I can think of at least two possibilities:
- If there’s another pandemic, there’ll be no need to close bars, restaurants and high streets and place entire populations under virtual house arrest – merely banning gatherings of over 50 people will have exactly the same effect; or
- Imperial College’s epidemiological model is no more reliable than a crystal ball.
Of course, both of the above could be true.
Government Does U-Turn; Schools Won’t Reopen Until September, If Then
Depressing news which I expect most of you have seen. At Monday’s daily briefing, Matt Hancock hinted that secondary schools may not reopen in September and yesterday Education Secretary Gavin Williamson told MPs that he doesn’t now think all primary school children can return for a few weeks before the summer holidays.
As Robert Halfon, the Chaiman of the Education Select Committee, put it:
I think we’re a strange country in which we turn a blind eye to mass demonstrations all over in every city, we campaign for pubs and cafes to open and yet we say to open schools before September is too risky.
Amen, Brother.
As a father of four school-age children as well as the co-founder of four schools, I’m pretty angry about this. The reason for this almighty cock-up is that the Government is insisting that children be taught in “protective bubbles” of no more than 15.
But who on earth are they protecting, given that the risk coronavirus poses to children is virtually zero and, according to the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health, there hasn’t been a single case of a child passing on the virus to an adult?
What’s particularly galling, as Halfon pointed out, is that the very same virtue-signalling politicians who are praising teenagers for pouring onto our streets in their tens of thousands to protest about racial injustice are also claiming it’s far too dangerous for them to go back to school. Yesterday, Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Shadow Education Secretary, “welcomed” this Government’s U-turn on reopening schools – forgetting, perhaps, that those who are suffering the most from the continuing closure of schools are the 700,000 disadvantaged children who aren’t doing any work at home.
I’ve written about this for today’s Telegraph. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The reaction of various organs of the state to the ongoing coronavirus crisis – Downing Street, the Department of Health, local authorities, the police, the BBC – has left me profoundly shocked.
I didn’t have a particularly high opinion of our ruling elites to begin with, but the lack of political courage, the failure to put the interests of the country above their own sectarian self-interest, the staggering incompetence of agencies like PHE, the lack of integrity of our leading scientists… it’s all a bit much. I hadn’t realised just how dysfunctional the British state is. But the absolute nadir has been the closure of our schools and the failure to reopen them.
It beggars belief that virtually all ‘non-essential’ businesses will be open again within a matter of weeks, including Alton Towers, but schools will remain closed until September – and, according to Matt Hancock, may not reopen even then. Thanks to the intransigence of the teaching unions and the Government’s ludicrously over-the-top social distancing guidance, we have blighted the lives of millions of children.
As a lockdown sceptic, I don’t think the Government should have closed schools in the first place. In Sweden, schools for those aged 5 to 15 have remained open throughout the pandemic and it has seen fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than the UK. Sweden is often contrasted unfavourably with Norway, which has an even lower death toll, but the Norwegian Prime Minister recently appeared on television to apologise for over-reacting to the crisis and said she regretted closing schools.
Worth reading in full if you can get past the paywall. And worth reading these letters from incandescent Telegraph readers, too.
Independent Schools Won’t Reopen Either
There doesn’t seem to be much hope that independent schools will reopen either, partly because their insurers won’t allow it. Bit short-sighted, considering that more than 30 have already gone bust thanks to the crisis. Allison Pearson set out the problem in her Telegraph column today:
Private schools, which have provided full timetables and Zoom lessons for their paying customers, are desperate to open. No wonder. As many as 30 are preparing to shut altogether due to the pandemic with parents struggling to pay the fees. But the Government wants independents to stay in snail-like lockstep with state schools, presumably to spare its blushes. One head told me that they were being deliberately denied insurance to prevent private schools “proving that it is perfectly possible to open a whole school safely”.
I got an email from a reader with an interesting suggestion about how independent schools might get round this problem.
How about independent schools clubbing together to do what the hospitality industry has done?
A pressure group, HIGA, was founded during the lockdown by the litigation PR specialists Bell Yard Communications and they are working alongside Mishcon de Reya to bring a big group action against Aviva and QBE (the biggest insurers of restaurant businesses) to force them to compensate hospitality businesses for losses suffered during the coronavirus crisis.
Couldn’t independent schools do something similar?
Worth looking into.
Avoid Rocks – Could be Infectious
Amusing email from a despairing reader, although, in truth, it’s not all that funny.
If it is your want to collect COVID-19 memorabilia, this one might interest you. As an expression of manipulated mass delusion, it really is quite extraordinary. I found it in Tunbridge Wells on April 23rd. While it is apparently OK to walk on the footpaths and the grass, sitting on a park-bench or stepping on the rocks it’s anchored to puts one at risk of becoming infected.
On what possible basis, one might ask? Uninterrupted sunlight was raining down as I stood there.
I have come across a plague village on my travels, even a plague carpark and a plague public footpath. But a plague park-bench? Yes, I found a notice on one in East Marden in West Sussex claiming that COVID-19 can survive on wood for four hours, making it far too dangerous to put one’s bottom there. But infectious rocks?!? The 17th century witch-hunts had nothing on this madness.
An Englishman Writes
And here’s an email I got from an English reader. I think this will resonate with many:
I am neither a scientist or a statistician, but in my view, the R-number is a concocted fiction designed for crowd control rather than public safety.
Logically, In order to accurately calculate the R-number you would need to identify every single case of COVID-19 at or just after the moment of infection. Collected over a reasonable time (maybe the two-week assumed incubation period), these data could reliably extrapolate an R-number under prevailing conditions as long as those conditions remained rigidly unchanged. Clearly nigh on impossible, and if ever achieved, of very little value in a situation with so many other variables.
Most of our (incomplete and time-lagged) information comes from people presenting to GPs and hospitals as sick or from the slowly expanding testing regime. Surely the R-number calculated from this data is historic, reflecting all the variables as they were at the times of the patients’ infection and may or may not have some limited value in the ongoing decision making processes.
But we’ve all observed the beginnings of a slavish fascination with the mythical ‘R’. People in the north are expressing concern about their safety because they’ve been told that the R-number for their region is 1.1 whereas in other regions it’s 0.9 and for some lucky bastard southerners it’s 0.7.
Now, assume that observation has also been made by a Government struggling to control a country lurching towards widespread civil unrest. Imagine the temptation to make the R number 1.3 or better yet, 1.5. It’s not difficult, it simply needs to be uttered to be “true”. The squealing media will obligingly ramp up their shrill chorus of alarm and lockdown will be automatically tightened, with peer pressure once more serving as our implacable gaoler. Because you’d have to be a Cov-idiot to risk everybody’s lives by going outside when the R is bigger than one… bigger than one, I tell you!
When this is all over, which I’m beginning to doubt, I will be suggesting that we remove the noble, dragon-slaying St George as our patron saint and replace him with Henny Penny, depicted forever gazing skyward with a grimace of hysterical paranoia transfixing her beaky face…
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:
- ‘WHO clarifies comments on asymptomatic spread of coronavirus‘ – WHO does a reverse ferret on asymptomatic infectiousness in 24 hours. A record?
- ‘Brooks Brothers prepping for bankruptcy‘ – Say it ain’t so! I bought my first suit from Brooks Brothers
- ‘Facts about COVID-19‘ – The Swiss Doctor and arch-sceptic has just updated his site. Always worth a look
- ‘New York Times editorial page editor’s resignation a terrible omen for freedom of expression‘ – Alex Berenson, lockdown sceptic and author of the best-selling book about the virus on Amazon, laments the resignation of James Bennett
- ‘Unreported truths about COVID-19 and lockdowns‘ – An extract from Berenson’s book on the Fox News website
- ‘“Rather Than Total Lockdown, India Could’ve Relied on Its Young People to Keep Economy Running”‘ – YouTube video with Professor Sunetra Gupta making the case against lockdowns. Watch it before it’s taken down
- ‘Surely, Guardian must fall?‘ – Guido Fawkes draws attention to the fact that Manchester Guardian gave unqualified support to the confederacy during the American civil war. Embarrassing
- ‘Denmark says easing lockdown has not increased infections‘ – File under “dog bites man”
- ‘Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research‘ – More evidence from Yuri Deigin that the “conspiracy theory” claiming the virus originated in a Chinese bio-lab may not be so far-fetched after all
- ‘COVID-19: Doctors’ Bring Legal Challenge Over PPE Shortages‘ – News of a collective action suit against the Government by a group of British doctors. The lawyers are going to have a field day in the aftermath of this crisis
- ‘Marin epidemiologist Larry Brilliant: Virus crisis just beginning‘ – Larry Brilliant claims COVID-19 has an IFR of 5% and says “Marin County is nowhere near out of the woods”. He wins the prize as bedwetter-of-the-week
- ‘Please Just Stop‘ – Great piece in Hector Drummond Magazine by a clear-eyed New Zealander on why the risks associated with the virus have been wildly over-stated
- ‘Bill for furlough scheme and business loans hits £90 billion‘ – The tab just keeps on getting bigger
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few 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 takes me about nine hours to do on a day like this, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/advice-on-reopening-activies-er-doctor.html
I’m an ER Doctor. Here’s What I Feel OK Doing as My State Reopens.
………………….
So should I just ignore the fact that restrictions are easing, and stay home?
Well, I haven’t been.
Yes, we would all be safer at home. If you had the ability to ride out the pandemic, however long it takes, by staying home, growing and cooking your own food, ordering nothing off the internet, and avoiding contact with anyone except those who had chosen to isolate themselves with you, you could be 100 percent guaranteed not to be infected with coronavirus. You would also be guaranteed not to die in a car accident, an occurrence whose lifetime risk is 1 in 100 for people who live in this country. And yet most of us drive every day.
I know that people want to be safe and healthy but that they also want art, and laughter, and music, and bourbon—to create them and to consume them.
Responsible people take risks all the time in the course of normal life. And as responsible people, both out of regard for ourselves and for others, we take steps to mitigate those risks. We… Read more »
A little light humour and a chance to ridicule the woke brigade:
shorturl.at/bcL45
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg
Perspectives on the Pandemic Episode 2: In this explosive second edition of Perspectives on the Pandemic, Professor Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, says that social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus.
Further, he offers data to show that China and South Korea had already reached their peak number of cases when they instituted their containment measures. In other words, nature had already achieved, or nearly achieved, herd immunity.
Thankfully I watched this video back March/April. I do believe everything Professor Knut Wittkowski said in it has come to pass. I’d like to check but I cannot because Youtube have removed it.
What are we really up against?
Yes, as I recall it just about everything he said came to pass.
I think it’s available elsewhere, including:
https://www.facebook.com/perspectivesonthepandemic/videos/258992005297175/
Number waiting over year for NHS treatment trebles
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/number-waiting-over-year-for-nhs-treatment-trebles-288tvfn9m
NHS England released waiting time statistics this morning showing that 11,042 people had been on the waiting list for more than 52 weeks in April, up from 3,097 in March. Overall the number of people on the waiting list fell to 3.94 million, down from 4.2 million a month earlier. This was driven by a sharp drop in referrals.
Only 491,934 people were referred for treatment in April, down 60 per cent from 1.2 million in March. The figure for April last year was 1.7 million.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/11/ignore-neil-fergusons-guesswork-the-post-mortem-covid-19-best/
Ignore Neil Ferguson’s guesswork – the post-mortem on Covid-19 is best left until this is all over
The trouble comes when reporters, or politicians, see one study which suits their purposes and promote it as if it were scientific truth, beyond all challenge. Ferguson’s claim was reported in Wednesday evening’s news bulletins as if it were evidence that the Earth is spherical – that you would have to be loopy to deny it.
There is a still a huge amount we have to learn about Covid-19 and about the success or failure of various measures which have been employed to combat it in different countries. Why, for example, has Japan had such a low death rate when it has neither gone into lockdown nor carried out a huge amount of testing?
Maybe I’ve just finally been broken by the whole thing, or maybe I drank more beer last night than is good for my serotonin levels, but I’m finding this whole situation increasingly difficult to explain rationally.
I’ll acknowledge that I’m specifically looking for information that supports the anti-lockdown side of the argument – I’m sure we’re all guilty of that here – and it’s true to say that that is the kind of information I’m mostly going to find here (and I’ve probably spent an unhealthy amount of time here in the last few days at least), but (and bear with me)…
I’ll acknowledge that there is an a priori argument that a lockdown should work as a way of stopping the spread of a virus. It makes logical sense that, if you limit people’s interactions, it will limit the opportunity that a virus has to replicate, therefore fewer people will become infected, or at least people will become infected more slowly. I’ll also acknowledge that it’s possible to argue that lockdown has indeed worked from looking at the way that infection rates, hospitalisations and deaths have decreased since the imposition of lockdown. I don’t buy this argument and I… Read more »
Hear, hear Matt; I agree completely with what you’ve written.
Matt,
Unfortunately I can’t point you to any data that says all this is justified and I’ve been following and researching it since early February when I was working overseas and the news was coming out of Wuhan an what was going on – along with all the dissident round-ups being hidden by the lockdown (a few of the guys were living in China or has Chinese girlfriends so we were getting things sent through by them and confirmed by independent sources).
There must be some, I’ve just not came across it.
During the research lots of interesting stuff turned up going all the way back years which could be a long post by itself. Lots of coincidences, synchronicity etc and lots of follow the money and same names and companies cropping up time and time again.
The only threat really was that if too many people contracted its and were needing hospitalised at the same time then the hospitals would be overrun with not enough beds available for about a 10-14 day period as it all peaked and as people dying in corridors is bad publicity for any Government and especially as the NHS is… Read more »
I have seen dozens of videos and articles that discredit the lockdown policy, yet instead of relaxing it, they double down. Its simple, we have a government of occupation that will not stop until the objectives they have been given have been introduced. These include crashing the economy, mandatory vaccines, full on surveillance with track and trace, humiliation and subservience of the population, a complete stripping of our fundamental rights, euthanasia and a complete restructure of society and its institutions. There isnt any credible data to justify the lockdown so the controlled media distracts, confuses and lies to buy time for the government objectives to be met. People need to wake up to the horror of what is happening and that understanding is truly terrifying, as we are running out of time.
I believe the nasty data doesn’t exist, because if it did they would present it to back up their case. There’s only two explanations ‘absolute rank incompetence’ or, as you say above, wilful destruction. Frankly, I don’t believe anyone is that incompetent. So we turn to wilful destruction. A quick tour of Twitter (I did it for the cause folks!) will illustrate that in the main the country has been fooled into thinking we are in grave danger and if the economy has to be brought to its knees to save us all then so be it. People on their knees (a lot of them doing it willingly I concur for BLM, adding irony to this post) are much more easily controlled. And this is about control. It’s about ruling, rather than governing. It’s a power grab and a bid for despotism. Just take masks/muzzles as an illustration. Masks don’t work but if they were needed then they were needed at the peak in April but people are calling for them now when the virus is on the wane. That is insane, but it is because it is an overt symbol of being controlled. On the leash. To me those… Read more »
Don’t call me a conspiracy theorist please
‘Conspiracy theorists’ are a slur that is used by a hostile media and government to psychologically dissuade people who look into the real nature of government and its shennanigans through shame and ostracisation. Its just a rehash of the Church calling non believers ‘heretics’ back in the day, as the heretics called into question the power of the Church which was a threat to them.
Thanks MoH, I know that but it’s worth pointing out because it is another thing that has become ‘woke’. (God how I hate that word!) The heretic analogy is a good one. And ‘conspiracy theorist’ works, because I have it thrown at me almost daily by people who should know better because they have the capacity to think critically.
Thanks. We need to push back against anyone using the CT slur with logic and reason due to the seriousness of where we are right now.
To me, a conspiracy theorist is anyone who has the ability to look at all sides of an issue, examine it thoroughly, and come up with the most rational answer. Without being led down the garden path by TPTB.
At the very start of this, I tried to examine all sides, all theories as to what had happened, all remedies and medical interventions, what works best, what doesn’t, what the figures truly show. I went from one extreme (Mr Icke) to the other (what is fed to us by government) and as ever I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. But Mr Icke is being proved right on many things right now which is a little scary. I believe very little of what is dished up by the MSM, but we parted ways long ago. I would have liked to believe the government, if only for my state of feeling secure and looked after, but sadly that wasn’t to be. I do believe however that they’ve got themselves into one almighty mess and don’t know where to go from here without losing a lot of votes. Which they already have, but for some reason are still insisting… Read more »
I completely agree but surely the charade of democracy is becoming ever more clearer? We had local elections due in May 2020 and they were suspended due to the Cornavirus Act 2020 and there was hardly a murmur. Surely they could suspend elections forever with such tyrannical legislation. Anyway there isnt any significant difference between Labour and Conservative as the main agendas get carried through regardless, as elsewhere in the world. They know they arent truly held to account. MPs fob constituents off and when people get to the booth, choosing between Coca Cola or Pepsi, is not any real choice so politicians do want they want, which generally is what their lobbyists pay them for
Please watch UK Column, as their news bulletins is the real news.
You may be right, though I hope not. The other possibility is that they now know they screwed up and are just covering their arses to save face and save their careers.
Look, honestly, I don’t want to think this way, but I can increasingly see the logic behind it. At least it makes rational sense of it all.
When reason leads you somewhere you don’t want to be either you give up on reason or you give up on where you wanted to be.
I noticed your post before about taking paracetamol and beer and although I empathise and although I am angry at all this shit I can’t deny that it is an interesting time to be alive. I thought the way things were being done before this ‘crisis’ were pretty unpleasant, people weren’t generally kind to each other, and for years we’ve been brainwashed to compete and trample on one another and my fervent hope is that when the dust has settled we might think and act in a different way. I don’t want to go back to what it was. I read somewhere that a crisis is an opportunity on a dangerous wind and rather than opt out of this life I intend to resist. And if they want incarcerate me for not doing as they tell me (e.g wear a muzzle) so be it. The French Resistance were much braver than me but sometimes we have to show our colours. If people that are here don’t resist who will? And if we win maybe the planet will turn out to be a better place. I keep on coming out with stuff that smacks of religiosity which is ironic given my… Read more »
There is no data. The only basis that I can see is that they won’t allow the possibility of us getting back into the situation we were in in March.
As I noted yesterday, the virus itself has become secondary in terms of threat. The primary threat now is merely the possibility of the virus becoming the primary threat once again.
Even I think it looks stupid when I write it but I’m sure this is the thinking now. Hence why the objective of flattening the curve has become eradication of the virus at all costs.
It fits the facts, but the problem I have with this is that it’s essentially the same position I’ve been taking – a government running scared of popular opinion that they themselves helped to create. And the thing is that it’s seems so irrational to me that there wouldn’t be some effort being put in to changing that public opinion. So irrational that I can’t even start to get my head around it. So irrational that I’m really struggling to believe it now
It’s irrational from the point of view of what’s best for the country, but from the point of view of what’s best for them to preserve their politicial careers, it makes sense, especially as they are not being challenged on the fundamentals of the choices made.
If you watch M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village it’s a fairly good representation of what we’re going through now.
You can find the synopsis here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_(2004_film)
In short the village elders created imaginary monsters to keep the villagers under control in case they find out the truth about the village. Over time merely the thought of monsters is enough to keep the villagers in line.
I haven’t come across any such studies.
I think it’s mainly based on supposition/conjecture/assumptions about levels needed to achieve herd immunity, when the spread started and how many have been exposed.
The surveys done looking at % with antibodies are pretty variable but tend to point to fairly low numbers having had it and this pushes up the IFR a bit, to a number that’s significantly above, say, flu for it to present a danger to healthcare’s ability cope and that would cause more deaths than people want to see, if the spread is allowed to continue naturally.
Others think that the experience in the real world points to a lower threshold for herd immunity, earlier spread, more people having been exposed and put the lack of antibodies down to natural immunity.
I’ve not seen much of a decisive nature as to which of the two competing theories is closest to the truth, or even how you’d go about verifying such a thing “scientifically”, but I tend to think the latter theory is more likely simply based on the fact that despite very varying amounts of imposed or voluntary distancing measures, we have still seen nothing… Read more »
A thoughtful post demands a thoughtful reply.
Recall that human experience with this pathogen is only six months old. The vast majority of scientific publications in the field are currently not-peer reviewed and live only on a preprint server (which is a huge advance on previous times and a clear benefit of the internet).
Our experience of respiratory infections ranges from rhinovirus (mild in all except the immunocompromised, but no lasting immunity) through to SARS-COV1 (not very transmissible but VERY deadly), passing through annual influenza (which can kill a lot more people than most realise). So early reports force us to put SARS-COV2 somewhere on that scale. Early data from Wuhan showed that, unlike SARS-COV1, it is transmissible in the community (perhaps about the same as influenza). Identification of pathogenicity was not possible – so will this be a flu that kills a lot more people? Estimating the denominator number of cases is really not possible without massive testing (which is not possible for such a new pathogen).
Surprisingly, influenza is a disease of children, who experience high morbidity but low mortality. This has the effect of clogging up healthcare preventing those most at risk of mortality… Read more »
In fact the mortality by age for this common cold coronavirus closely mirrors that of other common cold coronaviruses and rhinoviruses.
‘Unexpectedly Higher Morbidity and Mortality of Hospitalized Elderly Patients Associated with Rhinovirus Compared with Influenza Virus Respiratory Tract Infection’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5343795/
There is plenty more peer reviewed stuff out there from years back.
And, surprise, surprise, it looks highly likely that there is a great deal of cross immunity from other common cold coronaviruses.
If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, looks like a duck……
But we have a monolithic state health service, massive state bureaucracy, heavily unionised public sector (34% of GDP) and a state broadcaster. That is why we are where we are……statist intransigence, incompetence.
Not unexpected though – past influenza infections confer some level of immunity in the elderly. About that duck, the paper below has been one of my favorite coronavirus publications – 20 years of study of reinfection. I’m not hopeful for lasting or even significant cross-immunity. Nor vaccination.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v1
Don’t get your hopes up just yet. Witty is right in that these are early days for what may become the fifth circulating endemic coronavirus.
https://twitter.com/PFDgeologist/status/1269188376017743873/photo/1
There is no evidence that we had exponential growth at the lockdown. In fact, when lockdown was implemented the R value was below 1. The only reliable data is death. You see in the above reference that deaths are decreasing in the exact manners in all countries. You cannot rely on a quickly expanding testing system to give you exact figures of increase of cases. Ascertainment bias. But it is more difficult to cheat with the death figures gong in the same direction everywhere with or without lockdown. They are the best figures reflecting infection (not detected cases).
They all follow Gompertz curve. Everywhere the infection shoot up reach a roof and slows down before the implementation of lockdown.
https://twitter.com/plaforscience/status/1269196860029317120/photo/1
I agree with death being the harder endpoint, but the lag between deaths and infections (i.e., contact restriction) can be up to 14 days (about 5-7 in the raw data). Gompertzian growth in the early phase is, in essence, exponential. In fact on a technical level, I think the true growth is generalised logistic, which is between mass mixing and gompertz. There is much debate over the reasons for the slowing, but contact restriction, whether via lockdown or not, rather than limiting supply of people to infect, is my preferred explanation.
For those that care, the slope on a log scale for log(N) cases or deaths and a maximum of Nt is:
exponential = a – never slows
Logistic = a (1 – (N/Nt)) slows down due to lack of susceptibles
General Logistic = a (1 – (N/Nt)^pwr) slows down faster due to mixing restriction
Gompertz = a (1 – log(N)/log(Nt)) slows down even faster (used in cancer growth a lot)
a was about 0.23/day and we were likely in the General Logistic to Gompertz range, with net rate falling towards 0 from a. We still aren’t at zero.
OK – thank you. This is along the lines of what I was looking for and is genuinely helpful.
Leaving aside the arguments you made as to why imposing the lockdown was a justifiable decision in the first place (I conceded this point above and as I say, I understand and can accept it, though I don’t agree with it), to sum up what I think you’re saying (and please, do correct me if I’ve misunderstood): although there is an increasing body of knowledge on the behaviour of the virus, how it spreads, who it affects and how, there is still too little and it is not yet sufficiently established for us to have any real certainty, and so the scientific advice can only be caution? As the body of data grows, then there should be room for more action.
Is that a reasonable (if brief) summary?
Assuming that is correct, then it leaves us with a position where the political leaders of the country are acting solely on the advice of a single group of experts, who are themselves focused entirely on a single issue. This is not the fault of the scientists, because they have been given a… Read more »
Completely reasonable summary. Based on the situation in Feb-March, and knowledge of SARS-COV-1 from 2003, precaution was definitely merited. And the public were already calling for it in . Where leadership has failed is in lack of decisiveness in taking those decisions and waiting for precedence going in. That has led to uncertainty coming out.
Your comment on Hancock is spot on. But that is the point of leadership, with it comes accountability. The Govt seem to not want the second part of the deal.
Science is the skill of being comfortable living with uncertainty – “how wrong can I be” is a question I ask all the time. Models can help with informing just how wrong. But decisions by politicians are actually data-driven. And coming out, the data is lacking (testing is a culprit here), hence the dither.
I think it will be a bumpy twelve months.
Politics has to take data into account, because the best decisions can only be made based on information. Politics also needs to take public opinion into account – but should also not be driven by it.
Deciding the course of the country based on the most risk-averse possible way of dealing with any single obsession will always and can only ever be wrong. Any decision will always have unintended as well as intended consequences, but political leadership ought to be about having the courage (there I go using the c word again) of your convictions and the expectation that you will be able to account for yourself.
No economic assessment will ever come out looking favorable. Not that such analyses should not be done. The government have an economic version of SAGE who will have a different obsession (and models to back those up too – also wrong of course).
The Netherlands have largely followed the UK (slightly better outcome), but the difference has been leadership and communication. Leaders bring people with them. They don’t shirk responsibility and they admit mistakes. Apparently our government have made no mistakes.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/05/mark-rutte-the-world-class-pragmatist-trying-to-take-the-drama-out-of-the-corona-crisis/
Like you Matt I have looked and failed to find that definitive hard article “this is why we must stop the country stone dead”. I feel like I’m now actually living in Auden’s poem “stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone”
Insert lockdown & MSM you will see where I’m going.
I am close to the end of my career and live in a remote part of the UK with no elderly close relatives to lose so I was always circumspect with my friends when rather gung-ho at the start about worrying that people might die. I too will die. I’ve had a good life and would rather go doing something I chose to do that might be risky than have someone faceless bureaucrat tell me I can’t. Isn’t it MY choice? Have I been infantised to such an extent that ‘nanny knows best’? NO NO NO.
Closing the entire economy that funds our new God, the NHS, has impoverished this population for decades to come, has imprisoned our children and denied many less cared for young from having access to one regular hot meal a day for 6 months.
… Read more »
I agree. I am in my mid 60s, no close living relatives, and now is the time for “me” . . . I don’t want to hide behind a sofa because of a bug, I want to get out there, enjoy life, take a few risks, have something to really remember when I am no longer capable of getting around as easily. If in pursuit of that goal I pop my clogs due to this bug, then so be it. That’s fine. When somebody shouted at me the other day that I was reckless and quite literally could kill her Granny, I just said “I’ve never met your Granny and have no intention of going anywhere near her!” I’m not daft, I realise other people may not want to take the same risks and that’s fine too. But there must be CHOICE. And to have that choice removed to bow before the altar of the great NHS – which I don’t even use anyway, I haven’t even seen a doctor in 20 years – really does gall.
“Surprisingly, influenza is a disease of children, who experience high morbidity but low mortality.”
djaustin, I stopped reading your thoughtful reply after I read that sentence. I’m not sure you understand the concept of mortality and morbidity, also, as a scientist, what sources are you using?
Have a read, it may be surprising – Table 1.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163445313003733
Admissions of those without and with risk:
6m – 4y 84k 13k
5-14y 43k 10k
15-44y 88k 30k
45-64 40k 99k
65+ 52k 370k
However, per capita the 5-14y group are three time more likely to be admitted to hospital than the 65+ but 724x less likely to die. That’s for those without risk factors. If you have a clinical risk then the admission ratio is about unity but the fatality rate falls to thirty times more likely.
I am very familiar with the concepts.
I have read the one study you linked to, that says, ‘Mortality in children under 15 years was low’.
Are you actually a ‘scientist’, and in which field?
In my 20yr career as a paediatric nurse, I haven’t come across a child who died of influenza. Meningococcal disease, bronchiolitis, even varicella. I’m not disputing it, but ….
Are actually a practicing professional or are a blowhard?
Practicing professional scientist in a medical-scientific discipline, if you must know, with over 25 years experience (including but not limited to Epidemiology). My work has led directly to the extension of life in Cancer, progression of disease in MS and use of an antimalarial in children. I’m currently working on new treatments for COVID19. I am very happy with my real job.
I simply pointed to a paper that precisely matches your clinical experience, confirming what I wrote. Children do not die of influenza (almost zero mortality). However compared with young and middle-aged adults, they do suffer disproportionate morbidity (burden of disease leading to healthcare utility). That is surprising to those who are unfamiliar with the data. It was one justification for closing schools to prevent what might have been undue use of hospitals by children (as per influenza pandemic planning).
That outcome has not come to pass, because their infections are largely mild or asymptomatic (fewer children die from COVID19 than influenza). This was not obvious very early in the epidemic when there were very few cases. Now debate has moved to whether they contribute to transmission to the elderly who are at risk.
Why do… Read more »
djaustin, I apologise.
Your providence is reassuring.
We are all finding this this hard, in our own individual ways.
I do not understand why we have had our liberties taken away from us, when the excess deaths, historically, are greater than this epidemic.
My wife was ventilated for 3 weeks in the swine flu epidemic, I know how it feels. But, people die all of the time, my feeling is that the lockdown will have cause deaths not related to C19. I believe that my wife, if the hysteria that we are experiencing now was present then, I genuinely believe that she would be dead now.
🙏🏻
That’s OK. All I try and do is provide facts and untangle the science in a dispassionate way. The science now is not what it was three months ago. It’s still not well-understood, but some clarity is starting to emerge. I also had swine flu that year and it was truly awful. I am pleased your wide survived. My twin sister spent 8 weeks in ITU with ARDS, only to die of melanoma five years later. I also know only too well what missing oncology appointments means to patients. The closure of such clinics is outrageous.
Things appeared very grave in March. When faced with such gravity, action was required. Restriction of contacts, avoidance of large events, closure of London public transport, closure of schools, all will have helped. Removal of liberties? That’s the big question and to be honest the jury is still out. Sweden tells one story, it’s neighbors another. I expected 12 weeks of measures and an epidemic largely over by July – and made this prediction at and about lockdown. That seems to be likely. The Government have clearly not wanted to communicate “predictions” of duration with any clarity whatsoever (easily tested of course).
… Read more »
‘I am very familiar with the concepts’ – theoretically or ‘on the front lines. I dispute that you are very familiar with the concepts.
I am, intimately, personally and professionally.
I am tired of keyboard warriors opining their fantasy qualifications and pseudoknowledge, this a space for people to let of steam and talk about their daily frustrations about this living nightmare. Not parading your faux intellectualism to feed for ego.
Get a real job, actually making a difference or even actually really saving lives or even helping people at the end of their lives, making them and their families as least painful as possible.
Take a good look at yourself.
Morning
After a terrible Start to 2020 I’m desperate to get away this summer for some sunshine.
Obviously the 14 day quarantine poses a problem unless it is scrapped under its next review.
Has anybody got any insider info on these travel bridges and if they are actually going to be in place ready for mid July ? I don’t want to book anything yet as the lack of common sense from the leaders of this country leaves me doubtful we will arrive at a decision, but would appreciate any thoughts ?
Honestly, I wouldn’t even consider going abroad this year. They could easily change the rules while you’re away due to some kneejerk nonsense and you find yourself coming back to a new quarantine or a new lockdown.
Lou, I run a travel company and even with the up to the minute info, it is still clear as mud. On 9th June, it was stated in travel press that a senior Govt. source has said that quarantine would be replaced by air bridges on 29 June. My gut feeling is that they will do all they can to achieve this to avoid legal action from the ‘Quash Quarantine’ group. However, there are also reports that countries such as Spain have apparently stated that they are not in talks with the UK and want an EU wide approach which could take a lot longer than air bridges. According to a recent survey, 85% of Brits think the Govt lack the capability to manage quarantine and the early evidence of the farce at Heathrow seems to back that up.
The financial implications for the consumer are also unclear if a holiday is booked but you cannot go due to quarantine restrictions. If the hotel is open and the flights are operating then you potentially could lose your money as no insurer will touch it and the airlines/tour operator/hotels are also potentially in the clear from a refund aspect.
… Read more »
Thank you 😊
Gosh what a depressing year hopefully like you say another couple weeks we will know more
GOVERNMENT SETS OUT ‘COVID-SECURE’ GUIDELINES FOR FLYING
The government has set out its full “Covid-secure” guidelines for the safe resumption of international air travel.
Passengers are advised to check in all baggage, including their hand baggage, and wear face coverings at all times.
They are also advised to remain seated as much as possible during the flight.
The guidance covers the entire passenger journey, from arrival at their departure airport to picking up their bags in-destination.
Airports and airlines are encouraged to reduce face-to-face contact with passengers at check-in, security and at the gate, and ensure passengers take precautions to guard against transmission onboard.
Airlines have also been told to draw up and introduce protocols to manage passengers or staff who show symptoms during a flight.
Despite trials at Heathrow and several other airports, the government has said it does not believe temperature screening is an effective precaution.
A full guidance note published on Thursday (11 June) by the Department for Transport states “there should be no requirement for temperature screening before passengers fly to, enter, depart from, or fly within the UK”, citing the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
… Read more »
FCO have also removed the word ‘indefinitely’ from their travel advice:
COVID-19 Exceptional Travel Advisory NoticeThe Foreign & Commonwealth Office currently advises British nationals against all but essential international travel. This advice is being kept under constant review.
Was changed on Sunday night I believe.
If you’re not supposed to move around the cabin too much – presumably cut down on loo visits (no chance here then! 😂) then how on earth are you supposed to wash your hands regularly in flight? I’ve always carried Clinell wipes anyway as I fly regularly in the summer months.
What with ‘bridges’ and ‘bubbles’ I feel as if I’m living in a Philip Pullman children’s novel. WTF do these terms mean?
Bubble actually used to be one of my favorite words. Now I hate it with a passion.
They use childish words to linguistically disguise the nasty intent of enforced social isolation. These words are the velvet glove behind the iron fist. These words are patronising, humiliating, sinister and should be recognised for their true intent
I’m in the same sort of position. I have a little village house on a Greek island and I normally spend the summer hopping backwards and forwards as I have family both in Greece and the U.K. I desperately want to see my Greek family but 2 weeks quarantine on return is impossible as I need that time to tend to my livestock and land. Frankly I’m getting to the stage of just going anyway and ignoring the quarantine when I get back as I can’t see it being enforceable – by ignoring it, I mean do what I’ve been doing throughout lockdown which is live alone and go to my livestock alone each day, so I can’t see I’d be putting anyone in danger. I still think the virus will have disappeared by the end of July anyway.
Either that, or go and not come back! Which is looking more tempting by the day!
The quarantine rules are unenforceable. Only slaves comply to such petty tyranny that has no scientific or logical benefit. When I leave this ridiculous country, Im not coming back.
This might cheer you up – not. I came across this site at the very beginning of this nonsense and had a fit. I was inadvertently directed there yesterday and nearly had a coronary. They blatantly claim that the scientific evidence backs wearing muzzles. Not in my research. But this is what I mean about getting people to willingly allow themselves to be muzzled. https://masks4all.org/
And a slight digression on the same subject. I don’t watch much TV news so maybe it’s my paranoia but whenever I catch an item about CV19 and they’re interviewing a punter outside they seem to be invariably wearing a mask. Do you think the broadcasters make them wear one to push their narrative? I rarely see someone where I live wear them. And I’ve read somewhere else that as soon as the emergency services etc are off camera they take them off. Is this more of the same sinister shit? I will go to prison before I wear a mask. Or have a vaccine for that matter.
I had a look at the site and saw this:
Jeremy HowardCo-founder of the movement #Masks4All
data scientist and entrepreneur, a founding researcher at fast.ai, a faculty member at Singularity University, and a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum
Young Global Leader and World Economic Forum are red flags. The WEF is the Davos set, the global power brokers, that are pushing the transformation for the Fourth Reich Industrial Revolution, and all they spread are lies that are of benefit to the power elite. This is all hidden in plain sight.
The power elites control the worlds mainstream media and they know how psychology works, so they will make their broadcast staff wear masks to programme us into the desired action they want from us. They go way too far with it so on TV programmes or reports they will have presenters or guests sitting on the other side of the room, just to ram through the point.
The government has a Behavioural Insights Team, and a sub group of SAGE is SPI-B which are about psychological ‘nudging’. The government and the media are experts in controlling peoples behaviour through psychology and the British,… Read more »
https://www.rt.com/uk/491411-blair-digital-id-covid19/
A decade after his own ID project failed, ex-PM Blair pushes for one to prove Covid-19 ‘disease status’
Ten years after Tony Blair’s contentious British ID card scheme was binned, the former PM says a digital version is urgently needed so that people can prove their Covid-19 “disease status” as the world transitions out of lockdown.
Speaking at the Virtual CogX technology conference on Tuesday, Blair argued that it’s only when citizens can easily show they’re coronavirus-free that sectors such as international travel will be able to restart.
The former UK Labour prime minister insisted that such a system would operate alongside the government’s track-and-trace program as the economy is rebooted.
It’s a natural evolution of the way that we’re going to use technology in any event to transact daily life, and this Covid crisis gives an additional reason for doing that.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has been making a range of coronavirus response recommendations to leaders around the world, published a paper on Tuesday calling for a digital health ‘passport’.
Under the proposals, people would download a digital wallet app secured with either a fingerprint scan or facial recognition. This would allow them… Read more »
I love the fact that BLiar is championing this. Just like last time, it will cause people to recoil from the idea in droves.
And don’t forget that Boris said at the time: “If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.”
I’d like him to say that again today when he pushes his track and trace bollocks at us all.
He won’t… yet. Every rule and guideline published has pretty much failed hasn’t it. If they wanted to do it properly, then they could easily do that, given the amount of money being thrown around at everything else
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/06/11/dave-hampson-the-tyranny-of-process/
Makes for a depressing read.
It’s a really good piece of work. Well worth a read… I didn’t find it depressing.
New data suggests millions of Russians may have Covid-19 antibodies
https://www.rt.com/russia/491436-covid19-russia-herd-immunity/
As testing ramps up, a growing number of Russians are discovering that they have already had Covid-19. Results show almost 14 percent of people have immunity, meaning millions may have been infected.
“Almost 650 thousand people were tested in 46 regions,” she said, explaining that almost 14 percent of the tests came back positive.
If extrapolated to the rest of the country, 20 million of Russia’s estimated population of 146 million may have been infected.
Popova noted that children were found to have the highest level of immunity, with almost 20% of under-17s having immunity.
“14% of people between 18 to 64 years of age are immune, and only 11% of those 65 and older,” she explained.
She added that, in addition to checks for antibodies, over 13.5 million tests for current coronavirus infection have been conducted, with the results showing “a clear trend of decreasing growth rates.”
Very interesting. This is a gigantic country and such wide spread show that the virus is impossible to stop. The vast majority asymptomatic. The PCR tests showing on Worldometer, I think are many, if not the majority, asymptomatic carriers they have found in mass testing. They have tested almost 10 % of the population, more per capita than UK,US etc. And a very low death rate. This is most likely the normal IFR for this virus unless you deliberately infect care homes as in the US and UK as part of a strategy to free up NHS or US hospital beds by sending the infected to their care homes.
.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-aren-t-broadcasters-scrutinising-neil-ferguson-s-claims
Why aren’t broadcasters scrutinising Neil Ferguson’s claims?
Resigning in disgrace has come to take on a very different meaning than it did in the days when John Profumo withdrew from public life and dedicated himself to Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in east London. Now, it seems to mean a few weeks in the sinbin before you are allowed to creep back to doing pretty much what you were doing before. It is only five weeks since Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College was forced to resign from the government’s SAGE committee after it was revealed that he had twice broken lockdown by entertaining his married lover at his London home. Yet twice in the past fortnight he has been back to give evidence before Parliamentary committees, last week with the House of Lords and today with the Commons select committee on science.
And boy did he make best use of the opportunity. He told MPs:
“‘The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced. So had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.’
To be fair… Read more »
He could have gone the whole hog and said if we’d locked down and closed borders in October 2019 we could have had zero deaths. But then there would be no outrage, it would be considered a stupid thing to say.
It’s all very well saying if we’d done such and such, but he should then state the reasoning for doing so at the time as that is as relevant as the action proposed. Was he saying at the time if we lock down now we’ll have half the deaths that we’re going to end up with? No, at the time he was presenting models that had very little reflection on reality.
Some say his prediction of 20k has turned out to be an understimate. That’s one way to look at it I suppose. The other is that his modelling was simply wrong.
That to me is what proves it’s complete arse. 500,000 deaths!
A few weeks later: Agh shit, I’m really wrong. Quick, pick another number- what did Valance say was a good number?
20,000 deaths!!
When asked why he revised his estimate down, Neil probably says “because lockdown!!” OK Neil. Why has lockdown killed an extra 20 thousand? 😉
Mainstream journalists, especially on TV, have been abysmally poor at what you’d think are obvious basic challenges to the choices made.
I think Ferguson said the infection peak (or at least rate of increase peak) was between March 16th and end of March. It’s possible I’m misremembering, so here’s the interview in which I think he said that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cYjjEB3Ev8
#mediascum
https://twitter.com/FrankfurtZack/status/1270989479675858945/photo/1
Interesting discussion in countries late in the pandemic like Germany.
The few case detected are now almost in the majority asymptomatic carriers.
Why continue to test well people? Why not test symptomatic people and isolate?
Implied is of course the belief, that in a pandemic dying down, herd immunity has been reached (phoney arguments that lockdown reduced the herd immunity can be discarded)
And it is uninteresting to chase carriers who will anyway disappear.
This never happened in flu pandemic as we did not rely on testing at that time but only common sense that the pandemic was petering out in all measurements we had at that time.
Anyone else get the feeling Boris Johnson is just stalling until the Government loses the judicial review and is told to scrap the coronavirus legislation?
This way he can claim that if there are further waves “it was not me, the big boys made me do it then ran away” or can claim his delaying tactics save the nation?
He can then start reigning in the tyrannical councils and local authorities who are overstepping their powers during all this, depoliticise the Police, make the unions look like numpties and so on.
Personally I don’t think our “elite”are that intelligent to do either but are just winging it and hope the population give in eventually nad behave themselves.
And therein lies another tragic unintendid consequence in all this. The actions of today have undermined the effectiveness of any future actions should a more deadly virus come along.
It’s basically the boy who cried wolf. By overreacting to a relatively benign virus who’s going to believe them in future?
even vampires can gain entry to a premises once invited.
Apologies I guess my attempt at humour is simply to highlight the absurdity of the situation. I’ll try to hold back on the silliness but may not be able to help myself at times.
no – stick with the humour… sometimes the absurdity of the world today and some of the info that we are presented with on here, the only options are to laugh or cry and i for one have run out of kleenex
kh, as you said you are angry and you have every right to be. So am I and I have not suffered the privations that you have through this. I am angry on your behalf, my elderly mother’s behalf, schoolchildren’s behalf etc etc. The list is too long. But if you can step back I think you’ll find that a lot of people here support you. I’ve been coming since day one and there’s so many positive remarks directed towards you and your heroic attempts to keep your cafe open against all odds. I salute you for this and all your posts here, and I (and I guess the majority on here) don’t give a monkey’s arse about your education. I appreciate your contribution and thank you. I hate this country too, but only because of the people running it. All over the world now we seem to be embracing hysteria that makes no sense to me.Please keep coming here. I’ve had reasonable exchanges with all sorts whose political views I would have once railed against. Coming to LS has changed my political outlook and, I like to think, for the better. Some prejudices have been lifted from my eyes.… Read more »
I couldn’t agree more. And I have lost a lot of my lefty friends as a result. These are lovely people, none of them extreme, sometimes a bit posturing, but genuinely want what’s best for all people. I get on here that a lot of people would question their methods and I understand that, but they were my friends because their motives were unassailable. Kind people. I don’t like unkind people so they wouldn’t have been my friends if that were the case. But when I point out that this is madness, they just can’t see it. I thought they were all highly intelligent, certainly most of them have a better formal education than me, but this willingness to give up your liberty – hell that was what the left used to mean to me. Liberty, equality, fraternity. I am now officially neutral and stand with decency. God help us, please bring back decency.
Yep, my business gone as well – 20 years hard work gone in a matter of days. Bastards politicians and experts and quangos and billionaires one and all – worldwide w have to get rid of them.
I doubt the PM has thought through the consequences of the road they are on. I can see no evidence for that.
I bet Cummings has though. He will have thought it through
Maybe. I think he thinks he’s cleverer than he actually is. He’s not stupid, obviously, but I get the impression he overestimates himself a fair bit.
Yes,I am sure he has. It’s a long game that is just going far too slowly for my liking. I think it’s waiting for what else comes out from the ‘other side’. This is bloody tortuous though
makes you wonder what is going to happen when normal winter flu arrives again. Whereas in the past people get ill, many die, but the world goes on , is the “new normal” now going to be that everything stops again and we all get quarantined to stop flu deaths?
I’m afraid that may well be the case. The precedent has been set.
You’ll be surprised how much you can take before you crack, as a contractor at work paid by the day when things went to shit normally due to idiot managers and incompetent engineers the saying was always “I can do this for day longer than they have the money to pay me”.
I’ve found alcohol helps but it’s podging on the pounds as I’m testing the wine before it goes into the recipe – Keith Floyd school of cookery.
One day at a time like in AA helps.
So does annoying trolls and other assorted pro-narrative brainwashed numpties and nuggets,
Plus leading almost wannabe sceptics to sites like this and real independent sources of information.
My wife used to run a pub while I was working way.
The opposite corner was a shop run by an Indian family and the 2 sons used to come in for a few beers regularly when they closed up.
One day an New Pakistani face came in the pub and was a bit obnoxious and accused me of not liking him and being racist. I turned round and said to him “I didn’t care what colour, creed, sex, age or religion you are, you can still be an arsehole!”.
He left and the 2 Indian lads cracked up – said that’s why they liked drinking in there, I may not be racist but I did not understand that politically correct nonsense.
I have spent my whole life working and living abroad with brief stints in the UK so lived and worked with locals and been the only white man sometimes for hundreds of miles so I’m not a racist no matter what those who have never experienced what I have say but I do know arseholes come in all colours, creeds and religions and infest the world.
Try rewording it to suit your circumstances… Read more »
The only good thing I will say about the NHS is that if you are wheeled into A+E unconscious after a really nasty accident they are great.
Anything else and they are abysmal – and I know from experiences with myself, wife, kids, family and friends how bad they are upto and including killing people off by by dehydration.
Notice how many people die over the weekend? OK on Friday, dead on Monday morning – don’t give them water, no water for 3 days and the average human will die let alone an ill one. Cause of death whatever they were admitted for as dehydration not checked during the autopsy if there is one – not normally a they died under the care of a doctor for a known problem so not required.
I see the BLM idiots have toppled the statue of Christopher Columbus in Minnesota.
Thursday Reflections.
Most people are either –
– lazy thinkers
– easily led
– gullible
– not skilled at critical thinking
Many populate this board.
Can you expand on that thought?
There is certainly a lot of thought that the government that has stripped them of their liberty and set about the systematic destruction of everything we had is eventually going to turn around and save them.
Not really – just the one by the sound of it. Now f**k off….
I would just remove the ‘either’.
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For Wales: please remain behind your sofa for foreseeable future
All other rules remain in place except for those listed in Chapter 2, Section 3, Subsection 4.7, para B, revision 5.6.7 of the .gov website.
Dept of Obfuscation and Opacity
Technical question. Tomorrow Simon Dolan’s case goes to court. If he wins but the Government decides to appeal does the Government have to end the lockdown until such time as it wins an appeal or can it just keep the lockdown going whilst continually appealing against the ruling?
Maybe they don’t want to win. Losing would provide a way out of lockdown with someone to blame for any nasty consequences.
I don’t understand the whole idea that the government would end lockdown if only they could save face or find someone to blame – however much damage they have done so far its only going to get much worse when millions upon millions loose their jobs. If they cared about saving face or being blamed they would end lockdown now. Clearly they could not care less how much damage they might get blamed for. This is just wishful thinking. Its over – liberty and the prosperity it brings are gone.
A cynical viewpoint would be that the worse shape the economy is in the more focus they can put on “the recovery” and brush aside distractions such as public enquiries and blame seeking.
We are facing economic destruction of a scale never before seen. The governments recovery plan appears to be a totalitarian communism/facism hybrid. I thought we just had an election and rejected a similar ideology. If they can manage to just brush this aside then I am afraid the bulk of the people who went along with all of this deserve everything they get.
Not based on specialist knowledge, but I think the court can order either way. In practice, if the government intends to appeal I’d have thought there would be not a chance in hell that a judge would risk ordering material changes immediately.
But they’ll probably go straight to Supreme Court I’d have thought, so only one challenge.
Thanks – I genuinely wanted to know. Hopefully Mr Dolan will win, the Government will fold and we can start getting back to normal. At least the current Government isn’t likely to appeal to the EU courts to drag things out further.
Eleanor Roosevelt said:
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
I think it’s got the ring of truth.
I think for ‘events’ we can substitute ‘data’ (it’s a numerical representation of an event or collection of events).
I believe that Boris Johnson probably is in the first category, but his ignorance of science is such that he has deferred entirely to the second category of people.
Probably all the SAGE members are in the second category. We have our own second category person in these comments, and it’s fascinating to get a window on how this mode of thinking works. It will lead you over the edge of a cliff on the basis of a super-simplistic model that produces “data” that looks nice on a graph. Neil Ferguson is another prime example. The power of “data”, even if it is generated from within his own very small head, is such that he is prepared to keep sticking his neck out and effectively shouldering the responsibility for possibly the most catastrophic decision ever. He has no idea what he is doing.
And as for the third category, we see it… Read more »
Eleanor Roosevelt said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
I know a funny story about her!
Boris with a great mind? Hardly – if so he would not have been moved around by patent shysters like Ferguson, and he would have been able to put covid risks in the broader context.
Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t think you can underestimate the forces lined up against him… always remember them.
I’ve never seen evidence that Johnson has a great mind. Mr. Bumble, as Peter Hitchens calls him, cannot articulate a complete sentence without making an arse of himself. Great minds have stillness and gravitas, Johnson uses rugby metaphors and punctuates his lack of reasoning and argument in hearings with such erudite comments as ‘Get stuffed.’
As we’re finding out with the BLM protests, and the threatened angry reaction to them from others, you can only keep people under lockdown for a short time before frustration leads to violence. In our everyday lives we develop routines and ways of keeping deep emotions suppressed. Take away habitual ways of acting by introducing virtual house arrest and something’s got to give sooner or later, in this case in response to an unpredictable and not directly relevant trigger from overseas.
Johnson, Cummings, Sage et al. clearly thought there would be no significant reaction to their draconian measures. That’s a measure of how out of touch they are with ordinary people – and their own feelings.
A few of us here have predicted rioting before summer is over or after the furlough scheme ends. The police inaction over the BLM protests have shown that lockdown and antisoscial distancing was all bunkum and as more people lose their jobs and/or are unable to find one and more businesses close, they will find that they have nothing to lose by rioting.
Not only that but we may also see low level violence in the form of assaulting transport staff or those in retail and visitor services when they try to enforce antisocial distancing and muzzle wearing.
I sadly cannot see that there has been a “significant reaction” to their draconian measures – certainly early on there was broad compliance (though I am sure more people cheated than would have been apparent from opinion polls on whether people supported – vast majority did support and a majority continue to support the general thrust of what the government is doing).
Aside from people like those who post here, and certain newspaper columnists and scientists, the idea that we had a choice and made the wrong choice isn’t really in the public consciousness.
I dare say the BLM protests may have attracted more than they would have done otherwise, if for no other reason than lots of people didn’t have much else to do, but I don’t think they have much to do with lockdown.
“I sadly cannot see that there has been a “significant reaction” to their draconian measures”
I could believe that there is an unconscious reaction, though. Plenty of us were predicting rioting as a result of the lockdown even before it was imposed. The riots have been given a spurious ‘theme’ that distracts from the lockdown, but I think that our predictions were right.
Hear hear. The BLM ’cause’ basically just provided an excuse for most of them to go on the rampage.
How and why did the BLM protests appear when they did… did no black people die at the hands of the police in 2019?, Yes a load of wokist bandwagon jumpers that makes it look like a huge movement, but it’s incredibly suspicious isn’t it? All for a career criminal with multiple convictions no less. Worldwide and coordinated… But at the end of the day just a tiny minority of vocal race baiters that have revealed themselves.
Earlier this week, after all the rioting, the police did actually nab a large number of their ringleaders who would not disperse.
Have a look at USA to see the true extent of it.Who is supporting it…. ?
I doubt anyone will take any notice of any more lockdowns based on scientists dodgy calculations, especially those from Imperial College. I really hope we can save our pubs, restaurants and High Streets after this economic massacre. I’ve heard of a couple of businesses staying closed in my local town and they’ll probably be many more before the government stops this madness.
A friend and I are taking odds about how many of the shops that reopen on 15 June will close for good before the month is over.
I think the government is relying on the public to spend spend spend once the lockdown is officially lifted, thereby boosting the economy.
Agree. Trouble is I seriously doubt that people will have much money and the increase of prices will kill off any appetite to spend money even if people do have them.
I am not sure what makes you think the government cares about the economy. They are systematically destroying the economy for no good reason. Until we can accept how dire our situation actually is there is no hope of changing it.
Prof Karol Sikora: Covid-19 death toll may be less than half of what has been recorded (Daily Telegraph)
We’ve known it was a lot less for ages. But less than half?
Not sure we need a two millimetre rule now. Not sure we need any rules at all. Not sure what it was all about in the first place.
I’ve just been reading that article. Good on him for saying it.
Didn’t they find only 12% in Italy, isn’t it only 5% of death certificates in the UK list no other causes? So perhaps a lot less then half.
Yes 10-15% seems to the broad consensus from places I’m seeing who have revised their death count/estimated how it should be revised. But honestly? I think our figure may be even less due to the huge skewing of figures towards care home death. We really have had hardly any death from the ‘healthy’ portion of the population, unlike Italy or NY
And if that is the case there is a lot of excess deaths that can attribute to the lock down itself. I am no lawyer but how is this not criminal? Its not like the dire consequences of these actions could not be predicted by any reasonably competent person.
‘Perspectives on the Pandemic’, Episode 9. The view from a New York Hospital.
I had wondered why this latest episode of the series had been so long coming. Having watched it I can see why. There was a short thread on this yesterday, but it seems too important to let go.
First, I find the witness, a nurse from another state working temporarily at the hospital, to be credible. Time will tell of course; the program-makers invited the hospital to comment, but thus far they have declined.
A few thoughts, in no particular order.
The covid data coming out of New York has long raised eyebrows among analysts, as being off the scale and uninterpretable. This documentary implies that this data, taken as a whole, is of little or no practical use for any analysis or understanding of the disease itself.
The hospital concerned treated mainly what we would call ethnic minority patients. The ‘treatment’ they received puts the death of George Floyd into a new perspective. In the case of Mr Floyd, the police officers concerned have immediately become the subject of a murder investigation; despite this, there has been widespread protest, rioting and… Read more »
There have already been articles suggesting that people in care homes have died of neglect.
It would not surprise me at all if it was discovered that most of COVID-19 deaths, and non COVID excess deaths, were because of the way the world reacted.
We may never know but it’s entirely possible that this could have ended up as no worse than a bad round of flu had the world treated it as such.
Yes, it may well be that people in care homes have died of neglect – either direct neglect or the implicit neglect of not being able to see loved ones for months. It certainly appears that many people are going to die early because they haven’t had routine medical treatment over the last three months.
When you add all this up, your second paragraph seems bang on.
If you can speak Spanish this is horrifying:
http://82.221.129.208/newyorkmurder.mp3
it’s a voicemail from a Puerta Rican (I think) woman in a covid-19 ward in New York leaving a voicemail for her husband and basically it says she has watched the staff give everybody an injection and they are dying or dead and as she was the last one to get the injection she was also to die.
The place I read all this goes on to state her name, her family confirm the voicemail, confirms her name on the list of deaths for that day along with the number of the others in the same hospital.
There is also a video from new York showing an authority run sheltered housing complex being emptied. 2 days later there was a big spike in covid-19 attributed deaths as predicted by the article’s author.
Problem is most of the stuff I have been looking at and passing onto other sceptics in my little acquaintances list is now showing that the link/video/article etc is either deleted, 404’d, taken down due to community guidelines etc so cannot look at them again.
This makes my blood run cold.
There’s a bit in the documentary in which the nurse explains how ‘residents’ (i.e. trainee doctors) were giving out incorrect drug doses. Perhaps this is what happened to that poor woman and those poor souls around her.
If this is correct, then presumably it’s manslaughter (or whatever the US equivalent is), at the very least.
Your third para. – who’s doing the emptying? It’s difficult to know how to interpret this, without more information. Looks awful though.
In the video taken from the block of flats opposite a fleet of ambulances and buses turns up and the woman doing the filming asks what is going? Where are they all going?
She ends up posting it online but it got buried apart from a few independent sites – same as that video taken in the Uk where the a woman takes on some guys in hazmat suits as they claim someone with coronavirus and died there hours before and they were there to secure the area and she wants to know who they are and who gave them the info as she was talking to the “deceased” about 10-15 minutes before when the Police took him away as he was homeless and she used to feed him etc as he was dossing in the block of flats she lived in.
I don’t understand the down-vote(s) on AG’s post, but am intrigued to have an explanation.
Does someone think the post is inaccurate, or based on false information?
In the interests of genuine debate, I’m interested to know.
77th doing their stuff.
Look at John B’s post asking about 5G, same happening.
Who are the 77th? (Pardon me for not knowing.)
So they are just trolling?
Do you mean John Smith?
It’s the 77th Brigade of the British Army.
UKColumn in their podcasts over the past few weeks have a really good description of what they do, basically psychological warfare against the British people to control the narrative of what is seen on TV, internet etc.
Now there is also the 13th Signal Brigade that has been started an doing it as well.
Good description of them:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-77th-brigade-britains-information-warfare-military
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/british-military-information-war-waged-their-own-population
MP Tobias Ellwood is supposedly the independent oversight of them for the Government but he is actually a reserve Luitenant Colonel in the 77th Brigade so not exactly neutral nor independent is he?
From here:
https://www.forces.net/mental-health/watch-mp-tobias-ellwood-discusses-mental-health-veterans
“A former army officer with the Royal Green Jackets, now a proud reservist with 77th Brigade”
About 12 million people in Britain over 65.
63% of the UK population overweight or obese
Over 9% of age group 16-59 took drugs 2018/19
7.4 million people in Britain with heart and circulatory diseases.
The ‘spell’ cast over the population in Germany during the 1930s resulted from economic deprivation.
This ‘spell’ cast over Britain’s population derives from the state of the nation’s health; a ‘first world’ problem.
Britain really is, once again, ‘The sick man of Europe’
“7.4 million people in Britain with heart and circulatory diseases”
Scotland is proud to be a major contributor to those numbers. In fact using the Barnett Formula I’ve calculated that Scotland probably contributes more than it’s fair share to the rest of the afflictions mentioned.
We’ve been the heart disease capital of Europe for many a year. At least that’s something we can win at.
I watched a programme yesterday about how Goebbels transformed an eccentric and erratic German individual with an odd moustache into a national demigod.
‘“Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.” (After the rise of the Nazi party), “the whole country was as if under a kind of a spell,”.
Brunhilde Pomsel, one of Goebbels secretaries.
The Nazi’s won the war. They took down the British Empire for a shadow force we’re not allowed to mention. Off course the braindead think we won but during the war the shadow force used the American people and had them invade, sorry liberate us leaving their standing army where they set up the EU and forced everyone in Europe to join together and now? Now the whole world is to come here with their diversity and fantastic culture like genital mutilation, face coverings, drugs, guns, and stinky food, and because we’re awful people who once had slaves and must be destroyed we must sit back and say nothing, stuff like that.
Britain never won the war we lost.
Europe simply replaced one occupying force for another 2.
Got rid of the commies eventually (till now). The Yanks never left.
Yes indeed. It’s like that experiment where they get a person in a white coat (a person of ‘authority’) to tell people to electrocute a fellow participant without explaining why.
9/10 people do it without question.
I’m amazed anew at what a bunch of obedient saps the people of this country are and have become. If you need permission from Boris Johnson (Boris Johnson!) to go and have a shag with your girlfriend/boyfriend you need a thorough and immediate head checking.
Enough is enough for me. I’m one of the lucky ones: working at home on full pay, nice house, garden, live in a pleasant area. Why are the people of the cities, esp. London where there were NO new cases yesterday, not rising up? Why is there not mass disobedience to the draconian lockdown? Is it genuinely just the furlough scheme keeping people compliant. Pay people’s wages and they will forgive all else?
It amazes me that 11 weeks on (is it 11?) I still feel a social taboo to say out loud to others what a nonsense this is. Please tell me I’m going to wake up from this nightmare?
I think it may be because the majority of folk have become terrified of “The Virus”. I’m amazed at how previously sane and sensible friends are still petrified about going out and about. Sometimes I honestly wonder if they are right and I’m wrong, as without this website I’d pretty much be standing alone in my “it’s just a bug” attitude.
Yeah. When you’re the only sane person in a world that’s lost the plot, you can easily start to doubt your own sanity.
I’ve seen experiments where there are say 10 people with 1 person who doesn’t know it’s an experiment. They’ll then get shown a short clip with somebody wearing a blue hat for example. Then they ask everyone what colour hat the person was wearing. Everyone will say the wrong answer, “it was a red hat” and the person not in on it who’s always asked last will say it was a blue red hat in agreement.
The suggestion is that the need to fit in or conform is strong enough for people to go against what they actually believe to be true.
And don’t forget furlough money. That said, employers will be asked to contribute more from next month and it ends in October. It will be interesting to see what the unemployment figures will be then.
A few of us have predicted that there will be rioting either before summer is over or after the furlough scheme ends.
I could have wrote that 👍🏻
I am not sure its even the ‘furlough scheme keeping people compliant’. I know self employed individuals who have not had their income replaced still seemingly happy to wait to be told when they can resume working despite having the opportunity to work anyway. Its more like people have been possessed by what streams out of their TV. They will even only protest for the causes that the TV tells them are OK and not for the cause – their own .liberty and prosperity that the TV tells them is bad.
DT. claims an exclusive to the effect that the 2-metre rule us to be scrapped in time for the new term.
By September!!!
But it’s a start. If it’s true.
Morning Annie! I think that bit of guidance – which they have already backtracked and admitted it’s guidance rather than a legal rule – is going to go out of the window faster than that. As the shops open and crowds arrive, there may be carefully distanced queuing outside but a free for all inside. Very few people now step back 2 metres from me if we are talking. But yes, it’s good news if they have finally woken up to the fact it’s unworkable.
All of that queuing will go out of the window once the weather turns bad. The likes of Monsoon and Accesorize have now gone into administration with under 600 jobs going,what are the odds that there will be more to follow before this month is over?
Indeed, the weather forecast in my area is rain for pretty much the next 10 days. And it’s a terrible shame that so many shops are going bust – in my town, it’s not just big chains but a couple of small independent businesses have also permanently ceased trading. This is just the start and if this trickle turns into a flood, all hell will break loose.
Same here. I went out yesterday and got caught out in the rain so had to shorten my walk to go home. Checking over the next few days, its going to be rain here too.
I agree that its a shame that so many shops are going bust especially small independent ones. The high street in my area was decimated a long time ago and its worrying if vast swathes of this country will end up like my area – barely any local shops and the rest are branches of chains!
The government’s laughable statement about “bubbles” shows how clueless they are and are blind to the coming storm ahead all caused by their disastrous lockdown and antisocial distancing policies.
I’ve just been watching a short video of how the Trafford Centre is going to operate when it reopens next week. That’s all indoors. It’s depressing. I won’t be going. Though at least the toilets will be open!
https://www.facebook.com/74918289964/posts/10157822632854965/
Trafford Centre reopening “safety” plans 🙄
Jesus wept.
However if was heartening to see several people take the piss out of it,
But disheartening to see most people showing concern that masks are only suggested and are not compulsory and that handrails are cleaned.. It shows that the great british public are unfortunately still scared sh*tless
Isle ofWight will be no fun either:
https://youtu.be/Oz-WKhQJj3Q
Small mercies that the toilets are open. However I shan’t be going there or any store for that matter that imposes all of that
i make a point of ignoring it and if anyone says anything to me i tell them to shut their fucking face, It’s not very nice but i don’t give a shit. I long for one of these cowards to fight back but so far no one has. I’m afraid our nation is full of cowards
Just so people can see the BS. This is what djaustin just wrote:
“But in essence, Belgium counts COVID19 deaths including those in nursing homes. The U.K. and elsewhere does not. “
djaustin is claiming we in the UK don’t include nursing home Covid-19 deaths in our totals!!!
Well there’s only one word for that and it begins with a big fat L.
So I hope from now on we can just safely ignore all BS claims from djaustin.
“These figures do not include deaths outside hospital, such as those in care homes. This approach makes it possible to compile deaths data on a daily basis using up to date figures.”
From the official NHS website on reported daily deaths. Here:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/
Official U.K. COVID19 deaths do not include deaths in nursing homes. Nor do they for other countries on ECDC and worldometer. Belgium took a deliberately more conservative approach and report all deaths including unconfirmed by testing. The compatible rate of deaths for Belgium is roughly 450/M to the U.K. 608/M. That’s about the same as Sweden.
Nice article on why they chose this here
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-belgium-death-toll-lockdown-trump-who-uk-spain-italy-a9494186.html%3famp
Why are you using the NHS figures and not the ONS ones, then?
Also they started including them in the daily briefings a while back:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/uk-records-4343-care-home-coronavirus-deaths-in-a-fortnight
Any official daily mortality figure is based on hospital registered deaths in the NHS. The ons figures based on all registered deaths include deaths outside of hospitals but have a delay due to the reporting process and are only provided on a weekly basis. Any daily nursing home deaths are an estimate and hence unofficial.
Worldometer and ECDC (which is used by Johns Hopkins) is hospital deaths. Except Belgium. Which is why they and not the U.K. are currently far out front. Their comparative figure is not great 450/M. But about 15% lower than ours.
This is djaustin‘s MO in a nutshell. Total BS. The original claim was that the UK was not recording “nursing home” Covid-19 deaths. A totally insupportable claim as any reasonable person will understand. But now djaustin is trying to morph his absurd claim into more reasonable ones that have nothing to do with the original claim.
Just to confirm djaustin‘s total deceitfulness…
Djaustin claims (knowing it not to be true) that Worldometer’s figures for deaths per million are based entirely on “hospital deaths”. I knew that was BS and followed the Worldometer link to their source…which is of course HM Gov UK where you will find the following:
“From 29 April, figures for deaths include all cases where there is a positive confirmed test for coronavirus. The figures include deaths with lab-confirmed COVID-19 in all settings, not just those in hospital, and this provides us with a single figure on an equivalent basis for the whole of the UK.”
So djaustin has been tried and found guilty of high BS.
Your next question should be: why is djaustin coming here spreading disinformation?
Ok man calm down. Sounding hysterical.
What? I’ve just taken the guy down piece by logical piece and you’re accusing me of being hysterical? lol Djaustin doesn’t believe the BS in his/her posts. Djaustin knows it’s all untrue. If you aren’t allowed to call out that sort of duplicity in strong terms, well why should you give an f about anything.
How do you know what he believes?
Oh yeah, cause everyone but you has an agenda.
Where did I say I don’t have an agenda? But I don’t think anyone can justly claim I refuse to discuss issues on the basis of evidence. Djaustin does refuse to do so. More than that he/she just lies, as you yourself point out. Remember djaustin claims to be a scientist with expertise in mathematical modelling (!). Do you really suppose they don’t know how UK Covid death stats are compiled (ie they honestly believe that they include only hospital deaths) when you and I and probably 99% know the reality?
Djaustin is engaged in a disinformation campaign.
you need to up your troll game bro. It’s a bit rubbish at the moment
He knows all that. He’s just here to undermine free and fair debate. As I said, I’ve seen it lots of times before re Brexit and BBC bias. They do this fake debating thing.
Whether Toby thinks he should be allowed to continue posting while refusing to engage in free and fair debate is entirely up to him. I’m not particularly a fan of banning myself. But I do want people to know he is a total BSer.
Because he’s a BSer. He knows the difference!
I don’t know why anyone listens to him. I skip over his comments.
This Bubble Boris is talking about, will it contain John Travolta ?
I didn’t see the announcement but I gather Boris announced that single people can now have sex inside a bubble. I’m off to Portmeirion tomorrow to seek out The Prisoner and ask if I can borrow his.
Love it!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/did-late-lockdown-double-covid-s-death-toll-fact-checking-neil-ferguson In this article, Alistair Haimes calculates how the R0 has progressed in the UK, working backwards from death figures. He shows it falling rapidly from 2.5 at the start of March to below 1 when the lockdown started and staying more or less at that level ever since. If this is correct, this clearly shows the lockdown had no effect on the R0. Is it correct?
since i’m trying to free Fife from the Scots and want the Pictish Community returned to our lands i’m forming ‘East Fife Matters. We’re reasonable but if anyone disagrees with us they’ll be arrested and made to listen to Jimmy Shand until they change their minds
The Pictish reputation for brutality is well-founded: they are rumoured to have gone into battle stark naked, and they have no word for fluffy!