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From snake-oil to Big Pharma – and beyond. A documentary that helps one understand what may be going on behind the “pandemic”:
https://youtu.be/gOs8Cbo_KYk
I have some doubt about the simplistic claim it makes vis-a-vis the Yom Kippur War, but the rest of it seems sound to me.
This documentary was made by James Corbett, visit his website https://www.corbettreport.com/
Science unfortunately seems to be becoming increasingly dishonest – all of your points are 100% correct – turning this ludicrous 3.1 mln deaths saved figure into something real is insulting – it is an invention. They have just doubled down on the initial paper which has been proven over and over to be wrong its three core assumption – double x 5 days, IFR at 1.23% (all ages) and 80% attack rate. Why does BBC + MSM keep reporting findings from such an unreliable source? Thank you for lockdownsceptics, it is amazing that MSM has decided that the sceptics are the ones not to be trusted and shut down!
You think what Ferguson does is science?
No, but Boris seems to!
He’s at it again:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8407007/UK-lockdown-week-earlier-halved-COVID-19-death-toll-scientist-says.html
Good point. Action needs to be taken about the BBC and their outrageous media coverage, they are practically running a pro-lockdown pro-Fergusson campaign daily. Split up, slim down, end the licence fee and privatise please, nothing less radical will do.
Yes, dealing with the BBC should be top of anyone’s priority list. It might not solve everything, but with a “Conservative” Party majority it should be easy to do and quick. Just needs a PM with balls, to force it through the Lords.
Hmm. I’m seeing a potential problem here after all…
“No one, as far as I’m aware, has ever advocated that governments around the world do nothing in response to the pandemic.”
Actually, I would have done nothing. A decision made in a panic is worse than no decision at all.
The law of unintended consequences is operating here and as yet we don’t know what the consequences of this rash action will be.
Certainly untreated cancer will become a very serious issue in coming months. And there is also the deleterious effect of these lockdowns on the education of children.
Given the level of incompetence demonstrated by our government, doing nothing may have been better.
A massive effort to protect the vulnerable in care homes and hospitals would probably have saved lives. And telling ill people to stay at home, and the rest of us to wash our hands are low-cost measures that do a lot of good and not much if any, harm.
Beyond that, what the government should have “done” was to try to find out as much as possible before taking rash decisions, listen to different views on how to deal with it, been honest with the public, shown leadership by putting the risks in context.
100% agree. That’s all that needed to be done.
I agree, and hopefully sense prevails and that is the approach taken if there is a notable surge in cases in a few months or in winter.
Even so, care home residents and hospital patients can’t be fully ‘protected’ without imposing fairly barbaric living conditions on them which may do as much harm as good, as they have done for the past three months. Factor in the practical realities involved in complete ‘protection’ (of patient and carer as we are insisting), and even if preparation is much better, or at least not non-existent, the inherent nature of an occasionally fatal, contagious airborne respiratory virus means that some people are going to die (as they do from other respiratory viruses) unless the most hideous lockdown restrictions are imposed. Even that might not be enough.
Failure to come to terms with this by the lockdown zealots will mean the national self-harm and departure from civilised existence continues.
Yes, I don’t know much about what happens in care homes, but measures should be proportionate there too.
I don’t know how practical it would be, but you may be able to test the staff daily, if the test gave instant results. It would probably cost a fair bit less than shutting down or hampering large parts of the economy, indefinitely.
Does make me wonder though how the risk of a ‘second wave’ will be spun.
It seems clear that many parts of England haven’t finished their first wave. Infection rates have never come close to 20%. I do worry that this is where the “second wave” will come from.
R0 is lower outside London. I could be wrong but I don’t think we will see a second wave in the UK until the winter (when R0 goes up a bit because people spend more time indoors).
Nobody in London has the thing. To the point someone made earlier, it will now bump along around 1 forever.
Yes R is about 1 in London, but R0 in London will be higher than in places outside and therefore so will be the herd immunity threshold. So if 20% of people have been exposed in London but only 10% in Worcester (say) it doesn’t mean Worcester is destined to ever catch up with London.
For reasons of population density?
Not challenging – just querying to make sure I understand what you’re saying.
If they succeed in dragging out the lockup till October, we’ll be into flu season again and guess what ….?
Are you kidding?
2nd wave is their latest mantra.
It’s already being spun!
Well said. OK the economy would have taken a bit of a hit but not as bad as what we’re experiencing now.
And we would not have seen the spike in mental health issues that will be sure to increase when we come out of this.
Telling sick people to stay at home has done a great deal of harm. Early intervention, as with most illnesses, would have been much better. Prophylactic intervention for health workers and for those with other medical problems would have led to a much better outcome. I will soon be back as an outpatient at a rehabilitation centre. I will be asking for as much prophylactic medication as possible.
Surely, under normal circumstances, if people are sick, they naturally stay at home?
It’s telling the healthy to stay home that’s caused the problem.
No chance of that once Ferguson did his worst.
There was never a “life going on completely as usual ” option, because that’s not how people behave when faced with a threat.
Government simply needed to alert people to the fact that there was a nasty virus flying around which particularly affected the elderly.
People at risk were taking their own steps to protect themselves (not going out, not having the grandchildren round) in early March, as they would do in every nasty flu season.
The latest Imperial College face-saving exercise seems not to factor this in at all.
I imagine if the MSM hadn’t scared everyone to absolute death (almost literally) then things may have been a bit more ‘normal’. I remember thinking back in February that people’s behaviour was so at odds with what was being reported in the media; at that time, the virus was just seen as China/Asia’s problem, and people didn’t see it as a personal threat to them. There was a risk of it coming over here but normality pretty much prevailed, and that was comforting. But the tide started to turn in early March once it hit Italy and it was then that the MSM started really ramping things up, and I remember that things started to feel very strange by that point and normality ebbed away. We are still waiting for it to return.
Yes, you are correct on that. Our elderly neighbour (95) who has terminal lung cancer, locked down with her daughter in early March. We had a lunch booked for 18 March with other neighbours (in their 80s) but cancelled it because they had already decided to self-isolate.
Certianly we’d be in a way better position now if we’d done nothing, and told noone about what was going on. Which is just mad really – I’m not for cover-ups but I’d certainly support one that favoured worldwide public health rather than the current one that’s playing out.
Works for normal flu every year!
Toby, just thought you should know we’ve been doing all we can to share the “asymptomatic transmission very rare” article you posed yesterday to anyone who would listen. It is undoubtedly the most important single piece of evidence about the virus so far. And it’s been taken up by a small number of other news sources. But most of the largr mainstream media has ignored it, and where the likes of the BBC have mentioned it they’ve undermined it by including quotes by a pet “expert” of theirs who argues from anecdotal examples that the WHO’s statistically proven understanding of this vital fact about the virus does not matter.
This guy disagrees about the WHO’s statement: https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1270760450167209984
What do you think of his opinion?
Perhaps we need to do some crowdfunding to place adverts in the mainstream press stating the facts – PCR tests notoriously unreliable, excess deaths caused by lockdown, the actual IFR based on the data now available instead of on Ferguson’s nonsense, the percentage of fatalities that are the very old people with co-morbidities, the actual likelihood of a healthy individual dying from covid and the estimated economic impact and a few statements from real epidemiologists that know what they are talking about.
I’m on.
Is any one game to organise this as I am a technophobe. Everyone on the site could then raise ideas of what to put in the advert
difficult to know where to start the list is so long
It’s even dodgier than that, according to this article:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/09/scientists-have-utterly-failed-to-prove-that-the-coronavirus-fulfills-kochs-postulates/
“The science” so beloved of Mr Hancock has apparently yet to show that “SARS-CoV-2 causes a discrete illness that matches the characteristics of all of the deaths attributed to COVID-19″ and that “the virus has been isolated, reproduced and then shown to cause this discrete illness.”
Without these criteria being met, how can a coherent policy be arrived at?
At every stage we have been subjected to obfuscation – and worse.
It’s a truly fascinating idea. And guaranteed never even to be considered by 99.9% of people.
Epidemiology fits Karl Popper’s definition of pseudoscience, as illustrated by his description of psychoanalysis. Epidemiology can conjure a superficially plausible explanation for everything retrospectively, but can predict nothing.
Koch’s postulates used to be the gold standard for dealing with viruses.
A bit too precise/demanding for this worldwide debacle though.
Can you put a new wall up around a part of the country, let’s club together somewhere and buy it and only let it logical, rational, honest people. The closest I’ll get is likely to move into a van, at least then I can hope to outrun the madness for a few years, I hear Romania is nice and they still remember how bad communism is.
Yes, I’ve thought about that. You start to understand why the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America.
Wyoming has the same surface area as the UK but 0.38% of its population. But they probably don’t want to sell any of it to us…
Probably why the eastern European nations are doing well
Eastern Europe (Romania and Transylvania are just, wonderful, absolutely wonderful to me and I haven’t even been to either) sounds just grand.
Nearly 20 years ago I had some peripheral involvement with people who were trying to organise a movement of like-minded libertarians to a US state, with the idea of generating a big enough number of liberty-oriented voters there to protect their liberty. I remember hearing they’d gone ahead with it after choosing New Hampshire, but I haven’t had any involvement with libertarians for many years so I don’t know how the project is going.
It would be interesting to see what the response of libertarians in the US has been to the coronapanic. In theory the lockdown should be absolute anathema to them, but the same should be true of UK conservatives, and bitter experience has shown that fear – even irrational fear whipped up by dshnonest propaganda, can generate profound levels of hypocrisy in people.
This is probably what I was thinking of Mark. I didn’t keep up with it either.
There were significant protests across the US. GIve them their due, they like to dress up, congregate, and shout outside city hall.
Did a bit of searching – it was the Free State Project
Finally I can add something useful. The Free State Project was set up to get 20,000 libertarians to move to NH, within 5 years of getting the 20,000 signatories. They reached that goal in Feb. 2016, at which time about 10% had already moved. I don’t know how many have moved since.
@George Dance is this Keene in New Hampshire?
Yes. There’s another largish group in Portsmouth NH, but Keene seems to be the hotspot. They have an online blog, Free Keene, that’s a good source of info on the movement. https://freekeene.com/about/
2nd amendment supporters in the US of A have tried this sort of thing. At town, county, and even state level I think. Sorry, but I haven’t kept up to speed on its success or otherwise.
It was only last night I was looking on web sites for islands for sale.
The other day, someone here posted a link to a village for sale in Sweden with 60 houses for £5.6 million. Unfortunately, it seemed that the houses are still occupied.
Perhaps someone with a legal mind could create a Passport to Pimlico type setup for a town here in the UK?
Sweden is not the main comparison because they still engaged in the social distancing that we’re now trying to escape from. There’s no evidence that any social distancing measures made any difference to the spread of the virus. That’s the main point.
The real flaw in the Imperial model is as before that it simply assumes that all changes in the spread are the result of interventions rather than the natural behaviour of the virus, and that there is no variation in susceptibility despite the mounting evidence that there is considerable preexisting resistance. In other words they assume what they are claiming to demonstrate.
Italy locked down hard trapping the population, many families from children to grandparents live together in italy .once trapped in with the virus there was no escape
I just remembered that a friend of mine – who was my best man and I his – is good friends with a cabinet minister. So after all the talk of writing to MPs, I just sent this WhatsApp:
“Could you ask your friend Mr ____ what the hell is going on and when it is expected that Mr. Johnson will have his testicles returned to him?”
Possibly not the most constructive, but it made me feel better.
The reply was “yes, absolutely!”
So. Well, at least I’ve done _something_ today, useful or not.
That might have more impact than writing to your MP. Any opportunity to circumvent the foot soldiers might set the ball rolling, especially if your mate can encourage the Cabinet minister to grow a pair too – hope it is not Williamson though because he needs to grow a brain first!
No, it’s not him.
Thank God for small mercies.
Many years ago, W. S. Gilbert pointed out that if MPs have a brain, they have to leave it outside the House.
You wouldn’t need much room to store them nowadays.
I’ve spent some time in the past with the person in question. To give him his due, he’s fiercely intelligent and very impressive in person. How much of that is applied to the current government, I don’t know.
What I don’t understand is why no-one, not one Cabinet minister or senior adviser, has broken ranks. They can’t all surely think any of this farce is right, legally, morally if not scientifically. They are parents, spouses, sons/daughters. How can they live with themselves?
I don’t know. Maybe you only break ranks if you think you have the popular opinion?
Me and my friends are bombarding our Mp with emails ,wear the bastards down.
I wrote to my (Labour) MP on 2 April, saying that the lockdown was a threat to livelihoods and liberties, and asking him to push for the recall of parliament. He replied, saying, among other things, that he was ‘particularly surprised that you seem to place “our livelihoods and liberties” before the lives of our fellow citizens. That seems an extraordinary statement to make.’ I replied that I was ‘particularly surprised that you seem to place minor fluctuations in the annual mortality rate, overwhelmingly involving people of my own advanced age and more, or those who have pre-existing serious medical conditions, above the devastating effects which the present policy must have upon the livelihoods of millions of your fellow citizens, both during the lockdown itself and far into the future’, and pointed out that the opposition’s duty was not to scheme to win power, but to oppose. His response concluded, ‘I have read your opinions, with which I disagree, and will not be entering into further correspondence.’ I tried one more letter, but he has ignored it. As Tyneside Tigress (hallo, neighbour – North or South Tyneside ?) says, it’s probably best to circumvent the foot soldiers.
Finally got so cross that also wrote to my MP tonight – I couldn’t help it but WHAT HAVE YOU DONE crept in. I hate people who type in capital letters – shouty – but I COULDN’T HELP MYSELF. Oh dear.
SM: Do you think the disease arose earlier in China than has been suggested?
SG: Absolutely, yes.
SM: When do you think it appeared?
SG: I wouldn’t want to put a number on it but I think that in any normal system by the time you detect deaths from a disease it’s been around for at least a month.
SM: So, what are we talking – October rather than November?
SG: Yes, something like that – October or November.
Thanks for that, Professor Gupta, so it might be … October or November perhaps … now tell us about your model which predicted that over 50% of the UK population had been infected by March but only if you assume that only 1 in 1000 cases are hospitalised.
For crying out loud, folks, this is woeful but she doesn’t agree with Ferguson so let’s just accept this speculative drivel.
I don’t think you quite understand the way this works. “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Neil Ferguson produced a woefully over-simplistic model that produced lots of very precise, wrong, answers. The difference with Sunetra Gupta is that she knows it’s not possible to be precise, and she is open to a wider range of possibilities than Ferguson. She shouldn’t be criticised for not pretending her answers are definite and precise. It’s a virtue.
Yes, but Gupta’s predictions also had confidence bounds so wide they were effectively not predictions at all. Also note she’s changed her tune totally – she was previously a big supporter of lockdowns and got mad in interviews at “libertarians” who disagreed.
No- she was always against lockdown- she just thought it was a shame that the Libertarian argument was on the same side, as she is a fairly hard left socialist.
LOL! Dr. Gupta is in the same uncomfortable position as Sweden. Thanks, Annabel; your comment made my day.
Fergy’s drivel wasn’t also speculative?
Do you see 50,000 dead people right now or 500,000?
Only out by about 1/2 million
Mayo, I think this misrepresents Dr. Gupta, but let me hasten to add that I don’t think that you’re the one doing the misrepresenting. Rather, I think that you’re reacting reasonably to a media caricature – the picture of her the media has built up through necessarily selective editing – rather than the message she’s trying to communicate. (To a degree, I think that’s happened to Dr. Ferguson, too; just as it happens to anyone in the media spotlight.)
My knowledge of Dr. Gupta’s work is limited to a couple of YouTube interviews, but I got a somewhat different picture. As I see it, she was saying that the huge spiking of cases In March could be explained by two possible scenarios, both of which were therefore equally plausible:
1) The UK was at the start of an epidemic with a high R number, which would peak in April or May with millions of cases and perhaps millions of deaths;
2) The UK was in an epidemic with a lower R number, but which had started 2 months earlier, which was already close to or past the infection peak.
While Dr. Gupta made it clear that she liked scenario (2), and thought it most plausible, “the science” (the Oxford model) in no way proved it. All her model proved was that scenario (1), which was assumed in the Ferguson model as well as in most of the media, had not been proved – both scenarios were equally live options.
I think you’re right to be equally sceptical of both scenarios – whether to believe either one depends on the evidence, which has to be looked at. Perhaps one could check flu tests, or autopsy patients who died from pneumonia, from January and February.
My issue with all this, is the implausibility of it all. We have a virus where its been proven time and again, that its no threat, yet the government has removed our rights and maintains pointless restrictions causing serious harm and devastation. We had a mob on Sunday vandalising our monuments and harming the police (immune to the supposed bug, and praised for hypocritically breaking the rules), yet two days later, Sadiq Khan sets up a commission to revise London’s history from its English to global which is hyper-Orwellian and very sinister. So for many this will be seen as mob rule, where a violent gang can smash things in order to complete wide ranging government policy change. It just doesnt stack up.
The reason why the government is looking a bit iffy right now, is that they have to juggle this failing absurd narrative that defies any rationality, sense or logic. The reason they have to is because it is most probable that they are answerable to elsewhere. We are living under a government of occupation.
Initially I was amazed at how many people fell for the ‘deadly virus’ bullshit.
Now I am amazed at how many people still believe the government incompetence bullshit.
I’ve got to ask – why release a relatively mild, but scarily new virus, just so that the population would be terrified into agreeing to being vaccinated with a deadly vaccine? Why not just release a deadly virus? It seems a bit like hanging batman upside down over a tank of sharks, laughing and then walking away, when you could just shoot batman in the head.
THIS.
ESPECIALLY if you’re going down the ‘population control’ tinfoil hat road
Isnt ‘tinfoil hat’ a slur that is used against lockdown sceptics such as ourselves?
James Corbett has discussed the population control issue in a recent video. You are welcome to share your refutation of his points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igx86PoU7v8
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
That will cheer up the malicious no end, Cruella.
Malice itself can most often be explained by greed and self-interest.
I.E. Why kill people if you can make money off them?
If you are literally making money do you need the people? By this I mean given we have fiat money and the level of corruption – once you reach a certain extreme level of wealth you can coerce government etc to create money for you. The money itself essentially becomes irrelevant to you.
If you were a extremely wealthy psychopath you may think lots of these people consume many of ‘your’ resources yet provide nothing that you yourself actually want.
Of course you do. Because you want to make MORE money. It’s never enough – look at how these people behave. Their entire personalities are basically defined by making money, even if they already have unlimited funds. THAT’S the psychopathy – or, at least the manifestation of it.
Back to the vaccine for instance. The more people there are on the planet. the more money you can make from vaccinating them, no?
So… even Bill Overpopulated Planet Gates says these things but then does differently. I’d argue he’s doing the precise opposite to what say he is – he’s trying to keep kids ALIVE with vaccines…. So he can give them more vaccines!
My point is the after a point you can always get MORE money you dont need the people to get more money – just get the state to hand your businesses big contracts etc. The fiat money itself is just a number in the end. You could have 8 billions people and a £400 vaccine or 4 billion people and a £800 vaccine – once you have corrupted the government sufficiently you can make up any numbers you like. How many billions have been ‘donated'(although the tax payers didnt actually get much say in the matter) just to develop the vaccine.
What more people do do is consume more resources – which unlike the fiat money is finite. Some consume resources and in turn produce stuff you want as and some consume resources and dont – perhaps its better you get rid of those and then you are actually richer – you have more resources. This is not how I think of course but the point is if your and extremely wealthy psychopath you dont need more people to become richer in terms of either fiat or actual resources and wealth – you could do with keeping the most productive people around though as long as they are on a short enough leash that they cannot pose a threat to you.
He’s not keeping kids alive with vaccines, or not according to the data I’ve seen. The mortality rate is pretty high, Furthermore it seems that he is sterilising women with vaccines, or attempting to. Sorry, haven’t got time to search for the links.
I’m sure he said we could expect 700,000 to die from the new vaccine for covid19, but that that was an acceptable outcome – despite being fewer than the number of people that have died from the virus!
You may be right, but I’d argue that’s not intentional.
He wants to sterilise the third world (because their governments can’t afford vaccines ..lol) and make the rest of us have pointless vaccines every year.
That might seem rational but we have to accept that the guy is completely nuts!
I wouldn’t underestimate the role of personal vanity in all of this, and in human folly generally.
The ‘incompetence’ excuse wouold have to be stretched past its limits in this case. Only the insane or those with some motivation beyond the good of those they claim to serve could have inflicted policies so obviously, and so inevitably, leading to the collapse of the economy, with all that this entails in terms of human suffering. And where was the parliamentary opposition, where were the media, who should have been highlighting the views of scientists dissenting from ‘The Science’ of choice ? The excuse of ‘incompetence’ would have to extend well beyond the government and parliament, to explain the present situation.
Indeed it is. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any genuine tinfoil hat loons in the world.
Go on then, Farinaces, what happened on 9-11 ?
James Corbett and JFK Jr are not tinfoil hat loons.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/the-brave-new-world-of-bill-gates-and-big-telecom/
I like James and actually watch his videos regularly. Doesn’t mean I agree though. You have to admit if you wanted to control the population you’d be better off actually killing, or at least sterilising, a shit tonne of breeding age people rather than er….. killing a load of old people?
I personally would pick the Utopia method. (Anyone who likes conspiracy theories etc. would love this show – it’s one of my faves). I’d create a virus that sterilises 75% of the population rather than killing anyone. Just imagine if that was possible.
Lol I bet Bill Gates has actually done it by mistake already
This is one thing I really do agree with Corbett on – Gates is bad news.
This is not over yet. Who knows how many are already condemned to die by the actions so far and what else is in store.
I like Utopia too. Just the other day I watched the trailer again.
What is happening now is the Utopia method, as Corbett and many others including JFK Jr have said that the mandatory vaccines will include the means to sterilise us. This is the depopulation agenda.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/the-brave-new-world-of-bill-gates-and-big-telecom/
Remember too that Bill Gates’ father was involved with Planned Parenthood… Abortions lead to fewer people..
I’ve said below that the vaccines are about sterilising us, or certain groups.
They want to cull the elderly as Henry Kissinger as talked about the need to cull the ‘useless eaters’. The virus is a cover for multiple agendas.
Killing the ‘old people’ is maybe to get governments on his side – reduces the amount they have to pay out in pensions…
I don’t know for sure. But the bad guys have been boiling frogs for quite a while now, with never enough heat to make us all leap out of the saucepan at once.
A deadly vaccine is only one possible objective. Others might be –
Well, you see, Sweden is virtually at the point where it’s a cashless society anyway. All it took was a dramatic and exciting heist on the government cash warehouse.
I can’t rule out the others, but it seems to me like an awful lot of effort to go to for no obvious return.
It may be me just being wilfully blind, but all of my experience of watching governments tells me that they’re nowhere near good enough at anything to pull this kind of thing off. And all of my experience of big corporations tells me that they’re not, either.
Fairly sure Sweden’s shift to plastic will have taken years of expenditure, advertising, and social norm setting. A bank robbery stops a nation using cash ?!
If you cannot see the obvious return from (the benefits) of the other points to an authoritarian or tyrannical regime, a person less charitable than I might mention disingenuity …
You didn’t see our government implementing the smoking bans ? Involving our military in Afghanistan ? Rolling out 5G ? Mostly they bumble along. For some (a few) things that are somehow more significant, they are reasonably efficient.
I shan’t address big corporations, might get me the sack.
See my reply to Farinances below.
Look, I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time debating the validity of every conspiracy theory, so after this I will leave you to believe as you will.
Yes, I’ve been around to see all of those things happen. None of these things are a good example of government efficiency. Government is competent at passing legislation (given that we have no comparator, since they are the only one who can do it) and that’s about it. The smoking bans involved passing a piece of legislation (when the government had a significant majority in parliament) requiring premises to comply with it and asking the police and local authorities to enforce it. It’s not a complex task, so achieving it isn’t anything other than a minimum level of operational competence. Deploying the military to Afghanistan… deploying the military is something that government have done for as long as there have been governments (even when it was one bloke in charge of the village). It’s not like it went very well after that, is it? Rolling out 5G… I wasn’t aware that 5Ghad actually been properly rolled out yet and it involves the significant involvement of private companies.
Again, I probably made a mistake in getting involved in this discussion. There’s a fundamental difference in believing (as I do) that what’s going on is an example of incompetence, weakness and wilful stupidity and believing (as you do) that it’s all part of a grand master plan. Neither of us is going to convince the other. Either way, we both think this is all a bad thing, so let’s get back to agreeing with each other on that, shall we?
I think your analysis of all this is probably the most plausible. People accepted the lockdown because of the excellent job that was done in frightening everyone half to death.Once the true figures come out, and it is seen how other countries are successfully lifting lockdown, then the public mood will quickly change. At the same time we will see the left wing media pounce on Boris, they will be all over him like a rash.to discredit him and the Tory ‘Government.
Which left wing media is that?
Obviously we agree the lockdown is a bad thing.
Your rationale for having the last word is less convincing. Aha, a chance for me to achieve moral superiority by stopping first.
Well done!
Is that true? About the cash warehouse?
Yes. It was all like something out of a film. Rather fun.
And no, the move to card wasn’t immediate and yes it took a good deal of government effort to get to that point, but it’s hard to buy so much as a cup of coffee in stockholm with cash nowadays (having said that, it’s a year since I was last in Stockholm, so it may have changed still more by now).
Was about to reply to JohnB here, but will do so above.
Not a problem to use cash to buy coffee here in Uppsala, or in supermarkets; places where the average item is 100 kr+ are the ones more likely to be card only. Eg hairdressers.
Supermarkets incentivise use of cards by giving extra ‘loyalty points’ if you link your bank card to your loyalty card.
It is not The Governments but the smart vested interest forces behind all of this.
Oddly Sweden nonetheless fairly recently issued new design banknotes and coins…you have to wonder why? Most Swedes I spoke to were blissfully unaware (or at least did not notice) how similar the new notes and coins are to euros…When I pointed it out, the reply was that Sweden has an opt-out on adoption of the euro, which is not the whole truth..
Exactly. And the past few days have a similar echo of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the preceding Anti Rightist Campaign
“Build Back Better” which could include any of those things plus ID2020 (mandatory global ID), Zero Carbon (total control over every Joule of energy we spend – and therefore ALL consumption and actions), mandatory vaccinations, etc
I like the idea of point two, that’ll suit me just fine.
Re the extent to which the population can be ‘cowed and brainwashed’: those shaping our attitudes (government’s Behavioural Insights Team, promoting desired globalist mindset ?) must have thought it was safe to launch the present power grab after we’d been softened up so much that we were afraid to say there was any difference between men and women. The push for the cashless society has been going on for a long while. I remember a huge billboard six or seven years ago, with a picture of a jubilant woman outside a supermarket waving a bank card and proclaiming that she was cash-free and carefree, or some such thing. ‘Contactless’ has been undermining cash for some time, and now people are looking at me as if I were an outsize germ when I offer them a perfectly nice, crisp note.
It’s the vaccine/immunity passports that worry me – no immunity passport = no job, travel etc..
Gosh, it looks worse when you see it written down!
More random laws lead to more ‘crime’ (inadvertent breaking of weird laws) leads to people being scared to do anything in case they commit a ‘crime’ which, if they are chipped, will further seriously impair their personal freedoms.
I totally agree with you. Its a good question. Another thing that doesnt make sense is Iran and Russia’s response, as we would expect them to be more sceptical like Belarus.
However, for all these issues querying the hoax, they dont come anywhere close to the lies, contradictions and insanity from the people carrying out the hoax.
I disagree with your premise. No politician wants to be responsible for actual murder – and of course the virus would kill their own relatives and possibly themselves.
For a politician, the best possible solution is a ‘mind virus’ that results in the behaviour they want. It seems kind of.. obvious..?
Yeah but if your goal is ‘population control’ you really have to kill quite a lot of people. Get the population down to ‘manageable’ levels then control who breeds.
But hasn’t the mind virus already resulted in a future fall in the population? It’s now illegal for people to start relationships, and even married couples are probably steering clear of each other physically. And if, later, you wanted to control who reproduced, you could spread pseudoscience about certain groups who are in more danger from the virus than other groups.
Not really. Not nearly enough anyway to achieve ‘total’ control.
Shaggers will shag. Look at Ferguson. To truly control the breeding population you basically have to sterilise or kill.
Hell, look at me. I’d be shagigng right now if I had the opportunity, law or no law. Why don’t I have the opportunity? Cause I can’t be arsed to create it. I guarantee you though there’s a shit tonne of people shagging illegaly right now. And good for them.
There’s still gonna be baby boom come New Year.
I’m not much of a “herbivore” myself (see comment above), but from observing other people, some do seem closer to it than others. I don’t think it would be too difficult for the wrong ‘nudge’ – and the C19 disaster has been one hell of a nudge – to start the population declining.
I’m not convinced. It’s possible to turn young men into “herbivores” – passive and lacking carnal desire”.
This process was already well underway in Japan, land of the mask.
“A survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found 36% of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 had no interest in sex – a figure that had doubled in the space of two years.”
Japan’s population was already plummeting as a result.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24614830
Just read the article, it was very interesting.
What’s mentioned in that article is another in a long line of factors that has caused Japan’s population to plummet and why its ageing.
Cultural and economic factors have made it hard for Japanese men especially to carve out a career and family life that leads them to seek gratification via passive means such as what the article has alluded to.
The fact that we’re headed towards an economic crash unprecedented since 1709 could lead to the thinning of our population. Who will be able to afford children at this point both financially and psychologically?
That is seriously sick stuff!
They might not want to be responsible for it, doesn’t mean they don’t do it, or cause it to be done.
Remember the Ebola scare, I remember recently watching a video of some guy at the time predicting it would lead to essentially what we are seeing now. Perhaps they tried the deadly virus and found that it was just too hard to get it to take a hold. Deadly viruses are somewhat self limiting. Now if you can make every believe a mild virus that will spread much more easily is actually deadly – which it appears they have managed to do with between 50-95%(just a guess and this has obviously changed as some have clocked on) then you get your deadly virus scare without the ability to spread easily of a mild virus.
Just a thought. I dont know what exactly is going on but at this point I think things are far to strange to rule out anything.
Sorry that should have been ‘you get your deadly virus scare with the ability to spread easily of a mild virus’
A deadly virus is indiscriminate. A mild virus provides an excuse (aka a cover) to bring in totalitarian measures.
Because if they released a really deadly virus they would risk killing themselves in the process, unless they had a ready-made vaccine that works?
Actually that’s a good point – but I think you have to concede that if they were to release a virus on purpose then they’d DEFINITELY already have a vaccine ready
Presumably ICL will soon have to drop the ‘Imperial’ from their name, in order to avoid being tainted with the ‘legacy of Empire’. Unfortunately ‘College London’ sounds a bit downmarket, but I’m sure that their sterling modelling work will bolster their reputation. Sadly, it’s transparently obvious that ICL are trying to re-write history and avoid blame for what may well be the worst policy decision by any British Government, ever.
It’s now almost a month since Oxford University announced that COVID-19 was no longer an epidemic:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/11/coronavirus-no-longer-epidemic-uk-oxford-study-finds-cases-falling/
ICL’s dissembling and the Government’s introduction of ludicrous measures such as the so-called ‘quarantine’ on travellers entering the UK are part of an attempt to sustain the illusion that the ‘lockdown’ was necessary in the first place.
I live in hope that the wider public might eventually realise that the most dangerous aspects of the pandemic were media hysteria and weak government.
I’m worried that the government has lost control of the streets and mobs are being allowed to do what they want this is very dangerous locked down population tensions high it’s not long ago that we had mass rioting in the uk people lost their lives could happen easily happen again and we have a weak government. Does not bode well.
Not just our ‘Government”. Saw this on another site, apparently the reference is to Pembrokeshire in Wales! (Conservative). My bold emphasis
“I have just discovered that my Council Offices are to be bathed in purple light tomorrow in solidarity with BLM. Their UK crowd funding page states that their aims include “Developing and delivering training, police monitoring and strategies for the abolition of police.” Bearing in mind that I live in an area where the only immigration issues are those of the English moving into Wales (guilty as charged!) I cannot see this is in any way appropriate, but all criticisms on social media are shot down in flames by the virtue signalling Momentum types and I am still waiting for my Councillor to reply to an email sent a couple of years ago. I am devastated at this pathetic virtue signalling”
Absolutely agree!
Is the purple light going to be UV, we wonder. We do hope so as we found this interesting WHO document yesterday
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf
and it’s about non-pharmaceutical interventions in a flu pandemic. UV light is ‘not recommended in any circumstances.’
It also tells us that just about every measure currently being taken, apparently to combat CV19, is also ‘not recommended in any circumstances’. But of course ‘this awful virus’ is not the flu, is it?
The document outlines their current recommended procedures but, then again, we are talking the ever-varying WHO here.
Travel-related measures are unlikely to be successful in most locations because current screening tools such as thermal scanners cannot identify pre-symptomatic infections and afebrile infections, and travel restrictions and travel bans are likely to have prohibitive economic consequences.
Somewhat ironic!
The UV light in question is the artifical version, so I’d be inclined to agree with them.
Have you read about the thermal scanners they are *already* trialling at Heathrow? Don’t remember consent being asked for that or hearing any debate on it. Another Statutory Instrument?
Er, your body needs UV light to make vitamin D which combats respiratory illnesses, including flu. Are the WHO secretly a death squad in disguise?
How did you guess?
Perhaps the next colour should be red to symbolise the blood of cancer sufferers who have been left to die.
The best thing to bathe their bloody offices in would be nitric acid,
abolition of police?!? Wot?
Have you been so busy dismissing people pointing out the truth about BLM and Floyd as “racists” that you’ve actually been oblivious to what’s been going on in the US? “Defund the police” is exactly what BLM are pushing in the US and they’ve been making actual political headway on it over there for a couple of days.
But perhaps US events only concern you when some criminal unknown to you happens to die and become a political symbol for the scum of the earth in a cause based on an outright lie that you seem to feel the need to defend?
[I suppose I have to point out the obvious here: that most BLM supporters are white virtue signallers not blacks, or you will undoubtedly take the opportunity to dishonestly misrepresent me as “racist” again based on that line.]
Defund and shutdown the police? I’d give it three days before a vigilante group sets itself up who would then proceed to deal with the vermin in their areas. So which posse do you want in control? White men or black or ‘asian’ men?
which one would you fear the most?
I think the question is which posse do THEY want in control, seeing as they’re the ones calling for the abolition of the police. Not Mark.
I agree, sorry, I inserted myself into the conversation as it’s something I’ve been mulling since the Floyd death has morphed mutated into defunding police.
i wonder if BLM groupies are wanting to use the Purge movies as instructional videos?
You are exactly right that defunding the police is not about creating an anarchist utopia, it’s about replacing them with ideologically sympathetic enforcement forces. See the Ticker Carlson piece I’ve linked in several comments here today, for his discussion of exactly that point in the US context.
Yeah, the IRA policed a lot of Belfast and Derry in the ‘troubles’. Lots of kneecapping for joyriding. Did away with that inconvenient process called law and answering to a court.
I would ask under Freedom of Information who took the decision and how much it cost – waste of money and it might lose someone a job or at least diminish their chances of re-election..
It’s my theory that the riots were an inevitable consequence of lockdown and so the government are relieved to find that they have BLM branding and not anti-lockdown. I’d go so far as to speculate that they might even encourage the ‘BLM’ riots as a safety valve with no comebacks to themselves.
Yes.
Now the question is whether we can get BLM supporters to realise that the lockdown is what they’re really angry about and have them change their flags and banners.
Also what perfect cover for a genuine anti-lockdown protest.
Say if we went out to protest in London, right now, even if we all waved our signs and burnt some dustbins and threw penny farthings at police officers, who would notice? We’d be drowned out by BLM people. Literally surrounded and overwhelmed by other bodies. Or, at the very least (if we picked a quiet lefty virtue signalling day), people would point and frown and be even MORE hostile towards us because we’re not the *right* kind of protestors. The police may leave us alone unlike before but the public want us arrested because we care more about liberty than racism.
So…. legitimate questions and legitimate protest, in this current situation, being overwhelmed/drowned out by this issue that is completely unrelated. A fabulous, fortuitous distraction for the government from the disastrous policies. Probably factors a great deal into their treatment of the BLM protestors – the fact that they serve their cover-up well.
Imperial College’s Operation Historyhide is a go-go
A recent piece at The Critic magazine discusses the very topic of rebranding “Imperial” College for these woke times:
https://thecritic.co.uk/cui-bono/
Imperial College might well enjoy hiding history, they’ve already been sweeping science and maths under the carpet as a necessary step to being able to publicise their insane epidemiological modelling.
If you trawl through each evaluation of the RCGP surveillance network reports undertaken by the Oxford Covid Evidence Service, Covid 19 never reached the threshold to be considered an epidemic, at any point in 2020. Telegraph missed a trick there. I read it each time they updated that particular thread for the last few months and kept scratching my head. I couldn’t understand how we were having a pandemic without an epidemic…
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/what-does-rcgp-surveillance-tell-us-about-covid-19-in-the-community/
Well spotted. I was aware that there was some doubt about this early on, but I’d no idea it was consistent throughout the ‘epidemic’!
Following on from that, the observations are viewable in user defined graph form here:
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTU5ZDE5MGYtMzUzMy00ZjRmLTg4MGEtMTM3ZGJiZDNhODFkIiwidCI6IjZiOTAyNjkzLTEwNzQtNDBhYS05ZTIxLWQ4OTQ0NmEyZWJiNSIsImMiOjh9
I think it sounds like a Chinese takeaway….
They must think we are seriously thick if they thought no one would notice that they downgraded the threat from the virus before the lockdown! It was maybe done to cover their backs at a future enquiry? And they maybe hoped no one would have seen it before then?
So glad you’ve decided to provide a daily update, Toby. I feel like lockdown scepticism is at its kairotic moment in this country. The next big push is going to send it crashing down quicker than a slave trader’s statue on a BLM day out.
I hope you’re right!
me too
Nice to see the word ‘Kairos’ used in this context. I’ve only seen it used in Christian pro-Palestinian circles. It means ‘appointed time, an opportune moment, or a due season’ and I too hope you’re right (and I like the imagery, too!)
I was saying that on yesterday’s update, that I could feel the tide turning, it was almost palpable in the air, and then I catch a couple of news broadcasts and | see masks everywhere: Oxford at the Rhodes statue, Bristol this weekend, London, Houston today (on the news broadcasts today anyway). You have to look really hard to see someone not wearing a mask. How come at the peak in April I never saw anyone wearing a mask but now? It’s absolutely bizarre and mind-boggling. If you read enough on this site then surely you’d be asking, why the hell are everyone wearing masks?
Because, as with so much else, it’s nothing about reality and all about propaganda manipulation and virtue signalling, with both the coronapanic and the BLM lies. Two symptoms of the same underlying pathologies.
Agree Mark. All we need is a ‘witty’ hashtag along the lines of MeToo, BLM or NHS heroes and these whoppers will be on the bandwagon in no time. Might I suggest #kairoticmoment
To conceal their identity?
I’ve just ventured into the Daily Mirror – for the first and probably last time. (In my defence, I was trying to get a range of reports on the daily briefing.)
This is what I found there, written TODAY!
Coronavirus: Up to 40% of cases caused by those who have no symptoms, WHO says
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-patients-most-infectious-first-22163391
Didnt I hear the opposite to this that those who have no symptons dont spread the virus, confused now.
Yes. That’s what the WHO report actually said.
Let’s face it, the WHO says one thing one day, the opposite the next.
Everyone needs to stop listening and just get on with their lives.
This of course also means we’ll have to stop listening to our media and governments.
My point being that the Mirror has reported the exact opposite what the WHO said. Why would they be so out of step with the rest of the MSM?
Oh I thought you meant the WHO had changed their minds!
Lol see, I don’t know what’s real any more, especially coming from them
Another U-turn..
Sorry for causing confusion. My point was that the Mirror chose to write the exact opposite of what all the other papers reported.
‘… this Imperial College model takes for granted an essentially communist worldview in which the masses must be directed by central planners.’
Yes, you’ve nailed it there Toby. And we are now, almost unbelievably, experiencing what it is like to live in a communist state.
Two criticisms on your article, however:
1. You’ve been too kind to Imperial.
2. You’ve been too kind to the BBC.
A third more minor criticism: had ‘governments around the world do[ne] nothing in response to the pandemic’ I suspect things would have worked out a lot better than they have with the lockdowns, even in terms of covid-19, let alone wider general health.
Many thanks for taking the time to do this update though.
Totalitarianism maybe, communism no
For now, when the economy has finished collapsing as a consequence of totalitarianism they might try communism too
In practice they are the same thing.
Not really, there have been plenty of totalitarians who weren’t communist. There have also been communist thinkers who didn’t approve of totalitarianism, although totalitarianism always arose when thoughts came up against hard facts when someone tried to make those communist fantasies a reality.
Yes Toby you nailed it. Here in New Zealand our leader used to be president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. Lockdown was Big Brother heaven for her.
Why do lefty leaders think the masses they supposedly idolise are all dumb? The masses are in fact brighter than them. The BLM masses, I think all knew lockdown is a joke.
“The latest information is that the lockdown was unnecessary. In fact, not only was it unnecessary but it turns out that locking people in their homes was exactly the wrong thing to do. A study of almost 800 people shows that the higher your vitamin D status the less the coronavirus will affect you. Get enough sun, the data suggests, and you simply cannot die of the coronavirus.
World health authorities really got it wrong and unbelievably, they got the entire human race to listen to them. Recommending the exact opposite of what was needed, to step into the sun everyday and take D3 supplements and even get D injections would have represented intelligent medicine. We do not need a coronavirus vaccine, we already have one except its not a vaccine. If you want to inject something inject vitamin D.
This is the mostly costly mistake in history costing tens of trillions, destroying millions of small and mid-size businesses, and effecting hundreds of millions of lives. It has literally put hunger in bellies so you can start there with your measurements of suffering.”
https://drsircus.com/general/shining-the-light-on-unnecessary-quarantines/
Toby, don’t know how to contact LS but here is a must see (updated today)
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Excellent!
Great link
Point 17. There is also no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in healthy or asymptomaticindividuals. On the contrary, experts warn that such masks interfere with normal breathing and may become “germ carriers”. Leading doctors called them a “media hype” and “ridiculous”.
..and designed to keep the fear alive….
Thank you.
(Newbies to the site, click on June 2020 to get to the updated stuff.)
You’d think that even a government minister, as well as an an averagely intelligent ten-year-okd, should be able to understand this.
However…
‘Due to its rather low lethality, Covid-19 falls at most into level 2 of the five-level pandemic plandeveloped by the US health authorities. For this level, only the “voluntary isolation of sick people”is to be applied, while further measures such as face masks, school closings, distance rules, contact tracing, vaccinations and lockdowns of entire societies are not recommended.’
Exactly!!!!!!
Didn’t know about this group: ‘Despite this evidence, a group called “masks4all”, which was founded by a “young leader” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos, is advocating worldwide mask requirements. Several governments and the WHO appear to be responding to this campaign.’
The masks on the team’s faces have been photoshopped. The b*st*rds.
Great article by PROF KAROL SIKORA ‘Our Covid daily death toll is tragic but nowhere near up-to-date – this is the truth behind the Grim Reaper graphs’
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11812916/professor-karol-sikora-covid-daily-deaths-graphs/
“The UK’s archaic system for reporting deaths means there’s a significant delay between a patient’s last breaths and the moment their demise is registered. Sometimes, it takes six weeks.
In reality, even the Government has no idea how many fatalities occurred ‘yesterday’.
That knowledge takes time.
British epidemiologists are very gloomy about this – though they are fairly gloomy people at the best of times! They say a second wave of infection is inevitable, bringing further deaths and grief.
My personal view is, it’s unlikely.”
My view on a second wave is that it is possible, we just haven’t a clue if this virus will do it. Some viruses have, some haven’t. We haven’t reached the levels of widespread infection we expect to need to get herd immunity, but the virus is mysteriously not spiking up as illegal estrictions are relaxed, so maybe there is an “epidemiological dark matter” factor meaning that the spread is over. Either way, second wave, third wave or no more waves, I want to try to live during them, not simply cower. I’ll take my chances, if I catch it, if I haven’t already had immunity from an asymptomatic case, sooner than accept continued oppression “for my own good”.
Just listening to the pheasant link. Encouraging to hear a bit of scepticism creeping into the Beeb!
I saw a piece on the BBC this morning. Hancock and that swivel eyed green loon Caroline Lucas urging people not to go to the beach because of the (manufactured) second spike that it may, may not, could cause. Not once were they questioned about the possibility of a second spike due to the gatherings of thousands of people across our cities in the name of BLM.Utterly shameful
People have been crowding the beaches for weeks and no ‘spike’.
Only health risk is from indiscriminate defecation.
Not sure it’s indiscriminate. Desperate though, for certain – and maybe with some spite aimed at the local authority.
This video has been pulling apart Caroline Lucas’ bleating about a “second wave”. Comments have been scathing of the lockdown and antisocial distancing too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK7lI4QVrTA
And typical!
Surely the most glaring flaw in the Imperial model results is simply that for those ‘millions’ of lives actually to be saved we must stay in lockdown until either a vaccine becomes available or the virus gets bored and goes away of its own accord.
As Johnson’s hero said:
‘… if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’
Yes, they offered and offer no viable exit strategy, and the government didn’t and don’t have one either. They didn’t make a secret of it, but they didn’t make it overly clear either. People ought to have been paying more attention.
There is no real exit strategy because the virus is no longer the threat. The threat is the R number going up, the possibility of a second wave or everyone passing on the virus to vulnerable people.
Take away the virus and the other threats still remain. Yes it really is that dumb.
That is so true. The virus disappears tomorrow, nobody cares, because…. IT COULD BE BACK!
And when we all eventually die in penury and/or of health issues that can’t be remedied because of the huge backlogue created by covid ‘distancing’ insanity, they will smile, fold their arms across their chests, and say, with unctuous satisfaction, “The case numbers are *almost zero.”
Anyone working in dentistry know how accurate this is or how much is satire? Anyone had any contact with a dentist in the last ten weeks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lsv793gH4I&t=721s
This is what my dentist sent me last week:
https://www.portmandentalcare.com/dental-articles/new-patient-journey
I think they are all doing that – mine are anyway. And putting the prices up (covid-19 supplement). And not actually offering “routine” treatments yet, only urgent stuff.
Oh, it’s a “journey” is it? LOL!
You couldn’t make it up, unless following the mandate of a bunch of nutjobs.
The fact that they call it a “journey” made me laugh. Whoever thought of this must have a sense of humour.
At least patients won’t have to wear muzzles.
However what will they do if its chucking it down with rain?
Masks are provided, so presumably mandatory.
Gawd….didn’t see that. Oh dear….
Eh? How is that supposed to work at the dentist?
“Journey” is a euphemism. They’ll have paid someone a fortune to come up with that gem.
She said:
Son what are you doing here?
My fear for you has turned me in my grave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUUdQfnshJ4
Look out world
Take a good look what comes down here
You must learn these lesson fast and learn it well.
Thank you. So the link wasn’t satire. Jesus H Coronavirus. Whoever thought those precautions up must be seriously mentally ill.
Vernon Coleman used to be satirical but nowadays he is obviously just really pissed off.
Still brilliant though!
They are gonna lose literally millions in regular check-up fees. Who in there right mind is gonna go to the dentist just for a check-up if they have to go through this rigmarole?
I know I’m not going anywhere near unless a tooth is sending me to the next level pain threshold
I had a hygienist appointment booked (private dentist in England), and am pleased that here, in Wales, we are still locked up, so I was able to decline what would have been a very expensive procedure.
I’m due for a check up this month but even before lockdown I was warned that I’m under the list for non-essential work so I reckon I won’t see my dentist until later in the year.
The backlog is so great that the madness will hopefully have evaporated before we can get an appointment. That or the dentists will have evaporated first.
State of New York publishes data on comorbidities as well on their covid-tracking page here https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?%3Aembed=yes&%3Atoolbar=no&%3Atabs=n.
I noticed this same trend back in early April and it’s held constant ever since. Around 90% of all deaths had at least 1. Also consistent with the Off-Guardian story the sum of the top 10 is about 43K divided by 24K deaths is about 1.75 comorbidities per death. Since that’s only the top 10 the number is likely much closer to 2. I’m sure we can all draw our own conclusions as to what that means about most of the deaths observed.
I’d guess the story is the exact same in any state / country you look at. The issue is that, at least in the US, the data each state publishes is so different and non-transparent it’s hard to make many conclusions about an individual state.
P.S. Thanks Toby for all you do. Been enjoying and agreeing for months now. Cheers from Iowa.
Good article in The Telegraph. Comments have the air of increasing exasperation. Many people talking about writing to their MPs. People are really starting to worry about where we are heading as a nation.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/national-scandal-children-will-soon-able-go-thorpe-park-not/
Definately think there will be civil unrest and riots before the end of the year if this continues .much longer .
It’s already happening – I refuse to believe that the riots we are seeing in London are purely because people feel so strongly about the death of one man 4000 miles away.
Yep. 10% ‘genuine’ protestors, 90% angry, bored, self-righteous young people.
I think you’re right. BLM is fast being the excuse and seen as a “safe way” to protest against the effects of lockdown and antisocial distancing.
Great piece. She says, in the comments, that the Torygraph is starting a schools campaign tomorrow. The tide turns …..
It is mad that zoos and pubs are open but not schools..
Episode 9 of Perspectives on the Pandemic by Journeyman Pictures is up
https://youtu.be/UIDsKdeFOmQ
this episode is with a undercover nurse who has hidden camera footage of a hospital in New York. I’m only 15 minutes into it and my mouth has hit the ground in shock.
It’s in my watch later. Can’t wait
Better be quick – it looks like the sort of thing youtube will remove!
That’s too depressing to watch any more
I managed half. Sickening stuff.
That was one of the most disturbing videos I have ever seen. Truly and utterly shocking. They cannot get away with this.
OK I watched. Holy Christ on a bike.
Who needs population control when you have greedy mutherfuckers trying to milk a buck out of a flu bug.
Is anyone else wishing science would stop being relative and actually produce some facts again?
There’s too much science. Anyone can find evidence to back up their entrenched views
Evidence which may not actually be reliable, hence relativity.
We all know it’s the case that many real facts can be harmful to certain political goals and ideas, whereas the scanty evidence used to back up many politically useful ‘facts’ is in fact, horseshit.
Don’t worry, Neil’s models are always accurate. In the same way a broken watch is twice a day.
Joking aside, these type of models should not be used in the way he uses them.
Is anybody wishing so-called journalists would stop using the word ‘so’ as an accusative.
So, you call yourselves journalists?
Thanks Toby for a superb entry today, and I have noted Sunetra Gupta being allowed more airtime.
Today, I went into London on the train to run errands, professional and personal. I went on GWR, bought a off-peak open return. They do try and insist on you making a seat reservation on a specific train if you’re getting on a ‘fast’ train but on-board I saw no evidence of this being enforced as of yet, indeed I didn’t take my ‘booked’ service back. I believe LNER and Avanti are more strict. I decided to wear a Hancock conformity muzzle i.e. a mask. Good grief, it was uncomfortable even on a shortish journey on GWR and the tube. That brings me to another thing.
Of all the TfL and GWR staff I saw, a minority (and I mean under 10%) were wearing masks. Nor were any of the police I saw at Paddington. I find this quite funny given their unions were in the vanguard of enforcing this on passengers !!?? I don’t wish to criticise the staff who were very cheerful, but still. On that note, hardly any passengers on either company were masked. This … is going … to cause .. trouble isn’t it??? When they try and enforce this next week??
Also something to lift my spirits in London – people in *suits* going to *work*!!!!!
Meanwhile on my site, we may go to Alert Level 2 (i.e. go back to work) sometime between October this year, and March next year…… My heart sinks….
The fact that antisocial distancing isn’t really enforced especially after the BLM marches is probably a pointer that the muzzles won’t be either. Maybe during the first week but as people get tired of this sort of thing not to mention seeing the return of old problems with transport – signalling problems especially. Add rainfall and “customer incidents” (euphemism for anything and everything under the sun which includes suicides) will render the whole idea of antisocial distancing and muzzle wearing moot and academic.
Yes, I do get a sense that we’re being left to ‘get on with it’
“Left to get on with it” was life before week commencing 16th March. I refuse to be grateful that the police aren’t actual bothering to enforce stupid laws
Even many of the shops that are open aren’t all that bothered as well. I was in a cafe this afternoon buying a latte – there was a sign that said only 3 people allowed at any given time but there were five of us and no one from the staff told us off.
Hopefully smaller places will get away with more, and feel they can get away with more.
Agree. That said that cafe I went to was part of a chain – not as big as Starbucks or Costa though, I get the feeling that management are simply paying lip service and they’re not really bothering to enforce everything – shame they couldn’t open their toilets but at least we were being treated like proper human beings not potential disease carriers.
Well done. Am planning to write to my MP again about toilets, have not heard anything from him about my first email but will write him a second and third one….
Vernon Coleman on closing loos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwMxd13q8SQ
Thanks for that Cheezilla – gave me more idea for my email to my MP.
Go for it Bart!
Good luck with that I’ve sent 5 emails and received a bland reply to just one which says very little but is following the government line.
I haven’t received a reply from the one I sent last week. Never again will I vote for him.
Nice one kh1485
Bart S – I agree, I suspect a lot of this stuff won’t last contact with reality. In fact in some of our big cities I imagine enforcement of these ludicrous rules might actually trigger major disorder in itself. This does raise a long term issue with lockdown/SD rules though – if they are bad rules held in contempt by the population, surely that is an issue for governments and their respectability in the long term? Interesting to see how this pans out, but I would say SD and rump lockdown has been getting ignored for the last month at least..
Agree. If TFL try to enforce the rules especially when its raining or during a signal failure, we could end up with something like what happened in Canning Town where the ordinary working people having had enough of middle class Extinction Rebellion protesters stopping them from going to work forced the protesters down from the trains and beat them up.
There’s also the issue of lockdown and antisocial distancing rules causing more businesses to close and unemployment to soar – if anything that’s what the government will have to face at some point.
On behalf any menstrual customers or those with prostate problems, bless you!
And indeed, anyone in possession of a bladder and/or bowels.
Isn’t there some bylaw that insists services like toilets should be made available ?
Q: Does a cafe have to have a toilet UK?
A:The correct answer, according to section 20 of the 1976 Local Government MIscellaneous Provisions Act, is that toilets should be provided if food and drink is being sold for consumption on the premises.18 May 2016
and
According to a long-standing law—Section 20 of the 1976 Local Government Miscellaneous Provisions Act, to be exact—restaurants with ten seats or more in Britain must provide bathrooms for their customers.19 May 2016
Interestingly, I can’t find anything recent about it, so nt sure if the CV act is applicable?
If anyone ‘tells me off’ they’ll get a bloody earful. I’m not at school.
Exactly. I’ll just walk away and never return. Thankfully that hasn’t happened yet.
We should vote with our feet and our wallets when we can. A tough ask if you rely on public transport, or risk the sack from work for non-compliance, or you are a school pupil or university student. The bodies supposedly looking after the rights or welfare of those groups (unions, passenger organisations etc.) are likely to ask for more rules, not fewer.
Hence why I will be boycotting shops that require antisocial distancing and masks, will not be using public transport from the 15th (will have to rely on general intelligence) and when I did a survey for an orchestra I told them in no uncertain terms that I won’t book for any concerts if they force me to social distance and wear a mask for 2 1/2 hours!
Worth mentioning that, except for private premises, ‘social distancing’ is not enforceable.
Well, on National Rail I suppose they could add it to the National Rail Conditions of Travel but have probably been too lazy. I think TFL has byelaws too, which again I suspect they have been too lazy to amend.
How it will be enforced is not by imposing it on the general public but on businesses and venues as part of heath and safety.
I’ve told my boss I won’t be wearing a mask when/if we go back to the office.
I can’t begin to imagine why the government would sanction offices reopening if the staff can work from home. I am assuming our office will be closed for a very very long time – probably until the “new normal” disintegrates.
Good for you. We have human rights too.
There lies the problem!
“Alert Level 2”!! Is that the same as Defcon 1?
Sorry for the cheap joke. “ sometime between October this year, and March next year…… My heart sinks….” I sincerely feel for you. What business are you in?
Science, in the public sector/academia. We are currently alert level 4 (I think 5 is asteroid strike or something like that and only operations people and security on site). Level 3 allows us to have .. possibly .. 10 people (maybe!) in each building. Subject to full risk and method statement. Level 2 is relative normality but the laugh is no-one seems to know what this will mean.
Which area of the country is that publis sector/academia (asuming this probably means a Uni research dept) in. I’m a researcher trying to force mine to regain sanity and reopen, crazed health and safety nutters in manglement have a perverse obsession with this stupid virus though, despite the fact that everyone in my building is under 40 and in good health. Would love to make contact with other academics who want to force a reopening, would be even better if we were at the same place, allies we never knew we had.
Do you belong to a union by any chance, is it them insisting on these rules?
Bella – I am in Prospect and they are mouthing off about various things but they’re not a big force on site. I wish they would stick to sorting out the pay deal.
James – I am in the Thames Valley area in a big science campus. Talking to other labs and universities, there is a lot of variation. Some unis are starting back already with social distancing measures that seem designed to be ignored (i.e get on with it), other places are being very risk averse, including my site. Interestingly, most of our private sector clients i.e. chemical/pharmaceutical companies are back in work and in many cases worked through this crisis. We were musing this morning in fact on one of the dreaded Zoom meetings that we will probably be allowed to get on a fully loaded O’Leary budget skybus before we are allowed back to work.
As the situation becomes clearer I will try and put together a list of collaborator unis who have been allowed to open and will keep the board updated. It seems to depend on the clout of the PI and whether research is grant funded or has funded synchrotron/neutron/accelerator access.
Interesting that this headline says “because of the lockdown” not “because of Covid 19”:
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/staff-tower-london-hampton-court-18384634?fbclid=IwAR1xQk0BQURW4vUoM3j24kY9SVBQKCVVbAQdPcKW88wASd_uYHWRJNOBy5Y
Could it be that the tide is turning?
I hope so!
I spend so much time shouting at my poor, undeserving laptop: “It not caused by the virus, idiot, it’s caused by the lockdown!”
Thanks for the update Toby – I wasn’t expecting one today so it was a nice surprise. I sometimes take artist commissions in my spare time, and yours and James Delingpole’s London Calling podcast is one of the things I listen to while I draw.
I feel like the tide is definitely turning with the public now. I see fewer lockdownista comments on social media now and the MSM are slowly starting to cotton on. It’s finally happening. As I commented below in a reply to another post, I refuse to believe that people are rioting in London purely because they feel so strongly about the death of one man 4000 miles away. People are bored and restless of being locked up for so long, unable to do anything or see anyone in any meaningful way. The last 12 weeks (ffs has it been that long already?!) have been a pressure cooker, heated up by the hot weather, the indefiniteness of the restrictions giving a perpetual and unbearable sense of entrapment, and the MSM stoking the fire with fear whenever it can. Young people seem to make up most of the riots and I imagine that a lot of them can probably sense that their future has been totally trashed, and are now rioting because they feel like they have nothing else to live for. I refuse to engage in violence or rioting but I totally understand if some young people feel like this.
But, it seems that the more the public come round and wake up to this enormous disaster, the more the government double down on it. They are total clowns. I am speechless but at the same time, I am so angry and have so much to say about this monumental cock-up. I get the impression that they are just panicking now and trying desperately to save face. It is pathetic and utterly, utterly cruel. The evidence against this ruinous policy is so obvious that it would be funny were it not so deeply damaging. The scrapping of the plan to return all primary school children to school by summer is what has really made me angry today. I am not a parent myself but I read comments and anecdotes online about the harm this is doing to children – how they are being denied the innocence and freedom of youth, how they are missing their valuable routines, how they are unable to see their friends properly and have any sort of social development, how they have become shells of their former selves. These people are our future and mark my words, they will not forget what has been done to them.
It is scandalous that there are humans alive in a western democracy in the 21st century who are willing to inflict this level of harm upon so many people for so little justification, in order to save their own careers. That is something that I just have not been able to come to terms with during this crisis. In a way, it’s an interesting insight into human nature and perhaps even psychopathy/sociopathy. My God, there will be a reckoning after this. The law of unintended consequences is tightening its grip on our nation, silently but surely. It will take months if not years for us to finally feel it but when we do, there will be justice for the monsters who have done this to us.
Yes indeed. We can each play our part by trying to nudge our fellow citizens in the direction of being a bit less trusting of what they are told, and more rational.
Do it. Do it.
I wish it were only to ‘save their careers’ but you don’t exhibit utterly cruel (with you there) behaviour – which will backfire politically – if they thought you’d be depending on the ballot box in the future. I think this is a power grab (or about to be one). The Tories have lost a lot of their main stream support and the left (from which I am now officially lapsed), despite their lockdown zealotry, would never vote Tory. They must know they have lost the confidence of a sizeable majority and each measure they take makes that worse. I read somewhere (could have been here) that the military were mounting road blocks in Wales and turning cars back. Pretty soon we’ll have a state of emergency. And only yesterday I was saying I felt it in my bones that the tide was turning. Not so much now.
‘…if you thought you’d be depending…’ With everyone who says this forum badly needs an edit button.
But I did see this piece on the BBC this morning. Hancock and that swivel eyed green loon Caroline Lucas urging people not to go to the beach because of the (manufactured) second spike that it may, may not, could cause. Not once were they questioned about the possibility of a second spike due to the gatherings of thousands of people across our cities in the name of BLM.Utterly shameful
Poppy, I’ve said before that you would make the most wonderful stateswoman. That is increasingly evident. But even if you choose to take a different path, I hope that the politics of the future will have people like you at the helm, with genuine insight and integrity.
I too am so pleased that Toby has decided to update every day. Once again the news today has left me angry, frustrated and feeling completely helpless to change anything. I watch in disbelieve as the government continues to trash our basic rights to live a full and active life whilst it threatens individuals and small and struggling businesses with the most dire consequences if they, or we, fail to comply with increasingly absurd legislation. Today we have also heard that schools won’t be returning until September ‘at the earliest’.
Of all of the crimes committed in the name of stopping the virus this must be the greatest. Young children, not able to hold each other, hug and play normally. Older children, like my son in year 7, denied an education he has spent 8 years of his young life working hard to achieve. Education is reduced to a transaction – no music, no drama, no interaction with others, no sport. A year when he should be spreading his wings and developing his independence stuck at home in front of a screen trying to remain motivated and increasingly constrained by my inability to help. It is a crime.
I also fear that today’s announcement makes it clear that ‘social distancing’ is here to stay for the forseeable future. Why give up getting primary children to school before summer break if there was any plan to reduce social distancing guidelines that would enable more to attend? I suspect there are no such plans and that ‘social distancing’ will remain throughout summer and into the autumn until the much anticipated ‘second wave; next winter. Hence Hancock’s ‘at the earliest’ because the planning assumption will be that schools will need to work out how to get smaller numbers of children back whilst home schooling continues for others. It is a crime and won’t change until enough of us make it clear that we do not accept this imposition and denial of a normal functioning life for our young people, and for us. Unfortunately, I see no sign the the majority of people are yet in that place.
My anger and frustration is because I just don’t know what to do to change it. I’ve written to my MP and had the standard Conservative Central Office response. I’ve tried twice more and to date no further reply. There is nothing, none, not even a tiny bit of official opposition, and, apart from a squeak from Robert Halfon, no sign of a break in the Tory ranks. There are few critical pieces in reputable mainstream newspapers and magazines, otherwise they too are largely silent. This a scandal, a completely unnecessary denial of education to millions of young people and a frightening dystopian education for a few thousand. Why the bloody hell aren’t there headlines demanding Williamson’s resignation and the immediate and unconditional re-opening of our schools? Where are The Times, The Telegraph? I just don’t get it.
Yes it’s insane.
I think the tide is beginning to turn, but we need to try and plug away at it. The government followed what they perceive public opinion is. Gradually more and more people will realise the error that has been made, and we must help them see this error.
I really hope that the tide is beginning to turn, part of me feels that it is and I agree, we do need to keep plugging away at it.
I share your anger and desperation completely. Husband wrote in very direct (he is from Yorkshire!) terms to CCHQ last week. The Telegraph is bubbling over with anger – see the comments on Allison Pearson’s article:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/national-scandal-children-will-soon-able-go-thorpe-park-not/
And the headline in tomorrow’s paper is:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/09/school-age-children-likely-hit-lightning-die-coronavirus-oxbridge/
And, incidentally, uf you look at the mortality risk at the other end if life’s span, at ninety plus, when the Grim Reaper us almost certainly fingering his scythe anyway, it is one in FIFTY-FIVE.
And why can’t children go to school AND to Thorpe Park?
And the zoos, they are in desperate need of visitors too. Every day that this continues more and more problems are brought to light. Here in my market town one of our stores will not now be reopening which is a damned shame, they had worked hard to modernise the building when the new owners took over introducing new stock manufactured in England, giving a lifeline to small industry in rural areas.
I posted an article somewhere here where Historic Royal Palaces are considering redundancies as they’ve lost a lot of income due to the lockdown.
I hope they’re blaming the lockdown and not the virus. That’s the only way the message will start to sink in to some skulls.
I feel exactly the same, reading it in black and white makes me feel sick and powerless like you. Why won’t teachers stand up for the rights of children? Why won’t anyone? My daughter has been at home alone 5/6 days a week since the beginning, I don’t think she can take much more. Everything has stopped, no music, no riding, no drama club, nothing but entirely non interactive e learning. I don’t know how she’s doing it. Why it’s safe for me to work but not teachers I just don’t understand, with so little evidence that children are at risk or pose a risk why must they be so marginalised? I wrote to my mp, he feels I am completely wrong and supports continued closure and impossible to implement distancing measures in schools. He doesn’t have children and being a Labour man doesn’t care about the poor.
“ Why won’t teachers stand up for the rights of children? ”
Easy. The unions are all left wing zealots with the only goal of opposing the conservative government. Most teachers are also raving lefties.
Off work getting paid.
If the public sector workers were restricted to no/reduced pay this would have been over yonks ago
Yes, I fear you’re right. Both our neighbours are teachers at my daughters school, she can see them sunbathing from her desk….
That can’t be right. I have a friend who is a teacher and she tells me they’ve been hard at it and need their summer holidays. I’m not joking. That’s what she said.
She’s full of shit and must be challenged.
The situation is untenable.
I spent a day exchanging texts with her. Got nowhere.
I think it’s all or nothing.
It’s not unusual for the conscientious to carry the skivers.
I agree, that threatening a pay cut would probably help them think more creatively.
The unions are infiltrated at the highest level.
That’s why theyre acting in this manner.
What kind of union would actively STOP their members from working?
One whose workers are paid for not working?
It’s being used as a political weapon by the Left, Boris is a coward and too weak to stand up to them, that applies to BLM too. This is the most disasterous government ever.
Something has been bugging me I know people poo hoo conspiracies but right at the start of this farce my niece who lives in Portugal told me her childrens schools wouldn’t reopen until September. I thought it was a bit drastic particularly as no one supposedly knew that much about the virus at the time. Now we seem to be following that path. Should I remove my tin foil hat?
No!
Keep it, they’ll be collector’s items soon.
The Telegraph has just started working on it. Not seen the TImes. Damned paywalls!
There’s been a lot of discussion about the poor quality code in Ferguson’s model, but the epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski pointed out that Ferguson hadn’t really used it. He’d come up with his 510,000 deaths based on 80% of the population being infected with a 1% IFR. Back of a fag packet stuff really. Ferguson probably ran his model a dozen times as well and got an average figure somewhere near this, then split the difference. Trebles all round and a knighthood when the dust has settled.
He claims to have saved 3.1 million deaths when in reality he’s caused countless thousands of unnecessary deaths and unimaginable suffering, as the fallout is only just beginning.
The government won’t survive this. Tory voters don’t vote for a donkey with a blue rosette. We’re not like the other lot. We’ll abstain, drift further right maybe, and I’m fine with letting in a Labour government now. It’d be worse for sure, but I’m past caring. The supine nature of our people disgusts me.
Tory voters don’t vote for a donkey with a blue rosette.
Really?
Did you watch his performance during the election campaign? He made no attempt to hide the fact that he’s a lightweight, lying buffoon.
The fundamental problem one would’ve thought is that science consists of hypothesis and experimentation to find evidence to support or disprove the hypothesis – these models appear to be generating hypotheses, but don’t on their own provide any evidence.
Having briefly worked in academia developing software, and interacting with people who wrote similar models (though for group behavioural experiments), I know they certainly have value in trying to tease apart variables which contribute to a result. The theory goes that if you can produce a model which reflects the reality of something which has happened, then you have one possible explanation for the underlying mechanisms which resulted in an outcome. Clearly this is useful where a constructed experiment would be impractical or unethical.
Even ignoring the fact that the specific implemention of the model (as opposed to the algorithm/maths underlying it) is clearly useless, the covid-sim results seem to be being taken as factual fortune telling, rather than being used to understand the spread of disease. A model which doesn’t reflect reality has value, it helps to rule things out, unfortunately ego doesn’t allow some to accept that their model “doesn’t work”, which appear to be the case here given the history of this model not matching with real world outcomes. If you accept the model outputs are valid, they would appear to have quite effectively demonstrated how diseases do not spread, which is of value to inform other scientists, but not for the purposes of prediction.
I dunno. How about we just stick to facts?
This isn’t art. It’s science. (Supposedly).
The facts? Had we acted like Germany or Denmark, we could have prevented approximately 33,000 deaths. Both countries have a mortality rate 500/M LESS than the UK (66M population). These are not the best-performing countries either.
I don’t doubt it.
Data is data and modelling is modelling. I’m getting sick of people conflating the two.
I model for a living (and play epidemiology too) but in data I trust. It’s hard to refute the enormous disparity in mortality rates across countries. We had the same information as all the others (except Spain and Italy). I’ve not tried to predict lives saved, but lives we could have saved is straightforward.
Sadly I think you must be a rare example. Or maybe a fairly common example and the world’s governments just pick particularly terrible practitioners of your vocation to advise them. I don’t get it.
Do you think they know what you’re saying, the Imperial people, and they’re just arse-covering, or do you think they genuinely think they’re heroes?
There is a general frustration in the epidemiology community that the country did not act sooner. Perhaps some bold headline death numbers helped focus the non-scientific politicians. Germany has a PhD scientist as chancellor who will have understood the gravity of the situation early. We have Boris and the Cheltenham Festival.
Yeah but apparently even with that Chancellor, they ignored their public health and emergency planning department and locked down anyway. Doesn’t matter how intelligent people are when politics is in play.
In fact, more intelligent they are, the worse it can be (Cummings).
Sage NEVER advised lockdown.read the minutes they are publicly available.please don’t rewrite history
Surely the question at to if a death is merely with or actually from this virus makes this data quite unreliable. We have no comparable data for other viruses or variants of corona virus.
All cause mortality is more reliable and seems to show that in Germany and some other countries there has been no significant excess mortality as this virus has spread through the population.
“in data I trust”
There’s your problem. You’re not taking into account the incoherent processes that created that neat table of figures. The changes in the way deaths are certified; the way the number of confirmed cases tracks the number of tests. And many more egregious errors and distortions.
I think this should give you a clue as to where you’re going wrong:
https://swprs.org/rate-of-positive-covid19-tests/
Are you still sure that the doubling time of ‘confirmed cases’ is real?
Speaking as someone who has spent years managing teams and departments to performance metrics, I can honestly say that it’s as much about managing the metrics as it is about managing the performance of the people. Now, this isn’t the same as data, but in an imperfect world, where there are variables you can control (e.g. testing volume) and variables you can’t (e.g. spread of the virus), the same principle applies.
While there is some truth in the idea that numbers will always tell you the truth, it’s also true that you can spin several different stories from the same set of numbers, depending on what story you want to tell.
If it’s not clear, I pretty much agree with you.
I am sure that on March 14th cases and deaths were doubling in the UK every three days, and that there was no statistical difference between this rate and the rate in all other countries rebased to the same point in their epidemic. Robust conclusions are insensitive to assumptions. No data is clean, but the possibility that EVERY country had data that was not reliable, possibly in multiple ways, does not change the robustness of that inference. There is no hindsight here I posted that prediction when I did it.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10218321640526983&set=a.2504062275485
You obviously didn’t look at the article I pointed you to. The graphs showing cases as a percentage of number of tests covers Match 14th. And guess what? No doubling every three days. The number of tests may have been increasing exponentially, however, and that’s where you’re going wrong. And yes, this phenomenon would have been common to various degrees in all countries – it was a new disease and a new test being rolled out.
I don’t know why you can’t see it.
Modellers and epidemiologists don’t seem to understand the concept of variables.
I think we should have got the Met Office onto this last March. They might have done a better job.
I still don’t see at all where lockdown has had an effect on the rate of growth of this disease. Please point it out. If that’s not where you’d expect to see a change then please let me know what other data would show lockdown? The rate of change of this disease is described by an exponential decrease in the exponent, it was never exponential (and this was obvious by early April, but also visible in Wuhan data.)
I really can’t see a lockdown effect on the attached graph – should I be able to?
It’s possible that social distancing/hygiene have suppressed the disease, but if that’s the case we should have seen big bounces from the beaches and from protests, we haven’t yet.
As the disease declines, I suggest very little we have done has impacted it; we didn’t need to shut down the economy. All other things being equal, if opening shops/schools/churches/sports doesn’t cause the epidemic to restart, closing them wouldn’t have done anything.
So djaustin you have a time machine and have gone back into the past and then tracked an alternative timeline where we “acted like Germany and Denmark”….or did you just make this up? According to you ethnicity, age profile, hygiene culture, family culture, housing conditions, international contacts and a host of other factors are of no relevance to Covid death rates…only timing of full lockdowns is.
Why couldn’t we just act like Sweden? Then we’d have saved lives, not completely destroyed our economy, not scared people witless and not prevented people seeking or receiving medical treatment for other serious and life-threatening conditions. But maybe you don’t care about people with those other life threatening conditions?
Anyway it’s a good job we didn’t put in place an early lockdown like Belgium – whose death rate is 200/M MORE than ours.
Wow I didn’t realise it was that bad there!
The MSM have completely failed to cover the crisis in Belgium.
The comments about the damage being caused by Government action and the teaching establishment to the well-being of children are so true, and quite heartbreaking. Just one example: a young mother told me today of her little boy who has had difficulty socialising at school, but who had just got settled in, when the schools were shut. Since then he has relapsed into bed wetting and has developed a twitch; he is obviously at severe risk of being permanently psychologically damaged. To then see this latest stuff from Neil Ferguson, and its enthusiastic parroting by the BBC, is unbelievably depressing. One point about his stuff. It is not science, which is the application of reason and observation to discover objective truths about the physical world. His models describe an alternative world. So it is speculation at best. In any decent society, his stuff would be derided.
There is a simpler non-model driven counterfactual.
The UK and Spain have a death rate of about 600/M, Sweden about 450/M, Denmark and Germany about 100/M, Finland and Norway about 50/M. The population of EU is about 550M. If we’d all been the UK then that would be about 330,000 deaths EU wide. If we all been Germany then that’s 55,000 deaths, and if we’d managed to be Finland and Norway we would have 27,500 deaths.
Hence failing to act like the most prudent countries has failed to prevent between 275,000 to 300,000 deaths.
For context, the average all cause annual death toll in the EU is over 5 million, so if we take half that to compare with supposed corona deaths, we are looking at 2.5 million. And most people would say the EU is a very, very safe place to live ordinarily.
But the calculation you are doing is worthless without the cost side being estimated to weigh against it, and there can be no realistic doubt that the cost both in lost lives and in economic misery of EU-wide lockdown would dramatically outweigh any gains, and would most likely mean that the cost per life year saved would probably struggle to get much less than an order of magnitude higher than what is ordinarily spent on saving lives.
If only we could personally surcharge each and every advocate of lockdown.
I think the economic costs of following Germany and Denmark will speak for themselves too. We in the UK have the worst of all worlds. A three- to ten-fold higher QALY for a pandemic is probably in the right ballpark. But that’s why pandemics are the biggest (and most ignored) global threats.
Sorry, I know it’s late but I don’t follow?
The NHS, well NICE, values an intervention at £30k per life year gained. If we assumed that the 30,000 odd deaths could have been prevented in the U.K. would have had an extra three years of life, that’s about a billion pounds. That’s based on failure to act.
The fact is we did act (just not as well as others). We don’t know what would have been, but conservatively, given only about 6% have had the infection, if hers immunity is achieved at only 24%, then we might have saved 3x the 40,000 current deaths. That’s about 10 billion. The cost of the lockdown will be about 10 times this. Hence we’ve spent about 10x more per life year than we would for normal treatments. If it’s 70% for herd immunity, then it’s three times what we normally pay. Not quite so bad.
Pandemics are a bit special. The normal rules do not apply.
dj,
At the risk of being rude, I think that your analysis is based upon the most fragile and twisted logic that I have ever seen. Clearly, you are trying to justify your support of the worldwide lockdown efforts and their presumed (by you) effect.
I suggest that you concentrate your efforts on actual, factual statistics of deaths occurred which are now available from ONS, Euromomo, Oxford CEBM and in most other countries worldwide which, now that this virus outbreak in Europe is over, are showing the reality of what has happened. The predictive modelling or pure conjecture such as yours above have now been rendered worthless.
There are analysts out there who have analysed just the actual data and have mostly refrained from making predictions, guesses or crystal ball gazing, for example,
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com
Cheers, Bob
I have analysed the ONS data in depth on all-cause mortality. I have also reviewed the euromomo data. My point is simple, if all countries had achieved the same death rates as Germany and Denmark (which are double Finland and Norway), then there would be fewer deaths. The data shows that it is possible to achieve lower deaths rates than the UK have achieved. Even if deaths are very poorly accounted for in the UK – the magnitude of difference (SIX times), cannot be accounted for by any reasonable data quality explanation.
Hence the counterfactual is data driven, not a model-based inference. The debate as to why the UK has not achieved a comparable death rate is a different matter. But six times is pretty risible.
Sorry djaustin I am probably being dense but I am unsure what case you’re making here, and my doubts have been reinforced as others replying to you seem to understand different things from it than I do.
Would you mind awfully trying to it into different words, and spell it out for a real simpleton? It seems like a very interesting angle and I really want to make sure I have grasped it.
Again, you seem to be blindly trusting the “data” without any consideration as to whether countries have been deliberately inflating or under-estimating their figures. Naive at best. Some might think dishonest.
Italy has admitted they manipulated their statistics and we know the UK has too so it seems pretty pointless to try and interpret the statistics globally using the same methods for every country doesn’t it?
The mortality is corroborated by the 63,000 excess deaths recorded in the UK to week 22. In some other countries (the ones with low reported COVID death rates, coincidently), excess mortality has not registered at all. You don’t need blind trust, just a body count.
Yet again, looking at “data” as though it is clean, clinical and uniform. If your 63,000 excess deaths have been caused by a variety of factors but a ‘Covid’ certification has actively been encouraged for most of them, you have no clue as to the true nature of the disease. If deliberate policies have caused a sudden ramping up of deaths e.g. exporting infected hospital patients into care-homes while simultaneously stopping attempting to keep old people alive, you’re still being misled as to the true nature of the disease. And you’re not even considering co-morbidities, or thinking of it in sophisticated terms like QALYs as opposed to a uniform ‘death’ figure.
The tail-end of a not-very dangerous epidemic could look exactly like the start of a dangerous epidemic if you don’t look past the raw “data” to the factors that have contributed to its creation. I find it very worrying that people with your very limited vision and abilities are probably sitting on the SAGE committee.
Perhaps there is another explanation for why those 85+ in the UK have seen an increase in per capita mortality of three times the normal range (data from 2010-2019), but those in other countries have largely seen NO increase? Do you have an explanation? I have not said anything about cause, only a robust observation from all-cause mortality data. There are likely to be multifactorial reasons, but other countries have provided a counterfactual that it is possible to limit mortality in the most vulnerable population and we have not. Those are the facts. The debate should be on the reasons for this discrepancy, not its existence.
How about the UK was very good at keeping people at death’s door alive? Better and more keenly than other countries, in fact. Suddenly losing that ability due to a deliberate policy would cause a peak in ‘deaths’ (perhaps ‘releases might be more appropriate). A simplistic view would say “UK Covid policy very bad!”, but it might not be true at all.
The reasons are well understood (have been rehearsed on here so many times), will be confirmed by public enquiry and will result in public liability lawsuits costing the taxpayers hundreds, if not thousands, of millions of pounds.
‘David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, said that covid-19 did not explain the high number of deaths taking place in the community.
At a briefing hosted by the Science Media Centre on 12 May he explained that, over the past five weeks, care homes and other community settings had had to deal with a “staggering burden” of 30 000 more deaths than would normally be expected, as patients were moved out of hospitals that were anticipating high demand for beds.
Of those 30 000, only 10 000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis, “the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back . . . this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”
He added that many of these deaths would be among people “who may well have lived longer if they had managed to get to hospital.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931
This is flawed logic. It provides a monocausal explanation for the spread of a virus. The spread of a virus is a complex phenomenon to which many, many long- and short-term factors contribute (social, economic, political, biological, and so on). Your single-cause view sees its spread as a function of government competence/malevolence. How does the propogation of monocausal explanations help us better to understand how to prepare for, and respond to pandemics?
One of the problems within social science is that datasets are taken at face value. Are you confident that the definition of a ‘death from Covid-19’ in every country in the world is comparable?
I don’t need to. One look at the excess mortality for over 85’s from euromomo shows the same pattern. Norway has no excess mortality in this age group. German regions a very small increase, and the UK has the largest increase since records began. I would not question the quality of the recorded number of deaths. COVID deaths, perhaps, but not absolute body count. Up to Week 22 (May 29) 63,000 more people had died in England and Wales compared to the previous 10 years. Yes in other countries with “reported” low COVID mortality, there were no more. Very strong coincidence?
So why does Belgium with its full early lockdown have the worst Covid-19 death rate in the world? Why is Sweden’s less than ours. Why was only Northern Italy badly affected but not Southern Italy, since lockdowns were introduced in Northern Italy before Southern Italy? You might think you’re making sense but you’re not. Why is Greece so untouched by the crisis?
Your concept of comparing countries is flawed. There is only one factor which makes the difference in mortalities in Europe. If your elderly population is protected, you have less deaths. This has nothing to do with a raging pandemic in the community in those below 70 years. Your selection of countries and apply them to the UK is highly selective and subjective as you have chosen lockdown countries with low deaths due to having elderly protected. You could have chosen Belarus, a real non-lockdown country. If UK had followed the “wisdom” of Belarus how many thousands of lives would have been saved? As you can see this is a futile exercise. Randomly picking countries to compare make no sense at all. In fact, meaningless.
The comparison is valid, the point is “If your elderly population is protected, you have less deaths”. Hence had we in the UK and Sweden acted to achieve this aim, then I do not disagree – the fact is we did not and look at how we have performed. I don’t believe in exceptionalism. I do believe that there is evidence that other countries have achieved mortality figures six times lower then the UK and four and half times lower then Sweden. Comparing Sweden with its neighbors does not seem so unreasonable, surely? Sweden is currently NINE times higher than Norway and Finland. Any medical intervention of that magnitude would normally be called a miracle cure!
We did a great deal worse than not protecting the elderly and infirm, largely as a consequence of incompetent modelling:
‘Figures from the national NHS operational dashboard, seen by HSJ, show that 40.9 per cent of NHS general acute beds were unoccupied as of the weekend — 37,500 of the total 91,600 relevant beds recorded in the data. That is 4,500 more than the 33,000 the NHS said had been freed up on 27 March, and nearly four times the normal amount of free acute beds at this time of year.’
‘The clearout follows a huge ramping up of discharges from hospital in recent weeks in preparation for the covid-19 surge, with funding rules and checks scrapped, new facilities opened, and staff told to focus on discharge, change their thresholds, and be more directive about patients leaving hospital. The number of patients who have spent 21 days or more in hospital — so called “super stranded patients” — has reduced by 40 per cent, one source said.
There has also been a sharp drop off in numbers admitted for non-coronavirus care, sparking fears among senior clinicians about the harm being done as people fail to get treatment, and widespread suspensions of planned operations.’
https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/nhs-hospitals-have-four-times-more-empty-beds-than-normal/7027392.article
Britain’s excess deaths derived from a panicked and incompetent response to an illusory emergency.
Don’t disagree at all comparing countries how they dealt with the elderly.
That’s the whole difference in the outcome. Why Norway better than Sweden? If you vacuum clean Sweden of nurses and pay them three times more salary than in Sweden and replace them with badly paid, untrained, semiliterate care home staff in Stockholm,in care home double the size than Norway, you are bound to have problems,(including the fatal error of stopping visits to care homes only on the 1st April)
I agree. Given we know the main body of infection has always been amongst the elderly in hospitals/care homes, one of the best – perhap the best – comparative frameworks is using the data concerning them.
Yes – djaustin’s argument is typical of the approach of people like Ferguson to ‘science’!
What about different genetics, different definitions of ‘covid’linked’ deaths, different lifestyles, different age-profiles etc? Your comment is simplistic in the extreme.
Ah, the dreaded variables!
djaustin makes a valid point. If the virus was not allowed to reach the vulnerable we would not have the excess deaths that we have seen. It’s likely that the lockdowns increased the excess deaths further.
Initially the objective was not to eradicate the virus, simply to keep it manageable but that now seems to be the aim. All because some countries managed to virtually eradicate the virus and keep deaths minimal.
This might be a reasonable goal if the virus was far more deadly than it actually is. But it isn’t and the efforts being put into eradicating this virus are wholly disproportionate. We could probably put the same effort into stopping people dying from flu but nobody has ever considered it a worthwhile exercise. In fact you’d probably be considered crazy for even suggesting it.
So why now? Why this particular virus? I’d wager if the world had acted in the exact same way as it has for a round of flu we would be seeing virtually the same effects, i.e. exponential growth of infection, spikes in measured death, panic measures and increase in excess deaths.
We knew who the vulnerable were back in February. We made them more vulnerable, thanks to Noddy Pantsdown’s amazing model.
Thank you Toby. If I may post this paragraph from New Zealander Jeremy Harris, concerning the lockdowns around the world thanks to academics:
“It is the economic damage caused, and the resultant deaths that will come from it, which is why people like myself and others will do our best to ensure your professional culpability, and those of Dr. Wiles, Dr. Hendry, et al, is brought into full light, after the public has calmed down from their current state of hyper-‘rationality’ and cult of safetyism. Because when they realise how benign this virus is, when compared to the deaths that will come from the secondary and tertiary effects, which people like yourself seem completely unable to analyse, they will be angry. Very angry. While academics in the past have paid no professional price for their gargantuan failures, this time it will be different. We are already planning the books, books that will shine a light on bumbling academics like never before. A working title: A Perfect Storm of Stupid: How the ‘Experts’ Panicked New Zealand and the World.”
I’m sure many of the readers have seen this article before, but here’s the link:
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/06/05/jeremy-harris-please-just-stop/
You’re right, these people truly hold us in contempt.
Here’s a perverse development in Israel. They are scaling back the easing of lockup due to a ‘spike’ in cases, as reported here and elsewhere:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-israel/israel-stops-easing-covid-19-restrictions-after-spike-in-new-cases-idUKKBN23F1T2
However, have a look at the Wikipedia article for Wuhan flu in Israel, scroll down to the graphs at the bottom of the article and compare ‘New Cases per Day’ with ‘Tests per Day’. Am I missing something here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Israel
Certain morons at the WHO are now trying to backtrack on their admission that asymptomatic transmission is very rare. They are trying to cite models which imply that it is common. Models are no substitute for actual data. And Kerkhove said that the actual data finds very few such cases in which an asymptomatic individual transmits the disease. If they try to overwrite real data with modelled speculation for the purpose of keeping the hype up then I can fully suport any country stopping supplying the WHO with their share of its funding.
Source?
Very good article from Ron Paul. Concludes – ‘We have a tradition of separation of church and state in the United States for good reason. The merger of state and church invites oppression and corruption. We need to adopt this same approach to medicine and the state. We now see how this merger has produced the same kind of widespread tyranny and corruption.’
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/ron-paul-covid-19-shows-why-we-need-separation-medicine-and-state
In response to people suggesting here that it would be nice to be able to move to somewhere free of the lockdown-worshipping bedwetters, I commented down thread that about 20 years ago I had some involvement with people (libertarians, mostly American) wanting to do something like that – to get together and pick a US state to move to in sufficient numbers that they could sway the governance of the state in favour of their libertarian ideals. I’ve not had much contact with libertarians recently so I don’t know how it’s gone for them, although I do recall they settled on New Hampshire and went through with the idea once they’d reached a critical mass of people committed to the project. A bit of searching brings up the following (vaguely resurfacing now in my distant memories):
The Free State Project
Not suggesting it as a plausible solution to the current problems, but I thought some people here might find it interesting.
I was hoping there would be something on that site that would indicate their attitude to the coronapanic, but nothing direct. Though the fact that they do say they are going ahead with their festival on June 22-28, which suggests a suitable lack of concern:
PorcFest
(their symbol is a porcupine – don’t tread on me but a bit cuddlier than a rattler, I suppose)
I like this, in the FAQs (and I’m not in the least surprised by it, remembering the folk involve early on):
What about guns at PorcFest? What about them? PorcFest is a gun-friendly environment. Anyone carrying is expected to behave in a safe manner. Gun safety rules will be posted onsite.
Awww, I wanna move to the Granite State tomorrow !
I watched about half an hour, the rest tomorrow.
People need to consider the reality of what is going on today, displayed in microcosm right here yesterday when criticisers of BLM, speaking only evident truths and questioning sanctimonious dishonesty, were accused of writing “racism”, with the clear hope that their opinions could be excluded from even this tiny forum:
“Statements of fact and opinion that were entirely within the bounds of reasonable conversation just last Sunday, suddenly, a week later, were enough to get you fired from your job. And a number of people were fired.
…
In Vancouver, a men’s basketball coach was fired for liking a tweet that questioned Black Lives Matter. Meanwhile, a player on the LA Galaxy — that’s the professional soccer team in Los Angeles — was fired because his wife said something critical online. Not him, he didn’t do it. His wife. It doesn’t matter. They canned the player anyway.
Imagine being a high school student right now. High school students who refuse to show affirmative support for Black Lives Matter on their Instagram accounts were shunned by their friends. Journalists who asked too many questions about the group were fired or silenced. Again, not an exaggeration.
Now, you’d think people in the media would resent this; presumably, some do. But almost everybody stayed quiet about it. They were too afraid, and some applauded.
The New York Times ran an op-ed demanding that people disown their own families if their families failed to support Black Lives Matter enthusiastically enough. “Tell your relatives, tell your friends,” the author wrote .”You will not be visiting or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives through protest or financial contributions.”
Got that? Sorry, mom. I know you’re old and alone and miss your grandchildren. But we are shunning you until you send more money to Black Lives Matter.”
This is what the bigger picture is of the accusations made here yesterday by “cruella” and by “concrete68”, and the howling down of Farage earlier.
Tucker Carlson: Black Lives Matter is now a powerful political party and has nothing to do with black lives
The LA Galaxy player’s wife didn’t even write it in English, she wrote it in Ukrainian.
If course its nothing to do with BLM they are being used by their new white masters, the Left. Actually it would be quite amusing if it wasn’t so serious.
This is not ‘the left’. I am, or was, of ‘the left’. This is fascism writ large which, when I was at school, was of the right. I think it’s more useful to drop ‘left’ and ‘right’ when looking at these issues. It’s anti-libertarian (and I mean liberty in its true sense) and thought control. It is tyrannical and authoritarian. So is the lockdown. It crusades against free thinking and genuine debate. It is hysteria brought on, I believe, by the suspension of human rights accompanying this lockdown. The same hysteria came about during the cultural revolution in China, which also got out of hand. And at its most basic it is bullying, plain and simple.. Bullying because they love it. What this lockdown has done is release the inner Nazi in those who up to now would have been reluctant to show their true colours for fear of triggering the dissent of common decency. At the moment common decency is hard to find. As is common sense. Lockdown took common sense away from us. It was our daemon and without it we have become automatons.
I hear what you are saying, and for certain there are good people on the left on this as there are bad people on the right (as far as I can tell from their occasional other posts, of the two most outspoken willing accomplices here the other day, cruella and concrete68, one seemed to be of the political right and the other of the left, broadly).
But nevertheless this is a movement of the left, explicitly marxist, and it is mostly pushed by factions within the parties of the left – Democrats in the US and Labour here.
Those here who are of the left need to rethink, imo. The modern political left is not the ideology you thought it was, whether or not it used to be.
Imo, lockdown, like BLM, was a result of our losing touch with common sense, not the cause.
Precisely, that is why I won’t be identified as someone on the left anymore. I believed (and still do) in public services where they are deemed beneficial but I am aware of the neanderthal leanings of state monopolies. I believe in the welfare state because I think we should look after those who are most in need, but I don’t endorse it being abused. The original concept of communism as a foil against tyranny, poverty and oppression would have appealed to me if I lived in the ghettos of St. Petersburg but like every ‘good’ idea it got corrupted by the loudest voices and the biggest bullies. For me that is the problem, there are too many people (far too many) who think that control over others should be the driving force. I believed in the (old) left’s ideals of fair play but I’m done with the lot of them. People need their food, shelter and warmth – and a little love. And that’s been my driving force all my life, for everyone. I’m done with ideology. Faith, hope and charity (love) and the greatest of these is love. (And I’m not religious.)
Your school lied to you, as it did to all of us.
Fascism in Italy was typified by dictatorship, extensive state control of industry and information. Same as any communist dictatorship.
Fascism used in the more modern meaning of “like the Nazis” was also a far left ideology. Nazi is literally short for “national socialist” and the Nazi party manifesto (such that it was), consisted mostly of standard leftist political pledges. Of course it rapidly stopped being a political party and became a dystopian dictatorship, complete with ethnic social exclusions and firings (check), violence on the streets dished out by supporters of the ideology (check), concentration camps/gulags (not there yet thank god), tearing down statues (check, the Nazis destroyed any art or statues they found subversive e.g. works by Jews, depicting nudity etc).
The idea that Nazis/fascists are “far right” is the same sort of precise inversion of the truth that Orwell wrote about extensively in 1984. Indeed what would a “far right” society even look like? The opposite of a far left society presumably – i.e. an anarcho-capitalist one. The closest thing found to a far right society in recent centuries would probably be the Wild West.
If you are going to stick to the inherently very limited one-dimensional left/right scale then you are correct that the German Nazis were pretty left-wing in some senses (but not all and that’s the problem with the limits of the 1d system, which inherently conflates progressive/conservative with libertarian/authoritarian and collectivist/capitalist).
Probably the closest to a far right (conservative) dictatorship would be Franco’s Spain, and that was a direct response to the kind of out of control leftist zealotry we are starting to see in the US and UK. I doubt it could happen here, but might in the US. Our authorities probably no longer have the strength to win a civil war and if tshtf here we will probably face a full French Revolutionary Year Zero catastrophe.
It’s better to use a 2d system that has two axes, but even then you don’t get a clear answer to where the Nazis were, because they were progressive in some areas and conservative in others, collectivist in some areas and capitalist in others. In the end, mostly they were authoritarian and nationalist, but neither of those is necessarily right or left wing.
I concede your point Pandemrix. But that’s why I’ve never seen a satisfactory distinction between fascism and communism. Maybe we were taught that fascism was on the ‘right’ since the Soviets fought with the Allies against Hitler and were perceived as the ‘left’. But for me it just provides another illustration of how useless the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are. Like your example of the Wild West as a ‘far right’ society. Does that mean that by the time it was policed it lost that appellation?
Jordan Peterson says that the difference between communists and fascists is that communists are international socialists and fascists are national socialists. Hitler wanted Germany (and much of what the Nazis considered greater Germany, e.g. Poland) for the Germans alone with all other nationalities excluded, killed or enslaved- blood and soil. The communists wanted (and still want) the whole word to be under the same socialist rule – we are not Russian, German or British but comrades. No one is excluded, in principle, as long as you go along with the socialist utopian dream wherein everyone is absolute equal and no one has more than anyone else. Jordon Peterson thinks this is why communism isn’t demonised in many quarters as nazism is: the communists have ostensibly good intentions for everyone in the world: a brotherhood of man. Nazis had a clear in group and clear out groups: they discriminated. All the same, Hitler thought of himself as a socialist, just a national socialist – one who put his own nation’s folk first. That’s how I understood it, anyway.
They’re heading for a huge fall.You have to keep faith on that, because if you don’t we’re all screwed
Why are they not protesting these 18 black lives: https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime – 18 dead in 24 hours in Chicago? Maybe because they do not follow the narrative?
Coming soon to a city near you when the Police are defunded.
Sometimes I cannot tell if I am mad and the rest of the world sane or I am sane and the erst of the world gone mad. All very surreal at the moment.
Or questioning this on the Black Lives Matter website:
https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
One bit towards the bottom and I have no idea what it means except families are to end and everyone is to be queer unless you can spin if differently and which I would like you to actually mention and explain please:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”
You should read ‘The Madness of Crowds’ by Douglas Murray; I’m half way through: he dissects the lunatic, mind bending ,frankly batty and dangerous convolutions of intersectionality, heteronormative ,queer and patriarchy and privilege,along with all the rest of the belligerent b…..ks that these nutters wish to foist on us.
Clearly black lives only matter to these people when their deaths can be used to advance their political agenda. That’s always been obvious, from the fact that they picked on Floyd’s death and deaths at the hands of police instead of all the far greater numbers of the deaths of back Americans caused by other black Americans.
But this is all “racism” of course.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
It’s possible other cultures have other views on the ideal way to organise society and bring up children. I prefer “our” way, and believe it has brought happiness and prosperity, but I don’t like to preach to other cultures what to do. The problem comes when those different cultures are in the same country. You have to find a way to coexist, or go your separate ways. Sometimes that’s achieved easily, when the matters are trivial or very private, sometimes it is much harder, when the matters pertain to things like requirements on bringing up children. It also depends on what they mean by “disrupt the requirement”. I tend to think that parents ought to be able to decide for themselves how to bring their children up, but there are obvious limits to this, for example the need to send your children to school, feed them, look after them, keep them healthy. Absent fathers have often been pointed at as a problem, so if encouragement to fathers NOT to be absent is “disrupted” that might be seen as working against what many think of as a good thing, for fathers to be less absent. To an extent different cultures and communities in the UK already have different approaches to family life – I think the issue comes when those approaches are SO different as to cause friction, especially when those approaches may be seen as contributing to other social problems like higher crime rates, poverty etc. I tend to think that’s what countries are for – people grow up with a general consensus on the fundamentals, and different countries/cultures do things how they see fit for better or worse.
In some ways the thing I found more worrying was this:
“Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
I haven’t read enough to understand what is meant by “eradicating” and “white” and “supremacy”. Certainly if you were to interpret “supremacy” as economic and political power and success, then it’s true that different ethnic/cultural groups are variously over and under represented in different areas (not just black vs “white” but other groups, who are generally not mentioned). Do they mean that outcomes need to exactly reflect the ethnic mix of the general population, in every area? In any country where the majority are of one group or another, that group will usually dominate just by sheer weight of numbers, and MAY be over-represented because of discrimination or simple tribalism, though if you look at, for example, educational and economic success in the UK the picture is mixed and not simply dominated by successful whites and less successful non-whites.
The problem is they interpret “systemic racism” as “the system”. Therefore they can only reach one knee-jerk conclusion – destroy the system.
This is what I mean when I say- What do they want? How do we destroy racism? What are their aims? What does BLM actually achieve for black people?
Because they don’t know themselves. Their intellectual worldview is about as nuanced as the act of hammering nails into wood. White wood.
Article on muzzle buying in the Telegraph. Thankfully so far the comments are very anti mask wearing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/style/6-things-consider-buying-face-mask/
I refuse to mask up until Boris and his pathetic government practises what they preach!
They won’t of course! We will not be wearing them anyway.
I’m tempted to take a trip on Scotrail dolled up in a used drying up cloth! Don’t care for the thought but it just might show how ridiculous all this is.
Have considered a lot of options, including balaclava, lone ranger mask and gimp mask but have settled on a pair of fecking woman’s knickers.
I’m going for masks with anti-lockdown graphics on them.
Plus size I trust!
One made from a single layer of j-cloth should make the point nicely.
People might consider this funny, or ironic, or just plain daft, but the fact that this is on the fashion page of a national newspaper strikes me as horrifyingly sinister. Compliance writ large, resistance neutered, a sickening genuflection to the emperor with no clothes – but let’s all pretend he’s not naked, otherwise the mob will jump on us.
And how long will the fashion industry jump on the bandwagon to the point of flogging their version for hundreds of pounds to fleece the gullible?
They already have… it won’t last.
I agree. Very sinister.
Mango’s homologated floral print masks promise 90% filtration efficiency and 60% breathability over 10 washes, for £12.99. Others, like Aeibe’s Liberty print design, feature an in-built filter pocket which you can keep refilling, for £45. Dai’s simple style is made from blue shirt cotton material backed with a silver-fibre antibacterial lining and is priced at £12.
45 quid!!!! For a bloody face mask? That’s a week’s food and wine bill for me!
Homologated? Get over yourself! And 90% of what?!
Antibacterial – is that against a VIRUS, or so you don’t succumb to your own real bacteria?
I’m lucky not to need to use public transport but if I did, I think a very fine georgette scarf should satisfy the official requirement and make a relevant statement – for a lot less than £45.
I’ve just put a govt petition to get public loos re-opened. Amazed there didn’t seem to be one already.
Will let you know when and if it goes live.
Please post the link when it goes live, I’ll sign it and share it around.
Excellent Annie thank you!
Good news
Will definitely sign
Here:
I’ve made a petition – will you sign it?
Click this link to sign the petition:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/326125/sponsors/new?token=SrdsqHNpJGLKarGRXhCG
My petition:
Force the re-opening of all public lavatories
Ensure that lavatories are available to the public wherever they go.
We all need to use the lavatory at times. Young children, pregnant women, and people suffering from a variety of medical conditions need to use them frequently. Public urination and defecation are not only disgusting but also constitute a serious health hazard. It is utterly appalling that a modern state should reduce its citizens to this extremity.
Click this link to sign the petition:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/326125/sponsors/new?token=SrdsqHNpJGLKarGRXhCG
Have just signed!
Well done Annie. If your petition is thrown out I suggest you redo it from BLM that will definitely get through.
Blocked Loos Matter?
Done – thanks Annie
Just signed it.
Signed! My bladder will be most thankful if this goes ahead.
Clicked the link once and it says its being vetted by the petitions committee (after getting the initial 5 signatures) – “try again in a few days”.
I’ll let you know when and if it gets to the next stage.
Glad to see that the re-open zoos petition is going for debate and may already have forced some actiin.
Public defecation is something we’ve known to be a hazard since the Victorian era, how foul that in their virtue signalling quest to trap an untamable but thankfully usually mild respiratory disease our authorities would take steps to let cholera flourish again.
Signed Annie
I enjoyed this:
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/06/10/jodie-simpson-letter-to-my-mp/
It’s an excellent indictment of the government’s failings and how we are heading towards the abyss. Unfortunately her MP either won’t reply or fob her off with weasel words.
Great article. We should all get it out to other discussion boards.
Rather awkward response from Kern County Public Health officials to a question about Dr Erickson’s press conference.
https://youtu.be/xhLjm_EfKfI
I think as I become increasingly exasperated, that moral courage is what is lacking in governance: all we see are knee jerk reactions, stable door closing, an abject reluctance to acknowledge that mistakes have been made and the frankly cowardly evasions which now give the recent BLM eruptions a get-out-of-gaol-free card.
We have to endure hypocritical double standards in the MSM, nonsensical mask donning diktats and an utterly craven refusal to deal with the social and economic damage now ruining the lives of millions.
All I hear now is the mantra- “the R number will rise again if we lift the lockdown too soon”; this from those whose lives have, in the main, not been ravaged.
As to wearing scarves, as encouraged up here by She Who Must Be Obeyed: WTF!
I won’t do it!
And on another of my many gripes:
When will the tooth fairy, in the form of our local practice, materialise?!
Apologies for being boring, but this is another health cost in the making.
Have you not seen the measures that have to be applied and the ridiculous dance you have to do to get dental treatment once they reopen? Someone posted the new regs on here somewhere. ‘Orwellian’ has now become an inadequate cliche. I asked yesterday if this was satire. Apparently not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lsv793gH4I
Shocking; how can dental services possibly survive this nonsense?
Let’s face it, they’ve operated without constraints throughout the regular flu epidemics and are specially trained to get up close and personal with potentially hazardous oral cavities!
Dentists deserve better than this, and so do we, the patients who wish to keep our teeth.
According to the paper OK Diario, an association of families of Covid victims has filed a complaint in the Hague against Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez. Among its criticisms of the government’s response it cites the number of deaths in care homes due to government policy. By the way, in the Aragon region, it’s estimated that 85% of alleged Covid deaths occurred in care homes. This is claimed as a scoop by the paper and it remains to be confirmed if it’s true or not. if so, this is a very significant move.
Yes there seems to have been a global wide massacre of our elderly. By the way I’m not joking!
That’s one our own government will be watching with sweaty palms, if it looks like going anywhere…
In other news, NHS waiting lists could hit 10,000,000 by the end of the year
Coronavirus: NHS waiting list ‘could hit 10 million this year’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52984742
Meanwhile, according to yesterday’s stats, there are 6,348 people in hospital with Covid, with 446 admitted yesterday.
What is going on? Even accepting that there was a need to recalibrate the whole of the service to deal with the situation at the beginning (and I’m not completely sure I do accept that) why does everything else continue to be mothballed so that hospitals can deal with fewer than 6-and-a-half thousand patients with a single condition?
Every person that clapped for the NHS every Thursday and called them heroes should state why they clapped.
This can’t be called healthcare if you cannot access it in a good time.
I did not clap on any Thursday! Obviously some brave NHS staff on the front line but our much vaunted health service really is very run-of-the-mill on an international comparison basis and certainly not the envy of the world now if it ever was.
I don’t know why you call them brave for doing their job?
I didn’t clap. Frankly I don’t think they’re as good as they think they are. The older I get the less enamoured of them I become I’ve been misdiagnosed 3 times, 2 could have proved fatal, and I won’t bore you with the dozen or more tales of my experiences with them.
Bella, I’m exactly the same.I don’t clap. Misdiagnosed twice also. First time I spent 4 weeks in hospital and 8 months recovering!
It would be fascinating to see a breakdown of the likely waiting list categories (e.g. how many hip or knee replacements, how many cancer diagnostic tests) – and what about dentist waiting lists too? Certainly there will be much discomfort, pain, worry and trauma!
Yes they say 10m hospital procedures by end of year, one of which will be mine as its not life threatening just irritating the sight in my left eye is getting quite bad now.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52986783
I couldn’t give less of a s**t about visiting a zoo or a drive-in cinema right now – I just want to be able to have a normal physical relationship with my own boyfriend without it being illegal.
I’m starting to think that the virus has affected Johnson’s brain now. Why is it that they are opening all these attractions but still outlawing normal human physical contact? What the hell is wrong with our government?
I think it’s right that zoos should open Poppy, not least because many are actively involved in conservation of increasingly rare species and education of the public.
They also provide outdoor leisure-normally!- and a chance for visitors to appreciate animals, albeit in captivity.
Secondly, for some time I’ve suspected that Boris is showing symptoms of post-viral brain fog.
He seems to have lost direction and to be reacting on the hoof, rather than directing and leading.
This is not to excuse in any way, the shambolic governance,or lack of, which we now endure, merely an observation which I think has some validity.
My niece is also missing her boyfriend; she’s about your age, and they’ve been separated as you have, for many weeks now.
“ Secondly, for some time I’ve suspected that Boris is showing symptoms of post-viral brain fog.”
I’m quite certain this is true. Whatever your opinion of Boris pre-Covid and whether you liked his style or not, he’s been a shadow of his former self whenever he’s appeared since his “recovery”. And, though I didn’t like the direction of travel before he went into the hospital, at least it felt like there was direction.
I think two things have happened – his own experience has left him with an inflated view of the danger of the virus to everyone and at the same time, he’s operating at about 60% capacity because of the after effects.
I don’t say this to excuse. He shouldn’t be running the show if he’s not up to the job.
I’m sure his personal experience didn’t help, but the biggest blunder had already occurred by then, a blunder supported at least publicly by the rest of the cabinet and all of the opposition.
Before all this he did certain things quite well, and one would have expected or hoped for him to show more mettle on this issue, but I think he’s been found out. Not that any of the other candidates on either side would necessarily have done any better.
Boris was playing tennis the other day. He’s a shirker.
Yes, and he is a man being controlled by ‘dark forces’ – and they aren’t all in his own head!
Was Boris ever up to the job I wonder, people are starting blame his poor judgement on WuHuFlu but perhaps that’s just an excuse. When he was Mayor of London I learned he had half dozen deputy mayors which begs the question what on earth was HE doing?
Well, managing through good people is one of the better ways to manage.
I’m conscious that I’m coming across as some kind of apologist this morning. I’m not that and I’m not defending. I think I understand the psychology behind the decision making that’s brought us all to where we are today, and I think I have an inkling of why everything is proving so bloody stubborn right now, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s justified or justifiable, just that it’s explicable. You can explain the motives behind a mass murderer, it doesn’t mean you aren’t horrified by what he did.
As to whether he was ever up to the job, I don’t know. I had hopes before this all happened. I can’t imagine anything he could do at this point to restore those hopes.
The problem is that the “Conservative” Party seemingly no longer has its supposedly trademark ruthlessness in evicting leaders that have become a liability. Myself, I’ve got my doubts of that characterisation having recollections of Tory PMs going back to Heath, but it was certainly the media cliche about them.
The “men in grey suits” are long overdue, though it could be that there just isn’t anyone competent available to step up.
Who else is there?
Well indeed. Therein lies the measure of the pickle we find ourselves in.
I agree with you, absolutely zoos should open, but if they are to go back to normal then everything else should as well, including basic human contact.
Quite agree Poppy.
Suggest you start seeing your boyfriend
Unfortunately it is not that simple as we live 100 miles away from one another and he is in a complicated family situation which I won’t go into. Bottom line is I sadly can’t see him until nanny state says so.
Remember the Nuremberg principle, “I was just following orders” is not a valid defence in law as established at the Nuremberg war trials.
If you know a law or order is wrong morally or legally it is OK to break that law as a free thinking human.
The main 2 in this situation are these:
6. The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
7. Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle 6 is a crime under international law.
And all this is a crime against humanity and your human rights under the ECHR (not part of the EU) and the UN Charter of Human Rights both of which the UK is signatory to.
Do it Poppy, visit your boyfriend. I’ve been training with some select members of our club for 3 weeks now and our grannies haven’t dropped down dead.
My elder son is in exactly the same position, and neither he nor his girlfriend of four years is prepared to break the law. It is a basic human right to be able to chose your friends and partners, and be able to interact with them in whichever way you mutually agree. It is also a basic human right in a supposedly civilised, first world democracy, to have access to lavatories in public places, and have your children educated to the standard deemed appropriate for the benefit of wider society. Yet, in addition to the things you mention, betting shops are also opening and pubs will open before schools. Government is ‘listening’ to business, or so it would seem, but failing in its basics duties to individual citizens.
Here’s exactly the problem both with the decision to lockdown in the first place and with the complexity of managing the release of lockdown.
When you say “under the law, you may do nothing except subsist”, you shut down millions of options and combinations of options. Every single person, group and institution will have a list with different priorities of what’s most important next.
Poppy is desperate to spend time being intimate with her boyfriend, whereas I am desperate to get some time to myself, away from my wife and kids (no criticism of my wife and kids, but 3 months constantly in anyone’s company is a bit much), preferably in the pub.
There is no way to get the answer right, other than just lifting every single one of the restrictions all at the same time, otherwise you will always be favoring one set of priorities over another.
And while you’re trying to maintain the fiction that there was a good reason to shut everything down in the first place and while you’re dealing with a terrified public and a self-righteous political opposition and media, you can’t just lift all of the restrictions at the same time.unless, of course, you have the courage to do it regardless.
Apparently my iPad autocorrect is set to American English. Sorry for the spelling.
It’s been 3 months how long are we expected to live like this I live on my own I have a cafe cant work apart from a bit of takeaway I’m bored stiff and totally depressed with it all.
We need a proper debate with our leaders so they can answer sensible question.all I here is we are following the science stay safe R number blah blah blah
The question I want to ask is ,your only way out is a vaccine or treatment (it’s on their recovery road map) therefore do you expect us to live like this for poss ibly years and years maybe for ever? please answer yes or no please.
No.
This will pass and it will all blow over and after a period of time, even the zealots will be looking at this saying “what the hell have we done?”
I’m not defending it, please don’t misunderstand me. It was a huge miscalculation and the lockdowns were probably the worst and most destructive decisions made in the history of civilization by any government – and our government has ended up making it even worse than most.
As I say, the best decision at this point would be to flick the switch in the other direction and then try to pick up the pieces as best we can. I just trying to demonstrate that that isn’t going to be what happens and why.
It is depressing. I’m depressed by it. I hate it. I’m desperate for it to end.
To be single must be especially difficult at this time. Many of us are fortunate enough to have someone to share it with but even so we are desperate for a social life, a pub a restaurant to even mix with strangers!! Tomorrow we’re escaping our lockdown and going to lunch with friends, we’ll eat drink and laugh!
I live alone too Nic with no family in the area. It’s very hard. I too have wondered how long we are supposed to go on like this, no human contact, no hugs, no touch. Frankly if they are waiting for an elusive vaccine which I wouldn’t have anyway, I’d rather check out now. What we have granted to us is not living, it’s existing, and I can’t take much more of it either.
Exactly – unless you have the courage to do what’s right and necessary in the face of temporary possible unpopularity.
That courage is precisely what has been lacking from the start, in the failure to stand up for herd immunity, and it is yet another ;link between the coronapanic and the BLM problem. Tucker Carlson highlighted the shameful moral cowardice of the response to BLM yesterday.
‘Courage’ and ‘government’ are not part of the same semantic field.
Remember ‘Yes Minister’? Hacker’s ultimate dread was having his decisions described as ‘brave’.
If I was in your position no one would stop me. Unless you are a cat you only have one life and life is for living.
I think Boris is mentally ill he certainly seems a different person to the old Boris.
I think it’s good that zoos can open. I’m not a lover of zoos, animals should have their freedom just as much as us and we all now know what it’s like being cooped up for any length of time! To be honest I prefer animals to humans – I understand them better. But the alternative would have been to put most of the animals down, and that’s not a good outcome either. I suspect when that was pointed out to Boris he would have sworn very loudly again, as I doubt it had occurred to him.
I don’t think much does occur to him now. I think he’s too easily swayed by everyone else’s agendas and what he is told is public opinion – which probably isn’t. The Civil Service no doubt want to bring him down so they will be telling him things designed to do this. Cummings himself has a different agenda – he was apparently behind the new travelling quarantine nonsense – and we know how much influence he has. Other cabinet members will be biding their time waiting for their moment to bring Boris down. Plus there’s the fact he was apparently very ill, and is no doubt suffering post viral fatigue. And he has a new baby, so little sleep I suspect. None of these are excuses, he isn’t up to the job right now, he’s lost the plot completely, and the likes of Hancock are running amok with stupid schemes. They are all playing politics with our lives. Keeping partners apart who don’t live together can only have been thought up by scientific boffins who have no idea how real people’s emotions work. I’ve been re-watching Yes Prime Minister recently and everything there is so true, such clever writing. You can see easily how Prime Ministers are easily moulded by the Civil Service and don’t really run anything.
I despair, I really do. I’m going to be leaving Britain for good in the autumn and just move out to my summer home abroad full time. It may not be perfect out there, but it’s still better than what will be left here.
I’d rather put some humans down, those who have brought about this chaos rather than our zoo animals. At least going to the zoo brings pleasure to our lives I can’t say the same about this government!
Some are so broken and pathetic, it would be doing them a kindness to put them down.
Government ministers, I mean, animals in zoos.
sorry, NOT animals in zoos.
Just do it iv never followed the stupid rules !
It wouldn’t be illegal if you made it (ostensibly) a business transaction
Alternatively you could set up a small business together – even if it’s only at the planning stage.
I’d welcome input from the medics on this site about this morning’s NHS Confederation report re:
“NHS is running at only 60% capacity because of infection control measures”
and
“exhausted and traumatised staff”.
Is this really the case on the front line?
What about patients that do not get non-coved care? Absolute disgrace.
‘non-covid’
Not my sister’s experience (an anaesthetist) or my mother’s (a GP).
Yep, I’ve an ex-colleague, a critical nurse, who’s been furloughed because her ITU is so quiet and there’s no need for re-deloyment as the whole hospital is like a graveyard.
Work it out.
I’ve woken up (again
) to our brave new world.
The world has gone completely mad.
My country, our country, is being torn down whilst we watch, complain and do nothing.
I have learnt over the last week or so that violence is acceptable when you believe in something, so what are we waiting for?
We’ve destroyed our society and our children’s futures in 3 months, Hitler couldn’t do that in 6 years.
Do our leaders hate us so much?
Is our country that evil?
Certainly our politicians have done many evil things of late (ditto a lot of Lefties). I suspect that it is not because they are inherently evil, just incompetent, ignorant, often sociopathic, and obsessed with their -ologies.
I tend to agree regarding incompetence etc, but I what I find harder to stomach and closer to what one might call “evil” is that I think they know they screwed up and they are covering their backsides now, at least semi-knowingly. Maybe not evil, but a character flaw.
Morning IanE
I respectfully encourage you to read my post again.
My last question wasn’t directed at our leaders, but our country, our society, us. What have we done that we need to be punished so.
And we are complicit.
I think the politicians are unable to admit they have made a catastrophic error and that’s why they have been digging themselves into a deeper hole for which the damage has been greater than the disease.
How people stood back and simply accepted this without question is appalling. As is many people exposing themselves to be lacking in empathy and compassion. How they are also prepared to destroy everything they purport to hold dear is perplexing.
I think Hancock is the exception here. As far as I can tell, he’s enjoying every minute of this and is absolutely determined to make sure it goes on for as long as possible.
That’s why he has to go and face punishment for his actions. I’m not in favour of capital punishment but perhaps an exception can be made for him. An eye for an eye…..
There is no point singling out one figure to make disapproving comments on a fringe website, if the BLM campaigners did that, well, we would be asking “what is BLM?”
The time is now, the time to make our voices heard.
Confront every action of this nationwide oppression with the contempt that it deserves.
Agree, the only way out of this is mass protest.
I still maintain some hope that the pubs re-opening will turn the tide.
As time passes we are led to believe that every decision made becomes more correct based on having more knowledge than before. So eventually we will reach a point where every decision made is unquestionably correct.
We have reached a similar stage with democracy for example. We are to believe that there is nothing better and the ballot box is the best (only?) way to enact change. Even if all we’re really doing is voting for varying degrees of the same thing.
Honestly I don’t think the lockdownists hav done Hitler levels of damage yet. This disruption without cause has been milder than the damage of world war 2, while there is economic chaos the factories still stand (albeit idle). If lockdown is ended fast, and the population leanrs never to tolerate authoritarianims again THEN we can recover from the lockdown-2020 syndrome in under a decade, I suspect. Not that the fact that the harm of lockdown has been less than the harm of world war 2 stopped those enthusiastic for the lockdown from copying the ordinary officials who aided war crimes by saying they were only following orders.
What an incredibly depressing post. Yesterday I listened to James Delingpole’s interview with Dolores Cahill which cheered me up like anything. There was I thinking that good sense must soon prevail and the scientists who have got us into this mess will slink away and change their names and then I discover that Neil Ferguson and his ridiculous “team” still have credibility. And despite nearly 2000 comments on Friday’s post, there is not a thing poor Toby Young and other lockdown sceptics can do about it. I’m turning off the computer and going into the garden.
I know what you mean. But here’s a hopeful headline from today’s Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/09/school-age-children-likely-hit-lightning-die-coronavirus-oxbridge/
A huge headline saying that children are more likely to be hit by lightning than die from coronavirus, and that scientists say younger people should continue with their lives. It’s a start.
Good to see that in the telegraph, but on lockdownsceptics that got mentioned weeks ago already.
An innocent plague came to the planet Zog. The king of Zog was afraid. He feared that he might be killed by the plague. He consulted his favorite soothsayer Neil, a member of the Ferguson clan, and chief prophet of the Imperial Really-just-a-wild-guess Model.
Neil looked into his crystal balls and said to the king, “Sire, the plague will be terrible and swift! We must lockdown the population – it is the only way you will be safe!”
The king asked, “How many will die?”. Neil replied, “Sire, there are 100 million and 40 Zogans. It’s really-just-a-wild-guess, but I believe that without lockdown 100 million will die!”
The king was afraid – how would he survive with only 40 servants? The king ordered lockdown.
Three months later lockdown was lifted. The king again consulted Neil: “How many died?” Neil replied, “Sire, there were only 40 deaths! My strategy saved 100 million Zogan lives!” The king was pleased. He rewarded Neil with a knighthood and eternal funding for his really-just-a-wild-guess model.
In the next plague, Neil made – really just a wild guess – that maybe 510 thousand Zogans would die. 40 thousand died, so Neil claimed to have saved 470 thousand Zogans.
And in the next plague Neil made – really just a wild guess – that maybe 66 million Zogans would die. One million died, so he claimed to have saved 65 million zogan lives.
… of course, it could just be that Neil’s really-just-a-wild-guesses were all completely wrong to begin with … but shhh! – don’t tell the king that! If Neil got it right he couldn’t claim to have saved anyone could he? … And if he did that he wouldn’t have a knighthood … and his Imperial Really-just-a-wild-guess Model would be defunded. And that would be so terrible!
https://www.archivesofpathology.org/doi/pdf/10.5858/arpa.2020-0255-LE
This is a very interesting paper discussing asymptomatic spread (rare) and also the extraordinary “Interestingly, most people are not effective at spreading COVID-19. A recent study found that the distribution of individual R0 values was highly over-dispersed, with 80% of infections being caused by ~9% of cases”
There is also a discussion about reluctance of patients admitting slight symptoms in order to protect themselves for being classified as reckless. An interesting discussion about fever, as this is one of the cornerstones in the definition of Covid-19 symptoms. Fever in many US states is over 38 whilst in Wuhan it is over 37.5. This sole criteria could send a patient to an asymptomatic or a symptomatic group. Well worth read.
That’s fascinating. That implies that the lockdown measures may actually have increased the spread. If people are refusing to admit they have symptoms, because they don’t want to suffer the shame of being seen not to have followed the rules and so are behaving as “normal”, then they’re more likely (even though the paper suggests still not very likely) to be out spreading the virus than they would be if times were normal and they had just put themselves to bed.
I’m of the opinion that lockdowns exacerbated the problem and additionally caused at least some of the excess deaths we see.
Thanks for this – your posts of some of the more interesting scientific papers is the main reason I keep visiting this forum.
Interesting paper, thanks! If most spread is symptomatic and most symptomatic people have a slight fever of some sort this means you can achieve a lot with just thermal cameras at airports if you’re somewhere like New Zealand rather than having to break out the oropharyngeal swabs for everyone.
As anyone who is scientifically literate knows, the outcome of a computer model is not evidence; it is nothing more than the mathematically inevitable result of the assumptions. For Ferguson et al to pretend otherwise is the height of dishonesty and the media’s collusion speaks volumes.
A study of the lives saved and lost as a result of the lockdowns in the US estimated that so far the measures have saved 800, 000 life years and costs 1.5million life years. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life
This is the kind of calculation that governments should have taken before deciding to implement such draconian measures.
Neil and his buddies are just covering their arse and showing they are still missing the point because their new report still doesn’t balance economic factors or how many people have died unnecessarily by their advice.
An interesting comparison is Greece with Italy and Spain as regards Covid-19. Despite of being a poorer country and having been infected at the same time, Greece had a much better outcome with lower total cases and a very low death rate compared to Italy and Spain. Why? All three countries had lockdown. What have been the factors? Smokers? I think Greece smoke more than anybody in Europe. Air pollution? Athens pretty bad. Different care of elderly? I don’t know much about the exact difference of structure of care but obviously the low death rate in Greece must be that the elderly was protected. But why fewer total cases in Greece?
One of the startling factors in both Italy and Spain was the amount of infection of health care staff almost 15-20% I think in both countries. This could in fact been one of the main reasons that there was further spread in the society, and increasing the total number of cases in the population compared to Greece.
And the deadly spread among elderly, both of those already in hospitals and those in care homes, was caused by a gigantic nosocomial spread in hospitals in Spain and Italy. In fact, hospitals were the main reason for the mass deaths of elderly. And the community spread could have been sustained by this spread rather than returning travelers etc.
Possibly in Greece, following years of economic tragedy (mostly courtesy of the Euro), there is a lower population of older folk; I imagine there is also less obesity due to financial constraints.
They also travelled less to Northern Italy. Couldn’t afford skiing holidays there.
No. The average life of expectancy is the same and a tiny bit higher in the UK. There are a lot of elderly in Greece smoking and on a Mediterranean diet.
I wonder how much healthier using fat in liquid form versus solid form is, ie olive oil vs margerine or butter. I’d wager this makes a big contribution to the healthier Mediterranean diet.
lol, you been sleeping mate? fat is good for you, margarine, olive oil not good but dripping, butter, lard it’s the very essence of life.
Agree totally.
Looking at losing a bit of weight I’ve dodged on the past few months sitting around, done lots of research and good quality saturated fats are good for you.
The study from years ago saying it wasn’t and that governments used to base their “recommended diets” on has been thoroughly debunked many times with the main reason being the researchers ignored the 17 country’s data that did not fit their preconceptions.
Some vitamins are fat soluble so no saturated fat in the diet your body cannot use them – Vitamin D is one if I recall correctly. Also the lungs are coated din a protective layer which is basically 100% cholesterol made from dietary saturated fat and there is a theory that there is so much asthma and other lung problems now due to the low fat diets people follow especially in childhood when the body needs all this to get the protections into place as you grow up.
What I’m asking is whether it’s healthier in liquid form as opposed to solid form. Olive oil is liquid at room temperature whereas butter is solid. I’m wondering if it makes a difference in how our bodies process it.
Butter has a range of saturated and unsaturated fats. Interestingly the proportion and types of fats vary depending on the diet of the cow. So when the new grass comes through and many cows housed inside during the winter are turned out, the composition of the milk changes. IMHO the best milk/butter/cream is from those cows who are allowed to eat a wide variety of feed stuffs and are allowed out on pasture (& that includes good quality mixed hay during the winter months that may be supplemented with concentrates).
Do not use trans, hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats.
Use butter, lard, dripping, chicken with skin on, pork crackling, goose and duck fat, coconut oil, coconut milk, full fat creams, olive oil (but not for fryng), the white fat running through a ribeye (lab tests years ago could not tell the difference between this and olive oil) etc, full fat unsterilised un homogenised milk and so on.
Do not use vegetable oil except in very small amounts, it has to do with the omega 3/6/9 ratios. Vegetable oil has exactly the ratio that causes inflammation that leads to illnesses and heart attacks and this has been detected in 100% of heart attack patients regardless of their blood cholesterol levels.
The “good fats” have different omega 3/6/9 ratios and these are actually beneficial and your body can use them properly.
Read about the link between saturated fat diet and curing fatty liver disease, very interesting as is the Greek and French paradoxes.
I have seen a suggestion in Brussels Times that old people and those with existing terminal conditions, especially in more rural areas of Greece, were not registered as C19 deaths, but as ‘old age/cancer’ etc; unlike in UK perhaps where every death seems to be from the virus.
This would explain the ‘lower death rate’.
But not the absence of excess mortality. Why have those 85+ been three times more likely to die this year in April than previous years, but not in Greece? there is only so much misreporting possible, and it is not credible to explain such a huge disparity any other way. All-cause mortality statistics are the gold standard and they are not subject to bias. How people die may be, not if they died.
Correct. I usually live half the year in Greece. If they could register a death as something other than Covid, they did. Whereas the U.K. went in totally the opposite way and pretty much register everything possible as Covid.
I am Greek and live in Greece. I believe that the key difference is that we imposed a lockdown very early. The deaths were below ten and the cases below one hundred. Also our lockdown was really strict from the beginning. Care homes are really rare in Greece. Most elderly live alone or with their children. The deaths are stated to be WITH coronavirus, our leading virologist claimed that even death from brain hemorrhage counted in the total deaths. Now we are opening our borders for tourists having a population with low immunity. I predict a mess.
I see that inproportion2 has been updated:
https://dailysceptic.org/2020/06/09/latest-news-52/#comments
Looking at one of the charts, if i interpret it correctly, the total weekly deaths are now below the 1999/2000 population adjusted numbers.
If I remember right, this also happened in Germany towards the end of the “pandemic” (will try and find the link, I think it’s on swiss propaganda research somewhere), deaths dropped to below the “normal” and have stayed there as all covid-19 did was to bring forward those who would have died soon anyway – just as has been said all along.
Wrong link – should be this:
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com
Note to self – wear glasses more often
Looking at the graph, if I’m interpreting it correctly, the adjusted 1999/2000 numbers were outpacing this year’s numbers back in late April, and appear now to be similar – presumably wherever the slope of the graph is higher, that’s where the weekly death numbers are higher.
And given the covid death peak was in early April, that’s presumably what we would expect from the effect you mention – covid bringing forward deaths that were going to occur shortly anyway, if it outweighs the murderous impact of the lockdown itself, which is probably something that starts slow and builds up over time.
You don’t say…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52984742
Wake up you fools!
Again another article that should be shouted from the rooftops!
Amazing how completely asleep most of the ‘woke’ are to reality!
What has happened with Richard Horton the Editor of Lancet? He is a well-known China sympathizer and his paper has been awful main stream in fueling the Covid-19 fear and the lockdown mantra. His paper has been heavily influenced by Big Pharma and just recently had to retract bogus papers. Has he suddenly changed side or much more likely opportunistically changed side?
First an article in the Times calling SAGE a government directed group and now jumping on the bandwagon of deaths in our care homes. Look at his latest tweet!
“We don’t need satire. We don’t need humour. We don’t need mockery. We need organisation. We need alternatives. We need rebellion. Against a government that has fostered corruption, collusion, and criminality. A government that has presided over the avoidable deaths of thousands.”
We have an expression in Swedish “sent skall syndaren vakna” translation “ late shall the sinner awaken”
Wow, that’s a change!
Starmer as a golden opportunity now. If he is as intelligent as alleged, he could bring this government down in a short period of time. Jump on the bandwagon of Tory massacre in care homes. Change the school policy completely and opening up now for all. Only Eton and most expensive private schools can afford social distancing absurdities. Jump on Prof Sikora’s scary twitter today” I can honestly say in all of my decades treating cancer I have never been as worried as I am now. The figures are staggering. Patients have been delayed by 11 weeks – cancer spread is inevitable.” Forget about lockdown which anyway was a Tory disaster. Cancer spread? Johnson holocaust of care homes? It’s a win-win for him.
The trouble is, Starmer’s gone too far down the other path. He and his party have enthusiastically supported lockdown since he took over (and Corbyn did before him. Other than complaining about the operational problems and – yes – the care home problem, their only other answer has been to complain that lockdown should have happened sooner and demand that things not be relaxed too quickly. I don’t see how he can credibly change his position now.
Credibility has not hindered many politicians as far as I know
He’s just the flip side of the same establishment coin and will follow his master’s instructions (whoever that is).
Just been reading that Kier Stamer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service in 2009 when 4 cases were sent to him by Sussex Police about Jimmy Saville and he stopped the investigations.
Will have to delve deeper I think.
Guess how deep into the establishment he is?
As I said the other day, because the team behind the withdrawn Lancet article are in the US, likely there will be a subpoena from either the DoJ or FDA (Trump-directed), that will be a fishing expedition. All manner of things might end up in the public domain (emails, memos). Let’s hope!
We call Horton and his ilk opportunists ,or ‘running with thehare and hunting with the hounds’, or, blowin in the wind….
Don’t trust a word of that sentiment – there is an ulterior motive
“ICL should give the authors the benefit of the doubt – maybe Surgisphere just need a couple of months to release their code. ”
Admittedly Ferguson asking Surgisphere to release their code is ironic, but AFAIK that company’s work has been discredited anyway.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/overnights/501238-overnight-health-care-authors-retract-major-covid-19-paper-on
The Trafford Centre Manchester have just announced that when their shops reopen next week, the toilets will be open too. Sense at last! However the rest of the announcement wasn’t good – the usual marks on the floor, distancing etc.
But didn’t Trafford own slaves at one point?
I’ve heard all the canals in the UK are going to be filled in due to how they were built.
We’re going to import labour from Ireland to do the canal filling.
Don’t forget we now have to ban all produce imports from the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean with a view to how they were originally farmed.
A splendid piece by Brendan O’Neill
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/10/this-has-become-a-neo-maoist-war-on-the-past/
I used to think Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 were ridiculously over-the-top dystopias that could never happen in Britain. Boy was I naive in my younger years!
p.s. This is perhaps the most important leaked article that I have looked at today. Hell-on-Earth may not be that far away.
Bother : ‘linked’ of course!
It’s a fine piece by O’Neil, but he himself has been part of the problem in the past. The reason all this seems to people like him to have appeared so suddenly and overwhelmingly is that it has been building up for decades. O’Neil was, I seem to recall, one of the earlier media figures to start to question the political correctness censors, but all too often he slipped back to giving credence to their “racism” and other manipulative “hate speech” charges.
We saw their modus in operation here just yesterday, in a minor form, when commenters were more shocked by written criticism of BLM and the dishonest martyrdom of Floyd than they were by the underlying dishonesty and actual violence of BLM and the shameless media manipulation in their support. All too many (though not all) here were prepared to turn a blind eye to the latter because they found the former too uncomfortable, because they have been indoctrinated over decades to feel that way.
Here it’s a minor matter of making it a little but harder to tell the truth. Out in places less ideologically committed to freedom of speech, such charges routinely result in censorship and banning, and where real identities are used, in real life harassment and even loss of employment. There are certainly a lot of people here who could not write what I have written here without facing a very high risk of losing their jobs if heir identities were disclosed.
Think about that, because while what I have written has been emotive, it has been neither racist nor anything but political opinion.
We live in a society that is politically censored and speech controlled, and you people need to deal with that before it goes much further.
Not nearly as politically censored or speech controlled as 1950s America, where McCarthyism destroyed livelihoods and reputations wholesale. Interestingly, one focus of popular McCarthyism concerned the provision of public health services, particularly vaccination, mental health care services, and fluoridation, all of which were denounced by some to be communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people. Same old, same old conspiracy theorists.
Just shared it on my FB page. I’m now awaiting the backlash!
Brave soul!
There hasn’t been much response, but the few who’ve commented have been in agreement, which was pleasantly surprising
Just to cheer folks up: remember that we have 4 and a half years of the current ‘government’ left to run!
Tbh, that would concern me more if there were an alternative available that would be in any respect any better, and presently I doubt that.
There are plenty. Just not in the the three main parties.
And therefore not going to be in any future Parliament.
Defeatist.
LOL! You prefer not to face up to reality? Myself, i think that just means you get defeated again.
It’s not “defeatist” to point out hard truths. Identifying any problem and the scale of that problem is the necessary first step to dealing with it.
Trying to interpret your motivation for posting this, based on what I’ve seen of your political views I can only assume (please do correct me if I am wrong) you want people to think voting more “Conservative” Party candidates into office will solve our problems. Yet we are living under a “Conservative” Party government with a secure majority, and have experienced the most catastrophic failure of leadership and of moral courage I can remember. And I lived through the Major government. (Blair lacked morality, but not willingness to fight for what he saw as politically worthwhile).
Has there been any indication anywhere within the parliamentary “Conservative” Party of willingness or ability to resist either the lockdown or the BLM plague?
Missed the point by a mile.
I said, “There are plenty [of alternatives who would be better than the current government]. Just not in the the three main parties.”
You were the one who said then they wouldn’t be in any future Parliament! The only reason they wouldn’t be is if we don’t vote for them.
Plainly we need to stop voting for the three main parties.
Ok, fine, but that just confirms that the last thing we want now is another election. It takes significant resources and significant time to set up parties to challenge the incumbents under FPTP. Atm we don’t even have any clear consensus anywhere outside the mainstream around which a substantial party could start to form.
If you want to get those people you mention into Parliament in numbers (and even if I might prefer different ones I’m sure I’d prefer your candidates to the existing ones), you need to start setting up parties now and hope there isn’t another election for at least a year or two. Four years probably isn’t a bad minimum timescale, at that. We don’t even have Euro elections any more to make a quick impact in.
Actually the fact that we face no imminent election seems to me to be one of he few redeeming features of the current situation. Think about the kind of issues our cowardly politicians would be falling over themselves to kowtow to at the moment – coronapanic and antiwhite racist, marxist “antiracism”.
Think about what kind of Commons that would end up with. You could kiss Brexit goodbye for a start.
Four more years of this strikes you as a good thing?
See above, I don’t see any election held any time soon as likely to produce anything better, and most likely in the current climate it will make things much worse.
Replacing the government would certainly be a good thing, but of very limited benefit given the overall stripe of the Commons and even the “Conservative” Party therein. Mostly it would be good if it meant they were seen as being removed because of the lockdown, but atm it’s as likely they would be seen as having been removed because they didn’t make the lockdown soon or hard enough, and didn’t manage it properly, which would be a disaster.
A friend of mine compares this sort of thing to the NHS clappings.
A few police officers in US cities taking the knee, early on, the spontaneous applause of locked-down people in Spain for a genuinely overwhelmed health service. Both quite different from these creepy rituals.
Twitter Censorship – the saga continues
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/06/10/twitter-censorship.aspx
Can be downloaded from https://plandemicvideo.com/ !
The new trick in the scaremongering is the RIF (Rate of Infection Fatalaties). Keep the rate of infection no. low (by not testing much) which means a high RIF. They call it Covid-19 Fatality Rate, cf. The Times today
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/russias-miraculous-coronavirus-death-statistics-face-scepticism-fdmnp97jr
This is pure fiction. Nobody knows the Infection Rate, and nobody will ever know. So it is a sure fire method of scaremongering. In Iceland they tested just under 20% of the population and found 3% thereof had been infected. They concluded that the infection rate was probably twice or even five times higher. If we accept that the infection rate were twice the number, then the IFR in Iceland is 0,0027% i.e. statistically insignificant. So The Times assertion of an IFR in the UK of 14,7% is fake news of the highest order, as the UK stopped the drive to test. Now we know why the government did a U-turn on the matter of testing
https://www.covid.is/data
14.7%
Where are they getting this shit from, seriously?!
Not Simon Dolan’s legal case but another one it seems. Thoughts?
https://www.europereloaded.com/the-uk-coronavirus-act-2020-is-null-and-void/
Agree with their statement. However not clear if it is a court case or a petition. If a court case, when will it go before the courts?
Just a thought: If there are around 6500 hospitalised Covid-19 patients at the moment and the capacity of the Nightingale hospitals was set to be around double that, would it not make sense to simply move ALL hospitalised Covid-19 patients and future hospital cases to the recently mothballed Nightingale sites; staffed with specialised staff (fully PPE equipped) right now? (Older patients with possible co-morbitities may well need other specialised care but given the lower numbers, that must be possible to facilitate by including a number of commandeered private or NHS facilities within the group of Nightingales if needs be.) Then deep clean and reopen ALL remaining NHS hospitals back up for normal procedures. Allow all private hospitals to resume normal operating practices (advise quarantine for foreign patients flying into have private sector operations if you must). Pre-test every inpatient admission for NHS and Private hospitals before they come into Hospital and daily whilst in hospital. Any problems – sent to a nightingale isolation ward immediately. Outpatients can be tested on arrival and tracked to have a follow up test after 3 days. Nevermind getting the schools back to work – get the NHS back to work!
You
d like to think that someone would have thought of this, as its obviously the way forward. If not – why not!In my experience, the best thing to do in situations like we find ourselves in is to try and give those who have put themselves in a cul-de-sac a possible route out whilst still being able to claim that they were not “really” at fault in the first place. After all, the successful General is the one who lets his Enemy leave the field of battle with a degree of honour. We know they screwed up all over the place in this lockdown but the Nightingales were at least a sign of (Army) competence. Let them use those positive assets as a cover for retreating with grace and getting things going again – the press release writes itself!
I agree.
But then after they’ve gracefully retreated, you put them on trial ;oD
Because the NHS staff have enjoyed their status as heroes far, far too much to want to lose it. As soon as the “crisis” is over, the adulation is over. Who would volunteer for that? Not like turkeys voting for Christmas, more like eagles voting to become pigeons.
Yes. This is so obvious to me that it’s why I thought they were building them in the first place! – as covid only hospitals!
That is a very sensible suggestion so it won’t happen.
Ahoy-Hoy everybody,
just wanted to let you know about an interesting interview with one of the most famous Virologists in Germany. You might have heard of him, he is the guy that did the first serious study in Germany to find out how many people are / were actually infected and havent been reported (Heinsberg-Study). Prof. Hendrik Streeck.
Short summary of his main statements:
Some of you might say that this is all common knowledge to us (otherwise we wouldnt be in this forum…), but I find it remarkable that he gave these statements. He is the first scientist that is an official consultant of the government to make such statements. My special friend, our Enlightened Leader Dr. Drosten, has already criticized him in the past, it won´t be long until he crawls out of his hole and complain about this too, I would presume.
Sorry for this being so long again, but I thought it might interest you.
Cheers from Northern Germany
Thanks!
More good stuff from Streeck, thanks. I remember his studies being reported very early on in this, and he seemed then to have his head screwed on right. Still does, apparently.
A friend of mine who has the same opinion of this whole mess as us (he´s a doctor by the way) joked that we should found a Prof. Streeck Fan-Club. ;o)
He called him the David Beckham of Virologists…. ;o) ;o)
Well, according to my wife he is very good looking (Streeck that is), so I guess I take that for granted *sigh*
Well it’s good to have that (good looks, if your wife says so) on our side.
I remember this interview he did in English more than a month ago;
German virologist: Covid-19 is less deadly than we thought
Ausgezeichnet! Long may you reign on Teutberg. ‘subsequently murdered by his own people’ has a contemporary resonance.
It was always inevitable that Imperial would come out with some cobbled together justification for the lockdown now that the disease seems to be diminishing, before the full economic cost is revealed and inquiries are launched. Were they prompted by No. 10?
Oh ffs!
I suppose it’s in the nature of collectivist regimes based on lies to have regular public demonstrations of commitment to Official Truth, so we can only expect more of these kinds of clapping and knee taking abominations.
The only question I suppose is how long before it moves on from people losing their jobs for showing insufficient fervour for these causes to people going to prison for it. And that might not be too long – expect prosecutions for “hate speech” speechcrimes in the pipeline, especially with police officers such as this man rising through the ranks:
George Floyd death: More work needed to tackle racism says Met officer
I suppose at least we’re innovative. Eurasia had the two-minute hate – we were more creative and rather than imitating that, we have a two-minute love instead.
love is hate
It should have said more work needed to tackle stupidity.
Can’t be worse than Cruella Dickhead
Disrupt them, protest.
Shout loudly, ‘WE’VE PROTECTED THE NHS, WE’VE SAVED LIVES. NOW IS THE TIME TO PROTECT THE ECONOMY AND SAVE LIVELIHOODS!’
Ha! Got my Lockdown Sceptics mug today to find a Made in China sticker on the bottom. I found it so childishly funny. LOL
Just posted something on the FT site relating to their article of the bleedin’ obvious regarding Covid risks. I thought that the policy conclusion that I added there might be worth reposting here:
“… However, because we went into this lockdown by “following the science” politics dictates that we will need to get out of it by also “following the science”. Bring forth the mighty R. The fact that the R number was estimated to be above 2 when we locked down but was back to under 1 a week later was quietly released in the Sage minutes 10 days ago (it tends to imply that the figure of “above 2” was wrong from the outset but that is another story). It is still below 1. In a tail of a distribution it will likely never drop below 0.7/0.8 or increase significantly above 1 because the number of new cases is so low (relatively) as to actually make R meaningless. This profile can be seen in most other European countries. So all we need to do is declare that the R is below 1 and has been for 10 weeks. Declare victory. State that – if R creeps significantly above 1 to the extent that we need to lock down again to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed – the original reason for lockdown – (which is statistically almost impossible) then we will do so but otherwise end lockdown now. Faces saved all round and let’s get back to work.
“The Government claimed to be relying on ‘the science’. In practice there is no such a thing. There are competing views from eminent scientists about the nature of the virus, how it is spread and how effective various measures are against it”. – Quote by Roger Bootle
Oh fuck off
Sadly that’s a good way to give your car’s paintwork that ‘distressed’ look.
They wouldn’t dare. I have a reputation.
(Have been expecting a few egged windows though on Thursdays but…. haven’t yet received any)
What about these?
https://www.etsy.com/market/fuck_off_mask
Effing worrying that this is now a style item. Jesus wept
I already have a poster in my upstairs window that I made when I was despairing and bored in the earlier day of lockdown.
It says SAVE THE NCS in big letters with BY KILLING OLD PEOPLE in smaller letter underneath. It is highly, highly amusing to see people stop and squint as they walk past, trying to read the small print. Even more amusing seeing their faces when they realise what the C stands for, and what the point is.
I like the upside down rainbow logo . How about with NHS murderered my Grandma written in it.
I did a ‘rain’ dance and it rained i also did an ‘anti pandemic’ dance and it prevented 3.1 million people from dying. Saturday i’m gonna do a ‘win the lottery’ dance and i’ll 10 million quid richer.
Could you provide the full verse for me for Fridays draw please?
Prof. Pantsdown has modelled the winning number, but he’s made it about 14 digits too long.
I like this website – the emergency nd disaster informations service:
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php
Pandemic? What pandemic?
I first saw this site about 6 weeks ago and it has never had the pandemic or epidemic sign on the UK.
The latest update from the “Swiss Doctor” website has just been published:
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
A must read for the latest facts properly cited and cross referenced. Read it and weep!
After spending all mornin g on the Internet reading about the crazy world we’re inhabiting I’ve decided it’s the governments intention that if the virus doesn’t kill us the remaining will be driven slowly insane.
The UK is likely to be the hardest-hit by Covid-19 among major economies, a leading agency has warned.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52991913
No suggestion that it’s the REACTION to covid-19 that’s caused the problem. Feel free to get on there and comment.
There’s a similar story in Daily Mail but they include this in the headline:
“and it could be even worse if there is a second peak”
Express and mail are always Banging on about a second peak! They are desperate for one .
Aaaargh!
Lockdown, not covid. It’s doing my head in!
Two words the second one Off springs to mind.
Is there anyone influential at all who is thinking of organising a protest march against continued school closures? And if not, then why not? Surely if we don’t protest about this then the nation has truly lost its moral and legal compass and we are all guilty of the unnecessary abuse it is causing our children…..
Imagine if the children themselves were able to organise a protest. That would be a powerful message.
Absolutely!
And all it would take is one little girl, sitting outside the school gates with a hand written sign….
Or maybe Tik Tok clips of children crying whilst burning rainbows.
Singing “Somewhere over the rainbow”
I completely agree I’d be prepared to make a stand
They can all kiss my arse.
Does anybody know if it’s published anywhere the actual science/modelling that has been done RE school closures and the impacts on R rate – I’d be Interested to understand the assumptions made on this decision
It’s just I’m sure I read school closures have a modest impact on the virus
There’s a discussion in the SAGE minutes, before the closures that concludes that they might have. And there’s been a lot of talk about a possible “small” impact on R0 that could be caused by reopening, and that as a result there was a limit to how many measures could be taken at once to reopen. But nothing concrete and scientific, no.
As I say, there’s now plenty of evidence from other countries that reopening schools has no impact at all.
Everything I’ve read are studies from other countries demonstrating that any effect is meaningless, if there is any effect at all. I’m not clear that the government in the UK produced any of their own modelling on the subject. As far as I can tell, then whole conversation has been political drivel, with the government failing to make the case that it was safe and the unions, the opposition and labour-run councils expressing outrage that the government wouldn’t “guarantee” safety.
And then the government caved.
And yesterday, they were forced to cave again, because the “safety guidelines” they produced for the limited primary school reopening made it physically impossible to bring more of the school back on the same terms, in almost every case.
Exactly. They boxed themselves in with the ridiculous 2m rule.
I would be interested to see them as well. My guess is they don’t exist. The government claims to have had a really hard job persuading teachers’ unions and parents to accept even the dystopian school environment to which small children are now being subjected – our local primary school is known as the Stalag Luft in our house, I can hardly bear to look at the playground as we pass.
I excuse the unions nothing – or any of the labour movement which seems to have bought lockdown hysteria lock-stock-and barrel but the above explanation does not wash with me.
The idea of a hapless, incompetent, Tory government at the mercy of public opinion may contain a grain of truth but the real story is in the coup which is taking place in full sight of us all while we’re all agonising about irrelevant R0 numbers, IFR rates, second waves and whether or not we should wear masks. I know I keep banging on about this daily it becomes more obvious.
And Toby, we really should have done more-or-less nothing. It’s a virus, we need to live with it. This lockdown was never about combating a new and deadly disease but it has done a splendid job of trashing everything and nearly everyone we hold dear.
Reading your newsletter this morning I am struck by the fact that you appear to have been inculcated by the same neurosis as the fear-mongers. You say “No one, as far as I’m aware, has ever advocated that governments around the world do nothing in response to the pandemic.” but this is patently wrong and makes no sense. There are many, and moreover doing what has been done as opposed what is done every year by flu sufferers is madness and has been wholly counter productive.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the actions taken have saved one single life, and lots that it has in fact increased the number of deaths from Covid, not counting the many collateral deaths that the measures have caused. The idea that no one advocated doing nothing is wrong – many eminent experts cautioned that lockdown and social distancing was exactly the worst possible thing to do.
The fact of the matter is that had those with symptoms behaved exactly as they would have done with flu, i.e. the vast majority self isolated by going to bed for a few days, with a small number seeking medical treatment, there would have been fewer deaths than we have seen, in particular in care homes where symptomatic patients were sent by the imbeciles running this fiasco.
The fact is that this virus itself has killed vanishingly few healthy people. Up until 17:30, 2nd June the number of deaths in England was 27,045 (NHS) of these only 1,318 did not have a pre-existing condition. Of these fatalities only 3% were below 60 years of age without comorbidity. That is did not have pre-diagnosed conditions, it does not mean that at the time of death such a condition did not exist.
Of the total fatalities 53% were over 80, (and 49.7% over 85) and only 3% of these octogenarian deaths were not suffering from a comorbidity.
Bearing in mind that the life expectancy in the UK is 79.3 for men and 82.9 for women and men are measurably more susceptible than women, one might argue that we are likely to live longer dying with Covid than without. In the latest figures from the ONS rather than the NHS, 69% of fatalities of were over 80, 48% over 85 and 26% over 90.
It is clear that this virus is not a significant threat to healthy people of any age, for anyone under 50 to make any changes in behaviour; masks, social distancing etc., is absurd and counter productive. It has been known for decades that the human immune system benefits from contact with pathogens that over time have been rendered benign, as this one will be in due course as immunity grows. What we are doing at the behest of our Government is actively and specifically undermining our immune systems, making us susceptible to otherwise benign pathogens, the consequence of this may well be descent into a vicious spiral of illness and death.
The data is available, the continuance of ANY social distancing amongst the healthy is risible, dangerous and absurd.
Moreover, these S-D measures to ‘flatten the curve’ may or may not have achieved their aim, although the data does not support that conclusion, but what that policy was not designed to do and has not done, is save lives. It was sold to us on the basis of ‘protecting the NHS’, protection that, as it turned out was not needed. But the result of “flattening the curve” is that the area under the curve is increased and therefore the number of deaths increased. The is not rocket science, by lengthening the life cycle of the epidemic exposure to the virus of the vulnerable is increased resulting in more being killed – by Government policy more than the virus.
While this argument undermines the position of fear mongers, it does not even touch the surface of the real crime in all of this – the collateral deaths that Fergustein’s analysis ignores completely. There are now in excess of 75,000 undiagnosed cancer sufferers in the UK, increasing by over 1,000 per day. Many of these will die as a direct result of the actions championed by frauds and charlatans. The number of collateral deaths, deaths that would not have occurred but for the actions of Government is arguably already higher than those caused by the virus, that it will, when all is said and done by an order of magnitude more is without doubt. Already the UN are predicting a “Famine of Biblical Proportions” resulting from the economic collapse these lockdown policies have caused. Such a famine would inevitably mean the deaths of millions, possibly tens of millions, a vast proportion of whom will be children. The selfish, cowardly, corona phobic sheep, swallowing the propaganda and refusing to accept the data, lobbying to keep lockdown still longer, are guilty of a crime against humanity, it is quite likely that they will be responsible for one of the worst crimes in centuries.
I have one last thing to add. The new Imperial Paper and others are hardly surprising for while they are demonstrably inept they are not stupid. They can see the data, the hear the UNs prognostications and they too know what they have done. They are now trying to get their retaliation in first, trying to deflect the opprobrium, contempt and ridicule, that will surely come their way in the fullness of time.
This is a very nice summary
My thoughts exactly. The only reason that it’s not considered a reasonable option is people looking with hindsight at countries like New Zealand think that virtually zero deaths should have been the goal.
Yes – but one can only wonder what will happen in NZ when they finally open up to the rest of the world!
Presumably NZ will copy the methods of South Korea and Japan rather than scrapping education, cancer and domestic abuse whilst letting the virus run rampant through their health facilities and care homes.
After all, what sort of tin pot state would do that?
You’re not wrong in any particular that I can see and some of the detail you quote I haven’t seen before. I don’t think you’ll find anyone here who disagrees with you – including Toby Young, I would guess. I don’t think the blog post is making the suggestion that lockdown and/or extreme social distancing measures were accepted by all as necessary – it would be a strange volte face if it were. However, since the degree to which this is not in fact an especially dangerous virus was not well understood in March, there weren’t many people that I recall who thought that were making an argument that people should make _absolutely no_ changes at all in behaviour.
Given what we know now, I would certainly agree that doing much more than staying at home when you’re feeling peaky and behaving with common sense is almost certainly necessary.
I think it’s a little harsh on Toby in that regard.
First, there was certainly nobody of any prominence in the UK making an argument for “doing nothing”, though that was my suggestion at the time. I suspect that might have been Wittkowski’s and others’ stance as well, though I don’t think from memory that even he had any great disagreement with minor protective measures.
Second, if “doing nothing” means no social distancing measures at all, then it was irrelevant by the time of the lockdown decision, and en by the time the Imperial College report was released, because people were already starting to do things, more or less voluntarily.
Third, Toby was aiming that point directly at the Ferguson report.
Otherwise, like you, i have little problem with the comment.
“ I think it’s a little harsh on Toby in that regard.”
So do I, which is why I jumped in with an argument, instead of a “good point”.
And then I realised that I couldn’t, hand on heart, say that “nobody” had argued for doing “nothing”, do I wound my neck back in a tiny bit while typing…
Doing nothing was not an option when there had been a total lack of emergency planning for a pandemic. The NHS could hardly cope with a normal severe flu outbreak. So “something” had to be done, to slow the virus’s progress. I think Swedish-style measures would have had virtually the same effect as our full lockdown, without such severe damage to our economy. The most important thing was to try and keep vulnerable people at home, not healthy people.
Well when I say I advocated “doing nothing” I really mean treating it as basically a worse than normal flu, so basically ignoring it as much as possible in day to day life while taking obviously sensible measures that don’t interfere unduly with day to day life, such as setting up extra NHS capacity, reducing access temporarily to care homes and trying to keep the disease out. And imo that was perfectly possible. If a few extra people died that would be fine in order to protect the economy, which is what all our lives and futures ultimately depend upon. Everything simply isn’t about keeping as many people alive for as long as possible.
And there’s no real edvidence to suggest that any more people would actually have died, though perhaps they might have died a little more quickly without the early voluntary social distancing.
I don’t agree at all with the eternal “NHS underfunding” plea. Pretty much every state-funded body in history always is convinced it is grossly under-resourced and under-prioritised, but setting up the NHS to cope easily with occasional pandemics would be in itself irresponsible, wasting resources in most years that are better used elsewhere.
I can quite believe that the money could have been better used in setting up rapidly expandable contingency facilities, but that’s just a matter of competent management, something the NHS like most bloated, publicly funded bodies is famous for not having.
Overall, I think the whole crisis has highlighted the inherent danger in perpetuating the crassly outdated and politically poisonous NHS. If one long term consequence of the deaths inflicted this year to “save the NHS” is the final defeat of the obsessive political worship of that institution in this country, that will be one small gain at least to set against all the misery.
“ setting up the NHS to cope easily with occasional pandemics would be in itself irresponsible, wasting resources in most years that are better used elsewhere.”
I remember reading somewhere, before this madness began, that NHS critical care beds were ‘already’ at 80% capacity and thinking to myself “that sounds about right. Any more would be a waste of resources and any less would risk not being able to deal with a surge”
Of course, the sensible seeming level of precautionary spending always seems higher when it comes from the magic money tree rather than out of the owners’ pockets….
I agree wholeheartedly.
We had a normal flu outbreak throughout the election campaign. Most people didn’t notice.
As I remember it, Wittkowski’s stance was not do nothing but properly protect the vulnerable while letting the rest go about their business as usual. For instance, he advocated paying care home staff large bonuses to stay on site for a couple of months, so they could be properly isolated.
I actually wrote this while slamming my head in the oven as a way of dissipating the rage I feel every day. I am surprised my bleeding knuckles from punching walls were still able to work the keyboard. I rushed it off before I had finished the section from Professor Gupta, who appears to agree with my thesis. I didn’t labour the point but “doing nothing” didn’t include not protecting the vulnerable, I meant nothing that was not normal.
There is an issue that I am prepared to concede to the Government; they were clearly informed that this virus had been deliberately modified. They jumped to the conclusion or were informed, that it was weaponised and as such not merely a SARS virus but one significantly more infectious and lethal. It became obvious that it was neither by mid-April at the latest and at that point any moral person would have owned up, admitted that they had over-reacted but for the best of reasons. They would have been forgiven. Instead this shower in Westminster (on both sides equally) have considered only themselves and their worthless careers, looking for ways to extricate themselves from this mess rather than the country.
Johnson had the opportunity to be a leader or politician, Churchill or Chamberlain, he chose the latter, he chose contempt instead of reverence, hatred over admiration, ignominy instead of esteem, the dole in a few months instead of reverence – more fool him.
Well, you’re among friends. Rage-filled friends with balled fists, fending off a sense of despair. But friends, nonetheless.
Crystal clear. First rate summary. Thanks.
The 1318 figure does not have individual detailed data on BMI (weight) or Vit D status. That would be interesting.
I don’t think anyone did argue for doing NOTHING about the pandemic, what we’ve been suggesting is doing proportionate sensible things which don’t infringe civil liberties, ruin the economy, give busybodies a field day or deny healthcare to everyone who hasn’t got covid. If flu were a brand new virus spreading round the world we would want to try and stop it, futile as that might be, or at least reduce the rate of spread. As flu is not a new virus, though new strains emerge often, we don’t do anything because e had given up before we even started. With covid-19 doing something, something proportionate, makes sense, or did make sense earlier on when the disease hadn’t spread so far as to now be endemic almost everywhere.
People here have rightly drawn attention to the significance of media outlets like the BBC and Daily Mail (interesting that those two are on the same side on this) misleading people (probably intentionally) by reporting costs of the lockdown as “costs of covid”.
So it’s interesting to consider the implications of both Sunak’s choice of words here and Sky’s choice to report it verbatim, albeit not in the headline:
Britain facing hardship ahead, finance minister says
“Britain is facing a period of hardship as the COVID-19 lockdown hits jobs and livelihoods but the government will do everything it can to create new employment, finance minister Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday.
“Are you asking are there going to be severe consequences from this lockdown? Then the answer is yes and I’ve been very clear about that,” he told Sky News. “It is going to have an impact on people’s jobs and their livelihoods. “
He’s coming for Boris. Word on the street is he has already been anointed as Successor In Chief by the Tory lockdown rebels.
Well he’s one of the Guilty Men, but I suppose getting rid of the top Guilty Man is a necessary first step and there seems to be nobody viable outside the cabinet.
Plus he gets to come out smelling of roses when the shit hits the fan.
“I did furlough, and saved the country*!” etc. etc. whilst Boris still running around claiming he saved 500,000 lives, even when the public have all finally realised this is bullshit.
*Even though we are now all bankrupt, yay
Yes he needs to go ASP
Certainly, an asp would be one quite satisfactory way! ;-}
Don’t demean Cleopatra by borrowing her method!
I’d like to see Owen Patterson in charge (of course, he was neutered by Cameron). Though if he ever did get there, I would probably, judging on recent precedent, be disappointed!
You don’t have to be a Tory lockdown rebel to recognize competence.
If he were both competent and had moral courage he would have resigned over the lockdown decision. That is something ministers used to be known to do on occasion, you know – to resign over an issue of importance.
This is the man who had – just a couple of weeks before lockdown – been promoted from nowhere into one of the great offices of state, because he was prepared to surrender power to number 10 in a way that his predecessor had refused to.
On balance, I think he’s the best of the inner cabinet, as it goes, but I wouldn’t heap praise on him for moral rectitude or his willingness to take a stand, no.
I agree, that’s about the size of it for me as well.
In the long run, though, they all must pay the ultimate (political) price, barring some very dramatic recantations, apologies and mea culpas.
Until then, at least, they should be hounded mercilessly, and examples made of them that will make any future politician considering a proposal to impose a lockdown on this country shudder, and say: “not likely – remember what happened to the last lot who did that”.
One can only hope
LOL! Yeah, I admit it’s more in hope than expectation…
But how can this happen when the opposition can’t even see this shambles for what it is?
It has to come from their own (supposedly) side.
What the Guilty Men did should have been anathema to anybody with even a pretence at conservatism, and conservatives should collectively recoil in revulsion from it.
Granted there’s not much sign of it at the moment, but the hope must be that as fear recedes, reason and normal sensibilities will resume control.
I think Keir Starmer can. But he doesn’t care. Far better to let the government hang itself and take advantage of the ailing voters later when they’re all begging for a saviour.
Very future dictator.
Jon Ashworth: this horrific deadly virus.
God help us!
He is a Goldman Sachs place man. Need to be careful!
Meh. Goldman Sachs hires intelligent and high-quality people. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t buy the conspiracies here. Might be a good thing if the country were run by a Goldman Sachs banker for a while.
So djasutin why does lockdown Belgium have the worst Covid 19 death rate in Europe and the world? Why does Japan – no full lockdown – have a very low rate despite its aged population. Do you expect us to believe the know-all BS about “early lockdowns”?
Thanks for pointing this out. That’s a promising sign.
Yes, it has seemed, all along, as though Sunak is one of the few in the Cabinet who has a handle on what has happened.
He always seemed a little sceptical, but not sufficiently to prevent him from having been culpably complicit in the decision – all the decisions. He should have resigned.
Better than Johnson now, for certain. Still a Guilty Man, though.
Yes – I agree with that too, though I suppose he may have limited some of the inanities coming from No 10.
Maybe, though I’ve seen no solid evidence for it. Not much mitigation of his culpability overall though, anyway.
I’ve always got the impression that Sunak has been enjoying this the least and he’s been ‘forced’ into doing a lot of his measures.
Me too, but that’s no excuse for a man in his position. He could and absolutely should have resigned. It’s not like the alternative to his ministerial job was going on the dole. He’s still got the cushy MP number to fall back on.
Remember how he got the job. Surely the flags were big enough.
Competent, maybe.
Ambitious, definitely.
No s##t
‘Dr Flaxman emphasises that the crisis is far from over. “Claims this is all over can be firmly rejected,” he says. “We are only at the beginning of this pandemic.” ‘
But surely the important point is not whether or not the ‘pandemic’ is over, but whether or not the infection itself is serious enough to warrant government intervention. The evidence that has emerged consistently from country after country is that, for the general population, it is not. Arguments about whether or not the illness has run its course are red herrings. What we are experiencing is an illness no more serious than flu: and, as with the flu, the old and infirm should be protected, and the rest of us – including the healthy aged – allowed to choose for ourselves what chances we are prepared to take.
Chris Whitty using the same words… interesting…you’d almost think there was a pre-agreed ‘script’..
Hmm. Funny that …..
I am rather doubtful as to whether Welby believes in God, but I am utterly sure that God does not believe in Welby!
I see that Neil Oliver had come out in favour of free speech and against the mob…so that’s the end of his TV career, sadly, despite his fine presentational skills. The BBC is in unsmiling in its determination to exect revenge on anyone who crosses them. Opposing their persecution of Cummings and their support for violent mob politics is a career-ending move.
Full respect to Neil Oliver.
https://twitter.com/thecoastguy?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1270669175342665731&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbiasedbbc.org%2Fblog%2F2020%2F06%2F09%2Fmidweek-thread-10-june-2020%2Fcomment-page-2%2F%23comments
I have friends and family who are great fans of Neil Oliver, but looking at his twitter feed I couldn’t spot anything strongly anti-lockdown. A pity that, as HIS word might have brought those friends and family round to our cause where MY words have failed.
It was only tangential – he opposed the mob politics of going after Cummings.
Boy, do i know that feeling.
Keeping my powder for now though.
However, there will be many home truths told when the time comes.
Positive signs in the travel industry. New enquiries are coming in again and the majority of people I speak to are convinced it will all be over shortly and want to go on holiday, some as soon as July, majority for later in August and beyond. Some still cancelling as far ahead as November and there is little I can say to persuade some but always try.
Well, it surely is time to get away from all the madness. Personally, I shall be having a holiday in Devon: even before Lockdown/distancing/masks I was coming to hate airports.
Is Elon Musk taking bookings to Mars yet? I’m keen on a one way ticket away from this madness.
Oh, but think about the risk!!! [ LOL ]
You would have to be off your rocker to leave these shores until this situation is resolved.
When this farce began, I seem to remember a call out for British nationals to return home immediately. At the time, I thought it was simply for effect, to add a little drama to proceedings.
Not so sure now.
A friend of mine has been stuck in Spain since February.
Another – more worryingly – in Egypt. Back in March he had been given a date of 31st May at the earliest.
He’s still there.
It was always inevitable that Imperial would come out with some cobbled together justification for the lockdown now that the disease seems to be diminishing, before the full economic cost is revealed and inquiries are launched. Were they prompted by No. 10?
So, the next sector lined up for opening is…wait for it…zoos!
Forget education (essential!), tourism, pubs. cafes, restaurants, gyms, leisure centres, cinemas… what the country needs right now more than anything is zoos!
Apparently this is because Johnson’s dad complained about it to him. Good to know that BoJo’s policy decisions are based on scientific, well-analysed rationale.
I mean, great, feed the lions.
But Id’ much prefer it if they allowed us to feed our kids – both literally and intellectually.
They could feed the frontbenchers to the lions.
The government has been happy to kill people by starting the lockdown, but are scared of being seen to kill cute (and ugly) animals by prolonging certain aspects of it.
Wait… you were looking for logic?
Think you will find ‘friends and family’ behind early opening of tennis courts and golf courses, with someone closer to home behind decision to allow cleaners and nannies into your house!
Schoolchildren, pub landlords etc. will not be slaughtered if their premises don’t reopen.
Zoo animals will.
Just get rid of zoos full stop. Animals should not be caged.
I’d agree if it wasn’t for the conservation aspect. Many endangered species now have nowhere else to go. That’s another reason why reopening (i.e. funding) zoos is important. They’re the last refuge.
Good zoos provide outstanding environments and excellent care for their animals, which live much longer than they would in the wild. Chester is a good example.
Poor zoos, now that’s an entirely different matter.
I don’t want anyone to die; humans or animals. All I know is the longer things are closed, the more suffering we unnecessarily endure. We should open up everything today and with zero social distancing.
Of course we should. But try telling that to the zombies.
So, I’m fairly new to Facebook and hardly ever comment and have only got it on access to friends only, most of whom don’t even know I’m on it. I posted this yesterday and just received a notice, they’ve basically censored a link to cnbc reporting on what WHO said about asymptomatic cases saying it was partly true and partly false!
Wait the WHO are now being censored for not following things previously said by… the WHO? *laughs in clownworld*
To be fair they’re saying that it contains partly false information and then links to another study trying to explain what asymptomatic means. Still a bit worrying though.
What are they saying is false?
They linked to this site. They’re saying it’s false to say that asymptomatic transmission is very rare (apparently WHO partly retracted the statement the following day, probably because they realised that the house of cards would topple otherwise):
https://healthfeedback.org/evaluation/people-who-do-not-show-symptoms-contribute-to-significant-covid-19-transmission-contrary-to-cnbc-report/?fbclid=IwAR3Le5DY-lqZ9cun7hz1xubQbr9gxaY4vQ2rma3wtW8Yr9wXEI2fTiHdYhE
Basically, it’s now down to semantics.
The site says:
‘Scientifically, the term “asymptomatic” refers to people who never develop any symptoms at all during infection, which is the definition used by the WHO, explained Nina Fefferman, a professor at the University of Tennessee who specializes in epidemiology and evolutionary biology. However, non-scientists generally understand “asymptomatic” to mean people who are not obviously ill with COVID-19 related symptoms.’
I’m a linguist and I can’t see the difference between their explanation of asymptomatic and what they argue is a ‘non-scientists’ view of it. Tell me, what is the difference between ‘people who never develop symptoms at all during infection’ and ‘people who are not obviously ill with COVID-19 related symptoms’? Surely if you are not ‘obviously ill’ then you have not developed/manifested any symptoms have you? You might be able to do better at understanding it! In the following paragraph they actually change the definition to fit their understanding of what a non-scientist believes to be asymptomatic, namely presymptomatic and/or paucisymptomatic. They are basically presuming upon (prejudicing) the understanding of a non-scientist when they say asymptomatic and then justifying their argument about misinformation based on that presumption/assumption, namely that when a non-scientist says asymptomatic it means presymptomatic or paucisymptomatic!
The main point is, what fool wants to let a bunch of Facebook fatheads be the arbiters of what is “true science” and what is badthink?
Sadly, the answer seems to be: far too many people. All the sensible few can do is decline to use Facebook and its ilk.
What the WHO is doing is deciding their unproven models which say that asymptomatic transmission is common are mroe important than the data which says it is very rare. The model is not the data, the map is not the territory. You get taught this kind of thing constantly in GCSEs, A-levels and at degree level, the theory must bow to the experimental evidence. How does the WHO not recognise this? Are they doing science, or are they going to openly admit they’re in face saving mode? I’m willing to risk my life based on assuming data is correct, I’m not willing to sacrifice my liberties on the assumption that a model, and a model which disagrees with data at that, is correct.
Presymptomatic means that, with the glorious benefit of hindsight, you realised you did eventually develop symptoms.
You could have symptoms, like a slightly runny nose for instance but not be feeling at all unwell, as in paucisymptomatic.
Surely asymptomatic means not even the runny nose and no symptoms down the line, as in didn’t even know you’d been infected? Happens with lots of pathogens when they meet a healthy immune system.
However, it doesn’t matter whose semantics you favour, the bottom line is that it’s time to let us out of lockup!
Thanks for sharing Sunetra Gupta’s radio transcript. I’ve extracted key sections of Suntetra’s talk in a short “video” at https://youtu.be/9x2x1vAK1cM
thank you
Been thinking about the sheer lack of competence of the government – from obtaining PPE to testing, to the care homes, to track and trace, schools reopening, quarantine. Is this not down to Boris and the others not having has experience of running things? Boris is a journalist, for example. Looking back, the entire Tory government from 2010 onwards hasn’t really done anything, has it? No major action, no major initiatives. So now, when major action is required, they’re just not up to it. Don’t know how to organise things. Scientists won’t help – they’re not practical people. The whole lockdown from the start was impractical; social distancing is impractical; introducing 169 new protocols so schools can open? Impractical.
The problem is the government merely instructs the quangos and civil servants in their employ.
Quangos, like our universities, public sector, charities and mainstream media are managed by ‘graduates’ of the Common Purpose programme. They are full square behind the woke agenda and are clearly agitating for social unrest to bring forth a global Marxist revolution.
Too much ideology, absolutely.
“Amusingly,” the only reason why there’s a huge amount to be done is because they chose to take drastic action in the first place. There is now an unachievable mountain to climb because they took a wrecking ball to absolutely everything through lockdown.
I can forgive them the operational problems around testing and PPE – it’s understandable that these would have been huge challenges in a country that didn’t have a significant biotech or medical supplies industry and which hadn’t previously prepared for this. The care homes problems are at least largely caused by decisions actively made by the NHS and PHE in preparing for a tidal wave of the sick (that never really came).
But if they had had the courage to keep the hand on the tiller and steer the course they’d originally chosen, the really damaging parts of this would never have happened and they wouldn’t have an impossible job in front of them. It’s not inexperience, it’s lack of courage under fire.
I’d absolutely agree that when impractical people do do things, they over-complicate and create more work for themselves than is necessary.
As an engineer I can assure you, the more protocols and procedures are involved in safety the less safe anyone is. Actual safety is done through careful design of machinery, equipment, systems, buildings, user interfaces… so the people involved just naturally do the careful thing without having busybody rule makers pushing them around Even the Health and Safety executive, as an organisation, usually understands this, they typically mandate things such as a need for the presence handrails on high-up walkways and for electrical items to have passed certain standard tests. Busybodies put in charge of safety at specific places though, especially places where there are no substantial real hazards to worry about, or where all the people involved in anything hazardous know their jobs well but the busybody does not, cannot grasp this concept though. In a comical but also serious context I link to a comic below which makes the point on how relying on rules to create safety does the exact opposite:
https://www.rhjunior.com/quentyn-quinn-space-ranger-0134/
Exactly.
I think the idea that senior figures are to blame for errors in detail is as unrealistic as is the idea that great political heros can solve all our problems. In reality most of these admin problems were the result of inadequacies, incompetence and inefficiency in the system for years, long before this government came into power, and there’s no reason to suppose any Labour government would have avoided such problems.
Where we absolutely can blame the figureheads is when they make big policy decisions such as the one to go into lockdown, manifestly in a panic and manifestly based upon inadequate consideration of either the science or the costs side of the cost/benefit appraisal.
Not the least of the ironies of our insane culture atm is that the government is being blamed more for things that aren’t really their faulty or that they aren’t particularly culpable for, while being given a free pass where they absolutely are unforgivably culpable.
When the government does something – for example, launching contact tracing – surely they need to have some understanding of the relevant detail so they can grasp how long it will take to set up, how many operators will be needed, what effectiveness it will have, whether it will work at all. You say they should consider the “costs” of their policies but what are they if not details?
To some extent attention to detail is required, but mostly they rely on underlings to understand the details and explain them or manage them for them. A proper initial costs assessment of the proposal to lockdown, for instance, would have involved reports from numerous departments all considering matters in as much detail as there was time for, but little or none of that detail would have reached the desk of the man making the decision.
I’m not saying that the government hasn’t made some grossly culpable mistakes below the level of the lockdown decision itself, such as the literally stupid 2m rule and the equally literally stupid quarantine rule, nor that they haven’t managed some things badly. But for a lot of those decisions and the information and procedures they were based on as well as much of the implementation,they would have been relying on the same civil servants as any other government would have been, and as matt says, those mistakes are reasonably forgivable compared to the big one.
You’re much too forgiving.
It’s infinitely more serious than simply ‘impractical.
I would say “inhumane”, “barbaric”, “psychopathic” “genocidal” are more adequate words to describe what they’ve been all about since the day they fraudulently won power.
Ironically, the protocols are the main obstacle to schools opening.
Well, here is a surprise: New Zealand is now going to budget for the economy rather than greenery! Nothing like a bucket of cold water for waking up the woke!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/05/16/new-zealand-budget-ditches-climate-change-prioritises-the-economy/
LOL! It’s an ill wind!
Take that, woke coronapanickers! One set of modelling driven exaggeration torpedoes another, it seems.
St Jacinda has fallen off her pedestal not surprising. When push comes to shove she realises that people need to put food on the table and keep the roof over their heads.
Oh great. So now because no-one invests in nuclear and renewable energies we’ll face a new crisis in a few decades when fueled reserves are running out just as the climate gets particualrly hard to handle, just when agriculature is going to need more energy than ever to cope with continuing to produce when the weather becoems the enemy. And so the leaders can declare more authoritarian abusive decrees against their population to handle that future crisis which they are setting up by failing to take sensible small steps to tackle climate change now. If we’d never had the lockdowns we’d have a perfectly functioning economy and be ideally placed for the whole world to start shifting our infrastructure to more sustainable sources, less dependent on just in time logistics and volatile dictatorial states, with ample time to keep the climate situation under control.
“when fueled reserves are running out”
My impression was that the old scare stories about “peak oil” have long since been replaced by recognition that peak oil demand is being reached before peak oil supply. Unless things have reversed again while I wasn’t watching, but that seems unlikely as the concern of the big oil producers still seems to be with propping the price up by voluntary cuts in supply. That was true before the lockdown-induced crash, and lockdown will have smashed another big hole in oil demand as well.
Let’s not get involved in this one, folks. Kill the lockdown first, argue about other things later.
Re New Zealand. The country has had just over 1500 cases and 22 deaths. The equivalent of 19,500 cases and 286 deaths for the UK (whereas our totals are actually 290,000 and 41,000 respectively). According to the way lockdown theorists think, surely this means the country is a sitting duck for Covid-19. It has no herd immunity and there is no vaccine. Or…is the reality very different?
NZ is demonstrating the bubble effect.
Hurrah – let’s hope other countries follow suit!
Another good reason to live in France!
By ‘eck! These scientists, eh? They must attend seminars by Alistair Campbell…
I can see it’s perfectly reasonable in modelling circles to use a “no action” baseline as a comparison for the results of a run – I’ve probably done it myself in a financial / business context. Preferably you’d do this as a step to comparing two or more production runs as a comparison of parameter success.
But then to spoil your overall case by allowing it to be implied as a “real” difference rather than a variance comparison is disingenuous at the least. I mean, why not go the whole way and compare the deaths per model to the deaths if the government unleashed its nuclear arsenal on London as a prophylactic? That would give you a really impressive number of millions “saved”.
And after a suitable pause of a few minutes for your spokesman to tell the credulous and ignorant BBC – well known for its mathematical innocence – that these were real lives really saved as a result of their triumphant model is criminal. I hope that the eventual inquiry rips them apart and throws them on the scrapheap of history.
Exactly…the same trick was applied time and time again with Project Fear…we would “run out of sandwich fillings and be unable to sell our cars”…if we did absolutely nothing to prepare for the scenario in question. But of course, no firm and no government would do “absolutely nothing”.
I have conducted quite a number of mathematical/economic modelling exercises in my time and the base case is never to “do nothing”. Do nothing is the model default – not the baseline. The whole point of the model is to try and understand the sensitivity to outputs as a result of changing the inputs. In this instance, there should already have been a baseline response to (any type of) a pandemic -if we had one. The need to escalate inputs/ responses in order to control outputs should be built from that – otherwise the idea of the model forming “advice” begs the question as to whether any initial plan existed at all if it was baselined on doing nothing. When using stochastic models with non linear responses, what is critical is to replace theoretical data with real time data as quickly as possible in order to adjust the model in line with real world experience. To revert to the improved output claims made from the theoretical model, based upon theoretical data and against a baseline of doing nothing, despite real data being available is the work of a charlatan.
Presumably that’s why the talking head epidemiologists whom I most respect were quick to say it’s time to move from modelling to data once the crisis broke.
Well they’re certainly giving the tourists one piece of information: “take your money elsewhere”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8405769/How-Covid-19-affected-hometown.html
Interesting tool in this article. Looking at five year average it would seem hardly any of the excess deaths are home were COVID-19 related and all hospital excess deaths were related. Hospital excess deaths for much of May were also below the five year average.
All excess deaths in Hospital setting were COVID-19 related is quite remarkable.
Because they weren’t.
This is another interesting area…to what extent is this (the high hospital rate) a product of the lockdown? Obviously people who have lung conditions are going to be anxious about catching the virus. Anxiety may exacerbate their condition. If they do get the virus, or another virus, and experience some breathing difficulty it may be they are more eager to seek emergency treatment given all the propaganda about the lethality of the virus. Once in hospital…they may be exposed to repeat infection, maybe by different mutations or strains.
Also GPs might feel reluctant to leave a possible CV patient at home. We hear a lot about the “precautionary” approach in regard to the PM and this might well have been the mood music.
The excess deaths at home not related to COVID-19 would suggest that lack of medial attention for other conditions may have been the cause, i.e. lockdown related.
Professor Ferguson blaming the government for his care homes death being out x 4. The government didn’t protect them enough apparently.
Why didn’t they protect them enough? Cause he told them unless they ‘protected the NHS at all costs’ 500,000 people would cark it
I hope someone has the gumption to say this (with chapter and verse proof) at the inevitable Boris-bashing enquiry.
I mean I think Boris deserves bashing because bad advice need not be followed if one has the wherewithal (and the leadership skills) to not follow it.
However, it still needs to be said. BOTH boris and Ferguson need to be thrown under the bus and a lot more people besides, yet I agree most political actors are going to line up on ‘team’ or another – Team “Boris is innocent, evil Doctor Death dripped poison in his ear”, or Team “Boris is incompetent, he didn’t follow The Science well enough”. They’re both right- in a sense. But both wrong in COMMON sense
It will be interesting to see if Boris is removed once we get past 30th June – ie the deadline for seeking an extension to the Transition period..
We’re going to need a bigger bus…..
As someone posted here a week or so ago, you can re-use them !
I suspect that Professor Pantsdown is getting the boot into the Government. No doubt seeking to deflect from his own failings.
Professor “Patsy” Ferguson is going to prison for a very long time.
Assuming he makes it that far, of course.
I wish.
You can bet yer boots on it…
I wish!!!
Indeed he is:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8407007/UK-lockdown-week-earlier-halved-COVID-19-death-toll-scientist-says.html
But I thought Prof Ferguson could foretell the future. Surely being omniscient, he would have known that the Government would fail to protect people in care homes? Maybe it was the illicit liaisons took his eye off the ball…
The obvious retort to that is – what made up, fantasy protection for an unforeseen virus did the model have built into it?
I’ve just had a really obvious thought.
If you were the government undertaking the biggest cover-up in history (sounds hyperbolic but that’s honestly what it is), how can you most easily stop people ‘waking up’?
Stop them from travelling. Stop them from congregating, and talking (and…. *organising*…) in private. It’s a very old tactic.
I’m thinking about this more in context of the travel quarantine, actually. What better way to keep people from travelling out of the country and finding out that things elsewhere are almost back to normal? Why would you want them travelling to Paris, for example, and seeing everyone drinking in bars? Why would would you want them, heaven forbid, going to Sweden and seeing all the kids back at school and all the workplaces going full steam? Why would you want them going to Belarus and partying with the wodka heroes?
You get to keep people at home, and make them spend in the domestic economy which of course it sorely, sorely needs. But you also get to keep them ignorant of normality for as long as possible.
And of course the Big Brother Sex Law achieves the rest – a de facto curfew that makes people easier to track and harder for them to discuss things in private with people outside work hours.
As you see I swing wildly every day from thinking they’re a bunch of pigshit thick careerist failed celebs, and thinking they’re a nefarious power-hoarding psy-op outfit. Obviously the truth is probably somewhere in between…… but it really is hard to imagine why anyone would bring in that travel quarantine policy unless they had an economic deathwish… or a desperate need to escape recrimination at any cost.
Yes,sounds about right to me,keep people apart,keep them scared,don’t let them see or do nice things and above keep them controlled.
‘above all’ should say !
Excep that there’s this thing called the internet, where you can congregate virtually with like minded people (not in private, largely, admittedly) and see what’s going on in other countries.
That’s why the Chinese and Korean governments heavily limit which bits of the internet are available to be seen by their population.
I do think that stopping people seeing eachother “in private” and stopping us travelling to other countries and watching them live normally without dropping like flies contribute to the sense of living in an abnormal time, which helps perpetuate the problem.
With modern open source cryptography having truly private online discussions isn’t so hard, what’s trickier is making initial contact with people you’ve never met before. If antilockdown groups had existed before lockdown had eben declared they could have kept running quite effectively, the hard bit is building them in the first place without meatspace movements. The hard part about the internet is ever finding things, or getting an audience, in the first place. Most censorship can be beaten, but regrettably only by people who already know where to find what they’re after.
Exactly. Even in forums lots of posts get nixxed before anyone even sees them.
Also ‘meatspace’ lol
We’re all cyberpunks now…
Sounds like a good name for a new dating site. I also once got MySpace and Facebook mixed up and called it MyFace which could also be good but slightly risque.
As long as you’re wearing a mask.
To be honest, this is why I’m completely off social media. It serves no value whatsoever, if anything, it makes your world smaller. You’re less likely to talk to your friends in person. Less likely to go out and do something fun, more likely to just sit inside and scroll (she says, constantly refreshing Lockdown Sceptics ;op). The internet is of huge value to me, hell, it’s kinda my life, but the wider internet is not social media, app platforms, media networks, etc. – but I’m one of those people who goes looking for things. The majority of people, sadly, are not. They just look on their facebook and click whatever news story comes up there. Facebook controls what comes up there.
Facebook. Ugh!
I’m on a couple of good forums, one for booklovers and the other to support hedgehogs. But no-one lives out their life thereon.
I avoid my newsfeed/home page (whatever it’s called nowadays) like the plague.
Well yeah, but when you severely limit what can be viewed on the most popular public platforms…… what Facebook and Google are currently doing with their algorithm and ‘misinformation army’ is honestly not far off the Chinese model.
Hence the other week when the lockdown protests were happening and the event listings kept disappearing off Facebook. – If people could get together in someone’s house, organise that way, then personally contact their own people separately of social media…. more people would have been at those protests.
You get some MSM coverage but it is all negative, adding to the attack pile on on social media which is another factor. Yes, people have the *ability* to view normality on other places online. But they very rarely will unless they go looking for it. Government is counting on this.
When they go on their summer holiday however…. all bets are off.
Senior source in Govt. disclosed to the industry yesterday that 29 June will see end of quarantine. It is a farce any way. Forms weren’t checked. If address cannot be provided foreign arrivals fined £100, UK £1000:
In its latest statement, the group representing more than 500 travel and hospitality companies, said it had been told by “senior government sources” that travel corridors would be in place by 29 June.
Wait a minute, so I go abroad, then come back, but don’t fill in the form, I get fined £1000? I thought you got fined £100 for not filling in the form, but £1000 for breaking the quarantine if they rumbled you. – What I plan to do is just to not fill in the form, and budget for a £100 fine. They don’t catch me (likely) I have £100 to spend on gig tickets. If they do, they do.
I think they are counting on that – that millions of people won’t bother and take their chances with a small fine.
That is, if I’ve got it right and it is only £100 for not filling in the form ?
Except its not really air bridges we need, its land bridges and sea bridges. The channel ferries, the tunnel, all the other sea ports in Britain, are far more important for our economy* and ferries and car-trains and pan-european road travel are far less likely to spread infections passenger-to-passenger than planes are.
*Sure some goods from far abroad and needed fast need to come in by air, but most large volumes of goods and definitely most of the people can get in by sea. And it would do holiday makers some good to have to go through places on their way to sunshine, not just walk into an airport beside a metropolitan area at once end and walk out in another identikit city.
But what do they mean by “air bridges” will be introduced? How many? To which countries?
To all EU 27 apparently and it will be air, land and sea. All participating countries will not quarantine arrivals
I wondered how so many mobilised so fast for the first BLM protest.
Agree apart from the schools bit – in Sweden our schools have already broken up for the summer holiday. People will have to travel here in mid-August to see kids back in schools
yes
https://twitter.com/FrankfurtZack/status/1270657288819355649
In Germany each federal state decides on school openings. Now Hessen on 22nd June all primary school and most importantly no ludicrous social distancing.
I’ve just walked past my little one’s school with him en route to the shops to buy him a comic. I wanted to try to prepare him a little, because he goes back for the first time tomorrow. They’ve done things like fencing off all the play equipment and whatnot. I was expecting it, but I’m still furious.
It’s my older boy I weep for. He’s neither young enough nor old enough to be going back. He misses his friends (luckily, many of his friends’ parents are sensible enough to be absolutely fine with surreptitious play dates and “accidentally” meeting in the park), it’s become completely impossible to get him to focus on any of the hopelessly inadequate slideware he’s being sent in lieu of teaching by his “hard working” teacher. His emotions are all over the place – he’s become clingy with me and his mum (he’s always been affectionate, but this is clear regression) and he’s so highly strung that he can be absolutely fine one minute and absolutely off-the-scale losing it the next. It took me an hour to calm him down earlier today.
What are we doing to our kids?
Makes me glad I’m in that between stage where my children are all grown up and independent, my parents are dead, and I have no grandchildren yet….
I sympathise for your poor sons, this is cruelty of the highest order.
Funnily enough my 15-year-old sister doesn’t seem that bothered by everything, despite the fact that all her GCSE work has gone down the toilet, she can’t see her friends and her previously busy life has been put on hold indefinitely, but she’s always been incredibly sanguine about pretty much everything in life and very level-headed. However it does make me worry that something is going on beneath the surface. I am very different to her personality-wise.
I dread to think. It is definitely child abuse.
Breaking News on Sky News:
Professor Neil Ferguson says if the UK entered lockdown a week earlier the number of deaths could have been halved.
Will look for any articles reporting that in writing. Sky currently interviewing Carl Heneghen who’s saying we could have avoided a lockdown. He also pointed out that most care home deaths occured after lockdown.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-number-of-deaths-could-have-been-halved-if-lockdown-introduced-a-week-earlier-12004222
Ferguson is covering his own back; everything he says comes from the assumption that lockdown achieved anything, and he has to assume that or he becomes soley responsible for crashing the world economy. Which he is.
I still fail to see how the lockdown had any impact on the rate of growth of the epidemic curve, which is where you’d expect to see some impact, surely. It’s very clear that the epidemic was slowing down from the very beginning. His models don’t show this, but real actual data does.
Unfortunately no-one seems interested in real data these days; why bother with it when you can soup up another model?
I’ve long had a concern that with the age of AI we are seeing actual data relegated to an unimportance compared to models. Actual understanding replaced with simply trusting the machines to match patterns and not say why.
Almost makes you want to worry about things like “The Singularity”
The Singularity
And what kind of society we will live in when AIs produce policy suggestions that are literally incomprehensible to us.
Rewind about half an hour on the Sky News Live for interview with Heneghan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Auq9mYxFEE
Boris is lapping it all up, big smile on his face.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52993734
An article on the BBC website saying that research shows that virtually no cases came to the UK directly from China, but from people travelling from Italy, Spain and France. That closing the border would have stopped the virus, but …..”the study shows lockdown has massively disrupted the spread of the virus.
“If there’s good news here, these chains of transmission were and are being suppressed and going extinct as a result of social distancing and we continue to see that now,” Prof Loman said.”
Completely insane. Of course it wasn’t because of an influx of people from China, but it ultimately started there. Closing the border would obviously have stopped/severely reduced its spread, but we would have to have had restrictions at the border forever. Then the usual nonsense about the lockdown.
Don’t the BBC get bored of all their nonsense?
But surely BBC favourite Wee Krankie would not have failed to institute an early lockdown…so why is Scotland death rate higher than Italy’s?
Sorry that was meant to be a reply to Nobody 2020 below…
no one is dying here any more of the virus it’s back to OD’ing on government needles and drinking oneself to death on Buckfast or a still traditional death up here in Scotland, take every drug you can get all at once wash it down with Blue Lightening and then fall asleep outside on a bench when it’s minus 5 and die. It’s traditional but stylish none the less. Off course the ever popular smoke a no name brand of cigarette until you lose both legs is an option many take but the eat yourself into morbid obesity at Greggs is a new comer. It’s a surprise we in Scotland don’t have more gold medals at the special olympics.
Brilliant! Honestly, I haven’t fallen into uncontrollable laughter after reading something for ages but this just tickles me! Thanks Biker.
Someone will no doubt criticise me for being heartless etc but I love black humour which tells the truth.
Your cynicism at the Picts attitude to health and welfare is a breath of fresh air!
I wasn’t referring to the Pict. As a Pict myself i’m a fine figure of a man, like all of us. Men are men and Women live for their men, no you can’t cut your balls off and become a woman, if you cut them off here you become a Liberal Democrat. Pict’s don’t get sick and die we just get so old we become invisible and one day someone will go I’ve not seen Biker for a while is he still alive and no one will know. We’re civilised like that. Scots on the other hand are loathsome bastard creatures interbred with the Irish and well lets just say that’s not the Gold Blend of Coffee. English people lump us all in together but no true Pict will ever be Scottish.
Well said!
As any fule know, Scots were originally Irish (living in brackets).
What a genial move then of implementing quarantine in the UK 8th June
That’s from Prof Oliver Pybus who also said in March “It’s encouraging to see COVID genomes worldwide being generated & shared. I urge caution in drawing conclusions from these about the origin of new cases & the direction of transmission. Undersampling and limited genetic variation can make inferences highly uncertain.”
I also would urge caution. Northern Italy (not southern Italy) – like Spain – has a huge problem with illegal Chinese work gangs, using modern slave labour in industries like leather work. That is where the European outbreak was centred. Despite the EU’s much vaunted labour protection laws, the reality is that there are hundreds of thousands of modern slaves in Italy and elsewhere working for a pittance and with no employee rights. The EU does nothing about it. They often sleep in the factories. It’s a breeding ground for disease.
The samples referenced in the study will obviously have been based on hospital samples ie people who are seriously ill. The one thing we know about Covid is that Chinese people seem to have some natural defences against the disease since the death rate is so very low. despite it being the epicentre of the disease. So it is highly likely that Chinese people were travelling here with mild symptoms but not necessarily coming to the attention of hospitals.
This is something I often throw at EU-obsessives who claim UK labour laws are worse than most of their member states’. No. They’re way better. The UK is also better at enforcing them. Not that we’re perfect of course, we still import cheap labour wholesale and there’s still a considerable network of illegal slavery that we shamelessly profit from. BUT – they are worse. And they seem to care way less about doing something about it.
If the lockdown had “massively disrupted” the virus, new cases would have been falling faster sooner. They didn’t, so it hasn’t. But then, we already knew that, didn’t we?
Someone below suggested adding comments to this BBC post: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52991913
Re Subject: Coronavirus: UK economy could be worst hit among leading nations, says OECD
I attempted to post this obviously highly offensive comment:
/
Surely this should read ‘Hardest hit by lockdown lunacy…’?
/
Guess what? Yup, no go according to the BBC Thought Police.
Unfortunately we’ve had to remove the content below because it contravened one of our House Rules.
Your comment was considered to have broken the following House Rule:
“We reserve the right to fail comments which…
Are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others
Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable
Contain swear words or other language likely to offend”
/
That good old right to free speech is alive and well. Not.
Those of us who have long opposed political correctness or supported politically incorrect causes have known for a long time that speech has not even been close to free in this country for many years. There’s a reason why Toby’s Free Speech union is desperately needed, and it’s because the old left/liberal defenders of freedom of speech either just failed us or flat out turned into proponents of active suppression (once they found their own kind to be in charge) of dissent via “hate speech” and “offence” nonsense.
And of course one you have rules and procedures for censoring in place, they get used, even when it is outright false to characterise the material censored in the way they do, as with your comment.
I reckon i’ve been pretty “objectionable” most of my days. One really must learn to censor oneself because one wouldn’t want to “offend others”.
Who are these people that are offended? And who decided what’s a real thing to be offended by and what’s not? If you called my mother a whore and my daughter uglier than Michele Obama i couldn’t give a shit, i’d laugh at you. People need to relax. I’d suggest motorbikes, drugs, drink, music and woman as a place to start but that would probably be objectionable or offensive.
Fuck ’em
I guess brainwashed people don’t know they’re brainwashed which is why, in fact. it’s called brainwashing
No thank you.
I’d rather play “God Save the Tsar” on full blast.
I’m in a topically off topic mood this afternoon. I note that Priti Patel has apparently been using her platform as Home Secretary in this time of crisis to inform the populace that she was called names as a little girl.
I sympathise. But do I have to care?
I don’t know much about her, but on a superficial levels she is a very attractive woman. I know nothing about her background, but she doesn’t strike me as being particularly underprivileged.
I look in the mirror. A middle aged white male stares back at me. Should this man be checking his and “taking the knee”?
The man in the mirror started out with a silly surname and red hair. A double whammy with nurseries full of nasty infant name-callers and a particular disadvantage in the 7-11 age group, where young brats can be merciless. Then hitting his teens he was knocked down by a fairly severe case of acne which coincided with adolescence. Not a pretty sight for an already sensitised child. And then, “tragically” as the spots receded so did his hairline. So the spots were gone, but so was his red hair. He still had the silly surname though.
I suppose he might consider himself marginally better looking than “our” Toby these days. But how does one choose between Gainsborough and Leonardo? It’s a matter of personal taste, one must suppose.
~~~~
I like to think I am an advocate of free speech. I certainly have a great deal of sympathy with the cause. But I nevertheless feeel quite uncomfortable about the twitter red hair day. I did actually feel very sensitive about my red hair and I was taken back to it. I bristled uncomfortably at all the “hairist” hilarity.
And I’m still also inclined to bristle uncomfortably at the word “bald”. The pronunciation “bold” always sounds much better than “balled”, which always seems like rubbing my face in it.
Whatever, I shouldn’t be so sensitive about being called names, should I?
I don’t mind. No seriously, I don’t. I can cope with being called “baldie”, “spotty”, or “ginner”. I’m cool with that. No, I really am. I’m white and male. A “privileged” sort.
Speaking of which, I’ve been hearing news reports from the States that black porn stars have been seen “taking the knee”. Perhaps those who might watch such filth could explain that one to me … ?
Here’s another name that occurs to me: Ugli Betel.
Not interested Priti, just get on with the real job and open the country.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200608092951.htm
Univ College,London 8th June
“Instead of using the SARS-CoV-2 virus, researchers artificially replicated a section of DNA from a plant-infecting virus, which cannot infect humans, and added it to a millilitre of water at a similar concentration to SARS-CoV-2 copies found in infected patients’ respiratory samples.
Researchers placed the water containing this DNA on the hand rail of a hospital bed in an isolation room — that is, a room for higher-risk or infected patients — and then sampled 44 sites across a hospital ward over the following five days.
They found that after 10 hours, the surrogate genetic material had spread to 41% of sites sampled across the hospital ward, from bed rails to door handles to arm rests in a waiting room to children’s toys and books in a play area. This increased to 59% of sites after three days, falling to 41% on the fifth day.”
Not much changed since Semmelweis’s report , Vienna General Hospital 1847
I’m feeling good today. I’ve arranged to meet two friends/former colleagues a week on Friday evening. We’re going to buy a takeaway pizza and eat it together in a local park. The other 2 are coming to me for logistic reasons, and I don’t have a garden, hence the park. It will look strange: me,62, friends 54 and 51, sitting together on a park bench sharing a takeaway like 3 teenagers! Will be a laugh. No wine unfortunately due to Scottish “no outdoor alcohol” laws.
Good for you! Have a great time
Thanks. Should have said that it will be weather dependent but fingers crossed..
Enjoy! Drink confusion to Poison Sturgeon!
Sounds good! You could always put the wine in a mineral water bottle…
Hi Gillian is that alcohol law Scotland wide or a local by-law?
Have a great time, remember to make sure you are 6′ 6″ apart on the bench
Local by laws made under Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982. Most local authorities have designated no alcohol outdoor areas. We will need 2 benches, or maybe just sit on adjacent swings like we are bored 14 year olds!
Make it extra special by getting the pizza delivered to your bench.
Omi god genius. My local would actually do this as well
Put the wine in another dispenser. Break the rules for goodness sake.
Gillian please take a Boombox and play FUCK DA POLICE really loud. Also make sure to take a BLM sign and whip it out if they actually do turn up
Love it!
Pizza without red wine!!! Do you not have a flask, man!!???
Put some in a ribena bottle?
“Laws are for the obedience of fools … “.
Especially ones that say you can’t have a glass of wine with your friends. Fuck ’em.
New Zealand versus Sweden in the typical Tony Heller style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myQvdhiKVKk&feature=youtu.be
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52998806
Breaking – ‘People living alone in England will be able to stay at one other household as part of a further easing of coronavirus restrictions.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that, from Saturday, single adults can spend the night at another house in a “support bubble”.
No 10 said the change aims to help combat loneliness and that people are being trusted to observe the rules.
The relaxation does not apply to those who are shielding, or other UK nations.’
Fantastic – the police will have no way of checking who lives alone, or how many nights someone has spent at someone else’s house, and I imagine that those who do not live alone will feel resentful at being not technically ‘allowed’ to visit other people, so they will do it anyway. This is basically carte blanche to stay over at someone else’s house. Totally unenforceable.
LOCKDOWN – OVER
Still too slow, for my liking, I was hoping tonight he would announce the hospitality sector opening up from Monday and the 2m rule reduced to 1. And abolishing the 14 day quarantine for people entering the country so holidays can be at least salvage from the wreckage of this year. Disappoited overall. He’s about 4 weeks behind the actuality of what people are doing.
Oh definitely, and it’s not the official ‘lockdown over’ announcement and cringeworthy retraction of this madness I truly want either.
But it’s still over in practice.
Indeed, he’s caveating his ‘easing’ with all sorts of arbitrary restrictions to make it look like they have a handle on the situation and they’re in control but the lockdown is over in practice.
And opening up the hills and byways to people again. In *all* the countries. Can tell that Johnson, Sturgeon and the non-entity in Wales (where I live, and I can’t remember who the hell he is) are fat and unfit. Those of us who like long walks with bumps along the way are being overlooked. Again.
Yes why doesent he discuss the important things I mean does anybody follow these rules anymore? .
I think he says these things to get out of actually doing anything.
Unfortunately for us they are
pinning everything on the oxford vaccine notice everything is geared to september thats when it will be available, if it works .
This makes me feel very uneasy if that’s their only plan.
Anybody agree?
I doubt there’s any real plan. They seem like they are winging it. Hoping for a vaccine or for the numbers to drop here and across the world so they can tell us it’s safe.
still to slow? It’s fucking glacial?
Does this mean you can legally be with your boyfriend now Poppy?
Yes! We are currently trying to make plans for next week
All the very best Poppy. I always enjoy reading your very insightful posts.
I’m really pleased for you – you deserve some “legal” time together!
Whizz! Have an orgy!
Oh brilliant news so so pleased for you both.
That’s great news!
Your reunion will definitely be sweet
I hope you two get to make up for lost time Poppy! Your thoughts on this forum have been erudite and concise, and I hope and pray that the world rights itself sharpish.
For your sake and ours
:O) Say hi for us. I hope you have fun :O)
Not legally, because they have to change the law first.
They seem to do that a lot without bothering to consult Parliament. I posted this morning about another challenge to the government. This set of lawyers are claiming that the whole Coronavirus Act is illegal, not just lockdown.
Good. Any chance of the challenge bearing fruit or is it just bluster?
The law is an ass at the moment!
https://www.europereloaded.com/the-uk-coronavirus-act-2020-is-null-and-void/
Ta.
What a patronising imbecile! Am I supposed to rejoice at the scraps you throw under the table?! End the lockdown now you muppet!
Hear hear.
Why the fuck is Ferguson still advising the government!!!??? I thought he’d resigned!
Fantastic interview on Sky with Prof Carl Heneghan. He gets the straight talker award. His view of Ferguson’s latest missive – ‘a mathematician rewriting history’. Nice!
He shouldn’t even be allowed to comment, never mind advise.
It’s another green light.
He never left. Chris Whitty when asked about him should have said that SAGE as a whole influences policy. He didn’t, thus confirming that Ferguson’s soothsaying is still the only model/scientific input they’re following. Considering he’s utterly shit at his job, nothing will change for us until the economic situation dictates policy completely, which wont be long as it’s fucked. Its tragic that economic catastrophe is the only thing that can seemingly stop this insanity
At this stage it becomes difficult to believe that economic catastrophe is not their aim and so that gives me doubt that even that will stop this insanity – it will actually lead to more insanity.
Been given more rope to hang himself, MSM and the opposition I suspect…
Just watching Boris, support bubbles for lonely adults, how cosy! The rules are getting so complicated…..and increasingly unenforceable.
Increasingly unenforceable…especially since we’ve seen 10,000s of people being encouraged by the Police to gather in contravention of the law and not socially distance.
Does it mean that sex with someone from outside your household is allowed again?
Er…. bluster bluster bluster ummmm. Bluster.
I think the answer is yes, but that’s the only person you’re allowed to have sex with.
Are you a lonely adult ….?
Confusion is the name of the game.
i always wondered what that Abba song was about
Another rando obvious thought. (Mark will like this one)
The BLM shit is actually the perfect figurative representation of lockdown.
Shut the economy. NHS –> NCS. Suspend civil liberties. Apply this internationally.
= Kill literally hundreds of millions across the age spectrum, across the world, in a myriad of disgusting and preventable ways – in the pursuit of saving a few million lives.
*****
Burn shit down. Governments impose curfews on top of already locked down populations. Protests spread across the world with varying degrees of ferocity – all are disruptive, and largely pointless.
= Destroy thousands of black lives (via their livelihoods) in the name of protesting on their behalf.
Not gonna argue…..
It’s almost as if they were inextricably linked…
Go down the twitter rabbit hole and it’s amazing what you might find.The world’s in chaos, the lockdown is a nonsensical lie – anyone with half a brain can see that, and BLM is being exposed for the nonsensical hysteria that it is (why now? George Floyd live funeral streaming FFS, mass woke fascist rioting?)
So therefore what is the actual truth, I think there’s clues out there right now, even in MSM (not the BBC I might add)
There will be a reckoning. It will come, keep faith.
It will. Don’t despair. It plays into their hands.
It suddenly dawned on me – and perhaps this is obvious to everyone else on here already but I can be slow off the mark – that what all this has in common, lockdown, BLM, Greta-luvvin-climate degenerates, and all the rest, is a hatred of society and the normal, healthy social structures that we depend on. The mass imprisonment of healthy people and culture of fear (2m rule etc.) is all really just another side of the coin of anarchistic riots, tearing down not just statues but whole institutions (‘defund the police’ ffs).
Yes
It might just be a little bit more than that.. Incredible as it is to believe.
But, think of this : We know who they all are now don’t we…? It’s hard to see if there are any heroes in amongst all of this, but the true villains are the easiest to spot.
They want to create ever more powerful institutions with control over every aspect of our lives, our thoughts and our expressions. They wish to be the new ruler. Anarchism is actually about having no ruler. These rioters seek to impose absolute rule so I dont think they have much to do with anarchism. They are statist rioters seeking to increase the power of the state through violence.
Just seen the NHS ‘Track and Trace’ advert. So fucking patronising and at the end:
More normal? Nah, not having that.
I just blocked their number on all my phones :o)
Just a power grab by the authorities, as we suspected all along.
I get the impression that Johnson doesn’t even believe this crap himself anymore. That makes it worse, though.
All that stuff about bubbles… he’s having a bubble.
I am a bit worried by the ‘objective to get all schools back by September’ – this is not the same as ‘get all kids back by September’ and he knows that from the way he is saying it.
That bit was terrifying
I’m banking on the virus having all but disappeared by that point so that there will be absolutely no reason for the restrictions to still be in place. Even if it hasn’t completely disappeared, I’m hoping that there will be much more scientific evidence in the mainstream by that point to allow people to adequately assess risk.
If scientific evidence had ever meant anything to this government there never would have been restrictions in the first place.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/305525
Just seen this on twitter for reopening of schools if anybody wants to sign to drum up some more support
Thank you!
I signed. 1340 signatures so far, they seem to be clocking up fairly quickly. If enough of us sign in the next hour we may be able to get it on to the top three “trending” petitions.
1363 now.
Signed. Good luck to them.
Though the zombies have a petition on the go to keep schools closed, apparently for ever.
Would be nice to have a petition to reopen the unis too, even without the teaching the research they do is very important to the UK’s standing in the world.
Have just signed.
1534 now. (20:00)
Signed
1: Chris Whitty “we’re not at the end of this epidemic. Not by a long shot. We’re in the middle of it”
2. That bloody woman from Sky: claiming that Tegnell has admitted his no-lockdown strategy failed
I think I give up.
And he’s fluffed the schools question from the guy at the DT. And the 2m rule question.
To the “has he been taken prisoner by the scientists?” Question. He looks like they’re both pointing a gun at him.
Trouble is, making claims re Tegnell just fits their agenda.
She certainly lets herself down in many ways. Boris, Vallance and Whitty need to be questioned aggressively, but in a clever, not shouty/gotcha manner – it is counterproductive and too easy for them to deflect
Whitty gives the game away…. they think this started in February, realised it peaked in April and are assuming that it will be “over” by October. So they plan to manage the “ease” out of lockdown over that timeframe so that they can model the impact of these gradual changes. That way, they will have a better response “next time”. We are part of their live experiment….
Whitty says ….. What counts is what measures have the most impact on the virus, but the least impact on society. That is a “very complicated balancing act”, he says.
So sledgehammer to crack a nut then?
I think that horse has bolted, Chris.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way but definitely makes sense.
Beff? Workin’ for Keir?
Is it me or is this super sinister?
He says it is only by breaking the links between households that we can continue to bring the R down.
Breaking links. WTF?! Aren’t we separated enough?
Have I missed something? Can’t bear to watch the actual update, so I’ve just been checking the summary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2ewxCPtw7w
Oooh Norwegian health chief on Unherd!
Should be interesting….
“<i>Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that, from Saturday, single adults can spend the night at another house in a “support bubble”.</i>”
So are they actually going to bother to change the actual law this time, or has that now become too inconvenient a formality and the government just issues dictats whenever it feels like it?
Because unless they change the law, or it is overturned by Dolan’s challenge, the law still says:
7.—(1) During the emergency period, unless paragraph (2) applies, no person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place—
…..
(b)
indoors, and consists of two or more persons.
Parliament made it “too much of a formality” with their ridiculous conga. That was the intention.
And these idiots have the cheek to call themselves “conservative”!?
i don’t think we’ve had a conservative since the glory days of Mrs Thatcher
Love to see an adviser telling her she needed to “take a knee” to appease the mob…..
The average person doesn’t read statutes on gov.uk, they will have just seen the announcement on the daily briefing/BBC/MSM etc so they’ll assume it’s legal now (or from Saturday, whatever arbitrary day the easing is supposed to come into force).
These scientists are planning to only allow restrictions to be lifted in order to calibrate their models for next time. Claims of proceeding with caution are designed to help with that – not designed to help society get out of this absurd situation
Spot on. We’re all just little lab rats in their fascinating socio-epidemiological experiment
Completely fed up with scientists and their dislike of risk.
Not every scientist cowers from all risks. Just a shame that those of us in scientific careers who can take a rational attitude to risk don’t all know which others are like us, so haven’t been able to work together without the brain-dead busy-body averse-to-all-risk types interfering.
During an “warm” discussion at work today, someone with an oxbridge education said that Fergusson has saved nearly 500,00 people in this country.
What hope do we have.
I could puke. (sorry if you are having your dinner.)
You can brainwash people at Oxbridge just as easy as anywhere else
Today is the first day I have got angry with the situation we are all in, I have remained calm these past 12, yes 12 weeks. Why do people not see what is being done to them?
I did not get angry during our discussion, only privately later.
We are doomed if this is the best we can do.
Clearly your ‘oxbridge friend’ isn’t the best we can do. Lots of smart people on here.
Superfergie!
They can’t even spell “colonial” correctly at Oxford…the protestors spell it “collonial”.
Maybe they think it’s a roads protest.
PPE (not the useful kind) I presume?
No that’s the single use plastics ……..but you might think they are both past their usefulness
It has nothing to do with your alma mater and everything to do with whether you have a critical mind. Guilty of an oxbridge education, but is sniffed out the bullcrap from the beginning. And most of my friends who are also ex-oxbridge – even if they went to the other place – have finally sniffed it out too.
Some of us were even there at the same time as many of the protagonists!
Lol mine haven’t
And most of mine are —- *sharp intake of breath* – scientists!
Did they study classics by any chance?
The Greats course clearly lost the requirement for analysis and critical thinking between the early 70’s when I was there, and Boris’s time in the mid-80’s.
Too much drinking (with the Bullingdon Club) and not enough thinking.
To be fair, it’s clear that he hasn’t yet recovered from intensive care; he could step down (with some face saved) on grounds of ill health.
A teacher I know shared on social media a picture of George Galloway with a speech bubble caption “we won”. Boris, I really get the impression you don’t want to lead. Show some backbone and stand up to these people, for the sake of the country and our future.
The main news today – that the UK is set to have the deepest recession of all major countries in the world – the worst in 300 years – and all that is announced is single people can stay overnight somewhere?!
I agree with Professor Sunetra Gupta on her unherd interview – if lockdown ended tomorrow and everything went back to normal, probably nothing much would happen. Or rather, actually thousands of lives would be saved, from those who are going to miss their cancer screening and those who will die from poverty related issues.
Boris lead?
But he’s the king. And king’s don’t lead, their prime ministers do.
Oh …….
Year Zero update:
Gone with the Wind has been taken off HBO Max following calls for it to be removed from the US streaming service.
…
Tom and Jerry carries racism warning
….
It follows the removal of Little Britain from Netflix, BritBox and BBC iPlayer
I’ve just ordered Gone With The Wind on DVD for my niece as I think it’s important she understands history properly and, in this case, what not to do. She needs to understand why slavery was bad, and erasing it from history won’t do that.
You’ll probably be ok for a couple of years, before they’ve got the fire brigade set up to deal with reprobates like you.
Isn’t burning books what the Nazis did? Has it come to that?
For BLM, yes, of course.
1984 yet agsin. All books destroyed except ‘rubbish’.
Little Britain wasn’t funny anyway. But I shall miss Barbara and Papa Lazarou when they are deleted from history.
I agree with you about Little Britain. I may hate their crappy “comedy”, but I will defend to the death our right to view it.
The BBC analyst mentioned Tintin as well, which from my recollection of it must be well ripe for the Cultural Revolutionary chop.
Another completely unenforceable rule from Boris tonight. What gets me is the muppets they interview on the BBC who have actually been following the rule not to visit relatives if it means an overnight stay. What did they think was going to happen to them – lined up against the wall and shot by the cops, perhaps? Fucking morons.
Just read the details on the BBC website and it’s the most complicated load of bunkum imaginable. Completely unenforceable even if anyone could understand it. Surely Boris is having a laugh! I am!
It will be enforced by the track and trace app. For those who are foolish enough to download it.
But who I’d going to download it ? Crazy to do it
Agree I mean what is up with people today?
I get the impression that the government are kicking the can down the road shying away from making proper decisions thus all the waffle about bubbles
Why?
I think they are pinning g everything on the oxford vaccine, they cant see anything past september when if it works and that’s a big if, it will become available.
This is a very dangerous strategy to follow.all eggs I basket
This is a real worry.
ANYBODY ELSE AGREE with my take on things ?
Unfortunately I don’t think they are that clever. I think they are just scratching around in the dark. Zoos warned they are very near to closing down forever, so suddenly zoos can open. Same for garden centres a month ago. There is no logic to any of the rules or thinking, either from phe, sage or the government. They are in their own bubble.
Yes I think you talk sense reactive rather than proactive.
3 million people about to lose jobs in tourism and hospitality if quarantine is not removed and social distancing not scrapped or reduced. I am a huge animal lover but seriously?
Well every little helps. Pressure must be on wee Jimmy to open Edinburgh Zoo
She could be the chief exhibit – though they would have to put up a notice, “Do not throw rotten tomatoes at the animals”.
UK Column did an interesting article about professor bubbles not so long ago.
Apparently we are paying some young academic to work out how to release us from lockup by functioning in bubbles.
The government had decided it’s too complicated, so maybe it’s now yet another convenient red herring.
Today’s edition is a cracker. It would be great if more people paid attention to them: https://www.ukcolumn.org/
I don’t think the bubbles really mean anything. I’ve always thought it’s a totally ludicrous and unenforceable idea, it’s just meant to give the impression that the government is doing a ‘controlled easing’ but give the people an inch and they’ll take a mile, as they say.
I think it will just add to the confusion – but I suspect that’s the idea.
There is no strategy, just a random set of half-baked thoughts and ideas, which is why it is such a mess.
I would rather be inoculated by a dose of the virus myself rather then their virus – and I would want the same for my children too at least its a known extremely minimal risk vs a unknown potentially greater risk.
Thats meant to be ‘rather then their vaccine’
Agree, been thinking for a while now something else is up. Hancock?
God help us, these vaccines that would permanently alter your RNA/DNA would not have been tested properly (death, disability and long term effects of altering RNA/DNA)
I have good days and bad days through all this. Today was a relatively good day until the press briefing, and now it seems clear there will never be a genuinely good day again.
What’s the bloody point?
I don’t watch the press briefings. What was it that upset you?
Everything. Whitty and Vallance loving every bloody minute of it, while they try to make sure that the papers they write will be as valid and accurate as possible for the use of those other countries that still exist in the future, when they face a minor pandemic.The fact that Boris must have been using the lectern to help him stay upright, having lost the use of his spine (I can only assume that him walking into the room was mostly done with camera trickery) the continued message from the press that it was all terrible, but could only have been done better if we’d gone SOONER HARDER FASTER LONGER. The ridiculously pathetic set of relaxations announced. The fact that the light I saw at the end of the tunnel this week turns out to have been a train coming in the other direction.
I stopped watching the briefings a few weeks ago – and even before that I’d watched them at double speed. Really couldn’t stand the slogans, the waffling BS and self-congratulating.
Just peruse the summaries now, though to be fair that misses the very telling body language.
Yes, I know what you mean; I have bad days – and worse days!
Apologies if this has been mentioned in the thread already, but have seen some data from ONS and May deaths are below trend ie negative excess deaths. This is more evidence of the virus harvesting the vulnerable early on. These people, most of whom were sick enough to be in hospital or needing full time care would be dead by the end of 2020 anyway. Obviously not nice for families but not worth trashing the rest of the country for.
It was never worth trashing the country for. Too late now though.
It would be great if we could at least stop the trashing now but it seems everything must be destroyed.
UK must prepare for riots as anger grows over coronavirus restrictions, says government adviser
Of course “address the underlying causes” always means “do things that were always part of the lefties’ political agenda”, never “string up a few ministers responsible for lockdown pour encourager les autres”.
Still, we desperately need a yellow vest or orange vest movement of some kind on the right of politics to force the “Conservative” Party and supposedly “conservative” institutions and businesses to actually show some spine when faced with leftist and identity lobby bullying.
A summer of unemployment and economic misery combined with leftist zealots trying to impose a Cultural Revolution might be fertile ground for such a reaction.
Frankly, it’s probably either that or ultimately facing a choice between a French Revolutionary Year Zero type catastrophe or a Franco-ist defensive coup, and I doubt our remaining conservatives have the balls or the competence for the latter.
We’re heading for interesting times.
Hahahahahahaha.
If only.
Think we might see it this weekend if the Football Lads are allowed anywhere near the BLM protesters.
Reading this it occurs to me that the government with their lockdown and BLM have the same objective: complete control of the narrative and the people. So when are they going to join forces?
https://www.europereloaded.com/paul-craig-roberts-asks-can-we-survive-our-collective-stupidity/
Have they not?
It absolutely would not surprise me to see that bumbling oaf “taking a knee”.
I so hope that he does not debase himself (and our country) that far; like you, though, I could easily imagine him doing so.
Well judging by the protests outside Downing Street the other day they’re making a pretty good fist of pretending to be on opposing sides.
What – like Boris and Starmer, our two socialist leaders?
It seems the medical establishment is finally waking up to the potential death toll of non covid patients caused by lockdown
“There is a growing concern among many consultants that when it comes to Covid-19 the cure may be worse than the disease.”
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-09/coronavirus-horrendous-toll-on-non-covid-19-patients-emerging-nhs/
Something all of us here – and many others like Peter Hitchens and Toby, of course – have been saying right from the start. And only now do the intellectual giants who run the country and the NHS realise?
No s**t Sherlock!
Lordy, maybe a few of these consultants should have given a few of us a call in March.
Is everyone who works in any public institution dumb as pigshit?
Like….. I’m finding it hard to come up with any other explanation now.
“Support Bubbles” !!!
Jesus, God, this man has clearly been brain damaged by his stay in hospital.
Boris, I have to tell you two things, first NOBODY is listening to this woke drivel any more, and second, your career in politics is finished. At this stage, it makes no difference how much unenforceable garbage you come up with, you are finished, so stop trying to save your own skin and save your country instead – from yourself.
To quote a former leader – “Who will rid me of this turbulent pillock” OK they weren’t his exact words, I am paraphrasing a little, and anyway I failed my history O level, but you get my meaning I hope. Whilst thinking along those lines, and I stress I have no experience of this myself as I have never visited, but I hear tell that on the darkweb you can hire assassins. If this is so then wouldn’t it be an idea to get up a crowdfunding page somewhere? Knocking off a PM might cost a shed load of shitcoins (is that the right word?) but surely it must be worth it now.
If that sort of thing is not possible, then if anybody out there has access to a few barrels of gunpowder and needs a lift to Westminster, then do get in touch – I don’t care what religion you are, and I will even pay the congestion charge for you.
Does paying the congestion charge count as aiding and abetting these days?
Asking for a friend….
I can offer blue badge parking if it helps…
I agree he needs to go as quickly as possible he is wrecking the economy of this country he must be stopped ,I cant even bare to watch his pathetic speeches any more it’s gone past a joke and nobody is laughing
Is there a sitting MP that would actually do the right thing?
15 million Iranians may have been infected with coronavirus – one in five of the population – health official admits
Hmm I’ve seen that figure – around a fifth – somewhere before. Seems pretty consistently the level this disease tops out at.
Thsts interesting iran are going for heard immunity . They r consistently having under 1oo deaths a day in a population of 90 million 20% Infected they been out of a y kind of lockdown for a month they are getting towards herd immunity probably why there deaths are not shooting up they are I think in a good position and there is light at the end of the tunnel UNLIKE US
Iran have og course been criticised by MSM for their approach.
If COVID-19 isn’t notifiable in Iran and they don’t bother with a lockdown then it’s probable that the death toll doesn’t look much different to a regular bout of flu with a few more people than usual dying of respiratory problems.
I think I have the explanation for everything that’s going on,it’s not real !,yes that’s right not real,I reckon that I am in a coma in a hospital bed somewhere and all of this is a very vivid disturbing nightmare and unfortunately all of you,my sceptical friends,are just part of my fevered imagination,when I awake it will actually be the year 2120 and everything is a really great,to quote the words of that old 20th century musical poet Donald Fagen with his ballad IGY,
‘ just machines to make big decisions,programmed by fellows with compassion and vision,we’ll be clean when their work is done,we’ll be eternally free and eternally young,what a beautiful world this will be,what a glorious time to be free ‘
To prove it is all but a dream I will slap myself in the face,ow !!,bugger ! it is real,it is 2020 and it is becoming worse than a nightmare !.
I know one thing,all the positivity and hope we were told the 21st century would bring,at school and on programmes like Tomorrow’s World in the 1970s and 80s,hasn’t really turned out like that has it ?.
My thought was virtual reality – a lifetime in Hell to pay for what must have been very serious crimes (you know, things like saying ‘All Lives Matter’!).
Perhaps this is purgatory ?,mind you,isn’t that supposed to be temporary ?,this doesn’t seem like that.
I had a crappy year last year, including having had a skin cancer removed. At the end of last year I thought to myself “thank god 2019 is over.”
If I’d known what was coming, I’d have stopped the dermatologist from removing the bloody thing. With a bit of luck, it might have killed me by now.
Apparently we are all to be outside our houses at 8pm on 5 July to clap and celebrate NHS workers on the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the NHS. Will we all be expected to take the knee at the same time?
I shall remain indoors observing the lockdown and getting pissed like the good little zealot I am
Jermey Corbyn wanted you to kneel to-night…
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1270689136765263872
WTF!
My pronouns are Fuck and Off
No, no, no. This is too much.
Vomit, vomit, vomit.
Everyone keeps comparing covid deaths for each country but this is a false measure of whether the lockdown worked or not. The real measure is excess deaths by all causes. If one country that didn’t have a lockdown had 10000 covid deaths and another of the same size that had a lockdown had 5000 deaths it does not mean the lockdown was successful. The non lockdown country would have no real excess deaths apart from the covid deaths whereas the lockdown country would have perhaps many thousands more deaths caused by the lockdown itself and those deaths may not even show up immediately as future unemployment or mental health issues caused by the lockdown could result in lots more fatalities months or years from now.
EXACTLY.
Why all disses of Sweden are fundamentally bullshit.
Somebody today claimed that Sweden had failed because it had 10x the death rate of Norway. I had to ask for citations on the Swedish strategy to beat Norway at all costs. I’m still waiting.
If Sweden had protected care home residents, just the way most other countries failed to protect that particular category of people who made up the main proportion of people who would be in serious danegr if they caught the virus, they’d have had almost zero deaths. This is what Anders Tegnell talked of when he mentioend regrets, he knows full well that they were right not to lockdown everyone and that saving lives is done by carefully placed interventions, not blanket oppression. He was simpy wshing they’d thought about mrore specific protections for the really vulnerable early on. Well done Sweden for managing to do it amost perfectly, and keeping your liberties and economy throughout it all.
Boris, Whitty and Vallance are travelling together in a car which crashes into a wall then ends up in the Thames. All three are killed. Who is saved? Answer – the British people.
We can but hope they took one for the team!
[…] when I first read it. I know I had a crack at Neil Ferguson’s latest paper in Nature in yesterday’s update, but I wasn’t expecting the editor to react by calling for the closure of Imperial College, […]
Interestingly, I was just thinking about this last night. Why would anyone want to go to Imperial College now to study when clearly their academic standards are so low and they are now a laughing stock because of Ferguson et al. You would think they would realise they need to jettison these people or they will have less students enrolling and therefore less money. Maybe they need to be made aware just how ridiculous their modelling team are. A few humorous memes on social media to that effect may have some impact.
It’s not about attracting students, it’s about generous funding from friend Bill et al.
Is Diane Abbott a part time maths lecturer there?
Can someone enlighten me. I am from N.Ireland and I got the following reply to a freedom of information request I made to the NI Executive –
“I am writing to confirm that the Executive Office has now completed its search for this information and have established that this information is not held by the Department. Further information in respect to your request may be available from the Department of Health and Social Care in London. ”
Some of the questions I asked were
1.Please advise if any virologists or epidemiologists were consulted, who were they and what advice did they supply?
2. were there any other suggestions put forward other than lockdown and, if so, why was the lockdown option chosen as the only way to counteract the virus?
3. Were any economists consulted as to the economic impact? If so, who were they and what was their advice?
4. Were there any mental health experts consulted? If so, who were they and what was their advice?
5. Were any experts on suicide prevention consulted. If so, who were they and what was their advice?
6 Were there any experts on the physical and mental health effects of unemployment on people consulted? If so, who were they and what was their advice?
Surely all they need to do is check the minutes of these meetings.
If they have no minutes it would suggest the lockdown was introduced arbitrarily by by the executive with no formal discussions whatsoever and no notes being taken at any meeting. The only other solution is that The English government simply told us to lockdown and we agreed with no presentation of any written evidence whatsoever.
Even if all the meetings took place in London surely everyone that attended would have a copy of the minutes. We are moving out of lockdown at a different rate than other parts of the UK and we know the executive have meetings every few days about this.
Does anyone with a legal background in N.Ireland know if it is legal to either keep no records or say they haven’t when they have?
For the record the cabinet office in London refused my request also due to it being to time consuming and costly. So much for transparency
Yeesh!!!!
Right. I’ll look at this as a distraction from considering whether to take a long walk off a short pier.
It rather depends what you’re looking for. Freedom of information requests would not cover information legally not in the public domain. Cabinet records are released after 20 years nowadays and not available before that, so a FOI request for cabinet records or details of the proceedings of cabinet would not yield results before this. SAGE meeting minutes up to 8th of May have been released “in full” (read: heavily redrafted) on gov.uk. Ivan dig out a link, I expect, but you should be able to find through google. Toby posted in the blog on this and posted links to a couple of analyses along with it. As far as I can see, there’s no evidence that any economist contributed to the SAGE meetings (and someone will correct me if I’m wrong).
I don’t know that COBRA meeting minutes are available anywhere, or ever have been.
In theory, as I understand it, the process goes something like: SAGE provides advice to the government, based on consensus opinion
The “government” (meaning the few members of the inner cabinet, the PM, Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and The Chancellor of the Dutchy of Lancaster) make decisions based on this advice
COBRA meetings seem mostly now to be used to argue with the devolved administrations
Finally, the “inner cabinet” tell cabinet what they’ve decided, if they can be bothered, or if one or more member of cabinet is appearing on BBC Breakfast or Good Morning Britain the following morning.
So, in short, the answers you’re looking for aren’t going to be available to you for a very long time. From what I’ve seen, the answers to your specific questions are:
1. Yes, multiple, via SAGE (membership and minutes now available)
2. Lockdown was not in fact suggested by SAGE as a group (individuals’ opinions may have differed)
3. Not formally
4. Not formally, but behavioural psychologists were (does that make it better? No)
5. Not formally
6. Not formally
The above being based on 1) what I’ve read and 2) what I can surmise from the complete and utter disregard of any advice that might possible have been forthcoming from anybody falling into categories 3-6.
Not “Ivan” – I can
I should add – you’re on absolutely the right lines, but unfortunately this research will have to be done by historians in the future. These will of course be historians from other countries, and they will have to brave the locals throwing stones at them and trying to barter for animal skins as they do their work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/magazine/german-soccer-tries-to-kick-off-a-comeback-for-pro-sports.html?auth=login-facebook&utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
Football has come back and nobody has died. Countries have opened up and nothing untoward has happened regarding the virus. In fact wherever you look there are no signs of a second wave.
Now this may be a bit out there but please hear me out. Could it be that everything is working out well because there was no danger? In a similar sense, if you think it’s raining outside, you go outside and don’t actually get wet could the reason be that it’s not actually raining?
I know it’s a crazy idea but it’s definitely a possibility.
What’s happened here is it was raining outside, some miserable drizzle that didn’t hurt most people very much. Then that drizzle stopped, althogh the mainstream media still hasn’t admitetd that, weirdly it stopped long before the optimistic models said that the cloud could have run empty. Ferguson’s model, predicting the cloud held sufficient water to rival the atlantic ocean and that every drop would drown someone, has been shown to be even more wrong than the optimistic ones. We have to ask whether it started raining earleir than believed, whether this weird rain somehow just doesn’t stick to some people, or whether the rain falls in short bursts occasionally only. Either way the only way for us to work this out is to go outside and try.
Speaking of the Imperial College model, I’m reading up on the paper before I read it. I found the following in the 8 June London Sun, and I’d appreciate other eyes looking at it because there’s something wrong here:
“The team from Imperial analysed data from 11 countries in Europe, including the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and Belgium, up until 4 May to predict infection rates.
“The team estimated that by that date between 12 and 15 million individuals in these countries had been infected with Covid-19.
Deaths averted“By comparing the number of observed deaths against those predicted by their model in the absence of interventions, the authors suggest that approximately 3.1 million deaths have been averted due to lockdowns.”
Now, one of these sets of numbers could be wrong (I’ll check in the IL paper); or I could be misunderstanding; but this seems to be saying that the Infection Fatality Rate is either 20% (3.1M/12M) or 25% (3.1M/15/M). That sounds way high, about 100 times the current USCDC estimate.
Sorry; s/b “20% (3.1M/15M) or 25% (3.1M/12M)
If modelling predicts 500k and the actual number of deaths is 40k then the only conclusion that can be made is that everything done or not done to arrive at 40k deaths contributed to that result.
In the UK they are attributing the lives saved to the lockdown. On that basis Sweden also saved lives without a strict lockdown. South Korea and Japan managed to save even more lives by not bothering with any form of lockdown.
The logical conclusion from these examples is no locking down saves even more lives than locking down which in itself actually costs more lives.
I agree with everything you write except on the subject of tearing down Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol. I fully support the mob that tore down the statue of someone who profited from the exploitation of other people, and I look forward to seeing more statues of others whose money was made at the expense of slaves suffering the same fate.
[…] You can read our own critique of the Flaxman paper here. […]