In a recent viral tweet, Vincent Rajkumar – a professor at the Mayo Clinic – said the following:
South Korea followed the textbook principles of epidemiology. Kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated. This is success.
His tweet was accompanied by a chart showing the cumulative Covid death rate in the U.S., U.K. and Korea, with the line for Korea being much lower than the other two. In a follow-up tweet, Rajkumar identified the measures that supposedly account for Korea’s success, basically masks and contact tracing.
The implication is that if only the U.S. and U.K. had “followed the textbook principles of epidemiology” like Korea, they too could have achieved very low Covid death rates. But I’m not convinced.
First, there’s one small technical detail, which is that the U.K. did try both masks and contact tracing, and neither had much impact on the epidemic’s trajectory.
A recent report by the Public Accounts Committee concluded that Test and Trace (the U.K.’s contact tracing scheme) had “not achieved its main objective”, despite an “eye watering” budget. £37 billion here, £37 billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money…
So far so bad for idea that all we needed was masks and contact tracing. But there’s another reason to doubt the implication of Rajkumar’s tweet: Japan achieved exactly the same outcomes as Korea, and it did almost nothing until the start of this year.
In 2020, Japan had zero days of mandatory business closures and zero days of mandatory stay-at-home orders. The country relied on “limited contact tracing” (a designation given in the Oxford Blavatnik School’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker). This is in contrast to Korea, which used “comprehensive contact tracing”.
The chart below plots the stringency index for Japan, Korea and the U.K. Apart from a brief period at the start of 2020: the U.K.’s index has consistently been highest, while Japan’s has consistently been lowest.
In spite of this, both Japan and Korea have had zero excess mortality to date, whereas the U.K. – the most stringent of the three countries – has had between 6 and 20% excess mortality, depending on how you compute it.
The experience of Japan, combined with the global pattern of excess mortality, suggests that some cultural or biological factor that’s unique to East Asia explains the low death rates – and indeed the low infection rates – in that region. This factor could be more diligent social distancing or perhaps greater prior immunity.
Whatever the explanation, it’s unlikely Korea’s success could have been replicated in Britain – even if we’d ploughed the entire NHS budget into Test and Trace.
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“Democracy is the worst form of government………………………apart from all the rest”– Churchill. ———But ofcourse we put a cover over his statue now and a blanket over that democracy.
True varmit.. but Churchill wasn’t all that he was cracked up to be either.. he had his owners/controllers who pointed him in the
rightdirection he was required to go..Oh..look.. the Churchillians are out in force today. -6 red ones at the moment for Will L telling a few home truths about their hero. Get your heads out of your school history books and you might learn something instead of being led by the nose for the rest of your lives..
Incredible how people yearn for a saviour (past or present), isn’t it, Will?
I am a big fan of Maggie T, but I know she screwed up on several things. Just another flawed human being…
It sure is MAK.. the blind being led by the compromised and blackmailed..
Jeez.. its -14 now.. definite bullseye for Will.. ‘-)
I don’t have political hero’s mate. I gave a quote a politician (Churchill) made and you get yourself into a bit of a tizzy. So it isn’t really the case that I am pro Churchill is it? But it is certainly the case you are ANTI Churchill. ———-Bu are there any statues you wouldn’t put a blanket over? Maybe Mao or Corbyn or Stalin, or maybe Sturgeon or how about Gordon Brown or Tony (Iraq) Blair.
I’m in no tizzy and I’m not your mate.
Didn’t you note I started my post “True varmit” You obviously didn’t pick up on the nuance.
As for the rest of the unnecessary insulting tripe you’ve just thrown at me.. I’ll treat it with the contempt it deserves..
You also said the “Churchillians are out in force today”—–Indulge in your free speech if you want but don’t expect I won’t do the same “mate”. ————–I also have in my time quoted Hitler, Stalin, Thatcher Reagan, Eisenhower and a whole host of people. ——Quoting Stalin, does not make me a Stallininian.
Churchill quoting Aristotle actually.
You clearly do not understand US politics, laws, and their Constitution.
And the Conservative Party will quietly support this as their only means of survival while publicly expressing detailed concerns over timing, names and procedures.
Representative democracy only works when our elected “representatives” serve US.
That stopped with the ceaseless attempts to scupper Brexit by the House. Now Covid, and the slavish adherence of almost all MPs to the “Safe and effective” lie”, the hounding of Bridgen, coupled with the same worship of “Climate Change” shows clearly that whoever the House does represent, it is not we, the people.
Really, really DO NOT VOTE. You are voting for Davos, whoever is elected.
Yes.. Charmer Starmer even admitted he works for Davos on the BBC, and that parliament was just a talking shop. If that’s not in your face telling you how it is, I don’t know what is!
You mean you had to wait for Starmer to tell you what most of us already knew 30 years ago. —–Wakey wakey.
Democracy was always a sham, even more so when people are ‘comfortable’ and don’t feel threatened. Parliament and its occupants can pass whatever it wants with little hindrance.
I remember distinctly many years ago an old man (WW2 vet) telling me that you won’t see change until people don’t have food in their bellies. I was fifteen, he was about to retire. He also told me that by the time I was his age the country would be strangled by regulations. I thought he was just a miserable old sod.. what did he know after all..
He was right of course. Slow strangulation is the name of the game, but the pace and lies definitely quickened somewhat when Blair came to power. The slide downhill into the abyss and the populations ignorance of it go hand in hand.
Parliament should be the servant of the people, but relatively comfortable people like to be taken care of.. FATAL!
Indeed they should be, and paid by us via the Treasury. But in reality, it doesn’t look all that democratic. Back to basics via articles like this one: https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy
In recent times, Parliament gave up and let bureaucracy go mad, and get away with it in a panic, e.g. In the modern world, we are all influenced by organisations that are not governed by “democracy” to the extent that some would like us to believe.
Good article that.. thanks for posting.
Democracy is sovereignty of the individual with no Earthly power above them, being governed by a common law, shared morals, values, manners and the interdependence of its members that specialisation and division of labour brings.
Democracy essentially is the equal distribution of power to each individual in society, so none has more than the other, none can impose his will on another.
Democracy prevents concentration of power in the hands of one or a groups to stop tyranny.
Democracy therefore prevents Government – which is the concentration of power to one or a group and therefore tyranny – from forming. The will of the majority is a tyranny of the majority which is no better than a tyranny of one.
Democratic Government is oxymoronic.
Representative Government by its nature will inevitably be corrupt and will corrupt, and bribery will be its modus operandi.
Voting your sovereignty to others to hold power over you is voting for your enslavement.
So indeed DO NOT VOTE – it makes no difference anyway.
I agree entirely.. good post..
So, the Free are always running to Freedom… and running free.
Freedom.. what’s that? Didn’t Kris Kristofferson define it once as “nothing left to lose” in his Me and Bobby McGee song..
I will give you the 20 pence version of your ramble. ———“The best government is the government that governs the least”.
The left will destroy everything because of its conviction that nobody else should be permitted to govern.,
I think you need the past instead of the future tense in that sentence.
We have never had a Parliamentary democracy, not since 1689. GK Chesterton said it best, the House of Parliament is really the House of Lords. I would say it is the House of Tyranny and now the House of Pharma-ment. So now we have the House of Faceless Bureaucracy now usurping the House of Tyranny and Pharmament. Not a surprise.
These changes will just make it easier to impose the next LD and scamdemic. The former House of Tyranny (Pharmament) can simply blame the new House of Tyranny ($cientocracy).
Sadly, the Blairite era created a European-style political class – a technocratic one that considers itself a shepherd and ordinary citizens sheep. As herd animals, we can be penned up, quarantined and forced to have any medical injections they want us to and there’s no answering back: de-banking and unpersonning is easy in response. More than anything, individual agency is to be feared. They are absolutely the sort of people Ayn Rand wrote about as threatening our freedoms. This is Frankfurt School ideology reaching the conclusion of its century-long conquest of our institutions.
Ah yes.. the Frankfurt School and their ‘critical theory’. The destroyers of anything good/joyous and proud of it..
Parliamentary sovereignty?
May I refer you to the British Constitution dated 1215 and Bill of Rights 1689.
The people are sovereign, the King isn’t, Parliament isn’t.
Seriously?
What connection do elections have to democracy, given that the Mongol Horde was exemplary in this regard? No Mongol warrior of my acquaintance has ever thought he was thus living in a ‘democracy’.
What connection does an all-powerful, unaccountable body of professional liars have to do with being democratic? They’re frontmen for the Great Nobles they replaced, freeing them from any semblance of responsibility for the peasantry.
That’s beautiful. But our parliament disappeared during the covid panic and handed all the levers of power to a bunch of technocrats and bureaucrats.
I don’t know about Gordon Brown’s constitution, but I want a constitution that enshrines my fundamental right to freedom, and nothing else.
Without it I am at the mercy of a parliament that has proven itself not just incapable of protecting my rights but prepared to trample all over them or, in the case of the WHO treaty, likely to give them away to foreign technocrats and oligarchs.
The US Bill of Rights looks pretty good to me:
The Bill of Rights: A Transcription | National Archives
I am quite prepared to sign, but I will not give my phone number, and I don’t see why it is necessary to give full address details.
I gave my address but invented a phone number.
Blair/Brown started the process with their flawed devolution settlement. And the Not-a-Conservative-Government has done what about it? Precisely nothing.
They refuse to countenance any kind of Constitutional reform, so by default leave it to Labour to mangle whenever the sheeple are stupid enough to vote them into power.
And that’s what’s going to happen again because there is absolutely no point voting for the cowards, idiots and incompetents which make up the CON Party.
There had to be a reason why the Tories were repeatedly working towards their own destruction but to be honest I could not get my head round it, this supplies the answer.
Bliar and Brown with a sprinkling of Kneel – the treasonous triumvirate.
Why does a petition need my telephone number and full address. Name , email and postcode is all that is needed. Sorry won’t sign.