Month: December 2020

by Dr Ann Bradshaw Mary Celeste The huge body of student nurses in training is not being mobilised onto the front line in the Covid pandemic crisis, as I wrote in Spiked recently. Beds aren’t the problem, it is said. It’s the shortage of doctors and nurses. On December 27th the Sunday Times stated that hospitals have been ordered to mobilise their "surge capacity" in the face of soaring Covid infections, staff absence and longer patient stays. Amanda Pritchard, NHS Chief Operating Officer, ordered trusts to use the independent sector, community provision, specialist hospitals and the Nightingale Hospitals. Some hospitals in London are now operating above 100% ICU capacity and are said to be near "breaking point". The following day the Telegraph reported that the London Nightingale hospital was even being dismantled. This desperate need for health care staff in the Covid crisis was clear at the start of the outbreak of the pandemic. Health Education England (HEE), the Education Commissioning Branch of the NHS worked together with nursing and other organisations on a national response. At this time, students came forward to work in their clinical placements as paid members of the NHS health care team. By July, 28,108 student nurses and student midwives had opted into and been eligible for paid employment. In June, although the pandemic was ...

Government to Close Schools Again The Government has announced targeted school closures for England in an attempt to control the spread of the virus (though it's unlikely to help much, as Toby explained yesterday). The Telegraph has the details. One million primary school pupils will not return to classrooms as planned next term as Boris Johnson unveiled sweeping school closures and warned more could follow.The Prime Minister said that in order to combat the spread of the new coronavirus variant, the majority of secondary school pupils will now stay at home until "at least" January 18th, two weeks after term was supposed to start. Those in exam years 11 and 13 will return on January 11th.Only the children of key workers and vulnerable children will go back on January 4th, the scheduled start date. It means the staggered start to term which had previously been announced will be moved back by a week.Primary schools in "high infection areas", estimated to affect one million pupils, will also close for the first time since the spring for at least two weeks as Mr Johnson said "even tougher action" was needed because of the "sheer pace" of the rising infections.The Prime Minister said there was no guarantee that the January 18th return date would not slip further, as the latest data on infection rates would be reviewed at that point.He added: "I ...

by Dr Sinead Murphy It’s that time of year when we name the best and worst. Competition is stiff, on one side of the equation at least. How many worsts there have been, each hardly conceivable before it was suddenly real. But there was a worst of all. In October in Milton Keynes. Two brothers moved to the side of their grieving mother, putting their arms around her shoulders as she sat before the box containing their dead father’s remains, only to be reminded by an official from the crematorium that they were not permitted to be within six feet of their mother during the ceremony – as if she had been lowered into the grave as their father was being raised onto the pyre. It is the simplest of mourning rituals, a consoling arm around the shoulders. A fragment of a ritual, really. And yet it too has been made to retreat before the march of Health and Safety, those twin murderers of the last vestiges of our arts of living and dying. What’s the big deal? So the Covid crew has challenged us this year. It’s hardly life or death. They are right: a consoling arm around the shoulders is not life or death. Nor is the smile of an unmasked stranger. Nor is the shake of a ...

"If The New COVID-19 Strain is More Transmissible, Why Isn’t It Taking Over in Every Region?" Joshua Loftus, Assistant Professor of Statistics at New York University (and definitely not a lockdown sceptic), poses this question in the Spectator. Let’s look at these estimates of the percent of the UK population testing positive, broken down based on whether the test result "is consistent with" the new strain or otherwise. We can download data with estimates of COVID-19 infection rates from the Office of National Statistics. First let’s see the rates in two regions, the one where the new strain grew most rapidly and another region where it hasn’t. Next, here are all the regions sorted (top left to bottom right) in the order of the maximum estimated prevalence of the new strain. If the new strain has a biological advantage that makes it more transmissible why isn’t it taking over in every region?  Loftus stresses this is not a rhetorical question. However it is a real question that needs answering, and one that's also being asked by Professor Francois Balloux on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/1343842042754039813?s=21 A number of media outlets have reported on the new technical briefing from Public Health England that shows considerably more being infected by carriers of the new variant than carriers of other variants. Here's the report in the Times. Contacts of ...

“What we need, is more disrupters, more grumpy people to challenge the Government”, Alex Thomas, the Programme Director, Institute of Government, told Jeremy Hunt’s Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committee recently. Save your breath Alex. The problem is not a shortage of grumpy disrupters. The problem is the disrupters are not being heard – they are not being allowed to challenge Jeremy Hunt’s committee let alone the government. When Covid struck the U.K. in February there was a knowledge and information vacuum, and the global response was based on ‘follow the leader’; the leader was China and the course of lockdown was set. Ten months on there is a daily tsunami of robust Covid data and research papers from around the world for the Government to study and learn from, but they appear to have neither the bandwidth nor the inclination to do so. However, outside of Government there is an army of scientists, clinicians and statisticians in universities, companies, loose affiliations or on their own, who want to be part of the war effort and are working around the clock to see if there are answers in this vast new source of intelligence. If the Government and PHE are the Dunkirk mole then these volunteers are the flotilla of little boats. From the outset initiatives and ...

Gove: Primary School Children and Years 11 and 13 Will Return to School Next Week, But as For the Rest... Michael Gove said on the Today programme yesterday that primary schools, along with Year 11s and Year 13s in secondaries, would return to school in the first week of January, although he stopped short of saying other year groups would return later in the month and stressed that this was the Government's intention, not a cast-iron guarantee. BBC News has more. "It is our intention to make sure we can get children back to school as early as possible," he said.He said that prioritising children's attendance in school was "the right thing to do" but he acknowledged concerns about the new variant, which scientists believe may be more transmissible. "We have a new strain and it is also the case that we have also had, albeit in a very limited way, Christmas mixing, so we do have to remain vigilant," Mr Gove said."We are confident that we will be able to get schools back in good order. Our plan and our timetable is there, and we are working with teachers to deliver it."Mr Gove told BBC Breakfast the safe return to school would be built on an effective testing system, with teachers working "incredibly hard" to implement it. However, it's ...

ICU Occupancy in English Hospitals No Higher Than Last December This is stock photo, not a photo of an empty ICU ward in an English hospital The media is full of alarming reports of NHS hospitals being on the brink of armageddon, such is the surge in coronavirus patients. “As we head into the new year we are seeing a real rise in the pressure on NHS services, particularly across London and the south-east,” Saffron Cordery, the Deputy Chief Executive of NHS Providers told the Guardian. A letter from NHS chiefs sent to the chief executives of all NHS trust and foundation trusts on December 23rd contained this alarming paragraph: With COVID-19 inpatient numbers rising in almost all parts of the country, and the new risk presented by the variant strain of the virus, you should continue to plan on the basis that we will remain in a level 4 incident for at least the rest of this financial year and NHS trusts should continue to safely mobilise all of their available surge capacity over the coming weeks. This should include maximising use of the independent sector, providing mutual aid, making use of specialist hospitals and hubs to protect urgent cancer and elective activity and planning for use of funded additional facilities such as the Nightingale hospitals, Seacole services and ...

by Dr. James Alexander Alexis de Tocqueville In 1858 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend about un virus d’une espèce nouvelle et inconnue, "a virus of a new and unknown species". He was not referring to anything biological, but to the French Revolution. And it should be obvious to all of us at the end of the year 2020 that the significant "virus of a new and unknown species" this year has not been the coronavirus but the political response to the coronavirus. In trying to make sense of the extremity of what has happened, we have heard talk of a ‘Great Reset’: which is the name for the supposed conspiracy by which the global rich will use the current crisis to control and pacify the human population by taking property, regulating finance, monitoring us through the panopticon of modern technology, controlling our movement with health passports, continuing the flow of luxuries, signalling to us our subjugation by the use of masks, vaccinations and implants, and imposing on us a single technocratic world government. There are several obvious things to be said about any conspiracy. The first is that conspiracy is an exaggeration, the equal and opposite exaggeration to cock-up. The first wants to believe that everything is a consequence of control. The second wants us to believe that ...

Happy Christmas The third of three Christmas cartoons Bob Moran has done for Lockdown Sceptics For the past three days we’ve published a pared down version of Lockdown Sceptics so we can have a bit of time off over Christmas. Cartoonist Bob Moran has very kindly given us three original cartoons which we’re running on consecutive days. Happy Christmas to all our readers. Thanks for all your links, stories and suggestions, as well as your comments below the line and in the forums. Lockdown Sceptics is a collaboration between our small team, the writers who contribute original material, and the readers who post comments or send emails to us at lockdownsceptics@gmail.com. To date, we’ve had over 21,000 emails and we do our best to read them all. Back in April, when I set up this blog, I imagined I’d be signing off about now. Turns out, that was naive. God knows when this madness will end, but at least there are some comforts in this digital camaraderie. Readers often get in touch to say Lockdown Sceptics has kept them sane. The feeling’s mutual. Neil Ferguson: I was inspired by Communist China Neil Ferguson seeking inspiration for the lockdown policy Professor Lockdown gave an interview to yesterday's Times in which he revealed that China's lockdowns in January inspired him to push ...

by Joe Baron Annus horribilis just doesn’t cut it. A year in which we’ve seen the advent of a global pandemic, worldwide protests caused by the killing of an unarmed black civilian in Minneapolis and the cancellation of Christmas – all endured with the forebidding spectre of a no deal Brexit hanging over us – surely needs a brand new term. The most striking thing about this whole affair, though, has been the utter failure of our Alpha caste to navigate the ship of state through these tempestuous seas. Incalculable levels of ineptitude have combined with both arrogance and aloofness to produce an epoch-ending conflation of crises that has exposed the egregious shortcomings of our governing class and, just as importantly, the misconceptions of a credulous public. The mask has finally slipped and the veneer of superiority has been stripped away. The emperors really do have no clothes. Oxbridge and Eton, we now know. Apart from churning out an interminable, never-ending configuration of smug, arrogant, born-to-rule Malfoys with the means and connections to trample over their opponents and further their own interests, you have nothing else to offer. You certainly don’t add any value to the rest of society. Thanks to you, and our most influential institutions – institutions saturated with your alumni and the alumni of our other elite ...