Positive Covid tests fell again today, both compared to yesterday and compared to last Saturday, making it the tenth day in a row reported infections have dropped week-on-week. MailOnline has more.
Covid cases have fallen week-on-week for the tenth day in a row, in another sign of hope as the pandemic appears to be shrinking — but experts warn the drop off could be down to less [sic] people getting tests.
Department of Health bosses posted 26,144 infections today, down 17.8% on last Saturday’s figure of 31,795.
And the number of people dying with the virus has fallen to 71. The number of victims decreased 17.4% from 86 last Saturday.
The baffled Government scientists, whose gloomy predictions continue not to materialise, have now come up with another reason why positive test reports might be dropping: people are avoiding being tested because they don’t want to self-isolate.
I suppose some will be, with holidays approaching. But the ONS breakdown by age also suggests there’s a difference in the infection rate between people under 16 and over 16, with the latter having peaked while the former had not as of July 24th. That in itself is a bit confusing, as children under 16 don’t live on their own, but it does suggest that some of the drop in positive tests reported by PHE might be because parents have stopped testing their children.
ZOE data has gone weird since it changed its methods 10 days ago, as the below graphs for one local authority area indicate. The ZOE data tracks the PHE positive tests until the last couple of weeks, at which point they do the polar opposite and ZOE surges while PHE plummets. While the ZOE graph is prevalence (current active infections) and the PHE graph is incidence (new daily infections) the comparison is useful as you would still expect correspondence. Is this all because of testing hesitancy? Seems unlikely. I don’t know what the ZOE team did when they updated their method, but their data’s radical divergence now from reported positive tests doesn’t fill me with confidence.
But as I argued yesterday, this is all a distraction really. The bigger picture is that the Delta variant has been revealed to be no reason to remain cautious and the models predicting a massive exit wave have been shown to be unreliable. There is now no excuse not to end the state of emergency, end mass testing, end vaccine apartheid, rescind guidance and return to normal. What are we waiting for?
Stop Press: Worth remembering this howling embarrassment from two weeks ago: “England’s Covid unlocking is threat to world, say 1,200 scientists.“
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Obsessive case-counting is very, very silly, ATL. It lays you wide open to the idea that if so-callled cases ‘surge’ again, as they undoubtedly will in the autumn, we should all be locked up.
Forget ‘cases’. Seek freedom. Permanent, unconditional freedom.
Are they still counting every death within 28 days of a positive test result as a “Covid” death, or did they stop that as I seem to remember they promised? Very worrying for the Autumn if they are still doing this. Especially if those “vaccines” are as dangerous as has been suggested.
And are they even pretending now that they plan to end all the current nonsense eventually?
ONS show two different figures, deths within 28 days and deaths with Covid on the death certificate. They show radically different figures, with the latter being very much lower.
There are three measures in common use, two from the ONS, one from PHE. PHE show deaths with 28 days, ONS give us Covid mentioned on death certificate and Covid given as a cause on the death certificate. The 28 days figure is sometimes higher and sometimes lower than the two death certificate measures – of course the causes figure is always lower than the mentioned figure
I attach two charts showing how the three measures have varied. One since the beginning of the year, and one since the beginning of May, because the figures are so low since May that the difference between the measures cannot be seen if you take it from the beginning of the year.
Who cares?
All irrelevant nonsense
Well said. I don’t like to constantly whinge about what they’re doing ATL because they are on our side, but we must stop giving validity to the lunatic parallel universe in which covid was exceptional.
“they are on our side”
I’m beginning to wonder. Often recently more in no-man’s land.
While they’ve been a bit weak on the vaccine madness and have a blind spot for their hapless PM, I think they are on our side
Just somewhat too hidebound by the lunatic paradigm of the “pandemic”
Yes. I’m getting totally pissed off with this unqualified capitulation to the language and bad science of The Narrative. It’s really dumb.
“Concede the language and you concede the argument”
Cheers you speak the truth.
When there’s an upturn of ‘cases’ & ‘infections’ and there will be, the unvaccinated will get the blame!
Vaccinating during a pandemic is aborrant! It derives variants. During the foot & mouth outbreak, why didn’t they vaccinate (they had a vaccine), but culled instead?
Because vaccination while the infection was endemic, would have created resistive variants!
Thats not how it works at all.
Simple, basic GCSE Biology would have told you that.
(There are also several key parts of the makeup of the FMD vaccine that means its not suitable to use at short notice during an outbreak as well).
Whether mass vaccination during an epidemic drives viral evolution towards vaccine escape very much depends on the virus and the immune response to it.
There’s evidence of selection of vaccine escape in FMDV after vaccination, and mass vaccination in an outbreak should make things much worse.
It would appear that coronaviruses would suffer the same problem, both in terms of theory and in the outcomes we’re getting with our vaccination drive (eg, see Technical Briefing 19 figure 9).
There is no evidence at all.
All of the partial evasion mutations we’ve seen have arisen in *unvaccinated* populations.
We haven’t seen a single one arise from vaccinated populations and nor would we expect one too given thats not how any of this works at all.
This is something you cannot possibly know: If it was possible to trace movements of viral particles with this granularity, there’d be no reason to use the scattergun approach called “lockdown” for anything.
NB: Rejecting the “The unvaccinated are DANGEROUS !!!” does not amount to accepting the opposite piece of nonense told by propagandists of the other party.
For those who have caught Covid19 and for those who choose NOT to accept the ‘vaccine’, their immune systems will fight the whole virus, producing antibodies and T cells for the different components of the invading virus. Those whose immune system is primed by the vaccine to produce antibodies against just the spike protein will have to re-teach their immune system when a variant emerges, an immune system that is now potentially compromised by vaccine-induced ADE.
I would be interested to know your sources for your claim that all of the mutations have arisen from the selfish unvaccinated, seeing as most publicly available records don’t distinguish between ‘of’ and ‘with’ Covid, nor by age or ethnicity.
Well, there’s also no evidence that the mutations arise in the unvaccinated either; it is very difficult to identify the exact source of any mutation.
As a general point, your science is misinformed. I don’t know why — there’s lots of information out there. Nevertheless, you seem fixated limiting your understanding of viral vaccine escape for a limited set of vaccines and viruses.
Evolution of vaccine escape requires there to be a evolutionary pressure for the escape. You only get this if you vaccinate lots of people.
Evolution of vaccine escape requires there to be a virus capable of mutating — all viruses mutate, but some are very stable and mutations rarely survive; other viruses are highly mutable and mutations can survive.
Evolution of vaccine escape requires that the virus infects and is then transmitted onwards rapidly — this allows successful mutations to spread and thrive at population level.
Vaccine escape variants can be created in an unvaccinated person — indeed, they are created simply as a function of ‘the amount of virus’ present. However, there is no selective pressure for that variant to dominate in that person and thus it is less likely for it to thrive before it has a chance to spread to others. This spread is made much much easier if there are many in the population vaccinated who are more likely to become infected by escape variants. This is evolution.
Vaccine escape variants can also be created in a vaccinated person, but in this case there is enormous selective pressure for that variant to thrive in that person, making it more likely to be present in huge numbers in exhaled droplets and be spread to others. This is also evolution.
This within-person evolution isn’t the case for all viruses/vaccines, but it is the case with sars-cov-2 because circulating antibodies are present from the moment of infection, and thus the virus has selective pressure to evolve vaccine escape during the crucial exponential growth stage as it infects the person.
This type of within-person evolution isn’t seen with many vaccines, because most vaccines are actually rather effective at limiting viral load when a person is exposed to the virus. This means that most ‘viral particles’ in existence are in the unvaccinated, limiting the chance of mutation to the vaccinated. However, viral loads following infection in a person vaccinated with the covid vaccines are extraordinarily high — for the original variant they were about 1/4 that seen in an unvaccinated-infected person, and recent information is suggesting that there’s now no reduction in viral load in the vaccinated-infected.
We probably have made the perfect environment for vaccine escape — mass vaccination during an epidemic using a vaccine with only minor viral load reduction (at best), that targets the most mutable part of a virus that has a rapid spread through the community.
You could have a read of this if you’re needing an introduction to the topic: Unifying the Epidemiological and Evolutionary Dynamics of Pathogens, Grenfell et al, Science 303 (2004).
Interesting how much information is in this and similar posts, compared to the soundbytes from the “conventional wisdom” guys.
Watch this video. The jab is the so-called new Delta variant.
https://dougbillings.us/video/dougs-continued-interview-with-karen-kingston-7-27-2021/
Thanks for the find!
Indeed it is Will – which is why I dropped to the bottom paragraph when I saw the title.
It’s not the whole story.
I do know of several people that took the kids out of school a week early and deliberately not getting tested so as to not lose holidays. That’s definitely happening.
Doesn’t explain all of it though as the age breakdown shows a decline across the board.
Other things lately, 2 weeks of decent weather so more people outdoors, less school testing, 700000 people in voluntary isolation from the app etc.
That damped the Euro 2020 spike.
Id expect positive tests to go back up shortly, especially in September. 100,000 isnt an insane figure as a guess but cases don’t really matter *if* Boris holds his nerve.
I suspect however he wont hold his nerve and will reintroduce restrictions. Gove will demand it.
Guv can sod off. And let’s remember that the current “best that you’ll get, bare minimum” restrictions are causing huge amounts of suffering, stress and anxiety. The crooks responsible should be in prison even without all the other previous (and probably future) restrictions. Wicked, horrible villains.
Gove isn’t going to sod off.
Thats the problem and has been for years. He wont go away and wont rest until he gets the top job.
Sooner or later Gove’s halo will slip. Five in a bed? Six?
He’s a bummer
Unless someone tops him, PLEASE.
Your point about expecting positive cases to go up again is very interesting. I’m not sure what will happen next.
According to the past behaviour of covid across multiple countries, and of the behaviour of respiratory viruses in general, cases should now go down to near zero for about 4 months, with a significant winter wave arising around December. The rationale for this is explained in the Grenfell et al paper I mentioned in a different reply to you.
However, the vaccinated appear to now have a partially suppressed innate immune system (wrt covid). This is likely to result in extended periods of very mild (perhaps asymptomatic) infections in the vaccinated. These will then act as a reservoir for covid, maintaining some infectious pressure in the population and stopping case numbers from declining to zero. I’d suggest that we’re likely to see cases declining to a plateau in the region of 3,000 to 5,000 cases a day, but there’s rather a lot of uncertainty in those figures. I’d note that there is now substantial evidence suggesting that these mildly symptomatic infected-vaccinated individuals will have a viral load at least as high as seen in the unvaccinated-infected (of a similar level of symptom) — these vaccinated-infected individuals will very much be acting as spreaders of covid.
I suppose it isn’t out of the question that this covid reservoir made up of the vaccinated-infected would lead to case numbers approaching 100,000, but it does seem to me to be a less likely scenario.
We should see signs of these reservoir vaccinated-infected in people with extended periods of mild-symptomatic covid — perhaps 3 weeks (or even more) of mild symptoms rather than the week or so seen with normal covid where there’s no progression to serious-symptomatic covid. This is something to watch out for, although I note that there’s no proper monitoring of length of time of mild symptomatic disease for covid, so we probably won’t see anything in official statistics
Honestly the most confusing analysis yet on this site. Cases, modelling, delta, vaccines. A mess.
The fundamentals of this whole situation are warped beyond all repair.
The Zoe data is backed up by the ONS survey. The Government’s reported case data reflects the beginnings of a reporting rebellion sparked by the pingdemic. Summer holidays are at stake: COVID has gone covert.
The ONS data are predicated on modelling but even then the data up to 24th July showed a substantial slowing in the rise in incidence. The data up to the 31st, released at the end of the week will show incidence falling, if it isn’t spiked, in the way Zoe was when it reported rising incidence among the vaccinated, while incidence in the unvaccinated was disappearing…
I understood that the ONS data is based on reporting which is why they have various caveats on the age of some of the data and run a 7 day average.
ZOE data is however modelled data based on self reporting by a self selected group and it is not clear how the models are adjusted for the various biasses due to age, willingness to report and self-(mis-)diagnosis.
Incidence is falling on the ZOE data too, but very slowly, as the virus is taking longer to seek out the susceptible amongst the vaccinated. There are very few unvaccinated reporting to ZOE now. Even the massive numbers of close contacts being pinged by T&T aren’t fertile ground for the virus and then, many of them are now in rebellious mode, or about to become so, as their holiday comes into view. Add to that, the mildness of COVID symptoms in the vaccinated, which now include sneezing, and there’s little reason to test or report. Why risk your holidays because you have a sniffle? There are no sanctions: it’s now herd impunity.
I deleted the Zoe app in anger and sheer nauseating contempt after Spector or whatever he’s called, came out in favour of injecting children and younger people. I had been suspicious of him and his pet Zoe for a long time and that was the final straw. He’s another one of the abominable crew pushing the Covid panscam.
Yep UK Column did an article about him and there was something dodgy. I can’t honestly remember what (think it might have been to do with funding?) but they were definitely not impressed.
I did the same as you and deleted the app in disgust, he’s definitely controlled opposition.
I stopped reporting to Zoe months ago as I detected some government bias perhaps due to the government financially subsidising Spector’s pet. Was very upset as at the beginning I saw Spector as a beacon of objectivity on matters Covid
Yes he seemed to be objective until they met his price.
Incidence of what????
RNA signals are not viruses – let alone illness.
ZOE is sampling of hypochondria guesswork influenced by what’s in the media.
Cases of what?
All this data is nonsense. Don’t give it false validity by reporting on it as if it meant anything.
COVID was unexceptional.
THAT is the real bottom line. Never forget it.
… and its difficult enough getting the brainwashed to see that obvious fact, without confusing things with a-scientific wittering about ‘cases’ etc.
They tried to scare people sh….less with the Kent variant, the SAfrican variant, the Brazilian, this Delta (Indian) and now Sage is saying it’s not impossible that a new variant could kill 1 in 3 !!!! How far are they going to go? How far do they NEED to go before people wake up? Govt of any persuasion is never going to look the same after this show. The NHS isn’t either. And scientific publications are going to require a huge overhaul. Well… some positives to come from all this.
As an aside will someone please tell me what ATL means. There are so many interpretations on Google!
ATL = above the line – on a website or newspaper, articles published by that site/paper
BTL = below the line – comments
Oh thanks, Julian. Makes sense.
How are the ‘variants’ being detected? The PCR test can’t do it. Anyone know?
The Americans don’t even think the test can distinguish between Covid and flu.
If that’s true, it could well explain why flu ‘disappeared’ last winter!
Read somewhere (sorry) that its about ‘seeing’ a PIECE of the computer generated original Sars Cov 2 sequence which may or may not overlap with another piece of the sequence (read another variant). I’m sure there’s a science bod that can explain it here? But an obvious and good question. What test do they use to distinguish. Perhaps its all down to assumptions… the PCR test ‘shows’ a person has it and therefore if they are living in an area where a variant is dominant it’s simply assumed that’s the one!…Occam’s razor?!
It’s all made up shit
“Govt of any persuasion is never going to look the same after this show.”
This is the long-term damage of this departure into fiction and lies : the further undermining of normal social trust (which allows for scepticism – it’s not blind faith) that this entails.
Not looking good.
We are experiencing normal all cause mortality at the moment. And this at a time when there is the unavailability of treatment for other conditions and huge waiting lists and significant strain on the health system from medical issues following experimental vaccination.
Even if we look at deaths labelled as covid, these are very low. But most if not all of these covid labelled deaths are currently people dying of other conditions or people at the end of life with other conditions where covid is the final straw. The effective case fatality rate is zero at the moment.
About the only thing you can say is that possible encounters with SARS-C0V-2 have been high in Summer in that a positive test in some cases indicates that someone has encountered a new variant of the virus. And that is a good thing generally. It’s all a part of safe Summer spread and the build up of natural immunity.
Cases should be people with severe symptoms who test positive for SARS-C0V-2 and where there is a diagnosis that the severe symptoms are caused by SARS-C0V-2. Of course there will still be a tendency to misdiagnose as covid because we aren’t testing for other viruses for example that may be causing the symptoms rather than SARS-C0V-2.
A ‘new encounter’ with the virus I would define as the likely new detected presence of SARS-C0V-2 in the upper respiratory tracts which may be a good or bad thing depending on whether it creates immunity or illness. I say detected because some people will encounter the virus but will never test positive as they brush it off so easily through mucosal defences. During the Summer new encounters are predominently good. In Winter there may be some bad elements to it but nature decides on that and we only make things worse through unnecessary interventions such as lockdowns that pushes spread into high risk areas such as hospitals, and vaccines that create selective pressure for mutations and vaccine escape. And of course there are all the indirect bad effects of policy interventions including unnecessary deaths from other conditions such as cancer and societal collapse.
All that said, here is a chart of estimated new encounters from the ONS data from the ‘UK summary incidence’ tab of this accompanying ONS spreadsheet. It’s hard to see what is going on because the incidence estimates are about 3 weeks old (latest period is 4th July to 10th July) but perhaps it will be mesaured to level off by the end of August. But it’s all good as it’s the Summer.
It does look like we are being set up for a position where official ‘cases’ start rising again as we hit September and lockdowns are advocated again. So I agree with the other commenters here. Even if there is an increase in illness in September and into Winter, all that we are observing is a period where we experience normal respiratory illness from an endemic virus.
A sensible analysis. Far to sensible for Sage or the government.
Up to a point.
But the fundamental problem of PCR testing remains. There is no baseline of comparison of testing whole asymptomatic populations for a notional virus, and thus establishing the relevance of finding particular RNA strands to a viral surge.
Essentially – it’s literally the ‘dark’ arts – showing no light.
“But as I argued yesterday, this is all a distraction really.”
Correct, has been since 23rd March 2020. All these figures are from a discredited test and a reporting system that is total baloney. They are completely meaningless figures. I don’t know why TDS is even giving them any credence they should be treated with contempt and consigned to the bin of history. Sorry don’t know why I waffled on I could have summed it up in one word really.
BOLLOCKS!
I gave up reading the article at ‘less people getting tests’.
Quite right too. It should of course have read “fewer” people getting tests. I don’t know where MSM is recruiting their reporters from but clearly they haven’t been educated.
The same morons that say “impactful” when they mean “effective”.
The fact that the trajectory of this wave is virtually identical to the trajectory of the last wave indicates that it does what it does regardless of lockdowns and restrictions.
I repeat the question : ‘WHAT wave?’
I see no indication of any significant upsurge in confirmed illness or death.
“people are avoiding being tested because they don’t want to self-isolate.”
They don’t want to lose a week’s wage.
For the last week I have had the symptoms of ‘a cold’. Slight sniffles, squiffy stomach, tiredness and muscle ache and occasional bouts of sneezing. It lasted a week and now seems to have passed. I have been able to sail my boat every day. I get one of these episodes quite frequently. I have no reason to believe that this was Covid but if I had asked advice I would have been told to get a test. Had this turned out go be positive I and the congregation of my local church would have been condemned to spend what is left of the Scottish summer under house arrest. No more sailing! So why on earth would I take a test?
What’s Covid? It’s ‘flu.
Had enough of pitiful graphs and number diarrhoeia for a lifetime? I have.
i, personally believe that the reports of covid tests are fraudulently manipulated by the sage sy-op tramps to lift and drop moral as they feel! I take no notice of the propaganda and the bastards do not effect my personal outlook on my life.
Perhaps we could persuade others hto do the same and defeat the bastards
“It’s just because people are avoiding tests!” is a particularly silly excuse as it implies “Damned people aren’t get sick anymore!”
Isn’t that disturbing – the number of children under the age of 12 being ”tested”? It’s child abuse – nothing less – when it is KNOWN that children do not carry or spread this disease. It’s as Neil Oliver said – it’s disgusting that children should be used to ”protect” adults.