I’ve written a piece for Mail+ praising Boris for deciding not to impose further restrictions at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. This could be a turning point, I argue.
It was the first time a decision about whether to lock down had been made based on real-world data, as opposed to the gloomy predictions of the Sage modellers.
Last week, the UK Health Security Agency – the successor agency to Public Health England – said the number of new daily Covid infections from the Omicron variant had reached 200,000 a day. These figures just hadn’t shown up yet in the Government’s coronavirus dashboard because of reporting delays.
In fact, that number was an estimate based on Sage modelling which, as usual, turned out to be overly pessimistic. In the past seven days, the number of daily Covid cases by specimen date peaked at 102,297 on December 15th, and yesterday, the number of newly reported cases was 91,743. Meanwhile, the UKHSA has quietly withdrawn the 200,000 figure.
We cannot say for certain that daily cases won’t tick up again over Christmas, which is why Boris Johnson has been careful not to rule out any further restrictions. But the data from Gauteng province in South Africa, the centre of the Omicron outbreak, shows cases falling sharply in the past week. That suggests the new variant burns out quite quickly as it runs out of new people to infect.
On Sunday, this prompted South Africa’s ministerial advisory committee on Covid, which is similar to Sage, to recommend that the quarantining of contacts and all contact tracing be halted with immediate effect.
One of the reasons our Government’s scientific advisers have been so gloomy is because the Sage modelling teams have assumed that Omicron is as deadly as the Delta variant, but the data from other countries, including South Africa, implies it’s less likely to result in severe disease or death.
For instance, new data from Denmark suggest Omicron is 60 per cent less likely to result in hospital admission than infections from previous variants.
That might explain why Covid hospitalisations have not been significantly increasing in the UK, in spite of the rise in case numbers, and why they’re falling in South Africa.
Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty have warned of 3,000 new hospital admissions a day if further restrictions aren’t introduced – a figure Sajid Javid quoted in yesterday’s Cabinet meeting when arguing for more severe measures. But on Saturday, just 900 people were admitted to hospital with Covid, not much higher than the 865 daily average for the previous seven days.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Boris has confirmed that no new Covid restrictions will be brought in before Christmas, although he hasn’t ruled out some changes to the rules immediately after Christmas. BBC News has more.
In a video clip released on Tuesday, Mr Johnson said: “What I can say tonight, is that naturally we can’t rule out any further measures after Christmas – and we’re going to keep a constant eye on the data, and we’ll do whatever it takes to protect public health.
But in view of the continuing uncertainty about several things – the severity of Omicron, uncertainty about the hospitalisation rate or the impact of the vaccine rollout or the boosters, we don’t think today that there is enough evidence to justify any tougher measures before Christmas.
We continue to monitor Omicron very closely and if the situation deteriorates we will be ready to take action if needed.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 2: Philip Thomas, a Professor at Bristol University, writes in the Daily Mail his Covid model has consistently got it right and it’s telling him there’s no need for another lockdown.
Stop Press 3: Andrew Lilico in the Telegraph says we should be able to get through the Omicron outbreak without any further restrictions.
Discussion
Comments
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I know you weren’t that good at maths but dude you not do the basics in classics either?
Even my 9yo knows that Cassandra was always right and just people couldn’t hear her warnings, only remembering them when they came true.
I fear you are bringing the horse into the city.
Next time you try to sound educated learn what the analogy means.
SAGE projections (guesswork to you & me) only out by a factor of two?! Good going, the average is ten times out and Ferguson often out by a factor of forty!
I know government would like a magic crystal ball but, sorry to disappoint, they don’t exist.
Toby, you’re a fool if you think Boris made his decision not to add further restrictions by basing it on real world data. There is only one reason for his inaction and that is that he was politically unable to do anything. He was facing a revolt in Cabinet and an even greater revolt in his party. He was champing at the bit to lock us down. You can see it in his demeanour of frustration.
How can I get my world-beating home anti-viral? I wouldn’t want to have to go to hospital, and increase my viral load.
If only the UK had followed Brazil – we’d all be so much better off!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-58976197
https://www.r-ccs.riken.jp/en/fugaku/research/covid-19/msg-en/
I won’t hold my breath.
Long before Omicron came on the scene, the government was advertising huge long-term contracts for Covid advertising, development of digital health passes, placing orders for huge numbers of Covid vaccines, even the NHS website was giving advice to businesses on use of its digital pass.
It seems naive to believe that the current postponement of restrictions is anything more than that, it’s all coming in straight after Christmas and probably for months afterwards. Don’t praise Boris Johnson, he’s clearly part of it.
No …. he fears the next rebellion will be larger than 100 Tory MPs, and a subsequent Leadership challenge. That’s all.
Every time I hear the name Whitty,
I think of Billy Hunt’s ditty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpCxpmegbnE
Here’s an interesting sum. The govt has so far spent £400bn (and counting) on covid measures. Using the NICE Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) (the Nice definition can be found here https://www.nice.org.uk/glossary?letter=q) tariff of £30k for the cost benefit of any intervention then the interventions should be shown to have saved 13.3m years of life to break even. Let’s say you take Imperial’s garbage model, Report 9 you’ll recall predicted 500,000 deaths, then net off the official covid death toll of c145,000, that’s 355,000 lives “saved”. If the average age of a covid death is 82.4 (which it is and that’s above average life expectancy in the UK) then each one of those lives saved must be extended by 37.5 years of perfect health, taking each one of those 355,000 people to a ripe off 119! I didn’t need a model to do that btw.
Does anyone know what the percentage of unvaccinated actually is in NHS critical care?
About 3 weeks ago I was talking to a friend who’s relatively senior within a voluntary NGO who informed me that they have been requested to get volunteers for mass testing on 4th Jan. Apparently there is concern that school children wont of been tested during the holidays and need to be tested (for a cold) before returning. The cynic in me would say they want to get those positive numbers up so they can “justify” another lockdown.
No, he hasn’t. More likely he is shitting himself about being brought down by his own MPs.
They test for the flu since they’ve never isolated Covid-19. Which makes me wonder how they can tell there is a delta variant. They never isolated the virus but they use a test to show the damage of a solution does on monkey kidney cells then show the cellular debris as proof of the virus. So, they can use this method to claim an UNENDING! amount of variants. A lot of cancers and “viruses” are probably just different forms of parasites. Since the tests can’t differentiate between cold and flu and covid then doesn’t that mean ivermectin cures both the cold and the flu? Welcome to “they’ve been lying to us our entire lives about everything”. Get your Ivermectin while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
Wished I’d had looked at Wikipedia before now (see quote below). Whitty advocated support centres in Sierre Leone that people suspected of having ebola could isolate. Ebola kills 1 in 2 (50% mortality)!!!! Very interesting comparison to his proposals to a disease with an IFR of 0.15%. I’ve got to dig out this paper and read more – but look who his co-authors are: Prof Lockdown and Sir Jeremy Farrer (author of Spiked a self-serving and hubristic book about how if we’d only listened to him the world would be saved) who then resigned because from Sage because he wasn’t getting entirely his own way.
“He led the Research and Evidence Division, which worked on health, agriculture, climate change, energy, infrastructure, economic and governance research. During this time, with co-authors Neil Ferguson and Jeremy Farrar, he wrote an article in Nature titled “Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission”,[16] explaining the UK government’s response to Ebola in support of the government of Sierra Leone, which he took a leading role in designing, including the proposal to build and support centres where people could self-isolate voluntarily if they suspected that they could have the disease”
Cassandra was blessed with foresight but cursed with the fact that nobody believed her. SAGE isn’t blessed with foresight but nobody believes them.
I keep thinking of the irony that they call themselves SAGE.
The owl from The Herbs should sue. He had class.
“I’m a rather fat feathery owl called sage, I’m not at all happy in fact in a rage, it’s bad enough having ones home all upset, but to make matters worse all my feathers are wet.“
Yup, the most inappropriately named committee in history.
Why can’t we have someone with cojones like this as our leader instead of an emasculated fat pig dictator?
Ron DeSantis: Floridians know there will be no lockdowns
https://youtu.be/3XF5F2XrHHw
He also quotes data from South Africa that indicates Moronic is mild, and points out that most people in the “early treatment” centres they have set up in Florida are fully vaccinated.
Yes, it’s a crying shame that he isn’t this side of the pond. Our politicians are minnows compared to this guy.
Britain has been turned into a giant early 20th century public school run by sadistic prefects who, on the pretence of upholding a set of very loosely defined and arbitrarily interpreted rules, abuse their underlings to extract obedience and submission from them.
Oh thank you Head Boy Johnson for sparing us a beating before Christmas, but don’t worry, we are sufficiently cowed and intimidated and we know that you might whip your cane out after Christmas and administer the beating that we always had coming to us because we didn’t reach the number of boosters which is in your head and which of course you need bother sharing with us.
Sorry Boris, in the words of the hospitality sector….it’s too little, too late.
You’ve made your bed in prison already and most of us have our fingers crossed that you, Witless and Vanity are sharing a cell within the next year.
It is no exaggeration to state that you three are amongst the most serious criminals to ever walk the earth.
If you want to be the greatest, like Churchill, you’ve succeeded….you are the greatest evil tyrant….congrats. Merry Christmas.
No, Toby Young, he has done what he thought would be popular at this millisecond.
Stop live the idiot has any beliefs
To some degree I think that focusing on new restrictions is a bit irrelevant. The government have got what they wanted, which is backing for ‘Vaccine Passports, this is the end game,
Sure, but the theatrical spectacle needs to continue, to justify the passports.
Yes, sadly you are right!
It’s time to go on the offensive. These creeps have had it all their own way these past two years. Well guess what? Significant numbers of the British people are still standing and ready to return the favour.
They are. But a bovine herd is blocking all progress.
What more can we do?
Robust non-compliance. Targeted de-selection of Globalist endorsed MP’s. Creation and membership of friendly, common law and natural law-based societies. Becoming as independent from the State as possible. Voting out the big three parties, etc., etc.
Basically, starting again. A Greater Reset.
This will take time, patience and resolve. I’m in!
This is all lovely, but all you actually need to do is get someone young, famous and probably been on reality TV to start a #Newyearrevolution
That would take off I reckon.
Maybe, but the Marmite Man aka Nigel Farage is key. Like it or not, only he has the the stature to being this shitshow down via the political route.
It would be great if we could believe the covert strategy was to keep Xmas safe, play for time and hope the peak will have passed by then, and then gleefully state “no point locking down now, the peak has passed; and this proves that cases mean nothing: although they have shot up, deaths and hospitalisations haven’t, the plandemic is over.” If only. If only.
I’m not holding my breath. They know that a lockdown before this Christmas (unlike last year) is political suicide; their hesitation has proved this. Even though they’re trying to memory-hole the protests out of existence, they saw the numbers at the weekend. If they really believed omicron was a danger, I think they would have announced lockdown by now. He could yet u-turn, as he has proved countless times. Resignation by Boris isn’t a cause for celebration – they’ll pick his replacement carefully, and it may well be that his resignation (or ousting) is the contingency plan. People will be so glad he’s gone they won’t notice lockdown, just like we were supposed to rejoice Hancock and Cummings’s departures.
“If they really believed omicron was a danger” I don’t think they’ve ever believed covid in any form was much of a danger, except possibly at the very beginning, and then not for long.
Yet the frauds propagandised that it was a black death.
Not even for a second.. its been a fraud from the beginning..
Of course it has, but at least some people other than those on this site are beginning to to realise that. If you have time just check out the best rated comments on recent articles on Covid in the DM and DT. They are almost universally scathing as concerns our government’s reaction to Covid. Times have changed!
Yes, but Omicron could be the universal ‘vaccination’ at no profit to big Pharma. That’s why they want to stop it’s spread.
Comparing the SAGEs to Cassandra of Troy is seriously inaccurate. She was a real soothsayer cursed by the gods such that people would never believe her, including her prediction of the ultimate fall of Troy, despite her visions always turned out to be true.
SAGE, in contrast, has the reverse curse: People always believe them despite their predictions are always wrong.
It’s all fear based mind control. Turning this way, then that, then back again. It’s time to stop whinging about these nutcases and just make plans to turf them out. I’ve had more than enough of the whole of lot of them.
Time for a clear out and start again. They really are not worthy…
No need to start again.. government is not needed.. its an expensive folly..
I have thought of that as well…
Oh Toby you are so naive – it’s almost touching.
Incidentally, why aren’t the scientists crying out to jab all the cats – we know they carry this awful disease. Be on the safe side and do the dogs and the birds as well. And maybe then thechedgehogs and the earthworms. If it moves jab it!
And keep jabbing it until it stops moving.
No…. They’ll be back with more scaremongering on Boxing Day. Especially as Scotland have copied wales and inevitably England will follow. We will never be free from this either until we all say no or a stronger PM comes in and sacks the brothers Grimm!
Please don’t liken Ferguson & co. to Cassandra – she always spoke the truth, but was cursed never to be believed. They lie and are always believed.