News Round-Up
26 July 2024
Government Has Just Declared War on Free Speech
26 July 2024
by Toby Young
Covid testing rules are to be relaxed as part of efforts to shorten isolation periods and ease staffing shortages. But given mass testing has clearly failed to contain the virus why continue it at all?
The Government has awarded Serco and Mitie new testing contracts – worth up to £687 million collectively – to support the Test and Trace system. The contracts could run for up to 18 months.
India, with its surging infections, is the latest Covid cautionary tale. But the country is 20 times bigger than the UK and Covid is far from its biggest killer. And why is it suddenly surging in every region at once?
"Boris does seem to need the approval of his peers in Whitehall and is a great appeaser," says Dr Timothy Bradshaw. "He caves in everywhere, at the expense of ordinary people on behalf of massive corporations."
Biostatistics Professor Jon Deeks has criticised the Government's mass Covid testing plan as a waste of "time and money", highlighting that in some areas only one positive case would be found after 10,000 tests.
Offering free rapid tests to the entire population is a waste of money. It would make more sense to target resources at vulnerable people who have not yet had the virus or been vaccinated.
A major review led by Jon Deeks, Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, has concluded lateral flow tests are too inaccurate to be used in mass screening in schools and workplaces.
In the week that all students returned to school, only 0.06% of rapid Covid tests produced positive results. But how many of these were false positives, and how many families were forced to isolate as a result?
Mass testing in schools as children returned this week is resulting in hundreds of positives – but viral prevalence is now so low that the large majority of them are wrong and result in children and their contacts isolating needlessly.
© Skeptics Ltd.