Day: 13 October 2020

by Dr Clare Craig FRCPath Outbreaks of Covid in care homes appear to have spiked in September in the UK. Does this mean we will see a resulting spike in deaths? This article explores the possibility that a significant number of the alleged outbreaks in care homes could be based on false positive test results. The continuing absence of systemic cross-checking of alleged positive results against established clinical and diagnostic evidence such as loss of smell and distinctive CT chest scans remains deeply disappointing. At an absolute minimum, anyone who receives an alleged positive Covid result should be retested from scratch. The percentage of tests carried out in the community that were reported as positives reached a steady state over the summer at 0.8 per cent of tests. Reaching a steady state like this over a period of weeks is suggestive of having arrived at the baseline false positive rate. Similar figures have been used by SAGE. Matt Hancock has said the figure is “less than one per cent”. The argument in support of the idea that a significant proportion of national UK Covid diagnoses in July and August 2020 were actually due to false positives is provided in a separate blog post. This paper addresses the narrower issue of alleged outbreaks in care homes. This is how a false ...

Boris Lays Waste to the North As expected, Boris Johnson announced his "three tier" lockdown in the House of Commons this afternoon and then later at a Downing Street press briefing. It wasn't a fully-fledged second lockdown throughout England – just a fully-fledged second lockdown in parts of Northern England, with Liverpool paying the heaviest price (so far). Ross Clark in the Telegraph sums it up. Due to a printing error in last year’s Conservative manifesto a rogue word ‘up’ appeared. When Boris and his team wrote that they wanted to ‘level up’ the north’ they really meant that they simply wanted to ‘level’ the north – that is to reduce its economy to a smouldering ruin, in a way that not even the closures of mines and other heavy industry achieved in the 1980s.It is the only way I can think to explain the bewildering gap between stated government ambition and the reality. Clark goes on to point out that it's the double-standards underlying the Northern lockdown that will really stick in voters' craws. It is true that infection rates in many northern districts are currently much higher than in London and the south east. But here’s the thing: back in the spring, when the reverse was true, the whole country was made to lock down together. Now, the ...