Month: October 2020

by Guy de la Bédoyère As we headed back to the airport our phones started screeching alarms about the earthquake in the Aegean. We felt and heard nothing but it was a reminder there are more risks in life than just COVID-19. On the Jet2 flight home I was fascinated by a family or families that involved at least three adult women and several children all seated together two rows in front of us. Their masks were fashion accessories. Not one of them seemed to be able to sit still for a minute. Up and down like yo-yos with at least two vast and obese prepubescent youngsters obsessed with wandering up and down the aisle while the rest of them, children and adults alike, climbed over each other and the seats ceaselessly, with the adults blatantly consuming large bottles of alcohol they had brought on board. By the time we reached London after four hours of this a couple of them were distinctly ‘tired and emotional’. The hapless Jet2 staff, all aged about 21, were quite unable to bring themselves to do anything about these renegades, despite complaints from other passengers. One of the airline rules is that anyone aged over six is supposed to wear a mask, but that cut no ice. Fuelled by booze, the women were becoming ...

Boris Panics and U-Turns – Again! Lockdown 2.0 "To Be Announced Monday" "I've created a Monster!": Bob's Halloween cartoon for the Telegraph It was reported late last night that The Prime Minister has met with ministers and aides and will announce a new national lockdown on Monday. The Telegraph has more. Boris Johnson is expected to announce a new national lockdown next week after scientists warned COVID-19 was spreading faster than their worst predictions.The Prime Minister spent Friday in crisis meetings with ministers and aides after being told deaths were tracking above the “worst case scenario” that suggested 85,000 in the second wave.Mr Johnson is understood to have been persuaded that a national lockdown is the only way to save Christmas, and will spend the weekend contemplating exactly how severe it should be.Senior government sources stressed that no final decision had been made and the measure would need to be put to the Cabinet before any announcement to the nation.Mr Johnson is likely to summon ministers from his Cabinet coronavirus subcommittee over the next 48 hours and could hold a full meeting on Sunday if he decides he needs to act as soon as Monday. The alternative to a national lockdown would be a fourth tier of restrictions on top of the existing three tier system, but Government scientists now believe even Tier 3 is not ...

What Has SAGE Got to Hide? Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, has written a piece for the magazine explaining his decision to publish the leaked, classified projections from SAGE that appear to be driving Government policy and panic going into winter. The secrecy is odd. In classic pandemic theory, governments are supposed to keep the public informed at every stage about what they know and don’t know. The risk is that a lack of transparency erodes confidence in ministers, and creates space for misinformation. The other risk is that if government is relying on modelling, much depends on the accuracy of the modelling. If it’s not scrutinised, mistakes are more likely to go uncorrected. More fundamentally, if people are being deprived of their liberty, they deserve to know why.That’s why the Spectator is publishing a document which the government has not until now acknowledged the existence of: the ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ for this coming winter. The document is on our website and makes for grim reading: 85,000 dead from a new Covid wave, about a third more than have died so far. It envisages 356,000 heading for hospital. Deaths are expected to peak at a lower rate than the first wave — but what is very different, this time, is the duration. The second wave is expected to get steadily worse until March. ...

The Covid Physician Valentine’s Friday, 2020. A quarter century practising medicine. Half in hospitals, half in general practice. I’d been treating unseasonal, politely-coughing, relatively-well patients for the previous two and a half weeks. Extraordinarily, on Saturday at 4am I was abruptly awoken by uncontrollable, whole body, flailing movements. They continued without relent for 5 hours. I’d hypothesised I was having a grand mal seizure, but as I lay violently shaking and goose-pimpled I coldly concluded I was conscious, so these were rigors. I’d witnessed two in my career one as a naïve house officer on a medical ward, and now the second in the comfort of my own bed. It wasn’t my last hurrah. Two Paracetamol, two duvets, two days of bad diarrhoea and I returned to work Monday, a few pounds lighter and clinically puzzled. This was no ordinary fever. As it happens, two other GPs in my vicinity later described similar contemporaneous symptoms, and we all tested negative for Roche’s COVID-19 antibody assay 4 months later. That, however, is not so meaningful since most people are thought to clear the virus without the need for specific SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. On top of this, in PHE’s own studies, Roche’s test demonstrated only 83.9% - 86.7% sensitivity, so it was missing 13-17% of true positives. There are two arms of the ...

'Second Wave' Has Claimed Lives of Just 17 People Under 40 Good story in the Mail. Official figures reveal fewer than 20 deaths in people under 40 in the supposedly even-more-deadly 'second wave'. The latest NHS update published yesterday showed that just one person under the age of 20, and another 13 under 40, have died with coronavirus in English hospitals since the start of September.By contrast, 1,425 patients over 80 have died over the same period, along with another 1,093 aged between 60 and 79.It means the elderly account for a staggering 94 per cent of hospital deaths this time round.Wider figures from the Office for National Statistics covering all deaths across the UK tell the same story, with just 247 deaths among working-age people since the end of summer compared with 2,026 among pensioners.They cover a slightly shorter period than the NHS figures.It will put fresh pressure on ministers to avoid a new nationwide lockdown that could lead to other deadly diseases such as cancer and heart disease going untreated, and further damage young people's mental health and job prospects.Last night cancer consultant Prof Karol Sikora said: "On the whole, it is not a young person's illness, healthy young people especially."But they are playing the societal price in terms of education, university and social activities, and they will ...

by Sinéad Murphy  Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory (1997) Firstly, let me thank you for Lockdown Sceptics, which has provided such desperately needed comfort over the last months. I have sometimes wondered what it was like to have lived through one of the milestones of history. I never imagined I would come to know what it is like. Now I do know. It is sometimes bracing. It is mostly suffocating. Your website has been a must-read daily support throughout.  Until the events of this year, I have allied myself, for the most part, with the political Left; I have been a member of the Labour Party, and a Guardian watcher, if not quite reader. I have no compunction now in expressing my total abhorrence at the near-orgasmic enthusiasm for authoritarian control that has come to dominate the Left, and my gratitude for the reason and humanity that have, by contrast, characterised many on the political Right.   But there is a blind spot on the Right, which threatens the reason if not the humanity of its analyses of the Covid-response. It is the insistence that there is no ‘conspiracy’ afoot and that this whole unfortunate affair is attributable to the blunders of those in power.  It seems to me that there is something in this repeated denial of ‘conspiracy theory’ that is akin to ...

‘M. Pentadactyla’ On Friday nights in their Delhi sanctuary, Jains light candles to pay tribute to their 24 gods. 1. The original impulse We know that the primary reason for the growth of religion is to satisfy the psychological need for people to come to terms with their mortality. The more death terrifies, the stronger the religious impulse. The essential feat religion must perform is to say that death is not something to fear. Indeed, with the promise of the afterlife, it is not just death’s sting that is removed: death itself is obliterated. “Death hath no more dominion over man”, wrote St Paul in his Epistle to the Romans. In modern times, higher life expectancy and seemingly miraculous life-preserving medical treatments have lessened our fear of death and thus obviated the crippling need for religious consolation. The gnawing anxiety is still there, of course, but it simmers behind the scenes of everyday consciousness, reduced to being, in Flann O’Brien’s words, “an insanitary abstraction in the backyard”. Cut to the beginning of 2020. Like a malevolent star rising in the East, disturbing news emerges from Central China. A potentially fatal novel virus is spreading with the ease of the common cold. There is no cure, no vaccine and no treatment. Modern medicine seems powerless in the face of this new ...

SAGE Predicts Second Wave Will Be Worse Than First Chris Whitty stares at his latest Graph of Doom The Government has been caught using secret, non-peer-reviewed SAGE modelling again. When's it going to learn? The Telegraph has the exclusive. An internal analysis of the projected course of the second wave is understood to show deaths peaking at a lower level than in the spring but remaining at that level for weeks or even months.It is understood that the projection – provided by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – has led to intense lobbying from Sir Patrick Vallance and other Government advisers for Boris Johnson to take more drastic action."It's going to be worse this time, more deaths," said one well-placed source. "That is the projection that has been put in front of the Prime Minister, and he is now being put under a lot of pressure to lock down again." The report continues (though fails to mention that the 367 deaths reported yesterday followed two days of 102 and 151 so that the average has not risen by much). Details of the UK projection emerged as the Government announced that a further 367 people had died with Covid – the highest daily figure since May, bringing the UK total to 43,365.Dr Yvonne Doyle, the medical director of Public Health England, said: "We continue ...

Dr Clare Craig FRCPath Who you gonna call? Virus busters The system for counting deaths from Covid is not working properly and we are over-counting Covid deaths. This can be fixed, easily, by improving cross-checking and retesting all alleged positive PCR test results. Accurate data is a basic prerequisite for good policy choices. The remedial steps needed are simple and relatively inexpensive. Central government should mandate them to be done immediately. When trying to understand the impact of increased testing on case numbers we look to the percentage of tests reported as positive. In a similar way, it is important to double check other data points against each other, as percentages, to truly understand how the epidemic is progressing. Using this approach, it appears that we are over-counting deaths because there are not enough severely sick people from Covid to account for them. In other words, there are proportionately more Covid deaths per case and per hospital admission since the Summer. This paper explains this phenomenon and calls for proper scientific cross-checking to be instituted before a Covid outbreak is declared. Contradictions in the data The ONS carry out random testing of the population to estimate how many people have Covid in the UK each week. A sample of people are randomly tested and then modelling is used to predict ...

Is the NHS in Danger of Being Overwhelmed? Morten Moreland in yesterday's Times Just how great a risk is there of the NHS being overwhelmed? We're constantly being told by Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and others that unless we observe the traffic light restrictions in our area, we will witness the kind of scenes we saw in Lombardy back in March, with Covid patients dying in hospital corridors. But is that true? Not according to my friend who's worked as an NHS doctor for the past 30 years. Here is his guest post for today's Lockdown Sceptics. The last three weeks have seen much speculation about the numbers of COVID patients in intensive care units, particularly in the North West and London. Further local lockdowns have been enforced by the Government in the North West, London and yesterday in the Midlands on the grounds that the NHS risks being overwhelmed. But how close is the system to being swamped, and what can we reasonably conclude from publicly available information? NHS data released to the public to date is incomplete and usually a week in arrears. Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson point out in their recent Spectator article that this crisis has been characterised by sequential data inadequacy from the Government’s scientific advisors, Public Health England and the NHS. As they ...