Day: 26 September 2020

by JP Floru Many struggle with the apparent contradiction between pursuing one’s quality of life, and saving lives. It is said that we need to stop the world, and stop the pursuance of our own selfish pursuits, for the sole purpose of health. This is wrong. Health is just one of the many considerations of living individuals. Only individuals know what the costs and benefits of their actions are, and are therefore best placed to choose what to do. Risk is just one such cost; health is just one benefit. Free individual choice is therefore most likely to produce a net benefit.  This is why a free society leaves choice to individuals themselves: it increases the quality of life. Society is the sum of the lives of all those individuals: leaving people free leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in society. Governments do not have all that knowledge of individuals’ costs and benefits (the philosopher Hayek’s famous Knowledge Problem), and when they supplant individual choice, the outcome is likely to be less beneficial to the population.  Government saying that all other considerations must be shoved aside for the sole and centrally decided pursuance of health is in fact the nationalisation of individual choice. The outcome of this nationalisation is a dramatic decline in the quality ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère Disembarking our Ryanair flight from Stansted at Rome Ciampino on September 21st began with us not disembarking. We were told that we had to stay seated and only leave the aircraft by rows. It reminded me of being a teacher at kicking-out time. This of course was completely ignored by some of the passengers whose infractions were also ignored by the cabin crew. This was our first Italian experience of the schizophrenia of Covid-Land where the rules are mere wraiths that float in the background. Several times before we flew to Rome emails arrived from Ryanair to remind us of the vital Italian documentation that would need to be filled in and submitted on arrival. For some reason there seemed to be two versions of the laboriously arcane declaration we’d have to make about where we’d been, our reason for being in Italy, our health and so on. I printed them both out and filled them in, adding some blank spares, and dutifully carried them with us. On arrival at Ciampino Airport the most conspicuous feature was the total lack of anyone interested in any such piece of paper or any mention of it. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say if that there is a competition in Italy for the airport with the ...

75,000 – Government's Official Projection of Lockdown Deaths But does it even save lives? The Mail has discovered the figure the Government has put on the number of collateral deaths caused by the lockdown buried in a SAGE report. Nearly 75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown, according to a devastating official figures buried in a 188-page document.The startling research, presented to the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), will further increase pressure on Boris Johnson to hold back on introducing further coronavirus restrictions.The document reveals 16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.It estimates a further 26,000 will lose their lives within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E and the problems in social care persist.And an additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.The toll of deaths directly linked to the virus last night stood at 41,936.The estimates, drawn up by civil servants at the Department of Health, the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office, were presented to Sage at a meeting on July 15th. The documents stressed that had nothing been done to stop the spread of the virus in March, 400,000 people ...

by Gordon Hughes In BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme broadcast on September 23rd Sir David Spiegelhalter tried to row back from some of his previous explanations of the potential scale of false positives in testing for COVID-19. At the same time, the Huffington Post published an article making essentially the same arguments, though in a somewhat muddled fashion. In both cases, the logic is what I would term accurate nonsense – i.e., an argument that is formally correct but which misses the point of the debate by focusing on a small part of a much broader issue. In doing this, the presentations illustrate the dangers of attempting to communicate complicated issues by breaking them into small portions judged suitable for journalistic discourse. Spiegelhalter’s reasoning was that: (a) the false positive rate for PCR tests was much lower than 1% because ONS tests found much lower rates of infection during the summer; and(b) the current infection rate in those being tested now was much higher than the prevalence of virus infection in the general population because many of those being tested had COVID-19 symptoms – i.e., the population being tested is not a random sample of the whole population. He produced no evidence to support either assertion and there are strong reasons to believe that both are wrong. In ...