As I’ve mentioned several times, when you calculate mortality the correct way – as the age-standardised mortality rate, or as life expectancy – the year 2020 in England doesn’t look that unusual. Last year’s rate was a fair bit higher than 2019’s, but that was a year of unusually low mortality.
Plotting the age-standardised mortality rate over time (as the ONS has been doing each month since July of 2020) shows that mortality last year rose to a level last seen in 2008. So while the year-on-year change was large, the level wasn’t particularly high – at least by historical standards.
Interestingly, this point even found its way into a BBC article last September. The author noted:
And if you look at the age-adjusted mortality rates, which take into account the size and age of the population, you can see that while 2020 has undoubtedly been a bad year compared to recent years, what has been seen in terms of people dying is not completely out of sync with recent history. It is actually comparable with what happened in the 2000s.
Given that 2008 – which, to repeat, saw a higher level of morality than last year – wasn’t that long ago, one might argue the pandemic’s lethality has been overhyped. Of course, others would contend that, if we hadn’t taken the drastic measures we did take, mortality would have risen to a far higher level.
But I’m not convinced the UK’s lockdowns did do much to curb mortality, over and above the effect of restrictions on large gatherings and voluntary social distancing. And I’d argue that we could have saved more lives with a well-executed focused protection strategy.
However, many people continue to insist that mortality would have been far higher in the absence of lockdowns. It’s therefore worth looking once again at Sweden – the only major European country that didn’t lock down.
We already know that Sweden’s age-adjusted excess mortality up to week 51 was only 1.7% – below the European average. But when was the last time its mortality rate was as high as last year?
Going up to the end of week 52, the rate for 2020 – based on the European Standard Population – comes out as 16.4 per 100,000 (which is actually lower than in Denmark). And the last time Sweden saw this level of morality was in 2015 – just five years ago.
So despite taking the least restrictive approach of any major Western country, Sweden’s mortality rate only returned to the level of 2015. This casts doubt on the claim that mortality in the UK would have been much higher in the absence of lockdowns.
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Look just get up the f…..g ladder
Perhaps “Fire” is just a label that runs along a spectrum? Maybe the service should think twice about responding to an emergency call, if it’s just a “conflagration”, “blaze” or “flickering flames”.
But I’m sure that courses on the spectrum of gender will help them put out house fires more efficiently!
It’s hard to think of a less gender-relevant job… except that your female-male trans firefighter is going to be significantly lacking in physical strength, endangering both colleagues and the public.
Rapid promotion to a desk-based senior rank.
“in white Western cultures, gender is seen as being an either/or choice, also known as a binary”.
Well, in every culture on Planet Earth, since time immemorial, sex has been correctly recognised as an either/or fact (not a choice).
Their statement doesn’t even make sense on their own mad terms, because if your evil White western culture correctly observes that there are two sexes, they will also correctly observe that sex is not a choice but simply a fact determined by the hand of fate.
The fire service is not made up of private companies therefore it is a public service. Like the Civil Service, It is not a plaything for activists or similar individuals that haven’t matured enough to be aligned with reality. Would using the correct pronouns have allowed the fire chiefs at the Grenfell Tower disaster to have read the reality of the situation so as to abandon the rules and get the inhabitants out one way or the other?
All too stupid for words.
Another question to consider is who gave the fire service “educators” their own education in biology, sociology, philosophy, psychology and metaphysics to qualify them to teach these subjects to their staff.
I’ve no doubt that some ordinary firemen have, through choice or necessity like so many nowadays, foresworn careers in these subjects before signing up. So are they not perfectly entitled to tell these amateur experts to shove their theories up their hoses?
You can’t just mess with someone’s world view and epistemology even if you are the Messiah. I think the offence consists in the sheer effrontery of me telling my neighbour that I have a hitherto unrevealed truth to tell them and that once I have told them they will be expected to take it as gospel. This is not human interaction it is a reflection of something else. Fortunately even the simple-minded have the nous to see this for the most part.
For all you firefighters out there – there is a choice, you may have to sit and listen to this crap, but you don’t have to believe it.
Well, I suppose it is important to know if you are called out to rescue a cat from up a tree, whether it is a felis catus or whether it is someone identifying himself/herself/themselves as a cat.
It takes balls to go into a burning building.
It’s not possible to ‘teach’ adult human beings something that is biologically, scientifically, and morally bonkers…you may be able to persuade them that to prevent being disciplined or sacked they should just nod and agree…hopefully there’s enough sensible firefighters to disagree…and yes just put the fires out, rescue folks from fires, crashes, flooding, etc….