News Round-Up
27 October 2024
by Will Jones
“Why Did Our Parked Electric Car Explode?”
26 October 2024
by Will Jones
In a recent article, we considered the implications of the U.K.’s spring rise in infections, given that before now the assumption has been that coronaviruses are seasonal at northern temperate latitudes. Do we have to dismiss that hypothesis in light of the ‘Third Wave’? Here we argue that, contrary to Government claims, the British summer is indeed finally impacting viral transmission, with sharp falls in positives reported across the U.K. In England, reported cases have more-or-less halved in a week, from 50,955 to 25,434. This sharp fall runs counter to all three of the most recent SAGE models driving Government policy, which predict rising infections leading to peaks in hospital admissions in high summer – and by implication falsifies the assumptions upon which these models are based. Parsimony predicts the summer troughs and winter peaks evident for SARS-CoV-2 In spring and summer 2020 and winter 2020-1, SARS-CoV-2 infections parsimoniously followed the pattern of seasonal respiratory viruses, falling away in the summer months and rising again in the autumn, with peaks in deaths occurring between mid-November 2020 and mid-April 2021 in different northern temperate countries. Although falling infection levels were sometimes prolonged into early summer or began to rise again in late summer, there were no peaks in fatalities in summer or early autumn 2020. Most notably, while cases in Sweden ...
Imperial's REACT study reconstructs the epidemic curve in England from the symptom onset dates of people with antibodies. It shows that infections always declined before lockdown and sometimes increased under it.
There was a good letter in the Telegraph today co-signed by Lockdown Sceptics contributor David Campbell and his colleague Kevin Dowd blaming Imperial College's alarmist modelling last March for the pickle we're in.
We've taken a look at the new modelling from Imperial, Warwick and LSHTM that led to headlines earlier this week saying SAGE was no longer predicting an apocalyptic 'third wave'. Unfortunately, it's not all good news.
Imperial College's modelling has been consistently poor at predicting the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet for some reason Neil Ferguson and the ICL team remain respected authorities on epidemic modelling.
Imperial College have repeatedly denied they made failed predictions of Sweden's death toll, claiming it was the work of others that they did not endorse. But new data has come to light showing this is not true.
Imperial advocates that masks, Test & Trace and social distancing remain indefinitely. They mention no end date. They want to make this a new normal that lasts forever. This is typical out-of-touch behaviour from SAGE.
On the anniversary of the week in which our lives became intimately subject to the outputs of a physicist's dodgy computer model, let's revisit Imperial's infamous Report 9 to remind ourselves quite how wrong it was.
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