Day: 14 August 2020

By Zugzwang In a previous essay,  I speculated that somewhere in the bowels of Public Health England (PHE) there was someone who had worked out, like Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a method of making use of dead souls. At the time, I wondered if these dead, reported daily on the Government's Covid dashboard, were being created literally out of nothing, as there was no trace of them in the detailed death tabulations produced by the ONS. As it turns out, that part of my speculation was incorrect.  The Chichikov in question was a Professor Newton (John, not Isaac) who had decided at an early stage of the epidemic to define death-by-Covid in such a way that he could borrow genuine deaths that were properly registered as being from other causes and claim them, for the indefinite future, provided the deceased had tested positive at some point for COVID-19. He feared, it seems, that without this resource, PHE might have been "underestimating deaths caused by the virus in the early stages". This is a very strange explanation, as one thing that was absolutely not achieved was to avoid underestimation in the early stages. You may recall a chart (originated by Carl Heneghan and reproduced in my earlier essay) that showed clearly that PHE had underestimated Covid-related deaths during the peak of  the ...

Saint Jacinda, the toothy tyrant Once SARS-CoV-2 was no longer contained within China and was spreading throughout the world, it was clear to me that eliminating the virus would be impossible and that it would be here to stay. Most readers will be well-aware of the apparent ‘success’ that New Zealand had in ‘eliminating’ the virus from our country, with profuse amounts of praise being heaped on to the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. I never supported the NZ Government's initial lockdown in order to ‘eliminate’ the virus because I saw it as an unsustainable policy. In order for the virus to be kept out of the country, it is necessary to have strict border controls where everyone entering the country is held in quarantine facilities for at least 14 days (until they test negative). These controls would be necessary until some magic bullet, such as a highly effective vaccine, emerged to allow everyone to be completely protected from the virus. I continued to think the elimination policy was misguided, agreeing with the Covid Plan B group, even when NZ was purported to have successfully eliminated the virus, as I didn't think that closing our borders indefinitely was a sustainable plan. I did not, however, feel that I could complain too much about our own situation in NZ back then. Despite disagreeing with the policy, ...

France's Rise in Infections Due to Increased Testing The rise in infections in France hasn't been accompanied by any rise in deaths Yesterday the Government removed France from the "Green List" of countries you can travel to without having to quarantine on return, along with the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos and Aruba. From 4am on Saturday, anyone returning from France will have to self-isolate for 14 days. The reason? Rising case numbers. There have been an additional 11,633 positive test results in France in the past week, with approximately 600,000 tests being done, the highest number of tests to date. (On July 25th, the French Government introduced free PCR testing without the need to get a prescription from a doctor.) But in every department the percentage of infected people is still below the 50/100,000 threshold that in France would trigger a local lockdown. In addition, there's been no corresponding rise in hospitalisations or deaths (see above). That suggests the rise in cases is an artefact of increased testing and not due to an increase in the percentage of the population that's infected. Also worth bearing in mind that, according to Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, the standard PCR test is an unreliable diagnostic tool because of false positives. When the number of tests climbs above a certain threshold, ...