We’re publishing the latest update from our in-house doctor, who’s pored over the latest NHS England and ICNARC data packets so you don’t have to. Contrary to some hysterical reports in the media yesterday, it’s actually good news. Community admissions for Covid are falling in London and tailing off across England – and of those classified as being in hospital ‘due to Covid’, 40% were admitted for something else and only have Covid incidentally.
When I was a medical student, a novel called The House of God was required reading. It relates the experience of the fictional American Dr. Roy Basch in his first year as a qualified doctor. The book contained lots of good advice for surviving the junior doctor ordeal including several ‘Rules of the House’. Rule 13 states: “The delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible.”
Surprisingly often in medicine, doing nothing is the best option. One of my former mentors frequently advised me to “do as little as possible for as long as possible” – his point being that over-hasty intervention is not just unnecessary, but can be actively damaging. This transgresses a key principle of medicine Primum, non nocere – first, do no harm.
Having looked at lots of data from multiple sources over the last few weeks, I am coming to the view that the entire country would be better off in almost every way if doctors stopped ‘doing things’ for a while – particularly if they stopped testing asymptomatic people for the variant du jour.
I will discuss the available information and explain why I have arrived at that conclusion.
Firstly, the admissions from the community in London (as the leading edge of the Omicron wave).
Graph 1 shows the daily Covid admissions from the community in the blue bars vs the same time last year on the brown line. Readers will recall that Professor Sir Chris Whitty warned at the Downing St press conference on December 15th that a big increase in Covid hospital admissions after Christmas was “nailed on”.
It looks like we are waiting for Godot, because the numbers are actually falling, not rising and are currently less than a third of levels a year ago.
Graph Two shows the same metric for the whole of England. On this graph the bars represent daily admissions, the brown line the seven-day moving average. Again, admissions to hospital from the community are tailing off.
This is not really surprising as the ONS data for community infections shows that London appears to be well past the peak. The same pattern is also seen in the ZOE app reports. Other regions are now showing rising positive tests for Omicron – and it is likely that regional waves will peak and decline rapidly, as in the capital. Rather oddly, the data for Wales seem to show much higher community spread of Omicron than in England, despite far more stringent social restrictions. Could it be that Mark Drakeford’s draconian rules aren’t flattening the curve? Whatever next?
On Thursday/Friday the NHS release a weekly summary with hospital level data and the Primary Diagnosis spreadsheet. Graph Three shows the Primary diagnosis data for English hospitals – a busy graph, so I will explain it. The vertical bars represent patients testing positive for Covid (orange) and patients being ill from Covid in hospital (blue). The difference between the two is the number of patients with ‘incidental Covid’ – in other words, they’ve tested positive but that’s not the reason they’re in hospital.
It can clearly be seen that the ratio between the two on the gray line is falling quickly – in other words, only 60% of the total patients reported as in hospital ‘due to Covid’ have actually been hospitalised because they’ve got Covid. Fully 40% of the patients in the reported totals have Covid as an incidental condition. In the Midlands, 45% of patients have ‘incidental Covid’. I expect the proportion of incidental findings will increase in coming weeks. I will return to this point later in support of my contention that we need to rapidly scale back testing.
The weekly hospital update is often quite dull. Not so this week. For a few weeks now it has been apparent that hospitals in the East and South East of London have had higher admission numbers from the community than other parts of the capital. These numbers are now plateauing. However, the total Covid inpatient burden is much more evenly spread across the London hospitals. I think this indicates a serious issue with in-hospital spread of the virus (not surprising), although the significance is much less than in prior waves, because Omicron really is less severe than previous variants.
Exactly how much less severe is not possible to say because the NHS will not release key pieces of information around length of stay and oxygen utilisation in hospitals. Patients who are not very ill with Omicron do not need supplemental oxygen – it would be easy to compare current oxygen utilisation rates with those from a year ago to assess relative severity of Omicron vs the Alpha variant.
Readers may wonder why the NHS send this information daily to NHS Trust CEO’s but conceal it from the public? Readers may speculate that the NHS choses only to release information supporting the catastrophe narrative and conceals data supporting the opposite view. Readers may very well think that. I could not possibly comment.
The Spectator calculates that average length of stay has fallen from 8 days to 5 days – anecdotally I hear it is closer to 3 days. Admissions to ICU are flat and not substantially above normal for January, as are death rates. Cases of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and community acquired pneumonia are all substantially below expected levels for this time of year.
Unfortunately, the latest ICU ICNARC report does not provide information around how many people have been admitted to ICU with Omicron vs Delta. I expect this information will emerge in time. It is certainly already known. Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is a reasonable assumption that if most of the current ICU admissions were positive for Omicron, the BBC would be broadcasting that fact on an hourly basis. So far, that dog hasn’t barked – I am not expecting to hear it.
Given all the evidence that Omicron is a variant of the common cold and that admissions of moderately unwell people seem to have peaked already in London, why is the NHS under so much pressure?
There are three main reasons. The first is the policy of sending staff home for extended periods of time based on positive lateral flow tests irrespective of whether they have symptoms.
The second is the incredible degree of ‘organisational friction’ in segregating patients on Covid wards and the arcane rules around testing prior to surgery.
The third is the difficulty discharging patients from hospital – so called ‘bed blocking’.
The first two factors are attempts to limit the spread of Omicron. The available data shows the futility of that approach. Omicron is so transmissible, eventually everyone in the country will be exposed to it – yet only a tiny proportion of people will experience serious illness – very much like the common cold. If persistent testing of asymptomatic people stopped tomorrow, a substantial number of problems currently besetting the NHS would vanish overnight. To quote Rule 10 of The House of God: “If you don’t take a temperature, you can’t find a fever.”
I have come to the view that we are making mistakes in management of the pandemic that will damage the country for years to come. Much of these mistakes stem from testing asymptomatic people for a disease which is highly unlikely to do them any harm.
I close with a well-known limerick, which contains good advice for our times: “Dr Bell fell down a well, and broke his collar bone. Doctors should attend the sick, and leave the well alone.”
Primum, non nocere.
Stop Press: Saturday’s Daily case toll fell by 20% week-on-week and Covid hospitalisations in London are 31% lower. MailOnline has more.
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I am not sure what point there was in this story. We know BBC employees are highly paid so she would have the cash to do this. We also know they favour unlimited immigration. We know they think British tax payers should pay for anyone, from anywhere to come here to lengthen the queues for services.
what is the news value?
if you had reported the BBC journo had offered to take in a couple of them or was to pay for their lifetime costs, now that would be News.
Has she been promoted yet. Has Sunak recommended for an award.
“In another, it was reported that Ms. Harper warned that a 29-year-old Somali man who sexually assaulted a deaf girl aged 17 would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.”
You’d kind of hope that people tempted to sexually assault or contemplating any serious crime would feel at “severely heightened risk”. Isn’t that the point? Better still, not just feel at “severely heightened risk” but actually BE at “severely heightened risk”.
“but actually BE at “severely heightened risk”.
This is what should be happening. And it is no different in this country. Paedophiles are at severe risk in prison in this country and deservedly so. They remain at risk even in anonomised community settings and as far as I am concerned rightly so.
A BBC employee has no business indulging her rank stupidity in such matters unless in her own time and at her expense.
Furthermore, once the deportation order is issued it should be immediate ie next plane out and no messing about.
“Furthermore, once the deportation order is issued it should be immediate ie next plane out and no messing about.”
That seems like harsh treatment for the BBC “journalist”, even by your standards
There wouldn’t be room on the plane for all the ones I’d like to see aboard!
The government could always book a fleet of aircraft – they love chucking taxpayers money about.
Well actually tof my comment was aimed at the Third World perps but I would have no problem in seeing this fake journo treated similarly.
Actually, can you remember several years back, there was a plane with a convicted sex offender on it who was in the process of being deported. But when the passengers got wind of the fact he was facing possible death ( allegedly. Not sure if that was true but the deets are a bit blurry now, tbh ) when he got back to his home country they all did a ‘mutiny’ and the pervert was allowed to get off and stay. I think it was the UK but it’s a bit vague now, and I don’t remember what happened to him.
Well this woman is exactly like those idiotic, reckless passengers. Why in the name of all that is rational, would citizens want dangerous trash like that roaming the streets, like a ticking time bomb, just waiting to strike again? How on earth can sharing a society with vermin like this be in anyone’s best interests? I’m just mystified as to the inner workings of many people’s minds these days, I really am at a loss.
Damned right Mogs.
We don’t want to be facing a…
‘Lessons will be learned’ event once again.
Do we?
As society becomes more and more fragmented it becomes weaker, ( the scamdemic years were a good example of this ) less able to form a resistance to threats and so it becomes less safe. This is especially true of larger cities. We could do a lot worse than listening to the many ex-Muslims, many of whom are active on Twitter. Honestly, if it’s not the globalists it’s the bloody Islamists. Does that make anyone who resists ”far-right”, by default?
“What has Islam brought to Europe?
Intimidation, censorship, terrorism, rape gangs, no-go zones, hate preachers, violent homophobia, oppression of women, jihadist marches, shari’ah courts, madrassahs (indoctrination of children), halal slaughter, occupation of roads for prayers, blaring the adhan over loudspeakers, massive welfare fraud, Islamist political parties, rabid antisemitism, attacks on churches and Hindu temples, extreme intolerance for Ahmadis and apostates, and much more.”
~ Alliance of Former Muslims
https://twitter.com/ImtiazMadmood/status/1754823623766896772
As summaries go that takes some beating Mogs.
While agreeing with all of that….Maajid Nawas is a great guy. The fact that he says how Muslims are not interpretating the Koran correctly may well be true, but many don’t see it that way and they are the ones we have a problem with.
It seems this is the psychological side of the demise of society ready for Build Back Better.
Yes it was in the UK and he turned out to be a total wrong’un.
Personally I’d have got off the plane because I wouldn’t have wanted to be on it with him (don’t see why decent passengers should be transported with the scum), and just let the damn thing take off.
I remember on the old Wooton show Amy Michel saying that migrants were not committing sex crimes because they were migrants. ——-Sorry Amy you are totally wrong. In Sweeden migrants commit 10 times more sex crimes and rapes than Indigenous Swedes. So they are committing sex crime entirely because of who they are and what their culture is. STOP making excuses for these scum.
This person has literally argued people who committed violent crimes in the UK must granted asylum because having committed these crimes in the UK would negatively effect their social standing in the countries they supposedly fled from. Ie, first, they immigrate illegally, then, they commit violent crimes and then, they must be allowed to stay forever because they committed violent crimes.
People whose minds are twisted like this will endanger any society they’re allowed to be part of.
BBC is a criminal organisation. This story just confirms the obvious. Help an illegal criminal – get deported with the illegal criminal.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/polly-billington-face-of-the-emerging-master-class/
Here is another thoroughly nasty piece of work about to burst from her cocoon – Polly Billington. And she has form; until recently head honcho at the deeply malicious UK 100. A real US and Them advocate.
“Her UK100 scheme, aided and abetted by politicians, is designed to impoverish us, removing our rights and liberties that we took for granted as participants in a civic democracy. It’s a near future of no travel, no petrol, no pets and no petty cash. East Thanet is sleepwalking into electing an extremist, whose decarbonisation plans will apply to hoi polloi but not her and her pals in high places.”
She is standing for Labour in the Thanet by-election and when elected will doubtless muscle her way on to Labour’s front bench.
I saw a news clip with Greta protesting somewhere, one of the placards said…’End Private Jets’….If she keeps on like that she will be kept outside in the snow at the next Davos meeting. She would have to mingle with all the hoi polloi like Rebel News.
Oh, we can’t be having that Ron. Has she been placed on half pay or something?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/dolans-digest-its-the-immigrants-stupid/
Simon Dolan, whom I do have some time for, but here with a lamentable apologia for Fishy and his mob of treasonous barstewards. The guy is way behind the curve.
Remember he launched two legal challenges against Lockdown with no success. Does anyone remember what their reason (excuse) to reject the challenge was?
This woman is a bloody disgrace to humanity and should not be allowed to live freely amongst decent people in civilized society. Not only is she a complete traitor to British people but a traitor to women. She has played an active role in jeopardizing both national security ( to be fair, the politicians can take full credit for that one ) and the safety of British citizens. How much more migrant crime does a country actually need? Have we not reached peak ‘cultural enrichment’ from the paedo-worshippers and criminals yet?? Is Europe to continue being the garbage disposal unit for the third world rejects? Because this is what’s happening now, which I’m sure people like her will be all in favour of. Nothing says ”you have been conquered” like a Western country having ‘no-go zones’ and self-appointed Sharia psychos roaming around. But I suppose as long as women wear a hijab they’ll know who to molest and who to leave alone, so there is that..I mean, evidently “lessons” were not ”learnt” after the scandal of the extensive and long-running Pakistani rape gangs preying on vulnerable young girls. Unforgiveable, FFS!
”In the United Kingdom, there are now “no-go zones” that are Sharia compliant. Islamists seek to replace British law with Islamic law and left-wing immigration policies are helping the Islamists to achieve their goals.” ( 1min clip )
https://twitter.com/sapphirewrites_/status/1741067386772734031
Have you read “While Europe Slept” and “Surrender” by Bruce Bawer yet? Not that you need any educating on this subject, but I recommend those books. I notice there is some new Islamic Political Party supposedly for the “Muslim Community”——-I wasn’t aware that we needed political party’s to cater for different religious bunches of people. Do all Catholics think the same and require a political party? How about all protestants? Jews? ——–Only Muslims.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/king-charles-iii-diagnosed-with-cancer-buckingham-palace-says/
Official statement from the Palace for those who can be bothered.
This is a really good argument for setting a retirement age for royals such that their successors do actually succeed them before they enter the still-kept-alive-by-medical-maintenance stage of their lives. Charles III has now become king. That’s all he was ever going to become and he should really considering retiring now so that the present heir apparent can actually become king while he has still something like a life in front of him.
Willy is by all accounts thicker than his Dad. Maybe we will find out sooner rather than later.
Well, the idea that them Royals shag around like all students do and when they finally, likely out of exhaustion, settle down with some random tart, that random tart can just be ennobled and everything’s fine is obviously a reductio ad absurdum of the very concept of nobility and monarchy, but this would be a different conversation. Nevertheless, kings are supposed to be young or at least not already, for all practical purposes, very expensive OAPs by the time they finally get to ascend the throne.
And yet the BBC is somehow impartial… Sure.
Indeed. I think it’s close to impossible for any organisation working in the news and current affairs area to be “impartial”, so the solution is to get the state out of the business and then it’s “caveat emptor”.
Truly impartial? Probably not. But the BBC can be way more impartial, as we all know. And setting new guidelines is useless. There already are guidelines, but the people who are supposed to enforce them are just as impartial as the people they’re overseeing.
I’m not sure how that could possibly work. A political/social attitudes questionnaire to sort people into groups, quotas for people in each group, divide up tasks between them, get people of opposing views to write the same article and publish both.
Two basic steps to get most of the way there:
But like I said, who’s going to hold them to this?
Well, depending on your political views you will decide which facts to include and which not to, and which “sides” are worth getting statements from. As you say, who will enforce this? You’d need left and right wing “enforcers” – I think it has to be adversarial.
Yeah, and you get left and right wing overseers, except the right wing overseers will be exactly like all the commissions created to investigate the government: bought and paid for. So it’s a never ending cycle of “who’s watching the watchmen?” The only way out of this is for the people to hold the media and Ofcom accountable, but people couldn’t care less, which is why we’re in this mess to begin with. This is why TV, Hollywood, and social media are so important for the globalists. Keep the people satisfied and you can do whatever you want.
When I was young we had a set of national newspapers that were reasonably well divided between left and right – the spectrum still exists but the whole range has shifted to the left. Perhaps that was just luck.
It wasn’t luck. Some people worked very hard for that society. They’re all gone now, or too old to care.
Certainly good people worked hard and many are gone, but I think what evolved was luck or maybe the market doing its work. Press Barons, as they were know, were possibly more right wing, as I think the rich in general used to be, but I am not sure why for example the Daily Mirror supported Labour from 1945 onwards.
I think it’s socialism. I think those Press Barons, as self interested as they may have been, still cared about providing a good service. They had no interest in lying on a grand scale. But once socialism came along, that gave people an overarching cause. The People’s Cause. Combine this with the postmodernism that was so common amongst the socialist intelligentsia, and you have a perfect storm. There’s no facts, there’s no objective reality. All there is is power, and we must have the power at any cost so that we may further The People’s Cause. Like Diana West likes to say: “The issue is not The Issue. The Issue is always The Revolution.” Now you had people outright lying and supporting false narratives because they believed it was for a good cause. And there’s nothing that makes ordinary people more receptive to evil than believing it’s in the name of good.
So things changed. Back before all this, the worst people in society were out for themselves, trying to make some more money. Now the worst people in society aren’t even working for themselves. They lying, cheating, stealing, destroying without even realising the damage they’re causing, because they’re convinced it’s all in the name of the common good.
The Daily Mirror started supporting Labour for The Cause.
I still don’t know whether that kind of rich powerful person supports left wing causes because they really believe in them or for other reasons. Larry Fink of Blackrock has made a point of pushing Net Zero and “DEI”. Why?
With socialism there has always been three groups, as far as I can tell. The Party, the enforcers and the useful idiots, and the compliant population. The enforcers and the useful idiots either do what they do to survive, or they genuinely believe in the cause. Very few people in the Party believe in the cause. Most know that the goal of socialism is to create a subservient worker class, and that they’re the ones who truly own the means of production, supposedly in the name of the proletariat.
So I don’t think for one second that people like Larry Fink, or George Soros, or Klaus Schwab believe anything they say. I have absolutely no doubt that they don’t have a genuine bone in their bodies. But A LOT of the people working for them truly believe. Ordinary people just don’t force others through such ordeals, even if it’s in their self interest. But get them to believe that it’s all worth it, that utopia awaits, that it’s all for the greater good, and they’ll do it. And in any case, if they didn’t believe that would mean that millions of people are in on a conspiracy where they know none of this will ever work, but they’re keeping it a secret. It would make no sense.
And you see this everywhere. In the summer of 2022, when there was that so-called drought, I went to a park and noticed that even though the adjacent river was up to its usual level, the park’s duck pond was drained. Why? To conserve water, I’m sure the council would say. The end result? “Oh wow, this drought is so bad even the lake dried up!” Was the local council like “Yeah, let’s drain the lake and make these fools believe that there’s a drought when there isn’t so they live in fear of climate change!” No chance. What happened is that someone at the top did have that goal in mind and just told councils to shut down water features and drain ponds and whatnot, in order to conserve water. And the local authorities just did it. They didn’t ask themselves how exactly that will save water. They didn’t reply saying “but we have enough water”. That’s above their pay grade, not their responsibility. Useful idiots, advancing The Cause without even knowing. There’s no need for a conspiracy theory when people just mindlessly do what they’re told.
“So I don’t think for one second that people like Larry Fink, or George Soros, or Klaus Schwab believe anything they say.”
That would be my guess too.
My arse is more impartial than the BBC. It may not be symmetrical but it’s definitely more impartial.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/02/06/family-of-9-11-victim-vows-to-keep-fighting-for-new-inquest-after-uk-attorney-general-denies-them-a-second-time/
It is impossible not to conclude that, as usual the British government is colluding with the US government in covering up the real facts behind what really happened on 9 / 11. I am inclined to believe this was another Deep State job.
Agreed…And also Dr David Kelly.
Dr David Kelly certainly. Bliar had him ‘removed.’
One really has to appreciates this argument:
In another, it was reported that Ms. Harper warned that a 29-year-old Somali man who sexually assaulted a deaf girl aged 17 would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.
In other words, he must be granted asylum because he committed crimes here(!).
Obvious implication: Harper and her ilk want people to commit violent crimes in the UK.
Quote
The BBC has since announced that Ms. Harper was leaving the organisation. It is understood that she will depart later this month and that her most recent role at the corporation was as a journalist reporter. It remains unclear whether she quit or was sacked.
Intelligence asset – busted. The sickening ways of the treasonous establishment.
This should be another nail in the BBC coffin. Not that is that much more room for more nails. I despise the BBC and this slapper.
Is she unmarried? Often find these bleeding heart women are just falling romantically for the ‘bad boys’ they are supporting
Female biology is destroying our civilisation. I am with Nick Dixon on removing the vote from women and men who have not worked in a job that has to earn a profit. And men who have been in the military would get two votes. And all public sector workers automatically get no vote because they can influence the decisions of ministers through their work, and they are paid from enforced taxes.