I’ve decided to post an update every day, but the updates proper will be on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with shorter ones on the other days. This is in response to numerous requests in the comment from people who find it difficult to keep track of the threads if there are over 1,000 comments, something that happens if more than 24 hours pass since the previous update. Friday’s update, for instance, attracted 1,714 comments.
Today, I’ve decided to devote the entirety of the update to Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College, including a guest post by “Sue Denim”, the software engineer who wrote “Code Review of Ferguson’s Model” for Lockdown Sceptics on May 6th. That article was the most talked-about post that’s appeared on this site, as well as the most viewed.
This seems like a good time to publish Sue’s latest thoughts about Professor Ferguson’s model because yesterday the Imperial College modelling team, including Neil Ferguson, published a paper in Nature, based on a new model, arguing that the lockdowns have saved the lives of approximately 3.1 million people in 11 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). In the UK alone, the authors think the lockdown has saved 470,000 lives.
That 3.1 million figure, which they call “counterfactual deaths”, is the number of deaths they estimate would have occurred by May 4th if there had been no non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and people’s behaviour hadn’t changed one jot in response to the pandemic. But that’s a rather obvious sleight of hand. In effect, their argument involves contrasting the collective impact of the NPIs in all 11 countries, including Sweden, with a counterfactual scenario in which nothing was done at all, and saying, “Look! The lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives.”
No one, as far as I’m aware, has ever advocated that governments around the world do nothing in response to the pandemic. Rather, the argument is about whether they over-reacted. Have the full lockdowns saved more lives than less severe restrictions would have done, given the public health impact of imprisoning everyone in their homes, as well as the catastrophic economic consequences?
It’s also highly implausible to imagine people would have done nothing in response to the pandemic – just carried on as normal – in the absence of state-mandated, top-down directives. This flatly contradicts both common sense and actual mobility data from Google and other sources that shows people’s mobility falling before the lockdowns were imposed.
The authors try and get round this by including the following caveat:
The counterfactual model without interventions is illustrative only and reflects our model assumptions. We do not account for changes in behaviour; in reality even in the absence of government interventions we would expect Rt to decrease and therefore would overestimate deaths in the no-intervention model
So they know the 3.1 million number is wrong because their assumptions are wrong, but provide a specific number anyway for “illustrative only” purposes. But what is it supposed to illustrate, given that it doesn’t actually tell us how many people would have died in the absence of any NPIs?
I think I know the answer: it illustrates the ideological worldview of the scientists involved, which is that virtually the entire population in these 11 countries are sheep-like entities who must be told what to do by experts like them. Reading about a dangerous virus in the news –seeing pictures of hospitals in Italy being overwhelmed – won’t affect their behaviour in the slightest.
The epidemiologists who’ve been advising the UK Government during this crisis often protest that they are perfectly neutral scientists, and anyone who criticises them is “ideological”. But as we can see, this Imperial College model takes for granted an essentially communist worldview in which the masses must be directed by central planners.
In order to make a convincing argument for the lockdowns, the paper would have to compare the number of lives saved as a result of the severe restrictions imposed in 10 of the 11 countries with the number that would have been saved if those 10 countries had stuck with the same mitigation strategy as Sweden. That’s the relevant counterfactual, not the one they’ve conjured up, and the case for the lockdowns depends upon calculating the number of lives saved in contrast to that counterfactual and demonstrating that it’s greater than the collateral damage done by the extra measures taken. This paper only tells us how effective the lockdowns have been in contrast to an alternative scenario – the do-nothing approach – which no one is arguing for.
In other words, the paper isn’t a defence of the lockdowns imposed in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Rather, it’s an argument for doing something rather than nothing.
Needless to say, that isn’t how it’s being presented by its authors, or how it’s being reported in the press. The BBC’s headline yesterday, predictably enough, was “Lockdowns in Europe saved millions of lives“, apparently taking the Imperial team’s claim at face value, while the Sun at least has the good sense to put that claim in inverted commas: “Lockdown ‘prevented the deaths of 470,000 Brits from coronavirus – and 3m across EU’.”
Imperial has put out a press release claiming that the lockdowns have saved 3.1 million lives in Europe. Hang on. Wasn’t that 3.1 million number supposed to be purely “illustrative”, i.e. not a meaningful estimate of how much loss of life (if any) the lockdowns have prevented? The same release includes a quote from Dr Seth Flaxman, one of the paper’s authors, bragging about how many lives have been saved because governments across Europe have followed the sagacious advice of him and his team:
Using a model based on data from the number of deaths in 11 European countries, it is clear to us that non-pharmaceutical interventions – such as lockdown and school closures, have saved about 3.1 million lives in these countries.
An “illustrative only” figure seems to have been transformed into a hard data point without a second glance.
In the BBC story, Dr Flaxman emphasises that the crisis is far from over. “Claims this is all over can be firmly rejected,” he says. “We are only at the beginning of this pandemic.” That warning is echoed by Dr Samir Bhatt, another of the paper’s authors: “There is a very real risk if mobility goes back up there could be a second wave coming reasonably soon, in the next month or two.”
This follows from their model, since they assume the only reason the rate of infection has declined in the 11 countries they’ve looked at is because it’s been effectively suppressed by NPIs, not because the number of people with natural immunity is far greater than initially thought, or because the virus is nosocomial, or seasonal. The possibility that the majority of people who’ve died from COVID-19 are unusually vulnerable – elderly people in care homes and hospitals with underlying health conditions – and that further waves of infection are unlikely to have anything like the same infection fatality rate (IFR) isn’t considered by the paper’s authors. The model assumes the IFR is and will continue to be about 1% – four times greater than the CDC estimate. It also doesn’t allow for the fact that the IFR varies according to age.
Meanwhile, another paper in Nature – this one from a team at the University of California – claims that NPIs in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France, and the United States have prevented 530 million people becoming infected. But, again, the relevant counterfactual is no NPIs whatsoever, rather than a more measured approach. So not a persuasive argument for lockdowns either.
The argument made in these papers for the lockdowns is unpersuasive. It’s the equivalent of justifying Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drug trafficking in the Philippines, in spite of the fact that it’s resulted in the deaths of over 7,000 suspects, by pointing to the number of drug deaths it’s prevented and making the relevant counterfactual the absence of any policing whatsoever rather than a less draconian approach.
There’s a saying among scientists – just because something is published in Nature doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. But Imperial’s new paper takes the biscuit. Running my eye over the list of authors, I was surprised not to see Mystic Meg’s name there.
____________________________
So, on to the main event: Sue Denim’s latest blog post. I’m posting it in the update today, but will move it to the right-hand menu tomorrow so it sits beneath Sue’s previous two blog posts. A quick reminder that “Sue Denim” is not the author’s real name – kinda obvious when you think about it. The writer is a senior software engineer/consultant who doesn’t want to disclose his/her identity. As he/she wrote at the beginning of his/her first post:
I have been writing software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years.
How Replicable is the Imperial College Model?
by Sue Denim
After Toby published my first and second pieces, Imperial College London (ICL) produced two responses. In this article I will study them. I’ve also written an appendix that provides some notes on the C programming language to address some common confusions observed amongst modellers, which Toby will publish tomorrow.
Attempted replication. On the June 1st ICL published a press release on its website stating that Stephen Eglen, an academic at Cambridge, was able to reproduce the numbers in ICL’s influential Report 9. I was quite interested to see how that was achieved. As a reminder, Imperial College’s Report 9 modelling drove lockdown in many countries.
Unfortunately, this press release continues ICL’s rather worrying practice of making misleading statements about its work. The headline is “Codecheck confirms reproducibility of COVID-19 model results”, and the article highlights this quote:
I was able to reproduce the results… from Report 9.
This is an unambiguous statement. However, the press release quotes the report as saying: “Small variations (mostly under 5%) in the numbers were observed between Report 9 and our runs.”
This is an odd definition of “replicate” for the output of a computer program, but it doesn’t really matter because what ICL doesn’t mention is this: the very next sentence of Eglen’s report says:
I observed 3 significant differences:
1. Table A1: R0=2.2, trigger = 3000, PC_CI_HQ_SDOL70, peak beds (in thousands): 40 vs 30, a 25% decrease.
2. Table 5: on trigger = 300, off trigger = 0.75, PC_CI_HQ_SD, total deaths: 39,000 vs 43,000, a 10% increase.
3. Table 5: on trigger = 400, off trigger = 0.75, CI_HQ_SD, total deaths: 100,000 vs 110,000, a 10% increase.
In other words, he wasn’t able to replicate Report 9. There were multiple “significant differences” between what he got and what the British Government based its decisions on.
How significant? The supposedly minor difference in peak bed demand between his run and Report 9 is 10,000 beds, or roughly the size of the entire UK field hospital deployment. This supports the argument that ICL’s model is unusable for planning purposes, although that’s the entire justification for its existence.
Eglen claims this non-replication is in fact a replication by arguing:
although the absolute values do not match the initial report, the overall trends are consistent with
the original report
A correctly written model will be replicable to the last decimal place. When using the same seeds and same input data the expected variance is zero, not 25%. Stephen Eglen should retract his “code check”, as it’s incorrect to claim a model is replicable when nobody can get it to generate the same outputs that other people saw.
Number of simulation runs. ICL have contradicted themselves about how Report 9 was generated. Their staff previously claimed that, “Many tens of thousands of runs contributed to the spread of results in report 9.” In Eglen’s report we see a very different claim. He explains some of the difference between his results and ICL’s by saying:
These results are the average of NR=10 runs, rather than just one simulation as used in Report 9
Imperial College’s internal controls are so poor they can’t give a straight accounting of how Report 9 was generated.
The point of stochasticity is to estimate confidence bounds. If incorporating random chance into your simulation changes the output only a bit, you assume random chance won’t affect real world outcomes much either and this increases your confidence. Report 9 is notable for not providing any confidence bounds whatsoever. All numbers are given as precise predictions in different scenarios, with no discussion of uncertainty beyond a few possible values of R0. None of the graphs render uncertainty bounds either (unlike e.g. the University of Washington model). The lack of bounds would certainly be explained if the simulation was run only once.
People working on the ICL model have argued the huge variety of bug reports they received don’t matter, because they just run it repeatedly and average the outputs. This argument is nonsense as discussed repeatedly, but if they didn’t actually run it multiple times at all then the argument falls apart on its own terms.
Models vs experiments. The belief that you can just average out model bugs appears to be based on a deep confusion between simulations and reality. A shockingly large number of academics seem to believe that running a program is the same thing as running an experiment, and thus any unexplained variance in output should just be recorded and treated as cosmic uncertainty. However, models aren’t experiments; they are predictions generated by entirely controllable machines. When replicating software-generated predictions, the goal is not to explore the natural world, but to ensure that the program can be correctly tested, and to stop model authors simply cherry-picking outputs to fit their pre-conceived beliefs. As we shall see, that is a vital requirement.
Does replication matter? It does. You don’t have to take my word for it: ask Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, who in 2015 stated:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.
Alternatively ask Professor Neil Ferguson, who is a signatory to this open letter to the Lancet requesting retraction of the “hydroxychloroquine is dangerous” paper because of the unreliability of the data it’s based on, supplied by an American health analytics company called Surgisphere. The letter justifies the demand for retraction by saying:
The authors have not adhered to standard practices in the machine learning and statistics community. They have not released their code or data.
ICL should give the authors the benefit of the doubt – maybe Surgisphere just need a couple of months to release their code. They are peer-reviewed experts, after all. And statistics isn’t a sub-field of epidemiology, so according to Imperial College spokespeople that means Ferguson isn’t qualified to criticise it anyway.
Initial response and the British Computer Society. Via its opinion writers, the Daily Telegraph picked up on my analysis. ICL gave them this statement:
A spokesperson for the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team responded to criticism of its code by saying the Government “has never relied on a single disease model to inform decision-making”.
“Within the Imperial research team we use several models of differing levels of complexity, all of which produce consistent results. We are working with a number of legitimate academic groups and technology companies to develop, test and further document the simulation code referred to. However, we reject the partisan reviews of a few clearly ideologically motivated commentators.“
The first bolded statement is typically misleading. In the SAGE publication from March 9th addressing lockdowns, the British Government was given the conclusions of the SPI-M SAGE subgroup in tables 1 and 2. On page 8, that document states the tables and assumptions are sourced to a single paper from ICL which has never been published, but from the title and content it seems clear that it was an earlier draft of Report 9. There is no evidence of modelling from any other institution contributing to this report, i.e. it doesn’t appear to be true that the Government has “never” relied on a single model – that’s exactly what it was fed by its own advisory panel.
The second bolded statement is merely unfortunate. By ideologically motivated commentators they must have meant the vast array of professional software engineers who posted their reactions on Twitter, on GitHub and on this site. The beliefs of the vast majority in the software industry were summarised by the British Computer Society (BCS), a body that represents people working in computer science in the UK. The BCS stated:
Computer code used to model the spread of diseases including coronavirus “must meet professional standards” … “the quality of the software implementations of scientific models appear to rely too much on the individual coding practices of the scientists who develop them”
Is Imperial College going to argue that the BCS is partisan and ideologically motivated?
On motivations. It’s especially unfortunate when academics defend themselves by claiming their critics – all of them, apparently – are ideological. Observing that coding standards are much higher in the private sector than in the academy isn’t even controversial, let alone ideological, as shown by the numerous responses from academics agreeing with this point, and stressing that they can’t be expected to produce code up to commercial standards. (They “need more funding”, obviously.)
But in recent days people have observed that “for months, health experts told people to stay home. Now, many are encouraging the public to join mass protests.” The world has watched as over 1,200 American epidemiologists, academics and other public health officials published an open letter which said: “[A]s public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission …. this should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay at home orders.”
According to “the science” the danger posed by this virus depends on the ideological views of whoever is protesting. This is clearly nonsense and explains why Imperial College administrators were so quick to accuse others of political bias: they see it everywhere because academia is riven with it.
To rebuild trust in public science will require a firm policy response. As nobody rational will trust the claims of academic epidemiologists again any time soon, as the UK’s public finances are now seriously damaged by furlough and recession, and as professional modelling firms are attempting to develop reliable epidemic models themselves anyway, it’s unclear why this field should continue to receive taxpayer funding. The modellers with better standards can, and should, advise the Government in future.
Professor Sunetra Gupta Pooh-Poohs Imperial’s “We Saved the Planet” Baloney
Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford and a long-standing sceptic, was interviewed by Sarah Montagu on Radio 4’s World at One today and asked whether she agreed that the lockdown has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. She demolished the lockdown case so I asked a regular contributor to this site to make a transcript.
Sarah Montagu: Coronavirus is in retreat across the country. So said England’s Health Secretary yesterday after reporting 55 deaths, the lowest death toll since the weekend before the lockdown. Is the virus in retreat because of the lockdown and does it mean that it was all worth it? Imperial College said this week that the lockdown saved millions of lives in Europe. But there is another view that the price of the lockdown was and will yet be felt in different ways. Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and I asked her whether she would have argued for herd immunity all along.
Sunetra Gupta: Yes I think I would have said that but on the proviso that we put as much money as possible and to make up for what hasn’t happened over the last 30 years to support the vulnerable sections of the population. So I would have said yes, I think at that point we had enough information to know that there were certain sectors of the population who were particularly vulnerable and that we needed to protect them. And the word protect of course carries with it all sorts of implications, but essentially it seemed to me that there was a real gap in the resources available to achieve that. Let’s now try and divert as many resources as possible to protect the vulnerable population and to reduce their risk. And the way to reduce the risk to the vulnerable population, as we have done unwittingly in some cases with the pathogens that do kill elderly people and others who are vulnerable, is by having enough immunity ourselves such that the risk posed to the vulnerable population is low.
Sarah Montagu: So what the idea [is] that the rest of the population carry on as normal, try possibly to get the virus so that they can be the people who represent the herd immunity?
SG: I mean, that’s how we’ve traditionally dealt with the pathogens that do at the moment kill the elderly and vulnerable. I mean it’s a terrible thing that that happens, but it happens, but I guess we’ve made that decision that we need to balance out that problem against the problem of completely shutting down the economy or compromising our social interactions to the point of farce, let’s face it.
SM: So, what? Has the lockdown been a farce?
SG: We’re trying to wriggle out of this situation in a way that is I think quite farcical, we’ve come up with rules that are quite arbitrary to my mind.
SM: The idea would be to change the strategies so that it is the older and frail who should be staying indoors?
SG: First of all I think we need to go out there and make a proper map of what their risk is, and the risk to the elderly and frail is not just contingent on how elderly and frail they are but how immune the rest of the population is. So we need to go out and test to the best of our abilities, knowing now that some people are not going to register positive on these tests simply because they happen to be entirely resistant to the disease. We need some very clever statisticians and people who are disinterested in promoting any kind of sense of what they think is going on to make a proper clear, best assessment of what the risks are to the vulnerable in every part of the country – which is, talking about the UK, there is a huge variation in who’s been exposed, given the locality; there’s enormous heterogeneity and homogenising this data just to fit certain precepts or some preconceptions is not helpful. What we need to do is go out there, look at who’s been exposed in different regions, look at who is vulnerable and come up with a strategy, put money – public money – into supporting the people who are vulnerable, given the risks that they face. Though in London I think the epidemic has more or less run its course from what I can see and, you know, perhaps we can have different strategies, but it’s very likely from the data that it hasn’t spread out from London, so we need to make sensible decisions about how to protect people.
SM: So should we relax about the R number, lift the lockdown quickly and not be phased by the idea of a second wave?
SG: I think the R number is impossible… There will be another resurgence of this, like any other respiratory pathogen in the winter, and we need to prepare for that.
SM: We hear that there is some regret expressed in Sweden at their high death toll. Would that not have happened here if we didn’t have the lockdown?
SG: I think it’s unfortunate that people are focusing on that point. I think that what Tegnell said that they could have done better to protect the care homes and that is indeed what we should have done… we should have protected if we could, and far be it from me to say how that would have been possible, but to protect people in care homes – I think we’re agreed on that and I think it’s unfortunate that people are jumping on that to say that they should have locked down earlier. What I don’t understand about lockdown, is what is the exit strategy from it anyway?
SM: Would you just lift it as quickly as possible?
SG: Yes. Right now, yes, absolutely.
SM: Do you think the disease arose earlier in China than has been suggested?
SG: Absolutely, yes.
SM: When do you think it appeared?
SG: I wouldn’t want to put a number on it but I think that in any normal system by the time you detect deaths from a disease it’s been around for at least a month.
SM: So, what are we talking – October rather than November?
SG: Yes, something like that – October or November.
For those who want to listen to it, it’s here. Starts at the 20m 25s point.
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:
- ‘WHO Says Transmission by Asymptomatic Covid Patients “Very Rare”‘ – The National Review reports on the WHO’s latest bit of bonkers guidance
- ‘Government to row back on pledge to have all primary children back to school before the summer‘ – What fresh hell is this?
- ‘False negatives, testing capacity and pheasants‘ – The team at BBC Radio 4’s More or Less train their forensic analytical skills on the reliability of the Government’s swab test
- ‘Over 95% of UK “COVID-19” deaths had “pre-existing condition”‘ – Off-Guardian points out this means the majority of us are not at risk
- ‘A Perfect Storm for the “Woke” Revolution‘ – Rory Hamilton worries that the combination of the pandemic and the BLM protests has injected a dangerous accelerant into the culture war
- ‘Zoos could shut for good with animals having to be put down, MPs warn‘ – Another unanticipated effect of the lockdowns flagged up by the Telegraph
- ‘The eight reasons building a contact-tracing app is so difficult‘ – Shouldn’t they have thought about these difficulties before announcing it?
- ‘Satellite images of packed Wuhan hospitals suggest coronavirus outbreak began earlier than thought‘ – Interesting story in the Telegraph
- ‘Businesses Struggle to Open After Being Hit a Third Time‘ – Depressing Wall St Journal report pointing out that retail businesses were first hit by the coronavirus pandemic, then by the economic downturn, and now some are reeling after being vandalized and looted
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. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
For those of you who haven’t yet subscribed to mine and James Delingpole’s weekly London Calling podcast, here’s a link to the latest episode, recorded yesterday. We share our dismay at the events of last weekend – with the journalists who applauded the mob that tore down Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, and the police who stood by and let them do it. What’s next? Hadrian’s Wall? It’s a symbol of colonialism, after all. I suggest to James that we should head north and start dismantling it ourselves as a parody of the “Rhodes Must Fall” nonsense, but he worries about the “wildlings” that might pour through the gap. You can listen to it here.
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From snake-oil to Big Pharma – and beyond. A documentary that helps one understand what may be going on behind the “pandemic”:
https://youtu.be/gOs8Cbo_KYk
I have some doubt about the simplistic claim it makes vis-a-vis the Yom Kippur War, but the rest of it seems sound to me.
This documentary was made by James Corbett, visit his website https://www.corbettreport.com/
Science unfortunately seems to be becoming increasingly dishonest – all of your points are 100% correct – turning this ludicrous 3.1 mln deaths saved figure into something real is insulting – it is an invention. They have just doubled down on the initial paper which has been proven over and over to be wrong its three core assumption – double x 5 days, IFR at 1.23% (all ages) and 80% attack rate. Why does BBC + MSM keep reporting findings from such an unreliable source? Thank you for lockdownsceptics, it is amazing that MSM has decided that the sceptics are the ones not to be trusted and shut down!
You think what Ferguson does is science?
No, but Boris seems to!
He’s at it again:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8407007/UK-lockdown-week-earlier-halved-COVID-19-death-toll-scientist-says.html
Good point. Action needs to be taken about the BBC and their outrageous media coverage, they are practically running a pro-lockdown pro-Fergusson campaign daily. Split up, slim down, end the licence fee and privatise please, nothing less radical will do.
Yes, dealing with the BBC should be top of anyone’s priority list. It might not solve everything, but with a “Conservative” Party majority it should be easy to do and quick. Just needs a PM with balls, to force it through the Lords.
Hmm. I’m seeing a potential problem here after all…
“No one, as far as I’m aware, has ever advocated that governments around the world do nothing in response to the pandemic.”
Actually, I would have done nothing. A decision made in a panic is worse than no decision at all.
The law of unintended consequences is operating here and as yet we don’t know what the consequences of this rash action will be.
Certainly untreated cancer will become a very serious issue in coming months. And there is also the deleterious effect of these lockdowns on the education of children.
Given the level of incompetence demonstrated by our government, doing nothing may have been better.
A massive effort to protect the vulnerable in care homes and hospitals would probably have saved lives. And telling ill people to stay at home, and the rest of us to wash our hands are low-cost measures that do a lot of good and not much if any, harm.
Beyond that, what the government should have “done” was to try to find out as much as possible before taking rash decisions, listen to different views on how to deal with it, been honest with the public, shown leadership by putting the risks in context.
100% agree. That’s all that needed to be done.
I agree, and hopefully sense prevails and that is the approach taken if there is a notable surge in cases in a few months or in winter.
Even so, care home residents and hospital patients can’t be fully ‘protected’ without imposing fairly barbaric living conditions on them which may do as much harm as good, as they have done for the past three months. Factor in the practical realities involved in complete ‘protection’ (of patient and carer as we are insisting), and even if preparation is much better, or at least not non-existent, the inherent nature of an occasionally fatal, contagious airborne respiratory virus means that some people are going to die (as they do from other respiratory viruses) unless the most hideous lockdown restrictions are imposed. Even that might not be enough.
Failure to come to terms with this by the lockdown zealots will mean the national self-harm and departure from civilised existence continues.
Yes, I don’t know much about what happens in care homes, but measures should be proportionate there too.
I don’t know how practical it would be, but you may be able to test the staff daily, if the test gave instant results. It would probably cost a fair bit less than shutting down or hampering large parts of the economy, indefinitely.
Does make me wonder though how the risk of a ‘second wave’ will be spun.
It seems clear that many parts of England haven’t finished their first wave. Infection rates have never come close to 20%. I do worry that this is where the “second wave” will come from.
R0 is lower outside London. I could be wrong but I don’t think we will see a second wave in the UK until the winter (when R0 goes up a bit because people spend more time indoors).
Nobody in London has the thing. To the point someone made earlier, it will now bump along around 1 forever.
Yes R is about 1 in London, but R0 in London will be higher than in places outside and therefore so will be the herd immunity threshold. So if 20% of people have been exposed in London but only 10% in Worcester (say) it doesn’t mean Worcester is destined to ever catch up with London.
For reasons of population density?
Not challenging – just querying to make sure I understand what you’re saying.
If they succeed in dragging out the lockup till October, we’ll be into flu season again and guess what ….?
Are you kidding?
2nd wave is their latest mantra.
It’s already being spun!
Well said. OK the economy would have taken a bit of a hit but not as bad as what we’re experiencing now.
And we would not have seen the spike in mental health issues that will be sure to increase when we come out of this.
Telling sick people to stay at home has done a great deal of harm. Early intervention, as with most illnesses, would have been much better. Prophylactic intervention for health workers and for those with other medical problems would have led to a much better outcome. I will soon be back as an outpatient at a rehabilitation centre. I will be asking for as much prophylactic medication as possible.
Surely, under normal circumstances, if people are sick, they naturally stay at home?
It’s telling the healthy to stay home that’s caused the problem.
No chance of that once Ferguson did his worst.
There was never a “life going on completely as usual ” option, because that’s not how people behave when faced with a threat.
Government simply needed to alert people to the fact that there was a nasty virus flying around which particularly affected the elderly.
People at risk were taking their own steps to protect themselves (not going out, not having the grandchildren round) in early March, as they would do in every nasty flu season.
The latest Imperial College face-saving exercise seems not to factor this in at all.
I imagine if the MSM hadn’t scared everyone to absolute death (almost literally) then things may have been a bit more ‘normal’. I remember thinking back in February that people’s behaviour was so at odds with what was being reported in the media; at that time, the virus was just seen as China/Asia’s problem, and people didn’t see it as a personal threat to them. There was a risk of it coming over here but normality pretty much prevailed, and that was comforting. But the tide started to turn in early March once it hit Italy and it was then that the MSM started really ramping things up, and I remember that things started to feel very strange by that point and normality ebbed away. We are still waiting for it to return.
Yes, you are correct on that. Our elderly neighbour (95) who has terminal lung cancer, locked down with her daughter in early March. We had a lunch booked for 18 March with other neighbours (in their 80s) but cancelled it because they had already decided to self-isolate.
Certianly we’d be in a way better position now if we’d done nothing, and told noone about what was going on. Which is just mad really – I’m not for cover-ups but I’d certainly support one that favoured worldwide public health rather than the current one that’s playing out.
Works for normal flu every year!
Toby, just thought you should know we’ve been doing all we can to share the “asymptomatic transmission very rare” article you posed yesterday to anyone who would listen. It is undoubtedly the most important single piece of evidence about the virus so far. And it’s been taken up by a small number of other news sources. But most of the largr mainstream media has ignored it, and where the likes of the BBC have mentioned it they’ve undermined it by including quotes by a pet “expert” of theirs who argues from anecdotal examples that the WHO’s statistically proven understanding of this vital fact about the virus does not matter.
This guy disagrees about the WHO’s statement: https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1270760450167209984
What do you think of his opinion?
Perhaps we need to do some crowdfunding to place adverts in the mainstream press stating the facts – PCR tests notoriously unreliable, excess deaths caused by lockdown, the actual IFR based on the data now available instead of on Ferguson’s nonsense, the percentage of fatalities that are the very old people with co-morbidities, the actual likelihood of a healthy individual dying from covid and the estimated economic impact and a few statements from real epidemiologists that know what they are talking about.
I’m on.
Is any one game to organise this as I am a technophobe. Everyone on the site could then raise ideas of what to put in the advert
difficult to know where to start the list is so long
It’s even dodgier than that, according to this article:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/09/scientists-have-utterly-failed-to-prove-that-the-coronavirus-fulfills-kochs-postulates/
“The science” so beloved of Mr Hancock has apparently yet to show that “SARS-CoV-2 causes a discrete illness that matches the characteristics of all of the deaths attributed to COVID-19″ and that “the virus has been isolated, reproduced and then shown to cause this discrete illness.”
Without these criteria being met, how can a coherent policy be arrived at?
At every stage we have been subjected to obfuscation – and worse.
It’s a truly fascinating idea. And guaranteed never even to be considered by 99.9% of people.
Epidemiology fits Karl Popper’s definition of pseudoscience, as illustrated by his description of psychoanalysis. Epidemiology can conjure a superficially plausible explanation for everything retrospectively, but can predict nothing.
Koch’s postulates used to be the gold standard for dealing with viruses.
A bit too precise/demanding for this worldwide debacle though.
Can you put a new wall up around a part of the country, let’s club together somewhere and buy it and only let it logical, rational, honest people. The closest I’ll get is likely to move into a van, at least then I can hope to outrun the madness for a few years, I hear Romania is nice and they still remember how bad communism is.
Yes, I’ve thought about that. You start to understand why the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America.
Wyoming has the same surface area as the UK but 0.38% of its population. But they probably don’t want to sell any of it to us…
Probably why the eastern European nations are doing well
Eastern Europe (Romania and Transylvania are just, wonderful, absolutely wonderful to me and I haven’t even been to either) sounds just grand.
Nearly 20 years ago I had some peripheral involvement with people who were trying to organise a movement of like-minded libertarians to a US state, with the idea of generating a big enough number of liberty-oriented voters there to protect their liberty. I remember hearing they’d gone ahead with it after choosing New Hampshire, but I haven’t had any involvement with libertarians for many years so I don’t know how the project is going.
It would be interesting to see what the response of libertarians in the US has been to the coronapanic. In theory the lockdown should be absolute anathema to them, but the same should be true of UK conservatives, and bitter experience has shown that fear – even irrational fear whipped up by dshnonest propaganda, can generate profound levels of hypocrisy in people.
This is probably what I was thinking of Mark. I didn’t keep up with it either.
There were significant protests across the US. GIve them their due, they like to dress up, congregate, and shout outside city hall. 🙂
Did a bit of searching – it was the Free State Project
Finally I can add something useful. The Free State Project was set up to get 20,000 libertarians to move to NH, within 5 years of getting the 20,000 signatories. They reached that goal in Feb. 2016, at which time about 10% had already moved. I don’t know how many have moved since.
@George Dance is this Keene in New Hampshire?
Yes. There’s another largish group in Portsmouth NH, but Keene seems to be the hotspot. They have an online blog, Free Keene, that’s a good source of info on the movement. https://freekeene.com/about/
2nd amendment supporters in the US of A have tried this sort of thing. At town, county, and even state level I think. Sorry, but I haven’t kept up to speed on its success or otherwise.
It was only last night I was looking on web sites for islands for sale.
The other day, someone here posted a link to a village for sale in Sweden with 60 houses for £5.6 million. Unfortunately, it seemed that the houses are still occupied.
Perhaps someone with a legal mind could create a Passport to Pimlico type setup for a town here in the UK?
Sweden is not the main comparison because they still engaged in the social distancing that we’re now trying to escape from. There’s no evidence that any social distancing measures made any difference to the spread of the virus. That’s the main point.
The real flaw in the Imperial model is as before that it simply assumes that all changes in the spread are the result of interventions rather than the natural behaviour of the virus, and that there is no variation in susceptibility despite the mounting evidence that there is considerable preexisting resistance. In other words they assume what they are claiming to demonstrate.
Italy locked down hard trapping the population, many families from children to grandparents live together in italy .once trapped in with the virus there was no escape
I just remembered that a friend of mine – who was my best man and I his – is good friends with a cabinet minister. So after all the talk of writing to MPs, I just sent this WhatsApp:
“Could you ask your friend Mr ____ what the hell is going on and when it is expected that Mr. Johnson will have his testicles returned to him?”
Possibly not the most constructive, but it made me feel better.
The reply was “yes, absolutely!”
So. Well, at least I’ve done _something_ today, useful or not.
That might have more impact than writing to your MP. Any opportunity to circumvent the foot soldiers might set the ball rolling, especially if your mate can encourage the Cabinet minister to grow a pair too – hope it is not Williamson though because he needs to grow a brain first!
No, it’s not him.
Thank God for small mercies.
Many years ago, W. S. Gilbert pointed out that if MPs have a brain, they have to leave it outside the House.
You wouldn’t need much room to store them nowadays.
I’ve spent some time in the past with the person in question. To give him his due, he’s fiercely intelligent and very impressive in person. How much of that is applied to the current government, I don’t know.
What I don’t understand is why no-one, not one Cabinet minister or senior adviser, has broken ranks. They can’t all surely think any of this farce is right, legally, morally if not scientifically. They are parents, spouses, sons/daughters. How can they live with themselves?
I don’t know. Maybe you only break ranks if you think you have the popular opinion?
Me and my friends are bombarding our Mp with emails ,wear the bastards down.
I wrote to my (Labour) MP on 2 April, saying that the lockdown was a threat to livelihoods and liberties, and asking him to push for the recall of parliament. He replied, saying, among other things, that he was ‘particularly surprised that you seem to place “our livelihoods and liberties” before the lives of our fellow citizens. That seems an extraordinary statement to make.’ I replied that I was ‘particularly surprised that you seem to place minor fluctuations in the annual mortality rate, overwhelmingly involving people of my own advanced age and more, or those who have pre-existing serious medical conditions, above the devastating effects which the present policy must have upon the livelihoods of millions of your fellow citizens, both during the lockdown itself and far into the future’, and pointed out that the opposition’s duty was not to scheme to win power, but to oppose. His response concluded, ‘I have read your opinions, with which I disagree, and will not be entering into further correspondence.’ I tried one more letter, but he has ignored it. As Tyneside Tigress (hallo, neighbour – North or South Tyneside ?) says, it’s probably best to circumvent the foot soldiers.
Finally got so cross that also wrote to my MP tonight – I couldn’t help it but WHAT HAVE YOU DONE crept in. I hate people who type in capital letters – shouty – but I COULDN’T HELP MYSELF. Oh dear.
SM: Do you think the disease arose earlier in China than has been suggested?
SG: Absolutely, yes.
SM: When do you think it appeared?
SG: I wouldn’t want to put a number on it but I think that in any normal system by the time you detect deaths from a disease it’s been around for at least a month.
SM: So, what are we talking – October rather than November?
SG: Yes, something like that – October or November.
Thanks for that, Professor Gupta, so it might be … October or November perhaps … now tell us about your model which predicted that over 50% of the UK population had been infected by March but only if you assume that only 1 in 1000 cases are hospitalised.
For crying out loud, folks, this is woeful but she doesn’t agree with Ferguson so let’s just accept this speculative drivel.
I don’t think you quite understand the way this works. “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Neil Ferguson produced a woefully over-simplistic model that produced lots of very precise, wrong, answers. The difference with Sunetra Gupta is that she knows it’s not possible to be precise, and she is open to a wider range of possibilities than Ferguson. She shouldn’t be criticised for not pretending her answers are definite and precise. It’s a virtue.
Yes, but Gupta’s predictions also had confidence bounds so wide they were effectively not predictions at all. Also note she’s changed her tune totally – she was previously a big supporter of lockdowns and got mad in interviews at “libertarians” who disagreed.
No- she was always against lockdown- she just thought it was a shame that the Libertarian argument was on the same side, as she is a fairly hard left socialist.
LOL! Dr. Gupta is in the same uncomfortable position as Sweden. Thanks, Annabel; your comment made my day.
Fergy’s drivel wasn’t also speculative?
Do you see 50,000 dead people right now or 500,000?
Only out by about 1/2 million
Mayo, I think this misrepresents Dr. Gupta, but let me hasten to add that I don’t think that you’re the one doing the misrepresenting. Rather, I think that you’re reacting reasonably to a media caricature – the picture of her the media has built up through necessarily selective editing – rather than the message she’s trying to communicate. (To a degree, I think that’s happened to Dr. Ferguson, too; just as it happens to anyone in the media spotlight.) My knowledge of Dr. Gupta’s work is limited to a couple of YouTube interviews, but I got a somewhat different picture. As I see it, she was saying that the huge spiking of cases In March could be explained by two possible scenarios, both of which were therefore equally plausible: 1) The UK was at the start of an epidemic with a high R number, which would peak in April or May with millions of cases and perhaps millions of deaths; 2) The UK was in an epidemic with a lower R number, but which had started 2 months earlier, which was already close to or past the infection peak. While Dr. Gupta made it clear that she liked scenario (2),… Read more »
My issue with all this, is the implausibility of it all. We have a virus where its been proven time and again, that its no threat, yet the government has removed our rights and maintains pointless restrictions causing serious harm and devastation. We had a mob on Sunday vandalising our monuments and harming the police (immune to the supposed bug, and praised for hypocritically breaking the rules), yet two days later, Sadiq Khan sets up a commission to revise London’s history from its English to global which is hyper-Orwellian and very sinister. So for many this will be seen as mob rule, where a violent gang can smash things in order to complete wide ranging government policy change. It just doesnt stack up.
The reason why the government is looking a bit iffy right now, is that they have to juggle this failing absurd narrative that defies any rationality, sense or logic. The reason they have to is because it is most probable that they are answerable to elsewhere. We are living under a government of occupation.
Initially I was amazed at how many people fell for the ‘deadly virus’ bullshit.
Now I am amazed at how many people still believe the government incompetence bullshit. 🙁
I’ve got to ask – why release a relatively mild, but scarily new virus, just so that the population would be terrified into agreeing to being vaccinated with a deadly vaccine? Why not just release a deadly virus? It seems a bit like hanging batman upside down over a tank of sharks, laughing and then walking away, when you could just shoot batman in the head.
THIS.
ESPECIALLY if you’re going down the ‘population control’ tinfoil hat road
Isnt ‘tinfoil hat’ a slur that is used against lockdown sceptics such as ourselves?
James Corbett has discussed the population control issue in a recent video. You are welcome to share your refutation of his points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igx86PoU7v8
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
That will cheer up the malicious no end, Cruella.
Malice itself can most often be explained by greed and self-interest.
I.E. Why kill people if you can make money off them?
If you are literally making money do you need the people? By this I mean given we have fiat money and the level of corruption – once you reach a certain extreme level of wealth you can coerce government etc to create money for you. The money itself essentially becomes irrelevant to you.
If you were a extremely wealthy psychopath you may think lots of these people consume many of ‘your’ resources yet provide nothing that you yourself actually want.
Of course you do. Because you want to make MORE money. It’s never enough – look at how these people behave. Their entire personalities are basically defined by making money, even if they already have unlimited funds. THAT’S the psychopathy – or, at least the manifestation of it.
Back to the vaccine for instance. The more people there are on the planet. the more money you can make from vaccinating them, no?
So… even Bill Overpopulated Planet Gates says these things but then does differently. I’d argue he’s doing the precise opposite to what say he is – he’s trying to keep kids ALIVE with vaccines…. So he can give them more vaccines!
My point is the after a point you can always get MORE money you dont need the people to get more money – just get the state to hand your businesses big contracts etc. The fiat money itself is just a number in the end. You could have 8 billions people and a £400 vaccine or 4 billion people and a £800 vaccine – once you have corrupted the government sufficiently you can make up any numbers you like. How many billions have been ‘donated'(although the tax payers didnt actually get much say in the matter) just to develop the vaccine. What more people do do is consume more resources – which unlike the fiat money is finite. Some consume resources and in turn produce stuff you want as and some consume resources and dont – perhaps its better you get rid of those and then you are actually richer – you have more resources. This is not how I think of course but the point is if your and extremely wealthy psychopath you dont need more people to become richer in terms of either fiat or actual resources and wealth – you could do with keeping the most… Read more »
He’s not keeping kids alive with vaccines, or not according to the data I’ve seen. The mortality rate is pretty high, Furthermore it seems that he is sterilising women with vaccines, or attempting to. Sorry, haven’t got time to search for the links.
I’m sure he said we could expect 700,000 to die from the new vaccine for covid19, but that that was an acceptable outcome – despite being fewer than the number of people that have died from the virus!
You may be right, but I’d argue that’s not intentional.
He wants to sterilise the third world (because their governments can’t afford vaccines ..lol) and make the rest of us have pointless vaccines every year.
That might seem rational but we have to accept that the guy is completely nuts!
I wouldn’t underestimate the role of personal vanity in all of this, and in human folly generally.
The ‘incompetence’ excuse wouold have to be stretched past its limits in this case. Only the insane or those with some motivation beyond the good of those they claim to serve could have inflicted policies so obviously, and so inevitably, leading to the collapse of the economy, with all that this entails in terms of human suffering. And where was the parliamentary opposition, where were the media, who should have been highlighting the views of scientists dissenting from ‘The Science’ of choice ? The excuse of ‘incompetence’ would have to extend well beyond the government and parliament, to explain the present situation.
Indeed it is. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any genuine tinfoil hat loons in the world.
Go on then, Farinaces, what happened on 9-11 ?
James Corbett and JFK Jr are not tinfoil hat loons.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/the-brave-new-world-of-bill-gates-and-big-telecom/
I like James and actually watch his videos regularly. Doesn’t mean I agree though. You have to admit if you wanted to control the population you’d be better off actually killing, or at least sterilising, a shit tonne of breeding age people rather than er….. killing a load of old people?
I personally would pick the Utopia method. (Anyone who likes conspiracy theories etc. would love this show – it’s one of my faves). I’d create a virus that sterilises 75% of the population rather than killing anyone. Just imagine if that was possible.
Lol I bet Bill Gates has actually done it by mistake already
This is one thing I really do agree with Corbett on – Gates is bad news.
This is not over yet. Who knows how many are already condemned to die by the actions so far and what else is in store.
I like Utopia too. Just the other day I watched the trailer again.
What is happening now is the Utopia method, as Corbett and many others including JFK Jr have said that the mandatory vaccines will include the means to sterilise us. This is the depopulation agenda.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/the-brave-new-world-of-bill-gates-and-big-telecom/
Remember too that Bill Gates’ father was involved with Planned Parenthood… Abortions lead to fewer people..
I’ve said below that the vaccines are about sterilising us, or certain groups.
They want to cull the elderly as Henry Kissinger as talked about the need to cull the ‘useless eaters’. The virus is a cover for multiple agendas.
Killing the ‘old people’ is maybe to get governments on his side – reduces the amount they have to pay out in pensions…
I don’t know for sure. But the bad guys have been boiling frogs for quite a while now, with never enough heat to make us all leap out of the saucepan at once.
A deadly vaccine is only one possible objective. Others might be –
Well, you see, Sweden is virtually at the point where it’s a cashless society anyway. All it took was a dramatic and exciting heist on the government cash warehouse.
I can’t rule out the others, but it seems to me like an awful lot of effort to go to for no obvious return.
It may be me just being wilfully blind, but all of my experience of watching governments tells me that they’re nowhere near good enough at anything to pull this kind of thing off. And all of my experience of big corporations tells me that they’re not, either.
Fairly sure Sweden’s shift to plastic will have taken years of expenditure, advertising, and social norm setting. A bank robbery stops a nation using cash ?!
If you cannot see the obvious return from (the benefits) of the other points to an authoritarian or tyrannical regime, a person less charitable than I might mention disingenuity …
You didn’t see our government implementing the smoking bans ? Involving our military in Afghanistan ? Rolling out 5G ? Mostly they bumble along. For some (a few) things that are somehow more significant, they are reasonably efficient.
I shan’t address big corporations, might get me the sack. 🙂
See my reply to Farinances below. Look, I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time debating the validity of every conspiracy theory, so after this I will leave you to believe as you will. Yes, I’ve been around to see all of those things happen. None of these things are a good example of government efficiency. Government is competent at passing legislation (given that we have no comparator, since they are the only one who can do it) and that’s about it. The smoking bans involved passing a piece of legislation (when the government had a significant majority in parliament) requiring premises to comply with it and asking the police and local authorities to enforce it. It’s not a complex task, so achieving it isn’t anything other than a minimum level of operational competence. Deploying the military to Afghanistan… deploying the military is something that government have done for as long as there have been governments (even when it was one bloke in charge of the village). It’s not like it went very well after that, is it? Rolling out 5G… I wasn’t aware that 5Ghad actually been properly rolled out yet and it involves the significant involvement… Read more »
I think your analysis of all this is probably the most plausible. People accepted the lockdown because of the excellent job that was done in frightening everyone half to death.Once the true figures come out, and it is seen how other countries are successfully lifting lockdown, then the public mood will quickly change. At the same time we will see the left wing media pounce on Boris, they will be all over him like a rash.to discredit him and the Tory ‘Government.
Which left wing media is that?
Obviously we agree the lockdown is a bad thing.
Your rationale for having the last word is less convincing. Aha, a chance for me to achieve moral superiority by stopping first. 🙂 🙂
Well done!
Is that true? About the cash warehouse?
Yes. It was all like something out of a film. Rather fun.
And no, the move to card wasn’t immediate and yes it took a good deal of government effort to get to that point, but it’s hard to buy so much as a cup of coffee in stockholm with cash nowadays (having said that, it’s a year since I was last in Stockholm, so it may have changed still more by now).
Was about to reply to JohnB here, but will do so above.
Not a problem to use cash to buy coffee here in Uppsala, or in supermarkets; places where the average item is 100 kr+ are the ones more likely to be card only. Eg hairdressers.
Supermarkets incentivise use of cards by giving extra ‘loyalty points’ if you link your bank card to your loyalty card.
It is not The Governments but the smart vested interest forces behind all of this.
Oddly Sweden nonetheless fairly recently issued new design banknotes and coins…you have to wonder why? Most Swedes I spoke to were blissfully unaware (or at least did not notice) how similar the new notes and coins are to euros…When I pointed it out, the reply was that Sweden has an opt-out on adoption of the euro, which is not the whole truth..
Exactly. And the past few days have a similar echo of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the preceding Anti Rightist Campaign
“Build Back Better” which could include any of those things plus ID2020 (mandatory global ID), Zero Carbon (total control over every Joule of energy we spend – and therefore ALL consumption and actions), mandatory vaccinations, etc
I like the idea of point two, that’ll suit me just fine.
Re the extent to which the population can be ‘cowed and brainwashed’: those shaping our attitudes (government’s Behavioural Insights Team, promoting desired globalist mindset ?) must have thought it was safe to launch the present power grab after we’d been softened up so much that we were afraid to say there was any difference between men and women. The push for the cashless society has been going on for a long while. I remember a huge billboard six or seven years ago, with a picture of a jubilant woman outside a supermarket waving a bank card and proclaiming that she was cash-free and carefree, or some such thing. ‘Contactless’ has been undermining cash for some time, and now people are looking at me as if I were an outsize germ when I offer them a perfectly nice, crisp note.
It’s the vaccine/immunity passports that worry me – no immunity passport = no job, travel etc..
Gosh, it looks worse when you see it written down!
More random laws lead to more ‘crime’ (inadvertent breaking of weird laws) leads to people being scared to do anything in case they commit a ‘crime’ which, if they are chipped, will further seriously impair their personal freedoms.
I totally agree with you. Its a good question. Another thing that doesnt make sense is Iran and Russia’s response, as we would expect them to be more sceptical like Belarus.
However, for all these issues querying the hoax, they dont come anywhere close to the lies, contradictions and insanity from the people carrying out the hoax.
I disagree with your premise. No politician wants to be responsible for actual murder – and of course the virus would kill their own relatives and possibly themselves.
For a politician, the best possible solution is a ‘mind virus’ that results in the behaviour they want. It seems kind of.. obvious..?
Yeah but if your goal is ‘population control’ you really have to kill quite a lot of people. Get the population down to ‘manageable’ levels then control who breeds.
But hasn’t the mind virus already resulted in a future fall in the population? It’s now illegal for people to start relationships, and even married couples are probably steering clear of each other physically. And if, later, you wanted to control who reproduced, you could spread pseudoscience about certain groups who are in more danger from the virus than other groups.
Not really. Not nearly enough anyway to achieve ‘total’ control.
Shaggers will shag. Look at Ferguson. To truly control the breeding population you basically have to sterilise or kill.
Hell, look at me. I’d be shagigng right now if I had the opportunity, law or no law. Why don’t I have the opportunity? Cause I can’t be arsed to create it. I guarantee you though there’s a shit tonne of people shagging illegaly right now. And good for them.
There’s still gonna be baby boom come New Year.
I’m not much of a “herbivore” myself (see comment above), but from observing other people, some do seem closer to it than others. I don’t think it would be too difficult for the wrong ‘nudge’ – and the C19 disaster has been one hell of a nudge – to start the population declining.
I’m not convinced. It’s possible to turn young men into “herbivores” – passive and lacking carnal desire”.
This process was already well underway in Japan, land of the mask.
“A survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2010 found 36% of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 had no interest in sex – a figure that had doubled in the space of two years.”
Japan’s population was already plummeting as a result.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24614830
Just read the article, it was very interesting.
What’s mentioned in that article is another in a long line of factors that has caused Japan’s population to plummet and why its ageing.
Cultural and economic factors have made it hard for Japanese men especially to carve out a career and family life that leads them to seek gratification via passive means such as what the article has alluded to.
The fact that we’re headed towards an economic crash unprecedented since 1709 could lead to the thinning of our population. Who will be able to afford children at this point both financially and psychologically?
That is seriously sick stuff!
They might not want to be responsible for it, doesn’t mean they don’t do it, or cause it to be done.
Remember the Ebola scare, I remember recently watching a video of some guy at the time predicting it would lead to essentially what we are seeing now. Perhaps they tried the deadly virus and found that it was just too hard to get it to take a hold. Deadly viruses are somewhat self limiting. Now if you can make every believe a mild virus that will spread much more easily is actually deadly – which it appears they have managed to do with between 50-95%(just a guess and this has obviously changed as some have clocked on) then you get your deadly virus scare without the ability to spread easily of a mild virus.
Just a thought. I dont know what exactly is going on but at this point I think things are far to strange to rule out anything.
Sorry that should have been ‘you get your deadly virus scare with the ability to spread easily of a mild virus’
A deadly virus is indiscriminate. A mild virus provides an excuse (aka a cover) to bring in totalitarian measures.
Because if they released a really deadly virus they would risk killing themselves in the process, unless they had a ready-made vaccine that works?
Actually that’s a good point – but I think you have to concede that if they were to release a virus on purpose then they’d DEFINITELY already have a vaccine ready
Presumably ICL will soon have to drop the ‘Imperial’ from their name, in order to avoid being tainted with the ‘legacy of Empire’. Unfortunately ‘College London’ sounds a bit downmarket, but I’m sure that their sterling modelling work will bolster their reputation. Sadly, it’s transparently obvious that ICL are trying to re-write history and avoid blame for what may well be the worst policy decision by any British Government, ever.
It’s now almost a month since Oxford University announced that COVID-19 was no longer an epidemic:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/11/coronavirus-no-longer-epidemic-uk-oxford-study-finds-cases-falling/
ICL’s dissembling and the Government’s introduction of ludicrous measures such as the so-called ‘quarantine’ on travellers entering the UK are part of an attempt to sustain the illusion that the ‘lockdown’ was necessary in the first place.
I live in hope that the wider public might eventually realise that the most dangerous aspects of the pandemic were media hysteria and weak government.
I’m worried that the government has lost control of the streets and mobs are being allowed to do what they want this is very dangerous locked down population tensions high it’s not long ago that we had mass rioting in the uk people lost their lives could happen easily happen again and we have a weak government. Does not bode well.
Not just our ‘Government”. Saw this on another site, apparently the reference is to Pembrokeshire in Wales! (Conservative). My bold emphasis
“I have just discovered that my Council Offices are to be bathed in purple light tomorrow in solidarity with BLM. Their UK crowd funding page states that their aims include “Developing and delivering training, police monitoring and strategies for the abolition of police.” Bearing in mind that I live in an area where the only immigration issues are those of the English moving into Wales (guilty as charged!) I cannot see this is in any way appropriate, but all criticisms on social media are shot down in flames by the virtue signalling Momentum types and I am still waiting for my Councillor to reply to an email sent a couple of years ago. I am devastated at this pathetic virtue signalling”
Absolutely agree!
Is the purple light going to be UV, we wonder. We do hope so as we found this interesting WHO document yesterday
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf
and it’s about non-pharmaceutical interventions in a flu pandemic. UV light is ‘not recommended in any circumstances.’
It also tells us that just about every measure currently being taken, apparently to combat CV19, is also ‘not recommended in any circumstances’. But of course ‘this awful virus’ is not the flu, is it?
The document outlines their current recommended procedures but, then again, we are talking the ever-varying WHO here.
Travel-related measures are unlikely to be successful in most locations because current screening tools such as thermal scanners cannot identify pre-symptomatic infections and afebrile infections, and travel restrictions and travel bans are likely to have prohibitive economic consequences.
Somewhat ironic!
The UV light in question is the artifical version, so I’d be inclined to agree with them.
Have you read about the thermal scanners they are *already* trialling at Heathrow? Don’t remember consent being asked for that or hearing any debate on it. Another Statutory Instrument?
Er, your body needs UV light to make vitamin D which combats respiratory illnesses, including flu. Are the WHO secretly a death squad in disguise?
How did you guess?
Perhaps the next colour should be red to symbolise the blood of cancer sufferers who have been left to die.
The best thing to bathe their bloody offices in would be nitric acid,
abolition of police?!? Wot?
Have you been so busy dismissing people pointing out the truth about BLM and Floyd as “racists” that you’ve actually been oblivious to what’s been going on in the US? “Defund the police” is exactly what BLM are pushing in the US and they’ve been making actual political headway on it over there for a couple of days.
But perhaps US events only concern you when some criminal unknown to you happens to die and become a political symbol for the scum of the earth in a cause based on an outright lie that you seem to feel the need to defend?
[I suppose I have to point out the obvious here: that most BLM supporters are white virtue signallers not blacks, or you will undoubtedly take the opportunity to dishonestly misrepresent me as “racist” again based on that line.]
Defund and shutdown the police? I’d give it three days before a vigilante group sets itself up who would then proceed to deal with the vermin in their areas. So which posse do you want in control? White men or black or ‘asian’ men?
which one would you fear the most?
I think the question is which posse do THEY want in control, seeing as they’re the ones calling for the abolition of the police. Not Mark.
I agree, sorry, I inserted myself into the conversation as it’s something I’ve been mulling since the Floyd death has morphed mutated into defunding police.
i wonder if BLM groupies are wanting to use the Purge movies as instructional videos?
You are exactly right that defunding the police is not about creating an anarchist utopia, it’s about replacing them with ideologically sympathetic enforcement forces. See the Ticker Carlson piece I’ve linked in several comments here today, for his discussion of exactly that point in the US context.
Yeah, the IRA policed a lot of Belfast and Derry in the ‘troubles’. Lots of kneecapping for joyriding. Did away with that inconvenient process called law and answering to a court.
I would ask under Freedom of Information who took the decision and how much it cost – waste of money and it might lose someone a job or at least diminish their chances of re-election..
It’s my theory that the riots were an inevitable consequence of lockdown and so the government are relieved to find that they have BLM branding and not anti-lockdown. I’d go so far as to speculate that they might even encourage the ‘BLM’ riots as a safety valve with no comebacks to themselves.
Yes.
Now the question is whether we can get BLM supporters to realise that the lockdown is what they’re really angry about and have them change their flags and banners.
Also what perfect cover for a genuine anti-lockdown protest.
Say if we went out to protest in London, right now, even if we all waved our signs and burnt some dustbins and threw penny farthings at police officers, who would notice? We’d be drowned out by BLM people. Literally surrounded and overwhelmed by other bodies. Or, at the very least (if we picked a quiet lefty virtue signalling day), people would point and frown and be even MORE hostile towards us because we’re not the *right* kind of protestors. The police may leave us alone unlike before but the public want us arrested because we care more about liberty than racism.
So…. legitimate questions and legitimate protest, in this current situation, being overwhelmed/drowned out by this issue that is completely unrelated. A fabulous, fortuitous distraction for the government from the disastrous policies. Probably factors a great deal into their treatment of the BLM protestors – the fact that they serve their cover-up well.
Imperial College’s Operation Historyhide is a go-go
A recent piece at The Critic magazine discusses the very topic of rebranding “Imperial” College for these woke times:
https://thecritic.co.uk/cui-bono/
Imperial College might well enjoy hiding history, they’ve already been sweeping science and maths under the carpet as a necessary step to being able to publicise their insane epidemiological modelling.
If you trawl through each evaluation of the RCGP surveillance network reports undertaken by the Oxford Covid Evidence Service, Covid 19 never reached the threshold to be considered an epidemic, at any point in 2020. Telegraph missed a trick there. I read it each time they updated that particular thread for the last few months and kept scratching my head. I couldn’t understand how we were having a pandemic without an epidemic…
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/what-does-rcgp-surveillance-tell-us-about-covid-19-in-the-community/
Well spotted. I was aware that there was some doubt about this early on, but I’d no idea it was consistent throughout the ‘epidemic’!
Following on from that, the observations are viewable in user defined graph form here:
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTU5ZDE5MGYtMzUzMy00ZjRmLTg4MGEtMTM3ZGJiZDNhODFkIiwidCI6IjZiOTAyNjkzLTEwNzQtNDBhYS05ZTIxLWQ4OTQ0NmEyZWJiNSIsImMiOjh9
I think it sounds like a Chinese takeaway….
They must think we are seriously thick if they thought no one would notice that they downgraded the threat from the virus before the lockdown! It was maybe done to cover their backs at a future enquiry? And they maybe hoped no one would have seen it before then?
So glad you’ve decided to provide a daily update, Toby. I feel like lockdown scepticism is at its kairotic moment in this country. The next big push is going to send it crashing down quicker than a slave trader’s statue on a BLM day out.
I hope you’re right!
me too
Nice to see the word ‘Kairos’ used in this context. I’ve only seen it used in Christian pro-Palestinian circles. It means ‘appointed time, an opportune moment, or a due season’ and I too hope you’re right (and I like the imagery, too!)
I was saying that on yesterday’s update, that I could feel the tide turning, it was almost palpable in the air, and then I catch a couple of news broadcasts and | see masks everywhere: Oxford at the Rhodes statue, Bristol this weekend, London, Houston today (on the news broadcasts today anyway). You have to look really hard to see someone not wearing a mask. How come at the peak in April I never saw anyone wearing a mask but now? It’s absolutely bizarre and mind-boggling. If you read enough on this site then surely you’d be asking, why the hell are everyone wearing masks?
Because, as with so much else, it’s nothing about reality and all about propaganda manipulation and virtue signalling, with both the coronapanic and the BLM lies. Two symptoms of the same underlying pathologies.
Agree Mark. All we need is a ‘witty’ hashtag along the lines of MeToo, BLM or NHS heroes and these whoppers will be on the bandwagon in no time. Might I suggest #kairoticmoment 🤟🏻
To conceal their identity?
I’ve just ventured into the Daily Mirror – for the first and probably last time. (In my defence, I was trying to get a range of reports on the daily briefing.)
This is what I found there, written TODAY!
Coronavirus: Up to 40% of cases caused by those who have no symptoms, WHO says
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-patients-most-infectious-first-22163391
Didnt I hear the opposite to this that those who have no symptons dont spread the virus, confused now.
Yes. That’s what the WHO report actually said.
Let’s face it, the WHO says one thing one day, the opposite the next.
Everyone needs to stop listening and just get on with their lives.
This of course also means we’ll have to stop listening to our media and governments.
My point being that the Mirror has reported the exact opposite what the WHO said. Why would they be so out of step with the rest of the MSM?
Oh I thought you meant the WHO had changed their minds!
Lol see, I don’t know what’s real any more, especially coming from them
Another U-turn..
Sorry for causing confusion. My point was that the Mirror chose to write the exact opposite of what all the other papers reported.
‘… this Imperial College model takes for granted an essentially communist worldview in which the masses must be directed by central planners.’
Yes, you’ve nailed it there Toby. And we are now, almost unbelievably, experiencing what it is like to live in a communist state.
Two criticisms on your article, however:
1. You’ve been too kind to Imperial.
2. You’ve been too kind to the BBC.
A third more minor criticism: had ‘governments around the world do[ne] nothing in response to the pandemic’ I suspect things would have worked out a lot better than they have with the lockdowns, even in terms of covid-19, let alone wider general health.
Many thanks for taking the time to do this update though.
Totalitarianism maybe, communism no
For now, when the economy has finished collapsing as a consequence of totalitarianism they might try communism too
In practice they are the same thing.
Not really, there have been plenty of totalitarians who weren’t communist. There have also been communist thinkers who didn’t approve of totalitarianism, although totalitarianism always arose when thoughts came up against hard facts when someone tried to make those communist fantasies a reality.
Yes Toby you nailed it. Here in New Zealand our leader used to be president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. Lockdown was Big Brother heaven for her.
Why do lefty leaders think the masses they supposedly idolise are all dumb? The masses are in fact brighter than them. The BLM masses, I think all knew lockdown is a joke.
“The latest information is that the lockdown was unnecessary. In fact, not only was it unnecessary but it turns out that locking people in their homes was exactly the wrong thing to do. A study of almost 800 people shows that the higher your vitamin D status the less the coronavirus will affect you. Get enough sun, the data suggests, and you simply cannot die of the coronavirus.
World health authorities really got it wrong and unbelievably, they got the entire human race to listen to them. Recommending the exact opposite of what was needed, to step into the sun everyday and take D3 supplements and even get D injections would have represented intelligent medicine. We do not need a coronavirus vaccine, we already have one except its not a vaccine. If you want to inject something inject vitamin D.
This is the mostly costly mistake in history costing tens of trillions, destroying millions of small and mid-size businesses, and effecting hundreds of millions of lives. It has literally put hunger in bellies so you can start there with your measurements of suffering.”
https://drsircus.com/general/shining-the-light-on-unnecessary-quarantines/
Toby, don’t know how to contact LS but here is a must see (updated today)
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Excellent!
Great link
Point 17. There is also no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in healthy or asymptomaticindividuals. On the contrary, experts warn that such masks interfere with normal breathing and may become “germ carriers”. Leading doctors called them a “media hype” and “ridiculous”.
..and designed to keep the fear alive….
Thank you.
(Newbies to the site, click on June 2020 to get to the updated stuff.)
You’d think that even a government minister, as well as an an averagely intelligent ten-year-okd, should be able to understand this.
However…
‘Due to its rather low lethality, Covid-19 falls at most into level 2 of the five-level pandemic plandeveloped by the US health authorities. For this level, only the “voluntary isolation of sick people”is to be applied, while further measures such as face masks, school closings, distance rules, contact tracing, vaccinations and lockdowns of entire societies are not recommended.’
Exactly!!!!!!
Didn’t know about this group: ‘Despite this evidence, a group called “masks4all”, which was founded by a “young leader” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Davos, is advocating worldwide mask requirements. Several governments and the WHO appear to be responding to this campaign.’
The masks on the team’s faces have been photoshopped. The b*st*rds.
Great article by PROF KAROL SIKORA ‘Our Covid daily death toll is tragic but nowhere near up-to-date – this is the truth behind the Grim Reaper graphs’
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11812916/professor-karol-sikora-covid-daily-deaths-graphs/
“The UK’s archaic system for reporting deaths means there’s a significant delay between a patient’s last breaths and the moment their demise is registered. Sometimes, it takes six weeks.
In reality, even the Government has no idea how many fatalities occurred ‘yesterday’.
That knowledge takes time.
British epidemiologists are very gloomy about this – though they are fairly gloomy people at the best of times! They say a second wave of infection is inevitable, bringing further deaths and grief.
My personal view is, it’s unlikely.”
My view on a second wave is that it is possible, we just haven’t a clue if this virus will do it. Some viruses have, some haven’t. We haven’t reached the levels of widespread infection we expect to need to get herd immunity, but the virus is mysteriously not spiking up as illegal estrictions are relaxed, so maybe there is an “epidemiological dark matter” factor meaning that the spread is over. Either way, second wave, third wave or no more waves, I want to try to live during them, not simply cower. I’ll take my chances, if I catch it, if I haven’t already had immunity from an asymptomatic case, sooner than accept continued oppression “for my own good”.
Just listening to the pheasant link. Encouraging to hear a bit of scepticism creeping into the Beeb!
I saw a piece on the BBC this morning. Hancock and that swivel eyed green loon Caroline Lucas urging people not to go to the beach because of the (manufactured) second spike that it may, may not, could cause. Not once were they questioned about the possibility of a second spike due to the gatherings of thousands of people across our cities in the name of BLM.Utterly shameful
People have been crowding the beaches for weeks and no ‘spike’.
Only health risk is from indiscriminate defecation.
Not sure it’s indiscriminate. Desperate though, for certain – and maybe with some spite aimed at the local authority.
This video has been pulling apart Caroline Lucas’ bleating about a “second wave”. Comments have been scathing of the lockdown and antisocial distancing too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK7lI4QVrTA
And typical!
Surely the most glaring flaw in the Imperial model results is simply that for those ‘millions’ of lives actually to be saved we must stay in lockdown until either a vaccine becomes available or the virus gets bored and goes away of its own accord.
As Johnson’s hero said:
‘… if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’
Yes, they offered and offer no viable exit strategy, and the government didn’t and don’t have one either. They didn’t make a secret of it, but they didn’t make it overly clear either. People ought to have been paying more attention.
There is no real exit strategy because the virus is no longer the threat. The threat is the R number going up, the possibility of a second wave or everyone passing on the virus to vulnerable people.
Take away the virus and the other threats still remain. Yes it really is that dumb.
That is so true. The virus disappears tomorrow, nobody cares, because…. IT COULD BE BACK!
And when we all eventually die in penury and/or of health issues that can’t be remedied because of the huge backlogue created by covid ‘distancing’ insanity, they will smile, fold their arms across their chests, and say, with unctuous satisfaction, “The case numbers are *almost zero.”
Anyone working in dentistry know how accurate this is or how much is satire? Anyone had any contact with a dentist in the last ten weeks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lsv793gH4I&t=721s
This is what my dentist sent me last week:
https://www.portmandentalcare.com/dental-articles/new-patient-journey
I think they are all doing that – mine are anyway. And putting the prices up (covid-19 supplement). And not actually offering “routine” treatments yet, only urgent stuff.
Oh, it’s a “journey” is it? LOL!
You couldn’t make it up, unless following the mandate of a bunch of nutjobs.
The fact that they call it a “journey” made me laugh. Whoever thought of this must have a sense of humour.
At least patients won’t have to wear muzzles.
However what will they do if its chucking it down with rain?
Masks are provided, so presumably mandatory.
Gawd….didn’t see that. Oh dear….
Eh? How is that supposed to work at the dentist?
“Journey” is a euphemism. They’ll have paid someone a fortune to come up with that gem.
She said:
Son what are you doing here?
My fear for you has turned me in my grave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUUdQfnshJ4
Look out world
Take a good look what comes down here
You must learn these lesson fast and learn it well.
Thank you. So the link wasn’t satire. Jesus H Coronavirus. Whoever thought those precautions up must be seriously mentally ill.
Vernon Coleman used to be satirical but nowadays he is obviously just really pissed off.
Still brilliant though!
They are gonna lose literally millions in regular check-up fees. Who in there right mind is gonna go to the dentist just for a check-up if they have to go through this rigmarole?
I know I’m not going anywhere near unless a tooth is sending me to the next level pain threshold
I had a hygienist appointment booked (private dentist in England), and am pleased that here, in Wales, we are still locked up, so I was able to decline what would have been a very expensive procedure.
I’m due for a check up this month but even before lockdown I was warned that I’m under the list for non-essential work so I reckon I won’t see my dentist until later in the year.
The backlog is so great that the madness will hopefully have evaporated before we can get an appointment. That or the dentists will have evaporated first.
State of New York publishes data on comorbidities as well on their covid-tracking page here https://covid19tracker.health.ny.gov/views/NYS-COVID19-Tracker/NYSDOHCOVID-19Tracker-Fatalities?%3Aembed=yes&%3Atoolbar=no&%3Atabs=n.
I noticed this same trend back in early April and it’s held constant ever since. Around 90% of all deaths had at least 1. Also consistent with the Off-Guardian story the sum of the top 10 is about 43K divided by 24K deaths is about 1.75 comorbidities per death. Since that’s only the top 10 the number is likely much closer to 2. I’m sure we can all draw our own conclusions as to what that means about most of the deaths observed.
I’d guess the story is the exact same in any state / country you look at. The issue is that, at least in the US, the data each state publishes is so different and non-transparent it’s hard to make many conclusions about an individual state.
P.S. Thanks Toby for all you do. Been enjoying and agreeing for months now. Cheers from Iowa.
Good article in The Telegraph. Comments have the air of increasing exasperation. Many people talking about writing to their MPs. People are really starting to worry about where we are heading as a nation.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/national-scandal-children-will-soon-able-go-thorpe-park-not/
Definately think there will be civil unrest and riots before the end of the year if this continues .much longer .
It’s already happening – I refuse to believe that the riots we are seeing in London are purely because people feel so strongly about the death of one man 4000 miles away.
Yep. 10% ‘genuine’ protestors, 90% angry, bored, self-righteous young people.
I think you’re right. BLM is fast being the excuse and seen as a “safe way” to protest against the effects of lockdown and antisocial distancing.
Great piece. She says, in the comments, that the Torygraph is starting a schools campaign tomorrow. The tide turns …..
It is mad that zoos and pubs are open but not schools..
Episode 9 of Perspectives on the Pandemic by Journeyman Pictures is up
https://youtu.be/UIDsKdeFOmQ
this episode is with a undercover nurse who has hidden camera footage of a hospital in New York. I’m only 15 minutes into it and my mouth has hit the ground in shock.
It’s in my watch later. Can’t wait
Better be quick – it looks like the sort of thing youtube will remove!
That’s too depressing to watch any more
I managed half. Sickening stuff.
That was one of the most disturbing videos I have ever seen. Truly and utterly shocking. They cannot get away with this.
OK I watched. Holy Christ on a bike.
Who needs population control when you have greedy mutherfuckers trying to milk a buck out of a flu bug.
Is anyone else wishing science would stop being relative and actually produce some facts again?
There’s too much science. Anyone can find evidence to back up their entrenched views
Evidence which may not actually be reliable, hence relativity.
We all know it’s the case that many real facts can be harmful to certain political goals and ideas, whereas the scanty evidence used to back up many politically useful ‘facts’ is in fact, horseshit.
Don’t worry, Neil’s models are always accurate. In the same way a broken watch is twice a day.
Joking aside, these type of models should not be used in the way he uses them.
Is anybody wishing so-called journalists would stop using the word ‘so’ as an accusative.
So, you call yourselves journalists?
Thanks Toby for a superb entry today, and I have noted Sunetra Gupta being allowed more airtime. Today, I went into London on the train to run errands, professional and personal. I went on GWR, bought a off-peak open return. They do try and insist on you making a seat reservation on a specific train if you’re getting on a ‘fast’ train but on-board I saw no evidence of this being enforced as of yet, indeed I didn’t take my ‘booked’ service back. I believe LNER and Avanti are more strict. I decided to wear a Hancock conformity muzzle i.e. a mask. Good grief, it was uncomfortable even on a shortish journey on GWR and the tube. That brings me to another thing. Of all the TfL and GWR staff I saw, a minority (and I mean under 10%) were wearing masks. Nor were any of the police I saw at Paddington. I find this quite funny given their unions were in the vanguard of enforcing this on passengers !!?? I don’t wish to criticise the staff who were very cheerful, but still. On that note, hardly any passengers on either company were masked. This … is going… Read more »
The fact that antisocial distancing isn’t really enforced especially after the BLM marches is probably a pointer that the muzzles won’t be either. Maybe during the first week but as people get tired of this sort of thing not to mention seeing the return of old problems with transport – signalling problems especially. Add rainfall and “customer incidents” (euphemism for anything and everything under the sun which includes suicides) will render the whole idea of antisocial distancing and muzzle wearing moot and academic.
Yes, I do get a sense that we’re being left to ‘get on with it’
“Left to get on with it” was life before week commencing 16th March. I refuse to be grateful that the police aren’t actual bothering to enforce stupid laws
Even many of the shops that are open aren’t all that bothered as well. I was in a cafe this afternoon buying a latte – there was a sign that said only 3 people allowed at any given time but there were five of us and no one from the staff told us off.
Hopefully smaller places will get away with more, and feel they can get away with more.
Agree. That said that cafe I went to was part of a chain – not as big as Starbucks or Costa though, I get the feeling that management are simply paying lip service and they’re not really bothering to enforce everything – shame they couldn’t open their toilets but at least we were being treated like proper human beings not potential disease carriers.
Well done. Am planning to write to my MP again about toilets, have not heard anything from him about my first email but will write him a second and third one….
Vernon Coleman on closing loos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwMxd13q8SQ
Thanks for that Cheezilla – gave me more idea for my email to my MP.
Go for it Bart!
Good luck with that I’ve sent 5 emails and received a bland reply to just one which says very little but is following the government line.
I haven’t received a reply from the one I sent last week. Never again will I vote for him.
Nice one kh1485
Bart S – I agree, I suspect a lot of this stuff won’t last contact with reality. In fact in some of our big cities I imagine enforcement of these ludicrous rules might actually trigger major disorder in itself. This does raise a long term issue with lockdown/SD rules though – if they are bad rules held in contempt by the population, surely that is an issue for governments and their respectability in the long term? Interesting to see how this pans out, but I would say SD and rump lockdown has been getting ignored for the last month at least..
Agree. If TFL try to enforce the rules especially when its raining or during a signal failure, we could end up with something like what happened in Canning Town where the ordinary working people having had enough of middle class Extinction Rebellion protesters stopping them from going to work forced the protesters down from the trains and beat them up.
There’s also the issue of lockdown and antisocial distancing rules causing more businesses to close and unemployment to soar – if anything that’s what the government will have to face at some point.
On behalf any menstrual customers or those with prostate problems, bless you!
And indeed, anyone in possession of a bladder and/or bowels.
Isn’t there some bylaw that insists services like toilets should be made available ?
Q: Does a cafe have to have a toilet UK?
A:The correct answer, according to section 20 of the 1976 Local Government MIscellaneous Provisions Act, is that toilets should be provided if food and drink is being sold for consumption on the premises.18 May 2016
and
According to a long-standing law—Section 20 of the 1976 Local Government Miscellaneous Provisions Act, to be exact—restaurants with ten seats or more in Britain must provide bathrooms for their customers.19 May 2016
Interestingly, I can’t find anything recent about it, so nt sure if the CV act is applicable?
If anyone ‘tells me off’ they’ll get a bloody earful. I’m not at school.
Exactly. I’ll just walk away and never return. Thankfully that hasn’t happened yet.
We should vote with our feet and our wallets when we can. A tough ask if you rely on public transport, or risk the sack from work for non-compliance, or you are a school pupil or university student. The bodies supposedly looking after the rights or welfare of those groups (unions, passenger organisations etc.) are likely to ask for more rules, not fewer.
Hence why I will be boycotting shops that require antisocial distancing and masks, will not be using public transport from the 15th (will have to rely on general intelligence) and when I did a survey for an orchestra I told them in no uncertain terms that I won’t book for any concerts if they force me to social distance and wear a mask for 2 1/2 hours!
Worth mentioning that, except for private premises, ‘social distancing’ is not enforceable.
Well, on National Rail I suppose they could add it to the National Rail Conditions of Travel but have probably been too lazy. I think TFL has byelaws too, which again I suspect they have been too lazy to amend.
How it will be enforced is not by imposing it on the general public but on businesses and venues as part of heath and safety.
I’ve told my boss I won’t be wearing a mask when/if we go back to the office.
I can’t begin to imagine why the government would sanction offices reopening if the staff can work from home. I am assuming our office will be closed for a very very long time – probably until the “new normal” disintegrates.
Good for you. We have human rights too.
There lies the problem!
“Alert Level 2”!! Is that the same as Defcon 1?
Sorry for the cheap joke. “ sometime between October this year, and March next year…… My heart sinks….” I sincerely feel for you. What business are you in?
Science, in the public sector/academia. We are currently alert level 4 (I think 5 is asteroid strike or something like that and only operations people and security on site). Level 3 allows us to have .. possibly .. 10 people (maybe!) in each building. Subject to full risk and method statement. Level 2 is relative normality but the laugh is no-one seems to know what this will mean.
Which area of the country is that publis sector/academia (asuming this probably means a Uni research dept) in. I’m a researcher trying to force mine to regain sanity and reopen, crazed health and safety nutters in manglement have a perverse obsession with this stupid virus though, despite the fact that everyone in my building is under 40 and in good health. Would love to make contact with other academics who want to force a reopening, would be even better if we were at the same place, allies we never knew we had.
Do you belong to a union by any chance, is it them insisting on these rules?
Bella – I am in Prospect and they are mouthing off about various things but they’re not a big force on site. I wish they would stick to sorting out the pay deal.
James – I am in the Thames Valley area in a big science campus. Talking to other labs and universities, there is a lot of variation. Some unis are starting back already with social distancing measures that seem designed to be ignored (i.e get on with it), other places are being very risk averse, including my site. Interestingly, most of our private sector clients i.e. chemical/pharmaceutical companies are back in work and in many cases worked through this crisis. We were musing this morning in fact on one of the dreaded Zoom meetings that we will probably be allowed to get on a fully loaded O’Leary budget skybus before we are allowed back to work.
As the situation becomes clearer I will try and put together a list of collaborator unis who have been allowed to open and will keep the board updated. It seems to depend on the clout of the PI and whether research is grant funded or has funded synchrotron/neutron/accelerator access.
Interesting that this headline says “because of the lockdown” not “because of Covid 19”:
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/staff-tower-london-hampton-court-18384634?fbclid=IwAR1xQk0BQURW4vUoM3j24kY9SVBQKCVVbAQdPcKW88wASd_uYHWRJNOBy5Y
Could it be that the tide is turning?
I hope so!
I spend so much time shouting at my poor, undeserving laptop: “It not caused by the virus, idiot, it’s caused by the lockdown!”
Thanks for the update Toby – I wasn’t expecting one today so it was a nice surprise. I sometimes take artist commissions in my spare time, and yours and James Delingpole’s London Calling podcast is one of the things I listen to while I draw. I feel like the tide is definitely turning with the public now. I see fewer lockdownista comments on social media now and the MSM are slowly starting to cotton on. It’s finally happening. As I commented below in a reply to another post, I refuse to believe that people are rioting in London purely because they feel so strongly about the death of one man 4000 miles away. People are bored and restless of being locked up for so long, unable to do anything or see anyone in any meaningful way. The last 12 weeks (ffs has it been that long already?!) have been a pressure cooker, heated up by the hot weather, the indefiniteness of the restrictions giving a perpetual and unbearable sense of entrapment, and the MSM stoking the fire with fear whenever it can. Young people seem to make up most of the riots and I imagine that a lot of… Read more »
Yes indeed. We can each play our part by trying to nudge our fellow citizens in the direction of being a bit less trusting of what they are told, and more rational.
Do it. Do it.
I wish it were only to ‘save their careers’ but you don’t exhibit utterly cruel (with you there) behaviour – which will backfire politically – if they thought you’d be depending on the ballot box in the future. I think this is a power grab (or about to be one). The Tories have lost a lot of their main stream support and the left (from which I am now officially lapsed), despite their lockdown zealotry, would never vote Tory. They must know they have lost the confidence of a sizeable majority and each measure they take makes that worse. I read somewhere (could have been here) that the military were mounting road blocks in Wales and turning cars back. Pretty soon we’ll have a state of emergency. And only yesterday I was saying I felt it in my bones that the tide was turning. Not so much now.
‘…if you thought you’d be depending…’ With everyone who says this forum badly needs an edit button.
But I did see this piece on the BBC this morning. Hancock and that swivel eyed green loon Caroline Lucas urging people not to go to the beach because of the (manufactured) second spike that it may, may not, could cause. Not once were they questioned about the possibility of a second spike due to the gatherings of thousands of people across our cities in the name of BLM.Utterly shameful
Poppy, I’ve said before that you would make the most wonderful stateswoman. That is increasingly evident. But even if you choose to take a different path, I hope that the politics of the future will have people like you at the helm, with genuine insight and integrity.
I too am so pleased that Toby has decided to update every day. Once again the news today has left me angry, frustrated and feeling completely helpless to change anything. I watch in disbelieve as the government continues to trash our basic rights to live a full and active life whilst it threatens individuals and small and struggling businesses with the most dire consequences if they, or we, fail to comply with increasingly absurd legislation. Today we have also heard that schools won’t be returning until September ‘at the earliest’. Of all of the crimes committed in the name of stopping the virus this must be the greatest. Young children, not able to hold each other, hug and play normally. Older children, like my son in year 7, denied an education he has spent 8 years of his young life working hard to achieve. Education is reduced to a transaction – no music, no drama, no interaction with others, no sport. A year when he should be spreading his wings and developing his independence stuck at home in front of a screen trying to remain motivated and increasingly constrained by my inability to help. It is a crime. … Read more »
Yes it’s insane.
I think the tide is beginning to turn, but we need to try and plug away at it. The government followed what they perceive public opinion is. Gradually more and more people will realise the error that has been made, and we must help them see this error.
I really hope that the tide is beginning to turn, part of me feels that it is and I agree, we do need to keep plugging away at it.
I share your anger and desperation completely. Husband wrote in very direct (he is from Yorkshire!) terms to CCHQ last week. The Telegraph is bubbling over with anger – see the comments on Allison Pearson’s article:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/national-scandal-children-will-soon-able-go-thorpe-park-not/
And the headline in tomorrow’s paper is:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/09/school-age-children-likely-hit-lightning-die-coronavirus-oxbridge/
And, incidentally, uf you look at the mortality risk at the other end if life’s span, at ninety plus, when the Grim Reaper us almost certainly fingering his scythe anyway, it is one in FIFTY-FIVE.
And why can’t children go to school AND to Thorpe Park?
And the zoos, they are in desperate need of visitors too. Every day that this continues more and more problems are brought to light. Here in my market town one of our stores will not now be reopening which is a damned shame, they had worked hard to modernise the building when the new owners took over introducing new stock manufactured in England, giving a lifeline to small industry in rural areas.
I posted an article somewhere here where Historic Royal Palaces are considering redundancies as they’ve lost a lot of income due to the lockdown.
I hope they’re blaming the lockdown and not the virus. That’s the only way the message will start to sink in to some skulls.
I feel exactly the same, reading it in black and white makes me feel sick and powerless like you. Why won’t teachers stand up for the rights of children? Why won’t anyone? My daughter has been at home alone 5/6 days a week since the beginning, I don’t think she can take much more. Everything has stopped, no music, no riding, no drama club, nothing but entirely non interactive e learning. I don’t know how she’s doing it. Why it’s safe for me to work but not teachers I just don’t understand, with so little evidence that children are at risk or pose a risk why must they be so marginalised? I wrote to my mp, he feels I am completely wrong and supports continued closure and impossible to implement distancing measures in schools. He doesn’t have children and being a Labour man doesn’t care about the poor.
“ Why won’t teachers stand up for the rights of children? ”
Easy. The unions are all left wing zealots with the only goal of opposing the conservative government. Most teachers are also raving lefties.
Off work getting paid.
If the public sector workers were restricted to no/reduced pay this would have been over yonks ago
Yes, I fear you’re right. Both our neighbours are teachers at my daughters school, she can see them sunbathing from her desk….
That can’t be right. I have a friend who is a teacher and she tells me they’ve been hard at it and need their summer holidays. I’m not joking. That’s what she said.
She’s full of shit and must be challenged.
The situation is untenable.
I spent a day exchanging texts with her. Got nowhere.
I think it’s all or nothing.
It’s not unusual for the conscientious to carry the skivers.
I agree, that threatening a pay cut would probably help them think more creatively.
The unions are infiltrated at the highest level.
That’s why theyre acting in this manner.
What kind of union would actively STOP their members from working?
One whose workers are paid for not working?
It’s being used as a political weapon by the Left, Boris is a coward and too weak to stand up to them, that applies to BLM too. This is the most disasterous government ever.
Something has been bugging me I know people poo hoo conspiracies but right at the start of this farce my niece who lives in Portugal told me her childrens schools wouldn’t reopen until September. I thought it was a bit drastic particularly as no one supposedly knew that much about the virus at the time. Now we seem to be following that path. Should I remove my tin foil hat?
No!
Keep it, they’ll be collector’s items soon.
The Telegraph has just started working on it. Not seen the TImes. Damned paywalls!
There’s been a lot of discussion about the poor quality code in Ferguson’s model, but the epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski pointed out that Ferguson hadn’t really used it. He’d come up with his 510,000 deaths based on 80% of the population being infected with a 1% IFR. Back of a fag packet stuff really. Ferguson probably ran his model a dozen times as well and got an average figure somewhere near this, then split the difference. Trebles all round and a knighthood when the dust has settled.
He claims to have saved 3.1 million deaths when in reality he’s caused countless thousands of unnecessary deaths and unimaginable suffering, as the fallout is only just beginning.
The government won’t survive this. Tory voters don’t vote for a donkey with a blue rosette. We’re not like the other lot. We’ll abstain, drift further right maybe, and I’m fine with letting in a Labour government now. It’d be worse for sure, but I’m past caring. The supine nature of our people disgusts me.
Tory voters don’t vote for a donkey with a blue rosette.
Really?
Did you watch his performance during the election campaign? He made no attempt to hide the fact that he’s a lightweight, lying buffoon.