Day: 14 February 2021

by Guy de la Bédoyère I wonder how helpful at this stage Dr Alberto Giubilini’s article really is. It belongs to a range of claims that one group or another has suffered more or less than others either from lockdowns or other Covid-suppression measures. In this case, he argues that the young have been hit more than anyone else in the Government’s quest to make us all pay the price for Covid in the interests of ideological moralism. Some of what he says is true. I certainly agree with him that the media’s obsession with trying to find unrepresentative stories about younger people dying from Covid in an attempt to make a false extrapolation that ‘we’re all in it together’ is grossly misleading. The data, as he says, speaks for itself and only in this last week we have learned the sad fact that 60% percent of Covid-related deaths in the last year in the UK have occurred to the disabled, confirmed by the ONS. And it is absolutely correct that young people’s lives and prospects are being devastated for the sake of something that barely affects them. With four adult children of my own, all in their thirties, I am painfully aware of the impact of lockdowns and other restrictions on their lives and those of their own children. ...

Today's update on Lockdown Sceptics is here. Includes the latest on Boris's glacial re-opening plans, an essay by Noah Carl on the seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 and some advice from a reader about how to escape Gulag Britain.

by Noah Carl I read the article by Glen Bishop in Friday’s Lockdown Sceptics newsletter with great interest. The author, a maths student at Nottingham University, had heard that a new paper by Imperial College researchers was predicting a deadly third wave of COVID-19 in the summer of this year. He decided to read the paper for himself, and noticed that the researchers were making one very questionable assumption: there is no seasonality to COVID-19. Because he couldn’t quite believe this, Bishop emailed the researchers to check whether he had made a mistake. No, they told him: their model does assume zero seasonality. As a justification, Bishop received a paper titled “Misconceptions about weather and seasonality must not misguide COVID-19 response”, which was published in August of last year. However, he wasn’t convinced, describing the paper as “a political commentary on the consequences of what the virus being seasonal would mean for American politics, rather than a purely scientific paper”. In the next part of his article, Bishop compared the daily COVID-19 death numbers in four countries: Brazil, Peru, Sweden and the UK. These countries differ in important ways. Peru and the UK implemented extensive lockdowns, whereas Brazil and Sweden took a more relaxed approach. On the other hand, Brazil and Peru are located in the southern hemisphere, whereas Sweden ...