Professor Neil Ferguson is at it again. He predicts that a full lockdown will not be necessary this winter, but that the reintroduction of some forms of restrictions will be, warning that “we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic”. The Times has the story.
The Imperial College scientist said that there was no “reason to panic” but urged people to be cautious about social contact.
He said it was “critical we accelerate the booster programme” with millions of eligible older people yet to have a top-up jab despite concerns about waning immunity.
Last year hospital admissions were doubling every 10 days. At present, the rate is about five weeks and some believe outbreaks in schools will burn out before then, causing cases to fall again.
Ferguson told Today on BBC Radio 4: “I think we need to be on the case, and we do need to prioritise the [booster] vaccination programme but we’re not in the same position as last year.”
He added: “I don’t think we’re looking at another lockdown… the worst case here are demands on the NHS… it’s very unlikely we’ll see anything like the levels of deaths we saw last year, for instance.
“Coming into the winter, there may be a plan B which needs to be implemented, which involves some rolling back of measures, but I doubt that we’ll ever get close to the lockdown we were in in January of this year.”
The Government’s official ‘Plan B’ involves the return of working from home and compulsory masks, plus the introduction of vaccine passports. Ministers have been confident that this will not be needed but concern has been mounting as cases rise towards 50,000 a day.
“People need to be aware that we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic – for the last three or four months we’ve been up at well over 1% of the population infected at any point in time,” Ferguson said.
He said the Government was “very clear that it wanted to move away from social distancing measures, but it’s notable, clearly, that most western European countries have kept in place more control measures, vaccine mandates, mask-wearing mandates, and tend to have lower case numbers and certainly not case numbers which are going up as fast as we’ve got”.
Professor Paul Hunter, of the University of East Anglia, said he was not “overly worried” by case numbers, pointing out: “We’re doing far more testing of children than most or all European countries and at least 50% of our cases are in children, mostly teenagers.” …
Modellers are finding it increasingly difficult to know what will happen next, given huge uncertainties about the number of unvaccinated people, how fast immunity wanes and how people will behave over the winter.
Worth reading in full.
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Can’t think of anything profound or intelligent to say, other than “fuck off, Ferguson”.
I haven’t read this, but I just wanted to say that I don’t give a BUGGER what this dishonourable and dishonoured, discredited, disgusting piece of rancid offal has to say. Why on earth is he still being quoted?
“Sajid Javid says winter poses the “greatest threat” to the recovery from Covid, with cases rising.
He adds that case numbers could go as high as 100,000 per day – but that the NHS is performing with “distinction”.” (news conference as reported by BBC)
I presume the numbers are a Ferguson factors.
Er!
Who’s asking Ferguson?
Why are we asking Ferguson?
Why hasn’t Boris, SAGE, etc. twigged yet that Ferguson just has no clue, and *IS* the danger?
‘Authority’ can try imposing restrictions but whether or not they happen depends on whether or not we do them.
Rules only stand if majority comply with them and there’s nothing except personal choice that stops them being not complied with.
I and others learnt that that’s the way it is when we were children. ‘Grown-ups’ in our sphere never admitted it was so but most had the sense to not try to deny it in the face of the proof we kids provided
More lockdowns says ‘Professor’ Fergusson?
Thats not like him to be so alarmist.
They should try the radical practice of actually treating ill cov patients early as out patients with known, effective protocols such a as used by AAPS, FLCCC,etc instead of STILL doing nothing. If they did this from the start >85% of the deaths would have been avoided and we wouldn’t be in this mess. This is medical malpractice and the heads of NHS, Ferguson,sage and this government should be arrested and charged with mass murder.
Most have kept controls ….. except Sweden, Denmark and a range of American States all of which have far fewer deaths/infections than those who have kept controls.
But that’s irrelevant to Lockdown Ferguson.
This has seriously reached peak farce.
Zero evidence that restrictions “work” but lots of evidence of the harm they cause. But let’s do more of them.
God designed a perfectly effective breathing system so let’s cover it with a cloth mask to stop it working properly. With zero evidence that this impacts anything.
Vaccines are awesome and are so good that you need to keep taking them again and again.
I believe that this whole Covid theatre is sheer garbage. My own views increasingly align with Sam Bailey and “Virus Mania”.
Western “science” is fixated on viruses as the cause of illness and is programmed to find them and show them as the cause of everything. This suits big business interests that can then sell “remedies” and “vaccines”. But the evidence behind it is shaky, at best. A giant wrong turn.
In my opinion, we do not really know what causes the illness that has been identified as Covid. The “virus” may simply be a by product of it rather than a “cause”. The so called science is deep down based on a deck of cards where more assumption is piled on more assumptions.
History will equate what we are… Read more »
Can’t help thinking that masks, lockdowns, and this man’s finger in the air guesses are all about as useful as each other, i.e. not very.
Is this man a doctor? No. He’s a maths geek. So why the hell is this goon shooting his gob off about health matters? Worse, why is anyone paying attention to his entrail reading prognostications, let alone the bloody Govt who frankly should know better but would rather outsource their decisions and claim immunity from blame? Get a grip, Johnson and stop acting the clown.
This guy isn’t a maths geek, either. He’s a self-taught C++-programmer with no background in computer science (not per se something bad — my official job designation is senior software engineer and I’m self taughy as well) whose main occupation is forever working on a single program claimed to model pandemic spread by simulating population behaviour in a way he pulled out of his ass.
This guy isn’t really an expert in anything except this particular piece of crap code.
That’s a little harsh, didn’t he get his data from that esteemed impartial font of knowledge, Wikipedia?
Sheer lunacy to think our lives will probably be dictated by this nutter and his cronies under the pretense of protecting the NHS.
Imagine HAVING to pay for a service, but then when this service gets used as per what we’re paying for, we then get locked down to prevent us from using the service that we’re paying for.
Oh and when we’re at it, because you used that service you already pay for we’re going to have to charge you more now – because you used it.
Shame on us all eh
Charlatan on the loose again. The BBC’s favourite fantasist.
“we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic”
Great ‘vaccines’ aren’t they?
In the absence of a functioning democracy, in the absence of any actual opposition to the Government, and in the absence of any members of Parliament to represent our views, and given all of the weapons (literal and metaphorical) which the State holds against us, our sole responsibility as citizens is to resist, not comply, not co-operate, not collaborate and in general cause as much friction for central and local government as we possibly can.
Since 2020/03/31, 304,655,729 Sars-CoV2 test have been done in the UK, statistically this means every person living in this country has been tested 4.53 times. 27% of these tests have been done in the 92 days since freedom day. But these represent only 15.89% of the 579 days since testing started. Up to and including 2021/07/18, on average, 562,980.32 tests were done per day. From 2021/07/19, this increased by a factor of almost 1.6 (1.59) to an average of 894,331.55 per day. This exceeds the number of tests performed in every other major western European country (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) by a margin.
Could this perhaps be related to the higher case numbers in the UK and not enforced mask wearing and vaccination passes elsewhere?
Nearly 900k tests a day is a lot. Who exactly is getting tested? I think we should be provided with this information.
Also…. How many haven’t ever been tested? Apart from me 😉
No, never. I once wore a face covering in summer 2020 but then read up on it and realised it was a con.
Me neither. Some people have to get tested at work or in school. And the remainder are probably a rather small (compared to the number of people) set of volunteer repeat offenders who absolutely want have a pandemic going on.
Well i’ve never submitted to one so some poor smuck has had more than 5!
So they’re trying the same “Don’t panic” move that they tried with car fuel.
Ferguson doesn’t panic about restrictions anyway – he just breaks them while telling everyone else to obey them.
Good heavens. Imagining still listening to this crank. How on earth is this cretin (yes, philosophically speaking, he’s a cretin) still gaining airtime?
This inept specimen stands as a single indictment of our society.
Can we dig up Jimmy Saville and ask him what to do about child sexual exploitation?
Didn’t the bbc just do that?
How come people can become infected if they are vaccinated?
Impossible surely?
Ferguson is a cunt
Apologies, but there is no other way of saying that
Tempted to say
he is not as useful as thatbut I won’t for fear of being branded a sexistOh, do naff orf, Ferguson.
Vaccine passport: a device used in early 21st century society to segregate unvaccinated people from the people who were given an ineffective vaccine that didn’t actually stop them catching or spreading covid. This device was also used to give the appearance of “doing something” while nudging the populous into carrying around digital identification, and into compliance with government commands. The devices were eventually abandoned after the Second Pandemic War.
Awesome!
‘Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.’ –
Thomas Sowell
I doubt he’s ignorant. He’s getting away with talking shit and being listened to. Why would he stop?
Bring it on. Lockdowns and boosters forever. People need to have their noses rubbed in it to understand they’ve been conned. A general lockdown will help us. The nightmare scenario is vaccine passports everywhere. I think they are sadly too smart to close stuff again. The smart play is to demonise the unvaxxed.
Axiom: ‘In order to advance a communist ideological belief system, the rulers must *pretend* not to know things’.
Individually, in groups, or in the systems they construct, that axiom has always been true.
Not sure if that’s confined to just communism, probably applies to any belief system based on lies. But it’s very true. They know what they are doing.
Indeed – what we are seeing is fascism rather than communism.
It’s anti-democratic totalitarianism – which is sui generis, and can emerge from behind a range of fronts, be they communist, fascist, nationalist or vaguely populist or paternalistic. In this case, and in this country it’s actually Toryism that is the operative front.
Oh God, you’re still spouting this crap.
The only opposition – feeble, I admit – to this tyranny in the HOC has come from Torys.
Did Mussolini support the replacement of the indigenous Italian population with Third Worlders?
Did he want to close down cafes, cinemas, local shops, theatres and restaurants?
This is ‘communism’ the same way that Ferguson’s models are accurate predictions.
Looking at the gov stats, I see that “cases” have dropped significantly in Scotland where the kids went back to school a couple of weeks before England. Thus I confidently predict that they will drop here too, especially given the impact of half term.
“we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic”, and we also have some of the highest levels of asymptomatic testing we have almost ever had.
Italian news blackout is almost complete, they are still marching though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx8Th581wJI
Watching the news nowadays is like watching Punch and Judy. Everyone has the internet, so it’s easy to see what’s going on. And easy to see the readers have a hand stuck up their arse.
In the old days the news told you what actually happened and you had to work out what to think of it.
Now the news tells you what you should think and you have to work out what actually happened.
That doesn’t say much for the vaccines, does it.