Boris Johnson said yesterday that Omicron is “surging across the country now” and warned that “we reserve the possibility of taking further action to protect the public and to protect public health, to protect the NHS. We won’t hesitate to take that action.” The Telegraph reports.
The Prime Minister has said the Government “reserves the possibility” to implement further Covid restrictions amid surging Omicron cases, and warned that the current situation is “extremely difficult”.
Speaking in Downing Street, Boris Johnson said the latest data will be kept under constant review “hour by hour”, and refused to rule out further measures after Christmas.
“We will have to reserve the possibility of taking further action to protect the public and to protect public health, to protect the NHS,” he said. “We won’t hesitate to take that action.”
Asked about what types of restrictions could be reimplemented, he said: “We are looking at all kinds of things to keep Omicron under control and we will rule nothing out.”
But is it really true that Omicron is surging and warrants the Prime Minister breaking his repeated promise that the lifting of restrictions in the summer following the vaccine rollout was “irreversible”?
Not according to the latest data. Yesterday’s reported infections for the U.K. were at 91,743, down from three days ago.
The peak by specimen date is still December 15th and the figures for the following days, while incomplete, do not suggest it will be topped soon.
December 15th was 10 days before Christmas. Given that people have to isolate for 10 days if positive, this suggests the peak may be largely an artefact of people getting tested ahead of Christmas. The leap in testing on that day is also indicative of this.
In this regard it is similar to the spike in tests and positives that occurred ahead of the summer break in July. That quickly dropped off as schools broke up and people went off on summer holidays. We may well see a similar phenomenon now that schools have broken up and people go away or to family for Christmas.
Most of the recent spike in positive tests is an artefact of the increase in testing. While the positivity rate in the U.K. saw a modest rise in the past week, up to 5.3% on December 19th from 4.4% on the 14th (see graph at top), it is not yet any higher than it was in October, and far below last winter’s peak of 13.5%. No reason to panic there. Deaths also continue their downward trend. How does data like this warrant the return of draconian ‘last resort’ social restrictions?
Rather than causing a large new epidemic or surge, Omicron appears largely to be replacing Delta for the winter wave – though Delta is still retaining some market share for now.
Meanwhile in the original epicentre of the Omicron outbreak, Gauteng province in South Africa, reported infections have been falling sharply in the past week.
National data from South Africa also continues to show a much milder disease, with ICU admissions currently at 21% of their July peak, or 79% lower.
This mildness has been confirmed by new data from Denmark, which finds the hospitalisation rate from Omicron 60% lower than from other variants.
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise, then, to hear that South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19, which is similar to SAGE, has written to the Health Minister Joe Phaahla recommending that the quarantining of contacts and all contact tracing be halted with immediate effect. It is no longer necessary and too costly for individuals and society for too little benefit, they argue.
We have learned more about the manner in which COVID-19 is spread, and also now have to contend with variants of concern whose epidemiology differs from that of the ancestral strains of SARS-CoV-2.
Crucially, it appears that efforts to eliminate and/or contain the virus are not likely to be successful. Therefore, it is critical that the role of containment efforts like quarantine and contact tracing is re-evaluated.
In addition, among the small proportion of symptomatic cases, testing is far from universal, since patients may not seek testing when their symptoms are mild and when testing would be burdensome and expensive. Furthermore, the SARS-CoV-2 test sensitivity is suboptimal, sometimes leading to false negative results.
The inability of the current testing strategy to identify the bulk of cases is illustrated by the high SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity rates seen across multiple provinces in serosurveys, implying that only a fraction of cases (perhaps one in 10, or even less) are ever diagnosed.
It stands to reason that if the vast majority of cases are not diagnosed, then the vast majority of case contacts are also not diagnosed. This means that quarantining and contact tracing are of negligible public health benefit in the South African setting.
Boris’s support base is collapsing as even once-loyal Ministers desert him over his apparent addiction to lockdown restrictions. Yet he is deaf to their pleas and seems only to have ears for the doom-mongers of SAGE. Government modeller Professor Graham Medley revealed on Saturday they didn’t model more positive outcomes for Omicron because they weren’t asked to. Who didn’t ask them to, and why not? Boris has many enemies, and he is only making his position worse by alienating his natural supporters while heeding the advice and adopting the policies of those who would gladly see him gone.
Time to wise up, Boris, and start listening to the right people. Omicron is not “surging”, and neither is it a cause for panic. You just need to keep calm and carry on.
Stop Press: Tuesday’s reported infection numbers dropped again, to 90,629, and the peak by specimen date remains December 15th.
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Another “conspiracy theory” comes true!
Is that about 22-0 now? Since AGW, Brexit, Trump and now COVID.
When I pointed out the success of Sweden’s approach more than a year ago to my MP he loftily declared, as if he was citing incontrovertible fact that Sweden had not done well as evidenced by the apologies offered by their King and Prime Minister.
I knew then that he, like the rest, was an utter ****. I wasn’t totally sure up to that point.
The fact he was a MP should have been your first clue
It was always likely that lockdowns killed more people than they “saved”.
Sweden was misrepresented, lied about, vilified, and we were vilified for using them as an example.
However it should be remembered that Sweden did have some restrictions, vaxxed lots of people, and for a long time barred entry to the unvaxxed. Way better than here, but far from perfect.
Finally, while it’s nice that Sweden “did well”, covid was obviously never a societal threat so any measures beyond giving people accurate information and looking into effective treatments (HCQ, ivermectin, whatever) there was no need to do anything out of the ordinary or treat it differently to a bad flu season. We knew that from the start.
So true. Lockdowns inherently kill more people than they save. And it was self-evident and thus entirely foreseeable from the get-go by anyone with a modicum of intellectual honesty and more than two brain cells to rub together.
How much better again would it have been if safe and effective early treatments had not been not outlawed at the behest of Big Pharma? There must be a reckoning.
“not been outlawed”!
Indeed, very true.
Has the UK really had 24.5% excess deaths over 2020-2022? That is more than twice what I have from ONS data.
I have about 10.5% from January 2020 to today’s figures. That is excess above the average 2010-2019, corrected for population.
Have I got something wrong here?
is it because you’re using a 10 year (2010-2019) previous average as comparison?
This is its most simple form, uncorrected for population. Deaths registered in England and Wales Sheet 1a here gives
2021 586,334
2020 607,922
2019 530,841
2018 541,589
2017 533,253
2016 525,048
2015 529,655
2014 501,424
2013 506,790
2012 499,331
2011 484,367
2010 493,242
Ave 2010-2019 = 514,554
Ave 2015-2019 = 532,077
Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales Sheet 1 here gives
2022 471,064 (sum to week 43)
Total deaths 2020-2022 = 607,922 + 586,334 + 471,064 = 1,665,320
(2+43/52)*average 10 year = 1,454,605, excess = 14.5% approx
(2+43/52)*average 5 year = 1,454,605, excess = 10.7% approx
(These will be a few percent smaller when corrected for population and does not adjust for seasons. My chart does include this.)
Either way, it is nowhere near 24.5%
What have I done wtong?
Note: I think I see what Joel Smalley has done!
He has not taken the real % excess – i.e. above normal.
He has taken about 2.5 years excess deaths as a percentage over 1 year!
It’s accumulative excess deaths over the 2020 – 2022 period, not an annualised average.
Yes, as I later suggested.
I have been working with excess weekly deaths. These are currently 17.7% above the 2010-2019 average (population adjusted) when taken over the last three weeks. That’s for England and Wales. So 24.5% was a surprise until I sussed what it meant!
Amen to that! “Stockholm Syndrome” should really be renamed “Melbourne Syndrome”, because #SwedenGotItRight.
Additionally, Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and the Faeroe Islands didn’t do any worse than their stricter neighbors either in terms of all cause excess deaths. Ditto for the 12 states in the USA that eschewed lockdowns as well, compared to the rest of the country.
And it appears that the Governor of one of the sane states has done quite well in the current election (Ron De Santis). I wonder if that had anything to do with the election results?
Indeed. Ditto for Kristi Noem of South Dakota as well. A fortiori, in fact.
Well at least they got something right, but how is that multiculturalism working out for them? Or is it still against the law there to criticise the sex crime statistics?
I taught in schools for years. In the good old days the winter lurgy (whatever it was) would sweep through the school system and we’d hear that half the staff of school A were off and it was chaos as teachers tried to cope. A week later we’d hear that the lurgy had moved to school B and it was chaos there. This pattern continued through the local schools over a period of a few weeks and then everything settled down to whatever was considered normal. The point being that viruses moving through the population is what they do. People get ill or don’t depending on their own biology and susceptibilty. People are affected differently but for most it is a few days of ill health followed by a return to life. There is no need for lockdowns, masks, social distancing or whatever.
It is to be hoped that lessons will have been learned in the last 3 years but then again…
They didn’t bother with the lessons learned in the last 100 years, so clearly these buffoons will learn nothing from the last 3.
Sweden would have done even better if it had refused to roll-out the gene therapy jabs.
Indeed. Ditto if they had used HCQ and IVM as well (unfortunately it looks like they did not). But their food is fortified with Vitamin D at least, like the other Nordic countries and Canada, but unlike the USA, UK, and most of Europe.
Surely its obvious to anybody, but Americans, that Fauci was the supporter and promoter of the research originally in America, but later farmed out to the Wuhan lab in China. On that basis he has a big part of the responsibility for Covid existing, because it escaped from that lab, yet he continued in post imposing his restrictions not based on real science. Now he is being allowed to retire with probably a big payout and pension – he should be strung up, although as that doesn’t happen these days people should at least be aware of the number of deaths he has caused. Surely he should be forced to accept his responsibility and make a public appology.
And then be convicted and sent to jail.
“Those responsible for implementing them should be held accountable for the deaths they have caused”
While this is true, the economic and social effects of lockdowns will persist for generations. The people responsible for lockdowns should be held to account for this too
Can someone explain the sourcing on this? I can’t seem to spot any even on the full article.