- “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” – Philippe Lemoine has turned his magisterial anti-lockdown essay for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology into an op ed for the Wall St Journal. If you can’t get beyond the paywall, read the long version
- “Should we be worried about another Covid spike?” – With the introduction of mass testing for school children and teachers there is every reason to “expect a shift in the epidemic curve” write Ross Clark in the Spectator. “It would be better if we turned our attention instead to the hospitalisations and death figures”
- “Covid cases go up by 2.7% week-on-week to 6,753 after more than two million extra tests” – Testing goes up, as kids go back to school, and so do the cases, MailOnline reports. But it’s a remarkably small number, given the size of the population being tested
- “After lockdown we can expect a third wave – and No 10 needs to admit it” – Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph says that politicians need to get real about the risk of cases rising and Whitty and Valance need to help the public adjust to living with the virus
- “You only need to look outside to see no one’s obeying the ban on kids playing with friends” – A law that is routinely and conspicuously broken is not really a law, Jemima Lewis points out in the Telegraph
- “Sage’s Covert Coup” – Sonia Elijah investigates SAGE members’ connections to Big Pharma, Big Tech or the Big NGOs for the Conservative Woman. The first of a series
- “Government blames Covid as it delays full UK customs checks on EU goods until 2022” – The Telegraph reports that Michael Gove is blaming Covid for delays to “taking back control” of UK borders
- “NHS performed 40% fewer heart operations in January as waiting lists hit record high” – Heart operations are one of many types of treatment that people are waiting for, the Telegraph reports
- “The virus is in retreat. Isn’t it time the public is trusted to decide how to behave?” – It’s time people are allowed to exercise their own judgement, says the leader column in this week’s Spectator
- “The West has lost its moral high ground” – “Britain has navigated this pandemic with heavy-handed state coercion,” says Lionel Shriver in the Spectator. “There were other routes to managing this disease”
- “Effect of the pandemic or lockdown? FT gets into a twist” – Freddie Sayers is amused to read an article in the FT that seems unable to decide whether falling birth rates across Europe is the fault of the pandemic or the lockdown
- “There’s a youthquake coming” – Writing in UnHerd, Juliet Nicolson reckons that the end of lockdown will lead to a cultural revolution as a new generation bursts into action
- “COVID-19 Weekly Bulletin” – The latest bulletin from the Health Advisory and Recovery Team looks at vaccine passports, for and against
- “Poles apart: why the Polish community doesn’t want the vaccine” – Olenka Hamilton explains why so many Poles are not inclined to get the jab
- “Urgent open letter from Doctors and Scientists to the European Medicines Agency regarding COVID-19 vaccine safety concerns” – A letter from Doctors for Covid Ethics about the vaccine’s side effects
- “The town that didn’t lock down” – Reason reporter Christian Britschgi visited Paso Robles, California where many businesses defied state orders to close – and caught the virus
- “Private job openings increase to the highest level in a year” – US labour market is improving as lockdown restrictions reduce, writes Robert Hughes at the AIER
- “China Urges WHO to Let It Run Global ‘Vaccine Passport’ System” – Breitbart reports on China’s apparent interest in supporting a Global Vaccine passport system
- “Spain’s Ibiza reveals plans to run its own vaccine passport scheme for travellers worldwide” – Schengen Visa News reports that Ibiza is introducing vaccine passports and the rest of the Spain is likely to follow suit
- “Covid Prescription: Get the Vaccine, Wait a Month, Return to Normal” – The CDC is paralysed by fear, says Marty Makary in the Wall Street Journal
- “It’s every man for himself’: the Texans defying end of mask mandate” – The Guardian reports that mask-wearing is continuing in Texas, even as the mandate ends
- “GraceLife Church has been charged with violating COVID-19 public health orders” – Update from the Edmonton Journal on the case of GraceLife Church, whose pastor is in jail for breaking public health orders
- “Will the Tokyo Olympics go ahead?” – Seems that they will, but without spectators from overseas, according to Philip Patrick’s notes from Tokyo in this week’s Spectator
- Sebastian Rushworth’s book is now available on Amazon after an initial ban
News Round-Up
A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about the virus in the past 24 hours – not just in Britain, but around the world.
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But it’s not a “shift in the epidemic curve”, is it? It’s a shift in the “positive tests” curve, which has a very loose relationship with the progress of the epidemic.
The curves we need to watch are:
all causes mortality (not COVID mortality, which is too easily manipulated)
percentage of tests which are positive (not the number of tests)
overall hospital admissions (not COVID admissions, which are skewed by the fact everyone gets a COVID test on arrival).
All of those continue to suggest that the pandemic is over. Coronavirus will no doubt come back in the autumn but the “epidemic” phase is over and it will simply become another in the long list of seasonal respiratory infections.
Yes. I think this is the perfect time to fish the pandemic response plan out of the bin and start following it. And given by all measures we are not in a pandemic – that means back to normal.
latest PHE report
daily all cause deaths plummet to near record lows
does this mean we should lock down harder?
using an Imperial-type extrapolation I predict no more deaths from mid-April from any cause
Just to emphasise
1 – the government admits 1/3 of the first peak was due to lockdown, not covid
2 – after 9 months of lockdown, the suspension of the NHS for non-covid treatments, panic, fear, locking people in their homes, vitamin D, lack of exercise and lack of support systems – the 2nd peak will be mostly due to lockdown.
My short book on Covid
“There was a new coronavirus – most of the West panicked, threw out their WHO approved pandemic response plans and locked down. Everything else was arse covering”
That’s about it. A marketing suggestion.. The rest of the book could be sold as emergency loo roll.
I like it!
“and some bad actors took advantage of the chaos to make a lot of money and/or advance their political objectives”.
and the losers were the people that are always losers when there are big changes