Meat is crucial for human health, scientists have warned, as they called for an end to the “zealotry” pushing vegetarian and vegan diets. The Telegraph has the story.
Dozens of experts were asked to look into the science behind claims that meat eating causes disease and is harmful for the planet in a special issue of Animal Frontiers.
They warned that it is difficult to replace the nutritional content of meat, arguing that poorer communities with low meat intake often suffer from stunting, wasting and anaemia driven by a lack of vital nutrients and protein.
In recent years, there has been a widespread societal push towards plant-based diets, with schemes such as Veganuary and meat-free Mondays encouraging the public away from meat.
The major Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factor Study, published in the Lancet in 2020, also suggested that a diet high in red meat was responsible for 896,000 deaths worldwide, and was the fifth leading dietary risk factor.
But researchers argue that unprocessed meat delivers most of the vitamin B12 intake in human diets, plays a major role in supplying retinol, omega-3 fatty acids and minerals such as iron and zinc, as well as important compounds for metabolism, such as taurine and creatine.
In one paper published in the issue, experts found no good evidence to support red meat being dangerous below intakes of 75g per day, and argued that the link between red meat and disease vanished when part of a healthy diet, suggesting it was the rest of the diet that was fuelling health problems.
Dr. Alice Stanton, of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, one of the authors of the review, said: “The peer-reviewed evidence published reaffirms that [the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Risk Factors Report] which claimed that consumption of even tiny amounts of red meat harms health is fatally scientifically flawed.
“In fact, removing fresh meat and dairy from diets would harm human health. Women, children, the elderly and low income would be particularly negatively impacted.”
The NHS also advises that red meat – such as beef, lamb and pork – is a good source of protein, vitamins and minerals and can form part of a balanced diet, although it warns that eating more than 90g per day can raise the risk of bowel cancer.
The new edition includes a declaration signed by nearly 1,000 scientists across the globe arguing that livestock farming was too important to society to “become the victim of zealotry”.
The Dublin Declaration includes signatories from the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bristol, Belfast, Newcastle, Nottingham, Surrey as well as several scientists from Britain’s world-leading agricultural and farming university Harper Adams.
“Livestock-derived foods provide a variety of essential nutrients and other health-promoting compounds, many of which are lacking in diets even among those populations with higher incomes,” the declaration states.
“Well-resourced individuals may be able to achieve adequate diets while heavily restricting meat, dairy and eggs. However, this approach should not be recommended for general populations.”
The researchers warned that those who need to eat animal products included young children, adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, women of reproductive age, older adults and the chronically ill.
Worth reading in full.
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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE BBC TO THE NATION – TIME TO COME OUT FROM UNDER YOUR BED COVERS, WASH YOUR WEE STAINED BED MATTRESSES AND LEAVE THE HOUSE
SUBTITLE OF ANNOUNCEMENT: HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND MOVE ON FROM THE LAST NINE WEEKS IF YOUR INTELLECTUALLY CHALLENGED
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52758024 (thanks to an earlier sceptic who spotted this gem).
Remember children there is always risk in leaving your house…A tree might fall on you, you might choke on your tongue, you might be abducted by an alien, and god forbid, you might even come across a politician with a backbone…
Remember:
“Deaths among under-65s with no illnesses are “remarkably uncommon”
However, rather than focusing on those most at risk from the outset (like care home residents), lets close down the entire country instead.
“During the pandemic so far three under 15s have died. That compares to around 50 killed in road accidents every year”.
However, if you are a left-wing teacher or council, please ignore this fact as your soft headed anyway.
“What is remarkable about coronavirus is that if we are infected our chances of dying seems to mirror our chance of dying anyway over the next year…”
Remarkable? Really? Are you sure? You don’t say? Is this “the science”? I recommend this sentence as the sub-title of the public inquiry to come. Main title:
AN INQUIRY INTO THE END-GAME OF THE NANNY STATE, GLOBALISATION AND COVID-19
I am in fact recommending four separate public inquiries (uk; scotland; wales and northern ireland). It really makes no difference, but does employ a few more politicians and bureaucrats (lowers the mass unemployed) and keeps some of the locals happy.
As picked up by a few articles in the press, boris by the way weighed 17.5 stone (5 feet 9) at the time he got the virus so was obese (not just overweight) and perhaps a borderline diabetic type 2, but, based upon his own personal bbc risk management plan for going forward, is expected to be able to shuffle his hair for another 15 years. Unless of course a tree falls on him, etc, etc, etc.
Oh dear…Enjoy the economic suicide to follow…keep clapping…Spanish flu, my arse!
Toby, when will the book be out! Aim for xmas for the best sales. I intend to make it my number one xmas present to all those individuals who supported this biblical farce.
LOL Excellent! Yesterday there were quite a few barbeques in my area and the sound of people having fun and children playing was so welcome. These past couple of months have been terrible and Im desperate for us to get back to OUR normal not globalists idea of new normal. As for what Cummings did or didn’t do frankly I’m past caring. MSM are a curse at the best of times now they’re like a pack of feral jackals!
Had a superb bbq with my twin brother and fam on Sunday night. They stayed over and we took a walk down on beach by Peacehaven. Life is too short to stay under LD, so get busy living, or get busy dying
It is time everyone under 60, I am 73, as told to get on with their lives.
It’s time EVERYONE , no matter what age they are, got on with their lives
Hey I’m over 60 and I’d like to be able to get on with my life!
Whichever way Sceptics may have responded to the misdemeanours of Cummings – who for what it’s worth came across as a reasonable enough bloke to me earlier – we should all celebrate the key point:
I don’t really believe he was originally pro-lockdown either, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he still isn’t.
That BBC piece is by Nick Triggle. He’s done a few decent ones. Compared to all politicians and almost all mainstream journalists and other public figures, he deserves a medal.
Yes, I posted a link to that on here earlier. Basically says if its your time to go it doesn’t matter if you have Covid19 or not.
It’s all been utter madness!
If he isn’t and/or wasn’t pro-lockdown he should come out and say so. With luck it would help get Brexit and Tory supporters against the lockdown entirely, that frees about half the country from the bureaucratic treason of the lockdown nanny-state, then we just need a prominent remainer to come forth too and we can have the rest of the country going anti-lockdown too.
Well I’ve seen two pieces of evidence on it referred to here – that he was originally pro-herd immunity (months before) and that he himself stated that he supported lockdown when it was brought in.
Pretty clear that he was part of the government group that panicked in March and switched away from the rational Swedish-style policy and into the panic policy of lockdown, to our immense cost.
I suspect David Starkey is correct in his suggestion that this was motivated by political fear of being blamed for damage to the NHS, and that has Cummings written all over it.
So you can dream of a world in which Cummings was not responsible (with others) for one of the greatest governmental acts of incompetence in history, or you can face up to reality and assess Cummings;competence more accurately. He’s doubtless clever, but he’s manifestly neither wise nor judicious.
The lockdown hasn’t been enforceable for a couple of weeks! Even before then I broke it often enough.
This is the thing… MSM have highlighted the things you cannot do, still do, pious pricks. It’s fucking nonsense, you can go where you want to now, as often as you want. Makes no difference to me as I always did
Well he should have said so at the time and said so yesterday.
I am confused at Toby backing him as Cummings sat in on the SAGE committee meetings that advised the government to ramp up the threat of the virus, which they did with their terrorising adverts on TV and in the propaganda press.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/covid-coercion-boris-johnsons-psychological-attack-uk-public
And we were left with a paranoid population and terrified children. So its ok for him to have a hand in that but not for him to have a taste of his own medicine?
I call it karma myself.
CORONAVIRUS BILL
COSTS
HEALTH
Anxiety, depression, suicide, unnecessary deaths of thousands of citizens as a result of the NHS being effectively closed to them.
SOCIAL
Child abuse, domestic abuse, social isolation, family breakdown, loss of community cohesion, infantilization of the population, spiritual decline.
LEGAL
Loss of civil liberties, loss of freedom of speech, terrrorisation of the population, distrust of parliament, the police and judiciary, civil unrest.
ECONOMIC
Unemployment, loss of businesses, loss of income and savings, loss of homes, poverty.
Over one trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000) in government debt.
BENEFITS
NONE
“According to the State it may be necessary to go in an out of various levels of the regime from time to time, depending on the State’s threat assessment. This is based on scientific research bought and paid for by pharmaceutical corporations and private foundations including GlaxoSmithKline (Wellcome Trust).”
GSK has a base in….Barnard Castle. Why was Cummings there?
It’s all very well your contributor djaustin saying the figures coming out from China were scary, but I remember coming back to London on March 19, with the intention of catching the bug as soon as possible, and even then it was obvious from the Wuhan data that the greatest fatalities were among the elderly and the mortally ill.
I remember having a conversation with my brother, an engineer, a day or so before the lockdown. We both reckoned the government should crunch the weekly numbers and post an online questionnaire, in which you put your age, health conditions etc, and it comes up with a score from which you see how high risk you are in the light of current knowledge. People with a score over X could be recommended to self isolate, so as not to overwhelm the NHS. The questionnaire could have been updated each week as we learned more about the virus, and as hospital beds became free.
Who knows, if people with an enormous BMI found they were recommended to stay behind closed doors it might even have prompted them to do something about it. I’m looking at you, Boris.
Anyway they didn’t do this as we know. I still have no idea why.
I am shocked that Mr Young thinks it may have been the right decision to “lock down” but we should have lifted it when data became clearer. Where is the cost benefit analysis that could justify taking such a decision?
Lockdowns MAY “work” up to a point for some countries, but the only justification possible is to take the pressure off the health service. We were told it was about flattening the curve and that was done, but we’re still here, even with “easing” the intention is to carry on with this insanity forever so that no-one has to die, ever (on their watch) (except all the people whose lives will be shorter and less pleasant because the huge screw up they have made, but they are harder to count). Flattening the curve and protecting the NHS was a lie, or maybe it was truth but then the government found they rather liked the new arrangement and decided to carry on, or they are crapping themselves because they have created a beast they can’t control.
If they wanted to tame the beast, they’d relax the 2m idiocy and they wouldn’t have decided to introduce a nonsensical quarantine rule 3 months after the event. Clearly they’re not interested in controlling the beast. The thing is to ask why not?
I suspect you are right. I think they like the power and the feeling they are doing something historically important like saving us from coronavirus. I think it’s hard to overestimate the role of vanity in the actions of the powerful.
Greetings, dear brothers and sisters in sanity.
Just sounding off a bit today from Gulag Wales, which us worse than Scotland, believe me (although I know that’s difficult).
It’s not about dear Dominic. I really don’t care about him one way or the other.
But…
One of the worst things the universal incarceration has done to me is to reveal my capacity for hatred. Sheer gut-wrenching, soul-twisting, heart-stopping, blinding , roaring, murderous hatred. I could wound. I could hack. I could kill. I could hang somebody from a lamp post. I could parade somebody’s head on a pike. I could be Saint-Just, Robespierre and several guillotine operators, combined.
Compared with the hatred I feel now for everyone involved in the present oppression, any former hatreds I thought I felt turn out to have been mere minor irritations.
Oddly enough, I don’t feel the hatred most strongly when listening to the gibberings from the government or media monkey cages, or when zombies swerve to avoid me in the street, or even when I see one of those nauseating NHS rain-grovel-bows, or hear the claptrapping of the assembled morons.
It’s when I go past one of the innumerable car parks that have been blocked off and festooned with nasty threatening notices. Car parks beside two-mile-long beaches swept with sea air, where children used to paddle and make sand castles and eat ice creams, while grown-ups played French cricket, or sunbathed, or just sat and enjoyed being on holiday. Car parks by quiet riversides where people used to stroll with their children and friends and dogs. Car parks beside gardens and parks and woodlands and flower-decked cliffs: car parks owned, and shut off, by the cowardly, fawning National by-no-means-worthy-of-Trust. The same National Trust that pretended its properties were ‘for ever, for everybody’. (This is in Gulag Wales, remember, where everything is forbidden.)
It was obvious from the first that closing these car parks would not save a single life. But it isn’t even the gross, mind-boggling stupidity of it that gets me. It’s the joylessness, the pettiness, the meanness, the sour-faced determination to prevent people from even thinking of doing something harmless and enjoyable.
And the worst hatred of all is for myself, because I haven’t the courage to shove aside their foul barriers and just drive in. I’m so ashamed to look at myself, I could almost wear a mask.
Beautifully put Annie, I share your pain, and your hatred, frankly. What irks me is, here in Dublin, there are outdoor exercise machines in the middle of outdoor parks, and they are cordoned off with tape like some sort of permanent crime scene. But I must admit that the robotic zombies and busy bodies annoy and sicken me the most. The world really has been taken over by mindless, joyless, prying, obsessive compulsive hypochondriacs. This period has laid us all so low, sometimes I just can’t believe my eyes and ears. Keep up whatever fight you can muster and the Overton window will shift inch by inch.
Thanks for that!
Taping off exercise machines … well, it all fits in. Sigh.
Its far worse in my area. After the taping off didn’t work, they erected large barriers around it but even that’s not working anymore as those who want to use the bars for excercising have resorted to climbing over them.
That’s the spirit.
This might (initially) give you some cheer:
Unfortunately it didn’t take long for the local council to act:
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/crime/car-park-barriers-vandalised-at-overstrand-1-6669347
Wonder if the police have acted on that.
Extra exercise!
It is. One has to admire the determination of those who want to use those bars for exercise.
Hypochondriacs who clearly haven’t seen the news that the virus is killed very quickly in bright sunlight.
Have to agree, locking the car parks is disgraceful. But for me, it’s the locking of the children’s play areas. Everytime we go past one, one of my three young children will say, disappointingly, “is the play area still closed? Will the coronavirus be gone soon daddy and can they then open the park?“ drives me insane! It’s a kids’ park for god’s sake! The cruelty is ridiculous!
Yet another here that shares your burgeoning hatred Annie. Your feelings and their severity are completely understandable.
On the matter of Cummings and his lockdown trips, I disagree with Toby. The only offence I have ever been charged with in the 67 years of my life is ‘Illegal use of a motorway hard shoulder’ (ironic that they have all been turned into fourth lanes now – do you think I could claim my fine back?). By his own admission DC has been complicit in the implementation and continuance of this lockdown, which is a crime against humanity and crimes against humanity should always be punished. It is unfortunate that our society has become so dystopian, that it is his car journeys that are considered the crime and not his part in the lockdown. It is an expression of my own anger and hatred that makes me wish to see him punished for anything at all, I don’t care what – did anyone see him drive on the hard shoulder during his journey? That would be treated with more seriousness than his heinous crime of supporting and perpetuating lockdown.
Don’t be ashamed of yourself, social pressure is a really big thing, it’s hard to be a lone warrior. I’m just trying to chat to people, bright and breezy, very conversational, ‘gosh this is bonkers isn’t, ha ha ha, we’ve gone mad!’ and when they say ‘what do you mean?’ I cheerily drop a little subversive bomb, ‘Well mass unemployment and the worst recession in three hundred years is a bit of a worry!’ and on I go.
I really really really hear you on the joylessness, and the meanness, particularly to kids. I have honestly felt hate too. But come the reckoning, it’s those people who will feel ashamed, as we are going to turn this around, and it’ll become their embarrassment. It’ll be like the war, where everyone denied they were ever a member of the Nazi party. And look what happened there!
This must NEVER happen again, save your strength for that battle, as we’re going to need to write lots of letters, and turn up to meetings, and MP surgeries, and write to newspapers, and go to rallies, and generally keep a watch so that we are never ever governed by social media panic ever again.
You are so right.
I now know the truth of the saying that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Exactly, and what upsets me is were weren’t even kind! I don’t want to be in a society like that, empty virtue signalling and no kindness. At least you CARE, that matters at lot, particularly right now.
Anger is a Gift!
Well put Annie. With you in spirit. This was manna from heaven for the jobsworths. No sense in virtually any of these restrictions, but it’s fun to make other peoples’ lives miserable. I wonder what it must have been like to be in the Civil War. In principal I would have been on the side of Parliament except Puritans were going to make life so bloody miserable for everyone. No wonder they wanted Charles mark two back. Closed the bloody theatres for godsake! (Oh hang on, they’ve closed them today.)
Sorry, spelt ‘principle’ wrong. Long day in the sunshine with ale
Sounds as much fun as Soviet Russia.
Or North Korea.
Is it a coincidence that those greenest to enforce the lockdown tend to be more left-wing??
Annie, I agree with every word of your post.
Annie
Excellent and an all too familiar feeling. NT in England have finally lifted the car park closures. However, the new NT magazine (member only for car parks, the irony) has the usual welcome from the Director General who declares her allegiance to the cause by stating ” …the only way we will beat this virus is if we all make a contribution by staying indoors…and not travelling”. Maybe she sits on SAGE and is some expert modelling epidemiologist? Since she mentions a contribution I have now removed mine by cancelling my membership.
I cancelled mine when they colluded with farmers to cull badgers for no good scientific reason. Gave the money to the RSPB instead.
Hello Annie,
I live in coastal Wales and I enjoy all the beautiful places you mention by parking a short way away and walking in to the beach, the woods, the river, wherever. I noticed yesterday at my favourite beach that the coast path north had a sign up saying the path was closed but no barrier. In fact the notice looked like a planning application, so I thought the farmer was wanting to convert his barn or something. Today I walked along an estuary with no banning notices or other signs. It has been bliss to go to these places sans packs of tourists and enjoy seeing more birds than usual – and less dog poo.
Hi Annie,
it is a relief to know that I’m not the only one gnashing my teeth rather than cheering the NHS. However, I have reliable information that the real reason a lot of National Trust sites are closed is that they cannot make enough income to pay the staff, and they need a minimum number of staff to protect the historic sites etc. (even apparently wild areas need some supervision if dog walkers et. al are allowed in) let alone police the social distancing malarky they would be demanded to impose on their visitors. Almost the entire National Trust have been furloughed. None of the relief measures given to buisinesses that make their money from events, hospitality and destinations are available to charities who do likewise, so that was their only option.
I’m a great fan of this site which has helped keep me sane in the last couple of months.
But any sympathy for Cummings is completely misplaced.
He’s in a leadership role in this country – arguably as important than the Prime Minister, whose strings he seems to pull. Through shared responsibility, Cummings’ fingerprints cover the government’s policy of terrorising the public and keeping us imprisoned and in our houses.
Yet he ignores the rules he himself, most egregiously with his 30 mile day trip to the beauty spot. Anyone who believes his claptrap about checking his eyesight will also be leaving leprechauns, fairies and all manner of other fantasies.
Millions and millions of British citizens would not have done what Cummings did because they dutifully obeyed the government. They have every right to be furious and contemptuous of him and with the supplicant Prime Minister.
Johnson is proving to be a buffoon of a leader and the longer he sticks with Cummings, the deeper will be his infamy.
Spot on we are being led by Janas
Deep enough already given HS2, Huawei (OK, now under review again), Net Zero and, most appallingly of all, the nuclear-war level disaster of Lockdown!
Lockdown is just the precursor to Net Zero.
And the rubber boats that keep coming from France. We’ve all been mugged………..
I absolutley agree with you Moly. I too have been following this site since the begining as a source of interesting and informative material that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen and which has enabled me to form my own opinions. I have defended the site from friends who have no time for Mr Young and friends on that basis.
For me this isn’t political. I was an ardent Remainer and have never voted for the Conservative Party in my life. Nor Labour very often either as never a strong party here. However I simply believed that a prolonged and stringent lockdown would cause more damage than the disease itself and I still do.
Mr Cummings actions were unacceptable and in my view not reasonable given the efforts made by everyone else to struggle on and comply with the guidance. The excuse for the Barnard Castle trip is laughable and I think he should go. I believe the defence and support by Toby of Mr Cummings’ actions is misplaced on this site and would have been better expressed elsewhere.
Barnard Castle is home to a facility of GlaxoSmithKline.
https://uk.gsk.com/en-gb/about-us/uk-locations/barnard-castle/
Make of that what you will.
And there it is…..thank you Simon
If that is the reason he visited, what possible reason would he have for not just saying so (or, if commercially sensitive, “a meeting on government business”).
https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/sanofi-and-gsk-to-join-forces-in-unprecedented-vaccine-collaboration-to-fight-covid-19/
Statement issued two days after Cummings’ visit.
You need to start joining some dots. Start with the UN and work down.
I’m exactly the same as you, and it’s not about splitting hairs about the letter of the law, it’s what this has done to people, a very very real human cost. Lots of vulnerable kids have no benevolent grandparents, let alone ones who have their own bloomin’ estate. Most of all it indicates he knows lockdown was not needed, but inflicted it on the rest of us just the same. Argued for it in fact. I wish Toby would cut him loose, I don’t give a stuff about Brexit (and neither does Mr Cummings or Boris, they just went with it because it’s popular, same as lockdown).
Agree. Boris is a weak man who is desperate to be popular. Such people are very easy to manipulate.
I find it amusing that people think he’s still ‘anti metropolitan liberal elite’ – he went from his leafy London home to his dad’s ESTATE, and stayed in ‘one of the cottages’. As for him slouching out of number 10 in his joggers, what is wrong with the man, he might as well have just stuck up two fingers on the door step, and he’s fooling no one with his Top Man attire. He just oozes contempt. I agree with Toby that the baying mob is vile and hypocritical (they don’t care he broke lockdown any more than he does) but I still don’t get what is to support about him (unless we’re just being canny and can see the noise is just a distraction from attacking the actual lockdown).
What upsets me is the carnage lockdown is inflicting on ordinary people, missed cancer treatment, domestic violence, child abuse, lost jobs, bankruptcy, suicide, mental illness – those things are not from a lack of ‘common sense’. And if at the beginning we were all supposed to exercise our common sense, why did all the doom laden adverts tell us to do the opposite, was Sheila in Shepton Mallet meant to actually pore over the legislation? And if she didn’t she’s a muppet?
I’m with you, Annie. What we’re doing is inhuman and cruel … unbelievably ridiculous and unnecessary.
The media were an absolute disgrace tonight at the press conference. Not a single question about the lockdown. The media have truly lost the plot – utter scum.
At least they have been consistent in their scum like behaviour over the last couple of months.
Never forgive them, never forget
i feel like a kid on a long car journey asking my dad “are we there yet?”.
Ah, so you were the 4-year-old! ;-}
are we there yet?
50p to the first one to spot Blackpool Tower.
Eye spy?
Just don’t tell us you need a wee, they’ve shut all the public toilets.
As a remainer I can say I’d love to see Cummings and Boris in deep trouble. But not for this whole “lockdown violation” “scandal”. What I would like to see instead of Boris and Cummings being scapegoated, is a government admission that lockdown was wrong and a full pardon and reimbursement of fines for anyone else who heroically violated the unconstituional lockdown. Right now, even as a remainer, I’m on Boris and Cummings’ side. Because however awful Brexit may be, we need to unite against the evils of lockdown and as far as I’m concerned there should be a truce between both the fairly equally matched sides of the referendum until the tragedy of anthropogenic lockdown is over and guarantees are in place that it can never happen again. Only with that completed would I possibly consider returning to the increasingly irrelevant leave-remain debate. Given I voted pro-EU because I thought the EU would protect us from whitehall authoritarians, and we’re still in the transition period and under the EU courts and yet they haven’t blocked lockdown so haven’t been doing the job I expected of them, I don’t really care much for remain any more.
The ‘contrary point of view’… Classic case of tunnel vision stupidity. The arrogance is breathtaking.
Now please model the number of deaths and the destruction that the lockdown has and will cause?
How about following THAT science? Of course he can’t or won’t.
Sorry Mr djaustin but those are not the facts or the science. Do you have some numbers and graphs to show that? The fact is that there is no discernible relationship between social distancing being observed and the shape of the curve or when deaths slow down or peak. See https://conservativewoman.co.uk/social-distancing-the-case-against/. In Genoa for instance there are 24 days between social distancing beginning and the infection curve starting to slow down. That’s almost a month of exponential growth in infections while people are social distancing. And elsewhere the numbers are all different. In Belarus – assuming the figures are remotely accurate – there is little social distancing and no catastrophic contagion. These, Mr djaustin, are the facts. Not your vague claims about cases dropping off.
Certainly.
UK data for COVID19 incidence of new cases and deaths 9 days apart at lockdown:
14 March 149 cases, 15 deaths
23 March 967 cases, 264 deaths
Cases doubling time = 3.3 days from 9(days) x log(2)/(log(967/149)
Deaths doubling time = 2.2 days.
You don’t need a sophisticated model, just an understanding of logarithms
Thanks. I don’t doubt there was an exponential growth phase, though I’m confused by your figures. On 23 March there were well under 200 deaths in hospitals in England.
I was asking for figures showing the drop off in Sweden was slower than in the UK etc. In England excess deaths started to spike around 20 March and were back in normal range by 20 May. In Sweden excess deaths started to spike around 1 April and are on track to be back to normal range by 1 June. They don’t look very different to me. Do you have figures that show otherwise?
Hard to show them on here but incidence in Sweden is falling at about half the rate (on a log scale) as U.K (U.K. half life is currently just over a week, Sweden closer to two but pretty stable). that’s because they have stumbled upon an R about 1 strategy. I view that as encouraging for when we do end lockdown. It says that once daily cases are down, we can keep them on a slow burn with their strategy. Btw the numbers above were daily incidence from Wikipedia based on ecdc data for U.K. NHS numbers are only England. You have to add Scotland, Wales and NI.
Sweden here. Pretty stable https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102193/coronavirus-cases-development-in-sweden/
You need to stop using case data. Case data tells you nothing. It is a function of testing – how many and which groups. Use death curves by date of death (not report) or hospitalisation curves otherwise you’ll persuade no one on here and are just perpetuating misinformation.
Cases are just a function of testing
Correct as Prof Gupta of Oxford university says. Cases are unreliable data . If we had had widespread testing in February we would have had a very different picture.
Unfortunately for your lockdown fanatic djaustine, there’s no sign in the data of any exponential growth, and there wasn’t from very early on. Quite the opposite; the rate of growth of cases was clearly dropping as early as February. A simple examination of the PHE data shows that between the 10th of march and the 17th of march the rate of change of the daily deaths went from 1.5 to 1.25 each day and it kept declining to 1 on the 8th of April. A gradually declining rate does not an exponential outbreak make; there is absolutely no sign of change in this from any measures at all. Deaths on the 10th of march were from cases caught in late February. The drop in rate of increase matches in Spain and Sweden with vastly different lockdowns.
Surely there is a short exponential phase. Take Sweden deaths (by date of death, 5 day average):
19/03 6.8
24/03 17
29/03 36
03/04 70.4
08/04 96.8
Here there is a more than doubling every 5 days in late March, slightly slowing in early April, brakes coming on around 6-8 April.
Exponential implies a constant or increasing rate of change surely. I don’t see that, I see a decreasing rate of change from the very start. Use PHE hospital data, take a 7 day average to smooth the data, calculate rate of change from one day to the next. It constantly decreases; about the 10th of march it’s around 1.5, already by the 17th it’s only 1.25. it decreases steadily.
At the same rebased point I the epidemic, when plotted on a log scale, you would find from 64 cases, all countries had a doubling time of 3 days. The variability was very low. I’ve added some official U.K. data above. Cumulative cases grew at the same rate as incidence of cases. That implies exponential growth.
Sorry case data is junk. Death data only.
And they didn’t double in three days for long. As I say PHE death data doesn’t support a constant or increasing rate of increase. Quite the opposite;The rate of increase slows constantly from the start of the death curve.
Do the same for deaths rebased from 16 onwards. I did and found the same slope and 3-day doubling time). Log scales adjust for different case fatality rates due to ascertainment differences across countries. Almost every country except U.K. had the same growth rate for cases and deaths. This is exactly what exponential growth in an epidemic predicts. A lag from cases to deaths does not remove the constant slope.
Deviations from exponential were also well-describes by Gompertz, which itself signals a deviation from pure mass-action and is a reflection of limited contacts, aka lockdown. The SIR model everyone loves gives the reason for deviation from exponential as lack of susceptibles. Seroprevalence suggests that this is unlikely (less than 10% have antibodies), but if there is some mythical non antibody immunity (unlike every other coronavirus in existence) then deviation may be due to that instead of reduced contacts. I don’t believe that based on precedence. Deviation from exponential is self-evident. The reason, biology and precedence would suggest, is not lack of people to infect. So it must be…
Yes non antibody immunity. Karol Sikora of the WHO has been talking about it see https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1285960/coronavirus-update-latest-cases-t-cells-vaccine-antibody-test. Also see https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v1.
Perhaps he’d like to read this preprint – one of the most reasonable pieces about immunity to coronavirus infections – for some perspective. I’m not hopeful for lasting immunity.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v1
If Covid 19 is just another common cold coronavirus, and its mortality by age suggests that it is, why should a lack of immunity be of any concern? Coronaviruses/rhinoviruses have been known to be more lethal to the elderly and infirm than influenza for some time and we have to live with thar. The response is better hygiene in care homes e.g. frequent hand washing (Who knew!)
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/how-can-pandemic-spreads-be-contained-in-care-homes/
Other research shows some cross immunity to Covid 19 from other common cold coronaviruses (hmmmm…….? If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck etc.)
‘The teams also looked at the T-cell response in blood samples that had been collected between 2015 and 2018, before SARS-CoV-2 started circulating. They detected SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD4+ T cells in ~50% of unexposed individuals. But everybody has almost certainly seen at least three of the four common cold coronaviruses, which could explain the observed crossreactivity.’
https://www.genengnews.com/news/good-news-for-covid-19-vaccine-immune-system-shows-robust-response-to-sars-cov-2/
Logistic or exponential then?
Regions of the U.K. are better described by a generalised-logistic equation at one end is pure logistic (SIR like model) at the other extreme is gompertz. The exponent for the U.K. is about 0.25 that days it’s a lot more like gompertz than logistic. Deviation from pure logistic is more suggestive of contact reduction (mass action mixing) than immunity.
Contact reduction in February though? Or even early March? lets be honest, that wasn’t happening.
Ok, plotted that. To my eyes until 24 March it remains at or above 1.2 daily growth rate. It darts around a bit and does come down from an initial high but sits quite still for a week between 16 and 23 March. That would correspond to the short exponential phase. I can see what you and others are saying about there being a downward pressure from the start, but the growth rate does hold steady for a week or so. You can also see in those Sweden figures a couple of weeks of periodic doubling. I don’t think it’s right to say there is no exponential phase given these figures.
If you want to claim 1 week of exponential growth sitting between 2 periods of downwards movement of the rate of growth then be my my guest; it’s hard to claim that this downwards pressure was caused by anything other than an innate characteristic of either the virus or the population, it’s way too early for any govt measures.
It’s telling that djaustin seems to be unable to accept what the data shows, that something is causing a deviation from exponential akin to population immunity.
I basically agree. What I’m worried about is that the claim that the growth was never exponential is quite a technical one based on a strict definition of exponential that risks making sceptics look implausible to people who can see deaths doubling every few days. Take England hospital deaths:
12/3 14
16/3 41
20/3 100
24/3 222
28/3 400
Ok, so in fact the exponent is decreasing over time. But it’s quite technical to say a trend like that is not exponential with doubling coming every few days. I fear it makes sceptics look implausible to non-mathematicians to argue it was never exponential.
Ok, I get what you’re saying. But it’s important that we do point out that the exponent decreases with time, in other words, the pedal was lifted long before the brakes of the lockdown were put on.
I should note that in the graph above the swedish data has been moved to sync with the UK data. It shows each day divided by the previous day, giving a rate of increase/decrease. Both show a short period, possibly where the exponent remained constant (although I detect some downward movement in the UK), but only lasting maybe a week at most.
Full comparison of data attached. Which one had lockdown?!
I can buy that the lockdown might have caused a sharper reduction in the tail in the UK than in Sweden. But that’s a very different cost/benefit analysis, if it achieved nothing else.
In terms of length of drop off, the only thing that really matters is the period during which there are excess deaths. I haven’t been able to calculate this accurately for both countries, but from what I can see it looks like the period will be very similar. Stockholm for example was already back at the top end of the normal range by the end of April.
Todays excess mortality – predicted from regional UK COVID deaths modelled with a generalised logistic curve then summed over NHS regions. Area under the curve of excess deaths is heading towards 70K.
In epidemic land, only log-scales matter. Yesterday’s ECDC data for the UK is well-described by a Gompertz model for cases and deaths simultaneously. Plotting the same data for Sweden, shows them to be an outlier in that cases are not falling as fast. Spain is an outlier in the opposite direction – cases are falling faster. All countries are modelled simultaneously.
UK
Sweden
You are ignoring the point; Do you deny that the exponent was decreasing from the very start of the epidemic? What explanation do you offer for this?I contend that there is a natural ‘breaking force’ on the epidemic beyond population immunity, as we clearly haven’t hit a simple SIR model population immunity. I also contend that it is improper to call this growth exponential; the exponent is never constant. I contend that if you were to see some effect of lockdown you would see it in the rate of change, and I do not see any evidence that it was effective.
I don’t deny the breaking effect at all – in fact, all my models have included this explicitly – what I contend is that the effect is much greater than an SIR model would expect – hence Gompertz and generalised logistic curved describe the data much better. That is due to restriction in contacts not acquisition of immunity.
Contact restriction works and has done so. One can debate how much is necessary, and how early it came into effect, but a lot of sceptics would maintain that it has had no effect whatsoever. That is my point. The early break up to mid-March was relatively modest, except in Japan and S Korea, where there really was very different growth.
Spain is a great example – fast up and fast down – quite a different decline to UK.
Ok – but the lowering of the exponent starts before contact restriction begins though? It is clearly declining through deaths in early march which is before most people had changed behavior and implies that it wasn’t just contact reduction that had this effect?
I don’t deny that contact reduction has had some effect, although I do wonder whether forcing families into homes to infect each other would have had a counter effect as well. I’m also not sure about the added effect of full lockdown on top of contact reduction.
I can’t see any consistent effect of social distancing on death rates in cities around the world. Can you?
One final point – your rate of change is actually the second derivative – Daily incidence is the derivative of cumulative cases, the difference is the second derivative. Second derivative will always show a decline from the beginning for any exponential growth model with limiting resources, be that due to immunity or contact reduction. For the three weeks before lockdown, there was approximately exponential growth in cases and for the two weeks, deaths (they were too low at three weeks).This was matched by every other country except JP and South Korea when rebased to the same point in their epidemics. Sweden came later behind us and took a different action They have not really “overshot” but have shown a rise to steady-state, which is not really showing much evidence of decline.
Of course it would always trend down in a limited system. However, I suggest that the earliest you could account for the effect of the lockdown is probably the week after it happened, if we’re using data from deaths – and that assumes that the instructions issued by BJ the monday before were effective. Given that the rate was declining steadily (I can fit a straight trendline from the 21st march to the 10th of April), why is there no change from the lockdown?
Here’s another graph comparing Sweden and England showing a decline in rate without any real effect from the lockdown.
It’s even got a log graph for you
Taken from
https://twitter.com/PFDgeologist/status/1264838174553112577
Case data is useless and trends in it are misleading. You’re not engaging with this point.
I posted plots of the rates of decline in UK, Sweden and Spain for incidence of deaths and cases above using consistent ECDC hospital death data – It is clear from those three plots that Spain has the fastest decline, followed by UK, followed by Sweden. There is a statistically significant difference (if that matters to you), and the order follows the order of severity of lockdown. My contention is only that lockdown works. Nowhere have I argued the ethics of doing so.
Yes that’s a very important point that I hadn’t properly appreciate before. The growth was never strictly exponential as the growth rate was always coming down, from the very start before any interventions at all had been made. I don’t think I’m going to join in saying it was ‘never exponential’ (for the reasons given above about plausibility and it being quite a technical distinction) but I can certainly say this.
For the plot above, you should really plot difference/absolute value. For dN/dt = rN f(t) then 1/N dN/dt = d(logN), plotting difference/N gives the f(t) which will indicate the deviation from pure exponential growth.
The alternative explanation, certainly for the United Kingdom, is that a minor coronavirus common cold epidemic followed its traditional path until exacerbated by large numbers of the elderly and infirm being discharged from hospital to make way for Covid 19 patients who never turned up:
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931
England Covid 19 infection numbers data flawed:
‘Summary of the initial results:
1. There is considerable diversity of molecular platforms, reagents, kits and assay performance conditions in PHE and NHS laboratories providing SARS-CoV-2 molecular detection
2. There is evidence of quality assurance difficulties for key reagents due to global supply chain issues
3. Shortages of swabs and transport medium have led to local variations in sampling practice which
may impact on assay performance through the introduction of inhibitors into biochemical reactions
4. There is no evidence of viral genetic drift as a basis for altered sensitivity of assay
5. Enzyme performance from external suppliers has degraded compared with original validation performance.’
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zoki1xUKuY15JmPujZXd-mMjXn0K_2GM/view
England mortality data flawed:
‘In an emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic there is a relaxation of previous legislation concerning completion of the medical certificate cause of death (MCCD) by medical practitioners’
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/877302/guidance-for-doctors-completing-medical-certificates-of-cause-of-death-covid-19.pdf
Any enquiry can only conclude that far reaching policy decisions of great damage to the Nation were taken on the basis of hopelessly unreliable (and known to be hopelessly unreliable) data.
Is every other country’s data also so flawed that the initial spread was at the same rate and wholly consistent from country to country. I don’t believe in exceptionalism. Variability was about 30%. Rhinovirus does not induce hypoxia in otherwise healthy individuals. The morbidity for this pathogen is totally at odds with the common cold. Morbidity is likely to be similar to influenza (<1%), Nowhere have I argued otherwise.
Thomas, here is my analysis of the deviation from pure exponential growth of cases and deaths. This uses cumulative numbers and derivative. A value of 1 is pure exponential. You will see deviation begins really after the third week in March. Of course the early restrictions, rather than pure lock-down will have had some effect, but there is quite an acceleration beyond lockdown.
Djaustin needs to explain to Michael Levitt where Levitt’s analysis went so wrong to achieve results that directly contradict most of Djaustin’s assertions.
It might be an appeal to authority, but I’m going with the Nobel Laureate for now.
And, by the way, a key point here is that Levitt (and others) pointed out many of the key points back before the lockdown or as it was introduced. There is no excuse for having acted on the kind of ridiculous assumptions that were used to justify the lockdown – they were demonstrably implausible or flat out wrong at the time and that fact was pointed out.
Djaustin comes out with some of the obvious errors again here, suggesting that it was somehow meaningful to extrapolate from early rapid growth in numbers. The one thing that was absolutely incontrovertibly known for certain at the time was that such rates of growth where not going to continue and indeed as Levitt has pointed out, in every case there was no exponential growth at any point after these epidemics were identified.
Contemplate that fact, when you think back to all the black fear propaganda about “exponential growth” we were treated to at the time.
Quite. In fact COVID has acted as any epidemic ever; it has been self limited from the start and never accelerated, something slowed it down before any measures at all.
Looks like there were several of is all pointing out the errors in Djaustin’s points simultaneously. What really concerns me is that if he is indeed a former epidemiologist, how does he not know this already?
I get the feeling that epidemiologists are basically modellers and not that interested in hard data.
Yes, but they ought to be basically numerate and aware of the kinds of elementary facts that we’ve pointed out here.
I performed the same analysis as Levitt weeks earlier. At lockdown, geothermal in cases and deaths in the U.K. were exponential. They slowed as any intervention would reduce mass action and a Gompertz equation describes that effect well
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.09.20059402v1
Figure 1 right at the end shows U.K. on a growth chart from all other countries. When your child is an outlier, what do you do?
Growth in not geothermal.
Published the day after deaths peaked according to CEBM, Oxford (8th April, a mere 16 days from incarceration on 24th March following BJ’s speech the evening before0.
You shield your child and let the rest of us get on with our lives?
Precisely. On the growth charts for the epidemic, the U.K. was that child. It was the outlier. Hence we shielded it.
I must say I found the Djaustin letter interesting. It raised some ideas that I hadn’t seen or considered before. The decelaration or rate of change of deaths/cases makes sense with regard to the efficacy of lockdown. I’d be interested to know if the difference is significant. I can see the slopes on the graphs but I don’t put too much faith in the data.
I don’t agree that Sweden was “probably fortuitous” though. Their results are in line with what they predicted. Had they not made the same mistake as everyone else in letting it spread within care homes their death toll would have been roughly half what it is.
Regarding the 60k excess deaths I’m of the belief that lockdowns are cause for some proportion of these. We can’t say precisely what proportion but the number not attributed to COVID-19 is a good starting point. There is also a strong case to be made that stricter lockdowns cause more excess deaths. Certainly places with stricter measures than Sweden have proportionately higher excess deaths that are unlikely to be all caused by the virus. So either it’s coincidence or it’s somehow related to the lockdowns.
Walked past a housing showroom which reopened today. Despite the sign at the door that said that they were observing social distancing, it seemed like no-one was paying attention. The staff also weren’t wearing any masks and gloves and looked like it was business as usual.
These perpetual updates when you’re trying to read someone’s comment are really distracting. I’m irritated enough already without this site adding to it. If you’re reading this, Toby, can you ask your comment software people to pack it in?
Disabling Javascript, and reloading the page stops the update “thingy” – unfortunately this prevents you from making comments…
Hear hear !
I liked the smaller font, and more tightly nested comments, I’m getting repetitive strain injury scrolling up and down the page.
Browser zoom control ?
On Windows pressing Ctrl & + or – will change the font size in a webpage
I think it feels too ‘chaotic’. I would suggest that mere indentation isn’t enough to separate each top comment and its replies from the next one. There needs to be some sort of box around a set of connected comments.
Thanks Toby, much more balanced. And I share your repugnance of the baying mob (with no love lost for Mr Cummings, in the least, as I have opined so will spare the repetition). I’m seeing more and more posts on social media that lockdown is in effect over, I really hope that’s true.
Maybe for individuals, but not for schools, dentists, the travel industry, hotels, elective surgery, etc. It is the latter set of bodies and processes that are so desperately needed to limit the already catastrophic effects coming down the line.
No, of course I agree, in dashing off my comment I didn’t explain myself very well, people who have up to now not made a peep, or been very stoic and pro lockdown are now saying ‘well what’s the point, it’s over’ – I mean a change in mood.
Lockdown sadly, isn’t over. Not Until our Suprime Leader allows it. Most public services and amenities remain closed. It’s strange that newspapers publish pictures of people on beaches and report that people are getting “back to normal”.
Bizarrely the park 15m drive from us still has a locked carpark, with police signs advising the public to report non-adherence.
But thank goodness Son can return to his preschool on Monday.
As Hitchens points out, it won’t ever be really over until we have an apology and an admission of error from those who inflicted it upon us. Otherwise even once it peters out it will still be lurking in the background ready to be reimposed at the first sign of a new disease or a recurrence of this one.
As I recall, the “Emergency Powers” are supposed to be limited to 3 months, at which time they need to be debated in parliament before being extended. That means we’ve got another few weeks, but what’s the betting it will just carry on without so much as a peep from the meeja?
My guess is they’ll have to “regularise” the position at some point, but I can’t see there being much meaningful opposition. Lots of noise about trivial details, but no meaningful resistance to the whole basis.
I thought there was a need to debate and potentially vote in parliament every 6 months, but this can be prolonged indefinitely by ministerial fiat. And the whole thing expires in 2 years.
We can’t do this for 2 years!
Not sure if it’s 3 months, I’d thought 6 months BUT that’s in part what Simon Dolan’s Crowd Justice appeal is all about.
@Mark, Julian & Nel – I was wrong, it is 2 years, but with a provision for debate every 6 months.
From here: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/coronavirus-act
How long measures will last for
Most of the Act will stop having effect two years after it is passed. Some provisions, including certain provisions relating to the emergency registration of health professionals and indemnity of health service activity do not expire after two years.
Following government amendments in the Commons, MPs will now have an opportunity to express a view on the continued operation of the Act’s temporary provisions every six months. Every six months, a minister must, ‘as far as practicable’ make arrangements for MPs to vote to keep the provisions of the Act in force. If MPs are able to vote and vote to stop against keeping the provisions of the Act in force, the government must make regulations to prevent provisions having effect within 21 days. MPs will only be able to vote on the continuation of the powers if parliament is sitting. If they are not able to vote, the powers will remain in force
……………………………………………………………………………………………
Either side of that paragraph options allow changes to the timings, but it strikes me that terms such as “An opportunity” “As far as practicable” “If they are not able to” would allow the Govt to keep it running for years, but maybe I’m just cynical?
Presumably at some point they’ll bring in a Public Health Bill at some time, to regularise this kind of response for the future.
There is no Parliament so there will be no debate.
I agree, and safeguards so they cannot do it again. I meant more the ‘mood’, people seem to be commenting more, asking questions, scoffing, saying ‘well what’s the point’ etc. I do concur that they absolutely have to recant, and we need an independent inquiry, a Leveson / Iraq war rolled into one.
This lot aren’t big on recanting.
The Cummings business is still good news whether he resigns or not. But it’s weird to see Johnson now pissing off pretty much the whole country. He always loved a good windup but normally had a majority on his side.
Yep, that’s precisely what I mean. My Telegraph reading, Tory voting, brexit supporting parents are appalled. So are all their friends. So is the Daily Fail. It’s a definite tone shift.
Lockdown’s not over until we can socialise in the accepted sense of the word, like a drink in the pub, a meal in a restaurant, a visit to a cinema or theatre, a concert, a sporting event, a Thames pleasure cruise….and on and on and on. If there are no arts or culture (in the broadest possible sense) in this country then we don’t have a ‘society’ we have a slave colony.
Yes I know that, I just mean the tone of the debate, I’ve seen lots of posts today, from people who had been quiet, saying ‘sod this for a game of soldiers, arranged to go and stay with my parents’ or ‘well if it’s good enough for him, we’re having a barbecue’ or whatever, I’ve had more chat, proper discussion, on my own timeline today than at any point through all this (and 100 unfriended me, my scepticism was so appalling!),it’s cheered me up a bit. A bit like O’Neill’s Spiked article, the public have to lead the way, and I think the public mood has changed quite a lot. I’ve not seen all that much ‘he’s killing people’ but people are angry at the hypocrisy.
Oh, and Barnard’s Castle, I didn’t know, is actually Geordie Slang also, ‘that’s Barney Castle’ means ‘that’s a rubbish excuse’, a colloquialism that made me laugh when I read it.
So Johnson’s big announcement today,non-essential shops (whatever the bloody hell that means) can open from June 15th,another bloody three weeks away ! and then only subject to this oppressive distancing nonsense,just unbelievable.This is really going to help small businesses loads isn’t it ! there aren’t going to be many left to re-open.Johnson and all of the government must actually be insane,they really must,I know many small business owners that are in complete despair,years of hard work thrown away in a matter of weeks for no good reason by the actions of those at the top who just do not give a flying shit about anybody but themselves.
Some of the big shops have reopened. Yesterday I saw a photo of two staff members from Fortnum & Mason wearing both visors and masks. Talk about overkill and serious barrier to providing good customer service!
But I don’t want to frequent big shops. I want my quirky local independents to be able to function successfully.
Social distancing when shopping and all the other petty rules along with the Stasi enforcers mean that shopping is no pleasure. This is the end of the small business shop.
Dispiriting visit to the supermarket today. It was the only place open in a large shopping centre, and till now, was relatively normal. But now they’re in the process of introducing the absurd one way system with the annoying arrows on the floor. This was the first day of phase two of the so called deescalation, but what they give with one hand they take away with the other. There’s no sign that they are going to let this lunacy go anytime son.
That’s just what I can’t understand,a few of the shops in my town that have remained open all through this and been pretty normal are only now implementing the ridiculous types of measures you mention.I was in one of these shops last week,not through choice I must add,and I overheard two staff members talking,one of them said that she ‘felt happier at work this week because everything was back to normal in the store’ !,one door to go in,one to exit,staff in masks,frowning on taking cash,keep 2 metres away from everybody and don’t touch anything unless you are buying it,yes,that’s really normal.Not like this for the past eight weeks so why now ?.
That’s a good question. Insurance? Edict from some official business gestapo?
Make sure when buying fresh food you check the dates on everything available to get the latest date. Pop into shops decide you don’t want anything and walk back out. Non compliance can beat this.
Paul, I found this on the HSE website. Here’s our answer:
The updated guidance takes into account the best practice demonstrated by the many retailers which have been allowed to remain open and have applied social distancing measures in store. Measures that shops should consider include placing a poster in their windows to demonstrate awareness of the guidance and commitment to safety measures, storing returned items for 72 hours before putting them back out on the shop floor, placing protective coverings on large items touched by the public such as beds or sofas, and frequent cleaning of objects and surfaces that are touched regularly, including self-checkouts, trolleys, coffee machines and betting terminals, for example.
The vast majority of businesses will want to do everything possible to protect their staff and customers, but tough powers are in place to enforce action if they don’t, including fines and jail sentences of up to two years.
In France these shops have reopened the 11th of this month. At first a lot social distancing, one way walking areas and such (why the big supermarkets who also sell a lot non essential stuff don’t have to comply to these rules I don’t know), but after a week already situation returned a little bit to normal with most people ignoring the “one way” arrows on the floor and clearly not keeping the 1 meter distance. Still lots of sheeple with facemasks though…
Not just BBC, ITV, C4, Sky and The Guardian to be kept at bay, much as I used to admire them The Independent have lost all sense they may have had on other issues pre-lockdown by running some disturbingly deluded pro-lockdown articles in response to Cummings’ reasonable* travel with mroe bullsh*t claims which tried to state that by travelling, and not even meeting anyone, he was committing “murder by virus”.
*by civilised opinions pretty much all travel is reasonable, lockdown is the unreasonable thing
I’m afraid djaustin is wrong. The growth of the epidemic was NEVER exponential. See:
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264838174553112577?s=21
Shows unequivocally that the epidemic did not have an exponential growth phase.
Moreover, UK and Sweden declining at a near identical rate. I don’t know why this is so hard because the data is out there. The analysis is not that difficult. There is no evidence that lockdown in the UK had any impact on the progress of the epidemic. If djaustin is a mathematician then he can look at my analysis of the English and Swedish data and tell me where it is wrong.
Surely it was exponential on the way up for a bit before slowing down?
Depends what you mean. The rate of growth was dropping from the very start.
“Surely it was exponential on the way up for a bit before slowing down?“
That’s not what Levitt found, at least not from when it was being measured. He speculates that it’s because of asymptomatic and non-infecting cases. Here’s his discussion from the transcript of the interview linked by Toby the other day(emphasis added):
” And uh, one thing that the curves show and it is predictable, but basically this virus is slowing down from case one, now clearly nobody has any lockdown when you have one case, people don’t usually implement lockdown until you have say a thousand cases or a few hundred cases. Well it turns out that the, the growth is slowing down. It’s never exponential, but it’s slowing down dramatically. Professor Levitt (00:55:57): So if you infect, you know, three people on day one, then those people will only infect 15% less of those three people. And so in an, like a bank paying you, a great thing, come to our bank, we’ll pay you a hundred percent for the first week and then 50% for the next week and, 25% for the next week. And you’ll quickly realize that it would have been way better. It’s got 3% for the whole year. And you know, when you have exponential growth, decreasing exponentially, it doesn’t go very far. And you actually see when you were talking about the shape of the curves, the curves are actually bending from the first moment. I picked some of the things I released in my podcasts. So the curves are really bending from day one, and this is true everywhere. It’s true in Iran and it’s true in Italy, and it’s true in New York city. Professor Levitt (00:56:46): And this basically means that there’s something slowing down the growth. And what I think that is, I never understood this. It doesn’t make sense. I’m the first case, surely I can find three other people really easily and surely they can find me through three other people really easily and we’ll get it. You do that for a short while and you’ll have five days of exponential growth at three people a day. You have a pretty big number. But I think what is happening is, is that a large fraction. We don’t know, but let’s just say for every real case, there were three hidden cases. These are people who are asymptomatic, who feel nothing but are infected and are infectious. So now I’m, you know, I’m the virus. I’m in case number one. I’m going out looking for people to infect and I’m feeling great and I’m the first guy on the block, I’m going to get somebody except unbeknownst to me, all my hidden companions have been out before me. Professor Levitt (00:57:44): or the same time. So by the time I get to fresh case, sorry, somebody just got him, we don’t even see that person. So I think if you have these shadow cases, they took a change but then, there’s a lot of evidence now for these shadow cases. They make the R value a different thing. Because instead of me infecting everybody, it’s all the shadow cases working together. So I think that this explains immediately why you get essentially the virus is growing slowly but just competing with invisible copies of itself that aren’t being counted as confirmed cases. And this is also why when you have case one, you probably have a hundred infected people and it makes sense. Ivor (00:58:30): And that’s the essence of the self limiting slowing curve and then tapering off. “
https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Ep78-Stanford-Professor-and-Nobel-Prize-Winner-Explains-this-Viral-Lockdown-Fully-2.pdf
asymptomatic and infectious cases, grrr!
Interesting. In theory if 50% of the cases are invisible but otherwise behave the same the epidemic should still follow the SIR curve just with everything divided by 2.
My theory was always that the reason we never saw exponential growth in deaths (or very little) was basically because by the time we started noticing them we were already past the exponential region.
But Levitt shows Gompertz growth fits very well right from the start with small outbreaks. I would assume the reason for this is lack of homogeneous mixing. There are plenty of susceptible people in the entire population but not among your immediate contacts. I think Gompertz is often a good fit for epidemics and there are some papers of other people in the earlier days fitting different models including Gompertz to see what worked best.
Anyway I think he’s going to make a new video on his YT channel soon so we’ll see what he says. The transcript you sent a link to is very interesting though.
I think that is pretty much what he’s saying (that it went through more quickly and was past the rapid growth phase), but I don’t fully follow his explanation. The important point was mainly his observation in the numbers of no exponential growth.
It will be interesting to see how he follows this up as I think he was only in the process of formulating a hypothesis on this, at the time of the interview.
Yes I think the SIR model looks a lot like the Gompertz one once you’re out of the exponential region. As the log deaths curve is bending over, you get a pretty straight line in the graph of its gradient (which Gompertz has all the way) all the way until very nearly the bottom when it levels out again (it’s another reverse sigmoid type of thing).
No not exponential on the way up. Increasing yes but at an ever decreasing rate from the get go! If you look at my tweet and the upper plot. The red dots are the rate at which it is increasing on a daily basis. See the dots are aligned along a slope downwards indicating the rate is decreasing. Confusingly, the decrease is exponential!
Surely there is a short exponential phase. Take Sweden deaths (by date of death, 5 day average):
19/03 6.8
24/03 17
29/03 36
03/04 70.4
08/04 96.8
Here there is a more than doubling every 5 days in late March, slight slowing at start of April, brakes coming on around 6-8 April.
That looks like two consecutive 5 day periods before slowing but you need to look at overall picture….see my tweet above and plot of Swedish data over 70 day period in blue. There’s no substitute for graphing the data! Top plot shows a continuous straight line with negative gradient. An exponential growth phase will be horizontal on this plot. Can you point out to me where this is? And a huge caveat when looking at small numbers. The noise, or variability in the data is significant. This is seen by how the points to the left between days 1 and 10 bouncing around considerably for both Swedish and UK data.
Also look at the middle graph showing cumulative deaths. Where you say it is exponential growth all lies at the left edge of the plot before day 10 – its not visible above the x-axis. By 20 days it is clear above the noise that it is not exponential.
I feel like you and others are trying to argue against the figures that show a period of exponential growth. I’ve looked at the growth rate for England hospital deaths and it seems clear to me that it stays above 1.2 growth rate until 24 March, and stays pretty steady around 1.2 between 16 and 23 March. I can’t really see how until 24 March it can’t be described as exponential growth. It’s not a long exponential phase, but I don’t really buy the idea that it’s not there.
Thanks for the comment Will. I again refer you to the plot. Day 20 on the x axis is the 21st March. By day 20 the fact that the rate of growth in numbers of deaths is declining is evident in the negative slope of the upper graph. I grant you that up to the 12th March the data is noisy and at that time difficult to assess. It is with hindsight that we can see there is something limiting from the first case onwards. So it is difficult to make a decision as to what is happening and an exponential model appropriate for unrestricted growth is often used. However, lockdown decision was taken on the 19th when the evidence was beginning to accrue that growth was limited by some factor. For the record I don’t disagree with that decision. However, from every day onwards the evidence became more and more clear. Simply updating the plots every day would give you more and more confidence in ones estimates of the Gompertz parameters and would allow higher confidence in the predicted trajectory of the epidemic. By the time of the first review – 3 weeks later the peak had been passed. Look at points between 40 and 50. The trends from day 1 are now pretty well defined. This evidence is available to government but we were still constantly being warned about dangers of exponential growth and put into another 3 weeks. By the end of the second period there could be very little uncertainty and doubt. I’m sure that this is the approach to the data that Sweden took and from very early on made decisions based on that.
In the very early stages the data is imperfect as well as somewhat stochastic. So it has inherent noise. There was a limited testing regime and the reporting of cause of death was not under any control in terms of dying of, or dying with and if deaths were associated with positive deaths. You say the daily rate was 1.2 or more. But it bounced around a huge amount, sometimes more, sometimes less and even 0 on occasions! It’s not until a statistically significant number of cases or deaths have occurred that inferences about appropriate models can be made with any degree of robustness. In the early stages the choice of an exponential growth model is just that – a choice. It might be a wise and appropriate one but it limits ones ability to make inferences about the future because one can not determine an upper limit to growth. The Gompertz function, on the other hand, does allow such estimates to be made and once it was clear that it would be a good model to choose it should have been thoroughly investigated.
Apart from Michael Levitt and a few others have you seen anywhere in the MSM, the government press briefings, NHS England or ONS output any discussion of this. I haven’t!
If you look at the Gompertz line of best fit it is below the gradient data for much of the early period (till the blue vertical line) as the data has flat areas. Likewise, the Gompertz curve is not as steep on the way up and flattens earlier. I think you’re basically correct (except in seeing the lockdown as justified initially, they were always obviously a ruinous overreaction!) in that with the clear downward pressure on the growth rate throughout it is not in a sense of true exponential growth, but I think that’s quite a technical point which is hard to convince people of when they can see with their own eyes doubling trends for a couple of weeks. eg in England approx every 4 days in later March:
12/3 14
16/3 41
20/3 100
24/3 222
28/3 400
Ok, so in fact the exponent is decreasing all the time. But it’s quite technical to say a trend like that is not exponential with doubling coming every few days. I fear it makes sceptics look implausible to non-mathematicians to say it was never exponential.
Will, taking your numbers the rate of growth for each 4 day interval is:
2.93, 2.44, 2.22, 1.80
You have just proved the point that the rate of growth is falling! This is an important point because in exponential growth it does not fall, it remains constant.
It might be technical but it is also true and one should never shy away from accurately describing the data even though it might be difficult for others to understand.
Will, I think we are in agreement on the basic science here but perhaps disagreeing on how to relate this so that others can understand it. I take your point that being overly technical and precise can be confusing. I then take that to mean that we need to explain more clearly so that our fellow citizens can understand better.
You make a good point about the upper plot. If one looks at the points and the line of best fit one observes a waviness if the points around the line that is not random. This implies a small variation in the time constants (there are two of these in The Gompertz equation) about the mean implied by the line. This is why the resulting cumulative line (middle graph) and death rate curve (bottom graph) show variation from the actual data. I don’t believe this affects in any way the interpretation that the virus was limiting from the outset. These variations are likely due to the fact that the dynamics of the epidemic are not regionally homogeneous. That is there are variations say between London and the north-west and so on. However, the overall pattern is undeniably one of a Gompertz distribution.
This is why the fact that the rate of increase is decreasing from, I’ll say virtually here, the start is so important. It points to a limiting behaviour and a Gompertz distribution. It gives us a much better model to try to understand the behaviour of the epidemic on a macroscopic scale. Certainly a much better model than unrestrained exponential growth, or a sigmoid function which is markedly exponential in it’s early stages.
“It points to a limiting behaviour” Quite – and a natural one, as this behaviour is without doubt shown from before any human change is possible to have impacted the curve. It also shows in Swedish data, and Spanish. Something caused the rate to decelerate, and that something was natural. The epidemic would never have hit 60% of people without any measures, it would have self limited before that. The death tolls implied by modeling – all modeling – were wrong.
Given that the rate of change was moving downwards long before the lockdown, it’s hard to see what additional effect it might have had. If I was trying to prove the efficacy of a lockdown I’d like to see it changing the rate at which the disease spread.
Absolutely. In Genoa in northern Italy they began social distancing early in the epidemic, and it still continued growing
exponentiallyvery fast for nearly a month before coming to a peak. Elsewhere the curve slowed down at completely different periods from the beginning of the adoption of social distancing. I have not been able to find any consistent relationship between social distancing and the shape of the curve. But who, save for a few brave souls, is pointing this out?djaustin is a lying bollix.
You are welcome to view figure 1 at the end of this preprint. I wrote it some time ago. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.09.20059402v1
Gompertz is not a bad model and a good description of the epidemic now. Btw a gompertz model is equivalent to an SIR model with limited contacts. Hence lockdown is built into that model, with eventual deviation from exponential.
See my comment above to your other posting where I thanked you for the link. I’ll read in detail tomorrow.
Has there ever been an epidemic that had unfettered exponential growth? Modelling is all well and good but it seems to me that they assume everything is uniform.
Instinctively the more a virus spreads the harder it becomes to find enough new hosts to maintain exponential growth. That’s assuming uniformity and no voluntary change in behaviour which is highly unlikely in any real life situation.
It stands to reason that any exponential spread of a virus has an upper limit long before full saturation is achieved.
It’s a bad move I think to try to dogwhistle brexiteers to back Cummings on this. It’s understandable loyalty to a (no doubt) friend and political co-campaigner, but all it will do is damage the causes it seeks to protect, when Cummings does go down. And if he doesn’t all it does it keep in office one of the architects of lockdown, a man of established poor judgement by virtue of that fact alone, leaving him damaged and in a position to do more damage to our country and to try to cover up and justify the lockdown from an insider position of power.
And I write that as someone who has been anti-EU since before there was an EU (Maastricht).
And, of course, Baker was one of the leading Brexiteers (not sure about all the other conservative MPs against DC’s staying).
Lots of the very fake looking comments on the Daily Mail were trying to do exactly that. Portray Cummings as the hero of Brexit being attacked by the leftist media. Well you can’t blame him for trying I suppose.
We support Brexit. Not the people ‘attached’ to it. – They seem to change quite often
Regardless of what you think of the account that Cummings has had weeks to polish, what is absolutely clear is that going back to No 10 after visiting his infected wife was 100% against both spirit AND the letter of the law. That should be it.
Having vacillated wildly on the Dom question, I have to agree with Toby, who doesn’t seem to know whether he thinks Dom should go or not either.
As a free thinker, Brexiter and general non-conformist, I have to agree with Cummings’ approach to the question of rules. For the guidance of wise men and the blind obedience of fools. I pity the dying elderly whose mealy-mouthed relatives let the remote threat of a £60 fine stop them being with their so-called loved ones.
And I am an avowed enemy of almost all of those people calling for Cummings’ head.
And yet… I cannot think of a single thing he’s known to have done since being in No10 that I would welcome, and the creeping feeling of having been made a mug of by the politicians, police and media – and by Cummings himself – must surely start to come to us all.
Perhaps Poppy (comments yesterday) is right and the whole puppet show was dreamed up by him to get people to push back against the ‘soft lockdown’ and get back to work. But should we welcome being manipulated by these nudgers even if it’s to ends of which we approve? That weapon was turned on us previously, to initiate the lockdown and get public buy-in.
I hate to say this, because of the succour it gives to a bunch of hateful lefties, dullards, bedwetters and media w’anchors, but I do still think that he should go, and I think the media will have their plattered head by the weekend.
It’s not just the remote threat of fines that imposed these ridiculous rules. It was a disgraceful campaign of fear and intimidation. Hospital staff actually prevented people from seeing loved ones. Some police officers set up checkpoints on roads.
I don’t blame him for breaking the rules, but for coming up with them, and being part of an administration responsible for them. Don’t care what happens to him.
Do not give the media anything. Not a shred of of satisfaction or credit. Never forget these last 2 months… The government may have set the stupid policy decision but who has been responsible for brainwashing the primitives.
Give them nothing.
I think the problem might be that Boris is burning his political capital defending Cummings… he’s going to need that political capital when he finally decides we should get everything moving again.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life
A must read about the enormous cost of lockdown. Already after two months double more life years loss from lockdown than from Covid-19. And that is just the beginning. Stunning figures with serious public health consequences. Half of the childhood vaccinations has not been done during the lockdown. There will be pockets of population (the poorest of course) where small measles outbreaks can happen and kill younger people more than Covid-19.
This is not an article from the fringe ie. Scott W. Atlas is a physician and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
The lockdown must be the biggest public health disaster ever. Where is the investigative left-wing media?
Measles was not seen as an evil killing disease when I caught it in my youth (as all of my friends at the time) and with only one death every 1000 cases (in Europe) I doubt very much the reason for vaccination against it. I think there are far more deadlier diseases that deserve a vaccine ( no covid19 not being one of them
)
Because of having measles vaccine introduced in a population there is no choice than to immunize. The earlier public health advice was to reach a herd immunity by immunisations and not natural disease. Natural disease gives you natural protection 100%. Vaccine can never achieve that and even at 90 % level of immunity by vaccine you would have pockets of people (many older) being susceptible to measles. Measles have one of the highest R factor around and measles is more severe and can even kill if you are older and adults. There is no choice now because of an earlier decision to immunize. We must vaccinate against measles.
I remember my old professor in virology in early 70’s who thought it was a crazy idea to start immunize children against measles even though he admitted there was a certain but low mortality of measles in children. He said it was a stupid idea as we would have to rely on vaccine for ever and we could have epidemics of measles among old people killing them in masses. We all laughed at him at his back seeing him as an old-fashioned social Darwinist. But I think he had a point.
Am I right in thinking that the other reason people liked to get measles over early in life was that it resets the adaptive immune system, so that after having it you gain immunity to measles but lose all other immunities built up in your lifetime so far?
As soon as they announced the lockdown here in the UK the very first thought that came into my head was:
“What the f**k are they doing”
Since then my thoughts have changed slightly to:
“What the f**k have they done”
Don’t be surprised to see stories in the MSM about unusual measles outbreak caused by covid (because they will all test positive of course) .
The scene is set for saying it’s all covid. Caused by covid.
The UK is prolonging the reduction in lockdown measures over the summer months. What was 21 days to flatten the curve has now become an eternity of purgatory. Our whole well being as a nation is put in the hands of ” the scientists” who seem to have no more ability to divine the future than mystic Meg.
So much misery caused by the folly of man.
And there’s no excuse whatsoever for prolonging it by even a minute except to protect the reputations, positions and careers of the fools and scoundrels who misled us into it.
And there’s no excuse whatsoever for prolonging it by even a minute
I agree but I’m not sure your suggested reason for it is the only one. Yours is just less sinister than the alternative.
Out of all this insanity, here’s the thing that most makes me want to projectile vomit:
SCIENTISTS
Once upon a time, scientists were dispassionate seekers-after-truth. Science was a noble calling; the scientific method one of the greatest tools humanity has developed to unravel the nature of reality.
THEN POLITICS AND BIG BUSINESS GOT INVOLVED.
That marked the end of trustworthy science. Most scientists now depend on either politicians or corporatocracies for their funding, and they have to do their paymasters’ bidding. Which means they are encouraged to lie, obfuscate, or talk utter bullshit.
Unfortunately, this has produced a generation of scientists who mostly fall into the following 3 categories:
1) NUMPTIES (That’s you, Neil)
2) PSYCHOPATHS (The ones who spend their career developing such wonders as weaponised viruses to murder people)
3) CROOKS (The ones taking massive bribes from Big Pharma. One of the reasons we’re still locked down. These guys want their big vaccine jackpot and have GOT to stop us reaching herd immunity.)
The Science Swamp needs to be drained.
Woah…some of us are trying to do good science!
I don’t doubt it, PFD! My comment did say “mostly”.
I am incensed because I LOVE science, having been in my youth an avid amateur astronomer and amateur chemist, but not being mathematically literate enough to make science a profession.
So it breaks my heart when I see one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the scientific method, prostituted for commercial or political gain.
I wish we could go back to the impartial situation of the 18th and 19th century “gentleman scientist” – the guys (and sometimes gals) who made far-reaching discoveries in their spare time, while holding down a day job such as lawyer or clergyman.
Having said that, health blogger Phil Escott spoke of the recent emergence of the “citizen scientist” in creating healthcare breakthroughs – ordinary folk who are using the internet (PubMed and an online medical dictionary) to research, and find effective treatments for, their own chronic illness.
You did Gracie!
I have a lot of time for citizen science and public understanding of science. One of the tragedies of the lockdown is that there is a very significant portion of the population who are not thinking critically and evaluating data or information in any way. They are accepting the fodder they are fed!
I hope you still enjoy your astronomy and chemistry. If not….take them up again!
I’m still an “armchair” astronomer; maybe I should take up the practical side again – good telescopes are MUCH cheaper now.
Not so sure about the chemistry; I still remember with shame the time my young scientist self caused an explosion – which incorporated blue litmus powder – in my parents’ newly-redecorated kitchen!
I spoke to an IQ 125+ acquaintance today who thought the IFR of coronvirus was 6%
Intelligence is not necessarily an effective defence against the consequences of ignorance
I guess I have always associated intelligence with intellectual curiousity and lack of laziness when it came to considering important questions. Turns out I was wrong. Or my definition of intelligence needs to be expanded.
Absolutely spot on.
I sometimes get the feeling this is becoming like the Babylonian Captivity.
Sheesh, which pope shall we back?
i was thinking more of the first one where the people from Jerusalem were deported to Babylon. But in reply to your question, is “none of the above” an option?
I think it was probably the choice of most ordinary people at the time.
As for the first Captivity – I would sit down and weep by the waters, but I can’t because they’ve closed off the river path.
Agree. And you had to feel sorry for many of the cardinals at that time who were being pulled into different directions. I could imagine myself spoiling my ballot.
I can sit down and weep by mine but its disgusting. It would go like this: “By the polluted rivers of Babylon, I sat down and wept……”
We are going to leave to a biblical old age. Seriously. Lets take Switzerland. Population 8 million. In 8 weeks of lockdown we had less than 3000 dead “with” the virus. Since it seems nobody is dying of anything else, at least according to any mainstream media here, until all the current population dies of this virus it will take 5300 years. Wow, Matusalem had what, 900 years according to the Bible? We are easily going to beat that.
A quick spot of math shows that the UK with some 36000 dead will take 4000 years to have everybody die of this virus.Ok, 1300 years less than the Swiss, but still beating Matusalem hands down.
Why are we complaining then?
Oh yes, and the MSM keeps getting “reports” from experts in Swede that their approach was a “mistake”… of course, with no lockdown it will take the current Swedish population to die of this virus only 3300 years. The UK is beating the Swedes with an extra 700 years until death by virus of all the population. See, the MSM is right.
Here in Germany I carry a mask and I wear it on those occasions when a proprietor indicates by signage on their doors that they want their customers to do so. I have no fear of the virus, that’s just good manners, respecting their right to make such conditions.
While strolling on the street I never wear a mask but it has given me the opportunity to devise a very pointed cultural countermeasure, and this is assisted by the fact that it is spring and I get horrific hay fever at this time of year.
Every time I pass a mask-wearer going in the other direction I sniff loudly as they pass by.
It’s magnificent.
Nice being a lethal weapon!
I do this simply by virtue of existing in summer. I have vile hayfever.
It’s been fun over the past few weeks, I can tell you. (Mostly. The time I dragged off and temperature tested whilst giving blood wasn’t so fun).
Good to see the disdain alive and well in Germany. However, this mask rubbish. I cannot and will not accept it… Given supermarkets in Britain don’t require a mask to be worn, then I await with baited breath which shops will demand it on reopening. As I think that I will quite easily boycott any that do that.
That will soon put an end to it, if a lot of people have the same attitude
You have baited breath? Good for you. Hope a lot of zombies take the bait. Then you snap, and that’s another one caught and done for!
So the already glacial timetable for “easing” the lockdown is slipping.
“Non essential” shops, which were meant to be opening on the 1st, have been delayed to the 15th.
Until then we are expected to be oh-so-grateful that we can visit farmers markets, and window-shop at Volvo and Tesla dealers (other makes of car used to be available).
Well, since the only thing exponential about the lockdown is the growth of disastrous consequences (Hannan suggested it will take months longer for recovery for each extra day of lockdown), this is clearly rubbing salt into the wounds.
Ridiculous. Under German rules all of the areas of the country would be unlocking already. All of Europe unlocking rapidly. Virus disappearing here and everywhere. Still stuck at home. I’m never voting for these people again.
We have those opinion polls to blame I think. They are following the wishes of the population It is utterly ridiculous to wait three further weeks.
They manipulated the population into this mess. They have the means to manipulate us out but, as the fear is still being vociferously perpetuated by their MSM stooges, I suspect they’re in no rush – for some nefarious reason.
I have a friend who is heavily unionised, works for equity, will not go back to work as that involves getting the tube. Only option she has to get to work, allegedly. I’ve been visiting her in London for a decade and she’s always refused to get on the tube due her claustrophobia. I don’t live in London but I’d get on a tube tomorrow if it meant I could enjoy a heavily subsidesed public transport system.
So how did she get to work before?
Fuck knows, but what does it matter there’s a tory government to bring down.
Dominic Cummings quoted fro the “lockdown rules” relating to childcare. I’ve been hunting through the internet and gov sites but I can’t find what he was quoting from.Maybe I’m just being dim. Can someone help please?
The bit about exceptions for caring for vulnerable people.
But that specifically relates to vulnerable adults not children.”to provide care or assistance, including relevant personal care within the meaning of paragraph 7(3B) of Schedule 4 to the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act 2006(1), to a vulnerable person, or to provide emergency assistance;” The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020
I’ve no great wish to defend Cummings but very early on in the lockdown a female official at a briefing specifically said to the assembled press in response to a question posing startlingly similar circumstances to Cummings, that children were considered vulnerable people. She said where two parents were unable to care for a child because of Covid they had recourse to local authority assistance should no other family member be available. These were specific ‘exceptional circumstances’ cited.
I think he was bending his interpretation. The guidance was for children who were at risk of abuse.
Yes, this was yet another twist in an already-tortured ‘interpretation’ of the rules.
By the way, the 12th reason to add to Tom Walsh’s 11 reasons why covid won’t usher in socialism is that the current mob are already pretty much there (and Aceron and May too).
Why would anyone trust any of the people who thought it was acceptable to inflict lockdown and NHS-worship upon the nation, and who were too stupid or ignorant (or both) to recognise that the doomsday predictions being made in mid-March were literally incredible, to make any meaningful inroads on the socialism and big government that we labour under?
And yes, that includes Cummings, who people seem to think will somehow magically now transform from a lockdown buffoon into a great governor, because he apparently talks a good fight and was part of a team that won the Brexit vote.
At some stage, as a few commentators have pointed out, BoJo is going to have to tackle the issue that he wasn’t elected on a platform of big government and nanny statetism – Corbyn was soundly rejected (rightly or wrongly depending on personal politics). It will be interesting to see the way public opinion starts leaning once the ‘upset’/’shock’ of the virus starts to fade
As I tried to explain to djaustin in one of the other threads, we really have no idea of the doubling time of cases because the testing was all over the place. Here’s an article for him to read:
“…if you’re not accounting for testing patterns, it can throw your conclusions entirely out of whack. You don’t just run the risk of being a little bit wrong: Your analysis could be off by an order of magnitude. Or even worse, you might be led in the opposite direction of what is actually happening. A country where the case count is increasing because it’s doing more testing, for instance, might actually be getting its epidemic under control. Alternatively, in a country where the reported number of new cases is declining, the situation could actually be getting worse, either because its system is too overwhelmed to do adequate testing or because it’s ramping down on testing for PR reasons.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-case-counts-are-meaningless/
Today’s “confirmed cases” UK distribution map shows “high” density of cases in the Lake District area. given that population density is fairly low and visitors have been actively discouraged, why should lockdown have so little effect. Ant thoughts on other more relevant factors?
It simply be a more isolated area of England getting large scale exposure for the first time given the virus seems to have finished with other English cities, particularly London. I think something similar has been observed in North Wales.
I don’t have a reference to hand but I do recall reading that area of England has a particularly efficient public health/testing team which might also affect things!
Makes sense. More testing means more cases.
Maybe they have more than the average number of papayas there?
Interesting correlation.
I believe there is also a correlation between the number of Covid cases in an area and the number of auburn-haired single men with ingrowing toenails and buck teeth.
Post hoc correlations are bad science, aren’t they? I once saw a hilarious website which showed similar lines on a graph between all sorts of absurd phenomena. Anybody know it?
At this stage it’s probably better to look at hospitalisations than new case numbers.
Instead of getting angry about what Dominic Cummings did or didn’t do during lockdown…
– Let’s get angry that lockdown was ever allowed to happen in the first place.
– Let’s get angry about the fact that we are STILL in lockdown, and now into the start of week 10!
– Let’s get angry that SAGE used techniques of emotional and psychological manipulation, abusing their powers to ensure forced compliance.
– Let’s get angry that we are now entering a recession that has not been seen for 300 years and this was completely avoidable.
– Let’s get angry that millions of people willingly accepted lockdown like it was something that needed to be done, without any independent or critical thought.
– Let’s get angry about the REAL misinformation spreaders – the likes of the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian and the censorship undertaken by big tech.
– Let’s get angry that more people are losing their lives to suicide as a direct result of lockdown, than are allegedly dying with coronavirus.
– Let’s get angry that we, the public, will be paying for the mistakes of this government for many years to come. So will our children, and so will their children.
– Let’s get angry that lockdowns will force millions of developing world nations into extreme poverty, starvation and poorer healthcare.
– Let’s get angry that every Thursday people clap for an NHS that discharged sick, Covid-infected, elderly people back into care homes to die, and spread the disease among their co-habitants.
– Let’s get angry that the NHS suspended thousands of cancer screenings, cancer treatments, postponed two million operations, withheld dental treatment and allowed the public to be terrified of attending A&E for serious illnesses.
– Let’s be angry that children will have missed education for up to six months. Many will have been subjected to child abuse and domestic violence in their homes.
The Dominic Cummings story is not news. All of the above is. Yet none of our mainstream media is covering any of this.
Hear, hear!! Well said!!
They aren’t covering it because the Cummings story will keep distracting from it until he’s gone. It’s possible that they might eventually get bored and move on if he stubbornly stays in place, but that will take a lot longer than just sacking him would take.
Meanwhile people like Johnson and Toby are burning up political capital trying to defend what is in most people’s view, pretty much indefensible.
Do you think the old Guard will put their foot down, or was today the way it’s going to be. I’m glad Toby was less supportive today, but the Brexit stuff grinds my gears a bit, I really wish he’d stop making it about leave and remain, I don’t care, I do care about Cumming’s moral compass, and utter contempt for accountability.
Well said – I am sure that most of us here fully agree.
I am also incandescent that our politicians made all of this happen or with thos out of the loop let this all happen with almost zero resistance.
Well said. Anger has been my main emotion throughout this entire farce.
Spot on. Old Nic is a gift to the evil media, just when serious questions were beginning to be asked about the l.d.
RDawg – would you be ok if I copy and paste this on my facebook page please? ( I would credit you) I don’t post much on fb but flipping through the newsfeed there is so much hand wringing about people being out and about in the good weather, clapping for the NHS and other nonsense I want to scream. Your post articulates exactly how so many of us feel. It will probably be ignored by most (my other sceptic posts have) but I just don’t care any more, I just want to vent!
Of course, and don’t worry about crediting.
I just want life to go back to how it was in February. Don’t we all eh?
Thank you
Yes, the NHS (administratively speaking, and 12 members of my family have given their working lives to medicine) is clapped out – as is the idea that lockdown saves lives.
Seconded!!
“Lockdown” is on its way out. Too slowly, but it’s going. We should turn our attention to how best to resist the sinister and repulsive, unnatural, immoral “new normal” and “social distancing” (forever).
Well said. I would love to hear some practical and original ways of undermining lockdown and social distancing. The other day, I suggested complaining to Ofcom about the scare tactics used by the breakfast news teams who only ever read eulogies for the younger dead. However I’d be up for any inventive ideas that people can up with…..
Surely one way to tackle social distancing is to demand EVIDENCE for its effectiveness. Epidemiologist Dr Knut Wittkowski said there isn’t any.
It is certainly a way of delaying natural herd immunity; I rather suspect that’s the whole idea.
We’ll have to work on this. All I can come up with now is that it’s against nature. It’s hard to come up with an argument that would work if someone doesn’t already get the point. It’s a bit like trying to explain to someone who doesn’t see it why murder is wrong.
I can vaguely understand some vulnerable or potty people thinking they can distance forever, but I can’t see many teenagers or 20somethings accepting it. What makes my blood boil is parents who are prepared to put their children through it, even adult children.
I usually ask people how long they think it can last and no-one ever gives a figure in months or years, they just burble. Maybe that’s the point to push. There are many who think this will end soon, those are the people to work on. The semi-normal people who are just a bit lazy and go along with what the media say, not the complete loonies who probably could do this forever. I am hoping there are simply not enough of them to sustain this.
‘Social distancing’ is only guidance. The more people ignore it, the sooner it will go away.
Well that’s true up to a point, but only where it applies to individuals. Sadly a lot of very important businesses and institutions will need to modify their spaces and processes to accommodate it in order to be allowed to open – the shops that are open are already doing this, and other shops will have to do the same.
The same is true for schools, universities and offices which will be forced into being online/from home at least some of the time, and pay at least lip service to keeping people away from one another when they are on premises. There may be some people who will snitch and get them shut down if they are tempted to get back to “normal” on the sly.
And goodness only knows how bars, restaurants, pubs, cinemas, theatres, museums, galleries, any public or private space hired out, sports and leisure, concerts, festivals, office parties, weddings, funerals can ever possibly get licenses to operate legally while this insane idea hasn’t been forgotten.
The need to demonstrate the ability to enable/enforce “distancing” will be a condition of being allowed to operate, for as long as the Emergency Period lasts.
Most people only observe social distancing through politeness and/or the well-meaning idea that they are reducing others’ anxieties. Despite my strong lockdown scepticism, I fall into this camp. These are the type of people that need to be emboldened. If only there were a sign or symbol that could be worn – the exact opposite of a facemask – which says ‘you don’t need to be anxious around me’.
How about a t-shirt that says HUGS NOT MASKS ?
Our jailers allowed outside seating in bars to reopen 2 weeks ago. Very few have actually opened because they either don’t have outdoor seating areas, or they won’t even make enough to break even. I don’t blame businesses who have to abide by these lunatic regulations, but maybe a petition or threat of a boycott might encourage them to fight back against this insanity.
How can you boycott a business that isn’t open?
Yep, you’re right Julian.
Up to us to fix things then !
This!
I assume the idea behind the social distancing that if you cough or sneeze infected droplets, they will not get in the eyes, mouths or noses of other people as they are two far away. To me this raises numerous questions. Can droplets still be dangerous if they hit someone further than two metres from you? Are droplets less dangerous outdoors as they are dispersed? Does temperature affect how dangerous droplets are? Are droplets less dangerous if you sneeze close to an open window as the droplets will be dispersed outdoors? Are you still in danger if you only have brief exposure to droplets? If there is anyone here with scientific expertise, answers to my questions would be very much appreciated.
Am not a scientist but you have that many questions about it that I can feel that you are still fighting that fear virus. Nagging away at you.
Forget it, you’re not in danger. Put it out of your mind and get on with your life.
Start here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1257392347010215947.html
Basic conclusion is that most transmission is from prolonged close contact with people and in enclosed spaces. This is backed up by studies elsewhere and why the government message is that it’s relatively safe to be outside.
And why it was so mind-bogglingly stupid to lock people in their homes, along with other family members, for (initially) 23 1/2 hours a day.
Remember reading this at the start of the lunacy. Close contact for at least 15 minutes. As far as I know this advice hasn’t been retracted just quietly allowed to be forgotten.
Here’s the thing: if droplet transmission within a 6 foot distance is a serious spreader of viral illness…..
THEN……
WE SHOULD “SOCIAL DISTANCE” EVERY FLU SEASON!
24,500 UK flu deaths 2014
50,000+ UK flu deaths 2017-18
OK, I will allow that AT THE BEGINNING of this crisis the IFR of Covid was estimated at 3%.
However, we now know that for the healthy under 65s, the IFR of this bug is no worse than a nasty flu. This should mean that we use the same social distancing as any other flu season i.e. NONE!
I suspect that the REAL reason for this pantomime is to ensure that the potential staggering profits for the vaccine industry (and for those MPs and Govt “scientists” who are going to receive enormous backhanders for their collaboration) are not going to evaporate. So the plebs have to be INCONVENIENCED as much as possible and told they can’t have their “normal” life back until they’ve had their compulsory vaccination. And kept apart as much as possible to delay natural herd immunity.
Did anyone else read that numpty Oxford Prof’s angst-ridden comment the other day, that the pandemic might be over before they get to trial a vaccine? He WANTS the virus to keep going so his department can make money!
THIS IS WHAT SCIENCE HAS COME TO IN 2020. PROFITEERING AND POLITICS. Makes me sick to the depths of my soul.
Doesn’t that make you want to vomit your breakfast? Not a good start to the day.
Simply ignore it.
Oh and if you are in a shop with a maze of perspex erected by some do gooding jobsworth, then get ‘clumsy’ and keep bashing it. Often raises a smirk from those in the know
We as individuals can ignore it, sure, but as stated above many many organisations will need to modify their spaces and processes to accommodate this, and often that will render the experience/service provided vastly inferior to the point of being unpleasant or just not what you signed up for (e.g. online education vs on premises, working in an office but not being able to go near others for meetings, working from home more than you want) or economically unviable (pubs, clubs, restaurants etc, shops that simply cannot get enough footfall). This distancing stuff isn’t just about giving people more space when out and above, it’s going to screw up huge parts of millions of daily lives as long as this mad idea persists.
Also as above, up to us to fix it. Talking to shopkeepers, other customers, writing to their head offices, voting with our cash for those who only impose the bare minimum of nonsense, etc.
I’ve already told my boss if/when they want us back in the office, that I will not be wearing a mask.
Yes, all good points.
Good idea Ian, thanks.
Exactly Julian. The “new normal” is merely the next phase of the lockdown policy.
I did initially think that the Cummings story was a good thing for us lockdown sceptics given that it totally undermines the lockdown, but I’m now worrying that it’s going to provide a cover for what looks like an incredibly slow easing of restrictions. Shops were originally meant to open on the 1 June, now been moved to 15 June, why the delay? Where’s the ‘science’ to back up this delay? We haven’t been told in the media or at the press conferences that infections/deaths are increasing – we can see ourselves from the data that they’re actually decreasing. Is the government once again just pleasing the social media lockdownistas who want this to go on forever?
I think the effect of Cummings undermining the lockdown is still there – the mood in the country has definitely changed now. Those who would be empowered to ignore the lockdown now will still ignore it, and perhaps the delay in opening shops is to compensate for this undermining and make it look like the government is being ‘cautious’ even though it basically condoned one of the most important men in the country saying that lockdown is meaningless and unenforceable.
So in effect we’re being punished for going after Cummings. Could be…
Boris didn’t just ‘condone’ Cummings, he gave him the green light to mock anyone who complied with lockdown. That was for all manner of reasons from being physically stopped by the police, to just thinking the interpretation of the law meant they were running a risk of breaking it, with the obvious consequences for them and their families. Many suffered unnecessary distress from Mr Cummings’ lockdown strategy. The ‘Barnard Castle Defence’ was as incredulous as it was arrogant and insulting.
“I drove to Barnard Castle to test my eyesight”.
You can do that by standing 100m behind your car and reading the number plate, Dom.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m past caring. But bloody hell. How dumb do they think we are?
Pretty dumb. 2m.
He had already tested his eyes – he drove to the hospital to collect his wife and son. Why didn’t one of the journos probe that?
Incidentally, if he had any doubts about his eyesight, why was he driving?
Why are no (literally zero) mainstream journos – when quizzing the PM at the daily briefing – asking him about the second wave? Really drill down into that specific piece of fear mongering which was taken as gospel but has been shown to be complete and utter nonsense.
Did I hear that Doyle woman say we will be living like this long-term in this evenings ‘Sayings of the Dear Leader’? Don’t think that is going to gel with the scenes seen today. Round here, the teenagers are quite brazenly meeting up, and it looks as if groups of friends and households are starting to do the same thing. This started actually about two weeks ago so is a Dommo Cummings independent effect.. Also today noticed many private piston aircraft out and about, along with microlights and gliders!
Yes, I noticed a lot of light aircraft out today for the first time in months.
I noticed that also. Not seen them in ages.
We’ve had one or two a day since March. This afternoon we even had some dude doing acrobatics.
Maybe we should call him Domino Cummings, and coin the Domino Cummings effect?
He’d probably be better suited to delivering pizzas …
Haha, that’d be the worst customer service in the world!
Have you seen this?!!
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/05/25/booforboris-british-left-organises-anti-johnson-two-minutes-hate/
Straight out of Orwell with no self-reflection at all!
So get rid of Johnson and the rest of the lockdown Guilty Men and then those of us who might be willing to oppose that kind of thing can get behind a new government to start to clean up the mess this one made.
Happy to boo against the lockdown. Not sure I want to be booing on the same side as Owen Jones!
If the Guilty Men are still the government I’ll boo next to anyone who’s booing them.
A real price needs to be paid. They can’t get to “move on” because people want to protect their allies and mates.
This’ll make you laugh, Jones has really really angered the women’s sector over his stance on trans issues (violently misogynist, basically), they call him Talcum X. Makes me chuckle every time.
Excellent!
What. The. Fuck. Never join in with these lockdownista bastards. I can assure you that this is what they are and this their agenda. They are NOT booing against the lockdown make no mistake about that.
If I see or hear any of this tomorrow near me than there will be violence
Join the queue ianp……
Not a sound in my neighbourhood at 8pm – but they don’t clap on Thursdays either!
There is now, clearly a much bigger agenda at play. Opening of shops pushed back despite no evidence to support it, no evidence to suggest teachers are more ar risk than bus drivers but they’re allowed as long off as they like. There’s something much bigger going on here there has to be because even the most dim witted can now see lockdown is redundant.
Alas, there is a difference between ‘dim-witted’ and ‘totally witless’. The zombies all fall into the latter category, and they are, alas again, the majority.
The fear of a second wave is clearly driving the decision making. I’m sensing that the idea was to try and get the infection levels as low as possible. Which would explain why some SAGE members were particularly angry with Cummings effectively Kiboshing the lockdown efforts.
It’s not about the dimwitted so much as the MSM-brainwashed.
Dear djaustin,
The indictment of the British government regarding its response to the ‘Covid 19 pandemic’ is as follows:
‘However, 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.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931
The indictment of the German government is as follows:
‘in this, the biggest crisis the Federal Republic of Germany has ever faced, the state has possibly been the biggest producer of fake news’
‘Including all deaths of people who were infected among the Corona deaths led (and continues to lead) to a distortion of the perception of the mortality and prevents, among other things, the consequences of the collateral damage being recognised as such.” For example: someone with an infection dies of coronary disease because their planned heart operation cannot take place (i.e. the hospital has postponed the operation due to Corona pressure). This person is not classified as dying from the (collateral) effects of the measures, but as dying from Covid-19.
That is, there is falsification and manipulation of the figures. The persistent problems were acknowledged by the Robert-Koch Institute as early as the beginning of March 2020. A comparison of deaths from the virus and deaths from the counter-measures is prevented.’
http://www.klasseverantwortung.de/english/Corona.html
There is a lot of anger in this country, amplified by the fact that two of the main architects of lockdown in Britain ignored restrictions on their personal liberty, since they clearly knew the health risk, in fact, to be minimal; de haut en bas.
If you have an answer to this indictment, then let us hear it…..but you do not, cannot, since the official records of mortality will not withstand scrutiny:
‘In an emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic there is a relaxation of previous legislation concerning completion of the medical certificate cause of death (MCCD) by medical practitioners’
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/877302/guidance-for-doctors-completing-medical-certificates-of-cause-of-death-covid-19.pdf
The Covid 19 pandemic? Nonsense on stilts.
Good to see that car showrooms can reopen from 1st June, along with outdoor markets.
My wife was looking to replace her old smog monster before recent events, what she tends to do is buy a new car and drive it until it become uneconomical with repairs, generally 10 to 15 years.
Unfortunately as my wife was made redundant a few weeks ago, we will not be visiting car showrooms any time soon, I suspect many other sensible people will be cautious about such a large purchase when the economic climate can change so quickly.
But, but, but – we are taking an equity stake in car manufacturers – we need somewhere to sell them!
The way things are going the govt will likely end up owning everything – add state controlled centralised production and a 5 year plan for manufacturing and agriculture and we will be ‘Back in the USSR’.
Don’t forget the universal basic income. Who needs a private sector at all if you are a big government nanny stater like Boris and the crew?
I see Jaguar Landrover are negotiating for a £1b load from the government.
A heavy load indeed. For the taxpayer.
I am the taxpayer.
Not to mention that due to all the stupid “safety” measures, shopping for anything has become such a chore that a lot of people wiil only do food and household shopping.
Excellent comment under the Brendan O’Neill article that Toby linked above:
“To anyone who backs the lockdown and dares claim those who break it (although we’ve been told we CAN go sit in the sun as long as we now please, following social distancing), YOU are killing people aswell, don’t think this lockdown isn’t, it’s saving one group and damming the other to death by suicide, cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and many, many other serious health conditions, right the way through to chronic pain conditions.
Anyone who believes this lockdown is justified, do me a favour, go get a hair or elastic band and wrap it round the end of your finger, see how long you can cope with dull throbbing pain that comes from it, see how long you last before you rip the band off…trust me you won’t last long…then have a sit and good think about people with conditions that cause immense pain and discomfort, as all the above I mentioned do, have a think about those people and where their mental is it at now theyve been abandoned by the NHS until who knows when. Have a think about people with bipolar, schizophrenia, major clinical depression, post natal depression, personality disorders, severe anxiety, OCD, germophobia, who too have been abandoned by the NHS.
No matter what course of action we take people ARE going to die, there’s no if, but, or what about, about it. Those who whole heartedly believe in lockdown need to THINK for themselves who they wish to save the lives of, those vulnerable to a virus mother nature has delivered us, that overwhelmingly targets the elderly (as sad as it is), vs a manmade choice of lockdown in reaction the virus that’s predicted to kill at minimum 150,000 people of ALL ages including children. If 50,000 children die due to lockdown vs 40,000 people, the majority of whom are elderly, who die with or from Covid 19, is what we are doing ethically and morally right? To me it’s utterly disgraceful that we’ve thrown and unknown number of children and young adults to the wolves, to save the elderly from virus non of us asked for, non us wanted, non of us thought we’d have to deal with.
As sad as it is that elderly people are dying, it’s not right that were protecting them at the cost of children and young adults. Especially when younger people have a far better chance of a full recovery from everything from covid 19 to cancer, therefore are far more likely to have a decent quality of life. The elderly people we are “saving” have how many years of quality of life left?
The real covidiots are the people blindly following this lockdown and championing it, without any thought for the consequences of such measures, especially when it comes to saving lives. The government report i to deaths caused by lockdown claimed 150,000 people will die because of the lockdown, the thing thats u clear is if the time frame, is that per month of lockdown? Is it for 6 months of lockdown? If its the former its safe to say without doubt we’ve done the wrong thing it means roughly 450,000 people have lost their lives either now or in the mid future because of this, thats against roughly 40,000 deaths due to covid…how many of those people who’ve lost their lives to or with Covid were over 75? How many of those 450,000 are under 30?
Time folk started to question EVERYTHING.”
I strongly suspect that those most ardently promoting the lockdown are less worried about other people dying from it, than they are terrified that they’ll catch it and die.
I did think of that. I have a colleague who mentioned that she was afraid to go back to work because of the possibility of infection. Which is odd as we’re exposed to so many things all day every day in our lives.
However I agree with Lord Sumption when he said that the lockdown should be optional – those who are vulnerable or feel vulnerable can self-isolate but the rest of us should be allowed to get on with our lives.
I think that’s true for some. I’m amazed at how ignorant the allegedly intelligent are regarding the risk. I am a hypochondriac and really don’t want do die, and I checked the stats on the risk for me very carefully. Others who are younger and heathier than me who are more likely to die in a car accident simply have no idea how small the risk is.
The sad thing is they have no interest in finding out.
Lockdown Lunacy:
My local tennis club, whose four courts are ‘owned’ by the local town council have imposed a series of conditions so that play can ‘resume’ on the outdoor courts. Here are some of the conditions.
You have to initial your tennis balls
Members of the public can’t play because town council staff are working from home
Only one of the four courts can be used
The clubhouse can’t be used at all
Singles play allowed only, no doubles.
I have replied to the chairman of the club to see if we can have a whip round and buy the courts from the town council.
“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”
Ronald Reagan.
Is there another local (private) club you can join? Our club re-opened as soon as it was allowed, and other than singles-only and no group lessons, it’s business as usual. Those who want to do the whole thing with not sharing balls etc can – some do, some don’t.
Don’t tennis players ever wash their hands?
The problem with watching the Cummings press conference was that I had to spend an hour witnessing the mainstream media and politicians in action, rather than staying in my lockdown sceptical bubble. It made me all too aware that we are a tiny minority, and the rest of the UK is no more sceptical than they were at the start of the lockdown. We really are doomed.
I think we’re a vocal minority, but as Brendan O’Neill said in his article, more people are breaking the lockdown than we think – they’re just not as shouty about it as we are.
Lots of people in my town breaking it openly, lots of people I have spoken to doing it surreptitiously (though some of those still support the lockdown, but think it doesn’t apply to them)
I think a lot of people like the extra cash in their pocket of lockdown and don’t want that to end, massively reduced outgoings, more disposable income, nice little DIY projects. In fact the most satisfied and financially better off from lockdown are public sector workers, after years of pay freezes, I can understand (but don’t approve) why they might string it out a little longer.
Indeed. And those genuinely fearful, some with some reason, some not.
And a substantial number who can work from home, whose jobs are not at risk (or so they think) and who lazily accept all this was necessary to save lives. I know – I have talked to quite a few.
They are not all “extremists” (at least not by a modern definition) – they would class themselves as moderates. Their worldview is influenced directly or indirectly by what seems to be mad stuff that you see in the usual “progressive” news media, but it’s not that extreme.
But the default position of the young and middle aged metropolitan middle classes is, by the standards of my boyhood, “left wing” and they simply either consciously or subconsciously don’t think or voice any view that might cause a sharp intake of breath from someone in the circle.
In Spain Muzzles are compulsory outdoors, only, if distancing is imposible. We were walking along a seafront promenade with wide pavements that made dodging the muzzled zombies relatively easy. A Young zombie couple passed by tut tutting and hoping that the pólice caught us. My wife said to me that they were only angry because they were too scared or brainwashed to follow our lead. In short,they hate this inhuman bollocks being inflicted on us as well. A lot of the venom they display to people prepared to think for themselves is because seeing unmuzzled people without fear touches something deep inside them. An interesting observation but on the other hand, they could just simply be wankers.
Oh even better – HUGS NOT MUZZLES
That sort of negativity is the universe punishing you for watching politics on the television !
If you watch these things on catchup, you can double the playback speed.
Here’s a story that might be relevant. An allegory or something. In 1968 I went to a traditional grammar school. The uniform was just as you would expect, and included a red cap with green piping. All the boys hated the caps. We used to take them off and stuff them in our pockets when we walked through the town from the school to the bus station. Any boy wearing a cap was likely to be shouted at and called a red-top matchstick, or have his cap stolen, by the boys from the other schools. Every now and then one of the masters would give a little talk in assembly about how important it was to wear our caps because we were representing the school as we walked through town. It never worked. Eventually the headmaster stood up in assembly and said that although the caps were an integral part of the school uniform, and wearing them was essential, and of course we needed to remember that we were representing the school (which was not founded yesterday, as we were reminded, but in 1466), he had decided that the wearing of caps was now voluntary. Six hundred caps were thrown away, and nothing disastrous happened.
“But given the weight of later evidence, strongly implying that that Ferguson’s doomsday predictions were exaggerated, not to have immediately eased the lockdown is unforgivable.”
I’m on this website and have been for the last fortnight or so because I am a lockdown sceptic.
However, having been told at the weekend about the death last week of a friend, who died in hospital from CV19, it’s harder not to have some sympathy with Boris and Cummings who have both been a lot closer to this disease than most of us here.
The news was shocking, and troubling. The virus was not something that just affects people you don’t know.
Having said that, Boris and Cummings need to take a long, hard look at the data for themselves, and not rely on apocalyptic predictions from scientists with possible agendas of their own. The data says that lockdown doesn’t work, or especially affect death rates.
It’s worth taking watching Tony Heller’s video on the subject, “Guilty – Of Breathing”
https://m.youtube.com/watchv=4sjnq4ytum4
This link probably won’t work. I suspect a subtle form of censorship, as the video is still available, but copying the link doesn’t work. I suggest looking it up on YouTube yourself.
So, what about considering the deaths of people with cancer (etc) that are going to result (not to mentions the enormous numbers of deferred elective surgery ops and dentistry that will be causing untold pain already)? Most of us will know someone who has died of that and many will have relatives who have done so (my Mother for one). There will certainly be many excess deaths from this due to late diagnosis and deferred treatments. Anyone with an ounce of empathy can see that such deaths are at least as troubling as covid-linked deaths.
One cannot just consider one disease or problem in isolation, even if our ‘Masters’ have, unforgivably, done so!
Sorry about your friend. I don’t think any sceptics doubt that it is a nasty virus, just that the response to the virus is disproportionate to the rational threat. I was discussing earlier, I had, three years on the bounce, three bouts of dreadful flu. I honestly thought, the first time I was dying. I don’t think I have ever felt so ill. Each required a month off work, and took me weeks and weeks to recover from the post viral debility. The GP at the time told me ‘if you are not considering calling an ambulance because you fear the end is nigh, it’s not the flu’ – people bandy around a sniffle as the flu, when the flu is really very serious, can be deadly (friend of the family died two years ago at the age of 40 from the flu) and in fact is deadly to children and the elderly every year.
If you look at the evidence, the most effective things we could do is wash our hands, and stay at home with symptoms, and sensible social distancing for the elderly and vulnerable. Like you I don’t think that warrants a lockdown, and in fact delays herd immunity which would protect us all in the fastest way, if enough healthy people ‘take one for the team’ the sooner this stops being a threat, imho.
Love the new website Toby, Much easier to work with. Thanks.
But please, PLEASE get rid of that maddening little orange blob. It reminds me of something .. ah yes … a virus.
That’s unfair. I think Dominic Cummings is an evil sociopath, I don’t support Brexit, never have, I have had more sane, civil and nuanced discussions in these comments than anywhere else, even when we REALLY disagree, which we do often.
Toby’s piece on Cummings today was much more nuanced than previously. Totally agree with his point the virtue signalling thought pólice are using this to attack anyone who doesn’t strictly follow their absurd rules. Remember how hypocrites like Owen Jones were falling over themselves to defend numpty Neil Ferguson.
Djaustin is surely correct when he/she implies that we should have been frightened that back in March the cases and deaths were doubling every few days. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out where a month of that puts you, and thus the pressure on government ‘to do something’.
For my part, I could just about – at a stretch – go along to the point where that Friday afternoon, 20 March, the government announced the closure of pubs, gyms, and so on. They had a case is saying that this is a new virus, which we don’t know much about, and we need to be cautious until we learn more about it – which we intend to very shortly.
But as soon as I heard about the actual lockdown my gut reaction was that it was wrong. And when the police started putting up roadblocks around here I wanted to throw up.
In my view, anyone supporting a lockdown has to be clear on what it is supposed to achieve, and how. And when, and under what conditions, do they envisage it being lifted.
I can’t think of any way of answering those questions without, in combination, the muddle-headed thinking behind this lockdown, and the way it was implemented, being revealed.
Of course, I welcome someone like Djaustin commenting on this site – contrary views are important.
But as for their statement that ‘the science is clear’ that the lockdown had ‘some impact, both on peak and rate of decline’ – he/she needs to show their workings, and, for example, suggest a mechanism to explain what has happened in Germany, and how this has given them ‘more options on the way down’. Without these explanations, these statements are merely conjecture – and the burden of proof is on those supporting the lockdown.
Full marks to him/her coming on this site though. When all this is done it will become clear that none of us was completely right.
“Djaustin is surely correct when he/she implies that we should have been frightened that back in March the cases and deaths were doubling every few days. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out where a month of that puts you, and thus the pressure on government ‘to do something’. “
No he’s wrong, both on the suggestion that cases were doubling (which they weren’t on any sustained basis, anywhere, as Michael Levitt has pointed out – see responses below), and on the idea that early expansion could or should be extrapolated to huge numbers anyway.
What’s more, the government had access to this information if they had chosen to listen to it.
There is no excuse for the panic decision this government made to go to lockdown. That shouldn’t be surprising – after all it was a decision made in panic. Why would you expect it to be rational?
I had performed the same analysis weeks before Michael Levitt. On almost every country, cases and deaths were doubling every three days. The U.K. was an outlier with deaths doubling every two days. I took all global data to construct growth charts to see where the U.K. sat. You asked for my workings. Figure 1 shows the situation in the U.K. at lockdown. Exponential growth is self-evident.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.09.20059402v1
Now look at the half-life on the way down. Sweden is an outlier because the half-life is much longer than the U.K. which is longer than Italy, which is longer than Spain.
DJ Austin, thank you for the link to your preprint. I’ll read it in detail tomorrow. I notice for your UK fatality data you are looking at just the first 10 or so days. Here the daily death rate is very noisy as one would expect from the low counts. It makes it difficult to determine with any degree of precision the trajectory of the epidemic and certainly from the NHS England data it isn’t at all clear until 15 ton20 days. But I’ll read with interest tomorrow.
All global data?
‘From Jan 15 to March 3, 2020, seven versions of the case definition for COVID-19 were issued by the National Health Commission in China.’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30089-X/fulltext
‘On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88% patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three.”
Professor Walter Ricciardi, Scientific Adviser to Italy’s Minister of Health
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
‘In an emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic there is a relaxation of previous legislation concerning completion of the medical certificate cause of death (MCCD) by medical practitioners’
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/877302/guidance-for-doctors-completing-medical-certificates-of-cause-of-death-covid-19.pdf
Listen to this and tell me the data from England is worth more than a row of beans:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1013854/3675205-episode-4-dr-john-lee-part-1?client_source=twitter_card&player_type=full_screen
Germany:
‘That is, there is falsification and manipulation of the figures. The persistent problems were acknowledged by the Robert-Koch Institute as early as the beginning of March 2020. A comparison of deaths from the virus and deaths from the counter-measures is prevented.’
http://www.klasseverantwortung.de/english/Corona.html
New York:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5f_6ltv7oI
Global data? Pure bunkum from start to finish.
The truth is often simple: Is Sweden moving towards its neighbours policies, or vice versa?
Thanks Dj if I may!).
I’ll take a look at your paper in more detail later. I have a basic background in maths, but on first glance I fear your calculations may lose me.
Just looking quickly at the abstract:
‘Conventional epidemiological models require estimates of important parameters including incubation time and case fatality rate that may be unavailable in the early stage of an epidemic’: Yes, clearly true, leaving policy makers operating in a fog – hence my reply to Mark nearby.
‘For the ongoing SARS-COV-2 epidemic, with no previous population exposure …’ : Since the start I’ve wondered whether some people, or ethnic groupings, may indeed have had some similar exposure which has given some immunity. That now looks to be the case?
‘For the UK and elsewhere, prediction of peak and eventual time to resolution is now possible’: I see your paper is dated 9 April – pretty well bang on UK peak deaths, although we didn’t know that then.
As I’ve said, I’m anti-lockdown, have been from the start, and have a gut feel that even in the narrow terms of CV it may have made things worse.
But I’m sorry to see you’ve been down-voted. It takes a certain amount of courage to post on a forum in which nearly everyone disagrees with you, often vehemently. Yet without contrarians any forum risks becoming whacky, or at the very least uninformative.
Hear hear about the down vote. If people are afraid to air diverse views on this site, we might as well pack up.
That doesn’t ean that I want zombies posting we’re-all-going-to-die-so-kiss-the-NHS’s-arse. But reasoned debate, yes.
My personal rule on voting is that I only vote up. If I don’t agree with something I’ll just ignore it. I never vote down.
I do recall the cases and deaths more or less doubling every three to four days, albeit then from low numbers. Back then people around me were still playing the thing down, and I pointed out to them where a month of doubling gets you. I remember saying that were I the Prime Minister I would want to someone to give me a plausible explanation of when and why that trend would halt, or otherwise I would be forced to act, and dramatically – especially as any action taken would take two or three weeks to take effect, by which time the number of cases and deaths would have risen perhaps 50 or 100 fold.
I think we have to be fair to the government on this.
Back then there really wasn’t that much data; certainly any hint of downward trends couldn’t be extrapolated confidently for another fortnight or so. As PFD points out below, what data there was was noisy, as one might expect at that point. We know now how it turned out, but policy makers didn’t have the benefit of afterknowledge.
There was China – figures which weren’t necessarily trustworthy – and Italy, which looked horrific. The Wuhan figures couldn’t be completely wrong, however, and gave much encouragement that CV wouldn’t be actually disastrous in the UK (compared with flu, for example), especially as we probably have better healthcare. But the view from Italy changed things. Perhaps the Chinese had some immunity which we in Europe didn’t have, which might explain Italy, and point to just how bad things would get here? That’s what I was thinking then.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m anti-lockdown and have been since Day 1, and said so. I thought the measures in place by 20 March would have been sufficient, or at the very least would have bought time. Actual lockdown was an assault on the population, and don’t get me going on the police …
Even given the lockdown, there is no reason why by mid-April, at the latest, the measures could not have been relaxed dramatically. The evidence was there – the NHS hadn’t been swamped, and it was clear who was vulnerable and had to be protected, and who was at very low risk.
I’m not saying any of this to defend the government – I think they’ve been shockingly bad, beyond that even. I just think we need to be forensic and very focussed on what criticisms are levelled at them. And if we do that the case against them becomes even more damning than first appears.
Maybe not, but there is already sufficient evidence to say that some of us have been, and continue to be, completely wrong!
Yes, I was going to write that! A lot of the usual suspects have been diametrically and completely wrong throughout this. And they don’t learn.
Whereabouts were the roadblocks please, TJN ? Worth remembering which chief constables are mindless loons, and which showed a slightly more mature perspective.
Deepest Devon. It’s been the same throughout Devon and Cornwall. The TJN family were even questioned by an armed response unit when out near their house. I kid not: guns and tazers, and doing coronavirus duties.
To tell the truth, if you know the roads it was straightforward to avoid them. I was stopped a couple of times, and just refused to tell them why I was out, and they had to let me go after a few minutes of arguing. They did, however, succeed in intimidating a lot of people into not going out.
Shame on them, as anyone with half a brain knows that sunshine and fresh air are powerful boosts against viral respiratory illnesses.
Thanks TJN. Your local populations do seem to have had an extra dose of “You’re not from round here, are you ?”.
Sussex was fairly relaxed – I was read my rights once, after the poor chap had had enough of listening to me educating him. (20/25 minutes).
“Do you understand the caution ?”
“Not really, the appalling syntax makes it difficult to grasp on the first hearing.”
“Mmm, I didn’t write it.”
“You surprise me.”
I was quite looking forward to a FPN, which I was going to refuse to pay, and be able to educate some magistrate too. Sadly, never received anything.
Lovely BBQ with the neighbours today. Lots of chatting, smiling, kids laughing and playing. I can’t tell you at what distance we say from each other… it wasn’t discussed. We ate, drank and enjoyed the sunshine and fresh air. Ages ranged between 1 and 85. A good time was had by all.
Good for you. Nice to see groups of youngsters out together on our walk tonight.
This has to be one of the most shameless pieces of political propaganda ever made by a national broadcaster STV). These media whores are using children to get their message across.
https://youtu.be/4rtoJpnbxWg
Nothing more than child abuse. I pity those poor children when they get back to school.
Boris appears to be doing everything he can to wreck our economy and our spirits. I am starting to wonder if this is so that he can use the crippled state of the UK to reverse Brexit, with the excuse that we cannot now go it alone.
Any other explanations on offer?
He is having a nervous breakdown.
With the idea that misery loves company, perhaps?
Think there is something in that.
If so then our only hope is another Euro crisis
He’s a lightweight? I thought he was OK, but this situation required cojones. Not sure who would have done better.
Err, global police state, cashless society, restricted travel, mandatory vaccination & tracking. nwo for short.
I note comments from other countries along the lines of ‘inexplicable prolongation of this nonsense’, which suggests we are not alone.
Most countries seem to be coming out of their lockdowns well ahead of us.
Thanks, I’ll take your word for that, Ian.
He has fallen for the Britain-hating propaganda of the Guardian and BBC which claims that we were late to impose lockdown. He has decided that his only hope of salvation is therefore extreme extension of the lockdown. He thinks that because the whole world has f***ed its economies, that aspect of it won’t go against him.
Or, mass unemployment coincides with stripping of workers rights and deregulation as we crash out, which worker faced with no work or a crappy job in crap conditions is going to say no?
Wholeheartedly agree with the email regarding not sending their child back to reception under these ridiculous measures in schools. I am of the exact same opinion and its reassuring I’m not the only one. Schools will be pure misery for teachers and children under these measures. The images of seeing schools operate post covid breaks my heart. How long will this be for? The govt never seem to offer any forecasts on this.
It shouldn’t be happening at all, and is being designed by the teaching unions to make parents think twice about sending their little ones back to school. Shame on them. Professor Graham Medley, the government’s chief pandemic modeller, is on the record recently as saying the teachers are more likely to catch it from their co-workers in the staff room than from the children. Most studies (there was a major meta study of all country data) implies even if children catch the virus, they are around half as likely to pass it on as adults, and they are rarely, if ever, very ill with the virus.
Open question to you all:
How do you look after your mental health during the current crisis? I am so frustrated and angry about the reality of what is going on, but most of this comes from the inability to be able to do anything about it.
– I’ve twice written to my MP and had a 30 minute conversation with her on the phone.
– I’ve set up a campaign site on Twitter.
– I’ve challenged all of my friends (sadly fallen out with many) about the lies and false science around lockdown.
– I’m looking at selling t-shirts online with anti social distancing messages
What else can I/we realistically do? It eats me up every day.
Yes, being stressed can be good if one can do something in response; otherwise it just turns to being distressed. All our todays!
I don’t think I’ve lost any more friends as I probably lost most of them over Brexit.
I’m doing the same things you are – try to persuade those who seem most open to persusasion, sow seeds of doubt.
I’m trying to enjoy life, and be there for my kids.
My Mrs and I are very much in agreement on this – that helps.
I get pissed a couple of times a week which seems to help
Scissors for taped off things.
Big felt pens for ‘correcting’ posters
Sticky labels showing this site and off guardian URLs
And obviously, chat to people when out and about.
Exercise. Lots of exercise.
Glaring at and walking straight at people with masks on
Alcohol? I’m kidding, I hear you, I’m out in the country, and I have animals – hens, cats, dogs, horses, land, and a garden, I find being outside, particularly in nature, and particularly with animals who a) give no shits about a lockdown and b) don’t know how to lie is the only time I feel OK on the inside. Also with all this morbid obsession with death, life just keeps on trucking, we have lots of swallows suddenly arrived, and the sparrows, despite their cuteness, seem to be a state of constant war, they are violent little buggers! I’ve planted bee bombs, done some violent strimming of nettles, creosoted all the wood, cleaned out the barn etc. I’m lucky in that ‘at home’ doesn’t mean ‘in the house’.
Have you got anyone close to you you can chat with? I’m in a three way online chat with two trusted friends, where we can take the piss, cry, have a bad day, that kind of thing. It’s important (sorry to sound touchy feely) to have some support from someone who knows you and knows your integrity is intact (I find the constant implications that I am not acting with integrity in all this, really hard to take, I have many faults, lack of integrity is not one of them!).
I’m also reading a lot, I’m not a big non fiction reader, but I’m currently reading ‘The Blunders of our Governments’ and (I have two on the go) Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘Who Dares Wins’ which is the (very entertaining, 900 page) history of Thatcher from 79 to 82. I’ve never voted Tory, I voted remain, and had just reflexively hated her, and I’ve decided it’s time I grew up politically, so I’m going to actually read what happened, and make up my own mind. The cock ups of our governments (there’ve been some real clangers) gives me hope that this will eventually be contexualised, and will also be HISTORY at some point. Thatcher, made me realise that things are more complicated and nuanced than I thought. It’s doing me good, as whatever you might think about certain policy decisions, they weren’t just panto villians, there were really skilled civil servants, and some very skilled policy implementations etc, and complex negotiations and as much power driving and slipperiness on the other side.
I think what makes me despair a bit is I’ve inadvertently caught some of the current mood, you know the self hatred, that Britain is just a toilet, and we’re failing, and everything is awful, and all politicians are lying scumbags. I think that’s the virus actually. What we need more of is intelligence, and nuance and give and take, and civility and respect for our opponents, and actually respect for our institutions.
Sorry long winded way of saying, I’m sick of the baying, polarised, rude, shouty way this lockdown is being conducted, much as both sides of Brexit nearly sent me mad, and when it’s over I want to be one of the grown ups, that puts us back together again. So I’m shooting for civility and intelligence as my sanity.
The mental health question is interesting because for many people this period of a completely changed society is the first time in their life when they have to struggle with issues of mental health, I must admit I wake up most mornings thinking how the ongoing nightmare is causing me to feel depressed. it must be much worse for the isolated , those who haven’t got the zoom app , those who perhaps join their mates for a pint at Wetherspoons.
Absolutely. So many times I keep thinking I will wake up and it was just one really vivid, bad dream!
Same here. That nightmare of being glued to the ground and unable to run.
Make a brief study of Zen Buddhism and apply the ideas that suit to your life. Carry on using your anger creatively, as you obviously are. Giving up is not an option, be gentle with yourself.
I spare you 30 blows.
I have seen my mental and physical health deteriorate during the last 9 weeks, along with a succumbing more to my vices. It is not very nice to be in this situation, watching myself getting worse and worse. Additionally work is crazy, not full on social distancing yet luckily ( customer facing role) though busy as anything with tensions starting to show. Stress doesn’t help me one bit.. I have however been in this state before, and did come through it alright, bit scarred but functional!
Many of my friends(?) are lockdown advocates in speech by not action, those that I have met (I am not so keen on phone calls, so many conversational cues from actions) aren’t seemingly willing to listen to an opposing view to theirs / the government’s / the media’s. For instance tonight I went round to my pals (one pregnant, her fiance, and a long time friend along too) for a BBQ at their house, but when I voice my opinion on the matter it ends with them completely disregarding it and saying I need a tin foil hat, also get told off for saying goodbye cheerfully but accidentally loud, could alert the neighbours.. I’m not a happy bunny about the evening. There are seldom few situations where I can fully relax just now, and having a long conversation untinged by everything going on is rare. I really enjoyed this part of life, conversing about everything and the kitchen sink but with no real seriousness, it helped a lot in retaining sanity.
Leading on from this, I have found that spending a day out with my oldest friend riding in the loam (like powder skiing for mountain bikes, ’tis amazing) avoiding talking about current affairs helps a lot. My mate is good enough to drive 50 miles to me then another 10 to a secluded spot with sneaky parking, even though I would place him as supporting the measures we see. Took a bit to plant the seed in his mind, many times we spoke on the phone I would ask the question if he wanted to go out, but eventually he suggested it. Someone might surprise you! Also talking to those I normally wouldn’t, ‘the’ ex for instance, as she is at least willing to do similar, have a chat with minimal current affairs, helped admittedly by not having seen each other for time.
I for one have been obsessing over lockdown, and like you feel unable to do anything. Trying every bit of dissent I can within my own moral framework, capabilities and living situation. Getting more ballsy, adrenaline is a hell of a drug..!
Maybe design a car sticker for lockdownsceptics.org, and sell that or make it freely downloadable? They might start popping up all over the place.
Makes your car a target for the coronaphobic death cult lockdownistas… no thanks!
Much better to target public areas closed off to the public by tearing them down or placing other messages over the top
All this recent kerfuffle with Mr. Cummings has led me to watching ‘Brexit The Uncivil War’ which interestingly/coincidentally appeared on Netflix a couple of weeks ago.. just as Boris delivered his subliminal headfuck control the virus message.
For any of you who haven’t seen it, it’s well worth a watch as the similarities between what went on then and what’s going on now are strikingly similar in terms of how two totally different sides went head to head against each other. Quite eerie really. Some real clues about what’s potentially happening now.
I know it’s a dramatisation so who really knows the whole truth of what went on, feels like a long time ago now. But very believable.
Watch it. You’ll see what I mean. Cracking film as well.
My take from it makes me question whose side Cummings (and thereby Boris) is on right now – I do think he’s on ours, as make no mistake this is all one big fucked up political dance on a worldwide scale
You think Dominic Cummings and the PM are on “our” side? Maybe I’ve misunderstood.
No politician in the world appears to be on our side do they? But in terms of looking at the alternatives, who would you rather have from the current political spectrum? Domestically, not a chance for smarmy Starmer (all called for a harder lockdown did they not?), then take a peek at some other countries – say Merkel in Germany … ah the Germans, have opened up etc… but cardinal sin : compulsory masks. Yes other European countries are opening up, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence whatsoever that the US and UK seem to be the last ones to do so from the West.
I can’t quite work it out, but having had almost total media blackout control for a couple of months to be all of a sudden ‘slipping up’ right now, and especially with Boris defending Cummings, it all just kind of feels deliberate to me.
One thing I am sure on , is that we are all being played in some way.
Oh I certainly don’t think the opposition (if you could call them that) would be better. Worse, in my view, for sure.
Piers Corbyn?
Some mentioned David Davis earlier.
No-one voted against the Coronavirus Act, but I think Davis and others pushed for more time limitation.
What politicians from yesteryear would have done better?
Probably Maggie.
Maggie was so ruthless she’d probably have nailed us all into our homes.
Impossible question in my opinion, as I think ‘old politics’ has gone out of the window. That’s actually something that struck me when watching the Brexit film. Some real scary shit all about the use of big data and analytics. Do not underestimate it
Labour would most certainly have been worse.
We have Labour in Wales.
Until recently it was a crime – yes, a crime – to go out of your house more than once a day.
You are not allowed to drive ANY distance in order to exercise.
If you drive anywhere, for any purpose whatever, you must take the shortest route and return immediately by the same route.
Footpaths are closed by law.
There are road blocks on every road across the border.
I have become a hardened criminal with a murderous hatred of the police.
Incidentally, our Covid corpse count, pro rata, is almost twice that of England.
And still a miniscule corpse count (if at all accurate), in the grand scheme of things.
I feel sorry for the Welsh, I really do
Shit, including the M4 ? That must be fun …
I think I will have to withdraw the David Davis suggestion. The below is from his Twitter feed. He is doing a reasonable job of poking and prodding to get things moving and employ a modicum of common sense, but assuming he really believes what he is saying in this point, if he is the best of them then we are a million miles away from where we need to be:
“It is starting to look as though mandatory face masks, combined with hygiene measures such as frequent hand sanitation & intelligent distancing in schools, factories, public transport & other congested locations could achieve as much as lockdowns, on a more viable long term basis”
There are many ways of looking at how Dominic Cummings behaved, and has behaved since. I think it’s pointless debating exactly what he did and when he did it since we’ll never get to the bottom of it. His real mistake was first to get caught and secondly to conduct himself with his customary arrogance. Telling the journalists outside his house that he didn’t care what they thought amounted to saying he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. That may have satisfied his own need to flaunt his status and sense of superiority but for someone who is supposed to be so smart it strikes me as a phenomenally foolish way to behave, and more what you’d expect from an ill-tempered adolescent. As Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap says at one point, ‘there’s such a fine line between stupid and clever’ (or words to that effect). To be fair, being a top-flight political strategist requires a different sort of intelligence from being able to understand how to handle other people, but that’s why he needs handling himself.
Cummings and his friends in Number 10 could usefully spend a little time on historical research in how to lead. Being a leader does mean behaving in a particular way, but not the way they seem to think. One of the reasons Caesar’s army proved so successful was its loyalty to their general. Caesar achieved this by sharing the booty equally with his most deserving soldiers, and he also shared the same dangers as the men ‘and refused no toil’ (Plutarch, Caesar 17). In other words he did the same as he expected of his men.
But in this debacle we see here once again how governments and organisations so often make the same mistakes, and one of those mistakes is making things worse by prioritizing saving face. Let’s not forget Alexander Hamilton’s priceless observation in 1774:
‘To retract an error even in the beginning is no easy task. Perseverance confirms us in it and rivets the difficulty; but in a public station, to have been in an error, and to have persisted in it, when it is detected, ruins both reputation and fortune. To this we may add that disappointment and opposition inflame the minds of men and attach them still more to their mistakes.’
Still Lockdown Sceptics, we have learned something useful today. Since we cannot have our eyes checked at an optician’s, we do now know that we can legitimately take a 30-mile day trip in our cars to check if our eyesight is up to scratch. Of course if it isn’t we might add to the number of deaths caused by the lockdown, but at least we’ll have had a nice day out.
You can check it twice – you get to do a pre-trial, trial run to pick the wife and son up from the hospital too!
Toby, let’s keep it simple. What part of the “Stay home” message did Cummings fail to understand? That the rest of the UK population seemed to get? Please stop trying to defend the indefensible. Cummings is not an idiot and knew damn well what he was doing, but he clearly thought he would get away with it. And now he’s being proven right by Johnson. For me, Johnson now looks like Cummings’ bitch, and it’s weakened him incredibly in my eyes. Ye gods, we had such a hard time getting this lot to push through Brexit against a parliament set against the people, and here we are again. The country is screaming for some action and leadership to be shown here and we’re treated like we’re utter idiots. Driving to Barnard Castle to test your eyesight, with the family in the car just to witness you driving into a tree? Come on. This is a farce and a disgrace and I’m surprised and saddened that you just can’t bring yourself to admit it.
Brexit is why they’re doing it.
While Boris and Cummings were ill, someone, no names provided as yet, had decided to request an extension of the transition period. Then B & C came back to work and put a stop to it. That’s why the media and remainers are doing their utmost to get rid of Cummings, because there’s only until the end of June when an extension is off the agenda. They’re attacking him now because time is running out, and they want him out of the way. They’ll go after Boris next, with some confected outrage over something.
And I don’t think he did anything wrong. It’s not the same as Ferguson who was getting together with his married mistress for a “social visit.”
What Cummings did comes within the guidelines for exceptional circumstances, and was common sense.
Personally, I wouldn’t have wanted to drive that kind of distance, but if that’s where his family was, with empty accomodation available for his family to quarantine themselves, so be it.
And the only reason the public is screaming for some action is because the media have lied, distorted, and whipped up this storm for their own ends. Cummings shouldn’t apologise or back down.
https://coronavirusbellcurve.com/
In this web page US bell curve they have now a table for nursing/care home deaths. This seems to be the same as in Europe and that is in the world’s largest outbreak of Covid-19. This is a mainly a geriatric pandemic in Europe and North America with much more deaths than in other parts of the world.
Some US states have even very high number up to 80%. Interesting is the odd only 20 % in New York state. This is strange as New Yok city outbreak was often grouped together in the big metropolitan outbreak incl. nearby New Jersey and that state has 50%. The fraudulent Governor in New York and MSM wanted to manipulate the statistics so many care home deaths in New York was counted as hospital community deaths to make it more palatable to sell the idea of lockdown. At least we know that he got the nickname “Grandma Killer” as he sent 5000 elderly patients with Covid-19 back to their certain deaths in the care homes in the state. The motivation was to be able to cope for the enormous influx of patients from the community and MSM expected an Italian situation. As this did not materialize, they had to send pictures from Bergamo hospital, Italy, pretending it was a New York hospital.
I’m not sure I understand why Cummings doesn’t just resign? The PM could have said something to the effect of, “Dominic has my full support however given the national importance of the lockdown message, I’ve asked him to resign from his day to day responsibilities in Downing Street, although he will remain an advisor to the government”. Cummings could work from home for a few months, still receive government papers etc. and provide advice and opinions, and then quietly be reinstated in a few months. That would likely have ended the story this weekend – whereas the press conference has simply sustained it.
Once you are coming out with a convoluted explanation you have lost the argument already. He is a case in point – what reasonable person tests whether they feel safe enough to drive… by driving for an hour (and back)? Would ten minutes not have sufficed? A private car back to London? (I’m sure Boris would have signed off the expenses). It doesn’t make sense and so its no wonder the public mood is against him now.
Also I’m sure it isn’t pleasant doorstepped by the press pack everyday but Cummings has sat back and watched it happen to his political opponents on many occasions (no doubt in some cases on his instigation). Just like Campbell, Mandelson etc. I doubt there will be any public support for him on that count either – it’s not like he has a past history as a vocal campaigner for more respectful behaviour by the doorstep press team. At least he has the benefit that they all have to stay 2 metres away from him…
I suspect the reality is simply that he does not want to give the Civil Service and Labour the satisfaction of seeing him get fired and thinks he can get away with it. This is hubris and may well be his undoing.
‘Bubble socialising’ will continue this abnormality. Here is where the academic gloss for this policy seems to have been cooked up… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbemJNd4gFA&t=1138s
It is looking like Peter Hitchens warnings are spot on: https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/05/we-will-never-get-out-of-this-now-it-will-go-on-for-ever-we-will-not-be-free-people-again-even-when-we-seem-to-be-free-we.html https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/05/peter-hitchens-furlough-billions-just-a-giant-payday-loan-in-your-name.html
Can we all go and live in a colony somewhere? I think I’ll go insane otherwise.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the exiled book-lovers in Fahrenheit 451. If there was a colony like that of corona skeptics I’d join it! I increasingly feel like I resemble them in significant ways.
Sceptic Island?
Anybody got a nice island for sale?
Here’s a family of six who’d be more than happy to join!
I was looking at the deaths registered (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales). According to this, there has been one death involving primary aged children… Where’s the 13 year old boy who was one the front of every website? Am I missing something?
I copy pasted the below on three separate friends facebook pages today, after they had posted pictures of different beaches. I can’t conform to agreement by silence any longer. Two extra weeks of lockdown on shops have come about because of exactly this. The Government will say they are following the wishes of the Public.
if you’re under 50 the statistical chance of you dying from this is zero. Marginally increasing until over 75/80 where there is a jump.
I wouldn’t recommend them visiting a hospital or care home, but outside of that, life is supposed to involve personal choice.
You may be happy with a permanent housebound holiday, I’m not. The damage this is going to cause will significantly outweigh the deaths. Which are of course sad but ‘lockdown’ did nothing to protect them. Our peak deaths was 8 April so tracking back 21 days is mid March. Whilst everything was open. We kicked out ill patients from hospital into care homes and caused thousands of additional deaths. We did that ourselves to protect the nhs.
450 die of cancer every day. Without treatment or diagnosis for new and existing cases we are looking at a shitstorm. There’s plenty of other examples before we start of the economic crisis to follow. Let’s not start on the damage this is going to do to the young either, both psychologically and educational. More kids have died being killed by their parents during lockdown than of Covid.
If you’re waiting for a miracle cure, keep dreaming. I’m sure in a couple of years treatment will form part of the flu jab given to vulnerable and elderly. Because that’s what this is.
The longer it goes on, the worse it’s going to be.
We must be able to critically think, and have some accountability, for actions imposed on us. Neither the media nor the Government are interested in us. We have gone through this, in my opinion, because the Government wouldn’t have survived if pictures of the NHS over capacity and deaths in corridors occurred. Instead ICU is less than 20% full. If my desk was less than 20% full, I’d be on the dole. We might be soon.
We, all over the world, have gone through this because the media whipped up the proles with death stories and fear porn. Once they were incited all the proles demanded that the politicians, all the politicians from every part of the left and right spectrum, “DO SOMETHING”. And so the politicians, not being stupid people, did something. They knew that if they did not do “something” that every death would be laid at their feet. Look at Sweden who resisted the urge to “do something”. All the world’s media hate them because they did not bow to the pressure. So today we are mostly stuck, because those same politicians can’t think of a way to get out of the “do something”, and they know that when they do loosen up, the media will lay every death at their feet.
The politicians have forgotten that saying “when in a hole stop digging” and continue to dig themselves into a bigger hole. No-one has showed true leadership here and we are all paying the price.
You have a voice to the scumbag MSM … comments on their articles, their social media output. Whats clear is that there is no ‘direct line’ to the politicians at all . Its all fine and dandy sending a strongly worded letter to your local MP, but you may as well be pissing in the wind.
Get after the media hypocrites
Is this the 13 year old you are thinking of?
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1262255/coronavirus-news-portugal-Vitor-Godinho-youngest-victim-europe
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8173253/Boy-13-dies-testing-positive-coronavirus-London-hospital-fundraiser-says.html
http://www.meramirpur.com/ismail-abdulwahab-13-becomes-uks-youngest-victim-died-at-kings-college-hospital-in-london/
Oh look, his photo is disappearing from the reports:
https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/03/britains-youngest-coronavirus-victim-buried-no-family-funeral-12504643/
and not just on this website either – strange
And a lot of the reports are dated 01 April as well, even stranger or a give away?
and no post mortem either so how do they know what he died from?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/ismail-mohamed-abdulwahab-no-postmortem-coronavirus-a4404116.html
Or page is gone:
https://www.three.fm/news/uk-news/coronavirus-healthy-boy-ismail-mohamed-abdulwahab-13-is-youngest-uk-victim/
more and more strangeness as he’s completely disappeared
As of today, the ONS records three children (0-14yo) as having died with COVID19 in their weekly mortality summary. The media is seldom the best source. And in the UK, no post mortem is necessary if one has been treated by a doctor for the disease.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales
USA Today: “The CDC’s recently updated guidelines said. “It may be possible for COVID-19 to spread in other ways, but these are not thought to be the main ways the virus spreads… The CDC said that catching the coronavirus from boxes delivered by Amazon or on your takeout food bag is highly unlikely “because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces.” https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/05/20/coronavirus-does-not-spread-easily-surfaces-objects-cdc/5232748002/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11675335/unlikely-catch-coronavirus-touching-objects-cdc-claims/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QUy_Df3UIk&t=2258s
The key point is that the scare about “cash is dangerous” was fake news.
Possibly another key point is that money remains one of the filthiest objects we handle on a daily basis and if it is difficult to catch a corona virus by handling money then it is difficult to catch it from handling <b>anything</b>.
There’s something that’s been bugging me and I can’t go to bed without actually putting it out there.
Why is the infection and death rate in care homes not 100% or at least a high proportion of the residents? For any given individual these are the scenarios I can think of:
Unless they have been isolating infected residents then it’s possible that the majority of residents in any particular carehome could have been infected. What kept the survivors alive?
You’ve already answered your own question: points 2, 3 or 4. It’s not that deadly that it kills all infirm people infected with it.
I think this is because research indicates that up to 60% of individuals are immune (via T cells from previous corona virus infections). And this is why infections peaked and declined before the lockdowns came into place.
Also there’s more old women than old men -and men are the ones disproportionately dying from covid. (Testosterone or something apparently, not that old men have much of that)
Sorry about the length of this but I promise not to post any further nonsense.
Something is going on right now and it just does not smell right.
The UK is (or was) supposed to be the beacon of democracy in the world yet all UK government decisions are being made behind closed doors. Nobody knows what evidence has beed presented by academia, the medical profession and financial ‘experts’ to SAGE therefore it cannot be peer reviewed by the citizens. Nobody knows what political advice or the nature of that advice is being given at these meetings. The decision making process is opaque to the populace while at the same time the prime minister and his cronies have declared powers for themselves which have not been debated in the open venue of parliament. This is not democracy, it smells more of the politics of a Banana Republic.
We do not even know who is in charge, is it Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings or someone else? There are ugly looking connections between the extraordinarily rich such as Bill Gates and the powerful Pharmaceutical Industry. I live in a Banana Republic and if I drop even 100k in the pocket of a politician here I can get anything I want. This political situation in the UK smells just the same.
Large service oriented corporations have a vested interest in this too. They will take advantage of the situation by changing work practices to ‘the new normal’ so that they comply with government directives therefore allowing them, and nobody else, to win government contracts at vastly inflated cost so a little bribe (not paid in Panama of course) to their favourite politician will be a small price to pay. Their employees will of course have to take a 50% pay cut to allow for the reduction of productivity caused by social distancing split shifts, extra HSE (sorry to use that swear word) etc etc.
Or is it that someone or ones who have a political agenda are tricking us all? Such as the likes of Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings, and maybe even our host who have a far right, alt-right, populist, isolationist and anti-globalist philosophy which entails destroying the present world order and rebuilding it to their own design. It was Bannon who got Trump elected as a populist and won himself a useful idiot he could manipualte towards his cause. Cummings got Johnson elected using the same philosophy and perhaps he too has found himself a useful idiot. Johnson’s recent behavior makes me think that he has indeed become a puppet of someone and that only usually happens in a Banana Republic. In the past, reordering a country according to the philosophy of a few people has not gone well unless you want to live in a society like Cuba or Venezuela.
The media have a lot to answer for. They too are behaving like the media of a Banana Republic. No questioning of the government narrative, no independent analysis of the statistics, no questioning or analysis of actual financial and social costs of the lockdown. Is this just because the journalists themselves have become followers of the cult or is it more sinister.? Is it simply because their owners, either government or private, are enjoying the profits from their fearmongering which is generating increased sales? Or is it that they are being manipulated by someone else? Cummings for example? Whatever it is it just don’t smell right.
But then, my search for a reason for this in my last few paragraphs ignores the fact that this apocalypse is happening not just in Europe and the USA, it is a global phenomenon. Irrespective of my conspiracy theories above, I do actually believe that this was started by the Chinese. Nowhere in history has a government locked down its whole population in their homes. It has just never, ever happened for any reason until the PRC did it in Wuhan. All the research including the WHO said it is not effective in controlling a virus ….until the Chinese did it. So everyone else followed. I think its as simple as that!
A week or two ago I wrote a conspiracy theory for a bit of fun to entertain myself while having a few (My wife says, a lot) which I posted here. But now I am thinking that I may have actually hit the nail on the head so I am going to post it again to see what everyone thinks.
I have really enjoyed expressing my views here, reading others, and at the same time having a bit of fun but this situation is not funny anymore. One or two other commentators have expressed the frustration that while 80%+ of the world still think these lockdowns are a good idea we are just banging our heads against the wall. So this is likely my last comment.
We need to start mass civil disobedience, and if that’s not enough, a rebellion, and if that’s not enough, revolution and war.
We cannot allow this ‘new normal’ to happen in a world where I and you are leaving our offspring.
My theory;
BEIJING, February 2020
President is having breakfast. His head of intelligence (HI) walks in excitedly.
Pres: What do you want?
HI: Boss, I have come up with a brilliant idea
Pres: Yes..and?
HI: You know about this virus outbreak in Wuhan….
Pres: Oh yes, we did a brilliant job controlling that, shut down a whole city, scared the shit out of my loyal followers, nobody complained or argued. In fact if I remember right we did not execute many detractors and we only had to imprison a few. One of my better moments don’t you think?
HI: Yes, yes Sir, of course but listen, the virus is spreading, not here of course, but around the world.
Pres: Thats a shame. I hope they can control it like we did.
HI: But, Boss we see an advantage here to help us expand our power worldwide.
Pres: Oh yes, I like that idea! Tell me, tell me more.
HI: Listen carefully, this is the plan. We eggagerate the danger of this virus and claim it kills, lets say, 10 or 15% of everyone who catches it and publicise that in the western world’s press. Then, you may remember that we invested a whole ton of money in Ethiopia, secured most of their minerals, only had to bribe a few of their politicians……
Pres: Yes, good move that. But what’s this got to do with the virus?
HI: Sorry Sir, but one of their politicians is now head of the World Health Organisation and he owes us a favour. We will ask him to to declare this virus a global pandemic. Not only that but we have invested a lot into Imperial College London and about half their students are Chinese so we will ask them a favour too. They can make up some wildly exaggerated predicted numbers of deaths and put them in a professional looking document and present it to their Government to scare them.
Pres: OK, OK but get on with it……the world domination bit.
HI: Bear with me Sir. You know the western press can publish anything they like, the scarier the better, and they cannot even execute or imprison their journalists.
Pres: Yes, I always thought that was strange, ha ha ha.
HI: Yes, funny that. So they will definitely publish the exaggerated figures from ICL along with their recommendations to lockdown their whole economies. The WHO pandemic announcement will be music to their ears. Think of the sales, think of the advertising revenue for them! They will terrify their people. But this is the best bit……The western leaders are terrified of being criticised by their press so they will follow what the press say. They will lockdown all their businesses, put their citizens under house arrest and impose drastic restrictions on their freedoms.
Pres. Just like us, ha ha. I bet they will go against their own silly human rights laws they bang on about too.
HI: And voila! We have destroyed their economies.
Pres: I get it, I get it now. We go in and buy up all their broken businesses for a song. We put their workers on 7 day working weeks for half their present pay……we clean up……at no cost to us ….and not a shot fired! Your plan is beyond brilliant. You must execute it immediately. I will recommend you for a State Honour and your pay will be doubled to 20 dollars a month.
HI: Thank you, thank you, you are the greatest Dear Leader. (lots of bowing and adoration).
“Or is it that someone or ones who have a political agenda are tricking us all? Such as the likes of Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings, and maybe even our host who have a far right, alt-right, populist, isolationist and anti-globalist philosophy which entails destroying the present world order and rebuilding it to their own design”
Er what? Am I hearing you right? Toby Young is alt-right/far right/populist who wants to “destroy the present world order”? Have you read Toby Young over the years?
Thank god there are amusing commentaries like that to cheer us up through this dismal episode.
I think there is an agenda though…. and I have always thought it’s that but with at least 2 different paths. China dictatorship is one but I honestly think there is at least one other.
I simply cannot believe that the people of the world want to be serfs in a china type style system. Mention China to lockdownistas and you will surely get a negative reaction as well
djaustin posts “We currently have approximately 60k excess deaths, more than any bad influenza year from 2010-19. These excess deaths are nicely correlated with COVID-19 deaths In timing and magnitude, and will soon be back to weekly baseline.”
We read across many articles within and without this site that many of the recorded deaths are listed as due to CV but are not really attributable to CV. We also read across multiple sites that many deaths (excess deaths) are due to victims not attending hospitals for fear of contracting CV. So at the moment any claims on the quanta of deaths, be they due to CV or excess deaths, are like a good gossip. I look forward to the forensic reviews in a few months and hope that authorities will co-operate by telling the truth such that we will get the truth about what still looks like a bad flu season for which chicken littles’ have ruined economies.
I believe that the data points to this being worse than any influenza season since 1918/19, WITH the lockdown intervention. As for excess deaths, it is reasonable to consider a rise in other causes. However, the sheer numbers just do not stack up – even if NOBODY who had a stroke or heart attack in the past ten weeks attended hospital and died at home instead, this would not account for the difference between reported COVID19 deaths and all-cause deaths. Road accidents (10/day) is a modest sum, air pollution and cancer account for a longer-term rise. If you are over 45, your acute, immediate risk of dying at least doubled at the peak of the epidemic.
I want Cummings to go simply because I want any politician associated with this lockdown to be defenestrated as swiftly as possible and I don’t really care why.
Do you want to give the MSM a victory, which then validates the evenagelisation of the guidelines into some sort of ‘law’? They will go, but only if and when MSM turns fully against the Lockdown – Make those MSM hypocritical filth turn, thats the way here. Shame THEM
Can we get this man a membership?
https://m.facebook.com/SkyNewsAustralia/videos/293089391856137/?refsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2Fstory.php&_rdr
Yeah, I saw this the other day, the guy is ace! I wish there were more like him in the UK who tell it how it is, sadly not so.
Hear, hear!! He’s talking about Australia but it could easily be the UK.
Can we swap him for Bojo and Cummings? At least some Aussies retain some of the Common Sense we Brits used to have!
One of the major reasons that many would not have done what Mr Cummings did (I certainly would have) was because of some heavy handed statements and activity by the police. Many people were frightened, perhaps unnecessarily, about not doing the right thing but also by the thought of prosecution.
Added to that, a rash of hi viz coated chief air raid wardens made many even more worried.
Rightly or wrongly, the perception is that none of these things would have been of concern to either Professor Ferguson or Mr Cummings.
That is a problem for a government portraying itself as concerned with ‘levelling up’ but increasingly now seen as guilty of ‘de haut en bas’
Personally, I think if there is a new virus sometime in the future then the first thing to do is to shut down any travel to / from the place(s) with an outbreak. Related would be step 2 to identify all those who went through such places to trace, test and isolate.So (amongst many other things) I don’t agree with the WHO statement that travel bans were not necessary. Nonetheless, how this whole situation played out once March began is a disgrace and I think this article spells it out quite well.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/21/how_fear_groupthink_drove_unnecessary_global_lockdowns_143253.html
That’s what Taiwan and some other countries did I think. You’re right, it is a disgrace, it’s appalling and it’s the biggest scandal this country has ever faced.
The decision to send infected elderly people back to care homes without testing to confirm they were negative, under the guise of ‘protect the NHS’, comes a pretty close second. Shame on the government, if you can call it that!
And shame on the NHS too!
I listened to that Classic FM programme last night where Prince Charles was interviewed and he made the point that the current situation and the social distancing were making it hard for the orchestras and music groups that he’s patron of and that their survival is now in the balance. I know that HRH is prohibited by law from uttering political statements but why don’t the orchestras that he supports take the lead and make more noise? Because if they don’t now then they might go bust before this year is over.
Spanish lockdown luvvies Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz made a statement the other day urging people never to go back to normal. Can’t wait for their next socially distanced film or TV series.I’m sure it’ll be a cracker.
Are they serious? The film and TV industry have long been in trouble with flop after flop and the usual staples of sequels, franchises and reboots not to mention dreary, unimaginative dramas. I won’t shed a tear for them if they never get any work again.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/26/the-real-meaning-behind-dominic-cummings-breaking-lockdown/
Oh yes… just LOOK at the media scrumming together, and the police! This is what has to get out there – where the bloody hell is the ‘social distancing’???
Cos it’s all bollocks. It always was
Off work today so in reality i’m gonna drink tea and smoke for a while then i’m going out for a long bike ride but just in case they’re reading this i’ll play the fantasy game of staying in to be alert to protect fat nurses. Don’t worry i’ll leave my MacBook open and camera running so if when i’m out and the corona virus rears it’s flu like self i’ll be able to film it and report it to the Obergruppenführer of my district like a good boy.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/meet-parents-whose-children-wont-going-back-school-vaccine-found/
‘Meet the parents whose children won’t be going back to school until a vaccine is found.’
Three children under 15 have died with the virus in the UK. THREE.
These parents should be deeply ashamed of themselves and are practising borderline child abuse. The very worst example of the middle-class phenomenon of ‘worried well’. I can understand the worries of those who have vulnerable children, or if the parents are vulnerable, but I presume they don’t let their child get in a car, or eat small things for risk of choking, or anything similar. All aspects of life carry a level of risk. Those who are very vulnerable will have always lived in a state of shielding/lockdown anyway, even in normal times, but it is incredibly disproportionate to keep healthy children with healthy parents out of school until a vaccine magically appears.
This article has made me really quite angry – I feel so deeply for those poor children, and this is storing up a lifetime of resentment towards their parents which can result in chronic long-term mental health issues. As soon as these poor kids see their friends going back to normal without an issue they won’t be thanking their parents. As one commenter said, perhaps this is the first time in history where children will be playing truant in order to GO to school!
The title of the article should be ‘Meet the parents who fail to assess everyday risk’.
Virtue signalling whoppers. Recieving an education is a human right btw and I would hope the local authority take action on behalf of these children
You have always been allowed to teach your kids at home. They often learn more that way but end up a bit weird, like Rod and Tod Flanders.
What are the odds that these kids will turn out like that character from that film who spends all his life in a nuclear bunker then re-emerges 30 years later? That is if they don’t go nuts before that.
The thing is as with most media now this is just a handful of examples to sell the idea that it may be quite common. We have no idea as to how many people are actually that risk averse.
But with attitudes like that it’s easy to see why snowflakes exist and mental health is a growing issue as more and more children grow up unable to cope with the realities of life because they’ve never been allowed to experience it.
Kids at present are forever mollycoddled both physically and mentally. Its appalling because parents stick face masks on them, sanitise everything, no moderation in food intake, make them wash their hands constantly until their skin peels and bleeds. How can they develop their immune system properly? No wonder they catch every cold and bug going or develop allergies that were rare until 20 years ago.
Mentally its no better either. Many of them don’t go out and play parents plop them in front of a TV or place a tablet in their hands, they barely hear the word “no”, there’s the absence of activities and groups that they can join because of the Kafka-esque requirements surrounding them, parents hover over them and they’re never bored. Then there’s social media which ensures that there is no respite from bullying and abusive behaviour from their peers.
I’m so glad I’m not a child during this period and don’t have any children. Its just cruel what sort of world they’re now living in.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.18.20105189v1.full.pdf+html
This is another new paper confirming that there is a potential cross reactivity with other coronavirus we are carrying and also other common pathogenic viruses, all potentially protecting us against Covid-19 virus.
There is now published multiple papers suggesting a resistance in the population much higher than previously thought. That is a reason for the bad predictions of the previous models of the mortality of the pandemic, as they were all based upon herd immunity at 60% level in a new flu like scenario.
Big Pharma’s propaganda machine, BBC and MSM, wants us now to believe that the genial idea of lockdown has protected us from a devastating pandemic but, unfortunately, has let us become helpless future victims of Covid-19 due to a lack of immunity. Now the idea of prolonging the lockdown in some form or another until we have the new vaccine. Never go back to normal.
MSM and BBC has been instructed now to downplay the devastating effect of Covid-19 on care homes, especially the figure of 50-60% of all deaths is there, as the risk that the masses might get the dangerous idea that lockdown of the care homes might have been a better idea than locking down the working population.
The propaganda machine must also avoid at all costs to discuss the remarkable low effect of Covid-19 on the mortality of the working ages and especially the almost non effect of Covid-19 on children.
The propaganda machine must never discuss the enormous number of asymptomatic carriers creating a havoc of the idea of an army of tracers ready (which anyhow is more likely to be ready in the summer when the pandemic is over).
The propaganda machine must focus on an imminent second wave not even explaining to the population that a second wave of a pandemic always comes after the first wave has already finished.
The propaganda machine must now focus on South America and the death squad of journalists has to be sent there to report on the latest rumour of 110 doctors dying of Covid-19 in Rio according to Twitter.
Why? The Big Pharma must sell its new future vaccine. How can they otherwise persuade parents to have their children vaccinated against Covid-19, when parents already now, never vaccinate them against flu, a disease which seems 10 times deadlier to children than Covid-19? Why would the working population take this new vaccine against a disease less dangerous for them than flu, a disease which they almost never bother about ? We are left with the NHS staff and the elderly. The problem for Big Pharma is that the elderly is the segment of population that always will respond badly to any vaccine due to their waning general immune defence.
The profit for Big Pharma is a mass vaccine for everybody and also the best is a compulsory immunisation. Profit margins for vaccine is great, much better than for a new drug, no advertising cost, BBC will do this without a fee and the government will pay for any side effects.
Lenin purportedly used the expression useful idiots for the capitalists co-operating with the Bolsheviks. Selling them the rope they were going to hang them with.
In the Alice in wonderland we are living now, everything upside down, now it is the Big Pharma which has the useful idiots in the form of MSM and BBC.
Re. obeying the letter or the spirit of the regulations, I actually came to the opposite conclusion. The aim of the regulations about travel is surely to avoid the risk of spreading the virus as far as possible, not to prevent people from traveling as an end in itself. So (in my opinion) by choosing to travel further to ensure he and his family could isolate themselves as effectively as possible, Mr. Cummings was actually obeying the spirit of the ‘law’, not the letter.
I have just watched Kay Burley’s ‘car crash’ interview with Michael Gove. I listened to Alex Deane on Sky paper review last night. I read the Telegraph comment sections on yesterday’s article by Camilla Tominey. As far as I am aware, most of the defenders of Mr Cummings’ actions are Brexiters. They are all concerned that this is a left-wing Remainer stitch up. It is not. I am in a family of 4, and we are all Brexiters. It is a matter of what is right and what is wrong from an ethical and moral, if not legal technicality standpoint. I am increasingly thinking that the defenders of Mr Cummings are in a state of denial akin to an abused wife or partner. It is misplaced loyalty.
Yes – same with me and my wife. Furthermore, if unsure that he could drive safely, he should have stayed at home rather than, potentially dangerously, going on a 60-mile drive. Similarly, as soon as he knew his wife was infected, he should have instantly self-isolated and not gone back to No 10 as a potentially asymptomatic carrier.
As I pointed out yesterday, the ‘Barnard Castle Defence’ is also undermined by the fact that he had already driven to a hospital to pick up his wife and son. Not sure which hospital – perhaps the journos should have probed a bit further!
This is a real difficult one… It’s now out there to divide anti-lockdowners I think.
Just ask yourself… what’s worse? Cummings supposedly ‘breaking’ the lockdown guidelines (as that is all they are)…. or … the Lockdown itself.
I know which side I am on
If it is a deliberate attempt to divide the anti-lockdowners, it is both risky to the point of recklessness and immoral. It is not an either/or on lockdown. Lockdown should never have been imposed but we cannot undo that. Far better to fess up that it was a mistake – now – and open up quickly and completely before any more damage is done. Cummings and Ferguson were the main protagonists here – one was charged with the task of interpreting ‘the science’ of the other, even though it is clear that he also falls into the classic ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. As one of the posters higher up has said, from their position of knowledge at the centre of government, better to precipitate the pack of cards falling over now by removing Cummings (and Boris, Gove too, in my opinion), so some sanity returns to fulfil the mandate this government was given with an 80 seat majority.
I think it’s a case of knowing who is the bigger enemy, who we can bring to account.
The government aren’t listening, we don’t have a direct line to any of them. But we do to the scumbag hypocritical MSM …. hurt them, turn against them, and they will all turn.
Once they are all turned, the government will turn as well.
Appears we have divided ourselves over it, but it’s the ones who are obsessed with defending one of the prime movers behind the locdown for bizarrely weak supposed reasons such as the ones you give here who are to blame.
The harm caused by the arguing over Cummings is mostly good, because it’s increasing the damage done to the government of Guilty Men.
It has bad aspects, but they are not the ones you repeatedly try to claim here (“diversion of media attention”, as though media attention would otherwise be on ending the lockdown ffs!) The bad aspect to it is that those making excuses for him are mostly brexiteers and they are making themselves look like cynical, corrupt hypocrites. And to the extent they delay Cummings’ exit they keep one of the Guilty Men in place where he can continue to protect the lockdown record.
For goodness’ sake, stop giving Cummings hope he can survive this, get him out and get it over with so we can move on to targeting the next vulnerable one of the Guilty Men. The longer he clings on the more damaged he is and the longer it will be before he can be rehabilitated, if that’s what you want.
And… its clear from the comments here on this site, that we have divided ourselves over it. ‘They’ didn’t need to do anything.
Keep your eyes on the cause, shame the media, they will turn like the snakes that they are (other than the fucking Guardian)
how about we ignore the lockdown and praise those that beak it? Ethically a corrupt government has put the entire nation into slavery but hey as long as your sensibilities are ok. Jesus man it’s folk like you that become camp guards
Yes! Know the bigger prize here. Go after the people we can get after. That to me… is the MSM.
We are wasting our breath participating in this witchhunt charade. This has to stop
And what do you think about Leo Varadkar’s picnic? Something which should be encouraged surely? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/26/leo-varadkar-denies-breaking-coronavirus-rules-picnic-friends/
Wow! What a fun retail experience this is going to be!
Deep joy. This will make shopping a miserable chore than it already is, its like the USSR circa 1960.
This should go into a manual entitled “How to Kill A Business in One Go”
I sometimes wonder if the only way now to discredit this is to pray for a washout weather. See how queuing and social distancing can be sustainable in bad weather.
Well, it’s official, we are no longer going to Hell in a handcart! [We have arrived.]
Looks like I won’t be going shopping then
How long will it go on for? Jersey Zoo “Wearing a face mask is mandatory for all visitors over the age of eight. Face mask alternatives will not be accepted, including scarves or jumpers/jackets pulled up over the face. This is not a guideline, it’s a requirement – it is vitally important to protect our animals from this deadly disease.” Just hope that no under 8 sneezes
I thought that animals were not affected by this virus. Or is this a way to ensure that the zoo goes bust?
As a liver if Gerald Durrell’s books, I really wonder what he’d have said in reply to that monumentally imbecilic statement.
Was that written by J.Bezos by any chance?
It says furniture should be covered in plastic, but experiments show that the virus survives far longer on plastic than textiles.
“…no infectious virus could be detected from treated wood and cloth on day 2. By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 was more stable on smooth surfaces.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(20)30003-3/fulltext#sec1
There’s an appendix with the figures. It is also suggested that it’s easier to transfer the virus from a smooth surface than from something porous.
The recommendation to furniture shops seems to an example of self-flagellation; a gesture; a symbol; ‘something should be done’, even if it spreads the virus more.
It all fits the narrative though, the user experience for shopping, eating out, having a coffee, going the pub will be terrible. Therefore, it will be the end of Self Employes, and Small to Medium sized businesses, who will go bust. What you will be left with is large Enterprises getting stronger and stronger, and the only jobs will either be for these huge Enterprises or with Government.
We will be confined to our homes permanently apart from those that have to go to a place of work if it can’t be done at home. There will be little need to go out as everything will be delivered, teaching will be done by video, all social interactions will be video conferencing, and if you do go out you will be led to believe that the big bad COVID-19 will get you and to police this you can guarantee that there will be a push to increase CCTV nationally, ID to prove you have the antibodies or the vaccine, so even less freedom.
To me it all looks like a huge power grab, as once again as today’s ONS stats show that unless you have an underlying illness you are pretty much clear with this virus. This at the most should’ve lasted 4 weeks to get the NHS prepared and then everything goes back to normal, now we are in the 10 week but still can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and facing this horrendous new normal.
The point of trying clothes is to ensure they fit. Not being able to try clothes is going to be a major problem for customers.
” …. imagining that you aren’t a wimpy little autistic, psychopathic runt.”?
Yesterday I ‘lost’ a good friend I’ve known for 35 years. We used to regularly spar over politics and, of course, Brexit! It always ended amicably though of course.
However within a couple of minutes of him calling me I had to put the phone down. This is far too important for banter. I guess we are both now some sort of victims of all this nonsense?
For the record his arguments are:
1) All the worlds governments can’t be wrong.
2) I read The Sunday Times therefore have a broad view of ‘everything’.
3) We are all doing this for ‘The Common Good’.
Where do I start!!
I think asking questions can help a person test out things that they have assumed.
Emotion is a more powerful motivator than arguments, so sometimes people believe something because:
His ‘arguments’ are not really arguments.
1) Why? Is it possible that the worlds governments COULD be wrong? Historically different governments have made bad decisions. Governments have fought wars, caused famines, poverty etc… What evidence can we find to support the idea that they have got it right this time? Does it look like lockdowns are working? What about in Sweden where lockdowns haven’t happened, are they worse off because of their decisions? Governments work in far closer synchronisation than they ever used to, partly due to the increasing influence of supranational organizations, such as the EU, WHO, and the UN. Policial leaders are as vulnerable to group think as we are.
2) Is is possible for any newspaper to have a broad view? We are all biased in certain ways. Even the most balanced newspapers have editors who need to select stories which will sell their paper, and which people will want to read. To get a broad view now days you need to read different publications, and talk to people with different backgrounds. Your friend could try looking at a sceptical publication (perhaps this one)
Judging from 3), your friend probably believes that participating in the ‘lockdown’ is a moral thing to do. Does the fact that all newspapers and most of the public believe something is right make it right? There are lots of examples in history where governments have done truly awful things, which also happen to be popular.
Why is is moral to close down society anyway?
What about the widespread suffering that has been endured? Not just here but in poorer countries too. For instance some of which may face rising deaths from illnesses like TB because of the fact that humanitarian work has been impeded by lockdowns.
We would need to have a pretty strong case for causing more global suffering, and for taking away peoples’ freedoms. Do we have a strong case?
We lost friends we’d known for over 40 years over Brexit so can understand your loss. This man-made coronavirus hysteria is very similar to the Leave/Remain battle that raged isn’t it? It would be an interesting experiment to determine who voted Leave/Remain and those in favour of the Lockdown.
I voted Leave and have always opposed the lock-down.
It’s an anti-unaccountable, autocratic elites thing.
Find some common ground, something everyone can agree on– Johnson is an idiot is a good starting point.
It’s very hard to remain friends with people who have wildly differing views on this subject. But I feel one ought to try. I suppose it depends on whether they are truly your friends or not, whether you think as people, for all their faults, they are worth being with. I don’t have many friends, and of those most are default pro-lockdown. I try to persuade them, as forcefully as I can without alienating them. I try to be patient.
I’ve got friends on Facebook who regularly post “burn the witches” type posts every time there’s a news story on people daring to go outside. I just don’t bother discussing this subject with them because I’m likely to say things I’ll regret.
Has anyone else noticed the following in website and on social media pages comments generally and not just this one that as the the views of the majority turn more and more anti-lockdown and anti-government new “names” start appearing that try and steer the debates towards “you are all wrong”, “we’re all going to die”, “it’s not gone away” or “do it because the government says so” and so on? Full of buzzwords as well.
Son and his friends worldwide are noticing it and getting good at spotting these trolls.
Yes it seems the 2nd wave is still a favoured opinion by some.
I’ve seen this in the Torygraph comments – as soon as criticism of lockdown starts the same old names jump in to defend. Guido’s place at order-order is similar. Given these two outlets association with the Tories it is probably CCHQ or a Cummings-led event.
Seen a few recent trolls on off-guardian, that’s for sure. Here not so bad, so far.
You may be aware that health is a devolved issue in Scotland. Presumably that is why the FM is getting her excuses in:
https://www.scotsman.com/health/coronavirus/nicola-sturgeon-older-people-may-have-died-result-care-home-policy-2864117
This seems to be a roundabout way of saying ‘It’s a shame that people died, but we meant well, so that’s OK.’
It’s interesting to note that when Sweden admitted they should have done better in protecting their care homes they ware lambasted and the headlines were all about them admitting the failure of their strategy.
Yet when the same failings are highlighted in other countries it’s all about how they took the right actions based on the evidence at the time.
Yes, Professor Giesecke himself admitted that Sweden had protected their old and vulnerable two weeks too late. But everything else he said had been done correctly. Which it certainly seems as though it had. I do love his blunt way of talking, such as when being asked by journalists how Australia could get out of its lockdown and closed borders, he just said “I don’t know, as soon as you instigated lockdown and the borders were closed I wondered how you would get out of it. But that’s your problem!”
Yes, the road-to-hell excuse!
The cummings and goings of the Prime Minister’s personal trainer have provided the wrong kind of oxygen for our moronic media who, rather than being incandescent about the unanswerable fact of Lockdown – in Scotland of course it’s Jockdown – wasting more lives than it can possibly save, are still hyperventilating about an issue that was democratically tested four years ago. Lockdown Saves Lives is an egregious lie, utterly refuted by the medical and statistical evidence, and yet there are still spindoctors recommending it.
And as we move forward there will be a period of transition between Lockdown/Jockdown to full blown Mockdown.
‘Jockdown’… Love it!, but they really have got it bad with Adolf Krankie haven’t they? What would Wales (equally as bad) be?
Leekdown?
A question for Djaustin: supposing we sourced our first batch of test kits and took receipt of them at some distribution centre. Then supposing we distributed them around the country to other distribution centres, local authorities, large hospitals. And started using them. And then distributed the rest to smaller hospitals, clinics, etc. And they then started using them. And then recruited more testers.
And then we plotted a graph of how many tests were being done in the country against time, what would it look like? An exponential rise! With a time constant of some small number of days. And supposing the number of infections in the country was constant, or increasing much more slowly. What would the testing reveal? A doubling of ‘cases’ every few days! In other words, these patterns you think you’re seeing in the data are spurious.
Somewhere, I saw someone had plotted the number of confirmed cases divided by the number of tests and it was, of course, nothing like an explosive doubling every few days. Read the article I linked to earlier to understand the mistake you’re making.
I think you can make the same argument in relation to recorded deaths. Every year we have large numbers who die of lower respiratory infection and pneumonia and which deaths are not linked to a specific pathogen. The USA actually records these deaths as ‘non-influenza influenza-like illness’. Clearly in a situation where a specific pathogen becomes the only media story it is highly possible that deaths attributed to this pathogen can increase exponentially by allocating ‘normal non-influenza’ deaths to this new cause. The evidence for that is in the ONS data for March where deaths for lower respiratory disease are significantly below average. Given the much-discussed lack of clarity regarding the attribution of death to Covid, I would suggest, DJAustin, that your assumptions need to be reviewed.
Having said all the above, I am extremely grateful that you take the time to post on this site and engage in discussion.
One further question, DJAustin, if you are reading, as a non-scientist I am interested to understand the extent to which the fact that GSK is your employer and sponsor constrains the questions you are able to ask or the conclusions you reach? This is a genuine query: to the non-scientist the world of research is quite a mystery.
I’ve always liked Steve Baker and I was critical of Baker when he
lambusted Cummings for breaking the lockdown.
https://thecritic.co.uk/et-tu-baker/
Why? As you say, Cummings broke his own rules. Rule-makers cannot be allowed to be rule-breakers. How else do we have any control over what they do to us?
Sorry I don’t think I explained myself properly, I initially thought Steve Baker wrong for criticising Cummings however I’ve since changed my mind since learning he was responsible for the lockdown. I thought he was an advisor, he was not elected to govern us.
If Cummings is behind the lockdown policy and the propaganda that has led to the population begging to be allowed to commit suicide, then I am perfectly happy for his life to be ruined over this – just as he is ruining everyone else’s.
I like Steve Baker, and think he is right.
I agree with you.
<A HREF=”https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52806086″>Dominic Cummings: Minister Douglas Ross quits over senior aide’s lockdown actions</A>
Straight back to the front pages.
How much more political capital and credibility are government and brexiteers going to burn up on this?
Dominic Cummings: Minister Douglas Ross quits over senior aide’s lockdown actions
Indeed, as soon as the Daily Mail headline at the beginning of this page came out it should have been obvious that DC was toast. All efforts to defend him are just prolonging the agony.
Government minister for Scotland RESIGNS over Dominic Cummings row: Tory whip Douglas Ross says he ‘can’t tell constituents who have lost loved ones they were wrong to follow lockdown and one adviser was right’
Daily Mail “Breaking News” now
It is not just brexiteers (though I am one). It is about judging a behaviour in terms of the government’s own rules. His behaviour was simply wrong, regardless of one’s political views.
It seems to be largely brexiteers (and I, like you, am one of those) who are desperately trying to rationalise some kind of pretext for defending Cummings’ continued presence in government by the kind of basically silly arguments we see here. Things like “if we criticise him we are supporting lockdown rules”, and “maybe he didn’t really support lockdown”, etc.
In reality, it would have been far better even for Cummings himself just to take a temporary back seat and quietly get slipped back in after a few weeks or months.
By trying to defend him they are just making themselves look like cynical hypocrites and raising awareness of Cummings’ hypocrisy in the public eye.
I don’t have much problem with Cummings’ political and social goals, and as I’ve noted here, I am a longstanding and pretty fanatical anti-EUer. I just want him out because he is one of the lockdown Guilty Men. But the whole thing is rapidly alienating even me from those trying to keep him in place at any cost.
Yes – I expressed myself poorly there. Indeed I meant that even many Brexiteers were against his staying in place, whilst it does indeed look as if it is predominantly Brexiteers who are defending his actions.
The ‘defenders’ would be the first to criticise those liberal elite Me Too women in the US who have come out in defence of a man who they believe to be guilty of a serious sexual offence, because he is thought to be the most likely candidate to win against Trump. The ‘defenders’ are in a state of denial. It is not a good look!
Absolutely, the same kind of dynamic of partisan loyalty over reason and honesty. And I absolutely can understand it, and to some extent appreciate personal loyalty (where it is to a friend, that is, not just to a political figurehead) as admirable in itself.
But “worse than a crime, it is a blunder”.
I agree, but there are limits to personal loyalty – to which many abused partners who come out the other side would surely attest. There is a mis-placed loyalty to a man held on a pedestal for his supposed intellect and strategic brain by those, such as the host of this site, who ought to know better from their three years at Oxford, if nothing else.
Most people don’t Mark, you just listening to the Brexit and Remain extremists that have taken over social media and the MSM.
It’s all irrelevant, and the best diversion tactic ever as it has wasted 5 days now where the government has not been held to account over their appalling handling of this so called “Pandemic”.
It’s fairly irrelevant, agreed, but sadly the government was not being held to account over the biggest mistake of all which was “lock down” and the “new normal” which will be a permanent lockdown of normal human behaviour.
I don’t see how it can be “all irrelevant” – we are talking about forcing out of government one of the Guilty Men behind lockdown.
How can that not be a priority and a prize for anyone for whom lockdown is as bad as people on this site claim it to be?
In reality, it would have been far better even for Cummings himself just to take a temporary back seat and quietly get slipped back in after a few weeks or months.
It’s a smokescreen then.
I’ve been thinking about this, does it really help the Brexit argument that it’s becoming more and more apparent that the architect of most of it is very much ‘the ends justify the means’ and ‘flagrant disregard and contempt for any accountability, appeal to morality, or truth’.
I even found Steve Baker qualifying that he was OK with Cumming’s ‘guerrilla warfare’ and ‘unpleasant things’ at vote Leave, but he’s not now Boris is in number ten, quite alarming. I mean, exactly who are these people and what did they do that can be any worse than what we already know about? (PS if you’ve never seen it, regardless of what you think about the content of what they are discussing, how he conducts himself at the Parliamentary Select Committee and the really aggressive and dismissive way he speaks to these people is really quite shocking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJjShkGCa4c )
The longer this goes on, the worse and worse the whole lot of them look. Surely he’s sullying Brexit now?
I’m remain, but I’m now neither here nor there on Brexit, but if I was, I’d be now worrying he’s a liability, never mind – as you say – he’s burning through any goodwill the government currently has on lockdown.
Well in fairness, like the people Trump upsets, many of the people Cummings treats with contempt are people who desperately need such treatment. Some aren’t of course and are just collateral damage, but I understand those who want to let someone like Cummings loose on the cosy establishment leftists.
The trouble is, one of the prime groups of smugly arrogant and damaging leftist types comfortably nested at the heart of the establishment and leading us to disaster would be precisely Ferguson and his Imperial College group – exactly the kind of people whose influence would have been questioned by Cummings if he were doing any good.
Seems not.
We probably won’t agree on that, but it appears we agree on the damage this foolish attempt to protect Cummings is doing to the people who are attempting it, mostly
Well I think one can be contemptuous of someone’s ideas without actually being contemptuous to their face, in that I do think we need to retain some respect for our institutions. A bit like lockdown, if I’m so wrong (as I’ve had recourse to say a lot lately) win the argument, don’t demolish me as a person. I really don’t like that kind of sneering, slouching, disrespectful tone, I don’t think its necessary.
But I agree with your overriding point, that they should just cut him loose, even if – in some universe – their strategy originally had merit, they’ve lost control of it now.
From the perspective of the rebel right, the problem is that these people tend to be impervious to reason,. They are embedded in establishment positions, they ignore dissent by smearing and dismissing it as “hate speech” or “conspiracy theory” or “uncaring”, or just as the opinions of little, bad, ignorant and rightwing people.
Someone like Trump is very satisfying to people who’ve seen their concerns actively excluded from the “respectable” public square. He’s not ideal, for sure, but he’s probably all they’re ever going to get.
Cummings is a little more institutionally focused than Trump, but it’s a similar dynamic I think.
Today Tuesday 26th is the day that the ONS weekly statistics for deaths registered comes out.
Just had a look at the spreadsheet and was initially surprised to see that overall deaths had increased by nearly 2000 from the previous week. Then when I looked at the Covid figures they were actually down on the week before.
Thus the only conclusion I can infer is that the lockdown has caused 2000 excess deaths over the week before (and that figure would already have excess non covid deaths).
This is our crazy logic now
The Bank Holiday figures from the 8th May are included in the figures for Week 20, which is why Week 19 is lower.
A question to my fellow sceptics. If the government graciously allows us to sit outside pubs in beer gardens, maybe with taped-off seats and long queues to the bar, should we go? Or in doing so are we endorsing the government’s desperate face-saving policies?
I want to support the local pubs, but my enjoyment will be spoiled by the ‘measures’, and I hate to think that my presence might be mistaken by anyone as anything but utter contempt and hatred for the criminals and cretins who have done this to us.
It’s a difficult one, as it is the same for me and shops. What I do is to go to the one that does the least in the way of the new regulations. I then make sure that I act as normal as possible when there, to try to give a message to others who are also there. Laugh and joke about the futility of it, that sort of thing. Would that be an option. for you, or do you want to visit one particular pub?
I would also say, if you enjoy the experience, then go again. If you don’t, then don’t go. I think we have all done enough in the way of sacrifice recently! Time to enjoy life again. And then perhaps the pubs whose measures are totally overboard will realise their mistakes and wind them back a bit? Just a thought. The pubs and the shops will all be walking a fine line between wanting to encourage trade, but also not wanting to be fined by the government.
I think that’s a good approach.
That’s a difficult one.
I think I would go, and look as happy as possible, and shout out to passing zombies ‘Look at me, I’ve been here half an hour and I’m still not dead.’
Or something like that.
After a few pints, it will be brave soul in a mask who walks past our local.
You have correctly identified the choice between capitulation and cannibalism, which is the paradox on offer. Perhaps being as economically inactive as possible, with the pain that it will entail, is ultimately the shortest route to exposing this murderous fiasco for what it is.
Going to the pub with social distancing will be a similar experience as going to a supermarket at present. I limit this to once a week as it reminds me of Poland in 1984 . I will wait until pubs are normal; I am not keen on ” new normal ”
Not sure about your local, Barney, but in ours, after 5-10 minutes, there will be no desperate face-saving measures in place.
Unlikely we will even bother returning to the high street if, as seems likely, it involves queuing, one -way systems, not touching merchandise etc. That is not shopping – may as well get everything online. End of the high street, i reckon, and the jobs that go with it.
Same with pubs
If you listen to UK column I believe that is ‘the plan’…!
Personally I’ll be going back to my old normal and if there’s anywhere that makes me feel uncomfortable being there then I will find somewhere else to go. The more old normal places that thrive the more likely other establishments will follow suit.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot myself. Personally, I will probably avoid pubs and coffee shops under these conditions. It does pain me to think of the livelihoods of the people who own and work in these places but I can’t bring myself to validate the ‘new normal’. Bluntly, I am also unsure whether a lot of places can realistically operate under these conditions anyway. There might be an initial wave of people desperate to get out but that will quickly die away as people dislike the inconvenience and can meet up under happier (and less regulated) conditions in their own homes. I also think the ‘outdoors’ thing hasn’t been well thought through – the UK is enjoying nice weather at the moment but we all know this has limited shelf life – there is a good reason we don’t do al-fresco in this country!
I’ve been considering this over the weeks and as much as I want to support my favourite establishments I have come to the conclusion that I just couldn’t bring myself to under the expected dystopian conditions they will have to operate under.Going to the shops has become soul destroying enough so undertaking an activity that should be pleasurable,like having a meal or a drink,in the same conditions would be intolerable.
Absolutely. Our anti-social social life.
I’ve been thinking of this too. Personally while there is social distancing, I don’t think I’d want to go to a pub or a coffee shop or go shopping however I do feel sorry for the owners and the employees who have to put up with this. Surely they are aware that this will be the death of their businesses.
I also agree with coalecanth12, initially there will be lots of people because people will be releived to be finally out and about but the novelty will wear off quickly due to the queues and frayed tempers. Plus of course our weather is notoriously unreliable, it might be nice and sunny for now but we could have rain and wind in the coming weeks.
Don’t go. Have your friends round for a meal instead.
I’m gonna go in. Once.
In order to tell them that if they don’t drop the social distancing crap, I won’t be back.
Hopefully a few of them will listen to me.
Meanwhile, out in northern delusionland:
Coronavirus lockdown: Scots’ concerns over UK response
“A survey for BBC Scotland suggested that a majority of people thought Boris Johnson and UK ministers had handled the pandemic “fairly” or “very” badly.
Meanwhile 82% of respondents said First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had handled the crisis well overall, with only 8% saying she had done badly.
A total of 70% said the UK had entered lockdown “too late” on 23 March – and 77% said that easing restrictions “too quickly” would be “a bigger risk for Scotland” than easing them too slowly.”
God help us all.
against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
For pity’s sake don’t believe these surveys, they are self-serving
How utterly sad if true. What has become of the Scots…?
As we are following the Chinese in everything why not this? Can you beat that Matt Hancock?
“Most of those 9 million samples have been processed. As of Sunday, the mass testing identified 218 asymptomatic carriers, who were put under quarantine and monitored for symptoms. Just one of those cases was later recategorized as a confirmed case.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-tests-nine-million-people-for-coronavirus-in-10-days-11590408910
If this is not insanity please tell me what is.
It absolutely is insanity. And a colossal, gross waste of resources.
Welcome to the New Normal.
Looking at the picture is horrible. Like sheep being led forward (and the risk of a bullet in the back of your head if not obeying). Orwellian nightmare just in front of you. And this we should follow according to the whole political establishment?
Is the false positive rate that low? I would expect the number of “asymptomatic” carriers to be much higher out of 9 million people, just on the account of the false positive rate.
We should believe everything coming from China according to WHO, BBC and MSM even the non- existence of false positive
https://conexaopolitica.com.br/ultimas/brazilian-scientists-and-academics-write-an-open-letter-on-the-science-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic/
Very well written article by multiple Brazilian scientists about the use of the term “science guides us”and also an antidote to the usual HCQ bashing today in the BBC propaganda machine.
Really good letter, although I wish he’d left out this bit:
Some defend the “Big Bang” and the theory of evolution, others, including myself, are skeptical of them.
If I share that letter among friends I know they’ll immediately label him as a creationist and ignore the rest of the content.
Stupid will do as stupid is. Whether one should share things with people who react badly is a moot point.
Of course there are other theories for the very early evolution of the universe that are equally compatible with all observations of the very early universe bu which avoid the need for a singularity at the very beginning.
The whole point is that science is (or should be) about scepticism. If we fence off areas as ‘settled’ and do not permit reasonable scepticism then we limit science and prevent advancement. It’s not hard to find examples of absolute orthodoxies that turn out to be only partly correct. I can’t imagine the kind of arrogance that could believe we had settled all the issues around the Big Bang?!
Cabinet Minister Michael Gove says HE has driven to test his eyesight after PM’s aide Dominic Cummings claims he drove on a 60-mile round trip to Durham beauty spot with wife and child in the car ‘to check his vision’
Well I suppose one benefit of all the wasted credibility going on trying to keep Cummings in place is that others of the Guilty Men like Gove are making themselves look even more like idiots, and cynically hypocritical idiots at that.
“Section 96 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 states that: ‘If a person drives a motor vehicle on a road while his eyesight is such … that he cannot comply with any requirement as to eyesight … for the purposes of tests of competence to drive, he is guilty of an offence.‘“
Oops!
LOL. You couldn’t make it up. They are making Rufus T. Firefly look professional.
I wonder how many others would admit to be so stupid. I thought Gove was one of the intelligent ones, obviously I was mistaken!
More in the vein of the silver lining to lockdown perpetrator Cummings clinging on to his position, to some extent dragging the other Guilty Men down with him:
UK coronavirus LIVE: Boris Johnson’s approval ratings take nosedive as Tory minister quits over Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip
“According to pollsters Savanta Comres’ daily tracker, the Prime Minister’s ratings have nosedived from 19 per cent to -1 per cent following the controversy“
A long way to go, but we have to clear out all the Guilty Men.
Future politicians need to be terrified of the prospect of implementing another lockdown. and since they demonstrably don’t care at all for even the most dire consequences inflicted on the nation, they must fear consequences to themselves more than they fear criticism for not panicking.
The precedent has been set. It’s up to us to change it.
Couldn’t he have come up with a better lie? It seems odd that such an accomplished ‘twister’ couldn’t have come up with something less obviously dangerous and illegal. My suggestion: we went for a drive to see if [wife or kid] would feel sick.
(even though the whole 30-mile ‘test drive’ thing is decidedly implausible, anyway)
Of course, it will just have been that they felt like an outing, but knew that that was definitely against the rules and, yes, now he has self-incriminated in a much more serious offence.
The bastards are all laughing at us.
Yes, a point I have made to my MP. This seems to me to be absolutely clear – as was his going back to No 10 initially after checking on his infected wife – as soon as he knew that she might be infected, he should have, instantly, self-isolated according to his own rules!
I am confused at Toby backing him as Cummings sat in on the SAGE committee meetings that advised the government to ramp up the threat of the virus, which they did with their terrorising adverts on TV and in the propaganda press.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/covid-coercion-boris-johnsons-psychological-attack-uk-public
And we were left with a paranoid population and terrified children. So its ok for him to have a hand in that but not for him to have a taste of his own medicine?
I call it karma myself.
CORONAVIRUS BILL
COSTS
HEALTH
Anxiety, depression, suicide, unnecessary deaths of thousands of citizens as a result of the NHS being effectively closed to them.
SOCIAL
Child abuse, domestic abuse, social isolation, family breakdown, loss of community cohesion, infantilization of the population, erosion of public services, spiritual decline.
LEGAL
Loss of civil liberties, loss of freedom of speech, terrrorisation of the population, distrust of parliament, the police and judiciary, civil unrest.
ECONOMIC
Unemployment, loss of businesses, loss of income and savings, loss of homes, poverty.
Over one trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000) in government debt.
BENEFITS
NONE
Nothing to be surprised at. They are close political allies, and reasonably close in professional terms, bearing in mind they both work in the Conservative political/media sphere and Cummings’ wife is I believe an editor at the publication Toby writes for (Spectator). Given all that it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they are families who socialise together.
Nowt so corrupting as friendship.
I’ve no doubt that if the circumstances were identical but Cummings were someone with whom Toby had no political or social contact, and no professional connections, he would have no difficulty saying the obvious – that Cummings should go regardless of the rights and wrongs of the particular incident. There would be none of this “nobody deserves” to be “pursued by an outrage mob”, instead it would be: “he brought it on himself by refusing to step down in the first place”.
I get the arguments… But this is all fugazi, a distraction from the cause. Which is to end lockdown right now.
Look at the comments on this site about it all.
Simply put, he’s a twat, we know that. He’s a hypocrite, we know that.
But actually, he has done something that I myself have done.
What to me this whole fiasco has done is shine a bright light on the fear porn media and their actions and behaviour right now. Never forget who has brainwashed the populace. The government may have implemented this disastrous policy but who has twisted it, evangelised it, lied, and rammed it down the primitives throats??
It isn’t really all a distraction. It’s the attempts to protect Cummings that are a distraction.And it absolutely isn’t, or should’t be about what Cummings did or didn’t do by way of obeying the lockdown.
It is or should be solely about the central fact that Cummings is one of the Guilty Men responsible for imposing lockdown on all of us.
I genuinely don’t understand how quick you seem to be to forgive and forget that hard truth.
Doubt it came from Cummings, but whoever it came from I don’t think many of us would be “applauding” anything the PM is doing, in this regard or any other at present.
The most coherent position to my mind on this whole sorry business comes from Peter Hitchens: Cummings is a hypocrite but dismissing him for breaking absurd rules just plays into the hands of those who support these absurd rules, and those who encourage snitching in support of them.
The question is, does the continued focus on this story help our case by undermining the lockdown case or hinder it by removing focus from the vastly more important question of whether the lockdown is right at all? There is also the question of whether it would help our cause to remove an influential pro-lockdowner who has the PM’s ear, from the mix.
It’s hard to know the answer to this, but I think the main thing is that we should not let this divide us too much or divert from the purpose of discrediting the whole policy.
It would be great if you are right as it’s hard to imagine he can carry on for much longer – surely we’ll get a resignation on the basis of not wanting to distract from the message. On the other hand, who’s to say he won’t be pulling the strings still in the background?
You’re not taking into account psychopathic behaviour. You surmise based on reason which doesn’t apply to Cummings.
hope this is the case – a political ‘wormhole’ to get us out of this mess!
Just fired off a letter to my MP asking him what challenges is he putting to the Government in the upcoming debate on continuing this farce a she has been conspicuously quiet since the start.
I won’t put all the letter here but I told him my main concerns are but not expecting any reply except maybe received your e-mail but maybe I will be pleasantly surprised:
1 – the deliberate muddling of the causes of death “with covid-19” and “from covid-19 in an effort to boost the numbers dying from the pandemic needs investigated.
2 – the cause of death being misrepresented on death certificates as “covid-19” when no tests had been carried out to confirm this and it was reported on numerous occasions that the deceased showed no symptoms, had not been seen by a doctor but had been listed as a “covid-19” death regardless. Again a seemingly deliberate ploy to boost numbers as high as possible and needs investigated as a matter of urgency.
3 – the guidance issued by Public Health England that meant that “covid-19” infected patients were returned to care homes, nursing homes, their own homes and to their families then locking infected and uninfected together for a long period of time in an enclosed building, a scenario that seemed to be a deliberate plan to infect as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time and went against 2000+ years of dealing with these types of illnesses, went against the WHO guidance for non-pharmaceutical interventions during influenza type pandemics and epidemics and other papers published over the years and that also includes the original SAGE advice before the Government flipped to full panic mode.
4 – self-isolation being forced on individuals. It is not law. Is it just a way of avoiding having to follow due process in the legislation regarding isolation of infected individuals and having the local authority being liable for paying compensation as stated in the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984? It certainly seems so. All the authorities have to say is “they did it voluntarily” and they are off the hook for getting tests performed to confirm the exact infection as stated in the legislation (which is not possible as there is not one yet), having a proper person of the local authority write a notice as per the standards specified by the Secretary of Health, get a Justice of the Peace to sign the notice then it be served on the individual, the individual taken to hospital until well again and to pay the individual compensation.
5 – similar to the point above, why are shops, takeaways etc bringing in social-distancing, one way systems, plastic screens etc when there is no law about this? Is it an attempt to sidestep the requirements of the legislation pertaining to issuing notices (as above) to each individual premise stating what restrictions are placed onto their premises once the premises is confirmed as being contaminated and to avoid the payment of compensation as the business owner “did it voluntarily”?
Speaking to various takeaway owners, small shops and so on in an informal basis I am getting told time and time again in different council areas that the local Environmental Health Officer (EHO) comes in to inspect the premises and gives the owner a verbal OK to operate with the restrictions and precautions they have put in place. When I ask if the EHO gave them a notice stating this the said no, it was all verbal and the insinuation by the EHO was that either they would not be allowed to open or be closed down if they did not comply due to “coronavirus pandemic”.
This is outwith the EHO’s remit as the EHO, unless confirmed by the local authority as a “proper person” under the “coronavirus pandemic” legislation and has gone through the due process as stated in the legislation has no power to impose restrictions on the business.
Guidelines are just that, a guideline and advice. They are a matter of opinion on what is required but an opinion is not enforceable. To become more than an opinion it has to be judged in a court of law. A premises that ends up in court after an incident cannot use “I was just following the guidelines” as a valid defence as they are responsible for deciding what is required to operate safely on their premises and should have a risk assessment to prove they had thought about the risks and realised the guidelines were either too proscriptive, irrelevant or inadequate for their operations. The law does not state you have to bankrupt your company to follow guidelines, just put into place steps to make the operational risks “as low as reasonably practicable”. Bankrupting your business is not reasonable in any circumstances especially following guidelines that are not based on any solid foundation of fact or science.
6 – the trend for announcement to be made by central Government in press briefing etc and then the impression given by them and the MSM this pronouncement is “law” when it isn’t with Parliament and due process totally sidelined. Basically an edict from above direct to the people. In the legislation relating to public health that is being used to drive all this a lot of the responsibility is placed onto local authorities and Justice of the Peace with exact and strict sequences of steps to follow before imposing restrictions on individuals and businesses can be done and there is a right to appeal and to receive compensation. This is not happening and the legislation ignored.
This is included in the paperwork submitted recently requesting a judicial review.
7 – when did the justification for the imprisonment of the population change from “flatten the curve, save the NHS” to “new normal, vaccines for all” and so on? This is a huge change in the goalposts and targets and effectively means it will never end if so desired. The curve is flat, the NHS is “saved” so why continue this farce?
8 – Many independent researchers and scientists are ignored in favour of “experts” that are financially tied to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in an almost incestuous web of connections via the vaccines agenda, the industrial medical complex and the WHO. These include Vallance, Whitty, Ferguson, Hancock, Fauci, Birx in this country and the USA alone.Even Boris Johnson has written a newspaper article over the years stating his belief the world is overpopulated in 2008 and that appeared in the Daily Telegraph so cannot be counted as neutral in the matter.
Won’t hold my breath.
Brilliant points raised. You are living up to your pseudonym
Here in New Zealand takeaway shops will not take cash…How did we help you Brits push Rommel back in the Western Desert?
Similarly I will be writing to my MP I hope you don’t mind if I copy and paste your comments.
Feel free.
More and more it feels as if most world leaders are now Manchurian candidates (for China?).
How can any sane government continue down this self-destructive path for their nations? I simply cannot see any rational explanation for what is now happening.
I agree with your point about shops and takeaways,that is exactly what I have told aswell,local EHOs giving verbal say so on what is needed to allow continued trading and being told that without carrying out these measures they ‘may have to shut down’.Our local chinese takeaway,that has a 5 star rating by the council and has always been spotlessly clean,opened up a few weeks ago with only two persons allowed in the shop and staff wearing masks,but that wasn’t enough for the council,they have now had to install an expensive perspex screen across the counter.
Awesome!
Another thought from the heartless one (me).
By saving people from dying of COVID-19 are we saying that there are better ways to die? Or is it simply a case that this way of dying has arbitrarily chosen as being unnaceptable under any circumstances?
So while the world is made to suffer lockdown and all the collateral damage that comes with it, if some of these people die from other causes are we to say at least they didn’t die from the virus?
Thanks to the people my grandmother was allowed to die a proper death. Dementia is so much better than Coronavirus. Uncle John died of flu today but at least he got a few extra months. I’d rather he could have lived a bit longer so his cancer could kill him but under the circumstances I think flu is acceptable. Thanks everyone for your sacrifices.
It’s high time people started discussing death and how we deal with it more openly because if we don’t then I’m afraid this sort of thing is just going to carry on and like a virus possibly mutate into a more deadly form.
My condolences but from another heartless one, I agree that society is now scared of death that they prefer to give up on living rather than face up to it.
Quantity is preferred over quality but for me I do not want to live the last 20-40 years of my life on pills being kept alive by ever increasing medical interventions pills and potions living locked away in a home.
To me that isn’t living, you are just not dead yet and may take a long time about it.
Life is for living, you cannot be mollycoddled and protected from life forever (which the overbearing nannying state has got society to forget) and yes, I have lost ones I loved very much at a young age to accidents and illnesses but at least they had a full, interesting and enjoyable, if albeit short, life.
Friends and colleagues gone to in an instant over the years and it’s amazing I’ve made it into my 50s as I’ve had a few near misses.
I mourned them and got over it in time as you cannot brood forever. But I’ll never forget them.
You misunderstood. All my grandparents died long ago. I was merely using those as an example of the thinking. I should have made that clearer in my post. Apologies.
No worries, you still miss them though.
Just for clarity uncle John and the grandmother were just examples in my post.
https://youtu.be/iGTpumP6s58
I suppose the scientific advisers behind this Government Public Information Film would approve of the curret coronavirus advice being given to the government. Maybe in 80 odd years our descendants will be laughing.
Scraping the barrel stuff, even by the standards of the Daily Mail: “Men with longer ring fingers face a lower risk of dying from Covid-19 and are more likely to suffer mild symptoms, researchers claim.
Academics found coronavirus death rates in countries where men have shorter ring fingers were up to a third higher.
Ring finger length is determined by how much testosterone a foetus is exposed to when growing in the womb, the experts said.
The more testosterone a male is exposed to in the womb, the longer their ring finger will be, it is believed.” The alleged scientists probably believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden as well.
the academics – are they from Imperial College, by any chance?
Probably it’s just indirect correlation due to differences in the genetics of different countries (similar to the increased risk for more darkly coloured races – if I can use that term!).
Good god. These non scientists need culling, quickly. Because all these lockdown twats are being exposed each day for spouting shut they keep unearthing more random shit to justify anything remotely lockdown related. Next up, nose size, eye colour, pube length, bowel movement frequency, all linked to covid susceptibility
Shit, not shut
Pube length is true though. Numpty Neil Ferguson’s girlfriend can confirm it.
So he doesn’t shave?
To be fair, the result, if confirmed, could help elucidate why exactly men are on average worse affected by the disease – something that has had surprisingly little public attention. (Imagine if it had been the other way around!)
I haven’t bothered to look at the article to see how The Mail treats it, but the research itself sounds perfectly respectable. If it is a small step towards getting male mortality rates down to match female ones, let’s welcome it.
No lockdown Japan, what’s going on?:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan-just-beat-the-virus-without-lockdowns-or-mass-testing
This may be a little simplistic:
Japan & South Korea, no lockdown = hardly any deaths
NZ & Oz, lockdown = Similar result to Japan & SK but with lots of collateral damage
Sweden, no lockdown but with modest social distancing = relatively high death toll
UK, Spain, Italy, lockdown (fairly strict relative to Sweden) = Higher death toll and lots of collateral damage
What’s the case for lockdown again?
Japan is basically going back to life as before. Surely if they can do it then it’s possible elsewhere.
That’s interesting. Spanish TV quoted Abe yesterday as saying “we’ll have to get used to new ways of thinking, a new way of life”. More media lying then.
I think there will always be an element paranoia in case there’s a resurgence of the virus. Everyone will need to be ready to act relatively quickly. There will be some changes no doubt but they don’t have to be as drastic as what’s being proposed here and in other countries.
Thanks. Makes sense given what Toby and others have been saying about Japan.
Any idea what the Japanese media are saying?
Yes, Toby twists and turns remarkably at times!
Interestingly I see that Boris’s net approval rating has just gone negative (down almost 50% over the last 5 or 6 weeks!).
https://order-order.com/2020/05/26/boris-net-approval-goes-negative-government-approval-drops-16-points/
Just sent the following query to the 3 local councils in my area that I frequent:
To the Chief Environmental Health Officer,
Self-isolation being forced on individuals. It is not law. Is it just a way of avoiding having to follow due process in the legislation regarding isolation of infected individuals and having the local authority being liable for paying compensation as stated in the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984? It certainly seems so. All the authorities have to say is “they did it voluntarily” and they are off the hook for getting tests performed to confirm the exact infection as stated in the legislation (which is not possible as there is not one yet), having a proper person of the local authority write a notice as per the standards specified by the Secretary of Health, get a Justice of the Peace to sign the notice then it be served on the individual, the individual taken to hospital until well again and to pay the individual compensation.
Why are shops, takeaways etc bringing in social-distancing, one way systems, plastic screens etc when there is no law about this? Is it an attempt to sidestep the requirements of the legislation pertaining to issuing notices (as above) to each individual premise stating what restrictions are placed onto their premises once the premises is confirmed as being contaminated and to avoid the payment of compensation as the business owner “did it voluntarily”?
Speaking to various takeaway owners, small shops and so on in an informal basis I am getting told time and time again in different council areas that the local Environmental Health Officer (EHO) comes in to inspect the premises and gives the owner a verbal OK to operate with the restrictions and precautions they have put in place. When I ask if the EHO gave them a notice stating this the said no, it was all verbal and the insinuation by the EHO was that either they would not be allowed to open or be closed down if they did not comply due to “coronavirus pandemic”.
This is outwith the EHO’s remit as the EHO, unless confirmed by the local authority as a “proper person” under the “coronavirus pandemic” legislation and has gone through the due process as stated in the legislation has no power to impose restrictions on the business.
Guidelines are just that, a guideline and advice. They are a matter of opinion on what is required but an opinion is not enforceable. To become more than an opinion it has to be judged in a court of law. A premises that ends up in court after an incident cannot use “I was just following the guidelines” as a valid defence as they are responsible for deciding what is required to operate safely on their premises and should have a risk assessment to prove they had thought about the risks and realised the guidelines were either too proscriptive, irrelevant or inadequate for their operations. The law does not state you have to bankrupt your company to follow guidelines, just put into place steps to make the operational risks “as low as reasonably practicable”. Bankrupting your business is not reasonable in any circumstances especially following guidelines that are not based on any solid foundation of fact or science.
With this seemingly sidestepping of the legislation can you please the following information:
1 – the name of the “proper person” that is designated for this role
2 – how many notices has this person issued
3 – the names of the Justices of the Peace who countersigned the notices
4 – the actual reliable and accurate test used to confirm the individual or premises is infected or contaminated with the disease as stated
5 – how much compensation has been paid out to individuals and businesses by the local authority (Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council) under this legislation
6 – as notices must be posted on each individual premises closed or operating under restrictions under this legislation, how many have been posted as required as I have not seen one on any premises
I look forward to your answers and explanations of the above points.
Great questions!
So cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel? To quote Blackadder.
Found another way of correlating coronavirus to fatalities on the twatter feed coronabollocks:
https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1264223201955102727
Makes as much sense as the ring finger thing in the Daily Wail.
Again, I’ll defend the target from ridicule. I think that that graphic comes from a Tony Heller video, “Guilty – of breathing”, where he argues that Democrat governors, like the NHS, sent infected COVID cases to nursing homes, while Republicans did not. (I haven’t checked to see if he cherry-picked his data.) Cuomo actually issued an executive order in New York that a nursing home would be closed down if it refused transfers from hospitals, explicitly saying that infection status was not an acceptable reason for refusal.
So it is possible that that would have been clear if the tweet was in its original context. Candace Owen is a typical target for the Woke Left (being a prominent Young Black Female Trump supporter), so maybe the context was deliberately removed.
Somebody else posted the link further down the comments… But absolutely note that is is NO social distancing in the media witch hunt press pack after Cummings, and no social distancing when it comes to police either. They know it’s shote
This to me is the killer.
We can think what we like about Cummings, but know your greater enemy.
https://www.thelocal.no/20200522/norway-could-have-controlled-infection-without-lockdown-health-chief
There seem to be real epidemiologists not far from the UK
“The head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health believes Norway could have brought the coronavirus pandemic under control without a lockdown, and called for the country to avoid such far-reaching measures if hit by a second wave.”
Apparently a leaked letter/email showed that Norway decided to go into lockdown against the recommendations of the health experts. I’ve seen similar reports on Denmark too.
The evidence is mounting that lockdowns were politically motivated decisions.
Ooh have you got a link, where did you see that?
I’m sure there was a link in the comments thread here in previous days. I’m sorry I didn’t save the link.
I don’t think it was as positive as that. Rather:
You have plenty of loo paper.
But everybody else is buying loo paper.
So you buy loo paper.
And there is a panic.
Similarly:
You do not need a l.d.
But everybody else is imposing a l.d. …
Need I go on?
I think the decisions were political. Something along these lines:
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are No. 1 and No. 2. Whatever is No. 3 is far behind”.
Thomas Sowell, Economist
This is what happened in Germany too. The emergency planners recommended no lockdown – they were ignored in favour of the RKI’s forecast models. Sound familiar?
Sweden’s arse was saved by the fact they have a system that locks out central government aka politicians as soon as a state of emergency is declared. So the actual government DEPARTMENTS took over, what they recommended had to be implemented. Hence- no politics and no lockdown.
If shops implement all this anti-social distancing rubbish I won’t bother going into them!
The government must end this farce now and re-open everything.
I loathe going to the supermarket , and with social distancing I won’t be visiting the high street anytime soon.
Even Trip Advisor is fed up:
My dad just came round!!
First time I’ve seen him in over two months…
What has become of the world when just going about a normal life is now a threat to society?
Good on him/you.
He was so chuffed to be able to come round! AND his bowls club is open again!
Good on your dad!!!!
Good.
I think we all know a few of these ‘Blue Pill People’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC_lZLzCrOI&feature=youtu.be
Excellent, Offlands, thanks.
Now I have to work out which of my family/friends/neighbours won’t take it too personally if I forward it to them.
The WHO says a second wave is increasingly unlikely. Meantime, the imbeciles in the media focus on Cummings: https://twitter.com/ProfKarolSikora/status/1265232235705270272
That’s it. Know the real bigger enemy here, and hold them to account!
More Lockdown Lunacy:
Kurt Geiger will “quarantine” shoes that are tried on by customers for 24 hours
https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/05/kurt-geiger-to-quarantine-shoes-for-24hrs-as-it-gradually-reopens-stores-in-june/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020200526%20%20Facebook%20%20JO+CID_24e9a9f1c6b798532865b5a58f3a948a
Well that’s another shop I won’t be going to – never had done anyway as many of their shoes are impractical and overpriced.
Worth popping in just to try on a half-dozen pairs ?
And then walk out not buying anything? Might do that to take the mickey.
It does make you wonder … have the morons who set these rules ever actually been inside a shop?
I expect they have…but they want to be alone…all alone…and bankrupt….
This website has now got so many comments and commenters on it that my browser is struggling to return all the HTML…
Upgrade time again (already!)… or at least some lazy loading would be good
Heard the latest?
RNLI are not bothering to safeguard beaches.
Two people drown because RNLI does not save them.
RNLI tells government to ban everybody from beaches.
Will that include illegal migrants coming across the Channel? will the RNLI go out to save them if they get into trouble, and if the beaches are closed, will the migrants also be banned?
Who the fuck do the RNLI they think they are? They’ll be expecting Police powers next. If people want to swim in the sea and take a chance of drowning, let them.
How about they just do their fucking jobs. — Members of the public donate millions per year to the RNLI. Absolute disgrace.
Perhaps it’s time to stop donating. They’ve been taken over by the Social Justice Warriors anyway, who are more concerned about “sexist” cups used by the guys who man (!) the boats.
Pretty soon more teenagers will have been killed by cowardly lifeguards than the coronavirus.
I’m willing to bet there will be people out there saying they deserved it and making some dumb comment about Darwin Awards.
That will be the same people who claim these measures are necessary in order to save lives.
Just read a forum post that suggests based on a UCLA paper that found for unemployment reduced life expectancy by 1.5 years. This could mean 3.5 million premature deaths due to the lockdown, and the 5.25 million lost life years equates to 64,496 people dying based on the life expectancy in the UK for 2020:
https://lockdownsceptics.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=21&p=31#p31
Just knocked up the graphic below for sharing on social media. Any appetite for more of these?
That’s very good.
Sorry to rain on your parade but where are you getting those figures from? According to the ONS website there have been 4581 covid19 deaths of people under 65 in the UK so far. On the other hand thetotal road traffic deaths for 2019 were 1870. So you are 3 times more likely to die from Covid19.
It’s good to spread information promoting the cause, but not misinformation.
But how many had underlying health issues? (the commenter stipulates that)
Yes that did cross my mind but in that case you would need a figure for RTA deaths with no underlying health issues as well, otherwise you are comparing apples and pears.
Note also that the RTA figures were also for a full year, so the figure to June would be likely half of that (making the covid19 ratio worse).
No, health issues most likely isn’t relevant for RTAs, it’s legitimate just to give a general population risk, as a rough guide. As you say, the comparison should be half the annual RTA toll against the deaths (ideally) due to covid not with covid, to people with no underlying serious conditions (ie the group targeted by the comment).
Well… OK. But @PaulParanoia may be using monthly figures – it is you who is quoting yearly. Maybe PP has a calculator and has divided by 12!
Great points Max.
I started with 4,267 from Week 19 of the ONS figures.
You have to dig deeper into the ONS website to find the data related to pre-existing conditions. You can see this information broken down by age by downloading the data for figure 11 here … https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/deathsoccurringinapril2020. Elsewhere the ONS says pre-existing conditions were present in 90.6% of moralities.
That left me with 401 deaths under 65 with no pre-existing conditions.
It does look like I messed up the road traffic figures though. You are correct about the 1870 figure giving us 4.7 times the risk. I also didn’t account for the traffic figures being a whole year. So we really end up with just over twice the risk. I’ll update the graphic and re-post here.
Updated graphic.
Nice one, Paul.
Just to be absolutely accurate though you need to check the 90.6% applies to the under 65’s and is not skewed by the oldies.
Also you need to multiply the RTA figure by the % of healthy (no underlying conditions) people in the general population – otherwise you are not comparing the same cohort (if we’d said “children” instead of “no underlying conditions” you will see why that makes sense).
That said, I think your “more than twice” statement probably stands up, so good to go with that.
Looking at the ONS data again it appears their numbers don’t add up. They show 6,471 people under 70 dying of Covid to the end of week 19. While for the months of March and April they show a total of 6,697 under 70s died with pre-existing conditions. So 103% of deaths had pre-existing conditions!
Maybe some of the April / May pre-existing condition deaths were wrongly classed as Covid-19 and were later removed from the weekly figures.
If the ONS can’t get their numbers to line up, what hope do we have.
That’s very good, thank you!
Updated graphic to correct the mistake pointed out by Max.
Someone posted this on Brendan O’Neill’s Facebook page:
A great T-shirt!
It would make a great poster or sticker as well
Regarding the Cummings incident:
“When the people giving us these orders do not follow them themselves, they are not showing themselves to be “hypocrites”. They are showing themselves to be liars. They are admitting they don’t really believe what they’re saying….
If I tell you you shouldn’t eat chocolate, because it will make your head explode, then I take your chocolate off you and eat it – you wouldn’t think “You hypocrite! You fool! That could make your head explode!”, would you?
You’d be far more likely to think “Hey, he lied to me so he could steal my chocolate.”
(To fully complete the metaphor there needs to be a third person there, saying “but chocolate never made our heads explode before”, and being roundly insulted by the other two as a “Chocolate Denier”, who “just wants people’s heads to explode!”)”
From https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/26/the-real-meaning-behind-dominic-cummings-breaking-lockdown/
It’s a fair point. I maintain the real issue though should be that Cummings was one of the Guilty Men who imposed lockdown on all of us.
Shouldn’t everyone here just want him out of government, by any means and on whatever pretext, if only so we can move on to the next target? I certainly do, and I’m generally in sympathy with his wider politics.
I think the above article is saying that Cummings is one of the architects of the policy.
If he is removed now, it won’t be for the right reasons, and the public will lose the resentment for the lockdown that they are currently feeling because of him. Keeping him in his position will encourage more people to begin to ignore the lockdown – not simply ‘break’ the lockdown; but fundamentally stop believing in it. So I am happy if he stays, for now.
I don’t think so. Certainly it doesn’t explicitly use the “distraction” as a pretext to argue for him staying in place, as some here seem to be doing. As far as I can tell it’s just saying that the issues themselves (did he obey the lockdown or not) are a distraction from what him breaking the lockdown means – he didn’t believe in it.
Which is true in a sense, but again the article’s point itself is a distraction from what surely should be the real point here, which is the absolutely fundamental one I made just now – he is one of the Guilty Men. Don’t we want him out, ffs?
Yes, it would be great if we could have him removed for the “right reasons” – that lockdown was a catastrophic piece of governmental incompetence on a historic scale. When exactly are you expecting that to happen, if he survives this issue?
Seems to me to be a classic case of making the perfect the enemy of the good to me (though I think some of the people making these arguments are just trying to protect a mate or an ally, because that’s actually more important to them than nailing one of the Guilty Men).
Keeping him in place to do continuing damage is a legitimate argument, though how much more damage is there to be done to the lockdown by this? The lockdown itself has moved on from what it was when he ignored it. The ongoing damage is not now to the lockdown itself but to the people trying protect him.
Agree. What DC has done in effect is to shout (on behalf of the government) “hey look, you can’t trust anything we say to you”.
Now some lockdown sceptics may take this as a victory, showing that “look, we couldn’t trust them to tell us the truth about lockdown, so it’s all null and void”.
The problem with that is, the lockdown believe can just say “we cannot trust you to tell us when it’s safe”, and we end up with stalemate instead of people moving forward together.
I can see the argument that says that if he is the main motivator for the whole thing, then if he is removed then that motivation goes too. And also that the resentment will fade anyway by next week and DC will be forgotten again. So best to get rid of the source of the lockdown poison.
But in this case, I think that the lockdown mindset is endemic throughout the whole lot of them. You just had to hear that government advisor called Reicher immediately saying that “People will die” because of Cummings remaining in post to understand that it’s best to leave him in place. Not so that people will die, of course, but because we know they won’t die, and we need that to be seen.
So start picking them off, one by one. I mean, if you are going to let one you’ve got in your sights go because “he’s not all of them”, what possible plan is there for making the Guilty Me pay a real price ever, at all?
Or do we just let them all “move on” and “look forwards” and “be constructive”?
If Cummings remains, he can only do so because most people (other than the usual suspects) get bored of the story. And once most people are bored of the story there’s no more of the kind of damage you are claiming as the purpose of keeping him on, by definition.
Maybe. But as the article linked to above is saying, if you claim the scalp of a ‘hypocrite’ it is not the same as saying that the whole lockdown is a charade. You’ve just removed an individual scalp and not cast any doubt on the lockdown as a policy. Alternatively, if you can show the people that the reason for the lockdown is a lie and maybe you’re in business.
Removing the Guilty Men from power one by one is surely better than nothing, which is the alternative on offer. It’s the only meaningful political victory that’s available at the moment to people who genuinely mean what they say about the importance of lockdown.
Getting them sacked for perpetrating the lockdown itself, or to admit error, simply is not on the table atm and likely won’t be for some time.
Either do something concrete now when you have the opportunity, or decline the opportunity because some of the target’s mates want to protect him. That’s what’s really at issue here.
“<i>Alternatively, if you can show the people that the reason for the lockdown is a lie and maybe you’re in business.</i>”
That’s in the bag already as far as it can be achieved from the Cummings business. If Cummings survives, as I said above, it can only be because people get bored and move on.
No. I disagree.
He may have been part of the government who imposed this lockdown, but that wasn’t his first instinct. Don’t forget that everyone was freaking out of the first policy of allowing “herd immunity” to take place, and not a Chines Communist Party-style lockdown. The government ministers were panicked into it by the apocalyptic predictions of Ferguson.
Plus: a friend of ours died from this virus last week, which he acquired whilst in hospital being treated for a bad bronchial infection a few weeks earlier. During his first admission he was tested negative for the Wuhan virus, but when he was readmitted the second time, he was positive. The only place he could have caught it, according to his wife who is a retired NHS nurse, is in the hospital.
It’s a nasty viral disease, which clearly is fatal to those who are vulnerable.
With Boris and Cummings having both contracted it, they will have seen its effects up close and very personal. Boris ended up in hospital. They’re going to view it differently from those of us who haven’t been affected.
If you take Cummings out of the picture, they will go after Boris next, and whoever cooked up the plan to extend the Brexit transition period will seize their opportunity to put that plan back into action. We will not get out of the EU, ever, unless it collapses.
“He may have been part of the government who imposed this lockdown, but that wasn’t his first instinct. “
Oh come on! “Protect the holy NHS at all costs” has Cummings’ political management fingerprints all over it. He’s even openly admitted supporting the lockdown, as I understand it.
Ar you really going to try to pretend Cummings and Johnson were somehow innocent of the lockdown crime!?
“If you take Cummings out of the picture, they will go after Boris next“
Good. What part of “he imposed lockdown on us” don’t you understand?
Find another “Conservative” Party MP who’s sound on Brexit to lead the government, ffs! Make these f****rs pay a real price for lockdown.
I have to agree. Maybe Boris is intelligent on one level, but I do believe that his listening to Ferguson et al. shows him to be very stupid on another. And that combined with his general shiftiness and untrustworthiness (that I previously forgave because he was funny) means that he is dead to me now…
His old chums at university, Tobes and Delingpole, have a far better understanding of how science works – and fails – than he does.
I don’t know about anyone else, but this afternoon I officially lost it.
I had to go around a maze in the tiny village shop to find a condolence card for a friend who died last week of the Wuhan virus. There were no such cards that I could see. Ok. On to Tesco to return a couple of items, luckily with no queuing as there weren’t many shoppers there, which is unusual for that store. But there’s still the maze to get through to get to the self-checkouts, half of which weren’t working, and the rest had screens between them to stop the virus spread. Presumably.
Then on to B&Q to return some wallpaper. There was a small queue, but I was already getting extremely irritated at all the queuing, arrows, tape, obstructions, etc etc etc, so when I was told that I had to take a trolley in with me, despite the fact that I didn’t want one, which meant I had to touch something I didn’t need or want to, I was told I couldn’t go in the store without a trolley, “for social distancing” and it was “company policy”.
That was the last straw and when I lost it and refused to take a trolley and wind my way through whatever maze they’d constructed in the store to get to another long queue at the checkouts. We left, being told by some jobsworth at the till to “stay at home” which I answered with a very heartfelt couple of swear words which amounted to telling her to go forth and multiply.
I didn’t get my money back, of course, and I’m not sure I can stand all this social distancing blx and all the literal tape everywhere. Whether the rest of the public is going to put up with this when the weather is bad, I do wonder, or if everyone will have become so used to it, like living in Soviet Russia, I don’t know.
Ok, rant over.
This will only ever change if we can convince the companies involved that they will lose more business by imposing this nonsense than by not being seen to take the panic seriously.
It will only change if there are enough of us to convince them. I don’t think there is. The people of this country are far too soft and accomodating. They’ll grumble and complain when the weather turns horrible, assuming all these measures stay in place that long. I worry that people will just get used to it.
I’m certainly not going back to that store in a hurry, that’s for sure, but now have to figure out what to do with a spare roll of wallpaper that I don’t need….
We can chip away at it by telling staff in the shops as we leave that we are leaving because of their coronapanic measures and will be shopping elsewhere. It might eventually get passed on. And we can write letters saying the same.
You’re right that at the moment there are too few of us and too many coronahysterics, But we have to start somewhere. If nothing else, at least it starts to get across that there are actually costs in terms of customer relations as well as benefits, in all the coronapanic theatre stuff.
Put it on freecycle! Then you will be doing someone a favour if they need wallpaper.
Our Tesco has all the tape and crap but actually lets people in continuously so there’s little or no queue and it’s often quite busy in there. So this has become the first choice of shop. Probably also why it’s quite crowded. Other shops can cater for people who would rather queue up all day. It’s a free market.
As long as there’s flexibility allowed by the local government enforcers, people will eventually vote with their feet and the companies will have to respond.
Send child/teenager to return it for you ? Suitable bribe, or a percentage !
I am seriously wondering now if all this nonsense in shops is really necessary for health reasons, or whether it is simply the government trying to reassure the numpties who are still hiding behind their sofas, that it is safe to come out? Trying to reassure them? If so, let’s hope the whole idea gets put into the newest dustbin as soon as possible.
It’s definitely not necessary for health. Whether the government thinks it is or not is another question.
Most likely, it appears, the government are the numpties on this…
i think i dislike the Hairy Bikers more than the lockdown
I have to share this immediately. It is not new so apologies if you have already seen it:
‘What is notable is that these patterns of difference in response to COVID-19 seem to directly mirror differences in late life expectancy, in general. After the age of sixty five, men have shorter life expectancies, African Americans have shorter life expectancies and people with co-morbidity have shorter life expectancies. It seems a reasonable hypothesis to suggest that COVID-19 is like a magnifying glass, amplifying but not fundamentally altering the chronology of life and death nor the impact of social divisions.’
http://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2020/05/20/covid-19-amplifies-but-doesnt-alter-the-chronology-of-life-and-death/
So Covid 19 mortality is just like normal mortality by age, only bigger?
If you then take out collateral damage from health systems with too little surge capacity overwhelmed by panic; aggressive, inappropriate treatments doing more harm than good to the elderly and infirm; the effects of discharging large numbers of the elderly and infirm from hospitals to make way for covid 19 patients that never turn up; what you are left with may very well turn out to be…….you got there before me.
Any public enquiry (now required sooner rather than later) should be given the title:
‘Oh For Heaven’s Sake!’
It has occurred to me before that if SARS-Cov-2 was simply a harmless ‘marker virus’, we might well see exactly what we have seen.
The problem with any public enquiry is that it will probably start with the assumption that a lock-down was necessary and conclude that it should have started sooner.
I’d be amazed if any enquiry actually looked into the question of whether lock-downs work or if they do more harm than good.
I’m not so sure about that. Once the death toll from collateral damage starts mounting up there will be a lot of angry families demanding answers.
I’m hoping that people like David Davis won’t let go of it.
These idiot journalists are at it again. Nothing but Cummings questions. Good for Matt Hancock, he’s just swatting the clowns down one by one. His dismissal of Peston was classic.
So now defending Cummings has got you on the side of the people who imposed the lockdown, on this issue at least.
Personally I’m wallowing in absolute hatred for Cummings and the press and Matt Handjob and pretty much everyone atm. There are no heroes. Handjob beating the press down out of self interest is nothing to be admired even if they are hack scumbags.
Well…..My furlough time officially ended today, & I returned to my work (which closed on the 24th of March) & I need to say, this Covid 19 business policy is utter nonsense. I work in a manufacturing plant (it makes non essential things) & it’s utter bollocks now.
Before my shift started, I was given a little digital thermometer, which I have to place under my tongue (every morning before I start my shift & after I have clocked in) to get my temperature. This is then noted down by someone (it was 34.8) then I also now need to wear one of those stupid blue face masks that you see some people wearing when out shopping etc.
It’s truly horrible, & to be expected to wear one for 8 hours every day is utter nonsense. & due to the stupid Covid 19 business policy, my work has done away with the vending machine & kettle in the canteen & also the water vending machines in the factory now have NO paper cups, you need to now bring your own bottle or cup to have a drink of water!!
Oh & only 3 people at a time are allowed in the canteen also….oh & I am not allowed to go out the way I go in when I am finished my shift, I need to go out the main entrance now.
What utter nonsense this is. I will not be doing this forever, I can assure you of that.
Boris, you are a fucking Twat, As are you Sturgeon, all this over a common flu virus????
Twats.
Not sure they can force you to wear a mask if you have existing breathing issues !
If anyone tries to make me wear one in a warehouse I tell them I can’t breathe cause of my hayfever
Again, I don’t have hay fever, but…I might develop that…or Asthma
Hay fever can indeed come on later in life, for people who’ve never had it before.
Ideal…duly noted. Thank you John
Yup. I didn’t have any symptoms until my mid20s
Really? See…I don’t have any known health issues, but when I spoke with my sister about it today, she said tell my work that I suffer from Asthma & I won’t need to wear it. But my work has my medical form that I filled in when I started & I never mentioned anything about having Asthma (because I don’t have it) would that actually work? Because I genuinely don’t want to wear one, today was horrible.
work really slow telling them you can’t get a good breath and you feel a bit lightheaded. Take plenty of breaks for twenty minutes at a time to clear your head. Do everything and anything to mess their nonsense up.
Good idea also Biker, I will actually consider doing that.
I would certainly record all the symptoms you’ve experienced this evening – shortness of breath, coughing up phlegm, soreness around the mouth and nose, etc.
How do you get on with your GP – would he/she be sympathetic ?
I’d just say “No thanks, asthma.”. And see where it goes from there. Got any colleagues with allergies/ asthma/hay fever/ bronchitis ?
I don’t really see my doctor often, infact, I cannot remember the last time I did. Long time ago though. I might actually try the hay fever one, as it’s seriously not good wearing a mask. Cheers for the suggestion John.
So they’ve stopped cups of tea because of Covid?? It just seems to be a cover-all excuse for any random shittiness these days.
Apparently they are a source of contracting coronavirus, that’s what I was told…it’s utter bollocks though, my kettle in my house has never been a source of infection, like ever. As for the vending machine in my house….I’m kidding, but I agree with you guy153, it’s disguised as coronavirus policy, but is more than likely random shittyness by the company, but they are just going with the Covid 19 business guidance apparently….
34.8 deg C – that is low, better see a doctor as it’s a couple of degrees below normal. new coronavirus symptom?
It might have been 36.8, I feel fine…I will pay more attention to it tomorrow
maybe the thermometer was broken?…or I do have a new coronavirus symptom…
me bad.
I was stunned at having to do it in the first place.
Infact tomorrow, I might just jog to work (I don’t normally do any jogging) & go in all sweating & out of breath…
34.8 is technically hypothermia (core body temperature), in my day you had to be trained to take and record temperatures, clearly a life-threatening Killer Virus means that good medical practice goes out the window
Just listened to the daily briefing, first time since early April. The plan for track & trace lockdown sound terrifying, If you are in contact with someone who tests positive you will be contacted and told to isolate, but you will not be told who you have been in contact with.
That just sounds like it is designed to make life, and especially work life nigh on impossible.
Isolate for two weeks, go back to work, rub shoulders with someone else who is positive, off work again.
What about people who are in high risk groups, diabetics, people with hear disease, etc. Are they going to be able to do work where they mix with others?
How are employers going to be able to afford to do this?
Mad, mad, mad world.
Did they say if you had to download the app? I’m not doing it unless they make me!
Ditto.
They did not say, but I think they said T&T would be active from 1st June.
I will resist, like most on here I would have thought, masks, vaccines & apps.
You do not have to download the app whatever anyone says.
Not yet anyway!
They would have to give me a smart-phone first anyway. My PAYG Nokia is about 20 years old, used perhaps 30 times and quite incapable of anything smarter than actually phoning someone. Just as I like it!
Me too Ian. My trusty Nokia is only 10 years old though.
Everyone will realise it’s ridiculous before they even start. And not d/l the app. Hopefully.
Plus like have they said how they are gonna enforce this BS? Are they gonna send a few police round to your house every few days to check you’re there? Or could you just leave your phone at home and go put anyway?
— They know it’s complete lunacy. They’re just having to set all this crap up to make people feel ‘safe’. But trist me convenience will soon tump safety once people start having to lock themselves up again every two weeks.
Has the data protection side of it been sorted yet?
Forgive me, I don’t watch the briefings because I get shouty and throw things . . . so how does this track and trace work? How do they actually find you? Is it still via a mobile phone app or have they given up on that? I can see me starting to leave my mobile phone at home very soon . . .
Is Track and Trace going to be compulsory? Ie that by law everyone must download the app?
I don’t think the app is, but the army of contract tracers will be coming for you by phone….. and how do they get your phone number, pray tell?
Good luck getting hold of me, I don’t answer unknown numbers. And I sure as shit aren’t returning their call if they leave a message.
Nope, mad, mad, mad politicians. It really is the lunatics in charge.
And all for a virus that’s on it’s last legs.
Today’s little victory. In Sains weighing my loose fruit and veg some blue mask wearing young numpty (male) attempted to engage me in conversation from approx 3m – presumably to be on the safe side. Initially I ignored him but after his 2nd attempt I couldn’t resist. So I told him – “take off the mask, move closer then we can talk”. He declined my offer and fled. It felt good!
As I’m slightly hard of hearing, I have trouble understanding what is being said if the speaker is wearing a mask anyway. It comes out muffled, and as I have to lip read quite often, it can be a real problem. This is genuine by the way, not just me being awkward – for once! LOL
Here you go, Carrie. BBC’s got you covered:
Coronavirus: Call for clear face masks to be ‘the norm’
Somebody posted on one of the Newspaper comments sections that NHS staff can sign up for overtime then call in sick with suspected CV and still get paid the OT.
Anyone linked to NHS able/willing to confirm this?
I know the Mail does like to use any pretext available to get sex and scantily clad females onto its site (that nurse in lingerie story from Russia is still lingering on the international front page a week later), but I must admit I found this one funny:
Sex workers offer to limit customers to two positions which ‘minimise the risk of transmitting coronavirus’ to enable brothels to end lockdown in Switzerland
“It comes as Switzerland’s adult industry has been heavily hit by the pandemic, after the government placed a temporary ban on prostitution two months ago to help stop the spread of the virus.
The plan to reopen the industry, prepared by the organisation ProKoRe, suggests that sex positions which allow for a safe distance between faces, such as ‘doggy style’ and ‘reverse cowgirl’, are advisable. “
Just watched this (was on last night)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000jjh1/unprecedented-series-1-episode-1
This is the first decent covid related thing to come out of BBC. And the third story is a cracker… could be a documentary!!!