SAGE’s claim that the Indian variant could mean 10,000 hospital admissions a day in July assumes that between 30% and 60% of the U.K. population could become infected with the new variant in one week. Glen Bishop, the second year maths student at Nottingham who has buried himself in the epidemiological models SAGE is relying on, has looked at this latest scare story and concluded it is completely and utterly bonkers.
What makes it flat out insane is that the Warwick modelling team that came up with this projection have assumed that the vaccines are as effective against the Indian variant as they are agains the Kent variant – that is, 80% and 90% efficacy against severe illness and death for one and two doses respectively. The only variable they’ve changed to reach their conclusion is to increase the transmissibility. And yet, the team still thinks a plausible scenario – if the Indian variant is 50% more transmissible – is that 10,000 people could be admitted to hospital per day in mid-July if we proceed with steps three and four of the reopening. As Glen says, “Crazy how they got those numbers from their model and took it seriously!” Here’s an extract from his guest post:
To reach admissions three times the January peak, as the model projects, with a vaccinated population, this would mean that between three tenths and three fifths of the population would need to be infected – all in one week in mid-July – just to reach the central estimate projected. Then, the upper confidence interval, shaded in blue on the graph where hospitalisations reach 20,000 per day, would require between six fifths(!) and six tenths (120% and 60%) of the UK population, to be infected in one week. In other words, everybody in the UK would need to be infected and some twice, in one week in July, for the upper bound of Warwick’s projected doomsday scenario to be realised.
Clearly, to anyone who can do back-of-a-fag-packet calculations and type “ONS” into google, these projections are ridiculous and epidemiologically impossible. Yet there were 39 “scientific experts” attending SAGE meeting 89 at which these predictions were rubber stamped for the eyes of the Prime Minister. Is the groupthink so bad that none of them could do a few quick and simple calculations to verify the models were projecting things in the realm of what could be considered reasonable? Or do they not care? SPI-M are so attached to their modelling that they are not even testing it against basic numeracy to verify it.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Prof Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick, has told the Mail on Sunday he doesn’t think the Indian variant should delay reopening. “Any rise in hospitalisations and deaths we see won’t be anywhere near previous waves because we have the vaccines now,” he says. “While it is still spreading we have to be cautious, but I don’t think variants should stop us getting back to some sort of normality.”
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While I believe there are nefarious agendas behind a lot of this I do also believe that this society is crippled by a sort of collective psychosis that breeds a type of group incompetence at almost all levels, but particularly management.
The only way I can see it’ll break is when actions no longer match the necessary requirements for the sustenance of life for a sizeable part of the population.
The only way I can see it’ll break is when actions no longer match the necessary requirements for the sustenance of life for a sizeable part of the population.
That may not be be too far away and could even be a deliberate ploy to introduce martial law. Amongst other things, martial law would present an opportunity to start coming down hard on vaccine refuseniks and then compulsory forced injections and/or internment/death camps would be looming.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/johnson-must-think-again-on-plans-to-relax-covid-rules/ar-BB1gM4qy?li=BBoPWjQ
Welcome to the never ending cycle of lockdowns folks
SAGE angling for another lockdown are they? If they are telling us that things could be worse than January (after they started injecting the elderly), they are basically telling us that their “vaccines” don’t work. Now remind me what their game is again?
Them refuseniks!
Refuseniks, variants… what would it actually take for them to admit to significant numbers of deaths from vaccines? I was wondering if variants will be the cover for further vaccine deaths, in the same way that the annual January peak in respiratory deaths was seemingly used as cover at the start of the “vaccination” programme – did they kow that people’s immunity would be depressed in the first few weeks, and then go ahead and inject the most vulnerable anyway? (perhaps this can be examined in the enquiry…).
That is a damned good point.
“Perhaps this can be examined in the enquirer”
I doubt that there will be any forensic questioning of anything.
Well judging by the disproportionate amount of communists in sage I would say their game is impoverishing and removing the freedoms of the entire population. If you thought soviet Russia was bad then wait till you see the U.K. by the time they have finished with it. We will be like the USSR on steroids in a couple of years. The worst part of it all is the majority of the public are not only sitting back and watching nonchalantly as this happens but actively demanding their freedoms are removed and are happy to surrender all control of their lives to the creeps on sage.
The fascist government is owned by the ‘county’ extremist Tories – not the commies.
Just saying.
I’m a (real) county extremist – none of this “Cumbria” nonsense!
What is it about this government that remotely resembles a Tory one?
A couple of years? I know the “Not The Conservative Party” are a bit unhinged these days, but that would be bad even for them. Surely the Covid Recovery Group can temper this a bit? In any case, if that world war or whatever happens soon, they’ll have bigger fish to fry. (Or will that just be a pretext for going even further?).
As predictable as night follow day. Now the elections are out of the way they are going to lock us all up in our houses again.
If the “Roadmap” timings change, to quote Iago in Aladdin: “I think I’m gonna have a heart attack and die from not surprise!”
Can someone please tell me;
A) where I can find proof that any of these Modelling papers were right / partially right or a little bit right.
B) how can I arrange for these Modellers to pick me 6 numbers from a possible maximum of 49 ?
C) tell me why it is impossible to arrange for the next lockdown protest to start at Neil Ferguson’s house and remain at Neil Ferguson’s while everyone has a BBQ (This is of course a joke comment)
by joke you mean you are joking about joking right?
I mean this sincerely: does Boris have no one on this team who is competent at statistics? Maths? My son is in doing A Level
Statistics and could tear this apart. I’ve done enough modeling and work with accelerating and decelerating curves of object movements I’d be happy to be available for Boris to dm. These numbers are so ludicrous one wonders if they really have stopped trying. Like placing a swear word in an academic journal to see if anyone spots it, I wonder if they created these junk numbers to see if anyone in the Cabinet is smart enough to call their joke.
I knew someone once (sadly no longer with us) who had dealings privately with many politicians in the past (work he would do for them on their properties etc) … he spoke to many of them and he told me once that with the exception of a tiny few (and they were only just a handful) you would never believe just how ignorant, out-of-touch, naive and just plain stupid many politicians are (not to mention corrupt in some cases) – in fact he said it was quite frightening to think that these people were trusted to hold the reigns of power and even more frightening to think that that the public voted for them.
That is no surprise. We’ve not had any real statesmen/women in government since the abolition of the Grammar schools. Grammars meant that too many of the Great Unwashed were receiving a fine education and managing to gain access to the seat of power, and that had to stop, because these were largely representative of real people from the real world.
So he concludes, probably correctly, that SAGE intend to force Boris to keep restrictions after June 21st so that SAGE will not look like muppets. Add to this the “vaccine” programme coinciding with the January peak to disguise any “vaccine” deaths. Not to mention lockdowns being imposed after “cases” have already peaked. Do I detect a pattern here?
‘force Boris’ -?
Poor ickle babby.
If you accept that the goal is to Lockdown and everything else is a pretence it makes sense.
Well – they’ve made a forecast. Let’s keep reminding them of it – even if the falsity of the ‘4000 deaths a day’ of the fiasco last autumn passed by the glazed incomprehension of the gormless.
Looks like the pressure will be on to declare in-growing toe nails as ‘Covid’.
Meanwhile, India, the cradle of this terrible variant, remains well below the world average in it’s mortality rate.
You could only make it up (with a computer model).
“4,000 deaths a day” – ah, but their lockdowns and vaccines prevented this. And never mind that nowhere else, even lockdown zealot Belgium (let alone Brazil or India) got anywhere near to an equivalent IFR.
No- Witless and unbalanced predicted this would happen by the end of October.
On Saturday evening this appeared on the BBC main news website:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57126318
So, expect a whole new wave of coercion from Monday aimed at those who have already turned down the jab (ie refused to give voluntary informed consent to be experimentally jabbed despite extensive and persistent text, email and phone harassment).
Soon after the BBC’s piece the Guardian (21:45 Saturday 15th May) got the nod, and continued the coordinated propaganda assault, here are some edited ‘highlights’:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/15/johnson-must-think-again-on-plans-to-relax-covid-rules
The clear direction of travel needs little explaining, but worth remembering:
This new assault is extending the vaxx coercion-prop to younger people and school kids, with flip-flop Andy Burnham already on board. Yet there is negligible statistical danger of younger people dying of C19, with MHRA figures suggesting 100x greater chance of death from the experimental vaxx than C19; and this is not counting immediate, future and possible intergenerational vaxx side effects. The most worrying statistic, however, is that according to a poll last week (covered in LDS on Friday) the under 20s are only 13% vaccine averse. This next phase of enforced sleeve up-rolling is going to be so easy.
spot on!
’Only 13% vaccine averse’ I’m afraid because of government propaganda facilitated through schools? I’m not religious but all I can say is Heaven help us!
Nail > Head!
Analysis of Yellow card adverse reactions to the vaccines. Our children don’t need it.
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/05/13/uk-government-release-15th-report-on-adverse-reactions-to-the-covid-vaccines/
As of the 5th May, 781,395 yellow card adverse reactions have been reported to MHRA. This now means the current rate of people suffering a serious adverse reaction stands at 1 in every 166 people. But it’s important to remember that this rate only accounts for the adverse reactions that are actually reported, which is estimated to be between just 1% to 10%, meaning the actual rate of adverse reactions occurring is significantly higher.
8 deaths reported from blood disorders, 147 from cardiac disorders, 188 blinded. 29 cerebral haemorrhage deaths.
The MHRA advise that people under 40 should not to have the AZ vaccine. Clearly they admit concerns regarding its safety.
It’s also worth checking out the MHRA Yellow Card figures in a more immediate interrogative format that UKC has taken the time to put together. It uses a cross referenced database, as opposed to the official government website that deliberately hides all the nasties in plain sight among interminable text. Even more functionality is going to be added this coming week, apparently:
https://yellowcard.ukcolumn.org/yellow-card-reports
If Yougov had anything to do with this poll there’s nothing much to worry about because they said only 8% of the general public would refuse the injection, and the real figure is clearly MUCH greater than that! The real figures could be something like 70% of the general public, and 80% of under 20s, are averse to the vax. Yougov ‘polls’ just cherry pick the answers they want, and are another propaganda tool.
The author linked an article in his study showing that 47% and 76% of Conservative and Labour MPs respectively could not work out the probability of a two coin tosses consecutively returning a head.
What was the sample size?
SAGE is a group of insane, power -crazed b*stards. The sooner we lock THEM down the better.
Locking down large multi generational families in those small terraced houses in Blackburn and Bolton would undoubtably make transmission worse. Perhaps that’s their plan.
Good point. Especially in the summer. Certainly didn’t help in Leicester last year.
Give me some of the wasted £400bn and I could solve the housing problem of this country. Good housing is a basic human right. It has enormously beneficial health and social effects. Instead we waste money on face masks and track and trace. I know there are areas of poor housing in the south but I don’t think Boris and his chums from the Cotswolds have the least idea what it is like to live in two up two down terraced houses in a cold wet climate. No wonder people are susceptible to respiratory viruses.
Well I do agree but I also think it comes down to cultural expectations of how much of your disposable income you’re expected to spend vs desired standard of living.
For example, when I was renting in London, around half my disposable income would go on a decent double room in a shared flat with lounge in a safe-ish area. People I knew from other backgrounds could also have afforded that but would see it as a horrendous waste of money and were happy to settle for a single bedsit for instance and save a lot more money.
My conspiracy theory regarding that chart, is the to cover up the vaccine damage that can’t be hidden in the under 40s group. This lot are preparing the ground work to cover their backsides.
Google, Facebook and Amazon etc are not going to give this nice new world that they have created up so easily… this is the world of the future, the world where Silicon Valley is the empire and they are the emperors. One doesn’t need to be an intelectual to see where this is going or even need to look at a chart. My friends, welcome to the Big tech-over, we hope you are comfy here and have amazon prime amd netflix
Does anyone have Boris’s new number?! Perhaps we can text this to him. There must be some way of getting him an alternative view
Glen Bishop has a fine future ahead of him.
Well done,Glen.
The attitude of the SAGE predictions made me a little reminiscent about the Iraq propaganda bod who insisted that the soldiers seen by the reporter standing interviewing him were Iraqi when they were clearly USMC during the invasion of Iraq.
Sadly, our fellow countrymen and women appear largely functionally innumerate and very fearful so I believe any reasoned attempt to show a mundane thing like a compelling reasoned argument would be wasted.
We seem to live in a country where a Mumsnet mindset drives things…and not necessarily forward.
But here is the point. The Indian strain has been in this country for at least a month. It has been circulating freely. Apparently its more transmissible. We are still at 2k cases. So why the fuck would it wait till June to start infecting people? And secondly, so fucking what? It won’t kill anyone will it. You know that jab they have forced everyone to take. Why are we worried about infections? We are not going zero covid we are only supposed to be protecting the shit nhs. Its just another scariant to force reluctant people of Asian background to have the jab. But we have models, look!! What we also have is actual DATA from last summer, we also have DATA from open states in the USA. We really need to shut this sage shitshow down. How can it be nobody is challenging this utter bollocks?
The covid alert levels indicate that zero covid is the goal…
The error is conflating transmissibility with virulence. Because a virus is easily transmitted doesn’t mean that it is more dangerous.
Glen may be right, but my own back of a fag packet calculations don’t seem to match up and I want to understand where I have gone wrong.
Glen says that a hospitalisation rate of 20,000 a day implies 0.3 and 0.6 of the UK population being infected in one week. Let’s call it 30 million people for simplicity. 30 million over a week is about 4.3 million a day. So Glen has calculated that out of 4.3 million only 20,000 get hospitalised – that’s about 0.47%. Last week 15762 people tested positive and 751 were hospitalised (those numbers have not changed dramatically in recent weeks). That’s about 4.8% i.e. nearly 10 times higher. I understand that Glen is assuming that vaccination will be more or less complete whereas at the moment we are only about 70% first dose and 40% second dose – but is completing the vaccination programme really expected to reduce the hospitalisation rate by 90% (bearing in mind that most of the most vulnerable have already been vaccinated)?
I’m afraid we might be setting ourselves up for a(nother) big fall here. Back last autumn some in the anti-lockdown camp did considerable damage to the cause by appearing to know for certain that there was going to be no winter resurgence of the virus. Then there was one.
We don’t know what is going to happen with this epidemic (and nor do SAGE!). What we do know is that lockdowns are the wrong response.
Please, try to be more cautious and careful this time.
This is very important.
Try looking at the data. There was no winter resurgence there was just an endemic virus doing its thing. All cause deaths which is the real number did bugger all. It was misdiagnosed covid deaths. Wrong response for fucks sake, have a look at ANY of sages predictions. 250k dead by July 2020, 4k dead a day over Christmas. Every prediction has been over estimated by 11/12 times the actual number and WE should be careful about what we say??? We are saying there will be very low rates in the summer. Is that a prediction, yes. How can I be so sure? Because that’s what happened last year when we were in the pandemic phase. When LS talk we back things up with data, not idiotic model’s. Could you show me the scientific proof for the efficacy of masks. How does idiotic social distancing stop a micro virus? Why do I need a mask to enter a restaurant but don’t need it when I am sitting down? How does imprisoning healthy adults get us herd immunity. We have no need to walk quietly into the night, come on next week’s march, see the stupidity of sages forecast.
A suitably robust reply…
Are you talking about Mike Yeadon? I still think he was probably right. I have my doubts that the winter deaths were covid at all. More likely flu as it magically ‘disappeared’ at the same time, and the later winter ones most likely were a large percentage of vaccine related deaths. The problem is that the powers that be can package just about any death as covid, using dodgy PCR test or just downright lies.
This is no longer a pandemic about flu. It has become a pandemic of fear. Click on the link to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsRCmhjtekE
As foreign travel is now dead for us plebs (unfortunatelyI don’t have a private jet or a yacht), so this year I’m thinking of visiting all the mass graves of the covid victims who we were told that would be needed. Can somebody inform me where these mass graves are as they must be quit large what with 500000 victims that were predicted in wave one. Oh and the 4000/day from wave whatever.
Not in our local cemetery, an ex. fireman we know worked part time for an undertaker, says he had a less than average rate of funerals last year.
I repeat…
This is worth a look.
https://thewhiterose.uk/updates-for-saturday-15-may-worldwide-freedom-protest/
I repeat…
This is worth a look.
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/05/15/government-insider-says-uk-gov-has-a-plan-in-place-to-continue-lockdown-and-the-mainstream-media-are-in-on-it/
If we’re doing fag packet maths, try this.
currently 2,000 cases a day, 100 hospital admissions.
to get to 10,000 admissions a day that 100x so 200,000 cases
which is 1.4m a week, or just over 2% of the population, not 30-60%.
Yes more vaccinations by mid July will shift the cases/admissions ratio, but with over two thirds having had one dose now, it won’t make that big a difference, most of that win is baked in today.
You have expressed what I was trying to say in this comment but much more simply and effectively. It inspired me to investigate the ratio of hospitalisations to cases since the vaccine programme got underway. Here is a chart:
It seems like the ratio has changed remarkably little – which is a bit odd because you would expect the reported cases to be increasingly comprised of younger and vaccinated people, both of which should reduce the hospitalisation ratio. Anyhow Glen seems to be expecting this ratio to plunge by a factor of 20 as the vaccine programme finishes.
SAGE is for more interested in something else, nothing to do with our wellbeing:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/revealed-how-bill-gatess-influence-has-spread-virally-into-uk-medicine-and-science/
Ivermectin anyone?
http://bit.ly/2mBrCxE
As with Imperial College’s Report-9 back in March 2020, the work isn’t properly peer reviewed (or perhaps more likely, not peer reviewed at all). Having modellers from other colleges review your work is clearly not sufficient. It’s interesting that the Maths student who did this basic sense check actually got a response from the modellers. I challenged Imperial’s Report-9 via snail-mail direct to Prof Ferguson and another co-author plus IC’s President and got no response at all, which speaks volumes (https://uk-covid19-science-government.blogspot.com/).
It appears these groups churning out models seem more concerned about quantity rather than quality. The colleges hosting these groups really should reign in the modellers and insist proper independent peer review is undertaken prior to any model studies being published OR SUPPLIED TO SAGE. If this were undertaken we wouldn’t be seeing these poor quality papers and the country would probably be in a better place.
They never had a connection to reality so how could it snap?
The so called peak of wave 1 is considerably understated because nobody was looking for it when the peak occurred which would have been somewhere around early January.
I read a lot of science papers, (biology and genetics) basic maths errors are relatively common and missed on peer review. Such things as totals not adding up etc. It appears that as most of the work is computorised no one ever does a quick check with simple addition and subtraction.