We’re publishing a guest post by our in-house doctor looking at the latest NHS data, including ICU data. Conclusion: Omicron hospital admissions in the community are declining and are unlikely to result in severe COVID-19.
Before diving into the numbers this week, I’d like to give a big shout out to Ms. Kate Josephs CBE, formerly the Director of the Cabinet Office Covid taskforce. According to the Telegraph, which broke the story of her leaving party, she “literally wrote the rules” in relation to societal restrictions.
Ms. Josephs took to twitter yesterday to apologise for attending a leaving drinks party on December 17th 2020, when she had been substantially responsible for putting the rest of the country under house arrest. She writes about being “truly sorry” for attending the event – she clearly means she’s sorry for being exposed.
The Telegraph has a helpful timeline graphic showing the dates of the many known social events in Whitehall against a backdrop of prevailing restrictions at the time. I had no idea being a civil servant was such fun! It is interesting that the parties all cluster round periods of maximum lockdown. The brief period in the summer of 2020 was a social desert for civil servants. Maybe they were all on extended holidays?
I love a good laugh, so I’d genuinely like to thank Ms. Josephs. I haven’t laughed so much since Dominic Cummings took a 20-mile drive to test his eyes. By being exposed, this formerly faceless apparatchik has performed a valuable public service. Her hypocrisy reveals the absurdity of what Lord David Frost calls “Covid Theatre” – pointless petty regulations enforced so that the Government appears to be “doing something”. If Kate Josephs really believed in December 2020 that covid was a serious threat to her health, would she have turned up to a drinking session in a cramped Whitehall office? I think not.
After a brief moment of levity, I turn to the stats. By now, we should be well into the ‘nailed on tsunami’ of cases which are overwhelming the NHS – but of course we are not. Covid admissions from the community are falling, particularly in London, where they have been on a downtrend since the turn of the year. This week we have the monthly data summary from the NHS. Graph One is instructive. It shows daily admissions (blue line) compared to daily discharges of Covid patients (brown line). The weekend effect of discharges is clearly visible, as is the lag over the festive period. But in general, discharges have kept up with admissions. As these two trends are in balance, there should be no problem.
Graph Two tells a different story. Although Covid admissions and discharges are in balance, the total number of patients testing positive in hospital rose in late December and is now plateauing. This is the figure of over 16,000 patients repeated nightly by the mainstream TV news channels. How can this be?
Graph Three explains. The Primary Diagnosis spreadsheet this week shows that the percentage of patients in hospital with incidental Covid is increasing. Graph Three shows the numbers for London. Over half of the 3,200 patients in London hospitals ‘with Covid’ are not actually unwell with Covid. This is most likely to mean that in-hospital spread is the main reason for increasing inpatient numbers, but this is of questionable clinical relevance, as most of these patients are asymptomatic.
Graph Four from the monthly summary packet shows the real reason for the dramatic headlines. At the end of December, the NHS sent over 60,000 employees home to self-isolate. The majority were asymptomatic with positive tests or had merely been in contact with a person testing positive. If testing of asymptomatic staff and patients ceased tomorrow, this ‘problem’ would evaporate overnight.
The ICNARC database this week contains some interesting information about recent ICU admissions. There has been virtually no information released in relation to the variants of Covid infecting ICU patients. Colleagues tell me that all ICU patients are tested centrally for Omicron, but this information is not passed back to clinicians.
ICNARC has compared the clinical characteristics of patients admitted to ICU since December 30th (mostly assumed to be Omicron) with the prior cohort (assumed mostly Delta). The detail is outlined on tables 17-19 on pages 49-51.
In summary, patients admitted since December 30th are less seriously ill than the prior cohort – their oxygen requirements and respiratory ratios are lower than the presumed Delta cohort. It is revealing that only 72% of the patients testing positive for Covid since December 30th had Covid as the primary reason for requiring critical care – before December 30th, this figure was 93%. In other words, a third of the patients in ICU ‘with COVID’ are not unwell with the virus.
This is good news. Although we don’t have precise information about variants, it’s reasonable to conclude that Omicron is very unlikely to cause serious illness. ICU numbers continue to fall (Graph Five) and are not really any worse than a normal flu season. Dr. Mikko Paunio, writing in these pages, has calculated the Infection fatality rate from Omicron is lower than seasonal influenza using high quality Danish data.
I have seen no commentary from senior NHS leaders on this encouraging news. Readers may wish to consider the following counterfactual: had the numbers shown Omicron to be worse than Delta, what sort of media coverage might the ICNARC data have received?
Minutes of the SAGE meeting 102 on January 7th reveal that all the points I have made today were recognised by SAGE last week. Lower severity of disease, lower rate of admissions, shorter hospital stays. SAGE also acknowledge in this meeting that societal restrictions are unlikely to have any effect on reducing hospitalisations at this stage. This was reinforced in a consensus statement from SPI-M-O.
Yet coverage in the media continues to emphasise the risks of removing lockdown measures. The Financial Times reports that “scientists warn on dropping England’s Plan B Covid curb too soon”. It’s puzzling that the FT journalists have read the same literature as I have and come to such radically different conclusions.
The Mail reports that Warwick University modellers predict an ‘exit wave’ in the summer with 10,000 daily hospital admissions. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery to me – for comparison, hospital admissions peaked on December 29th 2021 at 1,783.
At the risk of sounding flippant, had these numbers been analysed in connection with an upper respiratory virus in 2019 we would probably have concluded there was a nasty cold going around. In 2022 we look at the same data and conclude there is a deadly virus which will overwhelm the health service. Misinformation seems to spread even faster than Omicron.
Misinformation aside, one of the more troubling aspects of the recent past has been the distortion of normal medical practice. Drs Mordue and Shaw writing in these pages have contributed fine articles on this point – chapeau to both of them.
Readers interested in discovering how doctors are expected to behave may consult the General Medical Council’s document Good Medical Practice. I entirely endorse everything in this pamphlet and strive to demonstrate these principles in my professional practice.
Readers will discover many references to respecting patient choice, even if it is different from their doctor’s advice. Doctors are specifically prohibited from discriminating against such patients. There are cautions about assessing the risks of harm from treatment and explaining these before requesting consent. There are detailed injunctions around declaration of conflicts of interest, acknowledgment of mistakes and transparency around analysis of harms. There are explicit passages in relation to respecting colleagues and the rules around personal conduct.
Readers may wish to consider to what extent these rules have been followed by public health doctors in relation to lockdown advocacy and vaccine mandates. Where guidance has not been followed, readers may wonder why deviation from professional norms has been tolerated and even encouraged by non-medical managers and politicians.
The history of the NHS over the last three decades can be interpreted as a power struggle between unregulated professional managers and groups of clinicians for control and influence. The managers have overwhelmingly triumphed and Covid has been the apotheosis of that victory.
Medical practice is now subservient to demands of management. Doctors are becoming functionaries of the system rather than independent clinicians. Medicine is at risk of becoming a profession in name only, with a primary duty to the NHS as a whole, rather than to the patient as an individual. As Steve Baker MP has noted, the recent past has seen a fundamental reshaping of the relationship between the citizen and the state. Doctors are morphing inexorably into civil servants.
Party on.
Stop Press: Daily Covid cases fell by 44% week-on-week, dropping to 81,713, with deaths dropping by 8%. MailOnline has more.
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When all else fails COVID returns
Wasn’t fake Doctor Jilly stabbed 4 or 5 x? How did she get the Rona if she was stabbinated? I assume she will rush out for the booster to save herself… I recall that she and her criminal husband tested positive for Rona during the plandemic more than once as well. What a theatre and pantomine the Rona fascism is. As with Doris Johnson’s fake near death act. Ugly actors pretending.
The whole mask wearing thing is all about fear, control and compliance.
A question to which I have never heard a satisfactory answer is: “If you are wearing your magic mask, why should it matter if I am not wearing one?”
Because reasons, obviously.
That’s because COVID masks, also emphatically known as covmas, are advanced SF technology: They’re one-way physical barriers which stop viruses arriving on the inside from passing to the outside but not the other way round. Why people who are technologically so much more developed than we that they can create physical barriers which act only in one direction didn’t create two way physical barriers which would have been both easier and more practical is beyond our feeble minds to understand! But we must trust The Science™ as handed down from our wise ancestors and never question it!
“Because its written, that’s why”
Monty python
And the reason is…..(crickets)
Of all the answers to that question that I have ever heard or read in the past three and a half years, not ONE of them satisfies Occam’s Razor.
Saying that it is no panacea suggests that it might have certain limited benefits. Mask wearing does not have any benefits but the deleterious effects on health have been well documented. Aside from the absurdity of putting a dirty mask in your pocket, on and off your face several times and this is suppose to be an infection control measure? I would say don’t address these people as if you’re on good faith terms with them because appeals to rationality are evidently futile. In order to attack this force you need to see that the masses need a talisman and the totalitarians love this yearning. These dependencies can be severed by implication if you discredit other parts of the agenda. But you won’t be able to pierce through to the frightened and you shouldn’t try because they will always find something to be frightened about and are utterly useless in a difficult situation.
Common sense (out of vogue) tells us that masks reduce oxygen, force inhalation of Co2 (oh no not the dreaded toxin) and carcinogens. The magic flying virus is 0.3 microns or less in size and happily passes through the diaper in or out. Anyone who wears a diaper is a swivel eyed moron and a dangerous one at that.
Indeed, masks are to viruses as chain link fences are to mosquitoes. And rebreathing the body’s own “exhaust fumes” hardly sounds the least bit healthy at all. Just goes to show how gullible the masses are.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/open-contracts-court-rules-favour-vaccine-transparency/5831704
This could have implications.
Not seen any round my way but we are experiencing ‘global boiling’ temps of 30+degs this week, which may be too much even for the masktard muppets. I feel it’s my moral obligation to point at and ridicule anyone I see with one because if I don’t react at all then that’s a win for them because I’m basically normalizing their madness. So I think we owe it to ourselves to take the p*ss out of the munters because it’s all for the greater good. I typed a lot of words when really a meme could suffice..
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1699172062042964436/photo/1
It wwill bite hard and nasty this autumn on many levels. Interest rise alone put about 800,000 mortgage holders at risk and that is without considering the concommitant decline. Not to mention the renters forced onto the streets. And then of course there is no exit strategy for the West. And nothing left to underwrite the system should it go kaput. You need to be ready for a reality both nasty and beautiful. And of course there is no beauty without danger or risk.
As long as you don’t give two hoots about dying then you’re good to go. And of course there are many things worse than death. And honestly I don’t say this as a matter of faith I can say that you are coming back so there is every point in refining this life and this reality.
Don’t look at these matters like they are spectator sport. They call it fifth dimensional warfare. We don’t have the resources to keep up but we have the fine old English art of taking the piss. Understand that if we reconnect with the realm of the spirit they would be wiped out in an instant.
You have to seriously ask yourself, what are you hoping that might happen in the future. For me I came to this country as a small child and it was such a beautiful transformation from where I lived before it was truly magical. Old ladies in turbans and young lads who worked in the motorbike factory. For me I jujst worry about the credulity of our countrymen and I wish that there was some way to break through this. One of the aspects of modern warfare is undertstanding on a granular level of the bonds that exist between people. How can you fight back against such an attack? There are things that this force can never comprehend we need to rediscover these.
This isn’t some indeterminate point in the future that we are discussing the attack is full bodied and relentless. I am not an aggresive person I am just telling you we are moving into the time of the wolf.
The whole point of our country is that it is a bit different and at the same time in tune with the highest reality. My point is that for us in Britian we could easily be the first country that re-establishes contact with the realm of the spirit. Trust me the yearning is there.
How can you hang half in and half out of the reality to come. If your wealth is predicated on what went before. There is no wise money now don’t go looking for safe havens. We should consider circumstances and how we are going to react. Don’t assume that these easy channls of communication will be here forever.
You’re supposed to be the Brits and intelligent and not putting up with any crap. So act like it.
I am just being honest with you. Either you mount a fighting response or you don’t. My support is a hunfred percent behind these islands. I am just telling you straight.
Just tell them, “OFF MY CASE, DIAPER-FACE!”