Month: September 2020

Herd Immunity May Be Closer Than Thought The idea that more people may have immunity to coronavirus than show up in standard antibody surveys is getting more oxygen by the day. It is what may explain why the epidemic often goes into decline when 10-20% of the population has antibodies, why the epidemic is now considered over in Sweden and why countries that are lifting restrictions are seeing no second waves, only the occasional ripple. This week the British Medical Journal added its voice to those arguing that population immunity may be closer than was originally thought. The Times reports: Tests for antibodies may be dramatically underestimating the proportion of people who have been infected with the coronavirus, scientists said. The claim, made in the BMJ, implies that it is possible some parts of the country are far closer to herd immunity than had been thought.  The original misdiagnosis, the authors explain, is because we've been testing not for the full range of human immune responses but for just one or two types of antibodies. Dr Burgess said that calibrating tests using people who had been more severely ill may mean that a lot of asymptomatic infections are being missed. “This might explain why, in cities such as London, we have seen the breakdown of widespread social distancing but infection rates have still ...

"No Sign of Second Wave": Experts Rubbish Matt Hancock's "Alarmist" Claims The Mail has been doing a good job of late, countering the Government's narrative of fear and doom (and social control) by giving a platform to some solid sceptical scientific voices. Here it is again today: Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday warned that the UK 'must do everything in our power' to stop a second surge of people going into hospital with the coronavirus, which he said was starting to happen in Europe. But experts told MailOnline Mr Hancock's comments were 'alarmist' and that there is currently 'no sign' of a second wave coming over the horizon. The data shows hospital cases are also not rising by much in Europe, contrary to the Health Secretary's claim.As of yesterday there were only 764 people in hospital with COVID-19 in the UK, just 60 of whom are in intensive care. This is a sharp drop from a peak of 19,872 hospitalised patients on April 12.The falling number of hospital cases comes despite infections having been on the rise since lockdown restrictions were lifted at the start of July. Experts say this is because the groups getting infected and diagnosed now are completely different to those at the start of the pandemic. Scientists say it is younger people driving up infections and they are less ...

Last Friday, I put my car in for service at Locharbriggs near Dumfries. To pass the time away, together with my little cocker spaniel, we walked along the very pleasant former railway trackbed to Dumfries town centre, a five-mile hike. Having arrived at the main square I sat down to enjoy a Classic Magnum, watched avidly by my dog Dusty, eagerly waiting to lick off his entitlement from the stick. The town centre was fairly busy but nothing like as busy as it was before the UK governments began their destruction of the small businesses and the panic measures enforced by draconian regulations and powers. As a former police officer of middle rank and happily retired, I began people watching, a habit I have been unable to change since retirement. As a law graduate, my interest was in criminology and I found that Lombroso's Theory of Criminology, although discredited, was useful to spot and keep an eye on potential miscreants. This theory would I suppose be identified by the woke brigade as racial or unwarranted profiling and no doubt present day senior officers of the spineless and promotion ladder plotter type would not approve of such profiling. Basically the theory involved stature and appearance. The shape of the head was quite important and although not necessarily infallible, it formed a ...

School Threatens to Send Children Home for Joking About Covid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U A school in Hastings has told parents it will send their children home if they make "humorous" or "inappropriate" jokes about Covid. The Independent has more. Pupils could be excluded for “malicious coughing or sneezing” or making “inappropriate” jokes about the coronavirus pandemic, a school has warned.And at a second school, any pupil refusing to follow hygiene routines and social distancing will immediately be moved to a separate area, leaders say.The Ark Alexandra Academy in Hastings, East Sussex, set out a list of coronavirus “red lines” that will result in fixed-term exclusions for pupils breaching them.The academy says “humorous, inappropriate comments or statements” related to Covid-19 and “purposeful physical contact with any other person” are off-limits and will risk the child being sent home. You can read the school's letter to parents here. Worth remembering that Milan Kundera's satirical novel The Joke about a man whose life is destroyed after he makes an inappropriate gag on a postcard to his girlfriend was set in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. Only 84% of Children Have Returned to School in Scotland Tens of thousands of children have not returned to school in Scotland, according to the BBC. More than 100,000 pupils in Scotland are absent from school with attendance down to 84.5%, according to ...

The UK's "Second Wave" is a Costly Myth Lockdown Sceptics contributor Will Jones has an excellent piece in the Conservative Woman about Matt Hancock's mysterious obsession with a "second wave" and the ruinously expensive steps the Government is taking to prepare for this non-existent threat. Here's his conclusion: A lockdown that was brought in without precedent or planning for three weeks to ‘squash the sombrero’ and relieve peak pressure on the NHS is still going on five months later. We face a future of continued social distancing and unpredictable new restrictions that are socially debilitating and economically disastrous. Even the much-vaunted vaccine is very unlikely to do more than mitigate the impact of the illness, making it a likely false dawn for those waiting around for it.Yet the World Health Organisation continues to call on governments to ‘do it all’ to ‘suppress, suppress, suppress’ the virus, holding up New Zealand as an ‘exemplar’. Britain, like Sweden, must reject this preposterous and nihilistic narrative. It is not possible to suppress this virus, as New Zealand is now discovering, but only to mitigate its impact while developing collective immunity and, ideally, returning to normal as quickly as possible. The measures introduced for this mitigation must be balanced against other risks and the high importance of normal, healthy living. Right now, the government ...