One reason that go-slow BoJo is taking his sweet time over lifting lockdown is to allow himself enough time (frankly, more than enough) to see the impact of each change before making the next.
A Covid surge was, naturally, predicted by Government scientific advisers when schools went back in March. Has that happened? Not even a ripple. In fact, since mass testing in schools began in early March the positive rate has hit a floor of 0.4% (presumably a lot to do with the false positive rate). Are any of these advisers embarrassed by their failed predictions that threatened the education of our children? If so, we’ve not heard.
To be fair, in February, SPI-M member Mark Woolhouse (one of the more heretical ones) told MPs he wasn’t expecting a surge as schools returned, since schools don’t drive the epidemic. “One of the stated reasons for keeping schools closed was to avoid some surge in cases when they open – that’s never happened across western Europe,” he said. Which begs the question: why were schools closed to “avoid some surge in cases when they open” if this has never happened? And why now are children subject to wearing masks all day and constant testing and having to self-isolate whenever they (or a classmate) gets a false positive? Is it all “just in case”?
Perhaps more significant, though, is that this no-show of a surge occurred despite the UK being dominated by the British Covid variant, as the graph below shows, which the Government says is more deadly and more contagious.
New ONS data published on Friday (see graph below) shows that new daily infections in the winter peaked around December 26th – 10 days before the lockdown on January 5th that we were told needed to be “tough enough” to contain the new mutant variant.
So, the new variant that was supposed to be 50% more transmissible than its predecessor goes into decline just as it becomes dominant, 10 days before lockdown and immediately after Christmas. This is the opposite of a Christmas surge – it’s a post-Christmas plummet!
No schools surge, no Christmas surge, and the British variant in decline well over a week before lockdown. None of these facts is “right”, none of them fits the mainstream narrative, whereby dangerous new variants are the reason we must stay locked down even as we are vaccinated.
A similar story is repeated in Denmark. Back at the start of February, epidemiologists with their models of doom were sounding the alarm about the coming flood from the British variant, reputedly so contagious that lockdowns could barely contain it. Here’s the alarmist report in Science magazine published on Feb 3rd.
On its face, the curve of COVID-19 infections in Denmark looks reassuring enough. A nationwide lockdown has led numbers to plummet from more than 3,000 daily cases in mid-December 2020 to just a few hundred now. But don’t be fooled. “Sure, the numbers look nice,” says Camilla Holten Møller of the Statens Serum Institute, who heads a group of experts modeling the epidemic. “But if we look at our models, this is the calm before the storm.”
That’s because the graph really reflects two epidemics: one, shrinking fast, that’s caused by older variants of SARS-CoV-2, and a smaller, slowly growing outbreak of B.1.1.7, the variant first recognised in England and now driving a big third wave of the pandemic there. If B.1.1.7 keeps spreading at the same pace in Denmark, it will become the dominant variant later this month and cause the overall number of cases to rise again, despite the lockdown, Holten Møller says. “It is a complete game changer.”
The same is likely happening in many countries without being noticed. But a massive virus-sequencing effort has allowed Denmark, a country of 5.8 million, to track the rise of the new COVID-19 variant more closely than any other country. “All eyes are on Denmark right now,” says Kristian Andersen, an infectious diseases researcher at Scripps Research who is advising the Danish Government. “When it comes to B.1.1.7, is there a way in which… we can prevent the kind of calamity that we have seen in the U.K. and Ireland, for example?” he asks.
The Danish Government had already tightened restrictions in December and January, closing schools, hospitality and leisure, reducing the cap on gatherings from 10 to five and doubling the distancing requirement from one to two metres. Yet the British variant was still, a month later, estimated to be growing exponentially, with R at 1.07.
So what happened after the epidemiologists’ predictions on February 3rd? The British variant did indeed continue to grow in dominance, as the graph above shows. But what about positive cases? Precipitous decline.
Nothing – completely flat from the start of February. Furthermore, far from the “super-contagious” British variant driving a surge as it arrived, its emergence at the start of January coincided with the plummeting of infections.
None of this is right. None of it fits the narrative about a super-contagious, super-deadly British variant. None of it was predicted by the modellers or anticipated by the Government ministers who listen to them.
Perhaps somebody should tell them.
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After a full year of stellar accuracy from these models, this is very surprising indeed!
I hope the sarcasm is evident…
there seems to be some other kind of virus going around that has stopped people actually thinking for themselves… it is more dangerous than covid and I am not sure that there exists a vaccine for it
There are prophylactic ways of reducing the risk, like switching off the propaganda, to start with.
I’ve been saying similar. It’s more of a mental defect than a virus. we don’t watch live TV or use mobile phones perhaps that makes a difference.
It isn’t a joke. I don’t watch tv news, I don’t read newspapers, i don’t listen to the radio. I seem to be immune. My whole family is immune. Around us, everyone is going crazy.
I think it may be genetic. I’d like to see a study of football fans vs covid true believers. I bet there is a perfect correspondence. Herd followers love a herd.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the reason for lifting the lockdown so slowly is so the Government has time to setup the infrastructure for their Covid-status certifications. Don’t be at all surprised if the timing of the avaiability of these coincides with lockdown restrictions being lifted.
If they lift lockdown too early, there will be no pretext to roll out these “freedom passes”.
I have been looking at the necessary data architecture. To do all that they are suggesting – particularly including a verified photograph – seems impossible with current govt databases. They don’t have a unique identifier that spans NHS and the passport office, for example. Plus of course not everyone has a passport. Names and addresses change, and data validation across all these networks would be a nightmare – which means scope for fake papers of course, which is good. It seems to me that they need to probably use the Government Gateway instead, and bounce people into voluntarily creating an account, if they don’t have one, and either adding a verified photo source via passport or DVLA, OR allow linkage to a verified social media account. I suspect this last one might be the objective.
By doing this, start and corporations gain that connectivity, via YOU. We then also have the necessary connectivity for a post-lockdown social compliance app, like the Chinese.
The only good news is 1) this is going to take a while and 2) There will be great gaping holes, and the existing armies of corrupt workers at DVLA, Passport Office, HMRC etc will see a new route for issuing dodgy documents.
Ironically, below the radar, you’ll have various government departments wanting reassurance that they can continue to cheat the system. Take, for example, the Witness Protection Scheme, where it’s vital to be able to “migrate” an individual’s identity, often to that of someone of the same approximate age who died in childhood. You can’t expect the Home Office to welcome a scheme that might make such moves more visible…
True, but I imagine they are not expecting a perfect system from v1. It could be full of holes as long as it’s workable for enough people to use and accept it, while they flesh out a more sophisticated system. As long as they have some way to back-fill records of existing jabs into the final system, they might be able to jerry-rig something on the back of the track & trace app, with some sort of paper certificate as a back up. It is extremely ambitious for the timescale, but I suspect they may have been working on this for quite a while already.
Longer-term, it looks like they are heading towards this digital identity framework that everything will hang off:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uk-digital-identity-and-attributes-trust-framework/the-uk-digital-identity-and-attributes-trust-framework
That would essentially tie everything together – health, finance, education, social media (assuming facebook et al require a link to your digital ID) etc enabling total surveillance and control (via having the “wrong” status for things).
It is also because the vaccines are licensed as an emergency medication – no emergency no need to push for the whole population – children included – to be vaccinated.
The reason for the expansive spread in the UK Dec and Jan, was the infection control or lack of it in UK hospitals. The cover up of our NDS service from our media to our population, seems very much to have extended to the powers that be in Europe, from the revolting Merkel down.
Our lad Ferguson remember at the announcement of the Kent variant, suggested that this variant would be more dangerous to children, ravenously fed on by the teaching unions. Yet again totally false.
Surely these leaders are not so stupid and are just following an agenda. The Kent variant barely differs from the original, they all must know that.
‘yet again’ being the operative phrase. Why is nobody sitting up and acknowledging the total incompetence of Ferguson? It beggars belief! Vote of no confidence in F now!
Ferguson is not incompetent – he is providing the results his sponsors require
But when, with hindsight the reality does not match the modelling and is very evident and tallies with a history of mismatch; how does that help his sponsors? All it does is make him look like a puppet.
He is a puppet of the Agenda 21 and 30 . Look it up.
I think its 2 or 3 irrelevant base pairs out of 30,000 for Sars-Cov-2 RNA.
As far as I understand, human DNA forensics depends on each of us having slightly different collection of base pairs that hold no useful information and readily mutate (so we’re all different), basically “rubbish” DNA. This has no effect on our makeup whatsoever, still 2 arms, 2 legs, a head etc – except for the rare unlucky ones.
Drug peddlers will tell you immunity from vaccinations is more effective than from natural immunity – BS!
Perhaps somebody should tell them.
They know.
About the most benign explanation for this shitshow is that it is all a vaccine scam. Other explanations are far less palatable.
What about the use of circular arguments to justify their crap ideas? Any sign of those yet? Maybe they are now so embarrassed that they try to move on and sweep it under the carpet.
Thank you for one of the best article ever about the unreliability of the models. It seems that when a variant start exploding it displaces the other being more succesfull and inevitable question.Why? Most likely being less severe giving the virus a further advantage of spreading even more.If this happens in a younger population not much impact on excess mortality
If you look at both the UK Kent variant curve and the SouthAfrican South African variant curve they are both very cassical sharp Barr curves going up and the down quickly.
Agree, it’s an excellent article. Thanks Will.
Most likely being less severe giving the virus a further advantage of spreading even more.
If it’s more infectious it would have more chance of surviving lockdown. In fact a new more infectious variant may be a result of lockdown.
It seems to be like tracking the first cyclists in a much larger peloton of cyclists travelling down a mountain and up a mountain on the other side. It’s an elite race so the cyclists are all of similar ability. It’s early in the day and the gradients are shallow so the cyclists stay together and are just cycling along at an easy to maintain pace. Observe what colour jerseys the lead cyclists are wearing and how fast they cycle.
Teams cycle together within the pack, and you may end up with cyclists with different colour jerseys at the front. Perhaps near the bottom of the descent a team in red jerseys from the Kent Veloriant Cycling team gradually move to the front for a bit and stay there for some time.
What is controlling how fast they travel down the road is the gradient of the mountain going down and the gradient of the mountain going up, not which team is at the front. They speed up as they go down the mountain and they slow down going up the mountain on the other side.
Now imagine the red coloured Kent Veloriant cycling team had decided not to go the front. It may be some blue jerseyed South African teams that go to the front or some yellow jerseyed Brazilian teams or some green jerseyed teams from the South West of England. They still travel at an almost identical speed down the hill and back up the other side as when the red team were leading the pack. It’s the gradient that controls the place not who is at the front.
The equivalence is that we have a virus spreading that increases in prevalence as we head into winter due to seasonality and then reduces in prevalence as we come out of winter because of seasonality and immunity (like speed increases going down and decreases going up the mountain). It may be that a particularly variant, the Kent variant becomes almost completely predominant (the red team coming to the front near the bottom of the hill) and it may very marginally be more transmissible than other variants. But that is virtually irrelevant to how fast the virus spreads overall. That is controlled by seasonality and immunity.
So trying to keep new viral variants out of the country is a bit like trying to stop the red team going to the front of the cycle race. The race still travels along at the same pace. And trying to control different variants is completely pointless. They are all about as transmissible.
Or as Swedenborg describes it in a single word, displacement.
I guess they are trying to “hide the decline”. We’ve been here before. We will be here again.
The early summer press campaign about the comings and goings of Dominic Cummings was to ‘hide the decline’ in the Covid towards the end of the ‘first spike’.
They even tried to revive interest in Madeleine McCann to distract us from the decline in hospitalisations but gave up after a few days because the most maddening obsessive realised there was no new news.
Why are they lying to us?
Because they are politicians?
I really think that this site shouldn’t bang on about and perpetuate the pure mythology of ‘dangerous’ variants.
I reproduced the ONS graph for England above from their own accompanying data yesterday, as you can see more clearly what has happened in terms of prevalence of new PCR positives.
You can see from this prevalence reached its maximum for the week 20th-26th December (shown in red). So falling new PCR+ prevalence before the national lockdown.
The press seems keen on publishing graphs showing an ‘alarming’ rise in ‘covid’ deaths from late 2020 onwards. Are you in a position to create such a graph with ‘non-covid’ deaths as a separate curve? I suspect there will be an interesting difference for the early 2020 pandemic versus the late 2020 ‘pseudo-epidemic’. I would expect both ‘c’ and ‘n-c’ deaths to increase, at different rates, for the early pandemic plus lockdown effects, and for the two (‘c’ versus ‘n-c’) to be inversions (more or less) of each other in the ‘pseudo-epidemic’ stage.
This is the non-covid and covid reported deaths from weekly ONS data for England and Wales. Some of the zig zags (such as Christmas 2020) are due to bank holidays affecting reported deaths.
I’ll let you explain the charts.
I don’t get this obsession with ‘variants’. So far the virus evolution seems to be following the same trajectory of all viral epidemics: they evolve to be more infectious but less lethal. Obsessing over minor peaks and troughs of variants is a crazy as following the FTSE 100 stock index and getting excited about minor rises and falls.
Fear mongering!
They try to imply that the next variant ‘could be like Ebola!’ while failing to point out that Ebola is a rubbish virus because, while nasty if you do get it, the disease itself has no robustness once out of its human host and thus perishes as soon as it has killed off the immediate host population.
It won’t be Ebola. Russia has a vaccine for that.
It is strange that they seem to know something bad is coming and almost exactly what form it will take, yet make no plans to counter it. Russia and China have been building isolation hospitals just in case, and as a way of not overwhelming normal medical facilities. Yet the nearest thing we have, the Nightingale hospitals, are being demolished. Perhaps the wrong kind of isolation was specified in the project plans – they seem to be so isolated that no-one could get there to use them.
Anyway, whatever happens if things do go that way, I’m sure the answer will be more untested vaccines.
The whole lockdown system is based on the 1984 Health Act which allows for such stringent measures in the case of a ‘substantial and imminent threat’, but the situation has to be assessed every 4 weeks to confirm the emergency still exists. Hence the periodic emergence of ‘alarming’ ‘issues of concern’ …. flatten the curve, masks to protect the workers, increasing cases (of asymptomatic people), increasing infections, new variants in the UK, new variants from abroad, etc, etc. As long as they can think of some superficially plausible reason, the emergency situation can be extended without legal challenge, as Simon Dolan found out.
Has anyone kept a log of all the excuses – sorry, ‘sources of substantial and imminent threat’ – that they have used. I would be interested to see how closely they tie in with the 4 week re-assessment period.
The 0.4% positivity mentioned at the top of the article is exactly what was coming out of the first mass testing with Lateral Flow months ago in Liverpool and Merthyr Tydfil. Narrative-followers accused the LT test of being faulty. They just couldn’t believe that there was so little infection with Sars-Cov-2 around.
The weirdest thing is the assumption that the “supply” of susceptible people is limitless and no immunity takes place. Uuuum, oh I know let’s invent a new variant and name it after a place we can blame and make a law against natural immunity.
My favourite Covid ‘model’ prediction is one which might not be familiar to many people probably because it’s hidden away in the SAGE minutes.
The SAGE meeting minutes for March 10th 2020 include this gem of a paragraph
So, in March, the experts reckoned the peak would be with us in about mid-June. This meeting, remember, was less than 2 weeks before the panic-driven decision to introduce the first lockdown.
The whole document has a number of other interesting points. For example Paragraph 5 reads
On March 31st (3 weeks later) the UK had recorded over 2.4k deaths. A number of studies estimate that the mean time between initial infection and death is about 23 days. This suggests that these 2.4k were infected around about the time (or before) of the meeting’
Even if we assume Ferguson’s 0.9% IFR figure is correct, this implies around 250k had been infected by March 10th – way more than the SAGE estimate.
Basically, the experts didn’t have a clue. Minutes are in link,
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/888782/S0382_Fourteenth_SAGE_meeting_on_Wuhan_Coronavirus__Covid-19__.pdf
Excellent article rather pissing on the chips of this splendidly illustrated piece of fear porn from Reuters. Interesting that on ‘The Island’ they blame us Mainlanders for the alleged carnage whereas on this side of the Swale we know that all bad things come from over there.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-uk-variant/
One thing I wasn’t sure about was that the article said that the Kent variant went into decline before lockdown around 26th December.
However the chart seems to show that the totality of new PCR positives for ALL variants went down from around 26th December. It could be that the Kent variant was still increasing in prevalence for a short while afterwards, but that the fall in other variants was so great that those falls exceeded the increase in the new variant, despite the new variant becoming a greater proportion of all positives.
I plotted a chart of just the new variant PCR+ prevalence from the ONS Infection Survey Data. It’s hard to do because the ONS uses partly overlapping periods to model the new variant prevalence but change their estimates for past dates over time. Their current dataset only goes back to 7th February. But working off the old data and smoothing it in gets to the attached chart.
The chart shows that for the new variant PCR+ prevalence peaked on about 3rd January. However NEW infections peak before PCR+ prevalence peaks because people test positive for some period of time.
The ONS data shows that for ALL variants NEW infections peak on about 26th December and ALL PCR positives peak on about 3rd January.
As we can assume the same lag applies to the Kent variant it looks like new PCR+ for the Kent variant also peaked around 26th December.
So I think we can indeed conclude that new incidence of specifically the Kent variant did start falling around 26th December.
A common sense check is that the fall in new incidence (all variants) after 26th December was quite a sharp one, and so it would be hard for an overall fall of this extent to happen while new variant incidence was increasing.
Sorry if that is a bit technical, I was just trying to sense check things for myself and just sharing my thoughts. Feel free to ignore!
Perhaps these Epidiomologists are on the Bill and Mel Gates pay roll? If we’re not all terrified of the virus why would we keep getting the vaccine that’s doubled their wealth?
A decade ago Mr G predicted this would be the decade of vaccines. Go figure…
Has anyone considered that Ferguson has a mental health issue. Munchausen by proxy comes to mind. Perhaps a psychological assessment is in order?