In a recent viral tweet, the new German Health Minister, Professor Karl Lauterbach, shared what seems like an alarming graph:
It shows daily Covid hospital admissions in England for all children (i.e., those aged under 18) since the start of the pandemic. Lauterbach wrote:
The UK data shows alarming levels in children. Since Omicron can be warded off well by masks, mask requirements in school and regular testing are absolutely necessary.
Incidentally, the graph itself was produced by Independent SAGE – the group that’s like SAGE, only more pessimistic about Covid and more in favour of restrictions (and not an official Government advisory body).
So, what should we make of Lauterbach’s tweet? One of the stylised facts of the pandemic is that Covid poses almost no risk to children. Has this ceased to be true in the era of Omicron? No, fortunately it has not.
One reason that Covid hospital admissions for children shot up in late December is simple: infections shot up at around the same time (in the first week of January, more than 6% of the population tested positive). And when more people in the general population are infected, the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid will rise.
Under simple assumptions, if the percentage of the population that’s infected jumps from 1% to 6%, then so should the fraction of people admitted to hospital with Covid.
Another possible reason Covid hospital admissions for children shot up – suggested by Professor Russell Viner of UCL – is that Omicron has a greater impact in the upper airways, which are smaller in young children. And as others have noted, this feature also makes Omicron less deadly.
Yet another reason, notes the FT, is the introduction of treatment guidelines requiring babies who develop fever to be put under hospital observation.
Indeed, a new study from the U.S. confirms that Omicron is less deadly than Delta – even in young children. Lindsey Wang and colleagues compared two cohorts of under 5s: those who caught Covid for the first time during the Delta wave, and those who caught it for the first time during the Omicron wave.
The two cohorts were matched on a large number of relevant variables including age, sex, race and pre-existing health conditions. Results are shown below:
For all four outcome variables considered, the risk was significantly lower among those who caught Omicron. To take one example, only 0.14% of the Omicron cohort were admitted to the ICU, compared to 0.43% of the Delta cohort.
What’s more, as this graph from the FT shows, the recent uptick in paediatric hospital admissions for Covid isn’t large relative to seasonal peaks for other child respiratory viruses:
Returning to the German Health Minister’s tweet, the totality of evidence does not suggest that “mask requirements in school and regular testing are absolutely necessary”. In fact, I’d describe them as ‘absolutely unnecessary’.
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My default position nowadays for any political pronouncements is to assume “they’re lying.” I no longer believe a word any of them are saying. This article more than reinforces my opinion. Labour are lying as usual and seem to be working on the Goebbel’s maxim of telling a big lie, repeat it continuously and eventually the people will believe it.
This Nut Zero travesty will surely provide Labour with their best ever chance to finally succeed at that which they are best at – running the country in to the ground. Significantly this will be the last government they ever form.
Indeed
As I write this, 21.7% of our electricity needs are being supplied by other countries, half of that by France
When the sun goes down, the contribution from solar will obviously disappear. At this moment our capacity from wind is far from being 100% utilised – presumably because the wrong kind of wind is blowing or not enough of it. Installing more bird choppers does not help if the wind is not blowing.
They must know this so the whole plan is malevolent and not a cockup.
Yes, 100%. Anyone who doesn’t have trust issues with anybody in authority, not even just the perma-corrupt politicians, is gullible in the extreme, in my opinion. There’s always an agenda, there’s always an ulterior motive, there’s always something they’re withholding from us. Sounds like paranoia but there it is, it’s how I roll now.
A 4min montage demonstrating the failures of these hated, ugly, destructive wind turbines, including a brief glimpse of the tragic effects on the poor birds;
https://x.com/TheMilkBarTV/status/1795113082907226397
If a cat kills a sparrow then all cats should be destroyed, but if wind turbines virtually wipe out the Red Kite, like what has happened in Germany then we should build even more of them.
Thanks for the link Mogs
Putting Government in charge of energy is like having wolves tending sheep. But actually the most powerful force today regarding energy is not this government or the next one. It is the “Climate Change Commitee”. It is they who run the show. It is they who have decided what your standard of living is to be moving forward, and since energy is the most important commodity for our prosperity and well being and the CCC have decided our energy use is to be strictly rationed then there can only be one outcome. ——Lower Living Standard. The use of coal oil and gas is what has given us the standard of living we currently enjoy. It is the standard of living that the developing world hopes to have and is why China and India continue using coal to bring their populations out of abject misery and poverty. By removing fossil fuels we reverse our standard of living. The countries with the highest energy prices are the UK, Germany and Denmark. —Why? because they have the most wind turbines. Any government that wants to expand the use of wind will only cause prices to increase. The idea we will have cheaper energy bills by using more renewables comes from the mouths of LIARS.
The odious CCC was covered here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/disband-the-climate-change-committee
Thans for that. Read it and saved it.
Quite apart from Labours usual fantasy orgasm non-policies I read recently that the average number of days without sun and / or wind is 110. That is 3 months of the year in the UK where anything relying on wind or sun cannot function. To put it bluntly that is 3 months with no light and no heat. Even if you have a gas boiler, how do you light it and drive the pump without electricity?
I didn’t read beyond the second mention of 3023
Only 9 comments. ————I am very surprised. There is no more important issue than energy for prosperity, health, life span and everything else that relates to our well being.
You are right, but I already feel defeated. If those in power decide to shut off the gas mains and stop petrol & diesel reaching the pumps there is nothing I can do to get them back.
And that is exactly what they will do …. but over a period of time, so that they don’t completely crash the economy or cause riots. It’s the classic “boiling frog” process.
The best thing we can all do is slow down the process by refusing to co-operate. Don’t buy an EV; don’t get a heat pump. Resist having a Smart Meter as long as possible. If you can, get an alternative heat source to gas and electricity.
So you vote for those that will stop Net Zero and currently the only party saying they will do that is REFORM. —–Not so easy if they were government to say it though as the entire Liberal Progressive machine of the western world would be down on them like a ton of bricks. No make that 50 tons of bricks.
Socialist Labour modus operandi when it comes to State run disasters, is keep the end-user price low by taxing them to subsidise the lower price.
The people have been falling for that one since 1945. Don’t forget when you use the NHS it is free – you don’t pay anything. State education similarly is free.
In the days of State owned gas, electric, coal, rail none of these made a profit – or surplus if you prefer – out of revenues, but prices were kept down.
In the case of energy, after it was privatised in the 80’s prices were still low and competitive. It was only after the Climate Change Act in 2008 (Miliband) that prices started to rise because wind is an expensive way to produce electricity, and also because the turbines were being paid for out of our bills. It isn’t privatisation that has cause high prices, it is government interfering in the energy market with pretend to save the planet policies.