Zero Hospital Deaths in English Hospitals Yesterday
Several people tweeted out this graph yesterday, accompanied by the news that zero deaths were recorded by NHS England on August 19th. While that’s true (I checked the NHS England website this morning), it isn’t the first time that’s happened as I’ve reported on Lockdown Sceptics many times before. In the past, the zero figure has subsequently been updated as recorded deaths for the day in question start trickling in. Will be interesting to see if that happens for August 19th, but I suspect it will.
Hospital Admissions Over-Counted
Must-read story in the Telegraph. According to an analysis done by SAGE, people admitted to hospital in March and April were counted as Covid admissions if they’d ever tested positive for the disease, regardless of how much time had elapsed between the test and the admissions and regardless of the actual reason they were being admitted. Science Editor Sarah Knapton has more.
An investigation for the Government’s Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) found that people were being counted as Covid hospital admissions if they had ever had the virus, and were added to those being admitted directly due to it.
Government figures show that, at the peak of the pandemic in early April, nearly 20,000 people a week were being admitted to hospital with coronavirus (see graph below), but the true figure is unknown because of the problem with over-counting.
The oversight echoes recent problems with the data for Covid-19 deaths, in which it emerged that thousands of people who died of other causes were being included in coronavirus statistics if they had once tested positive.
Professor Graham Medley, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, asked by Sage to look into the situation, told The Telegraph: “By June, it was becoming clear that people were being admitted to hospital for non-Covid reasons who had tested positive many weeks before”.
“Consequently, the NHS revised its situation report to accommodate this.”
The investigation led to a readjustment of how the figures were compiled at the beginning of July.
On Thursday night, experts warned that the miscalculation was particularly concerning because the number had been used to reflect the current state of the epidemic.
Professor Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “The admissions data is a crucial point. I’d say it is more important than the death data because it is the best marker of the impact of the disease.”
Worth reading in full.
Vicar of Dibley Moment
There’s a nice story in East Anglian Daily Times about a parish council that was forced to hold a meeting in a car park because four of its members can’t use Zoom.
In a situation that could have come straight out of the script from the Vicar of Dibley, Tostock Parish Council decided it had to meet in the car park because four of its nine members don’t have the computer equipment needed to hold a Zoom meeting. There are also fears that the broadband in the village is not good enough to host an online meeting.
Worth reading in full, although the bedwetting comments of councillors worried about catching Covid from standing in a car park for 10 minutes are a bit depressing.
SAGE Advisor Cannot Calculate Risk
This tweet from Catherine Noakes, Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings at the University of Leeds, is revealing. Why? Because she’s a member of SAGE. Surely, as a scientist, she should know that her chances of dying from COVID-19, given that she’s under-65, are lower than dying in a road traffic accident? Indeed, people of all ages are six times more likely to die of flu or pneumonia at the moment, according to the ONS. Did Professor Noakes refuse to go to restaurants during the winter of 2017-18? There were 50,000 excess deaths that winter, likely due to seasonal flu and unusually cold weather. That’s more deaths than there have been from Covid to date.
With bedwetters like this advising the Government, no wonder we’re in such a pickle.
Head Teacher Orders Five Year-Old Children to Wear Masks
A head teacher in Milton Keynes is insisting that all children at his school, including those as young as five, wear masks or face shields when they return in September. The Milton Keynes Citizen has the story.
Warren Harrison, chief executive officer of the Premier Academy’s Eaton Mill primary school in Bletchley, issued the order in a newsletter to parents on Monday.
He had previously warned parents that if they’re not taking Covid-19 seriously they need to find another school, advising them to: “Maybe try Hogwarts”.
In his newsletter, Mr Harrison slams the government for “doing everything on the hoof” and says the Premier Academy is acting with “common sense, logic and reason” in its face mask initiative.
This is against the UK Government’s guidelines. Won’t stop him, of course. Best hope is if a parent brings a lawsuit against the school.
Meanwhile, please sign this ThemForUs petition urging primary and secondary schools not to make face masks mandatory.
Windswept Testing Facilities
A reader has been in touch to tell me about his testing experience when he came back from his hols.
I returned this morning from a holiday in the United States with my family. We’d been staying in Vermont (1,533 total positive tests state-wide since mid-March; 58 deaths with Covid) and on the island of Nantucket (49 positive tests since March 16th; one death) so naturally as likely plague-carriers we’re required to quarantine on our return to the UK.
When we got home I thought we might as well get tested in anticipation of the government finally seeing reason and changing the ludicrous rules currently in place and went online to see what testing options were available. The first search result was a drive-through NHS test down the road, and it said ‘testing for all patients’. Not overly keen on tossing away six hundred quid unnecessarily, I called the number which rang through to a call centre in Northern Ireland. To my astonishment, after asking me why I wanted to test myself and family (I said because we’d been travelling), the operator said it was a waste of time but yes, even if we had no symptoms and were not essential workers we could have one. He then identified 3 drive-in test sites within 11 miles and offered an appointment at any of them for the same day. I chose the nearest, and he said we could have any time slot we wanted the same afternoon (I was calling a little after midday).
We drove to the site, which was the entire car park of a Leisure Centre – closed of course. There were 11 uniformed and nappied NHS-badged staff, two tents and not another soul the whole time we were there. Everything was deeply efficient and the staff were extremely nice – relieved to have something to do. It took about 20 minutes for the whole family to self-administer the tests in the car, and we drove off leaving them to the deserted car park. That’s the way the money goes.
Round-Up
- ‘Stop New Normal‘ – New anti-lockdown website
- ‘Be careful Boris: your backbenchers are running out of patience‘ – Good column by Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph
- ‘Team BoJo’s five months of cackhandedness‘ – Blistering piece by Patrick Benham-Crosswell in the Conservative Woman
- ‘Pandemic rescue package takes national debt over £2trn for first time‘ – Alarming story in the Times
- ‘WHO says Europe can combat spike in infections without full lockdown‘ – Encouraging story in France 24, although knowing the WHO it will change its mind about this tomorrow
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just one today: “Comedy of Errors” by Joe Saunders.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums that are now open, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We’ve also just introduced a section where people can arrange to meet up for non-romantic purposes. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Small Businesses That Have Re-Opened
A few 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 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 (and some of them are at risk of having to close again). 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! If they’ve made that clear to customers with a sign in the window or similar, so much the better. Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
I’ve created a 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 (now showing it will arrive between Oct 3rd to Oct 13th). 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 “exempt” card with lanyard for just £3.99 from Etsy here.
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 (now over 29,500).
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
Stop Press: Toulouse has become the first French city to insist on mandatory face coverings in all outdoor settings.
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. Doing these daily updates is a lot of work (although I have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending me stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here. If you want me to link to something, don’t forget to include the HTML code, i.e. a link.
And Finally…
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Pre Crimes the Next Tyranny
8 days late? Perhaps the G has production problems; it would have made sense on 1/4, after all.
They should change the name once more to:
Sharing Archives To Improve Risk Evaluation.
The revised name comes with its own handy mnemonic.
The most scary bit here is acutally that our officials are stupid enough to believe this is possible. Especially, this includes being ignorant enough about pretty basic math to believe that the relative frequency of a non-random past even equals the probability of it repeating in future.
Despite being taught in GCSE Maths in the UK, the False Positive Paradox (aka Base Rate Paradox) still does not gel with most people, including ignorant officials. A highly relevant example of the paradox can be found by googling for “Base rate fallacy Example Terrorist identification”. (Ironically, Google’s AI introduction summarises this!)
The idea behind this is much more f***ed up. A probability is the relative frequency a specific outcome of a random selection will approach if the random selection is repeated often enough. The usual simple example is rolling a dice. Each individual outcome as a probabilty of ⅙ and this means there’ll be approximately n/6 occurences of each number when a dice has been rolled n times. The actual number of occurences will converge towards n/6 as n increases.
Relative frequencies can obviously be calculated whenever there’s a group whose members have a property X and a subgroup whose members also have an unrelated property y but the y/x is not the probability that the next person with property X will also have property Y as there’s nothing randomly selected here.
We don’t know what the outcome will be is a necessary condition for a random selection process but it’s not a sufficient condition: Just that we don’t know why something occurred doesn’t mean something occurred randomly.
Mathematical de-nonsenifying: Let nx be the number of people with property X and ny the number of these people with property y. ny/nx is know the relative frequency of number of people in the property X group which also have property Y but not the probability that the next person where property X is observed will also have property Y.
Good example – I like the example around tossing a coin – many people believe after a series of one result, you are more likely to get the opposite, when in reality it’s basically still 50/50 because each event is separate
This is actually not true because the probability of an event occuring is the number of times “event occurs” in the total set of events divided by the total number of events. When tossing a coin once, the total number of possible outcomes is 2 (front or back) and both front and back thus have a probability of 0.5 of occuring. But when tossing a coin twice, the total set of possible outcomes is
This means the individual probability of each outcome is now only 0.25. The number of possible outcomes doubles with each toss of the coin. But a sequence of all front or all back always remains only one of the possible outcomes. This means the probability of it decreases exponentially with the number of coin tosses.
Here we go again! Matt Hancock allegedly based his strategy to
control everyonecontain a ‘deadly, killer virus’ after watching the film ’Contagion’.Who has now been watching Tom Cruise in Minority Report?
Perhaps anyone that has should be subject to a double eyeball transplant without being told that it only works in the pretend world of Hollywood.
They’d need a brain transplant first
*For those who haven’t seen the film, Cruise plays a cop who, after being assessed by an AI pre-crime programme, is falsely accused of a pre-crime. He has to fight the system to clear his name.
Dear Mr Smith,
Our algorithms detect that you are more likely than average to commit murder, and so we need to talk to you about your thinking, and enrol you in our Homicide Awareness Course. You should report to Blogtown Community Centre next Monday at 6.30pm, bringing this letter and a utility bill with you as evidence of eligibility.
Failure to complete this course may make you liable to summary arrest in front of your children, 48 hours in our cells, and then release on Police Bail followed by a “no further action” notification, as is usual in non-crime situations.
If you belong to any of the following Protected Categories, you may ignore this letter…
I’m surprised that there is no mention of ‘number of years residing in the UK’ as one of the predictive variables.
So the algorithm might not work very well if they don’t include all the variables that correlate strongly with crime.
They can’t help themselves can they.
They’ve never seen a dystopian film or book without thinking “ooh that’s a good idea, we’ll try that”.
Truly we are governed by moral and intellectual pygmies.
“Explore alternative and innovative data science techniques…“
…Meaning find new ways of making stuff up. Outcome life sentence for the heinous pre-crime of predicted premeditated homicide.
Elementary, my dear Two-Tier.
Just another excuse to pry into private citizens and then control them. But it is all protect the individual. “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin I believe.
Its been said before, but 1984 was not intended as an instruction manual.
“Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.” Like they denied the introduction of vaccine passports and look at what happened…..
This appears to be largely a re-run of the Home Office Initiative around 2001 (under various “Blair Babe” focus groups, presumably led by Jack Straw). This reached the level where the Home Office tried to get national and international definitions of mental illness changed to introduce a new one: “Severe and Dangerous Personality Disorder” (SDPD). This was defeated, not so much by human rights activists and lawyers, but by psychiatrists, doctors, medical professionals, researchers and, above all, mental health practitioners. On the whole these did not want the responsibility for “diagnosing” the politically-motivated new disorder of SDPD, especially as such a diagnosis would, under the Home Office proposals, render the person immediately liable to indefinite detention without charge, simply on the basis of a couple of opinions of psychiatrists. Also it tended to work the opposite way to that recommended by psychiatrists dealing with this type of case: namely, instead of encouraging the patient to take responsibility for their own actions, it would have specifically removed that responsibility from the patient and transferred it to the doctor, or the medical facility. As well as being psychiatric bad practice, it would have placed doctors and anybody else in a position of responsibility in a situation where they would be fearful of the consequences of NOT making such a diagnosis if the patient then went on to commit murder; such fear would tend to make the person adopt the contentious “precautionary principle” and make a SDPD diagnosis, knowing that they would not be held responsible for any violation of the patient’s human rights.
Twenty-five years later, what has changed? First, the government of the day still seeks votes by appearing to be able make the electorate “feel” safe from the extremely small number of people who pose a risk to the general public, while playing down the much larger risk of the much larger number of essentially basically harmless people, who happen to tick all the “right” boxes in the opinion of psychiatrists, being detained indefinitely. (It’s the old False Positive Paradox again, which came to fore during Covid testing.) Secondly, AI has come along, or whatever small development in software and hardware has been thus dubbed. This will encourage even more dependence on “computer says” diagnoses, based on even more obscure algorithms and models of human behaviour. The potential for unscrupulous, incompetent or merely mistaken people (whether entrepreneurial, medical, political, legal or social) to cash in on this, and the resulting human rights violations, will be enormous.
However, there will be opposition. One obvious tactic will be to point out that “psycho-eugenics” would be tainted by bad history, because it comes out of the same stable as eugenics, the difference being that eugenics was about extirpating carriers of “defective” genes, whereas psycho-eugenics is about extirpating carriers of “defective” memes. Another defence is the lessons from the psy-ops applied during Lockdown detecting people who might be labelled as potential “granny killers” just because they up-ticked a comment sceptical of the value of Lockdown and vaccination.
I hope this research does not result in the roll-out of an “early intervention” programme to stop crime before it occurs: the lessons of the 2001 Blair/Straw research must surely be available.
Scary!
“‘Murder Prediction’ Tool to Identify People Most Likely to Kill” Lite woke version no doubt.
The pre-crime tool will of course work only in identifying white people, any other person ethnic or sexual protected status will be filtered out.
I wonder if it could have predicted the Nottingham and Southport murders? It’s funny how all the layers of ‘experts’ couldn’t, yet the man on Clapham Omnibus would have done this in 5 secs.
This is just another boondoggle for the useless Home Office and MoJ.
At which university is this “research” taking place?
The Odeon or Cineworld.
Ha-ha! Brilliant!
Algorithm is:
white?
male?
not in trade union?
heterosexual?
not disabled?
score 2 or more positive answers to get arrested.
The biggest problem with this approach is not that it might identify those most likely to kill people but that following that identification nothing will be done.
Potential murderers will no doubt claim a right to enjoy a family life under the EHCR which trumps the ‘identification by algorithm’.
You don’t seriously want people to be punished for some AI claiming they might commit a crime in future with a certain probability, do you? If you do, why not just send people to prison street-wise? Some of them would certainly have committed some crimes otherwise! Or why not just gather people at random and shoot them?
Nice one. That’s a quote to remember:
“Why not just gather people at random and shoot them?”
Is this the real reason Stalin Starmer is so keen to force schoolchildren to watch that Marxist Indoctrination programme called “Adolescence”???
Softening up the public with propaganda, so they will accept White Working Class Boys as the primary targets of the “Pre-Crime Murder Prediction Tool”???
TPTB: We think you’re likely to commit murder so we have you under round-the-clock observation.
Subject: !! I’ll ****ing kill you. Make sure they get it on camera.
I presume this will only be deployed against white British people ….. since they know who the most likely to murder are and they all have various shades of darker skins and have come here from places where violence, particularly against women, is the norm and often sanctioned by their faith and their governments.
it was known at least thirty years ago that there are typically 39 to 39 antecedent criminal events prior to the major ‘index event’ such as murder, rape, etc and that the obvious job of the ‘relevant authorities’ was to work on the perpetrator during the first batch of criminal acts to prevent the probability of the major incident – but, as ever, the bureaucrats and politico’s ignored the research … no wonder we’re ‘at’ where we’re at