Day: 10 December 2020

by Neville Hodgkinson Charts and graphs can sometimes convey more of what is going on than millions of words. Here is one such, from the latest report by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre. It shows how many patients, as a daily average, were in critical care for each month over the past five years. The figures cover England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The vertical columns show the monthly totals for 2020, and the four horizontal lines show the totals for the previous four years. We can see clearly that after the huge spike that occurred in April, caused by COVID-19’s arrival, the monthly totals are either about the same, or less, than in all the previous years. That includes October, when the UK was already being told we were in a second wave of the epidemic and must face drastic new restrictions in our lives to save the NHS from being overrun. The October figure shows an increase in patients in critical care whose illness was attributed to Covid, but nowhere near that of the April peak. And it hasn’t continued to rise: latest figures show a decline in both admissions and deaths where Covid was involved. Total deaths are running at about a fifth higher than the five-year average, though how much of that is attributable ...

PCR Test Lab Chaos Exposed by Children's Magazine A feature in children's science magazine How It Works has inadvertently shone a light on the wholly inadequate standards in the Milton Keynes PCR testing "megalab" in the spring. Among the accidental revelations of the interview with two lab workers, Beth and Ben, is that the quality control was so poor that the error rate was estimated to be around 30%. A Lockdown Sceptics reader has summarised the key points (all points are his unless they've been put in quotation marks). 1) Long 12 hour shifts with inadequate breaks.2) Adverse regimental discipline of time management that gravitated into bullying.3) No Health and Safety training for a BSL2 facility as well as no induction in biohazards and the biology of contagion with a focus on SARS-CoV-2.4) New starters rushed into a BSL2/3 environment in the absence of scrutiny of CVs/clinical assessment by an occupational health physician (e.g. personnel of unknown health/immunisation status/no determination of Hepatitis B immunisation status/no suggestion of or opportunity for Hepatitis B Vaccination).5) Haphazard on-the-job-training by individuals with unknown expertise.6) Recruitment of personnel with no proper assessment even of the most rudimentary skills for a biosecure laboratory.7) PCR test error rate ~30%. Beth says: "I don’t know the percentage error at the moment, but when I was there I think it ...