Day: 19 November 2020

by Jack McClure We are Unlock, a student-led campaign that aims to highlight the irrationality and inherent unfairness of lockdown policies.  Unlock believes that lockdowns are highly damaging, based on overzealous science, and contrary to the very foundations of our traditional British liberty. Our mission is to raise awareness about the unforeseen, true costs of lockdown – the shocking excess deaths, the mental health struggles, and the decades worth of damage to our small businesses. This campaign seeks to give a real voice to people who can testify to the impact of lockdown on their lives. Our duty as citizens is to support the communities around us. Our aim is to increase public awareness of lockdown’s limitations, ultimately to push the government to rethink the cost of their actions. Our campaign has five goals: 1. Unlock business. We want to unlock the voices of small business owners who have borne the financial cost of lockdown. With regulations often announced at short notice, businesses have had an extremely stressful, uncertain experience in which they are constantly adapting how they trade (if at all). Business owners across the country made a heroic effort and investment in a time of great uncertainty to reopen their businesses in a new, Covid-safe manner; it is the businesses that are to thank for the restart of ...

by Julian D. Harris PhD A great deal of pressure has been placed on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the assay used to determine the prevalence of COVID-19 cases. The UK government have invested heavily in several Lighthouse labs for COVID-19 testing, but there have been a growing number of concerns about the reliability of these tests. There’s a concern that the PCR assay may be inflating the number of COVID-19 cases by generating false positives. What Causes False Positives in COVID-19 Testing The PCR is an extremely sensitive and specific assay that inevitably generates a certain proportion of false positives. Apart from the well-documented false positive rate – whereby ~0.8% of people tested will be falsely designated as positive, even when the test is run perfectly – there are also false positives generated by the test’s over-sensitivity, whereby if you’ve had COVID-19, or another coronavirus, but are no longer infectious, you may still be shedding small components of the virus and test positive. That risk increases as the number of amplification cycles increases. But there is a third cause of false positives which is when cross-contamination takes place between the samples being tested, so a positive sample can contaminate a negative one, turning them both positive. That’s the risk I want to flag up in this article. My Time as ...

Danish Mask Study: Masks Do Not Protect From Coronavirus The suppressed Danish mask study – the largest randomised controlled trial to date that had been rejected by three top journals, apparently on political grounds (read the interview with the authors here) – was finally published yesterday. The headline result is that in the study masks do little or nothing to lower the infection rate. It found a 2.1% vs 1.8% infection rate for unmasked vs masked groups (with around 3,000 participants in each group initially). However, due to low virus prevalence these figures correspond to only 53 and 42 participants respectively so the authors had to state that the result is not statistically significant (too few infections to be confident it's not random). The most striking finding is that when you look at participants who report wearing face masks "exactly as instructed" as opposed to just "predominantly as instructed" the proportion infected rises from 1.8% to 2.0% (22 participants). This is the wrong way round – if masks are helping, using them better should reduce infections – and 2.0% is almost identical to the 2.1% infected without masks. This suggests the lower figure for all mask wearers was probably just noise. A few more observations: Reported symptoms did not differ between those who wore masks and those who didn't, giving ...