Lockdown is going to bankrupt all of us and our descendants and is unlikely at this point to slow or halt viral circulation as the genie is out of the bottle. What the current situation boils down to is this: is economic meltdown a price worth paying to halt or delay what is already amongst us?
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, March 30th 2020
This is probably the most significant ‘known unknown’ when it comes to trying to understand the crisis and work out how best to respond. Simply put, if the Imperial College modelling by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team is correct and only 3-5% of the UK population has been infected, that’s a powerful argument for prolonging the lockdown. If we start relaxing social distancing measures, tens of millions of people will become infected, the NHS will quickly be overwhelmed and hundreds of thousands will die. This was the assumption built into the March 16th model which estimated the death toll at 510,000 if we took no precautions, 250,000 if we followed a mitigation strategy and 20,000 if we moved to a suppression strategy. In effect, the lockdown is preventing 230,000 unnecessary deaths, although that’s an underestimate if Professor Ferguson’s model is right because his 250,000 figure assumed that all those requiring critical hospital care would receive it when, in fact, the demand for critical care in the mitigation scenario would be eight times greater than the NHS’s emergency surge capacity. And even if we inflate that 250,000 to allow for this, that still doesn’t account for the total number of deaths that pursuing a mitigation strategy would result in because it doesn’t include the increase in the number of people dying from other diseases because the NHS would be overwhelmed.
But what if Professor Ferguson has underestimated the number of people who’ve been infected? A paper written by a team of scientists led by Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University published on March 24th included a range of estimates of the percentage of the UK population that has already been infected, one putting it as high as 68%. (This was widely reported as a claim that half the UK population may have already been infected.) If that’s true, it suggests we’re well on our way to acquiring herd immunity and if we end the lockdown tomorrow the NHS will be able to cope, particularly as it has over 2,000 vacant intensive care beds compared to about 800 before the crisis. As of April 13th, 290,720 UK citizens have had swab tests, of which 88,621 were positive, or about 30%. True, this isn’t a representative sample, but against that some of the people tested will have been negative because they’ve already had it. In general, the fact that only a small minority of the population has been presenting with symptoms doesn’t mean a majority haven’t been infected because data out of China suggests four-fifths of those who get COVID-19 are asymptomatic. (Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, thinks the real figure is likely to be closer to 30%.)
The Oxford paper was criticised on the grounds that many of the assumptions made by Professor Gupta were “speculative” and had no “empirical justification”, but the same is true of the Imperial model. The FT’s Jemima Kelly said Oxford’s research should be taken with a large dose of salt because it was “not yet peer reviewed”, but Imperial’s paper hasn’t been peer reviewed either. As John Ioannidis, professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, has pointed out, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built into the Imperial model “seem to be substantially inflated”. But others are much more sceptical, such as Gregory Cochran, who argues that half the UK population cannot possibly have been infected since, if they had, you’d expect the percentage of people testing positive after being swabbed to be far higher. What if they’ve already had it and flushed it out of their systems? Cochran thinks that’s implausible because the virus is so new.
One of the reasons it’s so important to accurately gauge how many people have been infected is because without knowing that we don’t know what the infection fatality rate (IFR) is. That’s different to the case fatality rate (CFR), which is the number of people who’ve tested positive divided by the number of deaths. The CFR varies enormously from country to country. In Italy, for instance, it’s 11%, while in Germany its 0.79%. In Iceland, which has carried out more testing per capita than any other country (it only has a population of 364,260) it’s 0.2%, just above seasonal influenza. In the UK, the CFR is around 9%. But it’s a safe bet that the IFR, whatever it turns out to be, will be significantly lower than the CFR. If it turns out that 30% of the UK population has been infected and 20,000 people end up dying, that’s an IFR of 0.12%, or just above the IFR of seasonal flue. Knowing the IFR matters because we won’t know how much demand there’ll be for critical care in the NHS if we relax the social distancing measures until we know both what percentage of the population has been infected and what the IFR is. We should start to build up a more accurate picture of both once we start doing large scale serological testing – something like an opinion poll, i.e., a large, nationally representative sample of the UK population. A team at the University of Bonn tested a randomised sample of 1,000 residents of the town of Gangelt in the north-west of the country, one of the epicentres of the outbreak in Germany, and found that 15% either were or had been infected, yielding an IFR of 0.37%. For what it’s worth, Oxford’s Centre For Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) estimates the IFR to be between 0.1% and 0.26%.
In the US, research released on April 17th by Dr Ioannidis of Stanford University on actual infection rates in Santa Clara county using a serology approach to test for antibodies on over 3,300 residents suggests that the number of people actually infected is a staggering 50 – 85 times higher than the 956 cases that have been documented (see video link below and the research here). As he goes on to explain, this would make the fatality rate “in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza”. A second report, covering Los Angeles County, was released on April 19th with similar findings, with actual infection rates estimated at 28-55 times higher than the 7,994 documented cases.
One note of caution: we don’t know for sure that people who’ve had COVID-19 are immune, not in perpetuity. There is at least one instance of someone catching it twice – a Japanese woman, although she may have been immunocompromised. Even if you’ve had COVID-19 as a result of being exposed to SARS-CoV-2, coronaviruses have a nasty habit of mutating, so you could catch it for a second time from another strain that you’ve got no immunity to. However, cases of reinfection are extremely rare to date and when viruses do mutate they tend to become less deadly, not more. Why? Because more deadly strains kill off their hosts faster and hence are less successful at replicating themselves. As a rule, the most successful coronaviruses in evolutionary terms are the least harmful, like those associated with the common cold.
Further Reading
‘“Trump Is Right About the Coronavirus. The WHO Is Wrong,” Says Israeli Expert‘ by Oded Carmeli, Haaretz, March 21st 2020
‘Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic‘, Sunetra Gupta et al, MedRxiv, March 24th 2020
‘Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population – Oxford study‘ by Clive Cookson, Financial Times, March 24th 2020
‘How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear‘ by Dr John Lee, The Spectator, March 28th 2020
‘Covid-19 – The tipping point?‘, Tom Jefferson, Carl Heneghan, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, March 30th 2020
‘It’s very rare to catch Covid-19 twice‘, FullFact, March 31st 2020
‘How likely are you to die of coronavirus?‘ by Tom Chivers, UnHerd, April 1st 2020
‘Covid-19: four fifths of cases are asymptomatic, China figures indicate‘, British Medical Journal, April 2nd 2020
‘Coronavirus, Castiglione d’Adda is a case study: “70% of blood donors are positive”‘ by Monica Serra, La Stampa, April 2nd 2020
‘Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters‘, John Ioannidis et al, medRxiv, April 8th 2020
‘Covid antibody test in German town shows 15 per cent infection rate‘ by Ross Clark, The Spectator, April 10th 2020
‘1-in-7 New Yorkers May Have Already Gotten Covid-19‘ by Justin Fox, Bloomberg, April 15th 2020
‘Has SARS-CoV-2 Fooled the Whole World?‘, Mikko Paunio, LockdownSceptics.org, April 16th 2020
‘COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California‘, John Ioannidis et al, medRixv, April 17th 2020
‘Stanford study suggests coronavirus is more widespread than realized‘ by Ross Clark, The Spectator, April 17th 2020
‘Global Covid-19 Case Fatality Rates‘ by Jason Oke and Carl Heneghan, CEBM, April 17th 2020
‘The end of exponential growth: The decline in the spread of coronavirus‘ by Issac Ben-Israel, The Times of Israel, April 19th 2020
‘Early results of antibody testing suggest number of COVID-19 infections far exceeds number of confirmed cases in Los Angeles County‘, University of Southern California and Los Angeles County Public Health Department, April 20th 2020
‘Getting a handle on asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection‘, Daniel P Oran and Eric J Topol, Scripps Research, April 20th 2020
‘New York antibody study estimates 13.9% of residents have had the coronavirus, Gov. Cuomo says‘, CNBC, April 23rd 2020
Further Viewing
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I’m persuaded by the chap on the left I’m afraid… If The Great Reset is just a crackpot conspiracy theory, it’s certainly fooled the WEF, who brag about it on their website, publish books about it and state very clearly that vaccination status will be the foundation of a new global economic system. Should someone tell them they’ve been had?
What sort of evil geniuses would just tell you their plans, right out in the open, then gaslight you for talking about them? Surely that’s James Bond stuff.
We are indeed living in the sum of every badly-written and implausible spy film.
that just happen to be propaganda for those nice people at the CIA (at least the Bond films anyway), who also popularised the term “conspiracy theorist”.
(For those not getting my point, decrying the obvious gaslighting as fiction is just cranking up the gas.)
From what I have seen these WEF people are third-raters. What certainly can be happening, however, is that many convergent interests make it appear that it is being run by a cabal. Money for Big Pharma, power for Karens (in and out of the bureaucracy), and relevance for politicians. It has it all.
Third raters, maybe. But browsing their own list of the “world leaders” they’ve trained they are some of the richest and most powerful third raters in the world, including those heads of nations pushing the lockdown agenda hardest, like Macron and Ardern.
Just to clarify, I don’t believe the WEF are directing the entire fraud supervillain style in a command centre under a Swiss mountain!. I think (like others have suggested) that they are just one component of a group of generally converging interests attempting to capitalise on an inevitable economic reset caused by spiralling US debt. That’s the interpretation that makes the most sense to me – if we accept that the whole thing is a gigantic fraud, we need to be able to explain how leaders across the world have been convinced of the need to play along, the only way I can get there is if the alternative has been presented to them as an economic apocalypse..
It could be even simpler than that. A bit like terrorism, covid is a useful bogeyman that allows politicians to grab more power and be criticised less.
True but it goes a bit beyond that doesn’t it? The fake terrorism crisis created a fake industry sure, but it didn’t involve destroying whole swathes of the economy and millions of peoples’ lives and livelihoods.
‘but it didn’t involve destroying whole swathes of the economy and millions of peoples’ lives and livelihoods.’
Well, not in the West, but elsewhere it did.
You’re right; I suppose the economic terrorism has just come home to roost.
Yes when they boast about their actions and write them down it stops being a “conspiracy theory” it just becomes a conspiracy.
Anti-vaxxer is a badge of honour now in the UK.
It describes people who can and do still practice the principles of the enlightenment and who understand and defend those principles in our constitutions or equivalents.
Most often medically, they are indeed fully properly vaxxed, in favour of or agnostic about Covid gene therapies for those at risk or desiring to have one, as long as that’s voluntary and concerns adults, but very much opposed against any coercion and discrimination on the basis of the Covid gene therapy status and as such equally opposed against those ‘passports’.
The equivalent term and insult in Germany is now Nazi.
But that is also in truth now a badge of honour, if, as and when thrown around only by the real and currently fascism practicing modern day Nazis online, in in the MSM and in the major political parties there.
Indeed, the convergence of Big Business (Big Pharma, Big Science and Big Media) with the Government is literally the Fascist end game.
Which would mean that your evident desire for aggressive confrontation and military deterrence of China (which I do understand the temptations of and arguments for, don’t get me wrong) points us not in the direction of a free world resisting an Evil Empire, but rather of two huge totalitarian blocs squaring up to each other.
Less Reagan versus the Soviets, more Oceania versus Eastasia.
Seems to me our internal problems should take precedence over military confrontation and containment, atm.
You could argue that building a military confrontation of China might help us to turn our cultures against Chinese-style totalitarianism, but I’m not convinced that will work – the totalitarians are far too deeply embedded here for that. And the risks of aggressive confrontation are immense.
My instincts are very much that we should focus on our own internal problems, leave other countries to their own business, and use our military to protect our borders and deter any possible attack on us. Where that approach might fall down is in a world where an evil superpower (e.g. China) is allowed to expand its military power to the extent that they can exert a good deal of control over what’s going on globally. As it stands, what might be stopping that happening is the United States, simply by being a military superpower. If we feel we’re benefitting from the US occupying that space, you could argue we should give them some help. It will (and has) lead you down some very wrong paths, but you could argue that’s still better than a world where China is able to throw its weight about more or less unhindered. Happy to be dissuaded of this, though!
“My instincts are very much that we should focus on our own internal problems, leave other countries to their own business, and use our military to protect our borders and deter any possible attack on us. “
Those are good instincts.
There are times when they fall down, but imo now is not one of them. Currently (and for the past few decades) problems have been mostly due to the consequences of the US throwing its weight around.
China is not (yet) any military threat to the world and certainly not to us. It’s just about getting strong enough to be able to deter the US from throwing its weight around in China’s own backyard. It has little or no global force projection capability.
Obviously the US and US sphere militarists want to paint it as a huge imminent military threat, but that’s just the usual interventionist and militarist bullshit.
It might become that, but it isn’t anywhere close yet.
There might come a day when a full defensive military cooperation against China is necessary, but this is not that day. This day we have more than enough problems of our own at home.
Of course, if you want to let the bullshitters lead you to risk war over Taiwan or Hong Kong – issues well within China’s legitimate sphere (certainly if you accept US dominance in Central America, as the world has for decades), then you can look forward to a world of hurt.
As history has shown time and again, weakness is an enticement to a potential aggressor.
Weakness does indeed sometimes attract aggression, as the relative weakness of Iraq, Syria and Libya attracted US aggression, for instance. But that’s a superpower imposing its will on uncooperative third world states.
When you are looking at wars between rival dominant powers, or a dominant power and a rising replacement, it’s more often misjudgement, or fear of real or potential strength that causes wars. As for instance if the US regime follows your evidently preferred course and tries to interfere in what are very obviously matters well within China’s reasonable sphere, in Taiwan or China.
Ad if they do follow that course, and there is a miscalculation that leads to open war, and that war is not contained, you can be pretty certain you will regret your country having done it bitterly, win or lose, if you are still alive to do so.
But hey, with the kind of superlatively skilled strategic leadership your country has been blessed with over the past few decades, what can possibly go wrong?
But also, firmly promote the free and open discussion of flaws and bad consequences from these very novel medical technologies, so that informed consent would be possible. It is not possible currently, given the censorship, politics and propaganda for informed consent to be arrived at for the normal person.
I think many of us started with Toby’s position, jabs fine with no coercion for risk categories. Looking now at the Vaers etc reports, especially the heart attack issues, it is no longer as simple as that.
“James Delingpole and I discuss Macron’s toys-out-of-the-pram reaction to the AUKUS deal“
Macron’s response was indeed hilarious, but Toby Young’s was almost as funny.
The idea that we are supposed to get all excited about a bit of potential future military expenditure and cooperation on the other side of the world, that even on its face only manages to promise us the enticing prospect of a potential war with a nuclear armed superpower, while at home we face the ongoing transformation of our own society into a totalitarian replica of the Chinese tyranny we are supposedly resisting over there, really is rather comical.
If fear propaganda and nanny state collectivist healthcare have been the most effective manipulative tools of big pharma/big government in pushing covid medico-fascism, jingoist glorification of interventionism has been the equivalent, for decades, for the military-industrial-political complex in pushing confrontation and war.
Which is worse? Well I suppose it depends whether you are looking from the perspective of victims at home or abroad.
No, the AUKUS alliance (along with the Qaud – India, Japan, Australia and the US) will, if anything, reduce the potential for war. That’s the whole point of deep water nuclear submarines.
“No, the AUKUS alliance (along with the Qaud – India, Japan, Australia and the US) will, if anything, reduce the potential for war.”
One’s opinion on that will depend upon a lot of judgement calls and opinions about the strategic situation, and the appropriate lines to draw.
If you view the most likely cause of war as some kind of outright Chinese military aggression, Nazi/Soviet/Pearl Harbor-style, then you could try to make a case that conventional deterrence has a role to play. But that’s a bad mis-judgement of the Chinese regime and strategic situation, imo.
If you view the problems as being more one of US aggressive forward positioning in trying to contain a rising China (along the lines of what the US did to rising Japan in the 1930s that led to Pearl Harbor), then you are unlikely to take that view, especially as war between the US and China today would likely be immeasurably more costly than even WW2 (we do not live in the shade of the nuclear peace for nothing).
We would better spend our time addressing the problems of our own elites transforming our societies into pale shadows of Chinese totalitarianism, than provoking confrontation with that power imo.
“That’s the whole point of deep water nuclear submarines.”
The issue here is not a mostly irrelevant few additional subs nominally in Australian hands, should they eventually materialise. That will neither add much to the military balance nor in practice serve as much of a deterrent to war between China and Australia. The Chinese threat to Australia is unlikely to be military anyway.
The issue is the political drawing of the US and its satellites into a forward posture to interfere in Chinese affairs in Taiwan, which is the most likely flashpoint for a war between the rising Chinese power and the formerly dominant US power.
China will regard outside interference in Taiwan much as the US viewed it in Central America during the Monroe Doctrine era, and any honest person would accept and understand that – if anything there’s more justification for the Chinese version than there was for the US one. The place to draw a line is not the Taiwan Strait, and nor is it Hong Kong, unless you believe war is inevitable. But in that case, you should be advocating for an aggressive triggering of war with China now (actually a decade or more ago), because every year that passes increases China’s relative strength, as its military power catches up with its huge growth in economic power.
And you need to face up to what global war between superpowers with nuclear weapons actually means.
The former Naval Intelligence officer (RAN) and now military historian, Tom Lewis, says that the real reason the French were left out of the AUKUS arrangement (apart from the unfortunate acronym that it would produce) is that the bureaucratic French style would not fit well with the flexible and nimble arrangement that the Anglo nations have in mind.
The froggies refused to contribute to NATO’s armed forces, if I remember rightly. They had a toy atom bomb all of their own, of which they were immensely proud, like a mentally deficient toddler with its very own teddy bear. Who’d want them in an alliance now?
And what’s the point of protecting Aus and NZ against China when to all intents and purposes they are part of China?
France withdrew from the NATO military alliance in the mid 60’s I think. They remained in the other parts of NATO. IIRC this was under de Gaulle. France rejoined the full alliance in 2009
When this site was setup I was on team Toby thinking that the governments’ reaction to a virus was just groupthink and incompetence.
Gradually that thought became a hope, and then disbelief, as step by step, lie by lie, every response fell into place exactly as those nutty conspiracy theorists had predicted, until eventually I had to become one.
Welcome. You didn’t intend to become a conspiracy theorist but when you looked at the facts it was either that or live a lie.
Delingpole is a bit of an odd one, but Young is now either lying to himself or pretending he is not seeing what is now crystal clear in an attempt to keep in with those setting the narrative.
Nothing odd about Delly, he tells it as it is.
He’s right, your wrong.
“[James’] crackpot conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the Great Reset”. Oh dear, Toby! Much as I appreciate this forum, there’s none so blind as those who will not see. I’m firmly in the Delingpole camp. If you still need persuading, try this excellent and concise expose of the Great Reset by Ernst Wolff. https://odysee.com/@LongXXvids:c/Ernst-Wolf-speech—summary:3
In early 1930s Germany, lots of Jews saw what was happening and left for America. Those that remained eventually ended up at the Auschwitz rail-head, where they were seperated from their family and sent to the showers. At this point they finally realised what was happening. I call this the “Auschwitz Rail-Head Moment.”
Some of us are either en-route to, or have already arrived at, our metaphorical American haven. Others refuse to believe it. Toby seems to cleave toward the Auschwitz Rail-Head Moment group. Wake up Tobe’s FFS!
Where is our latter day American haven though?
Well, there are bits of it. Florida and Texas.
Incredible indeed – how come TY is SO slow on the uptake? (Ker-ching?)
the glorious prospect that lockdown zealot Justin Trudeau will end up with fewer seats in the Canadian federal election than he did in 2019
Looks like he will end up with one more seat – disappointment for everyone really.
And, of course, should anyone mention vote stuffing, they will be called conspiracy theorists. Odd really since the MSM are all bleating on about ‘vote stuffing’ in Russia!
Only the bad guys engage in “ballot stuffing” and “interfering in other countries’ elections”.
The good guys “increase voter participation” and “promote democracy”.
How anyone can watch the footage from UN ‘Strong City’ Melbourne yesterday and think this is all a perfectly normal response is completely beyond me. We are rapidly being enslaved and virtually no one is speaking up about it, as long as the media gatekeepers get their paycheques they will happily lead us into a pen to be dealt with later.
Anyone who believes all the UN / WEF Great Reset stuff is nonsense should look at the work of Sandi Adams. She has copies of the source material, all you have to do is visit the UN / WEF websites and read their public documents to see their dystopian smart city transhumanism vision. It’s not a conspiracy if it is all out in the open and publicly discussed.
Absolutely amazes me that low level agents of the state sell out humanity and their families for so little money. Wasn’t previously religious but now really hope there is a heaven and hell.
And more evidence of corruption:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-front-row-view-of-the-covid-drug-corruption-scandal/
More from Melbourne: https://youtu.be/pCIWfRmZ-Ww
How can one be an anti-vaxxer over the jabbings? You do realise, Toby, that they are NOT vaccines, they are therapeutics (and rather dangerous ones at that)!????