Rishi Moves into Poll Position
In the race to succeed Boris, Rishi Sunak moved into poll position yesterday with a cash giveaway that was widely welcomed in the press. The Telegraph‘s Camilla Tominey is in no doubt whose star is rising, and whose is falling.
“Where’s Boris?” is a refrain that has dogged the Prime Minister throughout the coronavirus crisis.
It even featured on the front of last week’s Spectator, as the magazine he once edited asked: “Where is the man we thought we voted for?”
Never has Mr Johnson been more conspicuous by his absence than at Thursday’s hugely significant Commons statement by Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor.
As Mr Sunak introduced his winter economy plan, which will replace the furlough scheme with a new Job Support Scheme, the Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) was nowhere to be seen on the front bench.
He later emerged at a police station in Northamptonshire (as seen in the video below), where he busied himself meeting new recruits, sitting in a police car with flashing lights and watching a first aid demonstration involving plastic dummies.
Worth reading in full, although, according to Christopher Snowdon in the Spectator, Rishi is driving the nation to ruin.
Meanwhile, some members of Team Rishi are no longer bothering to conceal which horse they’re backing.
Toby contributed to a Michael Crick report for Mail+ yesterday about Boris’s future in which Crick concluded that Boris would probably cling on for a few years before being ousted in a bloody coup.
Prime Ministers aren’t like ordinary people. To get the job requires a persistence, a stamina, a tenacity, that the rest of us don’t have and therefore they’re not very inclined to give up the job either. And if I look back at the seven Prime Ministers of my adult lifetime, from Jim Callaghan to Theresa May, people forecast way ahead of time that they hadn’t got much longer in the job and yet they held on. And I suspect that Boris Johnson will hold on for a few years yet.
I wonder…
Government’s Graph of Doom “Wrong”, says Oxford Epidemiologist
“Wrong” – that’s the verdict of Oxford professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta on the infamous graph presented on Monday by Chief Scientist Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer for England Professor Chris Whitty as part of the Government’s justification for ramping up restrictions. The Telegraph reports.
Speaking to Allison Pearson on the Telegraph‘s Planet Normal podcast, she said: “I think it is wrong. I was quite surprised that such a graph would be presented to the public. It was qualified even by them as being not even a prediction, so it’s very hard to understand the logic of that. Why would you present something that’s not even a prediction?
“Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to predict with any accuracy exactly what’s going to happen. I don’t think mathematical models are very good at that. But this is not even a prediction. It was just following a line of thinking in which the doubling time would remain what it has appeared to be over the last week for an extended period of time.”
On Tuesday, Boris Johnson admitted that the virus may actually be doubling between seven and 20 days.
If the latter was the case, it would mean around 8,000 cases by mid-October, although the latest figures show the UK has already reached more than 6,000 cases per day, described as “near record” figures.
Record reported, yes. But as James Naismith, Professor of Structural Biology at Oxford, points out: “The sudden jump is likely to reflect issues in the testing system reporting.”
In fact, if we look at the graph of cases by date of sample there is little sign of growth over the past week. Of course, recent days will be revised upwards as more swabs are processed and the backlog clears. But even so, the lack of growth is noteworthy – particularly when the recent increase in the number of tests (the immediate cause of the backlog) is taken into account.
And still the Government fails to show on its dashboard a graph of the positive rate, which as Our World in Data notes, is a “crucial metric for understanding the pandemic”.
What possible excuse could there be for not including such important data in the UK Government’s coronavirus dashboard? Is it because it doesn’t look nearly so scary, and so is no good for inducing fear and compliance?
As it happens the positive rate has increased a bit during September, from 0.6% on August 26th to 1.2% on September 8th and 1.7% on September 22nd (the latest date for which we have data). That means it doubled in 13 days to begin with and since then, 14 days later, only increased by a further 42% (100% would be doubling again). So it initially doubled at around half the rate of the Government’s “every seven days” and then slowed down, though did pick up again a bit in the past week (growing 30% between September 15th and September 22nd, a doubling time of around two and a half weeks if it continues). This suggests the current level of growth is not exactly “exponential” and may already be beginning to peak. Of course, we will have to wait and see what comes of the latest rise. But the question at this point is why the Government is making a show of dubious projections of exponential growth from raw case data and not setting out the much less troubling reality.
Sunetra Gupta is clear about where things are headed.
Prof Gupta, who has argued that a large number of people could have already been exposed to the virus, said: “The fate of this virus is going to be principally determined by what fraction of the population is either immune or already has some form of resistance to it.
“The proof is in the pudding. It’s a question of whether when infection rates rise, death rates will rise. We’ve seen a summer with very low infection rates despite quite a lot of mixing. So that indicates that there is a level of herd immunity in place.”
Sick Children Turned Away by Covid-Only NHS
There was a scandalous story in the Evening Standard yesterday – sick children are being turned away from two London hospitals because they’re preparing for an anticipated surge of Covid patients over the winter.
Sick children will be turned away from A&E at two major London hospitals throughout the winter to enable them to focus on treating adults with Covid.
The paediatric A&E at the Royal Free, in Hampstead, will close at the end of the month. The children’s casualty unit at University College London Hospital, in Bloomsbury, will remain closed, having initially shut to under 18s in March.
It is not known when they will reopen but the closures are said to be “temporary”. The Royal Free and UCLH have been designated as “surge sites” for the feared second wave of Covid patients.
So let me get this straight. An actual child in need of emergency medical care will be turned away by an NHS hospital just in case a notional person in their 80s with a serious underlying illness catches coronavirus and needs a bed? Even though the risk of the hospital’s critical care capacity being overwhelmed if the NHS returns to normal is very low?
This is absolute madness.
As Cases Rise in Belgium, Restrictions are EASED
In what is being hailed as the first move of its kind in Europe, the Belgian government is responding to rising cases by easing restriction rather than tightening them. Ross Clark in the Spectator has more.
If there is one country which has influenced the Government’s toughening of Covid restrictions over the past fortnight it is Belgium. It was Sophie Wilmes’ government which, faced with a resurgence of Covid cases in late July, came up with the idea of placing a limit on the size of social gatherings – five rather than the six which Boris Johnson went on to impose in England six weeks later. It was the Belgian government, too, which came up with the idea of setting a curfew for pubs – 11pm rather than the 10pm which will come into effect in England, Scotland and Wales today. At the same time, Belgium extended the compulsion to wear a mask to most public places.
So did those measures do the trick in Belgium? Not quite. Daily confirmed cases rose from around 600 a day at the end of July to peak at just over 900 a day in the middle of August. They then fell back to around 400 a day at the beginning of September – before a further resurgence. On Wednesday, there were 1834 new infections.
But here’s the thing. In spite of rising cases, Belgium is now relaxing its restrictions rather than tightening them. This week it has announced that people will now be able to meet up in groups of 10 rather than five. The quarantine period for people self-isolating will be reduced to seven from 14 days and masks will no longer have to be worn everywhere in public – though they will still be required on public transport, shops, cinemas and on some crowded streets.
This is still a highly restrictive regime, so in that sense nothing to write home about. Belgium hasn’t been transformed into Sweden or Tanzania. But it indicates a shift in outlook and strategy, away from suppression at all costs to something more nuanced. It appears the idea is to make the restrictions more bearable and sustainable. But perhaps the inner logic of the shift will mean it turns into more before long.
Stop Press: The UAE’s National newspaper has run a report headed “Sweden’s ‘herd immunity’ model gains momentum in Europe“, citing as evidence the recent soliciting of advice from Sweden’s epidemiologists by British and Irish governments. And also Professor Carl Heneghan’s remarks to the BBC that he detects a “shift in policy” and a “move towards Sweden,” with more focus on personal responsibility and acceptance that cases will rise. And also the comments of a leading virologist in Denmark, Kim Sneppen, professor of biocomplexity at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, this week: “There is some evidence that the Swedes have built up a degree of immunity to the virus which, along with what else they are doing to stop the spread, is enough to control the disease… They may now be finished with the epidemic.”
Stop Press 2: Belgium has moved away from the PCR test as the main measure of the epidemic, presumably over reliability concerns. From now on, decisions about whether to tighten or relax restrictions will be mainly based on hospitalisations.
Scottish Students Banned From Going to the Pub
Our heart goes out to students at Scottish universities. Nic Sturge-On has banned all students in North Korea Scotland from going to the pub. The BBC has more.
Universities Scotland said the new guidance that had been agreed with the Scottish government was a “necessary step at this crucial moment of managing the virus in the student population, to protect students and the wider community”.
The new rules state that all universities will “make absolutely clear to students that there must be no parties, and no socialising outside their households”.
They go on to say: “This weekend, the first of the new tighter Scottish government guidance, we will require students to avoid all socialising outside of their households and outside of their accommodation.
“We will ask them not to go to bars or other hospitality venues.”
Extra staff will be brought into student accommodation to watch for any breaches of the guidance and to support students who are self-isolating.
Stop Press: Students at the University of Edinburgh have told of the ‘prison-like’ conditions they are having to live in:
First-year students living in the university’s catered accommodation Pollock Halls have endured being surveilled by staff as they eat alone at single desks at the JMCC cafeteria. …
First year student Florence Carr-Jones added that the dining hall feels like “exam invigilators patrolling the space”.
She added that outside of dining times, “security guards roam the halls in the evenings knocking on noisy doors, threatening fines and suspensions”.
Liberty added: “There are huge queues to get into the dining hall and staff lead students to tables so you don’t even choose who you sit next to.”
Plus: Watch this threatening video from Principal of University of Glasgow Anton Muscatelli
NHS Track-and-Trace App Doesn’t Work on iPhone 6
After today’s news that the NHS’s cutting-edge app doesn’t work on the iPhone 6, we asked our track-and-trace app correspondent to give us an update.
The latest version of the NHS COVID-19 app was available from yesterday, getting the prestigious home screen position in the Apple App Store. It has already done something amazing for me. It has made me feel a twinge of sympathy for Matt Hancock. One of the reasons this app is four months late is because it had to be changed to use the much vaunted “Apple and Google approach”. More specifically, it uses the ExposureNotification feature which respects your privacy by not sharing your data with the app’s authors, the Government. The problem is that Apple only provide that feature in iOS 13.5 or later and iOS 13.5 is only available on iPhone models 6s or newer. So the app cannot do its exposure notification thing if you have the plain iPhone 6 or older. If you try to install the app from the app store it won’t let you and there is nothing that Matt Hancock and team can do about it. It is true that less than 3% of iPhone owners still use the five year-old model 6, but from a PR point of view it is unfortunate that they are more likely to be older or less well-off. As Mr Hancock must surely be getting used to by now, even small percentages of large numbers, such as the number of iPhone owners in the UK, mean headline grabbing statistics: around 750,000 people could be excluded.
So Matt finds himself on BBC Breakfast trying to encourage us all to download and use the app but having to tell Charlie Stayt: “Only a very small proportion of people have phones that don’t have the latest iOS software. The best thing that they could do if they want to get the app, of course, is to upgrade.” Oops. Upgrading in this case means not just downloading the latest software – those phones won’t do that – it means buying a newer phone, as Charlie well knows: “What, buy a new phone? In terms of reaching those most at risk, for example, those who have the least money are the least likely to have newer phones and […] older people will have less sophisticated phones, maybe don’t have phones at all. Surely those are some of the people you would most like to reach?”
Yes indeed Charlie, but you and everyone else in the media were not making that point back in June when you were pressuring the Government to use the Apple solution which we knew back then would have this problem. To be fair, I also said on this site that if you must build an app then use the Apple/Google technology, but I also made the case that track and trace apps are not the panacea that politicians and the media make them out to be. They will always be problematic. The evidence from many countries this year has borne that out but the Government and the media have largely ignored it. Even with the latest phone the Times is reporting that one in three alerts from the new app will be false positives. This is just another data point for us sceptics to say, “We told you so!” But is anyone listening?
Less Than a FIFTH Adhere to Self-Isolation and Quarantine Rules
A new preprint study finds that in the UK just 18% of persons with Covid symptoms adhere to self-isolation, and only 11% adhere to quarantine if contacted by NHS Track and Trace (Hat tip Adam Kucharski). And this is what the Government is spending hundreds of billions of pounds on and thinks is the way out of lockdown?
Postcard From Zanzibar
A reader has sent us a postcard from Zanzibar. Sounds lovely. How do we get there?
Salamu (Swahili for Greetings) from Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania best known as the birthplace of Freddie Mercury, where we are bathed blissfully in sunshine, trade winds and, best of all, mask free.
While many countries in Africa locked down, Tanzania realised very quickly that with a median age of 20, half that of Europe, the cure being worse than the disease would be an inevitable consequence of shutting down the economy. They kept their economy open.
It was a wise decision. In a country of 56 million people, only 516 cases of CV19 have been registered and 21 deaths. Given that there is no formal healthcare reporting system, it is inevitable that these numbers are under-reported. However, as 2.5 million people die every year in Africa from another infectious disease (Tuberculosis), the Tanzanian Government and healthcare community thankfully enjoy a sense of context about risk management sadly lacking among the bureaucrats and government advisors our taxes pay for.
Alas, the local economy has still be shell-shocked. As global supply chains breakdown, tourism falls off a cliff, foreign aid and non-governmental agencies shut down, the most poor and vulnerable are back to what they know best. Subsistence living and seeking aid from ‘developed countries’. Ironically, these are the same so called ‘developed’ countries whose lockdowns have caused the very economic catastrophe ‘developing‘ countries are now suffering from.
Not content with presiding over a historic economic collapse at home; the same ‘experts’ whose gold plated salaries, pensions and healthcare benefits our taxes pay for, have also been the architects of a lockdown syndrome that will condemn another 100 million people to living below the global poverty level of $1.90 a day, while causing an additional five million global deaths from illnesses ranging from malaria and tuberculosis to heart disease and cancer.
Yet, as always, the locals here laugh, sing and see the bright side of life. Freedom from an entitlement mentality and the hysteria of main stream media has its upsides!
Tanzanians understand that the only way we are going to dig ourselves out of this catastrophe is if ordinary people insist the governments we elect make balanced and transparent decisions based on integrated health and economic data… and not just the ‘do no harm’ mantra of doctors.
Wish you were here? Flights and hotels are cheap. Planes and airports empty. The local people will welcome you with nothing more infectious than open arms, gracious hospitality and a healthy appreciation that life is all about living, not obsessing about the avoidance of dying.
Hakuna matata!
Starvation in Madagascar Exposes Selfishness of Lockdowns
The argument that I hear perhaps most often from lockdown zealots is that lockdown is the compassionate course of action because it protects the vulnerable and doesn’t sacrifice them for the sake of the economy. People before profits. Yet as I try to point out to these well-meaning but misguided souls (rarely with much success), the truth is that lockdowns themselves kill vulnerable people, and very likely a great deal more than they’re saving. The point of herd immunity is not to be indifferent to the vulnerable but to protect them by building up a community immunity quickly while they shield, and not doing lots of other damage at the same time.
In the Spectator this week, Jo Deacon reminds us why this is true, with an account of life in Madagascar.
Like many countries, Madagascar has gone into lockdown. People rush to make it home before curfew, their face masks dangling around their chins. Children play together in the dust outside the locked school gates. The hotels and restaurants are empty, swimming pools drained. Health checkpoints have been set up by the side of the road and people jostle each other as they wait in line for their temperature to be taken before entering town. In the developing world, a cut in income quickly translates into increased malnutrition, inability to pay for basic medicine, and death from starvation or entirely treatable illness. So far, just over 200 people have died from Covid in Madagascar, a country with a population of 27 million. The lives lost due to the indirect impacts of Covid from famine, decreased vaccinations and medical care are likely to be orders of magnitude greater. I was recently telling my youngest son the story of Hansel and Gretel and the wicked stepmother who led them away to die in the forest as they could not afford to feed them any more. There is nothing allegorical about this tale to a Madagascan: it is something we see daily.
The United Nations expects in the region of 71 million people to be pushed back into extreme poverty in 2020 because of the global response to COVID-19. Meanwhile, the official death toll with the disease is yet to reach a million.
In the UK we have had just over 53,000 excess deaths so far in 2020. In 2014-15 the excess winter deaths were 44,000. Nobody even noticed the 2015 epidemic, yet in 2020 with only around 9,000 more deaths – a 20% increase – the public has been terrorised into surrendering their liberty and sanity. Countries like Sweden, Tanzania and Belarus show that the death toll probably wouldn’t be any higher without lockdown.
However well-intentioned, there is nothing compassionate about lockdowns.
Glasgow Nightingale Hospital To Be Dismantled – As Restrictions Increase
A reader has written to say that a family member who is part of a Scottish engineering firm noticed yesterday on the website for Public Contracts Scotland that a tender had gone out and contractors found for the dismantling of Glasgow’s Nightingale Hospital. Is there any clearer sign of the incoherence, if not outright mendacity, of the Government’s strategy, that it will increase restrictions while clearly having no expectation of hospitals being overwhelmed. The bubble must burst soon, surely.
The Government’s Internet Censorship Bill
In his latest Spectator column, Toby has written about the case of Kristie Higgs, the 44 year-old Christian administrator who was fired by a secondary school for posting a message on her private Facebook account criticising the sex and relationship education curriculum at another school.
There are two free speech issues at stake here. The first is whether an employer’s social media policy, limiting what employees are allowed to say on Facebook and other platforms, can legitimately be extended to private conversations, particularly when the employee has taken steps to disguise her identity. On the face of it, that looks like a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to privacy. The second is whether Kristie’s comments constituted “illegal discrimination” as defined in the UK’s Equality Act 2010. Did they create an ‘”intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for LGBT colleagues, even though they wouldn’t have known about them if they hadn’t been circulated by someone trying to get her into trouble? Or is she permitted to express such views by Article 10 of the ECHR, which protects the right to freedom of expression?
Kristie’s legal team can also appeal to the Equality Act, which makes it illegal to discriminate against employees for their possessions of various “protected characteristics”, including religion and belief. Her lawyers will argue she lost her job because she expressed her belief about the immutability of natal sex. However, when Maya Forstater’s lawyers made that argument in an employment tribunal last year – she was sacked for refusing to use trans women’s preferred pronouns – the judge said her gender critical beliefs weren’t “worthy of respect in a democratic society”.
Kristie’s treatment is obviously deeply concerning for believers in free speech, but there’s another aspect of her case that worries me. According to a recent white paper, a Bill will soon be brought before Parliament empowering Ofcom to regulate the internet. Under the proposals, Ofcom will be able to impose punitive fines on Facebook for not removing content that political activists find “offensive”, even if it doesn’t fall foul of any existing speech laws.
Twitter already bans users for misgendering trans people, so it won’t take much of a push for all the social media companies to ban people for criticising trans ideology.
The Free Speech Union recently published a briefing paper about the Government’s proposed new internet censorship law that you can read here. The fact that Ofcom will soon be regulating social media is one of the reasons the Free Speech Union is taking Ofcom to court over its censorious “coronavirus guidance”, published on the same day as the country was placed under full lockdown, which cautions broadcasters against challenging the advice being issued by “public health authorities”, i.e. the state. If you’re concerned about the erosion of free speech, please donate to the Free Speech Union’s “Litigation Fund” here.
Round-Up
- “More than 40 Tory backbenchers back rebel bid to force vote on future lockdown measures” – Graham Brady’s rebellion appears to have the votes it needs to bring the Government to heel
- “Under cover of coronavirus, the Tory government is bulldozing basic liberties” – The Guardian‘s John Harris asks why the left has been silent until now on the Government’s assault on our civil liberties
- “Hydroxychloroquine And The Burden of Proof” – A thorough new examination by the Economic Standard of the evidence supporting the efficacy of HCQ in treating COVID-19
- “No, 90% Of Coronavirus Tests Are Not ‘False Positives’ And This Is Why” – The Huffington Post attempts a refutation of Lockdown Sceptics in a weird article that starts by conceding Toby and Carl Heneghan are right and finishes by asking its reader if they’re still “not convinced”. Main point: most being tested are symptomatic. Hmm, on what basis? And there are a lot of colds going round…
- “Boris has no plan, no credibility and yet he dares blame the VOTERS for the mess we’re in. Thank goodness most people will decide for themselves where we go from here – and sod his police state” – Janet Street-Porter goes full sceptic in the Mail
- “Who in their right mind would download Matt Hancock’s Covid app?” – Ross Clark in the Telegraph hits the nail on the head: “I don’t see what is in it for me to volunteer to be fined £10,000.” Er, quite
- “Questions to the government CV 19 advisers” – John Redwood MP with characteristically understated scepticism
- “Now the Government wants to cancel Christmas for students – what crackpot policy will we have next?” – Judith Woods in the Telegraph bewails what has become of the Conservative Party with its miserly, crazy ideas
- “I was right about Bonkers Boris, right about Covid, right about the lockdown” – Laura Perrins is feeling justly vindicated on Conservative Woman. Also, in their poll 87% say Whitty and Vallance should be sacked
- “Local lockdowns could soon be triggered by a ‘traffic light’ system based on coronavirus infection rate” – More barmy ideas, and still the fixation with the raw case numbers continues
- “Covid must be handled with effective risk management, not erratic risk avoidance” – Labour MP John Spellar joins the ranks of sceptics
- “COVID-19: open, reasoned, detailed, discussion of the options is overdue and welcome” – Thoughtful piece in the BMJ by Raj Bhopal, Emeritus Professor of Public Health at
HMP PrisonEdinburgh - “The Moral Case for Reopening Schools – Without Masks” – Excellent piece by John Tierney in City Journal. By “schools” he means universities and by “reopening” he means ending Covid restrictions
- “Britons face virtual worldwide quarantine as four more countries are added to UK Covid travel ban list” – Uh oh. Boris and Hancock have got the travel darts out again
- “The Spectator, the Co-op and cancel culture – a cautionary tale” – Fraser Nelson reveals what happened when the person who controlled Co-op’s Twitter account over-reacted to a few people telling the Co-op not to advertise in the Spectator
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just one today: “Instant Aura” by Rishi.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today is the turn of Harry and Meghan – or “Woko Ono”, as she’s known to Harry’s exasperated friends. On Tuesday, the couple formerly known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex urged US voters to reject Trump hate in the forthcoming US Presidential election. The BBC has more.
“As we approach this November, it’s vital that we reject hate speech, misinformation and online negativity,” the Duke said as he sat on a bench alongside Meghan.
He also reminded Americans to be discerning in the content they consumed online.
“When the bad outweighs the good, for many, whether we realise it or not, it erodes our ability to have compassion and our ability to put ourself in someone else’s shoes,” he said.
“Because when one person buys into negativity online, the effects are felt exponentially. It’s time to not only reflect, but act.”
100%, copper-bottomed gobbledegook.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
The Care Home Scandal – A Call For Evidence
Lockdown Sceptics has asked an award-winning investigative journalist, David Rose, to investigate the high death toll in Britain’s care homes. Did 20,000+ elderly people really die of COVID-19 between March and July or were many of them just collateral lockdown damage? With lots of care homes short-staffed because employees were self-isolating at home, and with relatives and partners unable to visit to check up on their loved ones because of restrictions, how many elderly residents died of neglect, not Covid? How many succumbed to other conditions, untreated because they weren’t able to access hospitals or their local GP? After doctors were told by care home managers that the cause of death of a deceased resident was “novel coronavirus”, how many bothered to check before signing the death certificate? The risk of doctors misdiagnosing the cause of death is particularly high, given that various safeguards to minimise the risk of that happening were suspended in March.
David Rose would like Lockdown Sceptics readers to share any information they have that could help in this investigation. Here is his request:
We are receiving reports that some residents of care homes who died from causes other than Covid may have had their deaths ascribed to it – even though they never had the disease at all, and never tested positive. Readers will already be familiar with the pioneering work by Carl Heneghan and his colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, which forced the Government to change its death toll counting method. Previously, it will be recalled, people who died of, say, a road accident, were being counted as Covid deaths if they had tested positive at any time, perhaps months earlier. But here we are talking of something different – Covid “deaths” among people who never had the virus at all.
In one case, where a family is deciding whether to grant permission for Lockdown Sceptics to publicise it, an elderly lady in reasonable health was locked in her room for many hours each day in a care home on the south coast, refused all visitors, deprived of contact with other residents, and eventually went on hunger strike, refusing even to drink water. She died in the most wretched circumstances which were only indirectly a product of the virus – and yet, her death certificate reportedly claims she had Covid.
I’m looking for further examples of 1) elderly people who died as a result of the lockdown and associated measures, but whose deaths were wrongly attributed to “novel coronavirus”, and 2) those elderly people who clearly died from other causes but whose deaths were still formally ascribed to Covid because they once tested positive for it, even after the counting method change.
If you have relevant information, please email Lockdown Sceptics or David directly on [email protected].
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected] or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here.
And Finally…
One of the few bright spots in the last six months has been the comic videos of Andrew Lawrence. Not only is Andrew scathingly sceptical and heretically un-woke, he’s also very funny. This is his take on the news that Sir Patrick Vallance has a £600,000 shareholding in GlaxoSmithKline. Conspiracy theorists will love it…
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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Talk in the Glasgow Herald (the now SNP-supporting disgusting rag sheet, one-time serious newspaper) of a “third wave” coming along. Will this never end?
On this website, it is long overdue for the word “cases” to be put into inverted quotes, to imply that the word is being misused. We cannot allow the government to continue to misuse this word.
Hi, I’ve noticed several posts where people say they are avoiding the flu jab.I’m due for mine next week should I have it?
Suggest you discuss with your doctor.
Me: I’m getting one at Boots as soon as their restricted appointments allow. Not planning to queue up at walk-in or drop-in facilities. I take the flu shot every year.
This government is pursuing a bogus, wrong-headed policy backed up by make-believe graphs, fantasy figures and statements from scientists compromised by the huge wedges of cash they have received from people with an interest in keeping the crisis going. This policy is doing unprecedented damage to our economy, our health service, our education system, our cultural life and the institution of the family – everything that we hold dear.
The government cannot succeed in continuing this policy for much longer. The coffers are empty, but the coffins are still full, the way they tell it. The policy makes no sense whatsoever.
Can sheep turn into guinea pigs on the say-so of government? I believe they can.
Saw ITV News tonight. The way they (a) tout the vaccine as the “solution” to the pandemic (b) fail to even consider that a “successful” vaccine might simply pave the way for another novel pathogen to attack the weak lungs of the old and sick and (c) assume we are all rooting for this vaccine and desperate to have it, is risible, pathetic and the very antithesis of journalism. Neurotic Tom Bradby is the very nadir of UK journalism.
BBC News, 7m cases in the USA, no percentage given, interview an English (why?) associate (why?) professor who blames Trump.
Completely laughable. No self-respecting journalist could work for them. The dishonesty is blatant.
The BBC, true to the principles of fascism, so admired by Lord Reith: tell big lies and tell them often.
Does anybody want to see a picture of my MP in a face nappy?
No thanks. When you think back to the photos of brave unmasked Britons in their early 20s in WW2 prepared to sacrifice their lives to save us from tyranny, it seems highly inappropriate.
I find the pictures of people in masks alienating. I actually believe we need better public hygiene e.g. pn public transport, more cleaning of handrails and lift buttons, pin pads, that kind of thing. But if you are sick, don’t go out! The idea that people can go out when sick but wearing a mask is plain daft.
Of course it is. And even if you’re asymptomatic, you’re likely to make things worse for yourself by interfering with the body’s natural mechanisms for expelling the virus.
We know masks don’t prevent the spread of the virus because we’ve seen a huge rise in cases since they were introduced. So the obvious question is: are masks actually facilitating infection? I think they could be.
I am sure they are facilitating infections.
No we haven’t. Don’t buy their lies. We have seen a rise in testing, which has detected more people who carry the virus but are not ill, plus a large number of false positives.
Masks make no difference whatsoever, either way, except to humiliate, frighten and dehumanise.
Only if I can put it in the bottom of the toilet bowel, which is where it belongs.
Csn we get some loo paper printed with Bojo, Wancock, Ferguson etc?
It’s a flowery one.
I am going to do a thing, I would like people to find a picture of their MP’s in a face nappy and posts the pictures on here.
Anybody who gets a picture of them in some gloves AND a nappy is onto a winner, if any of you are lucky enough to be able to dig up an image of them with a nappy, gloves AND a visor, well, you should be hero for a day.
Bonus points will be given for the most eccentric PPE useage.
Goggles would be almost priceless.
Bring it ON!!!
I am going to post this tomorrow too, perhaps it should be made a feature, politicians looking mental in their PPE gear.
All masks are vile but some are more vile than others. Anything suggesting a celebratory approach to mask serfdom is particularly abhorrent.
I agree masks are vile. Not just in a cosmetic sense.
I wasn’t thinking about a celebratory approach. Perhaps more a chance to have a laugh, if that is actually possible considering the subject matter. Perhaps just to make a point. Not sure what that point is right now.
I still find it weirdly funny when I think of Kier Starmer wearing the visor talking to some nappied up fools sitting in the outside bar of that windy golf club. It was such an absurd sight. Horrendous for sure but also just so ridiculous.
He looked like such a bell-end I really have to laugh.
I bet there are loads of pictures of politicians looking like total muppets in their PPE. Having all these images in one place might be quite telling.
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/democracy-muzzled/
I spent a pleasant half hour tonight with fellow sceptics trolling a local Facebook group post where COVID cultists were virtue signalling about downloading the track and trace app. While sheeple baiting is a great blood sport for all the family, I am actually very angry that the government I voted for has inflicted this deep and long lasting wound on our communities. COVID is dividing us in a way even brexit failed to do.
That’s what it is all about. The total fragmentation of society. Like a social high-explosive.
Yes. It is a small consolation to me that I had a Brexit Party candidate to vote for, and am not tainted by association with this shit show. Not that Conservative voters could have predicted this.
I just don’t know where we go from here. The entire mainstream political system has not just failed, but deliberately exacerbated that failure by creating and cultivating divisions, stoking fear and repeating what they must know to be catastrophic errors rather than admit they were wrong. Is there any political solution when the entire system, or all the people in it, are this rotten?
That is a hard question to answer. My best response
Has TBP come out strongly against the Lockdown Lunacy? I haven’t noticed anything. Farage has been chasing rubber dinghies around the Channel over the summer. Not really on the ball I feel.
Farage was much too late to take a sceptical position. He seemed early on to be pushing for the war on Covid. But he does seem to have come around now.
In his defence it might be argued:
1) the Brexit Party needed to concentrate on Brexit, which is being messed up predictably even as I type, and;
2) pointing out the regime’s willingness to receive refugees from the vicious persecution of Macron’s France [sarc] did serve a purpose from an LS point of view. It proved, even as we were being put under house arrest, that the regime was not really scared of any killer virus. It proved that this is a LARP (live action role play) at a time when even sceptics wondered whether there just might be something more to it.
The scandal of illegal immigration across the channel (which could be resolved overnight by the Australian solution of off-mainland processing eg somewhere like the West Falklands) is not unimportant and of course the government need to be pressed on getting Brexit done without more May-style surrender clauses. But, still, TBP missed a golden opportunity to set out a distinctive Swedish-style policy position on Covid.
Daily Mail: Coronavirus UK: SAGE say lockdown on elderly could save economy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8773445/Britain-avoid-tougher-measures-cooping-away-elderly-SAGE-files-reveal.html
Scientists admit the move would be ethically questionable
You don’t say!!!!
A seriously egregious article.
Did Tegnell meet SAGE, I wonder?
From the beginning, over 70s and vulnerable people here were advised (note: not forced) to meet as few people as possible and to (for example) ask others to shop for them. Lots of people volunteered to shop for relatives and neighbours; churches and councils also provided – and continue to provide – support. Supermarkets have teams of people who provided online shopping support as well.
One useful service (avoiding the need for home delivery costs) was (is) that people can place an order online and then pick it up themselves at a designated place outside the shop. Meaning elderly and vulnerable did not have to remain at home but could, if they chose, collect their pre-ordered shopping themselves.
One thing that helps in Sweden is the ‘personal number’ system from the population register – we use it for pretty much everything where ID is needed, and as it contains one’s DOB, you cannot pretend to be elderly. If collecting on behalf of another person, you have to have both their ID and your own.
Carrie, can you clarify this for me, please: is Tegnell’s policy suppression of the Covid, or only preventing health services becoming overwhelmed? Given that there is surely now no risk of the latter, is he slipping by degrees into suppression mode?
He and Giesecke see the virus as endemic, that it can never be totally eradicated unless there is an effective vaccine, which they think is a long way off (especially one that works for those who need it most, as Giesecke said the other day). I think that (even if not explicitly stated) they accept that it will most likely eventually pass through the population and thus the aim is to try and make sure that as it does, it does not overwhelm the health service. They are also trying to keep it from becoming a hindrance to the effective management/treatment of other health conditions.
So yes, keeping levels as low as possible to enable management of the ill, but they do not think ‘zero covid’ is realistic and that is not the aim. In some areas of the country the health service could still be overwhelmed if they got a sudden rush of acute cases (remember the ethnic population have higher levels of diabetes and obesity, and there are a lot of over 70s who have been shielding for the most part since March).
There is definitely a backlog of elective surgery here, but I have read no horror… Read more »
Thankyou for giving such a full reply.
So the aim is slow burn, rather than ‘take the hit.’ I suppose it’s too late now for ‘take the hit’ anyway, although over here I think Gupta recently identified that we are in a narrow window of time to let the young develop the herd immunity that could protect the old before Winter. I just remember, with a little dread, that lockdown itself was only meant to ‘flatten the sombrero.’ The suppression policy crept up on us.
You can place a supermarket order here and pick it up outside the store. I’ve been doing it for months to avoid the zombies.
all they care about is the piles of cash.
The once in a lifetime chance to experiment with people on an unimagined scale.
Yes, and with less protest than uf they used lab rats.
The media induced terror really does run deep in some people doesn’t it. I initially read this and for a minute thought he meant everyone, but alas, no. Apologies for the spelling and grammar.
God almighty. I’m starting to think the Remainers may have had a point about “low information voters”.
How do you know this douchebag isn’t a Remainer?
Either way, it can neither spell, nor deal with punctuation.
Insane. However this is the result of the brainwashing. See how it has worked. If you do not obey and somebody you know get the virus it’s errrrr your fault because you didn’t obey. So you loose your human rights? What all of them? Because you errr might have a virus or something that you might possibly pass on which might kill somebody or something. FFS, I can’t fathom out that one I really did try. Perhaps its the FOUR bottles of Spitfire.
Funny how you don’t lose your “human rights” (in quotes because they are a political tool, not a right) as a beheading terrorist, but you do as an obstinate old so and so.
Piers Corbyn spoke at the Covid-19 Truth Tour in my locale the other day with about 100 present. Press reported 50 which was clearly understated but there has been plenty worse manipulation. Stand Up X has been the only active organisation here and largely via Facebook (not a member but could view much of the info). The night before the page was still operational & had well over 1,000 members but when I got home that day the page had gone. Coincidence?, I very much doubt it.
They thought this was coming and had at a meet up asked for everyone’s email so contact could be maintained. Of course I realise having everyone’s email address could be rather helpful for the authorities so hope the list didn’t end up with them rather than a genuine supporter.
Whilst at the event I was pleased to hear a regular young guy aged about 17 who asked what it was all about and was happy to expound on his view that it was all “bollocks”. That was just a random conversation and not wth the loudspeaker
It fills me with pride (such that it is still possible to have) that many regular people… Read more »
I know this was posted earlier, but as things get lost in the number of posts, please view this of Boris. The man needs removing.
https://youtu.be/79DDaPM9w0I
So embarrassing!
I’m embarrassed this man is the leader of my country.
Cue loads more ridiculous policies to save to the planet and complete the destruction of the economy.
I can’t see his eyes they are sunken in so far. He’s a perfect idiot to execute whatever conspiracy is going on.
Drunk!
Also on the news tonight some stats, including an increase of 104 people with covid on ventilators. Where do these figures come from? Are these all people on ventilators because of covid or because of something else but have tested positive for covid? If the former then that is quite an alarming increase isn’t it?
Who are these people? All in the same part of the country? What age are they? need more details…
Agreed. Where is the detail on the data? So many figures flung about with no context.
Not from the official figures which show a much smaller increase. Remembering that a positive test even in hospital can mean relatively little.
An email I wrote to Leeds Councillor Judith Blake:
Dear Judith
I understand you are currently reviewing whether to implement a local lockdown for Leeds, as it has been identified by PHE as an area of concern.
I would urge you to reconsider this, since:
In order to maintain a rational outlook, we must analyse hospitalisations and mortality. If the figures we are seeing in Yorkshire follow the pattern identified in France, Spain and elsewhere – then a slight increase in positive results reflects the increase in testing and shifts in demographic for those tests, and will not result in a rise in serious illness. A lockdown, on the other hand, is guaranteed to be detrimental – since it will have a direct impact on people’s ability to feed themselves and heat their homes. PHE are basing their numbers on positive PCR tests, not cases. It’s very possible that in many instances, the qPCR tests are simply finding remnant RNA, rather than disease-causing infection. Without knowing the cycle count for PCR tests, or having some accompanying data (e.g. Ig-A/Ig-G/Ig-M antibody or T-cell immunity levels) this is an extremely weak foundation. They are also not sharing full demographic data – it… Read more »
And the response:
Dear Tee,
Thank you for contacting me in relation to a possible lockdown in Leeds. I have shared your message with our Director of Public Health, Victoria Eaton, who has suggested the following:
Thank you for comprehensively outlining your concerns about interpretation of data and local lockdowns. You may be aware that decision-making on restrictions that affect “areas of concern” is determined nationally, by the Government. Risk assessments used to arrive at such decisions, will weigh up the pros and cons that you are referring to. You may find our Leeds Outbreak Control Plan helpful (link is here), which describes how the Council works with partners such as NHS and PHE to reduce transmission of COVID-19, prevent and manage outbreaks.
You will hopefully appreciate that as a Council, we are not in a position to comment on PHE’s data analysis in relation to diagnostics, testing and demographic data.
I hope this addresses some of your concerns but please contact me again if I can be of further assistance.
Kind regards,
Judith
I wasn’t aware that the government has done ANY risk assessments.
DavidC
Painful!
No attempt made to address any of your points. My understanding is that the council was actually pushing to be put in local lockdown.
Yeah, but I reckon this was probably the councillors as a whole not Judith herself.
Not that it matters. 🙁
Surely you can request the “Risk assessments” and “the weighing up of pros and cons” that was used to consider the measures as “information” pertaining to a decision under FOI by way of notes and minutes and other documents produced and used in the decision making process?
I’m confused.
I thought the local lockdown powers had been handed to local authorities. Judith seems to be saying that the local authority is at the mercy of the Westminster government. We’ve been told recently of local governments begging Westminster for a local lockdown.
I mean, really – what the hell is going on?
When Kirklees went into the first local mockdown, my MP appealed for South Kirklees to be released because the casedemic was in the North of the area. He was up against the local council but appealed to the government.
We were released but are back in mockdown again now.
Non answer!
Extremely disappointing. I dealt with Judith a lot when I was a journalist, she is a good woman and usually full of sense. I was fairly confident she wouldn’t crack under the pressure and bring any stupid curfews or anything.
It wouldn’t surprise me if she actually is a bit of a sceptic but is being a pussy and not standing up for Leeds. Shame. Shame. Shame. *bell emoji*
Interesting -I get the impression that her moment of glory has finally arrived and she can be the Wee Jimmie of Yorkshire.
That’s a brilliant letter.
Aw thanks! I wish the response was a bit more reassuring… to be honest I was half expecting no response at all, but this isn’t much better ha.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mazca1982/status/1309584984982925313/photo/1
Sorry, it’s Friday night snd I couldn’t resist
Love it!
This is my contribution: https://twitter.com/coco07751613/status/1309376664841981953 (scroll down to the picture part)
I just CACKLED
I wonder if I could ask for some assistance with the defintion of “face covering”?
The law states it “means a covering of any type which covers a person’s nose and mouth”.
I had advised staff that the never before used face visors could be used instead of a face mask but the information from our trade association says, “The Department for Business, Enterprise and the Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has confirmed in writing that visors are NOT face coverings but can be worn in addition to them”.
It looks to come down to the definiton of “covers”. I don’t suppose that has ever been settled in court so wonder if it could reasonably/realistically be argued that it does cover visors, should it ever come there?
I have, of course, done all I can to guide the staff to declaring they are exempt but they are still reluctant to do so.
As far as I am aware this has never been questioned, the i newspaper had this item;
Can I wear a face shield or visor instead of a mask?The government have stressed that the liability for wearing a face covering lies with the individual, and so far there has been no official guidance on whether a face shield or visor can be worn instead of a covering, or if it offers better protection.
The Government’s advice on wearing face coverings is “that people should aim to wear a face-covering in enclosed spaces where social distancing is not always possible and they come into contact with others they do not normally meet, for example on public transport or in some shops.
In the absence of any official guidance there seems to be general acceptance by police and public that a visor meets the requirements and I have never heard of a visor being challenged. Since the facemask requirement was extended to shop staff, the staff in our village shop mostly seem to wear visors as preferable to having a cloth over your mouth all day.
I’m going to correct you, because you’re on my hobby horse.
Hancock said that £10Bn was spent on the app. It couldn’t have been (and it wasn’t). It looks like £11M was spent on the app, to June. Maybe as much again since.
So there are two questions that journalists should have been asking, but haven’t:
1) why did Matt Hancock claim that a simply fantastical amount of money had been spent on developing an app? Was he misinformed (in which case, a Secretary of State being misinformed over a sum of money like £10Bn suggests a deep and almost criminal level of incompetence in either his permanent secretary or his political advisors)? Was he making it up on the spot (in which case, he himself shows an almost criminal level of insouciance when it comes to vast sums of money being spent by HMG)? Or was he lying (in which case, it’s just criminal)?
2) Assuming the number quoted was on the track and trace programme as a whole, how can you spend £9,989,000,000 on a few thousand minimum wage service desk workers and the software to support them?
All questions that need to be answered – it’s our money, after all… Have you sent in an FOI? I can’t remember..
Just caught a bit of Fauci being interviewed on ITN. The man is a lunatic. End of.
Just saw that myself. Quite simply, the guy is a c*nt.
very young populations
This is going to go down well – not:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/25/uk-set-become-biggest-country-donor-world-health-organisation/
‘UK set to become biggest country donor to World Health Organisation, Boris Johnson to announce’
He has to be stopped!
Hopefully that’ll be another nail in his coffin.
60 Tory MPs now apparently behind the Brady amendment – he is toast.
And maybe, just maybe, his apalling mess too.
Labour will bail him out, they have the fat useless prick right where they want him.
Emailed my Conservative MP earlier today pressing him to support Brady. He has replied saying he has not made up his mind. For goodness sake why can a Conservative MP not make up his mind to stand up for parliamentary democracy?
Are you sure? BJ may just merely be constrained by this – or at least Hancock will, by being prevented from issuing late-night SIs. But topple the PM now and we are in big chaos – not the least because the chances of a Brexit deal will be scuppered..
I think they will let him limp on till Dec 31st and then plunge the knife..
Not happy about the idea of Sunak as a replacement either – he is ex-Goldman Sachs, and that does not feel good at all…
Where did Sunak pop up from anyway? I had never heard of him before Corona Day Zero hit.
Sunak is an inexperienced yesman.
Agreed. In these days of woke and diversity, his ethnicity is also to his advantage..
So we’re feeding the hand that is biting us?
I think this might be the price of the WHO taking Chris Whitty off our hands. Vallance is being hung out to dry by virtue of his flashy lifestyle.
Part of the exponential Covid budget! Not very good at English – Am I using exponential correctly?
I’m rather concerned that, over the last three weeks, my visiting foxes have grown very thick winter coats. It’s still only September!
This presumably means that we’re in for a harsh winter. Unless the vulnerable were already bumped off early in mockdown, this could play right into the hands of the coviplotters.
Mmmm, I’ve noticed that there are massive amounts of berries on holly bushes and the like … I’m sure as a young girl I was told that it’s nature’s way of providing for birds during a coming hard winter.
Bit worrying.
The holly was bursting with berries like I’d never seen it before last autumn/winter and we had a very mild winter. Sometimes folk wisdom is to be ignored.
I hope you’re right!
We had fork lightening and hail stones this evening!
Yesterday the hail over Leeds/Bradford left the roads white like in a snowfall.
Had the heating on tonight. But I am a softy southerner.
My heating is on very low but has come on automatically for the last three weeks.
But…but…we’ve got out of control global warming…sorry, out of control climate change! Haven’t we?!
DavidC
If we have a cold winter it will be classed as extreme weather due to climate change
So they say.
However, it is problematic for the global warming zealots!!!
its getting colder BECAUSE of global warming, you don’t understand.
The sea ice at the North Pole is slush. It is not as cold there as it ought to be.
The leaves on our sycamores seem to be dropping earlier than they usually do. Don’t normally start clearing them up until end of October at the earliest.
My garden is absolutely covered in sycamore seeds today. It’s is extremely early.
“Ought to be” is a fairly meaningless term, in the grand scale of the life span of planet earth. We have cold periods and we have warm periods. hundreds of millions of years before mankind started doing his thing.
Sorry I am a climat change denier. It’s another scam, just like COVID 1984 and comes form the same people to advance the same agenda.
My point was to emphasise the ammo for the covid scaremongers, rather than trigger a debate about climate change.
umm ok, yes better not do climate change debates..really
The ONS England and Wales five year weekly average deaths for this week, week 39 shows 9,283 deaths. The five year average for the week 51 shows 11,499 deaths. So we should expect an extra 2,200 deaths a week by Christmas. Hopefully the government will not put this down to Covid 19.
Depends how blatantly they intend to lie.
Nor do they depend on the state to care for their elderly parents.
If it’s monkey spunk, that’s basically saline. What are you worried about?
John Ward on form:
It sort of comes down to this: if you’d just been bitten by a Kite snake – thus leaving you with around 45 seconds to get some antidote into your veins – who from the following would you choose as the chap to plunge the needled antidote into your affected region:
Neil Ferguson Peter Horby Sir Patrick Vallance Matt Hancock Boris Johnson Keir Starmer Daniel Finkelstein A veteran medical practitioner who would, by definition, know more about what TF he or she was at than any of the above? Now what you need to bear in mind here is that, of the eight options I’ve given you, only the last one has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the decisions currently being taken about how best to deal with Coronavirus.
Fair enough, Covid19 is not the Kite snake – which is a deadly killer. However, the first seven people on that list would have you believe that Covid19 is exactly that. Which it palpably obviously isn’t, because 99.1% of people infected by the bloody thing suffer nothing worse than mild flu symptoms….and 99.36% of us will survive to tell the tale.
Yes, that’s right – 0.0064% of… Read more »
I’ve been following John Ward for some years now, he’s brilliant. His previous blog (Not Born Yesterday, if I remember its name correctly) had some great stuff about a certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
DavidC
He’s been subject to some draconian censorship, so obviously stating some uncomfortable truths.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/healthy-man-29-sends-coronavirus-22744961 never waste an opportunity to promote muzzle wearing. Looks a big lad .
It’s likely that more people who didn’t think it was bullshit have succumbed. So statistically you are probably (I don’t have actual numbers) more likely to become infected and die if you’re a believer.
He has an awful lot of energy for someone at death’s door!
I wonder how much he was paid.
Yer we aren’t saying there isn’t a nasty virus out there are we. Looks nasty. But I have had a good old dose of the lurgy in the past, a few times, then it was just the lurgy, now its OMG CORONA!!!!!!
Hospital!!!!!! Oxygen etc
When I was ill there was one night where I was getting genuinely concerned about finding it hard to breath, my lungs were FULL of gunk and I was very wheezy and felt terrible. That was in 2009 when SARS 1 CoV was in circulation. I went to bed and hoped I would wake up and feel better as usual, I did. It made me give up smoking.
If I was ill like that now I probably would be a real hospital case and on drugs and oxygen given the elevated status of this virus just like this poor guy.
I thought SARS-1 went extinct in 2004.
Yes, I think swine flu was all the rage in 2009. I was ill for a week after coming back from the Reading festival. Got prescribed Tamiflu. Could have been a mega hangover though…
Yer swine flu then…2009 a red letter year as I did end my love affair with Golden Virginia back then.
“is only breathing with the help of oxygen mask” – I was mistaken all of those years ago when I thought those ventilators were making those little lungs inflate, it was the oxygen masks! Silly me …..
Ha! “… no underlying health condition” are you kidding me? LOOK AT HIM! First he looks morbidly obese, with that, coronary and potentially uncompensated T2 diabetes, that’s just to begin with, and I daren’t imagine what is going on with his liver!
I’ve just had a strange thought and perhaps somebody smarter than me can answer this.
If the rate of infection is exponential then why is the rate of change of the R number not also exponential?
The model for the spread of disease considers Susceptibles, Infected and Recovered (SIR). It then sets up a system of 1st order differential equations with respect to time. When you solve a system like this you get a function involving an exponential (which is how the infections change) and a constant term R, which you can work out from the actual data. R is actually a constant at any given time, but as you recalibrate the solution from the observed data it will change a little bit. So the infections change exponentially, but the constant just moves up and down as you get more data.
It sounds more complicated than it is, I solved it as a math undergrad and it’s not too complicated.
It’s the change in R that I’m thinking about. If a virus was spreading exponentially you would expect to see an accelerating change in R.
I may have to sleep on this as it will probably keep me up all night if I think about it too much.
me too
The R number is an exponent. Take a simple example of an R of 2. 1 person will ‘infect’ 2, those two people will each ‘infect’ 2 (i.e. 4). Those 4 will each ‘infect’ two (total 8) and so on. The series is thus 1, 2, 4, 8 etc.
No exponential growth goes on forever though, the limiting factor would be the global population.
The other thing to consider is not the R rate, it’s the death rate. An R of 10 with a death rate of 0% is a bit different to an R of 1 and a death rate of 100%.
DavidC
Well, it depends on the model used. Simple models will have R as a constant, so any variability will be due to the differences as data is sampled. I guess the models could be more complicated with R as a function of time, but I think those models would be less stable and harder to calibrate and not very reliable.
This might as well be in Chinese. Amazing. I am so bad at maths its incredible.
I may be misunderstanding, but I’ll attempt this with an example and maybe someone cleverer can confirm / reject.
If R = 2 and one person has it, they infect 2 people. Those two infect 4. Those 4 infect 8, 16, 32, 64 and so on. So it’s infections are increasing exponentially. But R is constant, it hasn’t changed.
Of course in the real world, things don’t happen this neatly… but hopefully this illustrates the rough idea.
https://twitter.com/plaforscience/status/1309240923952500742
“Now the PCR+ comes in play. The presence in the file is enough to go into covid toll. We’ve regional confirm for 60 days old PCR use as covid death validation. That’s why EVERYDAY death data is extremely low, and few days later it grows 7~10x”
Spain obviously has deaths 60 days after PCR+ registered as a Covid-19 death.This can explain the higher numbers in Spain compared to other European countries and the erratic reporting of deaths in this wave.
Can you explain further?
1 Are these deaths which are being tested for Covid after death and treated as ‘with Covid’ deaths because of over-sensitive PCR testing?
Or
2 Are they people who have already been tested within the past 60 days, with over-sensitive tests (so may be false positives) and are then treated as Covid deaths?
Either way, if the FPR rate is 1 per 100 and the prevalence is 1 per 1,000, (as in the UK), it shouldn’t impact the death figures much.
BUT if (as Laurence keeps saying) the Spanish FPR rate is hugely greater than that (and why?) then it will have a significant impact in overstating Spanish Covid deaths.
All deaths where there have been a PCR+ within 60 days is treated as C-19 deaths.No 28 days cut off as in UK since last two months.They can have had C-19 but late deaths something else.Potential overdiagnosis of death of C-19
Its getting a bit late for me but first thought is that this discrepancy would result in material inflation of Covid19 death figures in Spain compared to say, the UK where I think the artificial bar is set at 15 or 28 days instead of 60. Probably results in a 100 to 200 deaths a day difference in reporting between the two counties? Good find again. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. I bet Vallence and Whitty knew this already having colluded with their Big Pharma buddies in Spain…or perhaps they did not care.
Good news https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-free-speech-union-fighting-fund over target