There follows a guest post by our in-house doctor, a former senior NHS medic, who says the latest ‘perfect storm’ causing pressure on the health service in parts of the country is more a self-induced squall.
In the middle of last week, several NHS Trusts issued warnings about the acute strain their services were under. The South Central Ambulance Service went so far as to declare a critical incident – normally reserved for a situation in which demands on the service exceed the capacity to manage those demands. I was surprised that so many NHS bodies spread over a wide geographical area issued public warnings about their failure to cope at the same time. Statements referred to high demand on services (hardly news) and lacked any specific detail about critical capacity constraints. Accordingly, the Daily Sceptic asked me to interrogate the available data to work out the extent to which a Covid resurgence might be responsible for the latest ‘perfect storm’ to hit the NHS.
Graph 1 shows daily admissions of Covid positive patients from the community. Admissions have risen in the last few weeks, but seem to be tailing off. Data from Graph 1 have been the subject of hysterical articles in the mainstream press implying the latest Omicron BA.2 subvariant may be triggering a new wave of acute Covid infections. It’s not sensible to interpret Graph 1 as a stand-alone figure without considering contextual information from other datasets.
Graph 2 for example shows information from the Primary Diagnosis dataset. Regular readers will recall this set shows the numbers of patients admitted suffering from acute Covid compared to the patients testing positive for Covid but admitted for another condition. The grey line shows the ratio is gradually falling – in other words the headline figures in Graph 1 are misleading, because nearly 60% of those patients are not actually ill with Covid but admitted for other reasons.
Graph 3 shows the numbers of patients testing positive for Covid in intensive care departments. The rise in cases seen in Graph 1 since the beginning of March 2022 is absent – so although there are more hospital inpatients testing positive for Covid than at the end of February, they are not ending up in critical care. Further, the data from the most recent ICNARC report reveal that the latest tranche of Covid ICU patients have lower oxygen requirements and better respiratory ratios than the cohort from this time last year – in other words, they are not as acutely ill.
Graph 4 is very instructive. It shows the average length of stays of Covid patients up to the end of December 2021. This data was released in March and unfortunately is only complete up to the end of 2021, but it is reasonable to infer that current length of stay is unlikely to be worse now than in December of 2021, due to increased availability of new monoclonal antibody drugs which reduce disease severity for the highest risk patients. Graph 4 expresses average length of stay as the mean average (blue bars) and the median average (orange bars). Both these averages are steadily reducing with the median length of stay being down to four days by the end of December 2021. For the information of statistically curious readers, the median average in this case is probably more representative of the situation as the mean average can easily be skewed to the upside by a small number of very long-stay patients.
Overall, from the available Covid-specific patient data, we see a rise in total positive Covid tests on admission from the community, but fewer than half of these patients are symptomatic for Covid. Very few patients are ill enough to need ICU care and the length of stay for acutely ill Covid patients continues to fall. The vast majority require a few days of supplementary oxygen, intravenous steroids and monoclonal antibody infusion (or other adjunctive therapies) before being fit to discharge. So where is the problem?
Last week Saffron Cordery, deputy CEO of NHS providers, commented that staff absences played a part in the current crisis. Graph 5 shows the data for Covid related staff absences up to March 2nd (the latest figures released) – they don’t seem to have changed much lately and were on a downward trend since the turn of the year. It’s possible they may have started to increase again, but the figures are not yet released for public scrutiny.
My personal suspicion is that Graph 6 shows the main issue causing trouble in hospitals. Graph 6 shows the number of patients in hospitals deemed medically fit for discharge. It is shown as a stacked bar chart, so the blue bar represents the patients who actually were discharged and the orange bar shows patients who were fit for discharge but had to remain in hospital for administrative reasons (often referred to as ‘bed blocking’). Readers will readily notice the ‘weekend effect’ in the figures, and that about 11,000 patients per day are in hospital when they are fit to be discharged – about 10% of the total NHS bed stock.
Over two years into the pandemic, the NHS does not yet seem to have solved fundamental administrative problems in relation to patient flow through the system. I am also aware from personal communication with colleagues that most NHS trusts are still imposing unnecessary Covid protocols which add to the time taken to complete basic episodes of care such as routine operations. This reduces efficiency still further in a healthcare system not renowned for operational efficiency in the first place.
Speaking about the latest crisis, Mark Ainsworth, Director of Operations at the South Central Ambulance Service, said declaring a critical incident meant it could focus its resources on the neediest patients.
Discharging medically fit patients from hospital and exercising a modicum of common sense when compiling Standard Operating procedures might achieve the same effect.
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Climate change is not science, at least in the case of miasma or aether theory these ppl were not malevolent. Those were reasonable attempts to describe complex problems. Climate change on the other hand is merely propaganda from the Geobells school, ie repeat a lie over and over till ppl believe it and suppress all dissent. This lie is then used to regulate every aspect of our lives. I’m sorry to say we have woken up from a slumber and live in what is fundamentally a vicious socialist dictatorship.
A superb article.
Just because we live in the modern world and that as such science has progressed especially with the aid, lol, of computers (can we really “see” a virus for example) there is a tendency to assume that is what is known now is definitively correct. Aka known as arrogance.
Should be compulsory reading, especially for those ostensibly in charge.
A further illustration is that of the fight between the contagionists and the anticontagionists re the spread of disease.. This fight has been going on for hundreds of years and is still far from settled – what actually causes illness, lockdowns work/don’t work, – masks, distancing etc.
The real problem is that matters medical and climate have been captured by politics and as such the unthinking public is too easily fed a narrative by the complicit MSM.
They censor and dictate what is true and not true – to the detriment of us all.
We don’t have science any more when issues are highly politicised. We have Post Normal Science. Not the same thing at all.
Scientism or the religion of science for power, money, control. A 200 year old project. Saint Simon, Comte et al and their Churches of ‘Science’. Irrational, deranged.
Evolution, the Big Bang – all junk as well but of course studiously left out of said article. Shrew to you. Whatever. Theories with so many Gods of the Gaps and hopeful monsters, including abiogenesis, they make Al Gore look intelligent.
But we don’t try to control the worlds wealth and resources using evolution or big bang theories. —–No one cares if they are true. I won’t have to rip out my gas central heating and spend 20 grand on a heat pump based on what someone tells me is true about black holes or evolution. Climate Change and the phony policies to fight it on the other hand will directly me and everyone else.
Exactly I feel many conspiracy theories are actually invented by the state, exhibit A would the flying saucer stuff which just happened to coincide with secretive testing near military baes. We need to worry where science is abused to control us. The actual truth of evolution, quantum mechanics etc is totally unimportant.
Scientific consensus gives me an ulcer
Read up about how stomach ulcers were improperly treated for decades to enrich big pharma.
Good peice
If science is ever ‘settled’ then it’s not science!
Nicely pitched. Could be room for a paragraph on cancellation of dissent: Alimonti, Pascal Richet, Judith Curry et al. Money hates heresy.
Through out science the consensus has often been wrong. Look at Black Holes, and plate tectonics etc etc. It should really be based on evidence, and not opinion or what somebody feels is right. Unfortunately how you do this is a bit more slippery than you might wish for. Complex systems like the human body, you have to take a risk type of approach, as there are so many complex cofounding factors. It is perfectly possible for somebody to smoke 10 a day, and live to 90, whereas somebody who doesn’t can die young due to other factors, including bad luck. Hence, things like RCTs, where you can do them for ethical reasons (for smoking you can’t). Unfortunately various things can corrupt the process, whether it is political, people’s reputation, money, power, and that often it is very difficult emotionally for somebody to admit they are wrong, and it is also difficult to go againt the consensus.
Oh yes, and if somebody states a scientific ‘fact’, it is always worth asking- “how do you know that?”. Nothing like getting back to the basics to clarify the mind, plus it makes science interesting (if you can past the jargonese).
“Settled Science” is really just “Official Science”. ——-It is the last refuge of scoundrels using “science” to bludgeon us all into accepting what officialdom want to be true and knowing that if we think it is all about “science” we are mostly not likely to question it. After all, if all scientists agree then who are we to disagree? Except all scientists do NOT agree and never did. So is this what science has become? Just another government department?———But what many don’t realise is that most of this climate change stuff isn’t actually science at all. It is modelling. It is speculations assumptions and guesses chucked into a model. But models are NOT science, and they are NOT evidence of anything. Climate Change is a pseudo scientific fraud, and it is all funded by government. —–If it were funded by the fossil fuel industry there would be spitting fury that they were using the science to support their agenda, but what makes people think government have no agenda? ———Ofcourse they do. It is called Sustainable Development. But I will leave that for another day.
Has Soviet Self Censorship come to Britain?
Fat Pig News Investigates!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIO3fJpnXLE
Donald Rumsfeld summed it all up with
Oh, that’s a good one
His usage in the context of the Iraq war and WMDs sadly tainted a very useful concept (or model) known as the JoHari window (after Joe and Harry). I’m looking forward to the time when Kamala Harris resurrects it and incorporates it into one of her legendary enlightening and erudite monologues. Perhaps she already has.
Its regular use in other contexts might just let the light in for.
“GIGO axiom – garbage in, garbage out.” Especially when the ‘model’ the garbage is being fed into is also garbage.
The problem was in thinking that ‘science’ was a destination rather than a continuous journey. The same could be applied to religion. It’s when these disciplines/beliefs become entrenched and dogmatic that problems arrive. Scientists should know this. So should those funding scientists and the media. In fact, anyone who has one iota of intelligence and the ability to think clearly and critically should too. The fact that all these ‘clever dicks’ say that the science is settled is massive piece of gaslighting. They are lying to us on such an enormous scale that they must think that most of humanity is largely ignorant. Sadly I think it is.
Of course science is never settled in the sense that it is always possible that it might be overturned. I don’t think any serious scientist would disagree with this and to attack it is to attack a straw man.
However science can be more or less certain, you could phrase that as more less settled. And we have to make decisions based on current science even though there is always some uncertainty. I am sure that when Doctor Banji was practicing there were some elements of medicine which he assumed to be true and on the basis of that made his diagnosis and treatment – for example I have no doubt that he considered it settled science that there are red and white blood cells and that white blood cells have a key role in inflammatory response. I am sure he is right. That’s not the point. The point is that it is settled science. Settled in the sense that he is sufficiently sure of it that he will base his treatment on it.
In the same way the main assertions of climate science might be rejected at some time in the future. It is always possible. However, we have to make decisions now. This is further confused by mixing up the many different assertions that are involved in climate science. Some of these are more settled than others. It is for example very settled that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 30% since about 1850 and this is the result of human activity. It is also very settled that the increased presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will raise global temperatures to some extent. What is less settled, and this is a matter of degree, is how big will that increase be given further increases in greenhouse gases, and what will be the consequences.
There is no such thing as “more or less certain”. You’re either certain or you’re not certain. If you’re certain, you have no rational doubt. If you’re uncertain, you have some rational doubt.
You can be more or less confident that something is true, but you cannot be “more or less certain”.
In the same way, there is no such thing as “assertions“ which are more or less settled. If they are “less settled”, they are not settled. If they are settled, there is no point in describing them as “very settled”. They’re either settled or not settled.
Very little is settled and very little is certain. Science is full of assumptions, and medical treatments can work or appear to work for reasons which are not the reasons they are believed to work.
“More certain” and “less certain” are common figures of speech but I won’t argue over definitions. The fact is some science is extremely well established – whatever you word you want to use and some science less so, and there is a gradient from one to the other. Sure you can see that?
Yes, I can see that. We can be very confident that some things are true, without being certain, and we can have less confidence that other things are true but still believe they are true.
And?
Spending trillions reorganising the global economy based almost entirely on the output from dodgy climate models that don’t include many of the parameters because (a) they are poorly understood or (b) because they are unknown is NOT science. Real world observations do not indicate a climate emergency. The fact that models full of assumptions might suggest a crisis is irrelevant. But it is the models that governments base policy on.————-Oh how convenient. A Political body called the IPCC with a clear remit to look for everything in the climate that might be caused by humans but with zero interest in what the natural climate might be doing is POLITICS not SCIENCE. The politics of Sustainable Development. Pseudo science not science
My point is that it is pointless arguing about whether some scientific assertion is settled or not. The key thing is whether we have sufficient confidence in the assertion to act on it given the circumstances.
(I would add that contrary to the headline of the article there is some science that is “settled” in the sense that you would have to be an absolute nutter to think it will ever be overturned. For example, that the earth orbits the sun or Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood).
The headline is not suggesting that nothing in science is “settled”, but that a lot of what we are told is “settled” is not “settled” at all, such as climate change, Coronavirus, the safety of vaccines, the effectiveness of vaccines, etc.
The problem is that too many scientists and the media reporting on science do not acknowledge that an awful lot of scientific findings are based on assumptions which may or may not be true, and therefore their findings may or may not be true.
Occasionally, there is some honesty, but it quickly gets forgotten about and ignored:
According to this BBC News article in 2017:
“Most scientists ‘can’t replicate studies by their peers'”
and then within 4 years the BBC wasn’t allowing anyone to even question Big Pharma’s claims with their obvious massive conflicts of interest!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39054778
Similarly, according to Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, in 2015:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext
And there was this:
“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”
– John P. A. Ioannidis
Published in Public Library of Science Medicine, 2005.
“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7686290_Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False
So it may be true, as you say, that “it is pointless arguing about whether some scientific assertion is settled or not’, but not for the reason you are suggesting, but because it gets ignored!
The headline is not suggesting that nothing in science is “settled”
Maybe not the headline but the author finishes with:
These few examples lead to the inescapable conclusion that there is no such thing as ‘Settled Science’.
Do you agree?
I agree in the sense that the author meant, and apparently you agree too:
“Of course science is never settled in the sense that it is always possible that it might be overturned.“
The author is not suggesting that there are no proven facts. He didn’t say there is no such thing as settled science. Instead he put “Settled Science” in inverted commas and he capitalised both words.
The author isn’t criticising those who claim there are provable facts, he is criticising the attitude and idea of “Settled Science” which shuts down debate and isn’t actually science.
If it were only science we were talking about then you might have an argument. But predictions as to the future of climate are based mostly on models not science. I recall one of the well known “scientists” from NASA saying exactly that. He said “we don’t base predictions on the data, we base it on the models”——–But here is the problem. Models are NOT science, and they are not evidence of anything.
Here is a nice piece on the role of models in science:
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/575-scientific-modelling
While I don’t personally think it can….It actually doesn’t surprise me at all that many people believe science can be settled.. in fact in this time of oppressive Global/Government/MSM agenda driven consensus, I’d say it was a natural conclusion….
It seems to me that we live in a world where we are constantly, told, pushed and nudged into believing that there’s a ‘right way’ to think about everything……pick any subject…
Everyone is encouraged to believe there is a single truth…and it only comes from them, (just like Jacinda told us)…..and of course, you are the Anti-vaxxer, Putin Troll, Trans hater, anti semite, climate boiling facilitator….etc etc ….if you dare to even question….
Why would we think that science is the one subject where people, who are ably assisted and led into every other ‘settled opinion’…would suddenly become sceptical and apply some critical thinking about science?
As a matter of interest how many people think that it is not settled that the earth orbits the sun?