The Guardian has splashed with a humdinger of a story today, revealing that Dominic Cummings drove 264 miles from his home in London to stay with his parents in Durham. The police were tipped-off on March 31st after Cummings was spotted in his parents’ front garden with his three year-old child by a member of the public and officers “explained to the family the guidelines around self-isolation and reiterated the appropriate advice around essential travel”.
The police took no further action, but the Guardian leaves its readers in no doubt what it thinks should happen:
The witness, who did not wish to be named, told the Guardian: “I was really annoyed. I thought it’s OK for you to drive all the way up to Durham and escape from London. I sympathise with him wanting to do that, but other people are not allowed to do that. It’s one rule for Dominic Cummings and one rule for the rest of us.”
Tulip Siddiq MP, the Vice Chair of the Labour party, said of the reports: “If accurate, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser appears to have breached the lockdown rules. The Government’s guidance was very clear: stay at home and no non-essential travel. The British people do not expect there to be one rule for them and another rule for Dominic Cummings. Number 10 needs to provide a very swift explanation for his actions.”
The acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, tweeted: “If Dominic Cummings has broken the lockdown guidelines he will have to resign. It’s as simple as that.”
Ian Blackford, the Scottish National party’s Westminster leader, said: “Dominic Cummings’ position is completely untenable – he must resign or be sacked.”
Breaking lockdown rules has been a resigning issue for senior officials.
Prof Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose modelling prompted the lockdown, quit as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies for flouting physical distancing rules when he was visited by his girlfriend.
After he stood aside, senior Tories insisted he had done the right thing.
Hancock said he was “speechless” and added: “I think he took the right decision to resign.”
So should Dominic Cummings go? I punched the air when Neil Ferguson was caught with his pants down and promptly slunk off with his tail between his legs. So shouldn’t I be screaming for Cummings’s head? Or is it one rule for my Tory mates and another for bearded leftists?
My view is that unlike Professor Pantsdown, Cummings had a “reasonable excuse” to be outside his home. Under the guidelines issued by the College of Policing (and reproduced in Appendix 1 of Lockdown Sceptics), one of the reasonable excuses listed is “providing support to vulnerable people”, accompanied by the following guidance:
Social visits are not generally a good reason to leave home. However, there may be exceptional circumstances for a person to visit another…
So what were the “exceptional circumstances” in this case? Well, both Cummings and his wife were suffering from COVID-19 at the time and as a result felt unable to care for their three year-old child. That was the “vulnerable person” that required “support”, so Cummings drove to his parents’ house in Durham and entrusted his toddler to their care while – as far as we know – observing the correct social distancing rules while in their household.
In other words, this isn’t a case of one rule for them and another for the rest of us, although Cummings was certainly interpreting those rules quite liberally.
And I don’t think I can be accused of sucking up to my Tory mates. If I was willing to turn a blind eye to their faults I wouldn’t have started this website…
Coronaphobia Still Grips Nation
Britons do not want to go back into work because they fear the lockdown is being eased too quickly – and they enjoy being at home, according to a depressing poll in today’s Mail. Here are some of the key findings:
- 33% said they were “better off” as a result of the lockdown, compared to 29% who said they were “worse off”. In the public sector, this rises to 46% saying “better off” and 23% saying “worse off”.
- 43% said they have enjoyed being stuck at home, with 25% saying they haven’t.
- 53% think the lockdown is being eased “too fast” against 11% who think it’s “too slow”.
- 75% think all travellers arriving in the UK should be quarantined for two weeks while 11% think they shouldn’t.
- 60% of parents said they won’t be sending their children to school on June 1st and 55% think the teaching unions are right to veto schools reopening compared to 27% who don’t.
- 58% think pubs with outdoor seating should not reopen, while 35% think they should.
Will London be First Out of Lockdown?
This is rumoured to be the big announcement Boris is planning on May 31st, following the news that there’ve only been 634 cases in the capital over the past fortnight. To lend credence to these reports, Barcelona and Madrid will be easing their lockdowns from Monday, allowing people to meet in groups of up to 10 and travel within their provinces. In addition, bars and restaurants will reopen, provided customers eat and drink outside.
Amusing comment spotted beneath the Times‘s piece on the forthcoming liberation of the capital:
People of Cornwall, Cumbria and Wales: please do not visit London. We are worried that you will reintroduce infection and overwhelm our health services. You will be welcome to taste the pleasures of urban sophistication when the crisis is past, and we will be pleased to relieve you of your money.
Former Director of Israel’s Health Ministry Condemns Covid Hysteria
There’s a good interview with Yoram Lass, former Director-General of Israel’s Health Ministry, by Fraser Miles in Spiked. He thinks the global reaction to the pandemic, including that of governments, has been fuelled by social media-induced hysteria:
It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria.
It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.
Lass is sceptical about the number of deaths being attributed to COVID-19 across the world, pointing out that the most reliable data are the excess death figures published at the end of the year.
The only real number is the total number of deaths – all causes of death, not just coronavirus. If you look at those numbers, you will see that every winter we get what is called an excess death rate. That is, during the winter more people die compared to the average, due to regular, seasonal flu epidemics, which nobody cares about. If you look at the coronavirus wave on a graph, you will see that it looks like a spike. Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month. If you count the number of people who die in terms of excess mortality – which is the area under the curve – you will see that during the coronavirus season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15 per cent larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017.
Compared to that rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering. In developing countries many will die from starvation. In developed countries many will die from unemployment. Unemployment is mortality. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners. They are younger. Among the people who die from coronavirus, the median age is often higher than the life expectancy of the population. What has been done is not proportionate. But people are afraid. People are brainwashed. They do not listen to the data. And that includes governments.
Needless to say, Lass thinks the lockdowns are a pointless act of self-harm:
Any reasonable expert – that is, anyone but Professor Ferguson from Imperial College who would have locked down everybody when we had swine flu – will tell you that lockdown cannot change the final number of infected people. It can only change the rate of infection. And people argue that by changing the rate of infection and ‘flattening the curve’, we prevented the collapse of hospitals. I have shown you the costs of lockdown, but this was the argument in favour of it. But look at Sweden. No lockdown and no collapse of hospitals. The argument for the lockdown collapses.
Worth reading in full.
The Covid Bible
A reader has sent me some verses from the “Covid Bible”. This one could run and run…
- And their number was said to be Five Thousand… until the Authorities dispersed them as it was an illegal gathering under the Corona Virus Legisation.
- And the Disciples said, there is a boy here with Five loaves and Two fishes… which caused accusations of Panic Buying as the maximum at the time was two per customer.
- And I tell you, Lo, where two or three are gathered together in My name there will… the Police be also, to fine thee for breaking the Lockdown Rules.
Professor Ferguson’s Latest Astrological Charts
Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College have published a new paper – Report 23 – analysing the likely impact of easing lockdowns in different US states. According to them, the prognosis isn’t good:
We predict that increased mobility following relaxation of social distancing will lead to resurgence of transmission, keeping all else constant. We predict that deaths over the next two-month period could exceed current cumulative deaths by greater than two-fold, if the relationship between mobility and transmission remains unchanged.
You’d have thought Team Ferguson would have learnt its lesson by now. Why make apocalyptic predictions, given the high likelihood that they’ll turn out to be over-estimates? In the case of this one, we only need wait two months before it’s proved wrong. You’d think the bespectacled soothsayers would be a bit more risk averse, given that the general tenor of their advice is to hide under your bed until we have a vaccine.
I asked Alistair Haimes, a data specialist who’s written some great number-crunching articles about the crisis, to take a look at the report for Lockdown Sceptics. This was after I’d seen a tweet of his saying: “Just imagine that the Imperial College report is all in Comic Sans and you’ll have an idea of the esteem they’re held in right now in the UK.”
Imperial’s latest analysis is mesmerisingly bad, finding interesting new ways to be wrong and misleading. Key questions to ask yourself reading it or its conclusions would be:
1. Why is Imperial still only using deaths to work backwards to past infections and then forward again to future infections (an inherently error-prone method) when we have on-the-ground data like hospital admissions and COVID-19 calls to doctors and hospitals to track the disease’s spread? (In the UK, this information is actually the most useful data for ‘community’ R, as it excludes nosocomial infection: UK’s R is currently around 0.6 from this data by the way). Why on earth wouldn’t they use whatever current data they can get their hands on rather than using a single, variable lag-indicator?
2. Why is Imperial not differentiating states based on how they have controlled the outbreaks in care homes, given the high percentage of total deaths this represents? New York has 10x the proportion of care home residents dying of COVID-19 as Florida, since NY made the same mistake as the UK, where 1/3rd of deaths are care home residents (and Sweden, where >50% deaths are in care homes or care-at-home), which was to send infected patients back to care homes without first testing them to ensure they’re negative. (Both Germany and South Korea got this right, btw.) The ‘care home’ R would clearly be hugely different as a result, and everyone is now ‘on”‘this issue, but Imperial’s analysis does not account for it.
3. Why does Imperial assume that infection spread is only affected by state-sponsored interventions rather than declining naturally, given that the downward trajectory of R is indistinguishable for a lockdown versus non-lockdown country (see UK v Sweden)? Michael Levitt – Stanford Professor of Structural Biology – pointed out two months ago that transmission is constantly declining whether the disease is managed or not, but Imperial’s model implicitly assumes that infections will spring up again when interventions are lifted like an un-squashed sombrero. The ‘natural experiment’ or ‘control’ of Free Sweden versus HMP England does not bear this out.
4. Why is Imperial using only antibody levels to sanity-check its results, when it is clearer by the day that large proportions of people are relying on other facets of the immune system (T cell and likely cross-immunity from other coronaviruses) to fight off infection? This would make a massive difference to its calculations of the remaining susceptible population.
5. Why is Imperial still running the model based on Chinese (no comment) parameter inputs for length of illness from over two months ago, when we know so much more about the virus, the disease and its treatment now than we did then?
6. Why is Imperial still using IFR assumptions via shaky historical data from selected countries in Europe, when the CDC has calculated the current actual IFR rate (0.26%) in the US?
I could go on. There is a two-page digression proving (with lovely charts) that mobility is strongly correlated with stay-at-home orders: no shit, Sherlock. The code itself is very short and simple – formatting and presenting the results is more lines of code than the calculation – but it’s the old chestnut: garbage in, garbage out.
P.S. A lockdown sceptic on Twitter decided to plug Sweden’s numbers into Neil Ferguson’s model to see what deaths it would have predicted compared to the reality. We all know how this turns out because I’ve written about two other versions of this exact same exercise. But here’s the graph just for laughs:
Instant Karma for BP’s Looney
A few days ago a reader emailed me with the following gripe:
I am really getting hacked off at the amount of money that is being splashed around as a consequence of this stupid lockdown. Now we learn that the wonderful boys in blue have been getting free petrol, c/o BP’s generosity. Do BP’s shareholders know this is how BP is misuing their funds I wonder?
He included a link to an article in Police Oracle confirming that from the beginning of April British police have been allowed to fill up their tanks at BP petrol stations completely free of charge.
Yesterday, the same reader emailed me again, only this time he was in a better mood:
Today the CEO of BP (aptly name Bernard Looney) announced this: “BP is halving the number of top managers as the coronavirus pandemic accelerates a strategy shift under the new chief executive to transform the UK energy major into a ‘smaller and nimbler’ company. The pool of managers will be cut from 250 people to around 120, with many who held leadership positions under former chief Bob Dudley leaving the company in the next few months, a person familiar with the change said. In an email to staff sent on May 14, Bernard Looney said the company was working towards a new operational and leadership structure as it seeks to achieve its ambition to be a net-zero emissions company by 2050.”
You can read the story in full on EnergyWorld.com, where it’s headlined: ‘BP’s Looney halves top management roles in energy transition plan.’ Someone has a sense of humour…
Did Matt Hancock Inadvertently Reveal London’s IFR is 0.32%
At the Downing Street press briefing on Thursday, Matt Hancock announced that “around 17% of people in London… have tested positive for coronavirus antibodies” based on “the results of our antibody surveillance study”. Is this the much-touted Porton Down seroprevalence study? He didn’t say. He also didn’t say how he was defining “London”, but if we assume it’s the London metropolitan area that’s a population of 14,372,596.
Can we calculate the infection fatality rate (IFR) in the capital based on this? I think we can. According to the ONS, 5,654 people died in London hospitals after testing positive for COVID-19 up to the week ending May 8th. The ONS estimates that 75% of Covid deaths in the capital have occurred in hospitals, giving us a total – in and out of hospital – of 7,805.
So let’s calculate the IFR:
- 14,372,596 x 0.17 = 2,443,341
- 2,443,341 ÷ 7,805 = 313
- 100 ÷ 313 = 0.32
- IFR = 0.32%
Probably an over-estimate, given that we know some people who’ve been exposed to the virus have it so mildly their bodies don’t produce enough antibodies for them to show up on a PCR test. But still three times smaller than the IFR Neil Ferguson plugged into his shonky model.
Stop Press: I put in a call to the Department of Health and Social Care to try and find out a bit more about this data and have been told it comes from Public Health England’s seroprevalence study, the results of which are due to be published next week. The 17% estimate comes from studying 974 NHS blood transfusion donors in London between May 1st and 3rd. So a small sample and hardly a representative one. After all, anyone who thinks they have the virus, as well as some who think they’ve had it, would be unlikely to give blood. Some of you may recall the bonkers prognosis that Professor Anthony Costello gave to the House of Commons Health Select Committee on April 24th, claiming we wouldn’t achieve herd immunity until after eight to ten waves of infection, with a death toll exceeding 40,000 in the first wave alone. This prediction was based on a Dutch survey of blood donors which showed that only 3% of them had developed antibodies to the virus. As a reader pointed out at the time:
By definition, a blood donor has no known infections, has not had a recent illness, even a cold or flu, and I presume the blood banks are being particularly careful at present. Even if the tests are done from the initial samples rather than the blood collected (i.e. includes rejected donors), someone who is aware that they had a cough recently would either not have volunteered or been rejected at questionnaire stage before giving a sample.
Children More Likely to be Struck by Lightning Than Die of COVID-19
At yesterday’s Downing Street press briefing, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, was asked what risk COVID-19 poses to children. He said: “They are very low risk, but not zero risk. And there have been some serious cases in children, of course, but very few compared to adults and older age groups.”
Let’s unpack what he means by “very few”. Up to the the week ending May 8th, according to the ONS, there were 37,375 deaths registered in England and Wales involving the coronavirus and of these two were of children aged 14 or under. There were no such deaths in Scotland, and none in Northern Ireland. So that’s two in total aged 14 or under for the whole of the UK. According to Statista, there are 11.91 million children aged 14 and under in the UK. So that means the chances of a child under the age of 15 dying from COVID-19 are one in 5,955,000.
An average of 49 people are injured by lightning in the UK each year and if we assume those strikes are distributed equally across different age cohorts that means about eight children aged 14 or under are struck by lightning each year.
So the chances of a child under the age of 15 being struck by lightning are four times higher than them dying of COVID-19.
Can you say that next time please, Sir Patrick?
Harvesting Deaths
In yesterday’s FT, David Spiegelhalter, the Cambridge statistician, told Alphaville’s Jemima Kelly he has revised downwards his estimates of the proportion of people dying from COVID-19 who would have died in the coming year anyway, suggesting that figure is between 5 and 15%. The colloquial term for this is “harvesting” – a short-term increase in the mortality rate that then causes a subsequent drop in deaths because some of the most vulnerable people will have died during the earlier spike. Five to 15% is a far smaller estimate than Neil Ferguson’s, who previously said that as many as two-thirds of the people who’ve died from COVID-19 might have died later this year anyway.
Sir David, who is the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and was formerly president of the Royal Statistical Society, said his reduced estimate was partly based on research carried out by University College London and published in the Lancet, showing that even among the over-85s with at least three comorbidities, we would still only expect 1 in 4 to die in the next year without coronavirus.
But evidence that at least some “harvesting” is taking place was provided by last Tuesday’s ONS data which shows that in Week 19 of this year the total number of deaths in hospitals in England and Wales was below the five-year average for all-mortality deaths in Week 19 – 114 lower, to be precise. It will be interesting to see whether that was a one-off or the beginning of a trend.
The Reality of Lock Down for One 99 Year-Old
Lockdown sceptics like me are often told we are “heartless” for wanting to “sacrifice” the elderly for the economy. Worth pointing out, then, that for many elderly people the miseries of being kept in quarantine, unable to see their families, are so acute they would prefer to take their chances. Here’s the story of one reader’s 99 year-old mother-in-law:
On 21 March my 99-year-old mother-in-law fell at her care home in Lincolnshire and cut herself so badly she had to be rushed into Peterborough Hospital. Since I and my wife had only returned home that morning from Australia after an abruptly curtailed trip, this was fairly distressing for all since we could not visit her. She was to remain there for 15 days largely because thanks to the habit of NHS regions of offering different treatments, Lincolnshire could not deal with the type of dressing used in Peterborough. On 31 March this was finally sorted out, my wife having had to ring almost daily to barrack staff in Peterborough and Lincolnshire.
So, she was discharged. Incredibly, even at this date the proposition was that this elderly lady be sent back to her care home in an ordinary taxi, with all the attendant risks. Staggered at this, we stepped in and collected her ourselves. I need scarcely mention that she was not tested for COVID-19 at the hospital. She lives in a detached garden apartment so does not need to come in contact with any other residents.
As it happens, she’s fine and there were and still are zero cases of the virus at her care home, a place which is incidentally so well organised they have plenty of stocks of PPE. But let’s just look at what the lockdown means for my mother-in-law. Her husband died three years ago. Two of her three children are dead, many years ago. Almost all her friends and relatives are long dead. The only person she has left is my wife, our children and her great-grandchildren, none of whom she is allowed to have visit her. Since some of them live abroad the new quarantine rules will ensure any chance of seeing them again is being pushed back further and further.
Handicapped by macular degeneration she can hardly see anything and her hearing is only just acceptable thanks to a number of electronic devices that enable her to listen to the radio and TV.
She has no dementia and is utterly appalled at watching her country being reduced to economic ruin for the sake of people like herself. She is crippled with acute back ache that confines her to bed most days. The doctor is not allowed to visit her. Nor of course can she go to the dentist or get her hair cut.This is the reality for one very elderly person who never stops telling us she has had enough and wants to go. The lockdown has denied her not only any remaining joy in her life but even some amelioration of her physical discomfort. She is in despair for the future of her descendants of whom she is immensely proud. The care home staff do their very best but nothing can compensate for what has happened.
I’m not going to pass judgement here myself on the lockdown. But when I hear people like Matt Hancock or Priti Patel say they understand how tough it must be, I know they really don’t have the slightest idea.
Queen Sacks Boris, Takes Back Control
Has one particular 94 year-old finally had enough? Excellent post in the comment thread beneath yesterdays update from “Annie”. It begins:
Last night I dreamed a dream.
The Queen was scheduled to make a live broadcast to the nation. She appeared as usual, poised and serene. But suddenly she sat bolt upright, hurled a brick through the autocue, fixed the cameras with a steely glare, and began:
People of Britain, I know you are watching me without respect or full attention, sloppily dressed and probably eating junk food. I will give you just five minutes to take off your nappies, assume decent clothes, smarten yourselves up and return to hear my announcement.
[Five minutes later.]In view of the lamentable condition of this country, I have decided to resume my proper place as an active head of state. I have dismissed the present Cabinet and am in process of selecting a new set of ministers equipped with brains and backbones. Dr David Starkey is to be the new Prime Minister, and Lord Jonathan Sumption will be Lord Chancellor. We are currently looking for a Chancellor who can add up and knows that there is no such thing as a magic money tree. We will let you know when and if we find one. Leading my new team, I shall restore this country from the shambles it has become.
For a thousand years, the best of the people of these islands have striven – not always successfully, and never unanimously, but unceasingly – to construct a system which is built on justice and individual freedom. But to maintain justice requires courage, and individual freedom requires individual responsibility. People of Britain! In a few short weeks, cowed and subjugated by panicking bullies who use fear and lies as their weapons, you have cast away the labours of a thousand years. You have ceased to care for justice, you have surrendered your freedom, and you have shrugged off your responsibilities. Everything that is worth having in Britain has been destroyed by the so-called lockdown. Without protest, without resistance, you have allowed your country to be turned into a vast concentration camp, where you are at the mercy of self-styled leaders who know neither leadership nor mercy.
There’s a good deal more in the same vein. Read the rest of it here.
Famous Companies That Have Gone Bust (So Far)
After hearing the news that Hertz has filed for bankruptcy I thought I’d start a new section in which I list those famous companies in Britain and the US that have gone bust as a result of lockdown lunacy. Here is a provisional list, but it will grow given that half of Britain’s high street chains are expected to be in administration by August:
In the UK:
- Debenhams
- Carphone Warehouse
- Oasis
- Warehouse
- Carluccios
- Cath Kidson
- Lombok
- Brighthouse
In the US:
- Hertz
- Dean & Deluca
- Gold’s Gym
- JC Penney
- J Crew
- Neiman Marcus
- Pier 1
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Tens of thousands of coronavirus tests have been double-counted, officials admit‘ – Diagnostic kits which involve nasal and saliva samples of a single individual are being counted as two tests, says the Telegraph
- ‘Every part of England would pass Germany’s Covid test‘ – Ross Clark in the Spectator suggests forgetting the R number and using the same metric used in Germany and Ontario – if the no. of infections falls below 50/100,00 then continue easing restrictions
- ‘Stanford Professor and Nobel Prize Winner Explains this Viral Lockdown – Fully!‘ – Ivor Cummins, aka the Fat Emperor, talks to Professor Michael Levitt about the lockdown policy
- ‘Feel a Little Shame for the Lost Soul of the Nation‘ – Avay Shukla makes a powerful moral case for ending the lockdown in India. A must-read for people who think lockdown scepticism is a conservative cause
- ‘The worst week for Britain’s economy laid bare – in five charts‘ – The Telegraph publishes five charts to show the economic devastation unleashed by the lockdown. Sobering
- ‘Lockdowns Haven’t Proved They’re Worth the Havoc‘ – Joe Nocera in Bloomberg contrasts the reaction to COVID-19 with the reaction to the Hong Kong Flu pandemic in 1968-69
- ‘We Can’t Go On Living in a Two-Meter World‘ – More scepticism from Bloomberg
- ‘Two in three of us have put on weight in lockdown‘ – I am among the 66.6%
- ‘Next week’s clap for carers should be the last‘ – The inventor of ‘clap for carers’ calls time on the virtue-signalling seals
- ‘Cracks widen as fatigue takes its toll at Downing Street‘ – Trouble down pit, according to the Times
- ‘California doctors say they’ve seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns‘ – Disturbing report in the Washington Examiner
- ‘Life long damage inflicted on children by lockdown, reveals study seen by SAGE advisers‘ – The Telegraph reports on data shown to members of SAGE showing lasting harm done to children by keeping them out of school
- ‘Justice Dept. supports downstate lawmaker’s lawsuit against Illinois stay-at-home order‘ – The US Justice Department is helping a state congressman in Chicago sue Governor JB Pritzker over stay-at-home order
- ‘Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike reveals restart plan as end of emergency looms‘ – Governor of Tokyo gives short shrift to the idea of a “new normal”. He told a meeting of the city’s coronavirus task force yesterday: “We need to proceed cautiously, but each day the city meets these criteria is another step toward reclaiming the lives we had before.”
- ‘Exclusive: Sir Keir Starmer reveals his children have been at school and calls for consensus to get pupils back in classroom‘ – Good scoop from the Telegraph. Starmer’s wife is a “key worker” so this is within the rules
- ‘Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ Are Spineless Bed-wetters‘ – James Delingpole’s latest in Breitbart. Yes, James, but what do you really think?
Theme Tune Suggestions
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “I Am the Law” by Spandau Ballet the Human League, “Cancer” by Joe Jackson, “You’re Not Very Well” by the Charlatans, “Patience” by Guns n’ Roses and “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison (for Lord Sumption).
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
Last week, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It still takes me about nine hours a day, what with doing these updates, moderating your comments and commissioning original material. And my journalist helpers have gone! If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here.
And Finally…
If you want to visit your elderly parents this weekend and are worried about being stopped by the police, just wear this Halloween mask. You should get away with a slap on the wrist.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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Today’s home learning spot is a history lesson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqsAMJEIQ8I
We need to talk about Matt.
https://twitter.com/russellhoward/status/1264179614051700736
ARRRRGHHHH
With you there!
Any advice for someone (a close friend of mine) who is a next-door neighbour to two teachers, who are spending each weekday enjoying their gardening, sunbathing, DIY projects and grocery shopping during school hours? My kids’ teachers have been nothing short of excellent but the above really is happening and it has to be more than this one couple. When parents are in despair at having to work from home etc and they are receiving nothing more than links to BBC bitesize for their children, we really have to take those polls from teachers as somewhat inaccurate.
Some (not all) of them are just keen to prolong their paid holiday and spruce up their houses. While others end up losing their houses and their jobs everything will be coming up roses for them.
Well. I am a School Business Manager and we are all on a rota to work one day a week, across the school workforce. This, sensibly, was put in place from the offset to ensure social distancing and to make sure that teachers who were at home, had time to set up online learning. Also because there is no way that any school staff, other than the head, will have needed to work full time during this lockdown period. We have all, in our school, been working hard, trying to keep up with the new rules and keeping the more mundane aspects of running a school up to date. But without face to face interaction with all of our parents and pupils it isn’t a full time job. So, what are the teachers next door to your friend supposed to do? It’s not their fault the school is shut. We didn’t ask for it to happen. If they are your friends neighbours why doesn’t your friend have a chat with them and stop being so judgemental?
Sure, it’s frustrating though when I hear from other friends that they aren’t being given structured work at all for their children. The two might not be directly linked but for those who don’t know the intricacies of the school system it feels unfair and annoying. My friend is having to work from home doing more hours than she usually does, as is her husband.
To be fair our school is an outstanding school with a hugely dedicated staff. Pupils teachers ring them every week to see how they’re getting on with life, not just home learning.
Probably because she’d get back the same defensive tripe you’ve just written.
Why is it tripe? It’s true! If your a neighbour chat to your neighbours! One of them may have underlying health conditions and shielding! Unless you ask you’ll never know. All of the school staff I know can’t wait to get back to school.
Just out of interest, and I’m assuming you will have a lot of contact with the unions through teachers etc. – what can be done by teachers when they disagree with their unions? Like….. can’t they just do it anyway? Could a band of rebel teachers just open their school regardless? Would they get fired?
Believe it or not I used to work in a school and there was a strike on whilst I was there. The ones who disagreed with the strike just went in anyway (and were treated like absolute trash as a result), brave souls. But in this case, can they not do anything because the schools are just…. shut? What if a headteacher decided she wanted to open her school? Could she do it?
It would depend on what type of school it is. An independent school I once worked at did not recognise unions, they could open if the trustees permitted it. An academy could do the same. My current school is an LA school and realistically we would have to take a steer from them as they are the employer. We have not consulted unions, but have been bombarded with blanket emails from them threatening strike action, wanting copies of our risk assessments for opening etc. We have told our staff we are opening if the LA permits it and that everyone, unless you have a shielding letter, is back full time from 1st June. My apologies for being defensive but there’s a lot of school staff bashing about generally, when actually the unions are the vocal ones.
Don’t feel that you need to apologise Adele. It’s nice to have people come on here and share their own experiences. And I’m disappointed that people aren’t being more receptive.
Unfortunately there is a lot of Public Sector worker bashing going on on here recently. Everyone decries the media for feeding them brainwashing material but then they lap it up from elsewhere as long as it fits their agenda.
I’m not entirely sure what people expect Public Sector workers to do…Send their salaries back? Turn up to work when it’s locked up? Hide indoors and self-flagellate in case they accidentally enjoy themselves?
I wish people would stop consuming the fake news that they’re all fearmongers who are enjoying a nice holiday and appreciate that they share exactly the same range of views as everyone else and that a huge amount of them are lockdown skeptics who want to get back to work.
I would expect teachers to be working still, for a decent portion of the week to be honest. I know not all kids have access to computers but many do and for those who don’t maybe more time and effort should be being put into creating work for them or trying to be accessible when possible.
I’m sure these people are the exception to the rule. I’m frustrated at this time about how much our kids are being let down and perhaps this story from a friend just hit a nerve.
I work in social work and we have absolutely abandoned our most vulnerable clients.
I was treated like a pariah for turning up to work on days I was not on the rota as everyone is totally paranoid.
I am being paid for doing next to nothing and that does not sit well with me.
As I said before there will be redundancies after this and I will be first in line.
So sorry to hear this. It’s utter madness and no one seems to be in charge! It seems with each day they’re making decisions that get us deeper and deeper into the mire.
Thank you! I am as frustrated as everyone else on here, can’t wait to get back to normal! And no, not the “new normal!” And I don’t care if my comments are getting down ticks either! 🙄🤷♀️ I can’t go into work if there isn’t anything for me to do because the government shut schools, I tried to volunteer but the NHS rejected me! 🤷♀️😂
Teachers are human just like the rest of us. While I don’t doubt there are some taking advantage of the situation, there are likely many who are trying their best to deal with this foolish situation and, even worse, dreading what it will be like returning to teaching during the “new %$rmal” (I can’t bring myself to even type the ridiculous phrase) of 2 meters apart and mask-wearing. Not to mention fielding inquiries from paranoid parents unaware that their children’s risk of dying from coronavirus is less than getting struck by lightning. However, I won’t be too hard on anyone posting here. It’s an especially frustrating situation for skeptics.
Then maybe they should be much more vocal about it!
My apologies for getting triggered lol. I have a temper 😉
So it’s the LA that is the Power That Be….s. Never thought I’d see an advantage to private schools but here we are. The Unions are literally acting like the mafia.
It’s fine! 😊
There was never anything sensible about closing schools. Do you think there was?
I think the lock down, including closing schools, to begin with was sensible as it was a new situation on which we had little info and we needed to ensure the NHS wasn’t overwhelmed. After a month it would have been obvious that those already in hospital, care homes, the elderly and those with underlying health conditions should be the only ones to be shielded and everyone else needed to get back to their normal life.
We knew from the beginning that this virus was not dangerous for children. It was deemed a category 1 ie of no particular threat. The only people needing protected were the elderly and those with underlying health conditions and those are the people we have failed to protect. The following is gudance from the WHO: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. Most people infected with the COVID-19 virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. Older people, and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness. The best way to prevent and slow down transmission is be well informed about the COVID-19 virus, the disease it causes and how it spreads. Protect yourself and others from infection by washing your hands or using an alcohol based rub frequently and not touching your face. The COVID-19 virus spreads primarily through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose when an infected person coughs or sneezes, so it’s important that you also practice respiratory etiquette (for example, by coughing into a flexed elbow). Nothing has changed… Read more »
I was fooled. But not now.
But look at the damage it has done to our children.
And if this nonsense idea of social distancing goes on there will be more damage.
It is nothing short of child abuse.
I know the majority of people got caught up in the panic at the start but the government deliberately raised the threat of the virus and repeated in its ads that the virus is dangerous for people of all ages, which they knew was a lie. Obviously this has terrifed parents.
Watch UK Column. They have been doing many excellent reports during this fiasco.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/covid-coercion-boris-johnsons-psychological-attack-uk-public
The main stream media and BBC have been complicit in ramping up the fear.
I don’t envy you Adele as it is not easy to make your voice heard about the crowd and I am glad you have come to this site. I think it is very brave of you and I hope you take some comfort from it.
Good luck in trying to lead your school back to normal normal.
Thanks. I came here as I wanted some sanity and a different perspective. As someone who has suffered health anxiety in the past this period has been an absolute nightmare! I am convinced Boris panicked and kicked us down, following bad advice. But now? Where even is he?!
I think he is having his own mental breakdown.
I think you’re right. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, but the man needs to get a grip! End the sodding lockdown now and protect the vulnerable (as outlined by the WHO.)
The virus has all but run its course now anyway.
I think it’s more that he’s a skiver.
I was too. Don’t be too hard on yourself. The panic porn was unrelenting.
Yes. For the first couple of weeks I was quick to embrace the lockup because my only sources of info were the Beeb and the Grad. Thank goodness I found sites like this – ironically thanks to Guardian comments. Please keep posting in there, those of you who can stomach it!
Which is why recently reinforcing the 2m rule is either bloody-minded or downright sinister.
No. In fact there are experts who believe it may have made the situation worse, at least initially.
who cares if the government says stay in? Individual Sovereignty takes precedence over anything else. The government can and do make all sorts of bullshit laws and i ignore all of them. They may wish to spend their one and only life in this universe making laws to make things better by always making things worse but i don’t have to listen to them. It’s like there’s you and then there’s the you that must do what they say. There ain’t enough people who genuinely don’t give a fuck about society or what happens to you. No one reading this gives two shits for me, quite rightly, but the ones who claim they do are the evil ones. How about we all get on doing what we like doing and stop caring what the so called law or the government or some chinless inbred royal or Scientist or Clergy or worst of all a celebrity say about anything. Time to step out the house and go do something the authorities are saying you shouldn’t, fuck ’em.
Quite right, have been defying the rules since day 1, and will continue to do so. New neighbours moved in today (quite strange in these times I thought).
Went to say hello, and first thing I did was shook his hand. Ha… Things already looking up.
Thankfully the wet lettuces who were previously there, NEVER left the house, and had their kids bouncing up and down on those friggin trampolines all day have ran off – hopefully to some nuclear bunker where they can be ‘safe’.
Small victories count.
Covid bunkers are actually a good idea. We build one in every community, and the zombies flee into it every time something ( calked real life) scares the s..t out of them.
And the rest of us shut the three-foot-thick steel doors on them, and get on with living.
Annie, Who’s going to see their virtue signalling.
Start how you mean to go on, Ian. Hopefully you’ll get on better with these neighbours.
Already have many times Biker.
Damn right, brother. There are some aspects of life that I don’t recognize the governments authority over me. One of those is whether or not I can leave my home. You want to put me under house arrest, put me in front of a judge, but until then I will do as I please.
You’re right Biker but the big problem is for those who want to go back to work but are forced to childmind, or who can’t because the 2m rule means it’s impossible – and insurance is a big deal for employers, nomatter how they feel about the silly rules. Same for teachers who want to pursue their vocation but are pawns in a political game. And of course for the children who NEED to play with their peers but are prevented from doing so by a mixture of hysterical parents and official redtape.
I know it’s Mental Health Awareness Week and I’ve seen the Conservative social media pages posting various virtue-signalling videos and photos to ‘mark the occasion’. As someone who has been in and out of therapists’ offices for the best part of 10 years of my life, this is a complete kick in the teeth. These cretins really have nerve posting their saccharine propaganda paying lip service to mental health awareness while implementing a ruinous policy that forbids anyone from having any sort of normal fulfilling life, preventing people from having physical contact with loved ones, pumping out endless fear-mongering and anxiety-inducing drivel, denying people the right to work and take pride in producing something and providing for themselves and their families, and letting businesses into which people have put their heart and soul go up in smoke – all the while allowing this lunacy to go on indefinitely and providing no end date. That’s just me – I already have problems so I was always going find lockdown very difficult but what really makes me angry is that my boyfriend, who was previously one of the most sane, cheerful, optimistic, and mentally stable people I knew, is starting to struggle… Read more »
Truly appalling that this country’s young are being so under-mined. And, as for ‘our’ government’s words of ‘sympathy’ and ‘understanding’, yes saccharine is indeed le mot juste.
You are absolutely right poppy. They have lost all credibility, particularly on mental health.
They have no credibility on the economy or education either.
I never imagined that any UK government was capable of these policies.
It’s terrible. I would take comfort in the fact that they must be suffering and struggling to sleep at night knowing the true consequences of the devastation they have wrought across the country, but then again most of them are sociopaths anyway. I don’t know how else they’d be able to live with themselves.
I’m sure they’re fine. After all, they have saved 450,000 lives, word of an expert.
Have you forgotten the 1980s?
You are so right. My teenage daughter (GCSE year) is suffering greatly. She worked so, so hard recently and spent a year in therapy building up her self esteem and dealing with her anxiety. She grafted at school to get the best grades she could in her mocks and was on an upward trajectory to do even better. Now she is withdrawn, her confidence gone almost completely, she is reluctant to take part in any of the work set for her etc and she is anxious about the future.
I can’t imagine how she must be feeling, truly terrible. It’s like the government has just totally overlooked the consequences of this for young people. My younger sister was due to do her GCSEs this year as well but of course they went out of the window. I’m not sure if it’s blissful ignorance, being too young or just incredible resilience (or a combination of all three) but she doesn’t seem too put out by what’s going on – yet I fear that by the time she is, it’ll be too late.
F++k the government and all the sniveling lickspittles and curtain twitchers of this country,don’t wait two weeks,go to your boyfriend and loved ones now Poppy,we all need to be back with the ones we care about now,enough is enough !.Over the weeks I have had friends harassed by the police for the crime of going to buy food and then been left feeling frightened to venture out afterwards,friends abused by members of the public for the audacity or going out for a walk on a beautiful spring day,I have been shouted at for breaking some kind of ‘covid law’ when going out for exercise and I am utterly,utterly sick and tired of being treated as if I am radioactive every time I approach someone on the footpath !.When I got out of bed this morning I was determined to try and be positive but after all I have seen and read today I am absolutely seething with anger.
This must be a very vivid nightmare,it can’t be real,can it ?.
Go for it Poppy!
Mental Health Awareness week has been a sham. If they truly cared about people’s mental health, the likes of Mind, the Samaritans and Heads Together should have been calling for the government to end the lockdown and social distancing NOW.
Instead they post the usual blathering about how “you are not alone”, “together we can do this” but its reached a point now where their advice is no longer helpful or effective. What will they do then when we see the inevitable spike in suicide rates?
My God, it’s disingenuous. I got one of those trite little ‘help your mental health’ pamphlets through the door the other day, complete with the stereotypical simplistic typeface and babyish illustrations. It went straight in the bin.
I got something similar as well. To be fair it was helpful in the beginning but now as the lockdown has become more Nightmare on Elm Street, they have ceased to be effective.
There has already been a spike in suicide rates the figures are just not being released.
I would have thought that these so called mental health charities should be collating the firgures and lobbying government but no they all stay silent.
Shame on them.
What a wonderfully heartfelt post Poppy, my best wishes to you and your boyfriend. I am utterly incensed by the biblical ineptitude and cowardice currently permeating through every corridor of Westminster.
I am 33 and soon to be a father of three children, and whilst I have been able to work during this lockdown crisis I fully appreciate that the worst is yet to come; crippling tax rises, cuts far more ranging than those felt during the last period of austerity and an explosion the cost of living.
Our generations have had their futures, ambitions and dreams completely dashed by the liberal elites who infect every facet of Government, major institutions, media and academia. These people have worked in lockstep to afflict some of the most authoritarian, punishing terms on our society in living memory; separating loved ones, destroying livelihoods, and surely precipitating a most dreadful increase in mental health issues.
Once the full scale of their hideous vandalism is revealed, I hope Boris and Co will be forever reeling from the venom of the nationwide protests that will hopefully ensue.
My best wishes to you and your family as well. I would hope Boris and Co will be ‘forever reeling’, but I get the impression that their political reputation is much more important than the wellbeing of their citizens, otherwise we’d be lifting lockdown a lot faster than we are. They’re just populists hiding behind a blue rosette.
Too late for the protests I fear. The damage is done.
You’d have to find Boris first!
And Cummings would say he was at one end of the country while secretly partying at the other.
My daughter lives in Wales – she went there to do a degree in dietetics and is in her final year. She was attending hospital placements until they stopped a couple of weeks short of her finishing – she is also (now) 32 weeks pregnant and suffered with severe anxiety before the lockdown, which has now intensified – all hospital appointments without her husband – why can’t pregnant women have their partners with them? Aren’t the hospitals pretty empty now? And we can’t even visit as Wales won’t let us in from England! I truly despair at what is happening but was heartened to see lots of people kite surfing at the beach today and others just enjoying the sunshine and the beach cafe (takeaway only of course!)
Wow. Well said. I hope your bf gets better. I think part of the problem with my generation ( I am 58) is that they do not seem to care for your generation (as I assume you guys are much younger if your bf is still studying).
The 70’s Me generation WAS just that. The focus was improving your own life – who cares about other people? The UK £1 trillion debt for Covid19 will be repaid by your generation not mine.
I have had terrible stresses in my life (as almost everyone does) from, in my case, friends committing suicide. God bless and good luck.
Yes we are both 20 and 21. I feel like my life has been much longer than it is because the internet/social media exposes young people to so much more anxiety and rubbish than they would have been exposed to 50 years ago and effectively robs them of their innocence – no wonder mental health issues in young people have skyrocketed what with the MSM’s apocalyptic predictions on the effects of Brexit, climate change, and now this.
I know that I’m only just starting out and I have time to turn things around. Sadly the government is robbing us of that optimistic opportunity by taking as long as possible to open up the economy. It’s a total joke that hairdressers will be open in JULY when they’ve already been open for weeks in other European countries. I doubt our lockdown easing will be brought forward either.
By July, it won’t be a case of whether or not to wear a mask, I’ll need a bag over my head!
My hairdresser is late 50s, absolutely brilliant but only worked 4 days a week before lockup. I’m not sure she won’t already have decided to fold. The remaining ones will have very long waiting lists. There are much more serious issues than a haircut, but it’s symptomatic. Like thousands of other small businesses, she won’t be the only one to disappear due to this fiasco.
Poppy, I really feel for you and for your boyfriend. This lockdown has to end, now. Right now. As a therapist, I’ve been terrified of what this house arrest will do to people’s mental state, and the sycophantic, happy clappy nonsense drives me to distraction. A lot of it perpetuated by my colleagues – sheesh! But I wanted to say this to you, and I hope you can pass this on to your boyfriend. This will end, and you have got time. We all have. Yes, the future might be a tough one, for some more than others, but reading through all of these comments, there are so many of us out here who understand, who want to be supportive and are fighting in the only ways we know how to change this situation. There is time ahead of us to make much of our lives after house arrest. Inferring your age, you both have a lot more time ahead of you than I do at 57, but we’ve all got time. My neighbour made me laugh the other day when he said, ‘one day we’ll look back and say, ‘you remember that crazy spring when we all locked ourselves… Read more »
I suspect your neighbour is right – one way I cope with this destructive madness is to imagine myself in 6-12 months’ time (hopefully), looking back on this period and thinking how completely insane it was. I feel that if I can mentally picture myself reflecting on it after it’s happened, then I can hold on to the idea that it WILL be over eventually.
“one way I cope with this destructive madness is to imagine myself in 6-12 months’ time (hopefully), looking back on this period and thinking how completely insane it was. ”
That’s a really helpful thought Poppy. Thank you so much for sharing. I will bear that in mind for my situation too.
Absolutely right. This will not be forgotten.
I was rather shocked to find that ” Boris should swing ” being rewarded with top comment yesterday but then on reflection maybe he should be held to account along with Gove, Hancock, Vallance and Whittey and there is a precedenct for this.
In 1947 the ” Doctors Trial ” took place in Nuremburg . Leading physicians who had performed medical trials on people who were definately not volunteers were tried before the tribunal and in the most serious of cases were sentenced to ” swing ” . As a result we now have the Nuremburg Code on Human Ethics . One of the stipulations for human experiments is that all participants should be volunteers.
We all know “Lockdown ” is a massive novel human experiment and we all know now that it has been ineffective. Its harm to the people of this country has been enormous. The people who forced it on the British people without the consent of the people should be held to account before a court and the events at Nuremburg in 1947 provide a basis for this .
*rubs hands together*
I’ll buy the popcorn
By the way I must emphasise that I am not in favour of capital punishment , before some stasi officer reports me ; however I do think there should be some settling of accounts and a legal process will be necessary.
The problem is that ANY approach to Covid would be an experiment. No-one knows for sure what is going to work. We are all guessing. The only way to not carry out an experiment is to do literally nothing and hope it doesn’t kill everyone.
Almost certainly a less costly response than the one we chose, as Belarus seems to be proving.
In reality the rational response was obviously just to do the least costly measures that have proven effect, such as encouraging people to was hands, and stay at home when they’re ill, and quarantining the vulnerable where possible. Pretty much what Sweden did and it worked for them.
Unfortunately the press think Sweden (and Belarus) are the ones “experimenting”. You won’t get any argument from me that we should have taken that approach, but equally if Covid was as bad as had been claimed then this would have been terrible.
It’s a little too easy today to say “the least costly measures that have proven effective” when at the time no-one actually knew what was effective.
We should have been more skeptical, and we should have been less cavalier with the economy, but we can’t fall into the trap of hindsight.
That might have been a sensible response 6 weeks ago. There’s absolutely no excuse now.
Hmm, I can’t say that I agree with you (perhaps a first!), Toby, over Cummings.
Seriously, he had to travel 264 miles to arrange care for his child, with a sick wife in tow and, according to some sources, whilst beginning to show signs himself?
Yes, of course, the ‘guidance’ is utter rubbish, but he was part of that. Quite intolerable.
Completely agree….
I understand the nuance Toby is putting forth, and technically he’s correct, but as I said yesterday, given the heavy-handed over-reaching way the police and gauleiters have dealt with this, and how it has left people being far more restricted in their movements and lives than the letter of the law dictated, he has to appreciate the bad taste it leaves in people’s mouths when he sees the people at the top ‘getting off on a technicality’.
I think this will not go away, and it will dog the government until they have no choice but to get rid of him. The comms guy absolutely cannot become the story. Rightly or wrongly, the press now have him where they want him and his position will be completely untenable by this time next week.
Maybe he himself planted this story so as to be ‘sacked’ by this joke of a government. It would make some sense.
In addition, his wife wrote an article for the Spectator which was deliberately deceptive and then repeated the deception two days later on Radio 4.
They deliberately made people think the restrictions were tighter than they are. He should go.
Marr read out the guidelines several times this morning. They were perfectly clear – stay in your primary residence.
Totally agree with you. Its another case of do as i say and not as i do. The fact all 3 drove all that way just for some childcare in case either of them got too ill to look after him is quite frankly ridiculous. You can’t tell me they didn’t have friends that they could of relied on for emergency childcare. Me and my partner is in a similar situation. Our nearest family member is over 100 miles away. I would never dream of travelling to see them if we were ill with anything just incase I needed them to look after our son for a few days. Also has anyone asked if they stopped for a comfort break. There’s no way they drove over 200 miles with a small child without stopping at least once on the way.
The total disregard they showed not only towards their family but everyone else they would of encountered on their trip up shows they knew the figures coming out from government was a complete lie.
Agree too… it is irrelevant the rules are unacceptable for so many reasons, them making an excuse to bend the rules to fit around him just highlights utter contempt for us plebs.
First we had 1984 now we have Animal Farm too.
… from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again…
Don’t understand how this took this long to be public knowledge-wish I could find that reference that Cummings himself made about seeding ideas so that it becomes accepted over time
If two parents with a 3 year old fear that they are coming down with Covid and the child can be looked after by relatives, what is the alternative for them ? They can’t pack him off on a train .
Yes that maybe the case but you wouldn’t be treated to the same rational if you were in that situation which is the point.
The family should all have self isolated surely.
Well all the other families did!
They have relatives in London and you can’t tell me they don’t have some form of nanny!
I agree, however how absolutely ridiculous and typical that this will now be the MSMs obsession for days (until he goes) rather than the COMPLETE LACK OF ANY POSSIBLE REASON TO KEEP US IN LOCKDOWN.
Anyone else think he KNEW the lockdown is bollocks? Same for Ferguson and Boris.
They all know it. Every single one of them.
None of this is about a virus
It seems that you might be implying that Mr. Cummings ‘crime’ is all more heinous because of who he is; that “Yes, of course, the ‘guidance’ is utter rubbish, but he was part of that”. How do we know he was part of that? I’ve seen that he’s an advisor to the Prime Minister, but I’ve never seen him speak publicly on any aspect of the lockdown (admittedly I never watch television, so he may well have done so, just that I didn’t see it) so to say he’s part of the guidance is just to believe what has been reported in the MSM. And as a matter of course, I don’t believe anything they report until I’ve investigated further (if I’m interested enough in the topic). I seem to be very much in the minority, but I applaud what Mr. Cummings did and I would have done the same. It seems to me that those on Twitter and Facebook and other MSM who are condemning him are just rather envious of the fact that he did something that they have wanted to do but were too scared to do so. What appals me more is that a neghbour felt… Read more »
At least he hasn’t caved to the pressure and apologised like a little wuss the way all the others do the very second they are caught being naughty. Gets my respect for that if nothing else at least.
Typical! I’ve been waiting for years for someone to show a spine and refuse to apologise, and when this one comes along it’s one of the evil idiots behind this coronapanic lockdown disaster, whom we desperately need to get out of government regardless of whether or not he’s “guilty” of what he’s charged with!
Most of the companies listed didn’t go bust just because of lockdown. They’ve been struggling for a long time and lockdown only accelerate the inevitable. I follow what happens in retail on a regular basis.
We criticise the government for blaming a lot of deaths for covid to inflate the numbers. We need to keep some level of objectivity and not blame everything on COVID ourselves.
The real problem though is that it is all being forced to happen within a very short time-frame. Who would wish to be looking for a job right now?
I agree with you – lockdown put these companies in a very disadvantaged position and left a lot of people jobless, without any chances of finding employment right now.
But we have to remember that some of these businesses were struggling for years. They were already closing down stores and looking for potential buyers long before we knew anything about coronavirus.
There is a difference between a healthy business (for example, restaurant) that was doing great until forced to shut down and a company with an outdated and overgrown retail estate that was making losses (JC Penney, Debenhams).
I think you may be surprised by the survival rates of non-chain restaurants on a 5 year timescale… it’s vanishingly small.
I think you raise a valid point here. In a sense, Covid was the catalyst – it sped up the inevitable chemical reaction, without affecting the final outcome.
Much of the death of the high street chains has come from the rise of online consumerism, particularly from Amazon.
It’s an ongoing trend called ‘Retail Apocalypse’ that started around 2010, and it’s a direct result of online sales increasing with every year. Only in the first half of 2019, there were 2,868 store closures in the UK. There was also a lot of openings, but nowhere near that figure.
Online is a big factor but it’s not the only one… car-unfriendly town centres and gross iniquities in business rates are a couple more.
Rent is another one. The overheads of having a bricks and mortar business make it very difficult to compete with online businesses.
I’ve been to Thailand a few times and apparently the stores in the malls don’t pay rent (the high end big name stores at least). The mall owners just take a cut of the sales. Possibly something that should be considered over here.
Also land supply restrictions by leftie Councils…causing high rents…IMHO
Town centre parking fees and supermarkets offering free carparking had a large part to play in the death of my high street.
Besides, Amazon offers a lot of small businesses a shopfront. That’s how I can buy my coffee from a small family business in North Yorkshire and my soap from two mums working from their kitchen in London. No way they’d survive lockdown without Amazon.
The wonderful tiny cafe I love to visit won’t be able to come close to adhering to social distancing, even if it’s reduced to 1m. Social distancing, if pursued, will kill many thriving businesses and whole communities with them.
And if anything the proposed social distancing measures will hasten the demise of more shops.
That said I do agree that the shops have not really helped themselves and are now even making it harder. Just now, I was forced to buy a kitchen knife and ice cream scoop after both gave up the ghost. Went to John Lewis website and to my horror, they proclaimed on their website that they were not selling knives online!
So I went to Amazon and found that they did and placed an order in no time.
Amazon – 1, John Lewis – 0
I had similar from John Lewis Online about a year ago, suggested I went to my nearest JL store, which is about an hour of more drive or train ride away, to see if they had the set of knives I was interested in.
As you say others will always pick up this type of business, in my case it was Lakeland, but it could so easily have been Amazon.
Normally I would not have minded as I could have dropped by a branch after work or during one of my days off but not now especially with this lockdown.
So for those complaining about Amazon’s dominance they only have themselves to blame.
They would probably argue their demise wasn’t inevitable. In any case, every business that goes under is a blow to employees, landlords, suppliers, HMRC. Even if they’d only survived 3 more months absent this disaster, that’s valuable.
Yep it happens every time there is a crisis. They used to blame Brexit now it’s ‘The Virus’.
From the start I jokingly called this virus “The Finisher”, I know I’m a heartless b’stard, because that’s essentially what it is. Most of the companies that have gone bust were on their last legs already and this was merely the final straw. More victims of “The Finisher”.
A few sectors as well are oversaturated – fashion is one that pops into my mind. Many fashion houses and retailers have been struggling for years now and it doesn’t help that they have been cynical and hypocritical in their pursuit of sales.
The current business model for fashion is not sustainable and I won’t be surprised if this current situation will see more brands either downsize or disappear altogether.
Yes of course Cummings used common sense but the populace as a whole were not encouraged to use common sense.
I just posted this comment on this story about how the clapping for the NHS & carers should stop now, https://uk.yahoo.com/news/clap-carers-stop-becomes-negative-143918669.html “Before all of this nonsense & scaremongering & fear about a common flu virus that the vast many of the gullible sheeple just fell for, nobody ever clapped for the NHS, it is & was their job to try & save people’s lives. Nobody bothered prior to all this nonsense. What next? Clap for the government who have single handily destroyed the economy on a biblical scale, who have peddled outright lies & fear of a stupid non threatening virus, caused unnecessary suffering to people by introducing a stupid lockdown that was not required, ruining normal life as we knew it, taking away people’s liberties & freedoms, stopping people from seeing their families (unless you are a government minister) causing unnecessary suicides, causing domestic violence to shoot up, Causing schools to close unnecessarily & causing suffering to children by stopping their education, introducing stupid 2m distancing from people, introducing stupid “social distancing “ in shops, taking away football & other sports. I could go on & on & on, but it’s time that everything was lifted & this country… Read more »
Don’t think you’ll get downvotes here mate.
Sorry Beefy, I should have said the “I await the comments & thumbs down” part was meant for my post on yahoo, not on here.
I post often on here, it has opened my eyes a lot since I first found this superb website, which was not long after it first started out.
I was going to downvote him for the tabloidesque style …
Just a small comment : you seem to have posted this in the wrong place – this is NOT the Guardian!
Few here clapped for the NHS and even fewer are under any illusion about the utterly devastating consequences to come!
No IanE, I posted it on here to show how stupid people are buying into all of this nonsense, because Yahoo is also full of people who fully believe in all this lockdown rubbish.
I enjoy noising them up, because it is rare that anyone on there (like the Guardian) actually can see this for what it actually is.
Will probably end up banned on Yahoo though.
Hmm, preaching to the converted as if they are the reverse seems odd to me, but, hey, it takes all sorts.
Send this to the MSM, they need to hear it
No excuse at all for Cummings.
The mantra was stay at home. Protect the NHS.
What if he, his wife, and god knows how many members of his family that he infected had ended up in an ICU in little Durham?
Goes against the spirit of why the lockdown was in place in the first place, certainly in the context of when he made his “mercy dash”.
Man is a complete hypocrite as well as a charlatan.
Agree, and at this point I don’t think it matters what happens to him. Looks like he’ll stay, so he’s a constant reminder of the govt’s hypocrisy, and constant ammo for critics as Johnson, Hancock et al try to explain it away. If he were to go or be sacked, it’s an admission of guilt.
We’ve seen this so many times before… a SPAD/minister comes a cropper… thinks he can hang on… PM expresses full confidence… media like a pitbull and there’s a new story every day…. by day 7, he’s gone.
I’ll give Cummings a week.
Steve Baker has the measure of it on Sky News…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMMkE6KP4zM
Well said Steve Baker. I enjoyed this in the comments: where can I get a dominic cummings mask so that I can go on holiday to Devon ?????
I like this website a lot but I don’t agree with Toby young defending Cummings… lots of people rightly or wrongly have followed lockdown rules – implemented by government of which cummings is part of..
Join the discussion…Simple question: when will anti-social distancing end in the UK? The message I’m increasingly getting is – Never. Any thoughts?
Same in the US. I feel that far more livelihoods and childhoods will be destroyed by “social distancing” / “new normal” noise than by the lockdown. This will be our new struggle in the post-lockdown world. We are post lockdown in Minnesota, but everywhere we go we feel a malaise and a dour sense that life is only barely worth living.
In business terms, it’s just a huge and entirely gratuitous decrease in productivity, which will have the results that inevitably follow decreased productivity. It has damaging social, cultural and political aspects as well, of course.
Now that Vrouw Aaslik, or whatever her name is, has called time on the spontaneous bestowal of Clap on the NHS, it is obviously time for the new religion to organise its services more formally. Here is a preview of the trial run: (The people of Zombieville, capital of Zombieland, congregate in the streets, masked, gloved and observing social distancing.) (The Celebrant begins the service. The Celebrant looks and sounds very like Nicola Sturgeon, only nastier.) C. Safety, security and stay at home be the rule with you all. All. And also with you. C. I’ll just remind you that I can see every single one of you on my telescreen, so you had better show fervour. (All show fervour.) C. We shall begin with Number 100 in your NHS virtual book of worship songs. The tune is ‘Old Groveller’. All sing: We praise you, holy NHS, For keeping us alive And to maintain your holy laws We will forever strive. We know we must protect you From every lurking ill And not let cancer patients Your holy precincts fill. We promise all to stay at home And wear hygienic masks And not to spread the virus As we go… Read more »
Terrific!
Brilliant. Sums up the Church of the NHS well!!!
Superb!
If you are not already making a living from your writing you should start. Savage and accurate. Thank you again.
James
Absolutely brilliant and thanks for all your effort in writing this. I certainly won’t be clapping for the NHS who’ve no doubt been complicit in making this whole charade a hundred times worse. I used to be a nurse and have never come across such a bitchy, back stabbing and mostly inherently stupid group of people who obsessively focus on the trivial and ignore the important issues. I left after spending years of dreading going to work as an insider in this insular culture and fighting the kind of covert and actual bullying that’s endemic in the profession. The final catalysts for me were being totally unsupported following an unexpected patient suicide and being disciplined after a bitchy colleague pretended to be distressed after I’d said I was a nurse who wanted to to leave nursing in a team meeting. I now work in a non nursing role in adult social care in a wonderfully supportive team.
Thank you, fiery! I hope that if I fetch up in hospital ( horrid thought) you will be my nurse – or at least pop in to see me!
Excellent once again! Keep it up.
This is just brilliant. Thank you!
Disappointing on Cummings. Regardless of the arguments on the issue itself, anybody who really recognises the severity of the damage this lockdown has done and continues to do should be requiring Cummings to be booted out of government for any excuse (or none) that becomes available.
This isn’t a matter of a criminal or even civil charge requiring to meet some sort of standard of proof. He’s just an adviser whose advice on the most crucial of issues has proven to have been some of the most disastrous given to any British government since WW2. It’s incredible, frankly, that he hasn’t been dismissed in ignominy already, except that to do so would be to admit the failure of the whole government.
Far too much mates’ and old campaigners’ sympathy going around here. Clearly you don’t have any respect for the idea of taking personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions. If Cummings had the slightest self respect or decency he’d have resigned by now anyway. Just remember, you who support him for old times’ sake – he’s already been responsible for more disastrous decisions than some entire governments. What’s he going to inflict on us next?
I will set out my “take” on the specifics of the Cummings business below, but I wonder if we should be looking at it more from the point of view of “how does it help or hinder our efforts to end lockdown?”. Sadly I think it’s negative for us – lose lose. If we defend him, we’re elitist, rule-breaking evil Tories. If we attack him, we risk finding ourselves on the same side as the lockdown supporters. I think we are best off ignoring it and moving on, and focusing on persuading people that the lockdown hasn’t done much good and it can’t continue. I have never got an answer from a lockdown supporter to the question “how long should this continue?”. Cummings I have mixed feelings about. His “excuse” is plausible, though the singing in the garden bit doesn’t quite gel with two desperately sick parents unable to look after their child. I don’t know much about him. He seems quite able, not especially likeable (though between having to deal with press, politicians and civil servants, one can understand a certain irritability), possibly a bit arrogant, bright, some interesting and innovative ideas, maybe can’t be trusted with big decisions… Read more »
All of which is why we must just ignore the ‘new normal’. If enough of us carry on as we did before, ‘they’ cannot put us all in jail can ‘they’?
Come on – out you go- back to normal and bugger the ‘new normal’.
Free petrol for police is disgusting, if they were offering free petrol to ambulances and health workers that would make sense, but giving it out to an organisation who have recently proven themselves to be scarcely better than concentration camp guards, that is unacceptable.
On the Cummings matter, what he did would have been entirely acceptable had he also at the time publically gone and stated that the lockdown was a bad idea, that it helped no-one and we should all get our country running again. What made his actions immoral is that rather than coming out and saying that the lockdown should appply to no-one he just decided secretly that it shouldn’t apply to him alone, at exactly the time that he was assisting the government in comdemning and fining people who did similar things that were within the actual rules but against the dictatorial guideline decrees.
The Cummings matter goes to the heart of the lockdown problem; the abnegation of leadership that got us here in the first place. That it has taken so long for this story to break speaks volumes.
So many of us would have done what he did. That is not the point. We are not senior figures in government.
It is very much one rule for senior figures at the heart of government and another for the rest of the population, but the rule for the senior figures is that they are held to much higher standards of behaviour than the general public. That is a requirement of leadership.
By that measure, Mr Cummings has fallen short (who knows what those who work for him must think of this since, by all accounts, including his own, he holds them to very high standards), even if for the finest of motives, and must go.
As I said yesterday – ‘All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others’. He should go.
To paraphrase on old saying “Caesar should be above suspicion”. The fact that those who have inflicted this on us could not even hold on to the rules they made is untenable. Cummings should go.
And if anything this shows that this lockdown is unsustainable. Until today I did think if we played our cards right we could go the Switzerland route and reopen earlier, now I think we’ll end up like Italy – people taking matters into their own hands and TPTB can’t do anything about it.
It was Caesar’s’s wife who had to be above suspicion. According to Caesar.
How many other bigwigs do you think have flouted the lockdown?
How many haven’t?
So far as I can tell, wasn’t it Cummings that pushed for the lockdown and Cummings that’s been brokering deals with big data, AI and whatever else, that I am convinced we remain in lockdown only to ensure these companies have a market for their product? In other words didn’t Cummings flog our freedom? I want him gone.
Toby. I don’t think you have called this right about Cummings, and nor do I think it holds up in the court of public opinion. As one of the architects of the lockdown – he sits on the SAGE committee and is the supposed ‘intellect’ tasked with contextualising ‘the science’ for the prime minister – the little people, rightly, anticipate ‘do as I do’. When his wife waxed lyrical about their experiences with CV, why the glaring omission if it was a perfectly legitimate reason; they drove to Durham to self-isolate because they have no family network around them in London to look after their little boy in an emergency? Frankly, his excuses now look rather thin and seek to play on technicalities.
100% agree.
Telegraph headline – he broke lockdown again in middle of April. Thought that was likely given Rachel Reeves’ letter (read in full on Guido). I will give him till 9pm to resign!
Suggested theme song for admirers of Sweden: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-mBMHR-ol9s#menu
“Nu mår jag mycket bättre”, which means “now I’m feeling much better”.
This is seriously turning Into george Orwell’s perpetual war against the invisible enemy. The Idiots in government spending £280 million to make public transport safe FFS! Is this the new normal.
Toby could you arrange / repost an idea that all us lockdown sceptics POST a physical letter to for example direct to No10 or maybe better to one of the main newspapers. A physical letter must carry more weight.
Maybe get all the other sceptics you know (Delingpole, Frisby et al) to publicise the same.
I’m sure everyone here would do this?
I think they are just describing increasing services in coronavirus terms – ie the plans are basically what theh would have been before?
No, they are recruiting a little army of hygiene nazis to yell at you if you get too close to a fellow commuter.
What’s the definition of IFR? I assumed it didn’t include people who were exposed to a virus but in which it never developed because they were resistant to it either through acquired or innate immunity. I don’t really care which it is but I just want to make sure we use the same standard for this virus as for others especially flu which is what we mainly want to compare it with.
Yes, IFR is all infections, asymptomatic etc.
The trouble is a serology survey only picks up antibody cases.
So we retrun to our quest since the start of all this to find medical evidence of durable (can’t be infect a second time) non-antibody resistance. IF we can find this then we can increase all these spread estimates, petition Bojo and get out of the Groundhog day!
Any joy finding anything? I still can’t find solid medical evidence. Plus, the genetic immunity research stories all seem to have gone quiet too…
…. this is the silver bullet, the thing we really need to find.
Obviously it includes asymptomatic infections. But what counts as an infection? Presumably not being exposed but immune due to acquired immunity from this or other coronaviruses. What about being exposed but resistant via innate immunity? Is this not a standard definition?
This study shows acquired resistance via other coronaviruses present in up to a third of the population https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v1.
But people don’t have to be resistance so that they can’t be infected a second time, it’s not a binary thing. They just have to have sufficient resistance to mean they aren’t all infected when they are exposed, so that not everyone gets it when it’s going round.
Yes exactly but can you imagine the headlines if they did find that asymptomatic cases could be reinfected?
In reality it just alters the herd immunity threshold in subtle ways. The infectiousness of these “asymptomatic superspreaders” is probably actually quite low on average so I would expect that even if they can be reinfected their existence would still reduce R0 overall.
Yes, it’s the reduction of R overall through a substantial proportion having a level of resistance that makes the difference and contributes to herd immunity without them necessarily being fully ‘immune’ from (re)infection.
Do you know the definition of infection in Infection Fatality Rate? Is it someone who would test positive for antigens in a (perfect) PCR? Is that true of all people whose innate immune system fights off the virus, or do some fight it off at an early stage before they would test positive?
Another way of putting this is, is there a difference between asymptomatic infection and being exposed but unaffected because your innate immune system fought it off, or are these identical categories?
What about if you’re exposed and your antibodies fight it off – is this an infection?
If you were reinfected, and actually had regular antibodies, there would still be a bit of virus in your body until the antibodies had got rid of it. A regular PCR test would probably not pick this up but you probably could detect it if you looked hard enough. If you had cross-immunity from something else maybe you’d have a bit more viral RNA present for a bit compared to someone with “proper” SARS2 immunity, but not as much as a completely fresh host would. Innate immunity and vaccination (especially with something like ChAdOx1 which doesn’t seem to work that well) would also result in some viral replication, though less. If you read that study about the monkeys they tried to reinfect (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1.article-info) even after they had antibodies they still had a small reaction and a temperature when they were re-exposed (they always use huge viral loads on these poor monkeys) but quickly dealt with it and were then considered PCR negative, but relative to a particular threshold that they used for the test. So I think the only consistent definition is to say that “infected” means “virus has entered your body and replicated at least a bit”. And that… Read more »
Excellent discussion of the issue, thank you, and I certainly agree with your conclusion, a looseness that doesn’t help the public conversation one bit. However, the answer to my question seems to be that infection basically means exposure, and the IFR properly speaking should take into account everyone who is exposed regardless of their level of immunity and how quickly they deal with it. (I wonder how they know what this is for the portion that doesn’t show up in any tests, or will all exposures/infections show up in PCR tests?)
On this definition then IFR will vary hugely between populations, even more than I thought.
No, I think IFR is only considering those that need to go through the process of establishing immunity for the first time. Essentially the main distinction is whether you have period of elevated infectiousness.
If you don’t, then you are just part of the background group of spreaders who move it about on the skin, etc, and you are simply added to the already immune proportion in the model.
So you just start with an immunity count near the immunity ceiling.
It does then mean the peak height can’t be as high and the potential size of the integral of herd immunity overshoot is lower.
It’s quite instructive to read about the IFR for Swine Flu including looking at archived web pages from when it first started. It was initially over-estimated as you would expect, but even today, the range of estimates for the “true” IFR spans at least an order of magnitude because nobody’s really sure how many mild or asymptomatic cases there were. I also read somewhere that an estimated 20% of the world had been exposed, which seems to have been enough.
I think the practical definition has to be “exposed for the first time to the actual virus”, where exposed means “some viral replication taking place in your body”– obviously it doesn’t count if someone sneezes on your gloves which you then burn but only after having touched a few door-handles.
Thanks, sounds sensible. But the very fact we’re having to debate and cannot find a definitive answer to one of the key terms in understanding this virus seems to me a big problem.
It is part of a bigger problem, and the complexities here point to some of the reasons modelling a new disease was always likely to be highly speculative, and should never have been taken seriously as a basis for policymaking. The following extract from a couple of tweets linked here the other day by swedenborg seems to highlight the scope of the problem quite well:
“we don’t have a universe of naive susceptibles, currently infected & recovered (SIR). We have a continuum of people with varying degrees of susceptibility due to variance in innate immunity, cross-reactive and specific immunity.”
I believe that Professor Dolores Cahill of University College Dublin has stated that once you have had covid-19 in any way, shape, or form (that is either the innate or the adaptive immune system fought off the disease and you either knew it or didn’t know it), you are immune. And you will not shed any further viruses in the future. One of the points of natural herd immunity is that those who have immunity themselves also do not harbor the virus. The problem with the innate immune system clearing the virus is that this does not leave traces that so far can be identified. Unlike if the adaptive immune system is called in and creates antibodies to defeat the virus. On the innate vs. the adaptive immune systems see
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279364/
I am not 100% sure I have it right on Cahill’s info on immunity after exposure. Check out her interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9ti6isM-NY
It seems like the jury is also still out on whether asymptomatic actually shed the virus or not.
My understanding was that it is still not clear whether a non-adaptive immune response without an adaptive one reacting to develop anti-bodies might be a function of viral load.
As in a low viral load (not quite getting a big enough cough in the face) might be cleared by a non-adaptive response, but that a larger viral load exposure might then lead to a proper infection and the need for an adaptive response with the possibility still of death.
Which is what led to my initial observation.
I’d be very keen to gain better understanding of this from either of you, as it is a big part of the puzzle.
I don’t think anybody knows. What actually happens is you have some virus in your body, you deal with it somehow, and you shed some of it. How much depends on your innate immunity, acquired immunity (possibly also from similar pathogens), vaccination, the general health of your immune system and quite likely also viral load. In something like a SIR model you just simulate this as a transition from susceptible to recovered via infected, which is good enough to see the overall dynamics. If you read about the ChAdOx1 vaccine they gave the monkeys huge amounts of the vaccine but their response was still “Th1-dominated” (which is the “innate immunity”). They did make some antibodies, but not very many. And then when challenged with the actual virus they got sick, but less so than the controls. Lots of shades of grey. This Th1-dominated response seems to be a characteristic of ChAdOx1 not of load. Is it also an inherent characteristic of SARS2 to have a Th1-dominated response in some/many individuals? After all ChAdOx1 is designed to mimic SARS2. The worst part is that the complications from Covid-19 that can be fatal are to do with immune system imbalance. The SARS-1… Read more »
Isn’t it the innate immune system response that can cause a lethal cytokine storm? I wonder if that’s why people are dying quite quickly from it. In the UK the average period between infection and death seems to be around 14 days – 5 days incubation, then the report on patients showed 4 days between symptoms and hospitalisation, and the death curve lags the admission curve by 5 days, giving 14 days average.
I think you’re right that the cytokines are part of the innate immune response. But the immune system is very complicated and it’s all to do with how it’s regulated and turned on and off. This is where vitamin D is thought to come in.
Not sure why that process should be faster in the UK. Some people, not sure what percentage, do actually recover from the ARDS but then die of heart failure, possibly precipitated by the overall stress to the system of having just gone through intubation which is pretty traumatic. These may be the cases that are taking longer to die and perhaps there are more of them in some places than others.
“Isn’t it the innate immune system response that can cause a lethal cytokine storm?”
I don’t think so. I *think* the cytokine storm occurs when antibodies are created in response to a vaccine, and then a similar but not identical virus comes along. The vaccine-created antibodies react to the new similar virus, but cannot kill it. Then the immune system kicks into high gear. It might be at this point that the innate immune system tries to get rid of the invader.
I think this is about it, but not sure I have all the details right. There is a term for this reaction by the immune system, called “original antigenic sin.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
That’s interesting thanks! It may be cross immunity from something similar that actually makes Covid worse in some cases and is perhaps related to the “enhancement” issues they had with the SARS1 version of the chadox vaccine.
Ok if it occurs due to cross immunity as well that could explain it. Apparently it was the main cause of death in the Spanish flu.
I think that’s a separate phenomenon as not all who suffer a cytokine storm have been vaccinated.
wikipedia is not a very reliable source of information (can be changed by anyone over and over again). Start there, get the terminology and then get answers from other reputable websites.
On comparing with flu, too many people, including Toby on his ‘Latest News’ for the 22nd May, wrongly compare CFR estimates for flu with IFR estimates for Covid.
CDC do not give an estimate of IFR for flu; their much quoted mortality rate of 0.1% is the CFR, and makes no account of asymptomatic cases.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
It is only accurate, therefore, to compare CDC’s CFR estimate for Covid, which is 0.4%.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html
Thanks that’s very interesting. We do need to make sure we’re comparing like for like. The excess deaths are in some places up there with the worst flu seasons so while Covid is not the world ending plague it’s being treated as it is no doubt nasty especially for older people.
IFR = Infection FATALITY Rate
You can hardlly have been asymptomatic!
Haha no it’s the definition of infection that’s at issue not fatality.
IFR is the ratio of deaths to the number of actual infections, per the journal Virology. Number of deaths is the numerator, number of infections is the denominator. It is the latter number that researchers such a Ioannides, Bhattacharya, Hendrik Streeck, Wittkowksi, and others have been trying to establish or at least have been talking about the need to establish. Bhattacharya, of Stanford, is on the record as being incredulous that research to establish this basic number has not been undertaken by WHO, the CDC, etc. So researchers are now playing catchup to get a reliable denominator for IFR. A lot of death etc. rates that have been thrown around majorly inflate the danger of the virus because the denominator (# of infections) has been unknown, too low, IOW underestimated by factors of anywhere from 10 to 50.
See the above discussion for the questions around what counts as an infection.
I visited my parents today. It was a good day.
Went to see mine last weekend for my birthday, going to see them again on Monday for my dad’s. I deem it essential.
How could anyone ever think it was non-essential?
Hi all, Thanks Toby for this fantastic site. It has replaced reading of newspapers which are now total torture and as for TV news….well.
The comment section is fantastic, Thanks to all that post, I cannot believe we are still in this utter madness. I am a blue collar worker In food processing have been at work all the way through this, doing plenty of overtime to keep up with all the hoarders. I have faith that many working class people are skeptical but are to polite to rock the boat or at least are apaphetic, is it possible there is a silent majority of skeptics yet?
A MESSAGE FROM FIFE – FINALLY THE SO CALLED SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT WILL BE HELD TO ACCOUNT On behalf of the workers, it has been sad to hear that seven well known scottish hotels have just gone into administration costing 2,500 jobs, including the hotel landmark at the tarbet junction on the banks of loch lomond. A significant pointer for what is to come. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52779276 As per a previous post of mine, scotland is now almost certainly in an even more vulnerable situation than england due to its heavier reliance on tourism / hospitality, greater volume of public sector workers and the recent localised recession in aberdeen (oil and gas). So, as the new mini-dictator sturgeon is fully supportive of this lockdown (even more so than boris), its finally time to hold the scottish government to account. What is its point? The scottish government (formerly executive) has been on the go now for over 20 years without having to deal with a genuine crisis. A highly divisive independence vote has come and gone with a large volume of minor / immaterial legislation inbetween, much of which is reflected in the agenda of the uk government anyway. Scots have however had a… Read more »
Sadly Tony I suspect the Nat sheep will vote her in regardless. The imbecile in East Lothian who wanted to organise a clap for Nicola event is indicative of the mind set. I hope I’m wrong, for if they get in again it will be a permanent move over the border for me.
I am sure the hospitality sector in Scotland will be hit much harder before this is over. I love Scotland and when we visit the Highlands, many visitors are from overseas. If overseas visitors have to isolate, I doubt they will be able to visit. Combined with the collapse of the oil industry. Renegotiate the Barnett Formula Nicola?
I used to live in Edinburgh and apart from the high volume of tourists that the city receives every year, in the last few years there has been a building spree of luxury flats which has been snapped up by wealthy foreigners. As I told my father-in-law, I can see Edinburgh’s tourism and hospitality sectors really hit badly and won’t be surprised if there’s a rush of these rich foreigners rushing to offload their properties.
And Edinburgh University going in the red as rich foreign students stay away.
For god’s sake get someone to check your numbers before you publish Toby… the ONS provides population numbers on their portal along with the mortality data… London is NOT the greater metropolitan area and the deaths come from a population of 8.96m. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2019 … so up to week 19 (which matches the survey timing) for the 7405 deaths recorded in London, this would make the IFR 0.48%, about the same as NY. BUT, given it has twice the population density of London this is no great victory. As to taking a dig at the reliability of blood donor serology surveys, particularly the dutch study, this was one of 4 blood donor/test studies of the 12 studies in Stanford’s (Ioannidis) paper estimating IFRs that you tweeted about. Half these 4 were of a similar or smaller size. So you’re not really selling the believability of this?! More so, the bigger problem is underestimating NOT overestimating IFR. As with most of the studies in the Stanford paper (including his Santa Clara study) they are for surveys that had a different death sample and infection sample groups. Given IFR = deaths / all infections, if the infections sample is for a much more… Read more »
My understanding of the point about the blood donors is that this is a group who believe themselves to be free of any infection or symptoms that might indicate infection and therefore will be under-representative of infection rates in the general population.
I don’t think that is quite right.
They are only asked to be free from infection in the last 14 days. This will introduce bias as it take 14-21 days for antibodies to develop, on the day you take the sample people who would test negative will not present, but those that have waited to test positive will.
OR
You’ll just be getting people who are more likely to get it asymptomtically who are likely to be fitter strong types.
These along with the fact that blood donors tend to be younger, fitter, more active members of society just means they will have had more chance of having it.
Where do you get 14-21 days from? This suggests 7-14. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-what-antibody-tests-tell-us
If true only strengthens my point.
Your article says 70% presence within 10 days… my understanding was based on this page and the linked sutdies…
https://www.aruplab.com/news/4-21-2020/How-Accurate-Are-COVID-19-Tests
… links this trial…
https://europepmc.org/article/med/32221519
… which has it at <40% accurate by 7 days, with the median timebeing 11-14 days, hence the recommendation of waiting 14-21 days to make the test certain.
Thanks. I wasn’t arguing with you I’m interested in the average time so the timing of the antibody test can be related to the infection curve. Those are helpful links and all the sources basically say the same thing.
Ioannidis does discuss these issues in his paper (which I assume you’ve read) along with reasons why some places like New York and Spain might have higher IFR, especially not protecting care homes.
How do you get 0.48 for NYC? I get population 8.4m, deaths 16,149 (confirmed, though I understand there is dispute about how many are really Covid), antibodies 20%. Thus: 16,149/(8,400,000×0.2) x 100 = 0.96%.
In the limitations section on page 7 he discusses demographic issues, and says he has tried to address these numerically. He does mention that the infections sample might have a higher prevalence relative to the population, but he does not discuss the other half of the point I make which is that the deaths sample will likely under represent prevalence. He also makes no attempt to correct for either of these.
As to you second part I think you’ve just misread what I wrote, the 0.485 is a correction of Toby’s estimate fro London, 7405 / (8.96m x 0.17) = 0.486%.
I was working off the Cuomo’s estimate of 0.5% that was in the news at the time it published…
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/04/23/governor-cuomo-daily-coronavirus-update-with-first-antibody-test-results
… but, you’re right they have revised it since to 0.836%…
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3590771
It’s the other way around. The young healthy active people are getting infected less (as well as dying less, in fact probably not dying at all) than the vulnerable in the care homes and hospitals. So to spell this out. Suppose you find 15% of people outside have antibodies. So you divide your number of deaths by 15% of the total population to get an IFR estimate. But if the sub-population that contained all the deaths (hospitals and care homes) had a 60% infection rate, then the number of deaths divided by 60% of the total population will be a more accurate estimate of the true IFR. In other words your original estimate will be 4x too high. If you went and infected the extra 45% of the people outside to match the rate in the hospitals and care homes you would get almost no more deaths. In reality population level IFRs are a bit of a red herring anyway because of the extreme age preference in the death rate. But the fact that the estimates arrived at are so much higher in badly affected areas than in places like Gangelt (where there were 7 deaths only 3 of which… Read more »
Younger people don’t get infected less, they just die less. In fact studies have shown they are more infected… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/20/young-adults-likely-age-group-infected-coronavirus-new-data/ … demostrating the effect that I’m talking about, they are infected more because they have a higher number of contacts so form a sub population with a higher r0. A population IFR is not a red herring, they work them out from age banded IFRs making sure they adjust for population specific demographics. Having a more heavily infected area will not affect the numbers in the way you describe. Here are the age banded IFRs from Italy that I’ve been using: 0-39 0.007% 40-49 0.030% 50-59 0.140% 60-69 0.570% 70-79 2.290% 80-89 5.940% 90+ 12.900% … applied to UK ONS data recorded up to wk 19 data you get… Band | IFR | Spread | Deaths | Infected | Pop in M 0-14 | 0.007% | 0.36% | 3 | 42,857 | 11.9 15-44 | 0.011% | 15.80% | 422 | 3,980,476 | 25.2 45-64 | 0.136% | 16.42% | 3,842 | 2,814,912 | 17.14 65-74 | 1.064% | 8.16% | 5,772 | 542,475 | 6.65 75-84 | 3.568% | 8.75% | 12,207 | 342,086 | 3.91 85+ | 8.175%… Read more »
Surely “years taken from humans” is highly relevant. IMHO opinion the flu IFR of about 0.2% would equate to an IFR for Covid of 0.8% as the average age of Covid deaths is in the late 70’s but for the flu it is much lower.
Can you provide a numerical argument?
For sure the median age is in the late 60s for flu and late 70s for Covid, so death for death it might be taking fewer years, but the average IFR is about 2.5x (0.56% vs 0.21%) higher for Covid, BUT crucially the r0 means the spread has the potential to take 4x as many people, so in total years lost it is way more, and even for 15-44 year olds you are about 2.2x more likely to die.
More than half the deaths in many countries are in care homes. Yes I know that’s mainly because they die more, but there’s no reason to think the infection rate in those homes is the same as in the population outside and every reason to think it’s quite a bit higher.
These are people who are trapped indoors together at a fairly high density who need a lot of people close to them to look after them. R0 will be a lot higher in a care home than in normal life outside, where most of us only share our house with a few other people.
I’m sure this explains why 85+ group has seen 11.51% spread set against 8.75% for 75-84. However, if you actually look at the UK data above the spread estimates for all 65+ age groups are all still BELOW the population average – e.g. 8.16, 8.75, 11.51 < 11.91. Further, for the 15-64 group they are all nearly TWICE these – e.g. 15.8 and 16.42. So your theory sounds great, but just does not present itself in the data. The Santa Clara study was for only 94 deaths in California, a state that has seen 94 deaths/1m to the UK's 541, they have had no care home epidemic, so the spread in their 85+ group is likely to have been more like their 75-84 group. Ioannidis states in his paper that his infections sample was 19-64 year old facebook users who could drive to a test centre. If the spread pattern in the UK data plays out similarly in California, for his Santa Clara IFR of 0.18%, simplying double that estimate to 0.36% would make the correction needed. Which would just make his estimate the same as Gangelt. Given I can correct it on an envelope, why didn't Ioannidis do so… Read more »
“More so, the bigger problem is underestimating NOT overestimating IFR.” Why is this the bigger problem? If overestimating it and other key inputs into a model leads you to put an entire population under house arrest, indefinitely, and wreck the economy and compromise the health and happiness of a generation, wouldn’t that be possibly worse than underestimating it?
… because the only way out of Groundhog Day (as I keep trying to convince people to deaf ears) is to sound more credible than SAGE, not less, and this involves being objective about the numbers. If Toby is able to use his fame to get the ear of people with influence, he needs to be talking bullet proof numbers when those opportunities come up.
So if SAGE members have looked at Ioannidis numbers and think they are underestimates NOT overestimates, and Toby says the opposite all that reenforces in their eyes is that they should listen to him even less, and this site stands less chance of influencing policy.
Yes indeed
Agree it is important to be as accurate as possible
Thank you, but you are in the minority.
Whenever I present anything on here that tries to correct or create shades of grey in our understanding, I just get flamed and told to get lost because I’m not being militant enough…
There is a general scepticism about the available data, for good reason. That makes any modelling, calculations, at least somewhat moot. It is also clear to most that this matter moved from the medical to the political a while ago, maybe even before lockdown. As the German assessment linked to in yesterday’s post by Toby stated: ‘…..there is falsification and manipulation of the figures. The persistent problems were acknowledged by the Robert-Koch Institute as early as the beginning of March 2020. A comparison of deaths from the virus and deaths from the counter-measures is prevented.’ ‘It is not possible simply to terminate the panic at a certain point in time and re-open normality. Normal life cannot be re-instated as simply as measures can be decreed. The fears, and especially the irrational fears and the consequent changes in behaviour, will not disappear automatically when the measures are relaxed.’ ‘The most difficult task will be to restore lost trust. Trust in a state that is reliably protective and therefore can on occasion legitimately enforce interventions and restrictions. This state has failed grotesquely. In order to restore trust, it must admit its errors and work these through. Otherwise, the state and its political… Read more »
I agree that accuracy is vital too.
No. Back on the mouse wheel you go with that approach to ending this, dog chasing tail. Chasing some magic number which is what? Blinkered to the wider world.
The issue is now psychological, the issue is now economics, and that has a million other factors and consequences that are not your area of expertise.
But to be absolutely clear, a lockdown or any ‘new normal’ will cost an exponentially higher number of lives than this virus ever will.
Oh, but sounding off in this echo chamber, insulting people and strengthening the outside world’s perception that this is not a credible alternative, is really productive.
If you have evidence of these “exponential deaths” share them, these are exactly what I want to see more of. If credible then they make a very strong case for the lesser of two evils argument being wrong and this will have far more traction at influencing policy than you think.
Ask yourself the question, why aren’t the ERG quote this website?
Neil…. Are you ok?
You know looking at your posts I’ve yet to come across one that adds anything material to any of the threads you join… and you appear in pretty much all the discussions…
… are you lonely?
Yes. I’m locked in my house against my will.
Plus, it doesn’t matter whether I add anything ‘material’ or not seeing as you just ignore everyone who does and carry on making yourself look like a tit.
Disagreeing with poorly argued responses is not “ignoring”.
As per Will’s correction my knowledge of a recent revision to the NY IFR on this thread, I’m pretty quick to acknowledge when people are correct.
Insulting me because you don’t want the results of data analysis I present to be true, because you don’t like the sound of them, rather than engaging in civil debate trying to make sure I haven’t made a mistake, or to aid your understanding, is hardly mature.
If you feel me trying to make this debate more credible by making it more facts based, rather than rhetoric based, makes me look like a tit, then I feel that says more about you and you capacity to welcome more varied view points, than it does about me.
You do realise you spend quite a lot of time in quite a few of your posts insulting other people, right?
Cite one example where I’ve:
– insulted someone?
– joined a discussion in an aggressive or insulting manner?
For sure I’ve defended my arguments robustly against some pretty aggressive and hostile comments, but when you guys create the environment you do for open reasoned debate, what else do you expect?
I’m mean just look at how you circled like sharks around my post of the 21st, with not one actually discussing the content, and whether it might contain anything worth considering… just venom.
You weren’t on this site 5-6 week ago when I joined as one of the first members, and we had far more productive and open debates about facts and made far more progress. I’ve just moved to other sites and blogs because this one is now just so closed to reasoned debate it is pointless.
From what I can see there are plenty of people willing to still ‘reasonably’ debate you. It’s happening up there. I’m just that arsehole who likes to poke bears.
Let’s not be vulgar.This has been a civilised debating chamber up to now.
I’m a bit disappointed with your support for Cummings.
There are two problems with your defence.
First Cummings holds a huge amount of responsibility for lockdown in the first place. He nudged the SAGE group into tailor making “the science” into the extreme measures we are in rather than what the scientists originally advised: the Swedish model. So, along with Ferguson and Boris, he owns this. Is this not what we are resisting against on this great site of yours?
Second you suggest that he abided by “the guidelines “. You know and most of us do, that these guidelines are the epitome of arbitrary powers. They are not clear and as such they don’t pass the requirement of laws that clearly delineate what is proscribed and everything else, which is the preview of free people. So saying he was ok by rules which are the result of his nudging merely exonerates him for laying waste to our liberties.
I’m surprised you let him off that easily. He’s become part of the problem.
That should be the story, he should fall upon the arbitrary nature of the regime he created, not waffle about if he avoided the rules.
I’m going to take this a step further and state that even the numbers you are using here vastly over exaggerate the “Covid fatalities.” I also wish to see the precise information on those two 14 year olds who supposedly died “of” Covid. Forgive the length of my comment here but having studied this in great detail over the last two months I think it is fair to question any and all deaths attributed to “Covid.” Consider the following: Guidelines recently released by the Centers for Disease Control bolster concerns that the death toll is being rigged to show a higher fatality rate. From the CDC: “In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed’,” the agency advises. “In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgment in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely.” That clinical judgment, alarmingly, does not require administering a test to confirm the presence of the virus. “Ideally, testing for COVID–19 should be conducted, but it is acceptable to report COVID–19… Read more »
Great stuff (if long!)
Considering the high prevalence of covid in hospitals and care homes it is entirely plausible that many people dying of something else catch covid in their last days and are added to the statistics.
Same for trying to calculate things like IFR and R, they will be significantly different in hospital/care home populations and small villages in the middle of nowhere.
Convincing and cogent. But it isn’t us you need to convince, it’s the rat-arsed stringg-pullers in government and their zombie followers.
Spot on. The numbers are all over the place……and we know why: ‘…..there is falsification and manipulation of the figures. The persistent problems were acknowledged by the Robert-Koch Institute as early as the beginning of March 2020. A comparison of deaths from the virus and deaths from the counter-measures is prevented.’ http://www.klasseverantwortung.de/english/Corona.html Are these numbers more representative of reality? Who knows? ‘Population 17,425,445 adults. Time period 1st Feb 2020 to 25th April 2020. Primary outcome Death in hospital among people with confirmed COVID-19.’ ‘Results There were 5683 deaths attributed to COVID-19.’ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1 Because: ‘In an emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic there is a relaxation of previous legislation concerning completion of the medical certificate cause of death (MCCD) by medical practitioners’ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/877302/guidance-for-doctors-completing-medical-certificates-of-cause-of-death-covid-19.pdf All we can know is that the longer the government persist with this medical fiction, the more devastating the eventual reckoning will be for them and, more worryingly, the country: ‘It is not possible simply to terminate the panic at a certain point in time and re-open normality. Normal life cannot be re-instated as simply as measures can be decreed. The fears, and especially the irrational fears and the consequent changes in behaviour, will not disappear automatically when… Read more »
“Children More Likely to be Struck by Lightening Than Die of COVID-19”
Is this a whitewash??
Lightning quick to spot the error, mjr!
I suspect that in the younger age brackets, people in New York are more likely to die of murder than the virus. Has anybody crunched those numbers?
Shhh, if this becomes common knowledge children will never be allowed out if there’s even the slightest chance of rain.
You can get lightning from a clear sky. Therefore children should never be allowed out at all.
Zombies’ children probably won’t be, ever again.
hahaha!
Regarding the graph for Sweden vs Modelling. I read with interest the Twitter comments linked to it. There were a few claiming that models are merely tools to aid in decision making. Whilst technically true it is surely important that they be reasonably accurate.
Let’s suppose that the modelling was accurate and that the models predicted exactly the result in Sweden. It would be highly unlikely that any country in the world would trash their economy on those numbers. It is irrelevant that Sweden has higher deaths than her neighbours or any other country in the World. The numbers do not justify the actions taken, ever.
This has given me an idea for a survey. Give people the projected graph from modelling and a separate graph for the actual result for Sweden and ask people if they would lockdown the country for each without giving them any more info than the numbers on the graphs.
Excellent idea
EXACTLY I just wrote that up there, but with far less eloquence
There seems to be some confusion here. Obviously it’s perfectly OK to drive however many miles you like to visit your parents even if you have a raging Covid infection. It’s your decision. What’s not OK is to make it illegal for people to do that. It was wrong to make a wrong rule, not wrong to break it. But if all we can throw him out for is breaking it we should take the chance. I don’t care if he technically did or didn’t break the law– the lockdown is about intimidation and of very dubious legality anyway. It was sounding from comments on yesterday’s post that Cummings is the “brains” behind the lockdown. This is very believable as it fits with the kind of scientific and technological hubris that wannabe nerds like him go in for– suckered by Fergie’s model because it’s overcomplicated and thinking he can make TTT work. People like him love that kind of shit. The missing piece of this puzzle is the ridiculous 14-day quarantine rule. If, as I though at first, the “roadmap” is all just politics and theatre to de-escalate the fear instilled into the plebs, why this completely unnecessary piece of… Read more »
I’d suspect that with Cummings the quarantine is more about what sells well with his demented focus groups / facebook algorithms rather than any solid science.