The Times leads with the news that remdesivir may be an effective treatment for COVID-19. Yesterday, Dr Anthony Fauci announced the results of a gold-standard trial showing the drug has a “clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery”. In a trial run by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases involving 1,063 patients in hospitals around the world, the duration of symptoms was cut from 15 days to 11. The news sent the share price of remdesivir, an antiviral originally designed to combat ebola, through the roof.
The Telegraph‘s front page has bad news, by contract. The above-the-fold headline reads: ‘Johnson to dash lockdown hopes.’ The paper reveals that the Prime Minister will use his first Downing Street press conference since his return to work later today to explain why the lockdown must remain in place. The Telegraph links this to yesterday’s announcement that the cumulative death toll has reached 26,097, meaning the UK now has the third-worst death-per-head ratio in Europe after Spain and Belgium. The jump in numbers from the day before is partly due to the Department for Health and Social Care including non-hospital deaths from COVID-19 in England in its daily figures for the first time, bringing yesterday’s total to 765. These are all patients whose death certificates name COVID-19 as the cause of death and who tested positive for the virus.
Another reason Boris is intending to keep the lockdown in place for the foreseeable future, according to the Telegraph, is the news that Germany’s transmission rate has gone up since the lockdown was eased last week. At yesterday’s Downing Street briefing, Dominic Raab cited this as evidence that a second peak was “a very real risk” if we scale back the restrictions. “Chancellor Merkel has made it clear that they might need a second lockdown in Germany if the infection rate continues to rise,” he said, although he didn’t explain why that would be more disastrous for the German economy than keeping the lockdown in place, one of the Government’s arguments for why a second peak must be avoided. Raab said no decision about whether to phase out the lockdown, or what form that might take, would be taken until the review of the data on May 7th by the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Any hope that Nicola Sturgeon would exert pressure on the Government to make an announcement before then was dashed last night when Scotland’s First Minister said on Peston: “I’m far from convinced that when we get to the next review point on May 7th we’ll be in a position to lift any of these measures because the margins of manoeuvre that we’re operating in are very, very, very tight.”
Is the infection rate in German actually rising? That’s a possibility sceptics need to take seriously because if it is that would suggest lockdowns are effective at suppressing infection. But it isn’t – at least, not any more. On Tuesday, Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced that the reproduction number (R0) for Monday had risen to 1, after having been as low as 0.7 in mid-April, although Lothar Wieler, the RKI’s President, later clarified that in fact it had risen to 0.96 so was still technically below 1. However, the latest data from the RKI is that the R0 has now fallen again to 0.75. In case Dominic Raab missed this announcement, here is a graph included in the RKI’s most recent bulletin showing a steady decline in the number of reported casts in Germany:
The latest official data in Germany shows that new cases of confirmed infections dropped below 1,000 yesterday for the first time in almost seven weeks, suggesting the easing of the lockdown has had no impact.
The blog Facts4EU has published a post on Tuesday’s ONS’s data, pointing out that COVID-19 is only likely to kill a fraction of the people killed by other diseases this year, such as cancer, alzheimers and ischemic heart disease. It also unearths this gem from the ONS’s website in which it explains that its definition of a death “involving” COVID-19 encompasses those cases “where COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, including in combination with other health conditions. If a death certificate mentions COVID-19 it will not always be the main cause of death, but may be a contributory factor.” So there you have it: the ONS records a death as being from COVID-19 even if it’s not “the main cause of death”. No doubt we can look forward to another clamour about the discrepancy between the ONS’s figures and those of the Government – even though the daily announcements at the Downing Street press briefings now include non-hospital deaths – when the ONS releases it’s data for Week 17 (April 18th – 24th) next Tuesday.
More on the model I mentioned yesterday created by the three Israeli professors, one an epidemiologist. According to their model, if a country adopts a mitigation strategy – social distancing as much as possible, including at work; 14 days self-quarantine for every person with symptoms; face masks, hand washing, etc. – then in most cases there’s no need for a lockdown. They caveat this by saying it only applies to those countries that have more than 60 ICU beds per million; those with less might have to partially quarantine high-risk populations for a short period. (NHS England is above this threshold and was before it increased its surge capacity.) Supporting their conclusion is the fact that the healthcare systems of countries that haven’t imposed general lockdowns – such as Japan, Sweden, Taiwan and South Korea – did not reach full capacity and in those countries that did – Spain, Italy, UK – infections peaked after mitigation strategies were adopted but before lockdowns were imposed. You can read the preprint here. (For a through demolition of the case for lockdowns, I also recommend this long essay by Ryan Kempber, a software engineer based in Santa Barbara.)
One of the more entertaining aspects of the crisis has been watching the world’s most eminent experts in infectious diseases fighting like cats in a sack. Last month saw the public spat between rival teams of epidemiologists at Oxford and Imperial – and thanks to Hector Drummond for unearthing the fascinating backstory to that dispute – and now we have the bust-up between Professor Ferguson and Professor Johan Giesecke, the Swedish Government’s ex-chief epidemiologist. When this is all over, Quentin Tarantino should make a film about epidemiologists. What should he call it? Once Upon a Time in Wuhan? Science Tsar Dogs? Ingloriuus Beardies? Suggestions please.
In the latest skirmish, Giesecke has hit back at Neil Ferguson after his dismissal of Sweden’s approach to managing the crisis in last Saturday’s UnHerd interview. Speaking to the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, Giesecke said: “I know [Ferguson] a little and he is normally quite arrogant, but I have never seen him as tense and nervous as during that interview.” He dismissed Ferguson’s prediction that deaths in Sweden will start to rise again, claimed the infection fatality rate is closer to 0.1% than 0.9% and said New Zealand’s draconian lockdown meant it would have to continue quarantining incoming visitors until a vaccine is found. Good to see Professor Giesecke – surely the hero of this saga – holding his ground in spite of attracting widespread criticism, including from 2,300 academics who wrote a letter last month calling for the Swedish Government to switch tack.
Sweden’s answer to Bruce Willis attracted an unexpected ally yesterday in the form of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which lauded Sweden as a “model” for battling the virus. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, said there are “lessons to be learned” from the Scandinavian nation. This, from the organisation that originally praised China for imprisoning everyone who tested positive for the virus in purpose-built hospitals, whether they needed hospital care or not, and boarding up in their homes those who tested negative. The New York Post has the story.
The Guardian reports on its front page today that NHS England is considering removing black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff from frontline roles, given that they appear to be dying in disproportionately high numbers compared to non-BAME NHS workers. Last week, I flagged up some preliminary research into whether there’s a connection between how much vitamin D a person’s body produces and their susceptibility to coronavirus – one possible explanation for why BAME people appear to be dying in greater numbers. Since then another paper has appeared, this one by a doctor in the Philippines who studied the relationship between vitamin D and clinical outcomes for 212 COVID-19 patients. His conclusion: “Vitamin D status is significantly associated with clinical outcomes.” You can read his paper here. (And here’s another paper making the same argument.)
Evidence continues to mount that the lockdown is taking a toll on our mental health. A blog called Mental Health Today ran a harrowing piece yesterday by Joy Hibbins, the CEO of Suicide Crisis, a registered charity which runs Suicide Crisis Centre. You can read that here. And photographer Laura Dodsworth has documented the loneliness that a variety of people are experiencing while being trapped in their homes in a piece for Spiked.
The Independent reports that police in Norfolk are hunting a man who takes daily walks in a Norwich suburb dressed as a “terrifying” plague doctor, complete with pointed beak-like mask. Nice to know there are still some freeborn Englishman out there who have kept their sense of humour during the crisis. No doubt he’ll be clapped in irons if the Norfolk constabulary ever catch up with him.
A reader flagged up an excellent comment piece in Derry Now by Anne McCloskey, a retired GP and a councillor on Derry City and Strabane District Council. She describes the ongoing lockdown on both sides of the Irish border as “non-evidence-based insanity”. I nominate Cllr McCloskey as my Sceptic of the Week.
John Rhys, a Senior Visiting Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, has referred me to a blog post he’s written that rebuts some of the assumptions underlying the sceptical case which is well worth a read. His best argument is that the economy would have taken a massive hit whether the Government imposed a lockdown or not:
Countries have taken approaches that differ in detail, but most have been essentially similar in their approach. Even where fewer formal restrictions are imposed, as in Sweden, actual behaviours and outcomes are not so very different. Tellingly, many in the UK were already modifying their behaviour, and creating their own forms of social distancing before formal lockdown was imposed. With a full-blown explosion of cases and deaths, and hospitals collapsing under the weight of new cases, it is inconceivable that we would not have seen massive changes in personal behaviour, seeking the same outcomes, albeit in uncoordinated and less effective ways, and very likely a degree of panic, with broadly similar damage to economic activity. The difference is that the damage would have been the result of individual consumer choice, not of government imposed restriction. Most of the economic damage therefore became inevitable as soon as the virus spread into much wider national populations. In reality there never was any way of avoiding the shock and its economic consequences, although there were and remain ways of handling the crisis well, badly or very badly.
I get quite a few emails from readers beginning, “My mum works in a care home…” or “My daughter-in-law works in a hospital…” followed by some hair-raising anecdote. But I thought this latest one worth passing on, given the hue and cry about deaths in care homes:
My mum works in a care home in Nottingham. They’ve had three deaths in the past two weeks, which is a normal number for them (they offer end-of-life care). The local GPs have recorded the cause of death as COVID-19 in all three cases, even though the people in question were showing no symptoms of the virus and had previously been tested and found to be negative. The residents of the care home are being frequently tested by Public Health England. No cases of COVID-19 have been detected so far. The care home manager was quite proud that their strict infection control procedures seemed to be working and is now quite upset that COVID-19 deaths are being recorded at the home. In this area of Nottingham at least, it seems that GPs are assuming the cause of death is COVID-19 without any evidence at all. I’m not sure how widespread this practice is, but if it’s even moderately repeated across this UK, this has obvious implications for the accuracy of the national statistics.
Some readers with a background in medicine or statistics may be shocked by just how poor their daily paper’s coverage of the crisis has been. But do they then turn to other parts of the paper and take everything else they’re reading as Gospel? If so, they’re suffering from what the late science fiction writer Micael Crichton called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Here’s Crichton explaining what that is:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Tim Bidie, one of our regulator commenters, asked for suggestions of theme tunes for this website. One reader has sent this YouTube video of ‘The Lunatics Have Take Over the Asylum’ by Fun Boy Three. And if you’re looking for some more light relief, I can recommend the latest video from Comedy Unleashed, the politically incorrect comedy club where I made my stand-up debut in February. (So far, YouTube hasn’t censored it, but it may not be long according to Tucker Carlson.) And if you’re really bored, you can watch my debut here.
A huge thanks to those who donated to pay for the upkeep of this site yesterday. If you feel like donating you can do so by clicking here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in the site, you can email me here. See you tomorrow.
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Great story in Bloomberg, too. May the tide be turning!! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-29/coronavirus-lockdown-critics-may-have-some-valid-points
This is a great find. Thanks for sharing.
Great link, and from a nice strong source to back up our claims.
And also good article in Washington Times by Joseph Curl saying this was a “media hoax” https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/covid-19-turning-out-to-be-huge-hoax-perpetrated-b/.
Maybe tide is turning…The new antibody tests are showing that it was. Also as time goes on I believe the Swedish and Japanese numbers will stay low and other countries will rise…So lockdown was pointless.
A clever and interesting study in MedArxiv about a week ago by a Dr Justin Silverman:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20050542v3,
estimates 10% of America have had Covid-19, based on “excess flu like” symptons compared to recent years. If this is correct the American IFR, based on 63,000 dead out of 33 million infected (10% of US population of 330 million) is about 0.19 %. This is just twice that of the flu.
As serology tests now seem to indicate 5% infection rates in California and a 20% infection rate in New York, a 10% infection across the USA seems about right to me.
Given that Covid19 takes a lot less years from humans than the flu, which can kill the healthy young, this bug is surely about as dangerous as the flu.
“which can kill the healthy young” Normal flu can, but rarely does. Covid-19 can but rarely does. Interestingly enough, many flu pandemics though have hit the young and healthy worst. Pandemic flus such as the 1918 one seemed to be worst in those with a good immune system and very mild for the elderly. We’re lucky covid-19 isn’t like that and that most of the people who run the infrastructure that civilisation relies upon are therefore not likely to be seriously harmed by it. If we had a re-run of something as bad as 1918 flu then lockdowns might make sense, or not depending on details of how that disease spreads which were never recorded at the time, but for something like covid-19 we need the lockdown over and the young and healthy getting out so they can serve any old and frail who are (not unreasonably) scared enough that they choose to stay isolating.
I read the Bloomberg article. Apparently it is in New York, Detroit and New Orleans that the hospital system has been stretched to capacity. Density of population is given as the reason. Might not obesity and underlying ill health of population also have a lot to do with it? More than half of adult New Yorkers have overweight (34%) or obesity (22%). Detroit residents are more obese than the average American. New Orleans residents suffer from obesity, diabetes and hypertension at rates higher than the national average. Just look up city name and obesity and the information comes up. These cities are also home to a large proportion of African Americans who are likely to be deficient in vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D plus overweight equals critical outcome. Meanwhile people stay at home eating junk food, getting even less exercise and less sunshine than usual and becoming an easy prey for any virus that is going about.
Perhaps air pollution too, much worse in big cities than elsewhere. Some studies have gone as far as to suggest that covid-19 spreads on air pollution particles, which sounds a bit far-fetched (although if true makes lockdown pointless), although it can also be concluded from them that in areas where lungs are damaged by pollution the disease spreads more easily and the percentage of severe cases is increased. Also explains, for the UK, why so many cases in London and so few elsewhere. Doesn’t make sense to lock us all down because of a London problem.
Thanks for the mention, Toby.
>So there you have it: the ONS records a death as being from COVID-19 even if it’s not “the main cause of death”.
I blogged about this quite a while ago, after correspondence with the ONS. Note that Covid is a ‘notifiable’ disease, like anthrax, which means that it must always be noted on a death certificate if the deceased had it, or if there were grounds to suspect the deceased had it.
The two new Covid-19 mortality classification codes U07.1 and U07.2 : WHO.org : Emergency use ICD codes for COVID-19 disease outbreak https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/covid19/en/ The COVID-19 disease outbreak has been declared a public health emergency of international concern. An emergency ICD-10 code of ‘U07.1 COVID-19, virus identified’ is assigned to a disease diagnosis of COVID-19 confirmed by laboratory testing. An emergency ICD-10 code of ‘U07.2 COVID-19, virus not identified’ is assigned to a clinical or epidemiological diagnosis of COVID-19 where laboratory confirmation is inconclusive or not available. Both U07.1 and U07.2 may be used for mortality coding as cause of death In ICD-11, the code for the confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 is RA01.0 and the code for the clinical diagnosis (suspected or probable) of COVID-19 is RA01.1. More information on coding COVID-19 in ICD-10 ( PDF, 194kb ) https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/Guidelines_Cause_of_Death_COVID-19-20200420-EN.pdf This document provides instructions for coding and certification of deaths due to COVID-19. The instructions align with the WHO definition of deaths caused by COVID-19 and ICD, and ensure feasibility in all settings. PDF Extract : “COVID-19should be recordedon the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the diseasecaused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.” […]… Read more »
This isn’t news though is it. The guidance was issued in March.
It isn’t news to us, but most people haven’t got a clue this is happening.
Yes, but if there is no positive test result for each assumed covid death, it shouldn’t be included in statistics used for lockdown justification.
Can you give me some examples of other ‘notifiable diseases’? Just so I have some extreme comparisons for when I slap people I know with how unreliable the death figures are 😆
The argument that the economy would have taken a massive hit whether the Government imposed a lockdown or not is only true if you assume that this virus required a massive reaction involving a significant decline in economic activity. In fact there has been a massive overreaction, and a variety of experts, mostly from continental Europe, have been saying this from the outset. You can read their perspectives and arguments on the immensely useful website Swiss Propaganda Research: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Re: It also unearths this gem from the ONS’s website in which it explains that its definition of a death “involving” COVID-19 encompasses those cases “where COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, including in combination with other health conditions. If a death certificate mentions COVID-19 it will not always be the main cause of death, but may be a contributory factor.” So there you have it: the ONS records a death as being from COVID-19 even if it’s not “the main cause of death”. We have known about the above for weeks. On 14 April I raised an FOI with the ONS to get the data on Covid-19 coded death certificates ( new WHO ICD-10 codes U07.1 or U07.2 ), which also carry any of the ICD-10 respiratory codes ( U00 – U99 ). The ONS responded pointing me to various data already known about, but not what I asked for, which was only addressed with this, disappointing cop out : “Further data will be available after the 2020 death registrations are finalised in Summer 2021.” They have the data already, that’s for sure. A simple query on their database would answer it. Apparently, that’s… Read more »
I hope I am not the only one who caught this story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52466834
Japan has had less than 400 Covid-19 deaths despite (because of?) not having a general lockdown. The Beeb journalist who wrote the story has clearly tried to given Japan’s lack of testing and lockdown a negative spin, but I think the lesson is clear – they only test and treat the most significant cases and tell everybody else to stay at home if they have symptoms, and combine this with a sensible and sane approach to social distancing and hand-washing. My wife is Japanese and my Japanese friends and in-laws can confirm this. (They have been politely asked to ‘only’ leave the house 3 times a day and go to work as normal.)
The real kicker in the story is this one: they reckon up to 780,000 people in Japan may have been infected. What’s 400 into 780,000? Answers on a postcard. Bet it’s lower than 0.9% or whatever Ferguson was claiming.
During this whole media pantomine the media have played a remarkable role. For the world media the President of the US is of course not only public enemy number one but he is a buffoon as well. To be honest he is a flawed character and his public statements have been sometimes way off mark but hey all politicians are the same if you shone a light upon them.
The media earlier in the show in Act 1 didn’t like Trumps enthusiasm for chloroquine a drug which has been used for decades in malaria prophylaxis. They blamed the death of a pensioner who had taken fish tank cleaner on Trump as it contained chloroquine, but now it would appear that there is more to this story and it might be homicide .
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/homicide-detectives-investigating-death-of-arizona-man-who-ingested-fish-tank-cleaner
Interestingly the first trials in England of hydroxychloroquine are now being conducted in general practice .
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/first-clinical-trial-potential-covid-4090039
The Imperial College paper was not peer reviewed. The simulation and programming that it relies on has not yet been published in the public domain. Given that its recommendations were at variance with the then prevailing policy in the UK, a very low bar seems to have been set by the international scientific community on its wide acceptance.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/seeing-the-invisible/a-critique-of-neil-fergusons-the-imperial-college-pandemic-model/
University of Washington is advising Trump and have similar conclusions to SAGE.
The Imperial College code has been released here:
https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/covid19model
They seem to have been porting the code to GitHub during the last month, so at the time of the alarmist predictions that contributed to the lockdown policy, the code would not have been available (as Ferguson admitted).
For those who are not familiar with programming code the Issues tab is interesting.
That’s actually a totally different model, not the Ferguson model (see the closed issues list).
As ever, many thanks for this. I do have a couple of points.
On a percentage of population basis, Britain has only a 0.038% mortality rate so far, while Spain has 0.5% and Belgium 0.4%. France is just behind us on 0.034% I think. Whilst indeed we are ahead of other European countries, the deaths-per-head, calculated as percentages, show very tiny variations (and, indeed, an overall tiny mortality rate from Covid so far). Does anyone know why these percentages are not being used in favour of simple raw numbers? I would have thought they provide a better context.
On Germany’s slight infection increase, and Johnson’s oft stated desire only to lift the lockdown when transmission rate is well below 1, surely it’s the case that as with any spreading disease, infections will rise at times and fall at times. The government should presumably be messaging a need to effectively learn to live with covid, not a nonsense about ‘defeating’ it, which implies that we can never go out until there is no danger of anyone catching it again, ever!
My apologies. My figures above are wrong. Spain’s percentage rate is only 0.05% and Belgium 0.06%. My broader point does still stand though
The Giesecke comment was interesting – Ferguson certainly radiates an impression as ‘one of them’ scientists I have encountered a couple of times throughout my career; slightly odd and not in a good, crazy cosmologist type of way. I imagine the other academic/PhD scientists on here know the type, especially as you get towards the theoretical physics end of science.
Yes. Very true. A theoretical chemist I knew certainly fits your description.
I may have been to the famous uni beginning with C (wouldn’t normally be sticking up for Oxford so much in any other normal circumstance 😉) and in my college we had a preponderance of engineers (great people but…. quite dull lol), linguists and literature…ists (That would be me), and biologists/physicists. I love physicists because they all seem to be stark staring mad lol.
But not who you’d want around in a health crisis, quite frankly.
Biologists are the practical people of science I find.
Am I getting this wrong, but also aren’t the deaths not the date they happened, but the date they are reported, so if some administrator finds a load of forms in a shoe box in the corner of the office and clears a backlog, that can create a confusing picture? Sure this was buried somewhere on the ONS site. ie) at some point we’ll get a clearer picture of WHEN these deaths happened?
Exactly, That’s the case but not just ONS that’s the same with NHS data as well.
See that:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/
Thanks, well that hardly instills confidence. What an almighty cock up this is turning out to be! I’ve just heard Theo Usherwood on the radio and it made depressing listening, more lockdown, and then contact tracing (I hope that’s voluntary, I don’t want to be a law breaker but might have to be!), and NOBODY talking about what the NHS is forcing on carehomes, what they are testing for, how they diagnosing deaths without a test, time lag on data, nor what the data means in context, and even more shockingly neither is any opposition party or even politician. And then it was rounded off with an entreaty to throw your doors and windows open this evening for a collective effing clap!
Unsurprisingly most of Radio LBC’s presenters have gone in for the weekly virtue-signal in a big way.
Sadly no incisive comment or analysis there, or anywhere else on MSM. Early on in this debacle James O’Brien’s view regarding the lockdown was that if it was unnecessary all we’d lost was ‘some time and money’.
More disturbingly it’s clear most of the hard-of-thinking British public are of much the same opinion.
No doubt these are the kind of people complaining about ten years of “austerity”. They’ll have a rude awakening when they discover the public finances could be back to 2010 levels, or worse, when the dust settles and there’s a danger of another decade of public spending restrictions.
Exactly and the government don’t make this clear when they give the data each day. On 10th April the media went nuts with the daily rise figure of 980 new deaths, but if you look at the total deaths graph on the NHS website for 10th April, it is 700 as of yesterday, three weeks later.
And (have given up all hope of truth or clarity from the government), did the media then jump up and down with indignation when they saw the 700 figure yesterday?
As a non-scientist/ statistician/ immunologist what I find most shocking about all this is that, while there may be room for discussion about many issues around this virus, a lot of what I see here concerns misrepresentation of facts and data, as in the ONS/NHS examples. Cock up or conspiracy, it’s disgusting that this is not being called out (present company excepted of course)
My post on the 10 April data, illustrating your point, with the day’s headlines :
Reported UK CV-19 mortality 10 April
https://judithcurry.com/2020/04/09/cov-discussion-thread-iii/#comment-914046
MG
I’m starting to think there’s a systemic lag of actual weeks between death and it showing up in figures. So maybe we’ll see a drastic reduction in deaths in like another month’s time 😣😣 When we’re all insane, bankrupt, or both
After being alerted by an article in Off Guardian, I actually did a calculation a few days ago to check whether cumulative number of deaths really was being reported as daily number of deaths. (You can tell I’ve got time on my hands.) The Daily Mail of April 24th, like other newspapers, reports that another 596 died of the virus the day before. What the Daily Mail does not mention is that 596 is the cumulative total of deaths going back to March 25th. Though the daily death toll gives the impression of being the death toll for that day, it is not; it is always cumulative. If you look up “covid 19 daily deaths announcement” on the NHS website mentioned by Csaba, and add up the totals for each day, i.e. 1 + 3 + 14 + 35 + 111, etc., you arrive at a total of 514 by April 22nd. The number of deaths for April 23rd itself is “awaiting verification” and has presumably been verified in the meantime and included in the Daily Mail figure. This would give the true daily death total for April 23rd as 596 – 514 = 82. The highest daily toll, from… Read more »
The government seems desperately trying to find any news that supports their original lockdown measures. They jumped on the news from Germany as it was the only valid information out there. Well, they somehow miss any news from Sweden, Australia etc. From countries where the lockdown was less strict or just recommended and much more effective than in the UK. The praise from WHO on Sweden means a lot for me.
I’m becoming alarmed at the political developments, Johnson really does look like a busted flush, a complete and utter waste of space being led by public opinion* instead of leading it like an effective politician should, on the back of a cabinet of mostly mediocre characters. Meanwhile in the real world, all of my colleagues are fed up and going stir crazy, I have heard of two incidents of self-harm within my social circle, as well as people not getting needed medical treatment. I was pleased to see one of the Torygraph columnists challenge the ‘new normal’ today. Surely many tory backbenchers must be alarmed?
*On that note, where are these ‘highly frightened, scared’ people the polls keep telling me about? Here in my corner of the London commuter belt life seems to be re-activating in-spite of Boris. I have a mounting suspicion that much of the ‘fear’ is coming from the ‘red wall’ new Tory areas, from speaking to family.
Let me assure you those of us languishing in the Red Wall do so under extreme duress and without fear.
Keep trying to make this about how we voted, and we’ll keep voting that way.
Also I’d suggest the highly frightened, scared people are locked up in their London mansions.
But yes – Boris has no balls.
He also has a very small Hancock
omg I have no emojis on desktop *crying laughing*
Saying that we would have had the economic hit anyway is an argument against lockdown for it.
If people want to lock themselves in because they’re scared of a virus that’s fine. It’s even the rational thing to do if they are at high risk. But that isn’t the point. The point is that it should be their choice.
Imagine if you could have a fine-grained intelligent lockdown where those who weren’t at risk could go out and build immunity while those who were could keep out of trouble, and in which nobody was forced to do anything or suffered harm and frustration from the unintended consequences of blunt instrument regulations. Oh wait you can. It’s called freedom. We should give it a try.
I like what you say.
I believe the way that you described is the Swedish way. More recommendations and less must.
However, in this case, we rely on decisions made by individuals. That’s where the responsibility of the government comes on board. If they want to rely on individuals than they need to educate them to get the right understanding and knowledge of the truth. We need a new example of people who read not only social media.
Csaba, have you though of standing for politics? You’d make an excellent breath of fresh air from all the authoritarian thugs we currently get.
THIS.
@guy153 – 100% agree. What has happened to our liberty in a so-called “free” country? How is this democratic, to legislate rather than provide recommendations? Why are the public so willing to give up their freedom?
Fear is a very powerful motivator. It is through fear they are managing to sustain this lockdown for so long, with very little public dissent.
Popped into my local coffee shop this morning (for takeaway I might add, that’s still currently legal!), and of course the obvious lockdown discussions were occurring. I made the point, “I’m surprised that a Conservative government seems to be neglecting the damage this is doing to the economy. I could understand if it were Labour, but Conservative!” To which I received the response, “Well that’s the choice; save the economy or save lives.” I find this response infuriating because it is so incredibly naive. It’s as if the general public have been brainwashed into thinking we have no choice but to lock down, in order to “save lives”. When I point out the damage being done such as missed cancer screenings and treatments, people too scared to go to A&E with strokes, heart attacks, and other serious health conditions, the suicides from plummeting mental health, the domestic violence, businesses going bust, the mass unemployment, the colossal government debt, all these reasons are not seen as valid. Interestingly The FT and other newspapers ran an article on 10th April, predicting 150,000 will die as a direct result of this extended lockdown. Read about it here: https://www.ft.com/content/8027d913-2e2f-4d4c-93db-89bd726105f0 I think this again falls… Read more »
I seem to recall only a few weeks ago and for much of last year, one of the most significant threats to the nation’s mental health and wellbeing, highlighted in the media, was loneliness. Especially amongst the elderly. Social isolation was considered a rapidly growing problem with calls for steps to be taken to alleviate it somehow.
Then suddenly, within days, forget that! You’ve got to put up with being lonely. As long as you’re ‘safe’.
Safety isn’t worth the red tape it’s written on. Liberty is the true measure of a society’s success or failure.
They don’t mean ‘save lives’ they mean ‘save MY life’, it’s immensely selfish, as my long in the tooth friend constantly reminds me ‘nobody is that thick, nobody is that naive’. They’re not.
PS my rejoinder to the guff that you endured is ‘what price are you willing to pay, how many raped children, how many battered women, how many lost jobs, how many dead from cancer?’ and they just look embarrassed, but they don’t answer, as they’re still thinking ‘but my life’.
I would raise a point here as well. How many lives will be lost globally because of the economic crisis such as starvation and all the other diseases where we need financial funds to fight with them? For me, it sounds like we burn out everything on this one virus that sadly can kill people but definitely not the most deadly problem that the world has. With some smart Swedish type lockdown approach, less people would die than the number of people who will be killed because of the lack of financial support.
Exactly, this is the thing annoying me about the virtue signalling about saving lives, or ‘it’s a mother’s instinct to protect her child’ or the cheap political point scoring or whatever, as within that choice to be safe there is another choice that *someone else* can be unsafe, can pay, just as long as it’s ‘not me’. That’s what I mean when I say what has most disgusted me (thought about that, disgusted is the right word) is the moral dishonesty going on. And perhaps because I’ve always been a bit of a centre left softie, those same people who told me if I cared about the poor I’d vote Corbyn (etc etc, I didn’t, I spoiled my ballot) are at the front of the ‘not me’ queue, most of them more likely to be struck by lightning than die of Covid.
Sorry, missed a bit, those at the front of the queue, those same people with their sanctimonious banging on about ‘the poor’ have shocked me the most as when push comes to shove, they don’t care at all.
I think we have a problem in our country’s culture that people in a bad situation want to drag everyone else down rather than boost themselves up. Accounts for all the Stasi neighbour incidents we’ve been seeing. The vurtue signalling only makes this worse, it seems some people have come over to the conclusion that life is all about virtue signalling and not about actually striving for anything yourself.
Yes, exactly that! When I walk around London I can mostly see my own age group (the unbearable late-20s to mid-30s millennials) sporting masks and gloves although they are not anywhere near the risk group – yet they are the biggest supporters of a full-on lockdown.
Nothing wrong with masks and gloves, just glad those folks have at least been out to some extent rather than just obsesively virtue signalling on social media by staying in. For those who do support a more extreme lockdown the mere act of going onto the streets proves their hypocrisy. Interesting about the stats, the ones I heard said 18 to 25 year old men were the group in which anti-lockdown views were most prevalent, although still disturbingly rare.
I personally really dislike the masks. Everyone has the freedom to wear whatever protective gear they wish, but masks for a cold virus are just silly, and give a dangerous false sense of security. And their gloves are just collecting viruses, bacteria, and mold.
The Telegraph also ran this story:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/two-new-waves-deaths-break-nhs-new-analysis-warns/
My resposne to “save the economy or save lives” is to say “how interesting you think they are entirely separate”. Then remind them how food gets to their plates.
The town where I live has become a ghost town. Both butchers are still open but both the veg shops are now closed – they are only doing deliveries. Some of the nearby farm shops are still open.
We used to have s strong local economy of small/family businesses and self-employed people. Now all locked down and unlikely to survive. I envisage one of the dentists reopening sponsored by Coke and the other by Pepsi, and the podiatrist by Kelloggs. The ironmonger’s has closed but you can buy your saucepans and batteries in the supermarket. I predict similar all over the country, only the large corporations will survive. And the banks of course, providing emergency loans at 30% interest.
You might try and give some messages to any contact details for the local firms that you have. Tell them that the locals will support them by shopping with them if they will but re-open, and be sincere about this, make sure that you and your friends will do exactly this lockdown or no lockdown. For a lot of them haing confidence that they’d still get some trade could make enough difference to encourage them to either defy lockdown with public support or encourage them to institute some level of social distancing to sidestep lockdown tyranny.
I tend to vote with my money anyway. It’s intriguing how the different shops cope; the supermarket obviously has a queue outside and staff who usher you in when permitted. Then you have to walk round the entire store past everything you don’t want to buy (IKEA anyone?) then stand in another queue until you are ushered to a specific till.
The butcher only allows one customer in at a time. One veg shop (bigger) allowed two as does the newsagent. The other veg shop would bring what you requested to a desk blocking the doorway. One of the farm shops (bigger still) permits FOUR customers at a time. The post office had a queue running the length of the Thoroughfare. The town shops now only open in the morning so you get twice as many people in half the time. How does that help?
So far all the other shops remain closed, I suspect some will never reopen. Sad because this was a very human-sized town.
It’s a race to the bottom. After mass redundancies look at the way BA is intending to take advantage of the crisis to ‘restructure’ their remaining employees terms and conditions. Ryanair stylee.
And they will probably get Government grants to do so
Pulp Ruction
So Nadine Dorries tweeted this:
I’m afraid that’s not the case.
You can still carry #COVID19
If you do have antibodies, we don’t know how effective they are or how long they last. We don’t yet know if everyone develops antibodies. Please follow the guidance. #StayAtHome
In response to this:
It’s been rough at times, but I’m glad my family has had #COVID19 We will not be part of a second wave, we can visit grandparents without fear of harming them, we can go back to work and uni and make ourselves useful to vulnerable people.
Thoughts ?
It’s scaremongering. The antibodies might not last forever and the virus might mutate so you might get Covid-19 or something like it a year from now, but it’s very unlikely that you would be any danger to your grandparents now provided it’s a good couple of weeks since you got better.
Nadine does seem to be enjoying the lockdown, the minister for Mental Health I believe? Publishing well-being pieces from her rather large back garden.
CONTACT TRACING.
Isn’t she the one pushing a vaccine? If they don’t know how effective antibodies are, what the f*ck is a vaccine going to do?
First of all, I stumbled upon this website by chance, and I am so glad I did, as the blogs here are brilliant and extremely well written. Please keep up the excellent work! The comments too make very interesting reading. My problem with the whole thing, is that I have so many questions which I would love to know the answer to. Of course, I won’t get the answers, but this is what I have trouble with: 1) There is constant talk of avoiding a “second wave.” I have heard countless accounts of this illness (or coincidentally an illness identical to Covid) doing the rounds in December and January. This is the case in Italy too. Can the Government be absolutely sure that we are not already experiencing the “second wave?” 2) Can the above be furthered by the huge influx of Chinese throughout December and January, yet it took 4 months to peak here really? 3) They mention schools going back in September. It’s only a month or so after that the cold/illness season starts, and with all these kids cooped up at home for such an extended period, might re-starting in June be actually better for their immune… Read more »
I second all these questions. The second wave point is a particularly interesting one. I know tonnes of people (myself included) who think they may have a had a mild corona infection already, from as recently as January to as far back as March/April last year (this was me. And I had all the symptoms including ‘crackly’ lungs. – I remember because me getting a cough, even when I’m ill, is extremely rare. And this was a bad cough, to the point that my entire chest ached).
I mean it could just be balls and we all had flu, but……
All very valid questions, as for the door thing, I wouldn’t worry too much, its all very theoretical, so far don’t think there is single case recorded coming from transfers in supermarkets or restaurants. Everyone round here is going on about killing farmers after touching gates (a dirty farmyard gate outside compared to a temperature controlled and sparkling clean surface in a lab dabbed with an ear bud with virus on it)
Agree on the thinking I had it, did a work trip to Shenzhen in December, and got a very bad dry cough the week after, and out of breath a week later.
I too had all ‘Covid19’ symptoms from January to February last year, the whole office got it, feverish at times and long hacking coughs that just wouldn’t go away; went on for weeks. The odd thing though it went straight to chest, no blocked nose.
I know many people who also had a dreadful ‘cold’ from beginning December ’19 that laid them up in bed for days and took them some weeks to get over. Sadly I also had a friend who died from it in early January (with co-morbidity).
If these were covid19 then it has been around a long time or a variation of it, so we could indeed be experiencing a second wave now.
I have a theory which I’ve previously dismissed as it sounded too tinfoil hat for my liking. But…. I reckon this thing emerged, in China, waaaaaaaaaayy earlier than anyone thinks – maybe a year before whistleblowers first sounded the alarm bells. It came, as we know, from bats. There may have been a very small outbreak somewhere (not necessarily Wuhan), but the Chinese authorities managed to isolate and contain it pretty quickly – or so they thought, but it actually did spread around the world to a degree but wasn’t identified elsewhere as anything out of the ordinary. Samples of the new virus were then deposited in the Wuhan labs for further research, where they were being worked on when it accidentally got leaked via an infected lab worker, causing the Wuhan outbreak – and the rest is history.
I think the fact that those labs are in Wuhan is just too coincidental.
actually this would also explain why the Chinese were so quick off the mark with the sharing of the genetic sequencing etc. — they’d been studying it for a while
When I heard this story it was fourth hand, and I haven’t read it anywhere else so of course it may be “fake news” but allegedly this British guy who had been working in Wuhan prior to the virus claimed that the Secret Police went into a research lab (there are several in the area), lined up everyone who worked there and shot them.
Obviously no chance of verification.
Yes me too, and a few thousand others – I met yet another one the other day. It caught my attention because in the last fifteen low carb/keto years I haven’t had the flu and had exactly two colds. Sometimes I would feel like I was going to get a cold, then that I had had a cold, without the actual cold in between – I guess that’s what happens when you have a working immune system.
Mine wasn’t nearly that bad – an annoying cough and feeling greebly for a few days.
We’ll never know if it was Covid prior to being “discovered” or if there was some other bug doing the rounds at the same time. Which leads to the thought I’ve seen expressed elsewhere that if you “only” catch Covid you have a mild illness, if you catch it along with the other bug you are doomed
@mrjoeaverage That’s a good list of questions. A couple of comments: 4)Yes, I wonder whether absent China lockdown, it would have become the weapon of choice. There didn’t appear to be much happening in China initially. A small number of people dying from a respiratory virus focussed in one region which experiences huge amounts of air pollution. The news story was the draconian measures taken to combat the virus – people being literally locked into their homes, and it being given an identity. Lombardy was next to come into the spotlight. The news story there was the ‘overwhelming’ of a ‘first class’ health service. What was to be done? The Chinese locked down, so it would be negligent of us not to. Then, Italy demonstrates this is a deadly virus that is capable of overwhelming one of the best health services in the world. What’s to be done? Lockdown. Italy did it. It would be negligent of us not to. 7)Yes, I’m confused by this as well, both from the point of view of the meaning of R and the effectiveness of ‘track, trace and test’. The way t, t and t is described is like tracing people infected with… Read more »
I can’t answer your questions as I’m simple man, but the bottom line for me personally is this. It’s all a load of hysterical b******s. Yes it’s a nasty virus, yes we should take sensible daily precautions like we were initially advised to do and yes, the vulnerable should take extra care. Apart from that lets get back to work. Our collapsing economy will kill far more long term than Coronavirus ever will.
If the way Germany counts deaths is comparable to ours (which is a big if) then they’ve got another 10k deaths or so to go. If they release their lockdown they will get a second wave but not as big as the first one. An unenviable position to be in because any new deaths will seem somehow more deliberate.
The UK probably won’t though (a few more deaths but not really a “wave”) as we did our lockdown too late and got most of the deaths out of the way. Our lockdown was also pretty permeable compared to most others and probably had little effect on the epidemic in places like London.
Dr Erickson and Dr Knut Wittkowski have a chat
https://www.facebook.com/AcceleratedUrgentCare/videos/1110257155996353/
This is like the sceptic equivalent of a cold glass of wine, thank you!
awesome – unfortunately, brainwashed lib friends who choose to make this a political issue believe Erickson was “debunked” and that Wittkowski is not to be listened to due to this (https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/27872-rockefeller-university-releases-statement-concerning-dr-knut-wittkowski/) as if that invalidates his credentials…
A couple of points/questions arising from Toby’s usual excellent update: 1 I thought/hoped that yesterday’s apparent modification of the fifth test meant that controlling R had stopped being the overriding aim. Apparently not. So what am I missing? What possible reason is there for wanting to slow the progression of the virus (other than not wanting to overwhelm the NHS and buy time before a vaccine/treatment) given the costs involved in doing so? 2 I’m struggling to understand whether the R value is an observable number that can be measured, or whether it is a modelled number. I looked at the RKI reference above which says ‘R can only be estimated and not directly extracted from the notification system’. If it is modelled rather than ‘real’ then what are implications. At the very least I would have thought it’s a number that you can’t simply take at face value. If I’m watching my fuel gauge I’d prefer to rely on a system that actually measures how much fuel I’ve got left, rather uses a model to calculate how much should be left. It may be that they give the same result but I’d want to know how reliable the modelled… Read more »
Very good point. It must be modelled, to a large degree, mustn’t it?
Because the only way to know for sure is to literally test everyone in the ‘active’ population every day at the same time and see what the change in infection is. Surely you can’t even estimate an R factor if you’re only testing a fraction of people?
Another thing that interests me is…..How do they model the thing going forward from this point, when we’re in such a massively different situation now re: the number of people allowed to mix freely outside their homes (I. E. Not many) versus the number had we not locked down. Projections were made on us not locking down, which is what the policy decisions have been taken from. But is anyone remodelling now
Surely if they’re gonna work off models, they’ve got to continually keep doing them to adjust for accuracy, not just keep working off the old model indefinitely. I’m no mathematician as you see but it just seems bonkers to me. Working off a two month old model when there’s ACTUAL.SCIENTIFIC.DATA. now available.
Likewise, there doesn’t seem much point in knowing or estimating R unless we know where the current infections are taking place. For example, it could be that R in public spaces is 0 as we know that the virus dilutes very quickly in the open air. And as (most) schools have been shut for several weeks then R in schools must be close to, or at 0, too.
However, until we know where the current infections are taking place we can’t make sure that lockdown is only applied where it needs to be. This subject was touched on yesterday by one journalist at the daily briefing, I think in regard to garden centres, but he was fobbed off with the standard “It’s still too early to be making those decisions…” response.
But if, for example, it turned out that R is high in hospitals and on public transport but low in shops and factories or building sites then we could move on at little or no risk.
I think it was Chris Whitty who clarified it a bit today. As you say @Farinances it is modelled to a large degree. He couldn’t say what the value was now – between 0.6 and 0.9 I think, which is huge range. He said they would be moving to make it more measured than modelled by doing random surveys. But how is that going to help with deciding what to do now? As far as I can work out, they’ll say something like: our model says R = 0.6 now, the model says that doing X will add 0.4 to R, so we can do that and nothing else. Would they then do some sampling later to see what R is after doing X? There’s a really good on ‘How reliable is Imperial College modelling’ on this, which I’m trying to get my head round..
I think your question ‘is anyone remodelling now?’ is important. As is the question ‘how well does the model predict the past? As is ‘has anyone run the model with different assumptions?’. As is ‘are there teams of modellers crawling all over it’
Another thing. How can you possibly know how many people one person infects? Surely that’s only possible if you’re dealing with something that’s transmitted person to person like STDs. A person can directly infect a person they come into contact with by coughing in their face say but they will also infect unknown other people by the virus they leave on door knobs etc. Am I missing something here?
So. Let’s start discussing some of the looming realities of what will happen once lockdown is, finally, over. (Will it ever be over? 😭)
What does everyone think of this tracing app? I think it could possibly be a very interesting flashpoint in the ‘my life’ versus ‘life’ (credit: Bec) cognitive dissonance that lockdown zealots seem to be having trouble getting over.
No doubt most people will just blindly download the thing and keep their Bluetooth on like good little data points. But surely there must be a significant minority who will either not want to make the effort, or who will actually have privacy concerns. What do they do, and where does it leave them in the argument that they’re the virtuous protectors of life?
My personal view is over my literal dead body. Given the NHS’s abysmal record, I don’t trust them with my location data as well as all the other stuff they have on me. I REALLY don’t trust the government not to sell that stuff to the likes of Amazon etc.
Not that Amazon would need it. 😉
I certainly won’t be downloading the app but no doubt plenty of idiots will regardless of where this might be leading. As someone who will probably decline the coved -19 vaccine when it’s available I’m certainly not giving the NHS the means to track me. I’m even thinking of not taking my phone out with me or switching it off if I do.
I won’t be loading up any app. Indeed, I stopped using my phone outside the house weeks ago. We all need to start getting used to living again without our mobile phones. Freedom!
I’m doing this too, leaving my phone at home. I’ve gone back to writing pen and ink letters, and I’ve deactivated social media, it’s actually a relief!
What’s an ‘app’? I don’t seem to be able to download such things on my old Nokia. Perhaps I will have to be implanted with one of those ‘chip’ things instead.
I started using my card in the local shops where I used to use cash (I expect a lot of people all over the country are doing this). It got blocked for “suspected fraud” when it was actually me going shopping. Three times now.
If this is the level of competence that is going to apply to tracking apps we are doomed.
Refuse to use card, force cash on them. It is for their own good, all local firms would be forced into bankruptcy in a fully cashless economy. Cash is safe to use in a pandemic, just don’t touch your face after handling your wallet. Cash transmits viral particles only between a small number of people, card terminals spread it between many more. Though one does start to wonder if given what we know about covid-19 survival times on different surfaces that we’d have been better with paper notes than the new polymer ones.
Good point! I’m just trying to be kind to the people who have been told to avoid cash. Do I want the bank to know how much I spend in the butchers? They might alert the Vegan Police.
Will never be downloading anything like that to my device thank you very much
Ditched my mobile 2 years ago…best idea ever!
I posted this earlier today on the previous article before today’s article was uploaded…
Finally…170 scientists and researchers have got together and issued a joint statement concerning the deployment of the NHSX contact tracing app.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uB4LcQHMVP-oLzIIHA9SjKj1uMd3erGu/view
Maybe we can approach them to band together to address other concerns or use that kind of template to do that ourselves?
By mistake uploaded on yesterday’s blog so reupload today I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the most politically incorrect country in the world, Belarus, and see how they are dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. All information is from Wikipedia and the actual epidemic curve is extremely informative and much better than Worldometer. The first case was an Iranian student 28th Feb but very quickly there were sporadic and increasing cases in clusters indicating local transmission but the real explosion was in the beginning of April. Different from neighbouring Russia which had a more “Western European” style epidemic with tourist coming back infected and then the explosion of cases. Belarus did ambitious testing and closed borders, quarantine of cases, contact tracing and isolation of cases. The only social distancing was prolonging the ordinary spring break in schools with two weeks but no other social distancing at all. A WHO delegation in April noted, in a very diplomatic report, the very ambitious old-fashioned approach with testing, contact tracing early on and isolation but recommended social distancing measures school university closing, stopping mass gatherings etc. Not something for Europe’s last dictator, Lukashenko. Quotations” “You just have to work,… Read more »
So the last dictator *isn’t Orban? 😉
I think it will be very interesting to follow the number of deaths per capita in Belarus indeed. Can you imagine the thing if it will be exactly the same or very close to other numbers in Europe? What if the Oxford study a few weeks back is true and most of the people were contracted the virus even before the lockdown and the lockdown might not change anything just damaged the economy. What do you think is there anybody out there who is brave enough to write it down?
I doubt it will be Neil Ferguson
Indeed… Belarus are probably laughing at everyone else. But as ever with statistics, there will be some fake news about underreporting
I was hoping to share some info on this, but what I found in the US media is that unfortunately they are poking like children at Belarus. People in the US are brainwashed by the supposed Russia election propaganda controversy. So liberals just claim any statements are fake/propaganda if they don’t like the findings. If Belarus comes out well, the US libs will simply claim they were playing with their numbers. US libs dismiss https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ as propaganda also due to the globalresearch connection. Any editorial, they just claim the author is “playing fast and loose with the facts”. Slippery, dishonest.
I would have thought that governments would be looking for ways to END the lockdown, not searching for excuses to prolong it. The lockdown was sold to us in the U.S. as a painful but necessary 15 days, which would flatten the curve. (Whatever that means and however it would work.) It was meant to be temporary – an unpleasant medical treatment but one that had clear benefits. It was urgent that the step be taken at that very moment, lest we be overwhelmed with COVID, our healthcare system collapse (whatever that means) and society itself fall apart. My brother, a law professor, actually said that society would fall apart if we didn’t shut everything down. I was like, it sure looks to me like it’s fallen apart already – no schools, no jobs, no freedom – but you know, that’s because I don’t care if people die. All those initial goals have long been forgotten. Remember ventilators? I’ve heard nothing about them for weeks. It’s now lockdown for its own sake. American governors are instituting increasingly draconian measures even as the epidemic dwindles. There is less scientific basis than ever – in fact, the rhetoric has returned to where… Read more »
Staggering figures from the US today – 30 million now claiming benefits with another 12 million jobs lost in last month or two but people unable to claim. Over 20% unemployment likely in next few months. Will UK fare any better?
30.3 million official jobless plus 12 unofficial plus 56.6 million K12 students plus 20 million higher ed students: that’s one third of the U.S. that’s lost its daily employment. With no substitutes offered and no stated end in sight.
And the Spectator actually has an article about “saving the lockdown”. People have seriously lost the thread.
This is interesting: https://ukaji.org/2020/04/28/the-emperor-has-no-clothes-a-sober-analysis-of-the-government-response-to-covid-19/
Here in France, the government is leaving it up to parents to decide whether they will send their children back to school on 11th May when we start to come out of lockdown. Instead of reassuring parents that school children have virtually nothing to fear from covid-19 and the vast majority of deaths are among the elderly and unwell, followed by the middle-aged and overweight, the government puts out alarming messages between radio or television programmes and on the health service website, about how the virus can live on surfaces for three days, how one infected person can infect three more, each of whom can infect three more, and so on, to give the impression of an invisible killer striking at random. Parents are understandably terrified. As you say, you would think a government would be trying to reassure people so that everyone can go back to a normal life, but not a bit of it.
Has the government there planted the story of Kawasaki disease into the narrative, with photos in the papers (with saturation turned up to maximum) just to scare parents even more?
Exactly what I thought. I suspect Boris wants to be famous for having the world’s longest lockdown and they will stick at nothing to achieve this. Those pussies in France and Germany gave up far too soon, and don’t even think about Sweden or Belarus. IMO the consequences will kill far more than the virus ever did.
Here’s a good song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZsfy8AD_S0
No end to this madness anytime soon by the looks of it, even suggesting it may run to June. It seems the CMO Whitty has fear running through Downing Street.
I’m done !!!!!
http://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-boris-johnsons-spokesman-suggests-no-relaxation-of-lockdown-on-the-horizon-11981188
I think/hope it’s all just Johnson’s usual ploy of trying to have his cake and eat it and tell everyone what they want to hear. “Phase 2 lockdown” should mean basically no lockdown. I support ongoing recommendations (not regulations) to wash hands and go to bed if you’re ill etc. although no doubt it will all be much sillier than that.
It’s clear to me Covid is a tool, and I’ve known that since February.
I don’t need any other graphs or experts’ words to see it’s a global scam.
It has been employed all over the world. That means there is something big going on, nations do not exist anymore, nor politicians or parties. It’s like it has fallen from the sky, in the sense it is a reality to which all humans are submitted. The gods’ will? Very likely…
”NHS England is considering removing black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff from frontline roles, given that they appear to be dying in disproportionately high numbers compared to non-BAME NHS workers.”
Given the role that gender, obesity and age play as risk factors, as well as ethnicity, does this mean that we can expect to see only young, slim, white women in front line roles?
We’ve passed the peak of the virus, but reached peak woke.
I’ve resigned myself to the situation not changing anytime soon here in the UK. We are led by cowards. In an effort to understand how this mess happened, before it came to the UK, I’ve been reading up on China, The Chinese Communist Party and the WHO. I’ve read a number of books on China/CCP (and have still more to read). So far, the best have been: – Stealth War by Robert Spalding, and – Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy by Bill Gertz I’ve not read anything on the WHO yet but found the following informative: – IEA. Covid-19: WHO is to blame? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOXgNi8qM4s – TrustWHO, a documentary available on Amazon prime and other channels (it was free on Vimeo before being taken down) Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge channel has had some interesting interviews. – Trump, China, and the Geopolitics of a Crisis https://tinyurl.com/y9ss7ou2 – Victor Davis Hanson on Corona, California, and the Classical World https://tinyurl.com/yb8vuct7 Another source that nobody has mentioned is War Room Pandemic. This is run by Steve Bannon. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea and he’s been driving the lockdown narrative. However, they’ve had some very interesting guests on… Read more »
There is a documentary about the WHO on a french channel called ARTE, you might be able to find english versions on youtube.
– WHO: profiteers of fear
Thank you. Strangely, I can’t seem to find that documentary. Maybe deleted like the other one by The Ministry of Truth? Good channel though and luckily I speak French.
I’ve started listening to the Bannon podcast. He is really having a go at China on a number of fronts and scathing on the American elites. Over here, I listen to the Delingpod and London Calling which seem to try to be more entertaining than informative, but they often lead to some other sources that are worth checking out.
Sounds like my podcast feed! 🙂
In the land of the free.Scroll up and watch a minute video Mother arrested in Meridian, Idaho for letting kids play in park
https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1252760509113344002
Today’s shoe hit the TV, and may have caused actual damage.
My jaw dropped when he used the 500,000 figure, I was quite taken aback. I just don’t know what we can do to stop this madness. I wrote to my MP this week and the reply, which I am grateful for, was pretty much what we hear on the news, protect ‘our’ NHS, etc. Will somebody please tell the government that the stupid five steps have all been met already for goodness sake!
I’m starting to find it funny now, probably my own immune response to extreme anger. The little posterings about how they know it’s causing collateral deaths, without actually admitting the scale of the problem, are kinda hilarious. It’s like watching a twitter feed of someone trying to address the counter argument whilst remaining bloody-mindedly committed to the cause.
“” We know loads of people are killing themselves, but nobody’s filming that #sorry “”
Yes, @Farinances I think you’ve got to be a little Zen about it and take comfort from the fact that you are not alone in thinking their policy making leaves a little to be desired. Chris Whitty is the only one who seems attuned to the wider impact of lockdown and the deaths, misery and suffering it causes but that recognition doesn’t seem to have any effect on the others.
I also find it astonishing that the media cannot nail them. All they do is bang on about operational deficiencies, grandstand and highlight specific regional angles. The token questions from the public are, naturally enough, narrowly focussed. There is only one question that is relevant: how can you Prime Minister justify a policy of lockdown when all the evidence suggests that it causes more death, suffering and hardship than it prevents? Like Paxo interviewing Michael Howard – keep asking the same question over and over.
Perhaps someone could design an, “End the Lockdown Now!” poster that could be downloaded, printed and taped to front room windows.
Our houses would be vandalised
I’m up for it. Although, I don’t want my front door egged.
We need T-shirts…
The police would absolutely love us
Hi,
I’ve just finished watching the PM’s address and I’m fuming! I just can’t take much more of the patronising propaganda and fear mongering. He even mentioned that 500000 could have died. How can we put up with this blatant lying? What can we do? Does anyone know why that petition to Parliament is taking so long?
Me too – although I only lasted 10 minutes. Had to give up after the Five Key Tests.
I haven’t watched it for a couple of weeks. A complete waste of time and energy.
I knew that they would claim a win whatever happened. 500k avoided though, that’s some spin!
My neighbour said that this whole “crisis” is going to be the biggest gaslighting operation in modern history or something along those lines. It made sense though, we were manipulated into this lockdown and we’ll be manipulated out of it. And the worst part is most people will believe that they really did brush death, that the lockdown was totally necessary and that 500k could indeed have died.
What petition is that? Where do I sign? Has anyone started one on the Gov Petition site?
There was a link to a petition in one of the first of these daily round-ups. It was removed for some kind of verification process. Toby mentioned keeping an eye on it.
I suspect the petition is taking so long because they are deliberately not approving it. The only way to test this would be to set up two new petitions with opposing agendas. One is anti lockdown, the other is for something completely unrelated. I wonder which one would be approved first?
Someone questioned them on the apparent success of that medicine – I can’t remember the name – and Whitty said something along the lines of: ‘We can’t make any rash decisions without the data.’
I nearly fell off my chair.