• Login
  • Register
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

As Infections Plummet Following ‘Freedom Day’ the Models Predicting Catastrophe are Exposed as Fatally Flawed

by Will Jones
26 July 2021 2:15 PM

As reported positive cases plummet following ‘Freedom Day’ – down to 24,950 across the U.K. on Monday, less than half the peak of 54,674 just nine days earlier – the damage limitation among the doomsters begins.

In the Spectator , Professor Oliver Johnson of Bristol University stepped up this morning to try to explain.

He starts by observing that “for the first time in 18 months, there’s been a fall in cases that can’t be easily explained by a national lockdown”. Yet the Spectator recently published an article by Professor Simon Wood showing that new infections peaked and fell before lockdown on all three occasions in England. Did the editors forget to bring it to Professor Johnson’s attention?

Next, Professor Johnson offers some reasons why it may yet be a false dawn.

Indeed it’s possible that the peak in cases, welcome though it is, could only be a local maximum with further rises to come. The rapid reversal in trajectory (from 40% increases between corresponding days of the week to 40% decreases) seems too sudden to be caused by a rapid gain in immunity. It seems more likely to be due to changes in behaviour, with school holidays, the end of the European Championship football and recent hot weather meaning that infected people have had fewer opportunities to spread the disease.

You could have made a similar argument about Covid peaking in Bolton, one of the first places hit by the Delta variant. There was plenty of talk of local herd immunity there. But it’s worth noticing that those falls were subsequently reversed.

And here’s the risk now: what behaviour gives, behaviour can take away. I don’t think anyone can be certain if and when Covid might start going up again. But Scotland gives us hope that sustained falls may be possible.

So far we haven’t even seen the effect of the July 19th reopening in the data, let alone people following now-deleted advice not to ‘cower’, plus there’s the return to schools and universities to come, seasonal effects coming back in the autumn and so on.

The argument that “what behaviour gives, behaviour can take away” is precisely why the models always predict exit waves. Yet the modellers don’t seem to have noticed that these exit waves never happen. There was no exit wave in the U.K. or Europe in summer 2020, nor in spring 2021 in the U.K. as restrictions were eased, nor in the U.S. as measures were lifted. Yet the myth of the exit wave persists.

Why Professor Johnson thinks the “rapid reversal in trajectory” should be taken as a sign of behaviour change rather than herd immunity is unclear. Rapid reversals are entirely normal in viral outbreaks, whether COVID-19 (visible in the U.K. winter outbreak, among many others around the world) or in seasonal flu outbreaks, which almost always have this pointy shape – clearly not the result of lockdowns or behaviour change. In fact, it is exactly what you would expect herd immunity to look like, especially with an overshoot, as the pool of susceptible people runs out. Conversely, there is no evidence that behaviour change causes this kind of abrupt decline of an outbreak. Can Professor Johnson point to any such evidence?

The recent double peak in Bolton may be a result of the outbreak there having two phases, the first focused on the British Asian communities first infected with the Indian variant and the second spread across the community more broadly. As Professor Johnson notes, the sustained decline in Scotland since the end of June suggests it may continue in England too.

Then there is Professor Johnson’s inconsistency in claiming that the school holidays, which began on July 21st-23rd in England, are reflected in the drop, whereas ‘Freedom Day’, which was July 19th, is not. In fact, the assertion that a reopening seven days ago would not yet be seen in the data is bizarre: the mean incubation period of the virus is four to five days.

In addition, Professor Johnson’s colleague, Professor Philip Thomas, leader of the Bristol modelling team, writing in the Spectator in June, was clear that he did not think the reopening would make a material difference. “The model shows that the virus is growing exponentially already,” he wrote. “The final step on the roadmap out of lockdown makes little difference. We are already mixing about as liberally as we would otherwise do on a full reopening.”

His team predicted “an enormous final wave” in which the virus “would quickly seek out the one-in-three Britons who are still susceptible: mainly the not-yet-vaccinated” and peak in the middle of July (he got that bit right) “at anywhere between two million and four million active infections“. According to the ONS, in the week ending July 17th (which PHE data suggests is the peak), around 741,700 people in England were infected, a long way short of two to four million.

This is more than just a curiosity, to be explained by half-baked explanations about football tournaments and hot weather (the peak by specimen date was July 15th, and there was no obvious change in the weather in the week prior to that).

It fundamentally challenges the validity of the models, Bristol’s as much as those used by SAGE, that keep wrongly predicting mass infection in the absence of restrictions because they mistakenly assume everyone is susceptible and the restrictions are working. This has been evident since at least the peaking of Sweden’s initial wave in spring 2020, and arguably earlier with the evidence from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. But now that infections have plummeted in England as restrictions are eased it is exposed to the world and the lessons must be learned.

The modellers of doom convinced Boris Johnson to delay ‘Freedom Day’ for a whole month because of worries about rising cases, only for the reopening to coincide with a steep drop. There’s a beautiful irony in that, but it’s important that Government ministers now see through the fraud that is being perpetrated against citizens by the flawed Covid modelling and grasp that they do not need to live in fear of this virus.

Tags: Exit waveFreedom DayLockdownsModelling

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

Minister Confirms Government Not Ruling Out Barring University Students From Lectures and Halls

Next Post

Caroline Lucas MP Says “Cases Are Soaring”. Hasn’t She Seen the Data?

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

38 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

DONATE

PODCAST

The Sceptic | Episode 40: Rob Bates on Stopping Britain Becoming Majority-Minority, Tilak Doshi on Trump vs Green Blob and Mario Trabucco on Osborne’s Elgin Marbles Betrayal

by Richard Eldred
13 June 2025
1

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editor’s Picks

As a Civil Servant, I Can Tell You Dissent From DEI Dogma is Not Allowed

13 June 2025
by Anonymous Civil Servant

Watch: Labour Minister Makes False Claim on BBC Question Time That Most Small Boat Migrants are Women and Children – With No Correction From BBC

13 June 2025
by Will Jones

Israel and Iran Are Now at War

13 June 2025
by Will Jones

The Great Climate Science Swindle Goes On

12 June 2025
by Chris Morrison

News Round-Up

14 June 2025
by Toby Young

Israel and Iran Are Now at War

46

Watch: Labour Minister Makes False Claim on BBC Question Time That Most Small Boat Migrants are Women and Children – With No Correction From BBC

19

News Round-Up

17

As a Civil Servant, I Can Tell You Dissent From DEI Dogma is Not Allowed

11

Abortion Up to Birth by the Back Door

49

Oxford is Now More or Less a Quango

14 June 2025
by Darren Gee

The Two-Stroke Engine of Brian Wilson

14 June 2025
by James Alexander

As a Civil Servant, I Can Tell You Dissent From DEI Dogma is Not Allowed

13 June 2025
by Anonymous Civil Servant

Woke Waste Has Become Even Worse Under Labour

13 June 2025
by Charlotte Gill

I’ll Take the High Road

12 June 2025
by Dr James Allan

POSTS BY DATE

July 2021
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Jun   Aug »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

POSTS BY DATE

July 2021
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Jun   Aug »

DONATE

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editor’s Picks

As a Civil Servant, I Can Tell You Dissent From DEI Dogma is Not Allowed

13 June 2025
by Anonymous Civil Servant

Watch: Labour Minister Makes False Claim on BBC Question Time That Most Small Boat Migrants are Women and Children – With No Correction From BBC

13 June 2025
by Will Jones

Israel and Iran Are Now at War

13 June 2025
by Will Jones

The Great Climate Science Swindle Goes On

12 June 2025
by Chris Morrison

News Round-Up

14 June 2025
by Toby Young

Israel and Iran Are Now at War

46

Watch: Labour Minister Makes False Claim on BBC Question Time That Most Small Boat Migrants are Women and Children – With No Correction From BBC

19

News Round-Up

17

As a Civil Servant, I Can Tell You Dissent From DEI Dogma is Not Allowed

11

Abortion Up to Birth by the Back Door

49

Oxford is Now More or Less a Quango

14 June 2025
by Darren Gee

The Two-Stroke Engine of Brian Wilson

14 June 2025
by James Alexander

As a Civil Servant, I Can Tell You Dissent From DEI Dogma is Not Allowed

13 June 2025
by Anonymous Civil Servant

Woke Waste Has Become Even Worse Under Labour

13 June 2025
by Charlotte Gill

I’ll Take the High Road

12 June 2025
by Dr James Allan

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

  • X

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In

© Skeptics Ltd.

wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment