Second Wave? Virus Has All But Disappeared
Your daily reminder that the virus has dwindled away to almost nothing. This graph shows daily triage calls for 19-69 year-olds. Note no uptick during the Hyde Park BLM protests or during the “major incident” on Bournemouth Beach. (Hat tip Alistair Haimes.)
Unfortunately, nobody’s told the National Trust. Had an amusing email from a reader just back from the Lake District.
My girlfriend and I took a trip up to Ambleside last week, arriving the day before Maskgeddon. We were denied an early check-in as the room-cleaning regime at our B&B involved multiple rounds of antibacterial fumigation!
The National Trust seems to have completely lost the plot! The day of our first outing, we visited the Aira Force waterfall and parked in one of their car parks near the top of the trail down to the waterfall. As we walked towards the trail, a bedwetter loudly informed me that there was a one-way system on the trails, before we’d even reached the sign. When we got back to the car, I noticed that the Trust has helpfully supplied a hand-sanitiser dispenser embedded in a tree stump near the pay & display machine! Goodness knows how many thousands of lives they’ve already saved with such thoughtful measures!
For the rest of the trip I refused to muzzle up, and I wasn’t challenged at all – in fact most shop staff seemed pleased to be seeing a human face rather than a soggy rag. When we were up on to the fells, it was (mercifully) easy to forget all the absurdity going on down in the valleys…
Not surprising that the National Trust is anticipating having to make 1,200 members of staff redundant, according to the BBC.
Tall Lives Matter
I’ve written a squib for today’s Telegraph about the research purporting to show that people over 6ft are twice as vulnerable to catching Covid. No, it’s not the usual demolition job. As a short(ish) man, I actually welcome the news and hope it’s true.
This comes as something of a relief because I’ve always been a bit chippy about my height. For years, whenever anyone asked me how tall I was, I would say, “Five foot eight and a half,” and then stare at them defensively, daring them to contradict me. But I realised eventually that adding “and a half” wasn’t doing me any favours. It was just advertising the fact that I had an inferiority complex. So now I say, “Five foot nine” and try not to look away too quickly.
Believe it or not, five foot nine is average height for a fully-grown British male and being below that, even if it’s only half an inch, is still a source of resentment. Without quite being aware of it, most people treat height as a proxy for social status, a form of “unconscious bias” that’s unlikely to be addressed by any diversity training programme.
People don’t exactly stop me as I’m on my way back from the lavatory in restaurants and ask me to bring them the bill, but I can still detect a hint of patrician disdain whenever I’m introduced to a tall, upper class man. If I stand next to Jacob Rees-Mogg at a party, for example, I feel like one of the grinning street urchin in that famous photograph of the two Etonian schoolboys towering over the local working class lads.
Worth reading in full, obviously.
My Mask Hell
I’m publishing a new essay today by regular Lockdown Sceptics contributor Guy de la Bédoyère. It’s about his first trip to the shops since the mandatory face coverings policy was introduced.
Walking round a supermarket is actually quite tiring. It’s not like wandering into a newsagent. You have to carry a heavy basket or push a laden trolley. This means that breathing is quite important. As my expedition progressed, I began to feel light-headed. This perplexed me until I realized I was experiencing the first signs of hypoxia. Not only was I not breathing enough, I was also breathing back in my carbon-dioxide laden exhalations. It was like being in Apollo 13 before they managed to knock up some emergency DIY carbon-dioxide filters.
No wonder I was overcome with a constant desire to tear the mask off and gulp air in. With a mild sense of panic beginning to take me over I hurried to the self-service till where I wouldn’t have to use up any additional air trying to speak, constantly having to resist the reflex to remove the mask, hurried through and exited the shop. What a total relief it was to get outside.
Worth reading in full.
Lockdown Killing 2,700 People A week – New Study
According to a study by economists and academics from Sheffield and Loughborough universities, the lockdown has already killed 21,000 people. The Telegraph has the story.
The analysis examines Office for National Statistics (ONS) data in the eight weeks that followed the national lockdown.
Researchers said the findings show that “lockdown has killed 21,000 people” because the policy has had “significant unintended consequences” such as lack of access to critical healthcare and a collapse in A&E attendances.
The study examines deaths data in recent months, and tracks it against long-term trends, taking account of other variables such as demographic and economic factors.
It suggests that the lockdown – and the subsequent reduction in access to healthcare – increased total mortality by roughly 2,700 deaths a week.
It follows warnings that the number of people attending Accident and Emergency departments fell by 50% at some points during the pandemic, while urgent referrals for suspected cancer dropped by 70%.
21,000 people seems like an underestimate to me. This new study complements Carl Heneghan and Daniel Howden’s article yesterday for the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine blog flagging up the high number of excess deaths in homes, which they speculated could be caused by “individuals deterred from visiting hospitals”.
Bakery Refuses to Sell Bread to Pensioner, 94, Because She Only Has Cash
The woman behind the counter at Bird’s Bakery in Arnold refused to serve a pensioner because she only had cash. Nottinghamshire Live has the story.
A 94-year-old woman who lived through the Second World War was was told she couldn’t buy bread from Birds bakery because she didn’t have a bank card.
Former hosiery worker Edna Dalchin, of Basford, has never owned a bank card and prefers to pay “the old fashioned way” with cash.
She was left shocked and embarrassed when staff at Birds Bakery in Bulwell told her to put essential items back because they could not take her money.
What utter madness. I’m tempted to send the owner of Bird’s Bakery this recent comment in the Lancet in which the Professor of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the New Jersey Medical School review the evidence about whether the virus can live on fomites and concludes “the chance of transmission through inanimate surfaces is very small”.
Postcard From Derry
A reader in Northern Ireland has been in touch with some cheery news: the people of Northern Ireland haven’t succumbed to Coronaphobia. Face masks still aren’t mandatory over there. And you don’t even need a passport, just some ID.
The atmosphere in Derry is very close to normal now. People are chatting and friendly, and even though cafes, etc. have fewer seats, the ones that are open are quite busy.
Last week there was a brief flurry of mask wearing, but it seems to have died down. About a third of people wear them in Marks and Spencer Food (that middle class virtue signalling is everywhere!) and a much lower percentage elsewhere. Staff in (NI) aren’t wearing masks, but south of the Border (e.g. in a really good cafe called Tank and Skinny’s), they do have to. The South seems to be going backwards very badly, having initially been getting better.
Talking to people here, there is a great deal of scepticism about the disease and the response. I get the impression from Lockdown Sceptics and my friends in England that the atmosphere is a lot more Stasi-like over there, so we are all very glad to be here!
There are a few other local peculiarities which help.
The history of the Troubles mean that the police are very wary of giving any excuse for a riot, so they were pretty light touch even during the worst of the lockdown. The Troubles also mean people are much less trusting of the media and the Government anyway, especially on the Nationalist side of the fence.
There is also a sense in Ireland, North and South, that people are entitled to their view (apart from that obnoxious and tiny minority which has caused most of the trouble over the years), which doesn’t come over in the media at all, and does make daily life a lot less Orwellian than, say, undergraduate studies at Oxford…
On the downside, the public sector is basically completely inert here just like everywhere else.
As well as that, the economic impact of the lockdown is increasingly visible. It is clear many of the shops, cafes and restaurants won’t be re-opening, possibly ever, and from my own perspective trying to get a new tax consultancy business off the ground, not being able to meet people face to face has not been good news.
It’s hardly the biggest problem caused by the lockdown, but I suspect in aggregate it will hit new businesses disproportionately and so hamper the recovery. Certainly, from my own experience things were going very well up to lockdown, and then went into the deep freeze and have been slow to come back out again. Many people thought in June we would be back to normal by September, but we all now think it’s going to be the New Year before the nonsense stops.
Anyway, overall things are about as good as they can be here, and if people wanted to visit somewhere in the UK with nice scenery, nice people and the same very little to do as everywhere else, they could do a lot worse!
Round-Up
Here’s a round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘The lockdown has been cruel and negligent’ – Arch-sceptic Dr John Lee is Brendan O’Neill’s guest on his podcast
- ‘Western liberals’ Covid myopia is condemning the world’s poorest‘ – Strong column from Madeline Grant in the Telegraph
- ‘Red faces as Guardian mixes up rapper Kano for Wiley‘ – The wrong rapper appeared above Owen Jones’s Guardian column about the Wiley brouhaha. Red faces all round
- ‘Will the speculative vaccine shopping spree ever end?‘ – Ross Clark laments the Government’s financially incontinent approach to vaccines as it concludes its fourth deal, this one for 60 million doses of an experimental treatment being developed by GSK and Sanofi
- ‘Cambridge scientists fear coronavirus second wave as “R” rate rises across UK‘ – More scaremongering nonsense. Give me strength
- ‘UK facing “K-shaped” economic recovery as the gulf between the “haves” and “have nots” widens‘ – Another reason lefties shouldn’t be supporting the lockdown
- ‘Lockdown-free Sweden is seeing a “very positive” downward trend‘ – Good news piece in the Daily Mail
- ‘Meghan Markle agrees to pay more than £67,000 in legal costs after losing the first round of her legal battle against the Mail‘ – Embarrassing
- ‘The latest BBC Leftie hatchet job is proof it’s incapable of balance‘ – The Mail‘s Stephen Glover takes aim at the BBC’s three-part documentary on Rupert Murdoch
- ‘School closures do not slow the spread of Covid-19, according to Finnish-Swedish official study‘ – More on the Finish-Swedish study showing school closures had zero impact on the spread of the virus. Finland closed schools, Sweden didn’t, but Covid infection levels for children were similar in both countries
- ‘JK Rowling: Edinburgh rail station advert in support of author removed‘ – An advertising poster reading “I love JK Rowling” at Edinburgh’s main railway station has been removed for being too “political” and potentially offensive.
Small Businesses That Have Re-Opened
A couple of months 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 re-opened, 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.
Now that non-essential shops have re-opened – or most of them, anyway – we’re now focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. As of July 4th, many of them have re-opened too, but not all. 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 – particularly if they’re not insisting on face masks! Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
Forums Back Up and Running
I enjoy reading all your comments and I’m glad I’ve created a “safe space” for lockdown sceptics to share their frustrations and keep each other’s spirits up. But please don’t copy and paste whole articles from papers that are behind paywalls in the comments. I work for some of those papers and if they don’t charge for premium content they won’t survive.
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums that are now open. Initially, they became a spam magnet so we temporarily closed them. However, we’ve found a team of people wiling to serve as moderators so the Forums are back up and running. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
I thought I’d create a new permanent slot down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (although it’s showing a delivery date of Sept 2nd to 12th). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from eBay here and an NHS exemption notice for just £2.99 from Etsy here (see above).
And don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here.
A couple of readers have emailed to say just how effective these devices are.
I am currently in Corfu after flying this morning from Birmingham International Airport. I drove down from Hull in the early hours, 50 / 50 as to what my strategy was going to be. Shops are one thing, airports and aeroplanes another. I had my lanyard on me from Amazon, which you had kindly sent a link to previously on Sceptics.
I thought, what the hell, parked my car at the meet and greet, should have been wearing a muzzle, but Unchallenged as I handed my keys over. Walked into the airport, guy at the entrance motioned to me about a mask, showed him the lanyard, waved me through. Checked my case in after having to get the required Greek travel number to the staff member, no problem. Shopped in the airport, asked in Smiths but again showed the lanyard, fine. Coffee in Starbucks then through to the boarding gate. Asked again, showed the Lanyard, onto the plane.
I was literally the only person on the plane without one. Strangely, I felt proud, rather than guilty, but naughty nevertheless. End of flight, into Corfu, and the long queue to go through customs. Kept reaching for the muzzle in my back pocket as it was feeling a little uncomfortable, I was the only one! I got a couple of comments in the queue but only to ask where I got the lanyard from, half jokingly. Got through, no problem, onto the transfer bus to the Hotel, never needing to put a muzzle on. I may act slightly differently on the way back but I’ll make that call at home time.
Anyway, thought you might to hear that the Lanyards do work. To my defence I do genuinely have mild asthma at times so I feel justified, although I was probably fitter than 50% of people on the flight.
And here’s the other one.
My Amazon mask exemption card/lanyard arrived conveniently on July 24th – £4.95 plus postage – and has proved 100% effective.
Nobody has questioned it nor have I had any ‘dirty’ looks in fact the reverse with some retailers actually thanking me for wearing it !
I have now refined it further by buying an NHS lanyard from etsy.com – £2.95 – and wearing this as well.
This has the added benefit of making the exemption card look totally official and quite a few members of the public giving me big smiles presumably because they think I work for the ‘wonderful’ NHS – which I don’t. Like most of us, I just pay for it.
Absolutely brilliant. All sceptics should get one!!!
And just in case you think we’ve got it bad, a reader has emailed from the People’s Republic of Victoria in Australian where things are much, much worse.
Premier Daniel Andrews has recently imposed a draconian face masks (or face coverings) requirement on us that makes England’s requirement of masks in shops and on public transport sound positively utopian. Melbournians must now wear face coverings at all times whenever they are outside their homes. This includes all workplaces, all day. There are a few anomalous exceptions. Although masks must be worn when walking for exercise, they can be taken off while jogging, cycling, drinking a takeaway coffee, smoking or vaping, or in a car with only other members of your household. Thus, a person walking outside by themselves with no-one else around must wear a face covering. Fines of $200 apply for non-compliance and social pressure from the “true believers” and media is also strongly apparent.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. If you feel like donating, however small the sum, 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…
Picture from the Spectator USA to illustrate an article on how law and order has broken down in San Francisco. Perfect illustration of how we’ve got our priorities upside down during the Covid crisis. And in case you believed any of that guff about housing the homeless in the UK, a reader reports on his conversation with a homeless person in Lincoln yesterday:
Spoke to a homeless woman who said:
* That policy they had to house the homeless through this period (talk of hotels being repurposed) never happened.
* Council/social services/benefits were almost entirely unavailable during this period.
* Police were nowhere to be seen and it became very dangerous.
* No people in streets meant no money and no city centre shops to buy food, but some people drove down specifically to bring food parcels. Very kind.
* She knows nobody that has had the virus or anyone that they know.
* She was shocked that my ways of thinking about this episode were similar to hers – this was the first time she had met anyone that wasn’t sold on the lunacy of this irrational wave of thinking.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Nature will do what is needed, Leave it alone, stop meddling !
Yes I know, Dinger, but the fact is that you’re in Ireland and haven’t once mentioned St Patrick’s Day.
This is funny. Just do a Roy Walker and ”say what you see”. 
https://twitter.com/janelvis77/status/1769281387268313411
Arctic Sea ice extent is influenced by currents and wind – compacting or expanding it, moving ice into warmer waters where it melts, upwelling warmer waters from volcanic activity deep down and the season, Winter v Summer.
We really need to stop taxpayer funded ‘scientific research’.
Why? I thought loss of sea ice during summer months was a good thing for shipping and commerce.
“Climate Repair” ——Are you having a laugh? ——Actually no they are not having a laugh, they will be deadly serious like all the others in the climate change funding feeding frenzy. If someone offers me big chunks of money to look for purple horses I probably will have a good go at it, and report back that “my studies are not inconsistent with the existence of purple horses” or some other non scientific squirming. If people think this doesn’t go on they are kidding themselves. —-It is RIFE. Scientists and modellers and the rest of the climate change gang all have families to feed and mortgages to pay, and it is hard to get man to scrutinise objectively when his salary depends on not scrutinising objectively. —–It really is as crude as that.
Cambridge University’s Centre for Climate Repair
What monumental hubris. These are the ‘brightest and best’? According to who and by what measure?
“…an experiment to arrest climate change with a stratospheric aerosol injection goes hopelessly wrong and ends up with the world condemned to a new ice age.”
This is just making sure all bases are covered much like the move “The Day After Tomorrow”.
The facts are we are still in an ice age and there is nothing to indicate it has ended or that the next glacial expansion won’t happen – it will, somewhere in the next 500 years or so. In which case these self deluded charlatans will create a fictitious scenario in a movie with actors and this will be presented as some kind of evidence! In this case the inference is the tinkering will do something and make the world cold when it already was and is going in that direction.
But when we come out of this current Interglacial and full Ice Age conditions start to return then it will be the same solutions. ——–More and more government interference in every aspect of our lives. More Ice or less ice, it does not matter, big government are there to save us all, except saving the planet only normally means one thing —ruling it
This, possibly from the DS.
Dysrationalia
Just because someone is intelligent, it doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. It’s possible to devote a genius-level intelligence to justifying idiotic opinions and behaviours. Tragically, a common fate of intellectuals.
“One issue is that the saltier ice may melt more quickly in the summer.”
Is that so? Who did the research to make sure this film was factually correct? Just a quick Google along with some enquiring intelligence is all that was needed – 5 minutes tops.
This is what the NSIDC has to say.
“As the ocean water begins to freeze, small needle-like ice crystals called frazil form. These crystals are typically 3 to 4 millimeters (0.12 to 0.16 inches) in diameter. Because salt doesn’t freeze, the crystals expel salt into the water, and frazil crystals consist of nearly pure fresh water.“
Every year 10,000,000 sq km of Arctic sea ice freezes and every year 10,000,000 sq km of sea ice melts. In the 1980s it was 8,000,000 sq km that would freeze and melt every year. What has happened is that minimum ice has reduced by more than maximum ice so that now more ice freezes during the Autumn, Winter and Spring months. The NSIDC produce various graphics and there is one that shows Arctic, Antarctic and global ice extent. It is a composite and for two of the graphs the zero line is not shown.
?ssl=1
Below are the same graphs but with the reference to zero restored. It doesn’t look that scary now, not that it was beforehand.
It is quite bizarre how there is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, no increase in the rate of sea level rise, no empirical evidence that there are dangerous changes to climate afoot and yet 90% of the public think all of that is happening. ——-Remember Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”——–With climate change it is “As long as we fool most of the people all of the time, it won’t matter about the people we cannot fool none time”
Great. All we need now is for Gates and Branson to perfect their ‘CO2 scrubbing’ machines, get CO2 down from a lowly 425ppm to below 200ppm and they’ve ended all life on Earth.
The ‘opportunities’ are boundless.
Yes – the ‘opportunities’ to receive large sums of taxpayer money to play with ‘scientific’ non-solutions to non problems and build academic empires and ‘fame’ and salaries are boundless
My spies tell me that Cambridge has another team, beavering away at their project to mend the holes in Polos. Should be brilliant!
Wouldn’t it be nice if these ocean pumping freaks could clearly show, before they started, that the sea ice extent in 1979 was “correct”, rather than just being a bit higher than usual?
Cost benefit analysis? Pump manufacturers will be happy chappies.
Effectively they’re transferring heat from the ocean into the atmosphere (heat pump technology). What could possibly go wrong?
This shows a lack of ambition: They would need 100 million wind-powered pumps to thicken sea-ice across
just a tenth ofthe Arctic.But it’ll be worth it if it saves just one polar bear. /s
These 10 or 100 million wind-powered pumps would be built of what? How much steel and other resources? If we (mankind) build 100 million wind-powered pumps for this what will we not build as a result? What could we have used the resources for instead?
Effectively they’re transferring heat from the ocean into the atmosphere. Correct. The process may be simply spraying ‘warm’ seawater into ‘colder air’ but spraying is going to warm up the air rather a lot even without heat pumps to enable this process. Water releases 330 kJ/kg when it freezes or approx 100 kWh/tonne. And theres about 150 trillion tonnes of sea ice in the Arctic assuming average thickness of 2.5m. The suggestion that this academicexercise has ANY value is absurd. Less than 10 years ago, I met a group of academics who had excitedly proposed a chemical mitigation to marine diesel engine CO2 emissions – these people had not done the basic ‘fag packet’ sanity check which showed their idea was absurd. But they would have happily accepted several hundred thousand bucks to make a playground demonstrator.
This lot sound as though they are from the same school.
Back in the 1970s there was a plan to cover the ice with soot to prevent the coming ice age. Some people do not have a clue, but they still get funded by other people who do not have a clue.
Yes. In the 1970s the Mencken Hobgoblin was the “The Ice Age Is Coming” (as the BBC called it) and was popularised by Nigel Calder (BBC/author) and Stephen Schneider. Schneider ingeniously changed horse in mid-stream and moved to “Global Warming Is Coming” when it became apparent that The Ice Age Was Not Coming. https://notrickszone.com/2021/08/02/in-the-1970s-climate-modification-proposals-included-purposely-melting-arctic-sea-ice-with-black-soot/
Can we work on something more useful to society, like finding the Yeti or the Easter Bunny,,,
Dear Climate Alarmists, what is the correct amount of sea ice the world should have?
And while you’re about it what is the correct temperature and CO2 level? Oh, so you don’t know? Then shut up and leave us all alone.
Sounds like another entry for an Ignobel award. Unfortunately for them there seems to be plenty of competition!