Three years down the line from when Covid first hit our consciousness and with the release of more time series data in digestible form some lessons can be learned from the Government’s capitulation to the ‘blob’s’ panicked measures in early 2020.
Undoubtedly the ‘one size fits all’ approach of Government at the start of the pandemic led to unnecessary deaths. I suspect the extent of these unnecessary excess deaths skewed the perception of many people about the risk they faced from Covid and also skewed the data which led, in turn, to bad decisions.
Back in March 2020, in anticipation of a wave of ill people it was decided to empty the hospitals. Go walk around a hospital, it’s full of ill people, they’re there for a reason. In England we expect about 225,000 people to die in hospital in any given year. The data in Table 1 come from my new favourite website produced by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (its staff have got their work cut out!). They show deaths in English hospitals over the past three years.
One of the oddities of the data is that deaths with Covid are so much higher than excess deaths. In 2020 there were three times more Covid deaths than excess deaths. In 2021 there were 2.7 times more Covid deaths than excess deaths and in 2022 the figure was 1.75 times greater. Can it be true that in the absence of Covid we would have had so many fewer deaths than normal?
It’s often stated, and certainly I would suggest that the man on the Clapham omnibus would think, that hospitals were overrun during the first lockdown in spring 2020. This is only true to the extent that two things happened that massively reduced capacity: we socially distanced the beds, reducing the overall capacity in the hospitals and staff absences went up due to self-isolation or illness. Of course, we built the Nightingale hospitals but these were never brought into service.
Figure 2 shows two charts. The top one shows the percentage of the average General and Acute (G&A) hospital bed occupancy by NHS trusts during April 2020. The lower one shows average critical care bed occupancy during April 2020. Due to space I’ve only named every fifth NHS trust but if you want to look at the data for your local trust you can find them here.
Usually hospitals run at about 90% capacity, overall, during the lockdown they were about 55% full. Hospitals weren’t full, capacity was reduced.
At the bottom of each table sits Royal Cornwall NHS Trust. Its average bed occupancy rate during April 2020 was 38%. Its critical care bed occupancy rate was 19%. Conversely, there were still some hospitals with relatively high occupancy rates. Croydon Health Services NHS Trust was top of the league at 85% General and Acute bed average occupancy.
I’m not trying to get at the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust; I suspect it did what it was told. No, my point is rather broader: decisions were in all likelihood taken miles away in London with little consideration of how this all would play out in Cornwall. How much more likely that we’ll end up with inappropriate decisions if the U.K. Government cedes pandemic control to the WHO, as spelt out by Dr. David Bell in his recent Daily Sceptic article?
Let’s look at how this all worked out in Cornwall. As you can see in Figure 3, which uses data specific to Cornwall, all-cause deaths peaked in week ending April 17th. In that week overall excess deaths were 53% higher than the expected level and in week ending April 24th they were 55% higher than expected. At this time there was very limited testing to confirm the presence of Covid so, whether all these deaths were from (or with) Covid will never be known. But, it does seem odd that over 50% more people were dying and yet the hospitals were less than 40% full and the ICU wards below 20% pre-Covid capacity.
There are two possible explanations for this huge rise in excess deaths:
- Covid, though the chart above shows that official Covid deaths accounted for about half of the excess deaths in April.
- The consequences of moving frail, ill people out of hospitals. Reductions in level of care associated with PPE protocols. Reductions in care home and care at home staff.
In a recent Daily Sceptic article, Nick Bowler looked at the rise in deaths other than respiratory illnesses. In Figure 4 you can see how deaths in England from some of these non-respiratory illnesses peaked during this first lockdown. How many of these excess deaths were down to policy? No doubt exactly the same pattern repeated itself in Cornwall: deaths of non-respiratory causes increased significantly due to the anticipation of a pandemic rather than because of a pandemic.
It seems deeply ironic that China recently abandoned its zero-Covid policy in favour of what we were constantly told was a ‘let it rip’ strategy, though really more like the strategy advocated by the U.K.’s Pandemic Preparedness Plan and the Great Barrington Declaration. And what were the consequences for China? Virtually nothing. Okay, we may not know much about what goes on inside the Chinese Government, but with one million Westerners living in China and a couple of million Chinese living in the West we have a pretty good feel for what’s going on in the street, and so far the Chinese ‘great reopening’ has gone pretty smoothly. Predictions of millions of deaths seem to be wide of the mark. It’s amazing, when you leave people to make their own risk estimates and to take responsibility for themselves, they usually make a pretty good job of it.
Of course, we had our own ‘great reopening’ in July 2021 when cases, hospitalisations and deaths promptly fell.
All this leads me to the conclusion that you should be wary of big Government saying “we’re here to help”.
This article has been updated. An earlier version incorrectly stated that excess deaths in hospitals in England were higher than Covid deaths.
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There is a strange increase in the reactions of people – the more their cherished beliefs or desires are shown to be at variance with facts – the more fanatical they become.
Applies to:
Trump
Brexit
Global Warming – or at least the idea that carbon dioxide is the sole driver of climate change despite ever more evidence that it has little, if any, effect on the planet’s climate.
–
The world is Topsy Turvy and I wish to be buried upside down, so that I will be the right way up when the world has sorted itself out.
Don’t forget Covid!
“People who make the rules made a rule which said nobody – not even they themselves – could break the rule so that means the rule was not broken because they said so, so there.”
If nothing makes sense, it’s usually money wot did it.
Eugyppius has some substantial reservations regarding Hersh’s article too.
Why is it so difficult to believe an underwater device could survive 3 months? Flight data recorders carry on transmiitting underwater for 90 days. An explosive device would need only enough power to pick up the detonation signal and to detonate the charge.
The legal argument is predicated on the assumption that those involved are honest and honourable, and as we know politicians and those in the security services are the epitomy of honour and honesty. It seems a bit like defending a criminal on the grounds that he knows crime is illegal so why would he commit one?
If the start assumption is that the people in power will violate the rules, anyway, the whole maneuvering to avoid doing so described in the Hersh-article could have been avoided by simply violating the rules.
Why did the US try to get a resolution passed in the UN to invade Iraq if they were going to do it anyway?
Why is it so difficult to believe an underwater device could survive 3 months?
Indeed. In fact such a device would be very simple to design and construct. There may even be off-the-shelf versions available.
“The legal argument is predicated on the assumption that those involved are honest and honourable”
The C1984 was authorised despite every law and rule in the damned world being broken.
“Rule of law?”
Give me a break – Jeez!
I seem to remember that the West has instituted a “rules based order” because the “international law based order” doesn’t get us what we want. But it’s still useful to wave the law flag bacause Joe Public has not been told about the new rules.
That sums it up.
Agreed. The Baltic at this site is not particularly cold or deep. 67m give or take a few metres. and bottom temperatures in June will be about +3degC. Thermoclines capable of accoustically masking a submarine are improbable in these shallow depths.
Presumably it would be a fairly straightforward technical matter, given US resources, to get an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) to do the job, which could be launched from many miles away.
I spoke to a merchant navy guy who does underwater engineering/maintenance stuff, and he said yes they’d use an ROV. But I’m not sure. For one thing, Russia has sonar sensors on those pipes (but I suppose there could be stealthy ROVs). Another thing is that Sweden has said these were larger, non-precision bombs that were placed near the pipes, not on them, so they could have been dropped from a ship (or perhaps a sub). In fact, the pipes are so vulnerable that anyone with some explosives and a small boat (no transponder) could have done it and probably got away with it. There’s an NYT article with a few more details. Maybe we’ll never know for sure who did it.
I think an AUV would be more likely than an ROV (which would be tethered to the mother vessel and have very limited range, thus necessitating the mother vessel to loiter over the site while the explosives were being laid. I agree with RichardTechnik that a submarine, at least a full-size submarine, would be an unlikely platform to use for this task.
If the explosives were indeed large, non-precision bombs then perhaps (as alluded to in the NYT article) the best way to lay them would be off the back of a motor vessel, tracking along the top of the pipelines (which could be visible on a multibeam sonar). On a second run over the target the multibeam could be used to check the explosives were sufficiently close to the pipelines to do the deed. No doubt such an exercise would have be practised to perfection in some secret location.
Detonate some time later, perhaps months later, at a moment of choice. The technology would be similar to that of an acoustic mine, adapted to fire in response to a given acoustic transmission rather than a ship passing overhead.
The technology isn’t difficult, but given the extent to which most Western navies have been run down, their independent technology bases hollowed out by spending cuts over decades now, my guess for the culprit would be the one nation that has more or less kept up to speed – the US.
I agree almost anyone could have done it, via a small boat and divers for example, but if the explosives were large this rules out divers. And getting away with it – absolutely vital in the circumstances – would be another matter.
I do wonder how effective the protective sonar sensors would be, in that whether there were enough of them to detect if something untoward was going on – simple dumping of explosive packages from above for example.
An oft-stated reason Putin did not go for the Donbas in 2014 was to keep the gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines which Nordstream would eventually replace. Thus the Trump administration under legislation proposed by Senator Ted Cruz applied sanctions to Nordstream 2 which – the very next day – halted the construction process. In an act of almost childish stupidity, Biden lifted those sanctions – with 100pc Democrat backing – simply because they were a Trump policy, and despite warnings, and the pleading of Zelensky that such a move would be a green light to Putin to move on Donbas. And so it proved. No wonder Biden blurted out that Nordstream could be taken out…You look a fool to deny otherwise.
The Russians doing it doesn’t add up either. It would be quite easy to dismantle the case that the Russians did it.
So where does that leave us?
The fog of war, people believing what they want to believe, chaos..
Cui bono?
A bit like the origins of covid, it may remain a mystery for a long time/forever. Also a bit like the origins of covid, it seems important to know so you’d expect those that govern us to be pulling out all the stops to find out the truth. Funny that doesn’t seem to be happening in either case. I’m sure it’s just a cock-up though. They did manage to fully investigate the Salisbury poisonings and established beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Russia wot dun it, same with US election interference, Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy theory. All completely believable.
and the excess deaths – due to eating too many eggs.
Cui bono?
The Yanks.
Therefore they did it.
Exactly. No need to overthink this.
So in addition to being a military specialist, Rons is also an expert in the interpretation of US law. Very impressive.
Further to Ian Rons’ well-researched points about the Hersh article,
A) Basing an entire journalistic investigation and its conclusions on revelations from ‘an unnamed source’ has exactly the same credibility as ‘it all came to me in a dream’.
It is perfectly possible that an individual did approach Seymour Hersh and present him with all the ‘information’ contained within this piece.
But without verifiable bona fides and corroborative evidence – of the sort that Mr Hersh would presumably have presented if available – the likelihood is that he was having a chat with a member of the FSB masquerading under the cunning guise of ‘Senior Agent Matt ‘The Rock’ Reacher, Deputy Sub-Director CIA Clandestine Section 14XJ, Undermine the Russian Federation With Extreme and If Necessary Illegal Prejudice’.
B) Even if it does turn out to have been a conglomeration of Western liberal democratic countries which were responsible for the destruction of this pipeline as Mr Hersh alleges, the intention was clearly to hamper the totalitarian Russian Federation’s neo-fascist project of mass destruction, murder and annexation / conquest in an independent and democratic member of the United Nations.
To put this moral and practical point in another way, how many genuinely life-preserving gas pipelines (to individual properties for central heating, hot water, cooking etc) have Russian Federation ‘liberation’ forces destroyed in Ukraine since the completely unprovoked invasion of February 2022;
And as a corollary of all this pipeline destruction (via aerial and artillery bombardment etc) –
How many lives?
Yes, there’s no indication Hersh ever tried to verify this source’s status in any way. And he clearly hasn’t asked experts (legal, military, engineering, etc.) about the key claims. There’s a reason he doesn’t write for the New York Times or the New Yorker any more, and it doesn’t look as though the NYT has even mentioned his claims this time, despite the fact that he was an excellent investigative reporter.
As to whodunnit, I’m very uncertain about all that (there are several possible culprits), but if it was the U.S. then I’d applaud them for having the audacity, and two fingers to Putin.
The ‘as to whodunnit’ cop-out implies you simply can’t be bothered to put together an argument that Russia destroyed their own pipeline because that would be ridiculous. And yet you refuse to jeopardise your own stated narrative by admitting all the evidence points to the Biden White House, not least of all its track record in disaster.
https://youtu.be/IAiZvKouZRw
P J Watson’s view.
Four minutes.
I’ve been reading this week about the Mỹ Lai massacre because I’m visiting the area this weekend. Hersh played such an important role in shedding light on that atrocity and subsequent events that I find it hard, not insulting to dismiss him as ‘gullible’.
It’s not a secret that the US has worked hard to make LNG from Qatar the primary source of Europe’s gas. So we have motive, something we don’t have in the case of Russia. For balance, maybe Rons should scrutinise the claims that it was Russia. Except he won’t, because he’s partisan.
Compared to what US strategic air warfare, ie undirected bombing of everything which could seen from the air, culminating in just unspecifically bombing the countryside after all of that had been eradicated, did to the people in SE Asia, the so-called Mỹ Lai massacre is a historical footnote. It’s also not really more gruesome than what invading Russian soldiers did to villagers in Eastern Prussia 1945. That’s just a lot less popular because they targetted The Right Kind of Victims[tm], ie, Germans.
Similar scenes have always occurred (and will likely keep reoccuring) whenever regular forces have to handle guerilla warriors, ie, enemies who dress up as non-combatants and prefer ambushes. When every supposed civilian could suddenly pull out a gun and start shooting at you, at lot of probably innocent civilians will end up being killed, either because they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or in retaliatory actions.
Another outstanding article from Mr Rons.
There are, in fact, only two countries that stood to benefit from the Nordstream destruction:
Russia: a ‘false flag’ operation to sow discord within NATO.
Ukraine: to remove the leverage Nordstream afforded Putin.
These are also the only two ‘hot’ protagonists engaged in this European war.
Take your pick.
But in the event, only the US economy has benefited from increased sales as well as German de-industrialisation, NATO members have murmured about US involvement but daren’t say it out loud, Ukraine has been largely destroyed, and Russia’s massive investment in the pipeline is lost. Pretty duff planning on both fronts – US false flags never cost them that much.
Still, it’s a relief to know that there are no other participants in the war, and that the stated US intentions for regime change in Russia and the breakup of the federation are just whistling in the wind and trusting Zelensky to deliver. The weapons, advisers, trainers, technical input and intelligence, “deserters” serving on the front, visiting leaders etc, are just to keep us informed.
Did you see Zelensky entering Westminster Hall with pretty much all 650 of our sycophant pretend MP,s clapping cheering & whistling in support of the Hero in a green tracksuit . There’s nothing else to say , we are living in cartoon world !
Those barstewards in Westminster do NOT speak for me – Andrew Bridgen excepted. Bloody cowards.
one of the most shameful sights in the history of this nation.
Yes – the hero who is now conscripting 16 year olds for the meat grinder. When it happens in Uganda it’s a war-crime.
Yes, indeed. Startling prescience, strategic grasp and administrative grip from a President who can barely tie up his own shoelaces……
Controls are for those following the flowchart of decision making. Bearing in mind how the Biden administration has treated the US, I can see how they might bypass all the controls to make this happen. I can also see, on the technical issues of getting devices planted on the pipeline and detonated. The idea that they would need some super leading edge prototype device to achieve the detonations, and then discount that as a possibility because they didn’t have time to make them or to a quality that would permit them to work is absurd. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you couldn’t just go to a storage room somewhere in the US Military, pick two, and heve them FedEx’ed to your mini-sub the following day.
I remain sceptical of everyone, but there is a strong smell of USA around this whole incident. It is really surprising to me how little has been made of it politically, diplomatically, and of course in the obedient media. I would be fuming if it was my pipeline and I’d want answers.
How can anyone doubt that lying Biden sabotaged NordStream 2?
When he officially promised that he would do it!
That it was a criminal act of sabotage, eco-terrorism and war is indisputable.
Few nations have the ability to pull off a stunt like this – so which ones profited from it?
Certainly not Russia, Europe or China – but America did, both financially and politically.
Why on earth would Putin sabotage a recent multi-million dollar investment that gave him huge political and financial sway over Europe? His “special op” practically depended on just that.
Why does Putin do anything? Why did his army not wear uniform when taking over Crimea? Why did he invade a country when he already occupied (uncontested, internationally accepted) a significant part of it?
Why did Russia do any of these things:
1921-6 Operation Trust, creating the pseudo-“Monarchist Union of Central Russia” (MUCR) in order to help the OGPU identify real monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks.
1939 False flag shelling Mainila before invading Finland
1968 Operation Progress, deployment of 20 KGB illegals to Czeckoslovakia
1999 Apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk were bombed by FSB, killing hundreds of Russian civilians, blamed on Chechens.
2014 Little green men, in fact Russian soldiers pose as freedom fighters in Eastern Ukraine
2017, Russia used footage from video game as evidence of the United States colluding with the Islamic State.
2022 Two explosions destroyed two radio antennas in the disputed Moldovan region of Transnistria.
Sorry but you lost me at “The most glaring issue is a legal one.” The Biden administration (and others before him) don’t care about the rule of law and most of Congress doesn’t either. Even if they were caught breaking the law, there would be no consequences. It’s laughable to think that “breaking the law” would stop them from doing it. Also, enforcing the law in this case would mean proving that the US did it and Biden covered it up. No one responsible for enforcing the law is going to do that.
Like the other commentator who brought this up, you’re missing the point: The Hersh-article goes to great lengths handling this legal issue. Hence, pointing out that the text doesn’t really make sense is a valid criticism of the article. Whether or not US politicians break the laws supposed to regulate their actions is unrelated to that,.
As RW said, that’s not really the issue, Walrus. The issue is that Hersh’s source is lying (and obviously so), because there’s no such exception to the Covert Action Statute of the sort he claims, never mind whether Biden would be prepared to break that law or not — although Hersh’s source implies he wouldn’t have been prepared to break it, so perhaps he’s being naive?
Ian Rons the globalist apologist strikes again…..is this just to wind up the (awake) non woke on this site.
It’s odd that someone this naive works at the daily sceptic.