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NHS Mobile App Will Be Used as Covid Vaccine Passport for International Travel

The NHS mobile app, through which people currently book GP appointments, will be used as a Covid vaccine passport when international travel returns. The date of return remains uncertain: Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said we must “wait and see” if May 17th continues to be viable. The Guardian has the story.

International travellers will be asked to demonstrate their Covid vaccination and testing status using the NHS smartphone app, the U.K. Government has confirmed, as the Transport Secretary promised to release a list of possible holiday destinations within a fortnight.

Grant Shapps said work had started on developing the app many people use to book appointments with their GPs so that it can show whether they have been vaccinated and tested for the virus.

But he was coy about when people would be able to start travelling abroad for holidays in interviews on Wednesday morning, saying the public would have to “wait and see” when they could go to some of the most popular foreign holiday destinations.

“Spain specifically, I’m afraid I just don’t have the answer to that because the Joint Biosecurity Centre will need to come up with their assessment and we can’t do that until a bit nearer the time,” he told Times Radio.

Speaking to Sky News, Shapps said he would be able to announce within a fortnight which countries people would be able to visit without needing to quarantine when they returned and added that domestic coronavirus statistics were on track for the Government to enable the resumption of foreign holidays next month.

“I have to say that so far the data does continue to look good from a U.K. perspective, notwithstanding those concerns about where people might be travelling to and making sure we’re protected from the disease being reimported.”

He added: “We do need to make sure that we do this very, very carefully… But, in the next couple of weeks, I’ll come back on and I’ll be able to tell you about which countries will have made it into the traffic light system – and that green list in particular.”

He said the green list would include the “countries where you’ll be able to go to, without needing to quarantine on your return, you will still need to take a pre-departure test, and one test on your return”.

Further doubt was cast on our ability to resume travel on May 17th last week when it was reported that the Foreign Office could refuse to sanction travel to countries on the Government’s “green” and “amber” lists since its travel advice is published independently of the “traffic light” system.

The Guardian’s report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  28 April 2021 • 10.18
     
80 comments

The Truth About the Covid ‘Crisis’ in India

Now that Chile is settling down a bit, the latest Covid cautionary tale is India, which never seems to be out of the news at the moment as its positive cases and deaths have rocketed in the past few weeks.

Even the usually level-headed Kate Andrews in the Spectator has been painting the situation in lurid colours.

As it happened, the UK’s worst nightmares were never realised. The Nightingale hospitals built to increase capacity were barely used. But what the British Government feared most is now taking place elsewhere. India is suffering an exponential growth in infections, with more than 349,000 cases reported yesterday, as well as nearly 3,000 deaths. Hospitals are running out of oxygen for patients and wards are overflowing. There are reports of long queues as the sick wait to be seen by medical professionals. It’s expected the situation will deteriorate further before it gets better.

Jo Nash, who lived in India until recently and still has many contacts out there, has written a very good piece for Left Lockdown Sceptics putting the current figures in context – something no mainstream outlet seems to have any interest in doing.

Jo makes the crucial point that we need to keep in mind the massive difference in scale between India and the UK. At 1.4 billion people, India is more than 20 times larger than the UK, so to compare Covid figures fairly we must divide India’s by 20. So 2,000 deaths a day is equivalent to a UK toll of 100. India’s current official total Covid deaths of approaching 200,000 is equivalent to just 10,000 in the UK.

In a country the size of India and with the huge number of health challenges faced by the population, the number of Covid deaths needs to be kept in perspective. As Sanjeev Sabhlock observes in the Times of India, 27,000 people die everyday in India. This includes 2,000 from diarrhoea and 1,200 from TB (vaccinations for which have been disrupted by the pandemic). The lack of adequate hospital provision for Covid patients may be more a reflection of the state of the health service than the severity of the disease.

Jo Nash also points out that poor air quality plays a role.

Delhi, the focus of the media’s messaging, and the source of many of the media’s horrifying scenes of suffering, has the most toxic air in the world which often leads to the city having to close down due to the widespread effects on respiratory health…

Respiratory diseases including COPD, TB, and respiratory tract infections like bronchitis leading to pneumonia are always among the top ten killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises…

According to my contacts on the ground, people in Delhi are suffering from untreated respiratory and lung conditions that are now becoming serious. I’ve also had breathing problems there when perfectly healthy and started to mask up to keep the particulate matter out of my lungs. I used to suffer from serious chest infections twice yearly during the big changes in weather in India, usually November/December and April/May. When I reluctantly masked up that stopped. My contacts have reported that the usual seasonal bronchial infections have not been properly treated by doctors afraid of getting Covid, and people’s avoidance of government hospitals due to fear of getting Covid. Undoubtedly, these fears will have been fuelled by the media’s alarmist coverage of the situation. Consequently, the lack of early intervention means many respiratory conditions have developed life-threatening complications. Also, people from surrounding rural areas often travel to Delhi for treatment as it has the best healthcare facilities and people can go there for a few rupees by train. This puts pressure on Delhi’s healthcare system during respiratory virus seasons.

Positive cases look like they may be peaking in many regions now.

The Truth About the Covid ‘Crisis’ in IndiaRead More

By Will Jones  /  28 April 2021 • 07.00
     
77 comments

News Round Up

By Jonathan Barr  /  28 April 2021 • 03.05
 
47 comments

No Benefit of Social Distancing and Capacity Limits, Study Shows

A new study published this week adds to the evidence that social distancing rules like the two-metre, one-metre-plus and six-foot rules offer no additional protection against COVID-19.

Professors Martin Bazant and John Bush from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology use mathematical modelling to show that the risk of catching the virus is unaffected by keeping your distance from infected people when in the same room because of the way the virus spreads via aerosols in the air.

Prof Bazant told CNBC that the six-foot rule “really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance”.

While distancing offers some protection against larger droplets, it offers none against aerosols, which are a very common mode of transmission.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, uses a model to calculate indoor exposure risk based on time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunisations, respiratory activity, variants and mask use. Their conclusion is that it’s not social distancing that reduces risk but primarily the amount of time people spend in an enclosed space. The authors advise in the paper:

To minimise risk of infection, one should avoid spending extended periods in highly populated areas. One is safer in rooms with large volume and high ventilation rates. One is at greater risk in rooms where people are exerting themselves in such a way as to increase their respiration rate and pathogen output, for example, by exercising, singing, or shouting. 

Prof Bazant explains in his CNBC interview that this means many venues that have been closed can reopen at full capacity without increasing exposure risk.

What our analysis continues to show is that many spaces that have been shut down in fact don’t need to be. Often times the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good. I think if you run the numbers, even right now for many types of spaces you’d find that there is not a need for occupancy restrictions.

The authors suggest that instead of an exposed person being defined as someone who has been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes (as per the current CDC definition), whole rooms should be considered to be exposed depending on whether or not they exceed their cumulative exposure time (CET) with the infected person.

This does seem to be a more scientifically credible definition of exposure, but it also invites the possibility of yet more public health tyranny. And indeed, the authors propose regular mass testing at a frequency regulated by the CET for the space in question – and they’ve helpfully provided an app to enable us to calculate that. They explain:

For a group sharing an indoor space intermittently, for example, office coworkers or classmates, regular testing should be done with a frequency that ensures that the CET between tests is less than the limit set by the guideline. 

The need for this mass testing arises because they assume in their model that asymptomatic infections are no less infectious than symptomatic infections, so that simply asking people to isolate when ill is not enough to prevent exposure. Yet it is well-established now that asymptomatic infection is considerably less infectious than symptomatic infection and contributes very little to spread.

It’s worth stressing, then, that this is very much a model, not a study of real world transmission data and patterns, so is highly dependent on the assumptions and parameters that go into it. Some of those assumptions are more sound than others.

The assumptions relating to masks, for instance, are highly dubious.

The model tells you that if a restaurant with 50 people in it includes one infected person then people should spend less than 40 minutes there to avoid being infected. But if they are all wearing masks then this would be 28 hours! How does it arrive at that incredible difference?

No Benefit of Social Distancing and Capacity Limits, Study ShowsRead More

By Will Jones  /  28 April 2021 • 01.41
     
17 comments

CDC Says Fully Vaccinated Americans Can Now Go Maskless Outside – but Not in Crowds

When Joe Biden became the President of the U.S., he asked Americans to wear face masks for his first 100 days in office. Thursday marks his 100th day as President, but new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that only fully vaccinated Americans can do away with face masks outdoors – and even then, only when not in crowds. The Mail has the story.

Fully vaccinated Americans can now safely go without masks outside, the CDC said on Tuesday.

“If you are fully vaccinated, things are much safer for you,” said CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky during a Tuesday White House press briefing. 

“There are many situations in which Americans do not need to wear masks if they are fully vaccinated, particularly outdoors.”

As long as they are outside, people who are fully vaccinated can now exercise, go to small gatherings or restaurants with people who are vaccinated or unvaccinated. 

It comes amid mounting evidence – finally acknowledged by the CDC on Tuesday – that outdoor transmission of coronavirus is exceedingly rare, accounting for less than 10% of cases. Those risks are mainly linked to crowded events that can turn into super-spreader events, or people who were in close range of one another. 

However, in crowded places like concerts, parades or sporting events, even vaccinated people should still wear masks, the CDC’s new guidance says. 

The guidance is merely that – advice about what the health agency has deemed safe – and is not enforceable. It’s up to states, counties and cities to issue mask mandates and other restrictions. 

Several states, including Massachusetts and Kentucky rolled back their guidelines on mask-wearing outdoors on Tuesday morning, in anticipation of the update to the guidelines. 

Unvaccinated people can shed their masks too, if they are outside exercising or at small outdoor gatherings with vaccinated friends and families.  

In order to “make a point” about the new mask-wearing guidelines, President Biden took off his mask when giving a speech at the White House on Tuesday and kept it off until he was back inside.

Worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  27 April 2021 • 21.52
     
24 comments

Durham University Introduces Covid Status Certificates

A reader has been in touch to tell us that a Covid certification scheme has been introduced at Durham University, where her son is a first-year student. As she asks, is this even legal?

Elder son, First Year student at Durham University, returned on Sunday for summer term. He has been told he needs to do two lateral flow tests per week and must have a negative email confirmation on his phone in order to do “any university activity”. This means that if he wants to participate in the life of the university, as opposed to stay cooped up in his tiny dorm room 24/7, Covid testing is mandatory.

Is this even legal?

He was also told his term has also been extended by one week, into early July, for the “wider university experience”. (Joke.) Is this so the university can broaden its new scheme to include evidence students have been vaccinated in time for when the roll out hits 18 to 30 year-olds? Presumably, the authorities at Durham don’t care that the risks of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks of not being vaccinated for people in his age group.

This academic year he will have had zero face-to-face teaching. There has been no announcement at all about the 2021/22 academic year teaching arrangements, apart from to confirm that maximum fees will be charges, as they were this year. But of course.

I cannot understand why universities, with all their fine minds, are supporting this nonsensical testing regime. Don’t the medical professors read the data on the false positive rates for lateral flow tests? To me, universities have been complicit in damaging UK further education, as well as the health of their communities.

My poor 19 year-old son is desperate to have a more “normal” life again. He could very easily be coerced into doing almost anything to achieve that and will get vaccinated if it means he can get back to university sport and some socialising. This is the second year of woeful education for him, having had his A-levels cancelled in 2020. It fills me with despair.

By Toby Young  /  27 April 2021 • 18.36
     
86 comments

Why Can’t the Government be More Transparent About the Data Guiding its Decisions?

We’re publishing an original piece today by Dr Anthony Fryer, a Professor of Clinical Biochemistry at the School of Medicine at Keele University and member of HART. He is becoming more and more frustrated that the Government isn’t being more transparent about the data it’s basing its decisions on, its failure to contextualise the data it does release and why, in particular, it has failed to acknowledge the impact false positives have in inflating the number of cases as well as the figures about how many people have supposedly died from COVID-19. Here are the first three paragraphs:

When I look back over the last year or so of the pandemic, I can forgive the first couple of months. We were all finding our feet with a largely unknown entity. However, as a clinical scientist with over 30 years in NHS laboratories and as an academic researcher with over 200 peer-reviewed clinical research articles in scientific and medical journals (including over 130 involving use of the polymerase chain reaction [PCR]), I found my views increasingly divergent from those of the Government and its advisors. Those who know me will know that it takes a lot to get me annoyed, but I could not sit by and do nothing when I could see the immense damage being done to countless lives and businesses in the name of supposedly protecting us from SARS-CoV-2.

But let me say at the start; I am not one to deny the damage that COVID-19 can do. (And I deliberately use that term, rather than SARS-CoV-2. It’s the disease that causes the problems – most people manage the virus without much difficulty.) COVID-19 can be very nasty and my heart goes out to all those affected. But the way in which the Government handled the pandemic has, in my view, been shocking. It’s felt like it has focused blindly on the virus (and not very well at that either – just think about PPE in care homes for a start) and ignored the massive implications on every other level.

So I wrote. I wrote letters to the local paper, emailed the Chief Medical Officer, submitted evidence to a Parliamentary Inquiry, signed the Great Barrington Declaration, published scientific papers on the ineffectiveness of face coverings and on the non-Covid harms to people with diabetes, and wrote to my MP. Several times. I also joined UsforThem and the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART).

This is a brilliant piece by an eminent medical scientist who’s been red-pilled by the Government’s poor handling of the pandemic and is very much worth reading in full.

By Toby Young  /  27 April 2021 • 17.44
     
30 comments

House of German Judge Who Ruled Against Masks in Schools Raided By Investigators

Earlier this month, we covered the ruling of a court in Weimar, Germany, that two schools should be prevented – with immediate effect – from forcing their pupils to wear masks, along with imposing social distancing measures and insisting on SARS-CoV-2 rapid tests. The judge said: “The state legislature regulating this area has gotten far removed from the facts, which has taken on seemingly historic proportions.” It has since been reported that the house, office and car of this judge have been searched by investigators because his ruling is thought to have violated the law. 2020News has the story.

The judge at the Weimar District Court, Christian Dettmar, had his house searched [on Monday]. His office, private premises and car were searched. The judge’s cell phone was confiscated by the police. The judge had made a sensational decision on April 8th, 2021, which was very inconvenient for the Government’s anti-Covid measures…

The decision… had caused quite a stir. It had been downloaded about two million times from the 2020News website alone.

The house search… took place obviously for political reasons.

According to a t-online report (translated from German by Google Translate), the Weimar judge’s ruling has been accused of being “manifestly unlawful”.

At the beginning of April, the judge ordered that the mask and test requirement for children at two Weimar schools were [to be] suspended because of an alleged risk to the welfare of the children. He had claimed responsibility for the decision. The administrative court, however, declared the mask requirement to be legal last week. The judges there indicated that they considered the family judge’s decision to be “manifestly unlawful”. Family courts are not empowered to issue orders to authorities.

The Weimar decision has also been heavily criticised… by other courts… The public prosecutor’s office is now investigating the initial suspicion that the judge could have “consciously and seriously distanced himself from the law” and made a decision that is not supported by the statutory provisions.

A demonstration against the treatment of the Weimar judge has been announced.

The 2020News report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  27 April 2021 • 16.54
   
33 comments

Number of Weekly Covid Deaths in England and Wales at Lowest Level in Six Months

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the number of weekly Covid-related deaths has fallen to the lowest level since last October. There has been a particular fall in Covid deaths in the 70-and-over age group, a large proportion of whom have been fully vaccinated. Sky News has the story.

A total of 362 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending April 16th mentioned Covid on the death certificate, according to the ONS.

This is the lowest number since the week ending October 2nd, 2020.

The figure is also down by 4% on the previous week’s total, although the ONS said the number of deaths registered is likely to have been affected by the recent Easter bank holidays.

Around one in 29 (3.5%) of all deaths registered in England and Wales in the week to April 16th mentioned coronavirus on the death certificate.

The latest data also showed a massive 97% fall in Covid deaths in the 70-and-over age group, with 196 virus-related fatalities registered in the week ending April 9th compared with 7,049 in the week ending January 22nd.

Deaths for those aged 65 to 69 decreased by 96% during the same period, with drops of 95% for those aged 60 to 64, 94% for those aged 55 to 59, and 96% for those aged 50 to 54.

Overall, Covid deaths were down by at least 95% since the second-wave peak among people in all 50-and-over age groups, the ONS said.

Worth reading in full.

The ONS also found that almost as many people are now dying from flu and pneumonia as they are from Covid. The Mail has the story.

Flu and pneumonia are now killing almost as many people as coronavirus, official figures revealed today as the outbreak continues to fade away.

ONS analysis showed the illnesses were listed as the underlying cause of death for 265 victims in England and Wales in the week ending April 16th.

For comparison, Covid was blamed for 275 deaths.

Also worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  27 April 2021 • 14.00
     
38 comments

New Paper Argues the Costs of Canada’s Lockdown Far Outweighed the Benefits

The Canadian economist Douglas Allen has written a paper reviewing the literature on the costs and benefits of lockdown. Early studies, he argues, made a number of erroneous assumptions, which led them to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs.

Such studies overestimated the benefits of lockdowns insofar as they used overly pessimistic values of key epidemiological parameters; they assumed people would not change their behaviour voluntarily in response to the pandemic; and they assumed the “value of a statistical life” is independent of age. And they underestimated the costs of lockdowns insofar as they only took into account the effects on GDP.

The “value of a statistical life” is a concept used by economists and political scientists to compare the impact of different policies. It is calculated by observing how much individuals are willing to pay to avoid a given level of risk. For example, researchers can examine the relationship between wages and fatality rates across occupations, while holding other factors constant. (Crab fishermen get paid a lot more than fruit pickers, in part because their work is more risky.)  

However, the “value of a statistical life” is lower at older ages, particularly above age 65. Since the vast majority of those who die of COVID-19 are older than 65, assuming the “value of a statistical life” is independent of age will lead one to overestimate the benefits of policies that aim to reduce mortality from COVID-19. 

Allen then reviews studies that have attempted to disentangle the impacts of lockdowns versus voluntary changes in behaviour. He concludes, “all of them find that mandated lockdowns have only marginal effects and that voluntary changes in behavior explain large parts of the changes in cases, transmissions, and deaths.”

Finally, Allen undertakes his own cost-benefit analysis of Canada’s lockdowns. Following the economist Bryan Caplan, he assumes that the average Canadian valued life under lockdown 5/6ths as much as the alternative, which implies that Canadians lost 6.3 million life years in total. Allen claims that this figure exceeds any plausible estimate of the number of life years saved. 

Even if you don’t agree with his assumptions, Allen’s paper is worth reading in full.

By Noah Carl  /  27 April 2021 • 12.46
     
8 comments