Today’s Sunday Times leads with the story that senior ministers have drawn up a three-phase exit plan that would see schools reopened on May 11th. (If you can’t get past the Sunday Times‘s paywall, you can read about the plan in the Mail here.) Under the “traffic light” plan, which has yet to be approved by Boris, schools would reopen on May 11th during the “green” phase, along with clothes shops, garden centres and hairdressers, and rail and bus services would return to normal. This would be followed by a second “amber” stage, starting in late May or early June, which would see more shops and businesses reopen, all employees urged to return to work and some small social gatherings permitted. Pubs and restaurants and larger events such as sport and concerts would be phased in later in the summer. However, the over-70s and those with underlying health conditions will be stuck on a “red” light and have to wait until a vaccine is available before they’re allowed to resume normal life. (Note to Boris: a vaccine probably won’t be available for several years, so why not just let older people decide for themselves whether to leave their homes and see their grandchildren?)
This, or something like it, is the exit strategy the Government should have unveiled on Thursday when it announced the lockdown would be extended for three weeks. It looks like the “hawks” in the Cabinet – those who want to end the lockdown – have triumphed over the “doves”. (Michael Gove, who was a leading dove, has “changed his position”, according to the Sunday Times.) One reason the hawks have gained the upper hand, the paper says, is because the Treasury has produced an “apocalyptic” report – soon to be leaked, no doubt – warning that failure to ease restrictions in “the next few weeks” will mean 60% of businesses running out of cash within three months. Did the Cabinet really need to wait for this report, given that the British Chamber of Commerce flagged up exactly the same risk nearly three weeks ago? And why did the doves – or former doves – not heed the warnings of the Resolution Foundation, the Centre for Economic and Business Research, the OBR, the OECD, the IMF, the Governor of the Bank of England, Uncle Tom Cobley and all? I suppose we should be grateful that they’ve finally woken up and smelt the coffee.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that the epidemiologists and virologists on NERVTAG and SAGE who spooked the Government into imposing a lockdown underestimated the percentage of the population that’s already been exposed to the virus and overestimated the infection fatality rate. For instance, all 397 residents in a Boston homeless shelter were given a swab test a couple of weeks ago and 146 tested positive, an infection rate of 37%. And not a single one of them had any symptoms. You can read more about that here. A reader flagged up a story in yesterday’s Le Figaro that points to a similar conclusion. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle experienced a Covid outbreak and all the crew were tested (1760) of whom 1046 (60%) were positive. 50% of those were asymptomatic. 20-30 of them were hospitalised, but only one required critical care – an officer in his 50s. And here’s another story out of Boston: a researcher from Massachusetts General Hospital gave antibody tests to 200 random passers-by street and a third tested positive. The Boston Globe has the story.
Mikko Paunio, the epidemiologist who’s been advising the Finnish Government, has written an addendum to his paper, ‘Has SARS-CoV-2 fooled the whole world?’, that I published on this site on Friday. In the update he refers to a number of surveys that have been published since he wrote the paper that seem to corroborate his hypothesis, namely, that many more people have been exposed to the virus than the WHO originally estimated, that at least 50% of people infected are asymptomatic and that large cities like New York are close to herd immunity. You can read the addendum here (scroll down).
Lockdown zealots got very excited over the mid-week figures showing the Swedish death toll was beginning to climb again, citing this as incontrovertible proof that the Swedish Government’ approach to managing the crisis is flat out wrong. Unfortunately for them, the daily death toll in Sweden has started to fall again – 67 on April 17th, down from 130 on April 16th and 170 the day before. As of April 17th, the total number of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden was 1,511, less than 10% of the total deaths in the UK (15,464). Sweden’s population is smaller than the UK’s – 10.23 million compared to 66.65 – but not 10 times smaller. Deaths per million in Sweden are 150, compared to 228 in the UK. Admittedly, that’s a higher number than in Denmark (60 per million) or Norway (30), which have imposed lockdowns, but you’d expect it to be far higher if lockdowns are as effective as the zealots claim. Meanwhile, Belgium, which has roughly the same population as Sweden and has just announced an extension of its lockdown, is recording 471 deaths per million. When this is over and the post-mortem begins, I wonder if lockdowns will be shown to have had any effect on slowing the rate of infection and reducing the total number of fatalities? Certainly doesn’t look that way based on current evidence.
One subject I’ve neglected in these daily updates so far is the source of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, but there’s been an interesting development on that front seeming to show that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and not the Huanan Seafood Market. For those unversed in this conspiracy theory – at least, I used to think it was a conspiracy theory – this YouTube video is a good primer. This investigation by the Washington Post is also good. The latest person to endorse the theory is Dr Luc Montagnier, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine. He’s not suggesting SARS-CoV-2 was developed as a bioweapon, or released deliberately to wreck the economies of China’s competitors. But having analysed the genome of the virus, he and a colleague have concluded that it contains sequences from the HIV virus. The only explanation, according to Dr Montagnier, is that molecular tools were used to insert the HIV virus in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and that could only be done in a laboratory. There’s a summary of his argument in the Jewish Voice and a podcast in which he’s interviewed about it by Dr Jean-François Lemoine (in French).
A reader has tipped me off about an out-of-print dystopian novel that seems to have anticipated this moment. She writes:
In this horribly topical tale, the Brits are gradually herded into walled cities like medieval castles, life is pared back to the minimum, with rationing and state-ordered work, because of some unnamed external threat, presumed to be the superpowers lobbing nuclear bombs at each other. (China is one of the superpowers). It’s all done over several years, by harmless sounding but increasingly authoritarian ministerial pronouncements. Society ends up in total lockdown, with everyone spying on each other, travel bans, thought police, 24-hour passes into cities, and even murders of passing strangers condoned by the courts, purely because they’re strangers. The hero, an academic who seems untouched by the brainwashing, says to his girlfriend’s parents: “But how can you accept all this so easily? Don’t you remember the way you were living a year ago? Don’t you ever ask who’s responsible for all this happening? Or why? Don’t you care?” There is a pause, and then the old man leans forward and pats him on the knee. “We’re safe, lad,” he says. “No one cares how much they pay for that.”
The novel, called Mandrake, is by Susan Cooper, author of the Dark is Rising Sequence, a series of five fantasy novels written for older children and young adults. You can buy it second-hand on Amazon.co.uk, but the cheapest paperback edition appears to be £29.70! Let me know if you see it on sale for less. You can email me here.
Several readers got in touch to say they tried to sign the petition I flagged up yesterday but were unable to. The reason is because once a proposed UK Government and Parliament petition has received a sufficient number of signatures it is then checked to make sure it meets the relevant standards and, in the meantime, no one else can sign it. On the website it says, “This usually takes a week or less, however we have a very large number to check at the moment so it is likely to take longer.” I will keep an eye on it and let you know when it’s approved (if ever), but in the meantime here is an ‘End the Lockdown’ petition on Change.org you can sign.
Finally, I’d like to say a big thanks to all those readers who donated yesterday. If you’d like to make a donation to Lockdown Sceptics, please click here. Constantly adding to the links on this site, moderating your comments and writing the daily update is proving quite time-consuming!
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I still haven’t seen any mainstream media contextual reference to cumulative annual mortality figures from the ONS which clearly show 2020 (as at end of week 14) to be an exceptional year, right?
Wrong. Cumulative deaths to the end of week 14 in England and Wales are (Source ONS at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales):
I don’t remember any lockdowns in 2018 or 2015; or even noticing ourselves to be at increased risk?
Those attributable to respiratory disease over the same period are equally interesting:
* 2020 only – For the last three months ONS have separated deaths with a mention of COVID 19 in the death certificate from those attributable to respiratory disease. Adding the two together makes more deaths than the total reported overall so there MUST be duplication. Subtracting the overall excess of 335 would make the 2020 total 28799.
My other more subjective points, which need to be caveated because I do respect what NHS care providers do for us, but:
– My own relatives who are nurses and doctors in various hospitals tell me that they are acutely embarrassed by the Thursday Clap for Carers because they, at least, are currently staring at empty wards and waiting rooms at hospitals and drinking lots of tea and snacking heavily on free goodies brought in by generous well wishers and food companies. Even ICU staff in their hospitals are still working normal shifts with no increase in overtime claimed (there must be a way to check this I presume?). Conversely, a nephew was extraordinarily busy, I gather, going round the hospital sticking COVID 19 warning stickers on every staff member’s smart phone. He felt so proud to be making a difference.
– They also remind me that the job of procuring stockpiles of PPE and policy for how much to hold sits with NHS managers not ministers. Those managers are, I gather, currently delighting in the privileges holding an NHS Staff Number and ID has unlocked for them. Perhaps someone needs to give Hancock a break?
W14 was the first week that deaths started to “take off” with 3000 deaths reported in that week. You won’t see that in cumulative figures, only in weekly figures and, indeed, W14 had the highest death toll of any week in the preceding 10 years. In fact, the death toll was 6000 more than average – twice the number reported as Wuhan virus deaths. Why? Well… the reported death figures are only made up of people who died IN HOSPITAL and not from those who died in the community. Will be interesting to see what the weekly figure is for W15…
The real question/discussion to have is whether we should have just done what Sweden has done. Only time will tell.
Yes and we would expect another ~ 6k excess per week for some weeks to come. Issues would be a.) how much of this non-COVID coded excess is actually COVID releated and b.) how large will the annual excess be if people are dying a few months earlier than would otherwise be the case. Minor point but it is quite clearly stated that the COVID and respiratory rows in the ONS data may include duplicates.
That’s my point John. My instinct is that of course we should have done exactly that (ie what Sweden has done). We have been infected by mass hysteria. We could lose 6k+ a week for over a month and still remain on par with 2018’s overall Q1 mortality. But in 2018 we did not put almost everyone on a publicly funded payroll and commit the nation’s only reserve.
As an aside, while we the taxpayer are paying all these non-working furloughed employees, should we not be putting them into the fields to pick crops or into other public service functions in return for their stipends?
They’d be no good at the crop picking, labourers are imported from Eastern Europe to the UK for that because they are genuinely better at it. We need to be keeping the borders open so we can get our usual seasonal workers, and getting the folks who live in Britain permanently back to the jobs they were doing before the lockdown began. No need for all the workers to be paid by the taxpayer if they can get back to normal work. We need to value people, wherever they are from, for all the things they are good at. And let them all get on with those things.
And with the NHS currently sitting with around 37,500 empty beds, we can only assume that the people who once laid in them are ill – and dying – at home. Once the community death toll is added up and some smart cookies join the dots, how long it will take for the 2 Minutes of Love for the NHS to turn into the 2 Minutes of Hate.
No wonder the NHS is pressuring the government for further indemnities against legal cases laid against it by people affected by the COVID-19 response.
We have to pity those living in prolonged but non-lethal agony because they’ve had various surgeries postponed by this crisis, for those who are terminally ill and would like to spend their last weeks walking in the hills unharrassed by drones and stasi-esque neighbours, for immigrants who’ve entered a country only to find the government abuses them and won’t help them and then locks down and cuts them off from the work and wages that were keeping them alive, for the doctors/nurses/cleaners/hospital-specialists who can’t get a takeaway after their tough shifts, and for the brave NHS personnel who know that if the lockdown goes on the economy will go down the drain so badly that their jobs get taken with it.
The stats about how the deaths stack up in nations that took different coronavirus policies are all well and interesting, but none of them account for the lives cost by the turmoil the lockdown is causing and will cause well into the future unless it is made extremely brief. I’m a lot more concerned with the numbers of suicides and lost QUALYs to mental health issues from folks trapped in small homes; the lowered life expectancies due to job losses, poverty and collapses of communities which occur when all the local businesses fail; the damage to future productivity and tech development caused by all the scientists who aren’t epidemiologists being sent home from their labs (and this includes medical researchers trying to cure non-coronavirus conditions); the depression that will follow when civil liberties are lost and never regained. Lockdown only seems a good idea because the (relatively few extra) coronavirus deaths without it would be immediate and countable while the deaths caused by it are more remote and further spread so easier for media to ignore.
I think you’re conceding a bit too much to the zealots here – Norway is a huge country with a hugely dispersed population; and we know the virus is far more prevalent in urban areas. And undoubtedly Stockholm is one very large population centre. Some clever person with time and info could try and work it out, but the relationship may well have a bearing. Anyway, c’mon the Swedes! And more power to your excellent blog.
I live in Scotland. We have roughly half the population of Sweden. Sweden’s deaths per capita and Case Fatality Rate are lower than Scotland’s. Scotland has been under lockdown since March 24th. Sweden hasn’t…
With regard to the differences between the Nordic countries this interview with Prof Johan Giesecke might help – start at 12:15 minutes in – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY
Excellent stuff. Thank you Toby. You’re a hero. More than happy to pay for your excellent journalism. Happy Sunday.
1) Sweden numbers didn’t even reach 170 – Worldometer and other counters are completely off. Let’s refer to the government website here: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa. As you can see, they reassign with correct dates all death and ICU entries — which media is ignoring. You can see a clear decline pattern and also a much lower “peak” than thought. Furthermore, I’d add that in the short term, Sweden is expected to see more deaths but to reach a return to normal faster – the question is what it looks like on the long run
2) BTW on the Charles de Gaulle, another sailor just entered ICU and 12 are under oxygen (not in ICU). I hope it settles there.
3) It is interesting to see that France doesn’t want to suggest an “age lockdown” once measures are eased (i.e. keeping elderly under lockdown and protection) because of an outrage about how discriminatory this would be… It is the virus that discriminates by age… Yet another example of “political pressure and correctness” impacting what should likely be the correct course of policy.
France’s lockdown certainly knocked the Yellow Vest protests on the head, didn’t it?
Easy way to avoid a discriminatory lockdown, make it optional for the old. Let out anyone who is willing, for say an hour a week amid their normal lives, to do their bit ferrying supplies (both essentials and luxuries) to those old people who still (quite reasonably in their positions) fear to come out. This way everybody wins.
sd
Re the Wuhan Institute of Virology point, reportedly in 2015 NIH Sent $3.7M to the Wuhan Lab:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/obamas-nih-sent-3-7m-to-wuhan-lab-where-coronavirus-may-have-originated-trumps-stopping-it/
It’s really interesting to see who among us is standing up for our freedoms, sanity, long term health and jobs against the lockdown. It transcends all the usual left-right, Brexiteer/Remainer, optimist/pessimist and other such political boundaries. Many of us utterly despise each other’s views on anything but the lockdown, but we know that lockdown is wrong, it’s putting quantities of lives (the brief extension of life for that small fraction of those who can be saved with treatment but would otherwise die, most COVID-19 victims have a miserable but non-damaging illness and most of those who do get severe cases can’t be saved with even the best current treatment) before quality (the quality of all lives, both those trapped under lockdown including the terminally ill who would like a chance to enjoy themselves and might not last naturally long enough to see lockdowns end, and for all who survive the pandemic to meet what future waits beyond). The harm of lockdowns to everyone can’t offset whatever amount they achieve in reducing deaths. I hope this site can provide a place for us to work out how we can go about getting the lockdowns ended in the way that does most to restore life and least to further spread the disease.
I’m acutely aware that it’s easy to read all the websites and news articles that support my view. As a result, I thought it might be useful to actually try to find some evidence for the opposing side. Does anyone know of actual scientific evidence for lockdowns and social distancing? In particular, is there any evidence that we know was actually used to justify these measures?
Or was this really all based on kindergarten science – i.e., we know a respiratory virus spreads by human interaction, therefore we just need to ban human interaction?
Hi V1NN0. The best I’ve found is a graph which purports to show that there is a slight correlation between lockdown starting and lower deaths. That said, it only had a r of 0.15, so the lockdown accounted, in theory, for 15% of the differences in death rates. Also it was using raw death data and not deaths per capita.
I’d like to see a number of things, including the difference between social distancing/washing hands and lockdown in terms of effectiveness, I suspect it only reduces the R0 by a small amount (washing hands and voluntary social distancing doing the majority of the work), whilst being disproportionately damaging.
I also suspect that there is very little transmission outside – I’d like to see proof of transmission outside.
Thanks for that Thomas. I guess I was more asking for evidence that was used prior to the epidemic and consequent lockdowns. Have there been studies from previous viral epidemics that showed lockdowns were effective? Surely there must have been some scientific evidence to justify them?
“only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” Prof. Walter Ricciardi (scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/
Is there any data like above for the UK, Spain, France, etc.?
ONS has some data on this: “91% had at least one pre-existing condition. On average those who died had 2.7 existing conditions”. They have fairly decent set of figures, interesting the age data. The media is clearly hyping up anyone with so much as a cough under the age of 30, the Imperial data suggest that under the age of 30, you more likely to die in a car crash over your lifetime than of covid (after you have actually caught it)
At last! A rational site that asks all the right questions! Well done Toby. Long may you continue to stand up to the MSM hysteria that currently surrounds Coronavirus. I can now grind my teeth at 8pm on a Thursday safe in the knowledge I am not alone.
People really are repeating the stay home save lives mantra, with little understanding, they think it’s as deadly as Ebola. Remind them that if you are under 65 then you are more likely to die in a car crash (over your life), than die of the virus and they don’t believe you, even with the figures.
Seem to get more buy in when you mention all the excess deaths due to the lockdown (my partners uncle died over the weekend with a heart attack and his colleagues chose to call his wife over an ambulance as they were worried about the whole wasting NHS’s time etc. ) . People question the numbers, but a simple explanation makes sense to them. Suicides…. a 3% gdp drop in 2008 let to how many suicides (with social support plentiful), compared to a 35% drop with isolation….
Dear Mr Young,
On Saturday 18th April you asked how to explain the change in national character reflected in our immediate acceptance of ‘lockdown’ regulation. The short answer is 30 years of gradual acceptance of imposed ‘Health and Safety’ legislation. As a nation we have individually lost the the ability to judge ‘risk’, so rely on ‘authority’ and legislation after the event to protect us if things go wrong. Compare your quoted Finnish national example leaving shops and other public institutions open for business. Scandinavian culture depends on individual self-reliance having little need for remote direct government safety or health edicts. The answer to your question is in Government’s departure from its historic function – tax collection and national security – a long way from individual safety. All this is reflected in our praise for doctors and nurses despite National Health Service organisational shortcomings. Cultural personal ‘safety’ should primarily be a matter of personal responsibility.
Nigel Vandyck
Herefordshire
The phrase “be it on my own head” is one I would be proud to live by. We have a moral right to take risks to ourselves and not to be held down by the nanny state, the people just need to start enforcing their rights. I’ve tried so many tiems to find campaigns in the UK against the intrusive aspects of “health and safety”, can’t find anyone who has organised against such abuses of power. Note here that the Health and Safety Executive as an organisation isn’t responsible for most of the nanny state nonsense, they put the majority of their effot looking at stats about real accidents and puting in commonsense and evidence based precautions in industrial settings like interlock switches on high powered equipment or more visible signage. The problem is little busybodies and jobsworths scattered all over the country, backed by paranoid profit hingry insurers and greedy lawyers who are happy to sue the blameless yet never do hard work around defending or prosecuting real crimes. The harm caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns needs to be our call to action for our individual right to take risks.
The single question that needs answering now is:
After four weeks of lockdown, where are the new infection transmissions coming from? Are they from within hospitals, within care homes, within the family home, on public transport, in shops or factories, or even in open public spaces?
Once this is addressed, we can make some informed decisions about which parts of our life can return to normality with no risk. If, for example, it can be shown that virtually no infections are transmitted in the open air then public parks and other open spaces can be re-opened without further delay.
If, on the other hand, the majority of transmissions are taking place in hospital – then we would need to see some changes in hospital procedures.
If we are really “following the science” then is it too much to ask that this fundamental question of the origin of current transmissions could be raised and answered at the next briefing, instead of continuing with the usual PPE obsession?