Lockdown is over as far as the British public is concerned. At least, it is when it’s the hottest day of the year with temperatures peaking at 33.3C, as they did today. Half a million people descended on the Dorset coastline, according to the Times, creating a “major incident”.
The council said it had issued 558 parking fines in 24 hours and dealt with congested roads into the early hours this morning. With campsites still closed, large numbers of people pitched camp illegally.
In the area between Bournemouth’s piers eight tonnes of waste were collected yesterday on the second collection run of the day. This morning, a further 33 tonnes of waste were removed along the full stretch of coastline.
The Daily Mail has more.
A major incident was declared in Bournemouth today after thousands of people flocked to Britain’s beaches, leaving the emergency services “stretched to the absolute hilt” on the second hottest day of the year in a row.
Furious council bosses said they were “appalled” at the scenes on the Dorset coast, blasting the “irresponsible behaviour and actions of so many people” as temperatures hit 91.9F (33.3C) in southern England this afternoon.
Police desperately urged people to “stay away” and “think twice before heading to the area”, while Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council said 558 parking enforcement fines had been issued – the highest on record.
There’s an easy solution to this chaos, Boris.
Abandon the ridiculous, completely pointless policy of forcing people who return from holidays abroad to quarantine themselves for two weeks.
Victory for Stu Peters
The Free Speech Union has scored a significant victory. At the beginning of the month, Stu Peters, a Manx Radio presenter, got into a heated discussion with a caller on a late-night phone-in show about the BLM protests in which he challenged the idea that he’d received special treatment because of the colour of his skin. The following day, the Isle of Man Creamery withdrew its sponsorship of his show and Manx Radio suspended him and referred the matter to the Communications Commission, the IOM equivalent of Ofcom.
Stu is a member of the Free Speech Union and we wrote to the Commission, pointing out that he was simply exercising his right to free speech, as enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and nothing he said could be construed as remotely racist. (You can read that letter here.) We concluded by asking the Commission to exonerate him.
Well, yesterday the Commission did precisely that. You can read the full decision notice here, but the gist of it is that Stu didn’t breach the IOM’s Programme Code. After examining all the evidence, the regulator said: “Whilst issues surrounding race can be an emotive matter, the debate in question was conducted in a fair and measured way, and for the most part, in a calm and open manner.”
The Commission noted that some of the language in the show – such as a caller using the word “coloured”, which Stu didn’t correct – was “insensitive”. But this wasn’t a reason to reprimand the presenter.
This must also be balanced against the provisions for freedom of expression in both the Code and the relevant Human Rights legislation which is clear that people are free to hold and express opinion without interference by public authority regardless of frontiers.
Ofcom, take note.
Chalk this one up to common sense. But there are many more battles to be fought in the War against Cancel Culture so please do contribute to the Free Speech Union’s Litigation Fund so we can stand up for people’s speech rights in the court.
Unlocked
A new organisation has been launched this week called Unlocked. It’s a group of people from all walks of life – some of them ex-Brexit Party MEPs, but it’s a broad church – who want life to return to normal as soon as possible.
Here’s what it says on the website:
It’s year zero. Not since the second world war have we faced a crisis like Covid-19 and the lockdown. From businesses that can’t open, to farmers who can’t bring in the harvest, from care-workers on zero hours contracts, to doctors who can’t get PPE. Share your big problem with us, so we can reach out to the country for pioneering solutions that unlock the UK’s potential.
I’ve a feeling we’re going to be hearing a lot more from this group. Sign-up here to get on board early.
It’s Vanished Into Air. Into Thin Air
I’ve got a piece in the Telegraph today predicting there will be no “second wave”. To be honest, I’m doubtful there’s been a “first wave” – all-cause mortality was only 7.3% above the five-year average in the w/e June 5th and it remains to be seen whether total deaths in 2020 will be above the five-year average. But, as Michael Levitt has pointed out, no one’s reputation suffers if they overestimate the death toll from a new virus (just look at Neil Ferguson); they only get pilloried if they underestimate it. So if even one person dies from COVID-19 in October, I expect George Monbiot will link to this article and demand that I be kicked out of the Honourable Company of Journalists. (Not that there is such a thing – but if there was I would surely have been kicked out already).
Here are the first four paragraphs:
Across the United Kingdom, epidemiologists, public health officials and local bureaucrats are stamping their feet and gnashing their teeth. They’re furious about the fact that daily deaths from COVID-19 are continuing to decline at a precipitous rate. Contrary to their dire warnings, the easing of lockdown restrictions hasn’t led to an uptick in the rate of infection. The much ballyhooed ‘second spike’ has refused to materialise. The virus has all but disappeared.
The extent to which COVID-19 has vanished isn’t immediately apparent from the figures. The death tolls announced each day refer to all those deaths involving coronavirus that have been ‘registered’ in the last 24 hours. That includes people who died weeks ago – sometimes months ago – but whose paperwork has only just been completed. If you look instead at the number of actual deaths in English hospitals in the last 24 hours, that gives a clearer picture. The number on June 23 was four – all in the north west. Fewer than 20 died in London hospitals in the past week. No one died on Tuesday.
The number of deaths involving coronavirus is a better yardstick than the number of infections, partly because more and more people are being tested each day, and partly because the test itself isn’t very reliable. There is a gold-plated antibody test you can have done by a company called Pyser that employs ex-Army medics and operates out of the Honourable Artillery Company in the City of London. I took one last week and tested positive.
But the PCR test – which tells you whether you’ve got it, not whether you’ve had it – throws up a lot of false positives. To give you an idea of how unreliable it is, take this announcement by Norway’s Institute of Public health last month. “Given today’s contagion situation in Norway, health professionals must test around 12,000 random people to find one positive case of Covid-19,” it said. “In such a selection, there will be about 15 positive test responses, but 14 of these will be false positives.”
Worth reading in full, obviously.
More Evidence That There’s no ‘Second Wave’
In case there’s any doubt about the easing of lockdown restrictions not leading to a second wave, I’m publishing an update today by Dr Rudolph Kalveks, the theoretical physicist who crunched the Covid data for us last week. He’s looked at the data for the last couple of weeks and reached the same conclusion as me: no second wave.
In conclusion, although the epidemics are obviously further progressed, over the last two weeks there has been no signal for any material change in the shape of the epidemic SIR model curves in Europe, the USA and Australia. Thus, the relaxation of lockdowns (well documented elsewhere) has so far had no discernible impact on the recovery from the epidemic in these countries.
This undermines the analysis by Flaxman et al (published June 8th in Nature) that continues to predict a tenfold increase in the population at risk from the relaxation of lockdown restrictions.
Worth reading in full.
Two Critiques of the Flaxman et al Paper in Nature
I’m able to bring you not one but two critiques of the Flaxman et al in Nature – the June 8th paper by Imperial College’s modelling team claiming the lockdowns in 11 Europe countries (including, weirdly, Sweden) had saved three million lives. This is the paper I blogged about here and here a couple of weeks ago.
First off is this critique by the independent researcher Nic Lewis. It’s quite dense and not readily accessible to non-specialists, but it looks pretty devastating to my layman’s eye. Here is his conclusion:
First and foremost, the failure of Flaxman et al.’s model to consider other possible causes apart from NPI of the large reductions in COVID-19 transmission that have occurred makes it conclusions as to the overall effect of NPI unscientific and unsupportable. That is because the model is bound to find that NPI together account for the entire reduction in transmission that has evidently occurred.
Secondly, their finding that almost all the large reductions in transmission that the model infers occurred were due to lockdowns, with other interventions having almost no effect, has been shown to be unsupportable, for two reasons:
* the prior distribution that they used for the strength of NPI effects is hugely biased towards finding that most interventions had essentially zero effect on transmission, with almost the entire reduction being caused by just one or two NPI.
* the relative strength of different interventions inferred by the model is extremely sensitive to the assumptions made regarding the average delay from infection to death, and to a lesser extent to whether self isolation and social distancing are taken to exert their full strength immediately upon implementation or are phased in over a few days.
It seems likely that the inferred relative strengths of the various NPIs are also highly sensitive to other assumptions made by Flaxman et al., and to structural features of their model. For instance, their assumption that the effect of different interventions on transmission is multiplicative rather than additive will have affected the estimated relative strengths of different types of NPI, maybe substantially so. The basic problem is that simply knowing the dates of implementation of the various NPI in each country does not provide sufficient information to enable robust estimation of their relative effects on transmission, given the many sources of uncertainty and the differences in multiple regards between the various countries.
Critique number two is by two German academics, Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner – “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020, Nature: The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe“.
This one is a bit more accessible. Here’s the introductory paragraph:
Flaxman et al. infer that non-pharmaceutical interventions conducted by several European countries considerably reduced effective reproduction numbers and saved millions of lives. We show that their method is ill-conceived and that the alleged effects are artefacts. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.
Here’s what they have to say about Sweden (which is more or less what I said in my second critique of the paper):
Our final remark regards Sweden, the only country in the dataset that refrained from strong measures, but has lower corona deaths per capita than Belgium, Italy, Spain, or the United Kingdom. In the absence of a lockdown, but with an effective reproduction number that declined in the usual fashion, Flaxman et al. attribute the sudden decline in Sweden’s R(t) on March 27th almost entirely to banning of public events, i.e., to a NPI that they found ineffective in all other countries. This inconsistency underlines our contention that the results of Flaxman et al. are artefacts of an inappropriate model.
Both Lewis’s critique and the Homburgl/Kuhbandner comment are worth reading in full.
Searing, Merciless Critique of Lockdowns
A reader has flagged up a brilliant paper by Carlo Caduff, an academic at King’s College London, in a journal called Medical Anthropology Quarterly. It’s entitled “What Went Wrong: Corona and the World After the Full Stop“. It’s a searing, merciless critique of the global lockdowns. Here’s a taster from Part III: Towards Another Politics of Life.
The story of how the Chinese approach became a model for generic lockdowns in the Global North and then exported to countries in the Global South is important to note, particularly considering the dramatic consequences for millions of people struggling to survive without any source of income. Ironically, these extremely restrictive lockdowns were sometimes demanded by people eager to criticize the authoritarianism of the Chinese state. Across the world, the pandemic unleashed authoritarian longings in democratic societies allowing governments to seize the opportunity, create states of exception and push political agendas. Commentators have presented the pandemic as a chance for the West to learn authoritarianism from the East. This pandemic risks teaching people to love power and call for its meticulous application.
As a result of the unforeseeable social, political and economic consequences of today’s sweeping measures, governments across the world have launched record “stimulus” bills costing trillions of dollars, pounds, pesos, rand and rupees. Earmarked predominantly for individuals and businesses, these historic emergency relief bills are pumping staggering amounts of money into the economy, but ironically they are not intended to strengthen the public health infrastructure or improve medical care. The trillions that governments are spending now as “stimulus” packages surpass even those of the 2008 financial crisis and will need to be paid for somehow. Today there is a massive global recession in the making. If austerity policies of the past are at the root of the current crisis with overwhelmed healthcare systems in some countries, the rapidly rising public debt is creating the perfect conditions for more austerity in the future. The pandemic response will have major implications for the public funding of education, welfare, social security, environment and health in the future.
If you think something good will come out of this crisis, you should think again.
New Essay by by Guy de la Bédoyère
Our old friend Guy de la Bédoyère has written a new essay for Lockdown Sceptics. Entitled “The False Choice“, it nails the lie that we have to choose between saving lives and saving the economy, between people and profits. As Guy points out, the two are completely co-dependent and not in any sense in opposition to each other.
Most people in Britain seem to have forgotten that the NHS only exists because we have, or had, one of the largest economies in the world. Without a thriving economy the future can only be one of unemployment, destitution, deprivation and want. And we all know what catastrophic health consequences of all those would be.
The reality is that if we tell ourselves to prevent the so-called second wave at all costs, by extending the destructive effects of the lockdown further and for longer, then the health and economic crisis that will follow and echo down for generations, not just here but across the world, will be one we will be far less able to do anything about. Most people in Britain seem to have forgotten that the NHS only exists because we have, or had, one of the largest economies in the world. Without a thriving economy the future can only be one of unemployment, destitution, deprivation and want. And we all know what catastrophic health consequences of all those would be.
That economy has enabled us not only to spare huge numbers of productive young people to work in that health service, rather than in making or generating wealth, but also to appropriate or entice others from around the world to work here with them. The result is that around 1.5 million people work in the NHS which is around three percent of the working population. To those we can add many more involved in healthcare. They spend much of their time dealing with an economically unproductive part of the population, primarily the elderly and vulnerable. Being able to do so and living in a society which values that is part of being civilized.
The same applies to education. Since 1944 there has been universal state education available in this country. It’s far from perfect but it means the vast majority of children emerge from school literate and able to take part in the social, cultural and economic life of this country. Yet, as a result of the disastrously blinkered scientific advice that has driven this crisis we have apparently been prepared to condemn a whole generation of children to compromised education and all the social, health and economic risks we know that will entail. No wonder then that in the Mirror of June 24th Polly Hudson wrote about the shameful betrayal of a generation.
Like mass education, the NHS is a fabulous luxury, a superb and enviable benefit of living in an economically powerful nation. It’s also a privilege. We are extremely fortunate to have it. But the price is massive and it means there is no point in ‘protecting the NHS’ if the result is that we end up being unable to afford it thanks to the economic Armageddon of lockdown. In the end the only way any disease is controlled is through herd immunity, gained either by letting the disease run its course or by developing a vaccine.
The choice we face is not a simplistic one between ‘health’ on one hand and ‘the economy’ on the other. By believing that it was or still is, the result has been to take this country and many others to the point where the very health crisis the lockdown was supposed to prevent is now facing us on a far larger scale. It’s time to get real and stop playing games.
Watching the Watchdog
In my Spectator column today, I’ve written about the Free Speech Union’s legal action against Ofcom. If you want chapter and verse on this, you should read Tuesday’s update on Lockdown Sceptics, but this piece summarises all the issues at stake. Here are the opening three paragraphs:
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, particularly on radio and television, that I decided to start a blog called Lockdown Sceptics. The idea was to create a platform for people who wanted to challenge the official narrative. In addition to publishing original material by Covid dissidents, many of them eminent scientists, I include links to critical papers and articles, and write daily updates commenting on the news. One of the things that puzzles the contributors is why the coverage on broadcast media has been so hopelessly one-sided.
The BBC, in particular, seems to have become a propaganda arm of the state. Normal journalistic standards have been abandoned and it just regurgitates the views of the public authorities, transmits nightly ‘death porn’ to terrify people into compliance and regularly warns its viewers and listeners about the ‘fake news’ circulating on social media. Often, something condemned as ‘misinformation’ one week — that face masks protect against infection, for instance — becomes Government policy the next, and the BBC’s phalanx of reporters all swivel by 180 degrees like a well-drilled marching band.
Much of this is down to group-think. But there’s another factor at play, which is the behaviour of Ofcom, the broadcast watchdog. It published some official guidance on March 23rd, the same day the government suspended our civil rights, and then further ‘confidential’ guidance on March 27th, advising its licensees to exercise extreme caution when broadcasting “statements that seek to question or undermine the advice of public health bodies on the corona-virus, or otherwise undermine people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources of information”. No wonder there are so few dissenting voices!
Worth reading in full.
If you want to contribute to the legal costs of this action, please donate to the Free Speech Union’s Litigation Fund.
And if you’d like to join the FSU, please click here.
Vindication at Last
Back in March, I was pilloried on Twitter and elsewhere for a piece I wrote in The Critic in which I attempted a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of the lockdown. I tried to put a financial value on the years of life that Neil Ferguson claimed the lockdown would save, using the Qaly metric employed by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, and compare that to the financial cost of the lockdown. Not surprisingly, given that the average age of those who’ve been “saved” by the lockdown is 80, I concluded that, no, it wasn’t worth it. I was then almost universally condemned for being “heartless”, “monstrous”, “inhuman”, etc.
Well, it turns out I was right – at least, according to David Miles, Mike Stedman and Adrian Heald, three economists who’ve written a paper doing exactly what I did, but in much more granular detail.
Let’s suppose that Neil Ferguson is right and the lockdown has saved 440,000 lives (the 500,000 that would have died if we’d done nothing, minus the 60,000 that have died or will die). Of course, people would have voluntarily engaged in voluntary social distancing behaviour in the “do nothing” scenario, and Ferguson et al made a string of dubious assumptions: that we are all equally susceptible, that 81% of the population would get it and 0.9% of us would die – all complete balls, obviously. But nonetheless, even if you give Professor Lockdown the benefit of the doubt, assume that each of those 440,000 people will live for a further 10 years and value those years at £30,000 each – the upper band of the Qaly estimate – that still gives a total value of the lives saved of £132 billion.
What about the other side of the equation? Even on the most conservative estimate, the UK economy will shrink 9% this year, which equals about £200 billion. So a net loss of £68 billion. And, of course, if you plug in a more realistic estimate of the number of life years saved, the net loss increases, as we can see in the table above.
Where did Ferguson get the figure of 500,000 from? Forget all the fancy modelling. If you assume 81% of the UK population (67 billion) would have got Covid absent the lockdown, that’s 54,270,000 people. And if we assume 0.9% of them will die, that gets you to 488,430. Close enough. So what happens if you take just one of Ferguson’s dodgy assumptions – that COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of 0.9% – and replace it with a more scientifically accurate one, i.e. 0.26%, which is the CDC estimate? That brings the number of people who would have got it in Ferguson’s “do nothing” scenario to 141,102. Subtract the 60,000 who’ll die even with the lockdown and that leaves 81,102 lives “saved”. If we value each of those lives at £300,000 (£30,000 x 10), that gives a total value of £24,330,600,000. So a net loss of more than £175 billion.
And, of course, that’s without factoring in the cost of all the additional collateral damage caused by the lockdown, such as children losing six months of schooling, the cancer operations postponed, the people not being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease, the rise in suicide and domestic violence, etc., etc.
Not surprisingly, the three economists conclude that the lockdown has been an absolutely catastrophic policy. Although, being academics, they put it more politely than that:
We find that the costs of lockdown in the UK are so high relative to likely benefits that a continuation of severe restrictions is very unlikely to be warranted. There is a need to normalise how we view COVID-19 because its costs and risks are comparable to other health problems (such as cancer, heart problems, diabetes) where governments have made resource decisions for decades. Treating possible future COVID-19 deaths as if nothing else matters is going to lead to bad outcomes. Good decision making does not mean paying little attention to the collateral damage that comes from responding to a worst case COVID-19 scenario.
The lockdown is a public health policy and we have valued its impact using the tools that guide health care decisions in the UK public health system. On that basis, and taking a wide range of scenarios of costs and benefits of severe restrictions, we find the lockdown consistently generates costs that are greater – and often dramatically greater – than likely benefits.
Worth reading in full.
Alistair Haimes’s Must-Read Cover Story for The Critic
Love this cover of the latest issue of the Critic. The Critic is one of the few British publications to get the lockdown right, along with the Spectator and, to a lesser extent, the Telegraph. Alistair Haimes, a contributor to Lockdown Sceptics, has written the cover story in the July issue and it is as caustic and withering as you’d expect. Here are his opening two paragraphs:
I am writing these words at the beginning of June, but you should by now be looking back on the worst of the UK’s COVID-19 epidemic. History books will dissect every aspect of the disease and governments’ response to it, but it is already clear that there has been an unexampled disregard for the foundational pillars of the scientific method even as governments trumpet that they are “following the science”.
The Royal Society’s motto is nullius in verba — “take nobody’s word for it” — but at every stage we have failed to apply scrutiny where it is due, or even to stop and check we are on the right ladder before we carry on climbing. For the country that is the birth-place of scientific inquiry and epidemiology it is astonishing. My godfather, professor of physics at Oxford, told me that the three most scientific things you can say are, “I don’t know”, “prove it” and “I’ve changed my mind”. Let us do each in turn.
Worth reading in full.
New Poem From Bent Knee
A new poem from an anonymous reader who calls himself “Bent Knee”.
Wave helicopter arms
Minimise playground harms
Nine poor kids to a room
Private schools do it better by zoom
Guests forbidden in the home
Never let your love roam
Best not dream of skin on skin
Sharing breath’s a dangerous sin
Save Lives, Stay alert!
More sanctions will only hurt
Authority is your new friend
Rules creep, they do not end
Jobs lost exponentially
Forget bodily sovereignty
Habeas Corpus struck though in black ink
Feel your hearts and hopes sink
Obey the governmental say so
Trust in GAVI, the new NATO
Viruses are deadly trouble
Relax in your mandated bubble
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:
- ‘Women denied abortions because of the pandemic‘ – I wonder if all those progressives enthusiastically supporting the lockdowns thought of this?
- ‘The limits of Covid death statistics‘ – Ross Clark in the Spectator on his usual fine form
- ‘Exclusive: Destinations for first set of “air bridges” from UK revealed‘ – The Telegraph has the scoop on the first countries we can return from without being quarantined. All in the Med, disappointingly
- ‘It’s all over for the Government if schools fail to reopen in September‘ – Allister Heath predicts political armageddon if schools don’t reopen
- ‘It’s our patriotic duty to go to the pub, and save one of Britain’s last great institutions‘ – Madeline Grant tries to rally the troops in the Telegraph. Mine’s a pint of Guinness
- ‘The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas and the Efficacy of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and Closings‘ – Good interview with lockdown sceptic Dr Scott Atlas by Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institute
- ‘Coronavirus Lockdowns Were a Mistake. The Media is Continuing to Mislead‘ – New interview with rogue epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski
- ‘Reducing UK emissions: 2020 Progress Report to Parliament‘ – Contains the words: “We must seize the opportunity to make the COVID-19 recovery a defining moment in tackling the climate crisis”. Bring on the Yellow Vests
- ‘Rail union warns of national strike unless the government keeps the two-metre social distancing rule on public transport‘ – It’s clear that militant trade unions are hoping to use the crisis to bring the country to a standstill and inflict maximum political damage on the Government. Britain’s next Winter of Discontent approaches…
- ‘I’m a viral immunologist. Here’s what antibody tests for COVID-19 tell us‘ – Zania Stamataki says six out of eight family members who caught the virus at home had T cell responses but no detectable antibodies
- ‘America’s Jacobin Moment‘ – Brilliant editorial in the Wall St Journal about the failure of liberal custodians of American artistic, educational, business and entertainment institutions to stand up to the Jacobite mob
- ‘The thin blue line‘ – Timely cover story by Rod Liddle for the Spectator
- PJ O’Rourke’s New Magazine – Called American Consequences. Worth a look.
- ‘A Hat Trick of Failures: How “the Blob” Led the Government Down the Wrong Path‘ – Up the garden path, surely? Powerful report by Jim McConalogue and Tim Knox for Civitas
- ‘The BBC is already diverse‘ – Fraser Myers in Spiked points out that The BBC is already very diverse without any need to ratchet up its diversity hiring quotas
- ‘Final sortie in the battle for charts and minds‘ – Quentin Letts in the Times on the swansong of Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance. And it’s goodnight from him…
- ‘Was the two-metre rule one big lie?‘ – Hard-hitting piece by Timandra Harkness in UnHerd
- ‘If you think America is unrecognisable under Trump, wait till Biden wins‘ – Scary piece by Daniel Johnson in the Article
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few weeks ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Now that non-essential shops have reopened – or most of them, anyway – we’re now focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet. Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
Note to the Good Folks Below the Line
I enjoy reading all your comments and I’m glad I’ve created a “safe space” for lockdown sceptics to share their frustrations and keep each other’s spirits up. But please don’t copy and paste whole articles from papers that are behind paywalls in the comments. I work for some of those publications and if they don’t charge for premium content they won’t survive.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It usually takes me several hours to do these updates, along with everything else, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. 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. (Please don’t email me at any other address.)
This is only the second daily update this week and I don’t expect to do one tomorrow. Will try and do one over the weekend. Apologies for winding down, but Free Speech Union business is becoming all-consuming, thanks to the fact that we’re in the midst of a Maoist Cultural Revolution. (And incidentally, if you want to understand what’s happened in the last four weeks in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, I highly recommend this essay by Professor Eric Kaufmann in Quillette. It’s astonishingly good.)
I asked my webmaster on Monday how many total page views Lockdown Sceptics had had so far and the answer is 1,652,739. Not too shabby. Peak traffic was 148,188 page views on 7th May, thanks to “Sue Denim”‘s first code review.
I feel the mood beginning to shift as it dawns on more and more people that the Government has bungled its management of the pandemic. The fourth estate, which has largely slept through the crisis, is beginning to stir. It’s going to get ugly – very ugly – and I cannot see how Boris can hope to win the next General Election, assuming he lasts that long. I need a new political home, as I suspect do many readers of this site, right and left. More on that soon…
And Finally…
Click here to listen to the latest episode of London Calling in which James Delingpole and I almost succumb to Boris Derangement Syndrome, so unhappy are we with his excessively cautious approach to ending the lockdown. The virus is gone, pfffft, kaput. Forget about the one-metre-plus rule. Just admit you made a terrible mistake and say everything can go back to normal. We also discuss the Cultural Revolution and… well, it all gets a bit ranty. Not many jokes in this episode. Incidentally, the brilliant Sherelle Jacobs column in the Telegraph praised by James at the beginning of the podcast is here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/25/britain-has-fallen-rabbit-hole-second-wave-hysteria/
One of the comments
Anthony Martyn
25 Jun 2020 7:37AM
Why hasn’t a spike occurred in London after the first wave of protests, when many didn’t wear masks? These were attended by numerous people from ethnic backgrounds who are said to be more susceptible to the virus.
Why will there be no spikes in a fortnight after 1000’s of people up and down the country will have gone to packed out beaches this week?
Those questions have to be answered but one of the answers as to why we’re still living under farcical conditions, is that our society is largely run by a health and safety culture that takes the worst case scenario
Because this virus only spreads from conservatives. Only they can spread it. Leftist, progressives, and radical protesters are all too pure of heart to spread the virus.
Ah that must be it. All those folks in the supermarket and other shops who failed to catch it must be militant lefties. They just voted in Therese Coffey for a joke
(kidding)
Qualities of good science:
Not based on authority
Testable
Repeatable
Universal
Measurable (Tangible)
Observable
Narrow (Occam’s razor)/Simple
The protests (eg those allowed to breach lockdown*) and beach outings (eg a crammed beach at Edinburgh with enough people to make nik nak Sturgeon want to weep according to national press) and raves (eg 6000 people in Manchester) can be seen as the scientific method in action.
*It is a known known police officers always speak accurately so this officer saying Nicola Sturgeon’s office allowed the protest appears to be accurate.
https://mobile.twitter.com/craigy33?lang=en
The Sottish Police Federation press release a week later suggested policing is impossible because of political messaging.
https://twitter.com/ScotsPolFed/status/1273587406084530176?s=20
Covid is not a high consequence infectious disease.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid
Why hasn’t there been spikes throughout in London as the trains and tube were still packed everyday?
The reduced service meant everyone had to fit in just a couple of carriages so surely this extremely close contact would have meant huge infection levels.
Because the virus has already left the station?
Except when it comes to funding the NHS.
Where have the shysters, sorry, pollsters been finding the 50% ++ of the population that think it’s too early to ease Lockdown, open schools, open anything? Where has the government’s comfort blanket of focus groups been, that they should even entertain the miles of gold-plated red tape we have now been tied up in during our departure from Shawshank? Not on Bournemouth beach, obvs.
They are readily found amongst the commentators on the Guardian. That must be where they are all coming from.
They’re all on my Facebook feed today as I’m a Dorset local. Some of the commitment are amazing including “these people are so selfish” and “we’re in the middle of a pandemic”.
All taken in by the BBC propaganda 🤦♀️
I’d noticed the persistent pandemic-mongering in the Grad and the DT.
Brainwashed
Far be it for me to defend the BBC or the Guardian, but the Covid bedwetters are all over the Sun and the Daily Mail too. And Toby’s wrong about the Daily Telegraph; they joined in the hysteria for the first two months and only did an about turn towards the sceptics way too late in the game to have any credibility.
And they are at it again today with two hysterical articles about Texas. Yesterday Texas reported 47 deaths out of a population of 29m. Total deaths there are 2,200. New Jersey reported 1,877 (most were backlog cases to be fair, but they dont mention that when reporting our figures) bringing their total to over 14,000. Out of a population of less than 9m. New Jersey has ‘full lockdown’. Texas has relaxed. New Jersey has had 21 x the number of deaths per head more than Texas. 21!!! Strangely, didn’t see that mentioned anywhere…
From the Telegraph’s 3 articles today relating to Covid in the US and wider world, it almost looks like this paper are going over to the same panic/hysteria/misrepresentation camp as the BBC, whilst in previous months (despite not being much of a fan of the “Torygraph’s” politics) I admired them as one of the few mainstream papers to take a (usually informed and articulate) sceptical view of the lockdown and the wider media’s reporting of the pandemic.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/25/us-officials-estimate-26-million-americans-have-had-coronavirus/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/26/america-failed-flatten-curve-coronavirus-cases-soar-new-records/
The “apocalyptic” (to quote one of the article headlines) way the facts are presented is as bad as anything in the BBC or Guardian! Surely if the actual number of cases is around 10 times the recorded number (up to 26 million) whilst deaths continue to decline at a steady rate, doesn’t that more or less conclusively prove the virus as something rather less than apocalyptic!?
Over the last few weeks the focus in the media seems to have shifted from “deaths” to “cases” whilst still reporting/predicting them with the same implied level of severity.
Some of them are on my Facebook feed as well and still going on about a “second wave”
They were on mine too but I unfollowed them.
I’ve been spending less time on Facebook anyway but I only saw them because I’ve placed some photos for scheduled posts.
What amused me is the council representative saying it was impossible to ‘keep people safe’ with the numbers crowded onto the beaches. Haven’t they realised, we don’t want to be ‘kept safe’!!
Exactly!
This is just poor planning on behalf of Bornemouth BID. It beggars belief!
They should of thought this would happen and planned for it accordingly. They should have set out thick plastic windbreaks in small 2meter (single person) 4meter (Co habiting couple) or 12 meter (family size /mixed household) cells on the beach. These should have been spaced out with 4 meter covid safety corridors with a clearly marked one way system with hand sanitizer facilities every 100 meters clearly signposted.
They didn’t even manage to get some of those flagey banner things with keep 2 meters apart on them, a schoolboy error!
For goodness sake these people really are thick. They are literally killing people with their last of foresight.
Muppets.
Absolutely, they could have made a fortune selling these things too. Clearly part of the problem is that Wales is still shut, and so people wanting to go to the beach have no option but to descend on the South Coast.
Thank God! 🙂
Two-six. I agree entirely brain dead councils up and down the land are caught by surprise that human beings are choosing to go to nice places for fun. It’s not even awkward to predict where the biggest groupings of homo sapiens will be on a given day, at a given time.
Those human beings by nature will leave a littered mess behind, wrong but human nature. The NLP’d Common Purpose goons could have spotted the opportunity and ‘reimagined-up’ a trendy thunberg keep Britain tidy effort. Capatlising on group think and as a primer into the eco ways they are going to foist upon us all to ‘green our way out’ of the depression.
I’m almost suspicious that they have been caught by surprise. The pattern I see is any place humans are gathering in spontaneous fun it is being stamped on by jack boots.
Closed shops and tourist venues will have concentrated the visitors into the beach.
The policy of closed pubs and cafes only allowed to provide takeaway will have exacerbated the litter problem. You’d like to think the council would have foreseen that.
Did I use council and foreseen in the same sentence?
Unfortunately like everywhere else, the council has lost all common sense.
Lost what they never had?
Pedants Corner (Lockdown Sceptics section): in the Round-up an American “Jacobin mob” becomes a Jacobite one in Toby’s comments! Are there really sections of US society calling for the return of the Stuarts?
As always, Toby is well ahead of us all regarding this important matter:
‘Prinz Franz von Bayern (painting by Dieter Stein), the legitimate heir to the Kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland, and France. Prinz Franz inherits his legitimacy to the throne of these United States as the legitimate heir to the Stuart kings of England under whom the first English colonies were established in what became these United States. As the United States threw off the oppressive rule of the House of Hanover, who usurped the House of Stuart, we feel that the Jacobite successors of the House of Stuart are the legitimate holders of any American throne.’
https://www.facebook.com/AmericanJacobiteSociety/
I believe you may have identified the mysterious new political home that Toby has in mind for lockdown sceptics.
This may well be the way forward for Britain and the U.S.A. in case the details of a mere trade deal prove troublesome.
HotUKDeals now censoring comments which merely question the efficacy of facemasks
Outrageous. The most logical question anyone could ask. It’s a nightmare!
Maybe a better question would be, can they be used for asbestos jobs? If not why not as asbestos is several times larger than the largest Corona particle.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5742293/police-glasgow-kelvingrove-park-botanic-gardens-helicopter/
Seriously.Send help to scotland…….
What gets me about this second wave nonesense is that its based on the false assumption that everybody is currently sticking to the ridiculous guidelines and that by easing them, infections will rise and we’ll all die.
Most of the people I know aren’t sticking to any of them and haven’t for ages, if at all. They’ve seen who they want when they want. I’m sure there are millions of people who are also doing the same and completely ignoring them and have done for months. Despite all that nothing has increased and never will.
I do expect the NHS to be overwhelmed this winter but it will be from complications from regular colds and flu, because a lot of people will have immune systems that are completely shot to pieces now, also the impact of the lack of care for any health issue not covid will catch up with the NHS. Will they be prepared for this winter? Absolutely not
After the lockdown was imposed but international air travel was not being curtailed, and UK airports were not closed, many of us realised it was all a big con; and as you point out ‘haven’t been sticking to any of ‘ the guidelines. Why should we when 15,000 people a day were being allowed to enter the UK and wander about!
Absolutely. Nobody with any common sense has stuck to any of it for a long time, despite the government and MSM making out people are strictly adhering. I’d love to know how many people never stuck to it. It would be a great figure to shove in the face of the second wave brigade.
Good point; thanks for mentioning it. In order to challenge the claim of lockdowns being effective, I’ve been so far focusing on the amount of voluntary social distancing that was going on and is still continuing for some of us. Lockdown lovers usually retort that mandating it gets the non-distancers to socially distance, too. But that really is an unjustifiable claim to make; there may well be no more people “complying” than there would be choosing to distance.
Common sense is key here. And yes, despite what the Powers (plus zealots) seem to think, the general public have that in spades.
Have people been ignoring stupid bullshit like wearing masks whilst having sex (yes, they’ve still been having sex ;p), not hugging their parents, or leaving their post outside for 48 hours before handling it? – Probably.
Have people been bathing in each other’s bodily fluids, breathing in each other’s faces for protracted periods of time, or standing as suffocatingly close as possible to each other in compacted spaces for as long as possible, on purpose? (Even most BLM protestors managed to, you know, stay a good metre apart from their nearest compadre in order to dodge his debris). – No.
Most people – myself included… (to a point… ;p)… HAVE been taking sensible hygiene measures, even if they think the lockdown and social distancing is bollocks. i’ve said this before but why does being sensible rather than paranoid make one an irresponsible, dirty bastard? When did common sense become revolutionary?
That is why I still can’t and never will understand the social distancing bullshit. Who stood within a metre of a stranger in a shop for longer than about 5 seconds before all this. Not many people.
Washing your hands before eating, fine, that’s a normal thing to do. Staying away from people who are coughing their guts up is again a normal thing to do and these two things are probably the 2 main things to stop yourself becoming ill from a cold, which most people with common sense already did.
I hate that we all get treated like babies who need our hands holding all the time for everything. We don’t, we’re perfectly capable of making our own decisions and using our own judgment for any situation. Well some people are, others haven’t got a clue what day of the week it is
Guy (iirc) has been pointing out here for months that just ensuring that anyone who has symptoms stays at home for a couple of days would have achieved more than enough to control the epidemic
Yep. It sure would have. It was when they started falsely saying that asymptomatic people would spread it that it turned into the catastrophic disaster that its become and they are still acting like that is the case. Infuriating.
Maybe I’m too charitable, but I wouldn’t attribute it to deliberate lying. As Lord Sumption pointed out in his recent essays, politicians turn to scientists for definite answers – scientists give them answers but qualify that the (proven) science is still largely uncertain, and the politicians treat those as definite answers while omitting the qualifications. I think the media does the same thing. In this case, the qualified answer was, “We don’t know enough to rule out a risk of asymptomatic transmission,” which became in the media accounts “scientists have discovered a risk of asymptomatic transmission.” I’m still not convinced either way. As I see it, the biggest (admittedly non-scientific) evidence for a.t. is the outbreaks in Italy and New York. The sheer size of those indicates they started with hundreds of mini-outbreaks, caused by planeloads of Patient Zeros fleeing the plague. Those may have all been presymptomatic, or people disguising mild symptoms, but one can’t rule out that some of them were completely asymptomatic. It’s reasonable to equate milder symptoms with a smaller viral load, and no apparent symptoms with a very small load – and to equate a small viral load with a low risk of infecting others:… Read more »
Someone who sheds a small viral load is, ipso facto, a much smaller risk to a shedee than someone who sneezes mega-droplets on a OAP. That is, a small viral load should be manageable to a shedee with a viable immune system and no comorbidities. Let’s be reasonable, and logical.
Reasonable? Logical? Zombies don’t know such concepts exist.
Meh….trouble is, asymptomatic hospital staff have been transmitting it. Or maybe they are not observing infection control measures correctly….
Exactly. If anything has had *any effect in slowing transmission, flattening death curve etc. it has probably been those initial ‘stay at home if you’re ill’, ‘wash your hands’ warnings.
Until of course they forced everyone in your household to stay at home WITH you, and closed at the toilets so you couldn’t wash your hands even if you wanted to.
I’m as convinced as I can be that I was an early adopter. I don’t normally catch stuff but I came down with mild flu symptoms and an annoying cough back around the turn of the year, as did many other people.
We didn’t panic because we idn’t know we were meant to. I stayed in and only went to the shops when I had to and avoided coughing over people.Strangely it didn’t spread like wildfire any more than it did after it was identified.
I suspect a LOT of the problem was nosocomial spread, people getting infected in hospital and taking it home with them, and of course into care homes which it apears was deliberate policy.
Lots of good food and healthy people here, some of them elderly but still unaffected. During the lockdown I went for a daily walk, in places where there weren’t many people and was pleased to see some in their eighties or more happily wandering about. I sat in the sun a lot (vitamin D) we mostly kept our distance in a commonsense way.
Society and the economy could have continuedbut IMO that was never the intention
I think this has been manufactured deliberately and it’s linked with the Climate Change loons. Little by little they are restricting our freedoms and movements. All our entertainments are under threat, but they cannot subdue 70m people indefinitely if we don’t want to be.! Eventually there won’t be enough money to go around to pay for the public sector then watch things heat up.
Yes I’ve felt from the start that the lockdown was the result they required and the virus just the excuse. What was it, 140 countries in lockstep?
I certainly haven’t stuck to it or followed any of the script in this ridiculous charade.
We discovered on Thursday that two of our neighbours have been observing the lockdown, to the point that they’d not even been to any of the supermarkets, and any packages delivered were left for two or three days, just in case….
It’s quite logical really the younger generations are not threatened by the virus because they are socially very active and their immune systems are being regularly updated, the over 65s retirees etc don’t mix very much anymore and those in care homes only mix with others in their care homes. Mask wearing will only hinder peoples immune systems.
The NHS is ‘overwhelmed’ every winter. As it has finite resources and is chasing an infinite need, the overwhelming is inevitable – until you stop treating every disease except one. And then the zombies APPLAUD you for it!!!
“The total number of NHS hospital beds in England, including general and acute, mental illness, learning disability, maternity and day-only beds, has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2018/9, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly.”
Jeez.
This looks like an analogue of “just-in-time” delivery. How is that working out?
This is like the Titanic: having just half the number of lifeboats needed.
All NHS planner and budget minders should be fired.
Hmmm. I read somewhere a few weeks before lockdown that there were 4,000 ICU beds available standardly in the national NHS and that they run at around 80% capacity.
That seems roughly right. If you run above 80%, it’s wasteful; if you run much above 80%, you have no surge capacity.
Or another solution Boris to the overcrowded beaches. How about the return of children to school and adults to their workplaces fully?
Well yes that would solve the problem but that’s using common sense and Boris doesn’t seem to do common sense.
I wonder how many of them were teachers?
Also if they opened the recreational locations where people go to spend their leisure time, people would, you know, probably go there instead of crowding up on the only available open public space.
Still not quite down with why pubs will be open in a week and libraries* won’t be, but hey, whatever the place, it should be open. Might be able to deal with those illegal street parties very easily if the pubs and clubs were open, eh Boris?
*I’m really revealing how sad my social life is now aren’t I.
My local library says it is opening on July 6th. However, we can’t browse or order any particular book and only a very limited selection of books will be available.
I hope they’re all dystopian to reflect current times?
HP and the Order of the Phoenix is very topical.
Propaganda, draconian rules and a resistance movement. Spot on!
FFS. This means all my local library will do is strap a few fully laminated copies of Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Shit, and The Da Vinci Code to the door and hope for the best.
Will there be there any ‘BLM-compliant’ books left?
It’s pretty pointless opening them if you cannot browse I’m using my kindle more now.
Isn’t that part of the plan Not being able to obtain FREE books but having to buy them?
Lending Libraries have been one of the ways the ordinary working man educated himself and found out what was going on in the world.
Yes, we have a very decent library system here on Cape Cod, Mass., USA. I depend on it heavily, and they are very good at getting ordered titles to their circulation desks within a week. Great, actually. So under Covid Rules, they said it might take a bit longer for ordered volumes to arrive, for curbside pickup. So far, no books. That was weeks ago. So, yes, bonanza for Amazon. And for the secondhand bookstores that sell through A’zon. So, that is something good, I suppose. but I really don’t have room in my tiny flat for new books.
I am furious that libraries have been hit with these closures, because our library is never all that crowded. Very easy to maintain social distancing. And many people rely on the library for photocopying, internet access, reading daily newspapers, using the scanner, etc. We even have a garden, where people could in principle sit outside, plenty of room, a breeze. Honestly, it feels like our brains and our intellects are under attack, along with our mask-clogged lungs.
Well, they can’t encourage brains, can they? Zombies don’t have them so why should human beings be allowed them?
Or, of course, they could send in the army, spray people with tear gas, baton-charge them, fire rubber bullets, surround sandcastles with tanks, crush toddlers under the wheels of armoured cars, and generally show how well the lessons of China have been learned.
Excellent stuff as always. Particularly like the synergy between Guy’s article and the economists’.
“I need a new political home, as I suspect do many readers of this site, right and left. More on that soon…”
Toby, you tease you….
Pedants Corner (v2)
I’m sure that should be 67 MILLION – although with Priti Patel’s inability to get a grip on immigration, maybe Toby was right, after all…
‘There is a gold-plated antibody test you can have done by a company called Pyser.’
Just wondering why this test comes with such high praise. It’s almost certain that cross-reactive antibodies will produce a percentage of false positives using this, or any other antibody test. Also, there’s evidence to suggest that infection does not always result in antibody production (or antibody levels quickly fall following recovery). Such a situation would make the value of antibody testing extremely questionable regardless of test specificity.
Yes there’s something distinctly weird occurring. It seems many people shake the thing off without bothering to produce antibodies. Hail the all-conquering immune system.
Round these parts I believe there have been around EIGHT cases of covid. Many times that number of people – self included – had a suspiciosly covid-like cough/flu type thing back in December.January before it was identified. Same in many other parts of the country with low covid levels. Did we all catch it and are now immune? Or was there another suspiciously similar virus doing the rounds and not beng tested for? Impossible to know, but that Occam guy might have been on to something . . .
An ICU nurse we know (daughter of our neighbours) was quite ill with what was clinically diagnosed as CV19 back in March. She had 2 PCR tests (negative) and then an antibody test also showed up negative after she recovered a couple of weeks later. That’s one reason we’re pretty suspicious of the widespread faith in testing.
A lot of people round here think that a mild form of CV19 circulated in the winter which is why hardly anyone knows anyone who has ‘had it’, let alone died of it.
And yet, surprise, surprise, you would honestly think the Black Death stalks the land, judging by the number of designer masks and paranoid behaviour on display in a local small town yesterday.
I read a speculation that there were two viruses cirulating, the one that was tested for and the one that did the damage – which would explain why there are so many mild cases of covid and some very severe ones which would be those who also caught the untested virus.
Whatever, it has been described as a cold with an agenda, or flu with a turbocharger, yet it’s being treated as Plague 2.0
I think the young girls like wearing masks because they think it makes they look cool, it’s now become more of a fashion accessory.
Yes, that’s our take on it too BD. As has been said before, in your designer muzzle, you can be the star victim of your own personal woke drama.
Unfortunately, though, it seems not just confined to girls. Even women my age (late 60s) are buying (making?) them now and we’ve seen young men in sinister black ones. Apparently in Florida, a Covid19 shop has opened full of lovely coloured muzzles and hand-sanitiser!
Oh well, one business bound to do well – makes a change 😉
A whole new economy! Plus perspex screens and notices
Cool, with no nose and no mouth?
Drool, more like.
“The Commission noted that some of the language in the show – such as a caller using the word “coloured”, which Stu didn’t correct – was “insensitive”. “ Why do all our institutions so cravenly accept this manipulation of language? Just because people choose to claim to be offended at a particular term, doesn’t mean their nonsense has to be taken seriously. There must be a line to be drawn, quite far out, at which a term becomes a recognised and serious term of abuse, by the use of which it is reasonable to expect people to feel offended even if it is not used aggressively. What we are now forced to refer to as “the N word”, or p**i for south Asians, are terms that were used with insulting intent, so it’s reasonable to accept a degree of offensiveness. But “black” or “coloured”? That’s just nonsense. It’s just an intentional attempt to force people onto the defensive with stupid circumlocutions like “people of colour”, and it should never be pandered to by official bodies. The proper response to someone claiming to be offended by that kind of thing is a terse “grow up”, if we are in a context where politeness… Read more »
If the n word is such an insulting term, then why are so many rappers throwing it about like it’s nothing? Either everyone can use it or no one can use it, and i wish these people would just make up their mind already.
No, special people are “allowed” to use these terms, so as to put the not special people in their place.
Everybody should use any term they want, and then be prepared to live and deal with the consequences. Why do people claim they have the right not to be offended? People who watch reality TV offend me, but I live with it.
I respect your right to say anything you like, as long as you respect my right to take the piss out of you for saying it.
(This a general statement, not directed at anyone)
Yes, my point here was merely that public authorities and regulators should not be applying absurdly politically loaded standards.
No, they mustn’t.
Actually, to follow up – the core problem is that the law has recognised that saying something that causes offence to someone is illegal. The thing you say need not cause offence to the person to whom you say it, it needs only cause offence to someone within earshot.
I have no control over whether or not the things I say offend you. I have control over whether or not I intend to offend you.
And even if I intend to offend you, I should be able to say it anyway, and you should be able to put your big-boy pants on and answer me back.
Yes. Iirc this was the law Katie Hopkins lampoons as “brought in specifically for her”.
My distinctly woke brother sums the whole thing up as “it’s really easy – just be nice to people.”
Much of the time I want to strangle him.
Of course, being nice to people includes not making a needlessly big deal about them using the “wrong” terminology with no intent to offend, and it also involves not forcing them to jump through stupid terminological hoops for reasons of your own political prejudices.
But somehow it never works that way for the woke.
“… just be nice to people.”
That’s really easy to do when you’re on the same level in society as the person you’re talking to – I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been nice to anyone.
It would be slightly less easy if being asked to kneel in front of someone and pay them ‘reparations’. It would be interesting to see how your brother-in-law copes with that future development.
I concur. Problems arise however, when people are practically punished (usually by being fired, which is pretty extreme – even Hitler had a job before he was…. Hitler) by people who are offended.
This is where ‘living and dealing with the consequences’ becomes sticky – if those consequences involve losing your job or going to prison.
Lost my job because someone grievance artefact hunting in my emails. In 2014!
It’s the difference between “You can’t say THAT”, and “YOU can’t say that”.
See Trigger Warning, by Mick Hume.
I think the “n” word is actually a colour. It’s a shade of brown. So it’s use has not always been perjorative. The “p” word, by contrast has always been perjorative.
It’s interesting to note, though, that when on twitter Katie Hopkins was referred to by the “c” word. As far as I know the individual that called her this was not censured for the insult.
You must recognise that the presumption of equality does not exist in this ideology. Quite the opposite. In this ideology “black” and “white” are no more equivalent than “man” and “woman”.
So you cannot say “white lives matter” in the way that you might say “black lives matter”. That breaks their rules. For them “black” is an oppressed identity, “white” is not.
Feminism has been with us for a long time. But “masculism” sounds like a joke.
In order to deal with this, in my opinion, you must first understand it. I agree with your sentiment, but it’s no good complaining about it now.
I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand why you say “it’s no good complaining about it now”. No reason not to complain about wrong. Whether it can ever achieve anything is another matter obviously, that depends (largely) on how many people do it. We have to start somewhere.
Seems like you can say ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’ though.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8460059/Cambridge-University-backs-academic-tweeted-White-Lives-Dont-Matter.html
Niger is Latin for black.
Paki means beautiful.
Pakistan means beautiful country/kingdom.
Guy Gibson of Dambusters fame called his black labrador Nigger. Not because the dog came from Brixton but because like everyone in 1940 he had a decent education so it was meaningful – like calling a yellow labrador Goldie
How long before that film gets banned
Shoot all Nigels and Nigellas?
Fairly sure it has been Bowdlerised for recent tv showings.
“The “p” word, by contrast has always been perjorative.”
It depends on the context. I remember possibly twenty or more years ago, a fuss being made about an Australian cricket commentator talking about the “Pakis versus the Aussies” or something similar. He absolutely meant no insult by it, but still they came down on him. The thing is, the person who automatically sees the ‘insult’ regardless of context is implying that there’s something shameful about being Pakistani – which is just bigotry dressed up as virtue.
If Paki is offensive, then so is Aussie or Brit.
I recall a comedian a while back doinga skit on The Creation. God was saying
“I’ll make people all different colours. That’ll give them something to talk about!”
I suspect the tapes have all gone away.
The manufactured difference between ‘coloured people’ and ‘people of colour’ has always struck me as a very powerful thing. One is beyond the pale. The other is nigh-on reverential.
Such a gulf of meaning between two almost identical phrases. What lies in that gulf is what we’re seeing a lot of now – performative simpering. Heavily applied gravitas. Kissing of arse rather than arse-kissing.
Yes – it is a particularly weird one. I must say I can’t see why that distinction emerged. Indeed, to my ears, ‘people of colour’ sounds rather insulting.
Why not just call them Negroes?
Why not just call them people?
Well race does have meaning and is a very real thing – there needs to be terms to describe it. Only the wilfully deluded pretend “race is meaningless” and such.
So it’s about how to retain effective language without having to kowtow too much to the manipulative “offended”.
Remember how Benedict Cumberpatch fell foul of the language police when he referred to “coloured people.” He was denounced by the AAACP, who complained that he should have referred to “people of colour.”
The AAACP = American Association for Advancement of Coloured People…..
Vindication at Last? Well, up to a point. Let’s look at your analysis of Ferguson’s 500,000 deaths estimate. He used 1% IFR, which was the consensus figure at the time, coming out of China. You use the CDC figure of 0.26%, which is regarded as too low by many other groups: here “more scientifically accurate” can only mean “one I like better”. You use a QALY figure rather than VSL of over £1million. So an equally plausible cost of doing nothing would be more like £500billion. But either way, with an R of nearly 3, the 140 to 500 thousand deaths would have occurred within a few months, overwhelming the NHS and leading to numerous other deaths from a breakdown of the healthcare system. At that point it really doesn’t matter whether the body bags are piled up two high or eight high in the car parks, no government could tolerate the scenario — and quite right too.
“with an R of nearly 3, the 140 to 500 thousand deaths would have occurred within a few months, overwhelming the NHS and leading to numerous other deaths from a breakdown of the healthcare system. At that point it really doesn’t matter whether the body bags are piled up two high or eight high in the car parks, no government could tolerate the scenario — and quite right too.”
Gosh, I can only imagine the slaughter in Belarus where they must be stacking the dead like cordwood!
It really doesn’t matter what timescale you apply a fantasy death toll over, it’s still a pure fantasy.
I’m not familiar with “VSL”. Perhaps you could explain to a layman the difference between a QALY and a VSL and why you think the VSL would be more appropriate, and how you arrive at a VSL of over £1,000,000.
Value of Statistical Life. Also Value of Prevented Fatality. Used as a measure by various UK government departments. The Department of Transport was using a figure of £1M over 20 years ago.
So what’s the difference between a QALY and a VSL, and why and when would you use one and not the other?
And how is a VSL calculated?
Why do NICE use QALYs and not VSLs?
Quality Adjusted Life Year is a measure of years of enjoyable life saved by a medical procedure, and NICE rates them at around £30K. So, NICE will give expensive treatments to young healthy people with a long and enjoyable life ahead of them which they might deny to a 90-year old with dementia and 6 months to go. VPF is used as a measure for capital projects, and assesses the capital value of a life as £1.8M, which is roughly 60 QALYs, So it’s worth spending £1M to rebuild a road junction if it prevents one fatal accident.
The point of course is that you can find figures to support almost any version of this argument. It’s a category mistake.
I don’t know what you mean by a “category mistake”.
The lives saved are mainly of those nearing the end of their lives anyway. The road junction example possibly assumes someone young, healthy and productive.
Is this “one fatal accident” annual, or one for the useful life of the road junction rebuild?
I mean that arguing about the minute details of a hypothetical scenario is mistaking the sort of thing that it was.
Well, it’s the scenario that was used, and continues to be used, by our government, to justify the measures taken, and continues to be accepted as more or less settled science by mainstream media.
I don’t think you can say anything about this is minute.
The legitimate use of the “what would happen if we took no action” scenario is to decide whether or not to take action. In this case, it suggested quite clearly that the no action scenario led to intolerable results on any plausible set of figures. To suggest that it ipso facto supported or did not support some specific course of action is a mistake: the figures, as we’re discussing right now, were not sufficiently precise.
Well, I suppose one would need to define “intolerable”, and “plausible”.
Obviously there’s a death toll above which the kind of measures taken could be justified. I suppose it depends on the value placed on the various factors at play.
Plausible – I would say there were other plausible figures. There was very little useful information, it seems. I think you’d need more than “plausible” to take unprecedented measures, which is what happened, and to boot there appears to have been no attempt made to calculate the cost (financial and human) of those measures.
Honestly, this is now at such a high level of ludicrousness that I assume you aren’t from a specialist disinformation unit, because god help us all if you’re (normally) supposed to be protecting the country’s interests.
At no point was “no individual actor will make any changes” a reasonable scenario.
We have no examples where nobody in a country did anything to change their behaviour. We have varying degrees of lockdown as examples and we have a few European (and many Asian) countries that did not lockdown, and what we can see is that the lockdown countries did not do measurably better.
The salient word in your comment is ‘plausible’. It was nothing of the sort.
I the figures weren’t sufficiently precise, then no draconian policy should have been based on them. And the action taken should certainly have been monitored and modified weekly, as necessary.
YES!
When we didn’t know much, panic may have been appropriate.
It soon became obvious from actual FACTS that the lockdown was a severe overreaction. Originally there may have been some point to “flattening the curve” but it became obvious that only the elderly and sick were affected, and they were the least protected and even targeted.
I believe Ferguson was chosen precisely for his wild exaggerations: he has always been wrong by orders of magnitude. Others were making much more realistic predictions, like 40 – 60 000 deaths, but where’s the fun in that? Boris can claim he “saved” 450 000 lives You can’t prove he didn’t.
The gap between The Agenda/Narrative and facts is becoming ever wider.
Why aren’t you taking the Swedish public health leaders more seriously than Ferguson? They got it right, pretty much. Seems odd to be defending Ferguson…
Please explain yourself in principle. It’s clear that an infinite economic value can’t be put on any single human life, otherwise virtually nothing that we do, from putting on our trousers, to walking downstairs, to driving cars – putting aside hangliding and rock climbing- could ever be allowed.
So are you saying that this calculation is invalid, or are you saying that all calculations are invalid?
The ‘nothing ever allowed’ scenario that you describe is being applied right now, by career zombies to themselves. And they want it to apply to everybody until life is ‘100% safe’.
Honestly its amazing I am still here with the risks I have taken, I have used 8 of my nine lives for sure.
I have a confession to make…..
I crossed the road earlier today.
I know what you’re thinking – I must be some kind of care-nothing daredevil. But it felt so good I might do it again tomorrow.
You selfish bastard! Don’t you realise that we all pay your hospital costs if you get injured, so we get to tell you what risks you are allowed to take. And don’t get me started on the potential traumas to first responder heroes….
Could you not have used public transport like a responsible person? A taxi? Or a bus – if you go to the end of the route most buses will bring you back along the other side of the road, you know.
I know, I know. It was wrong, but… the road was just sitting there, with nearly no traffic on it…
Yes, you see that’s where you selfish, narcissistic privileged types always get it wrong. You think somehow you are qualified to make these highly complex judgements for yourself, instead of following the guidance set out for you by the authorities – your betters, for the general good, like a decent person would.
II shall wear a mask next time as an abject apology and as a sign of submission to the rules. Sorry. Guidelines.
(Huh. Apparently you can edit your username as you post. Which I just did there by accident)
And then apparently you have to edit it back.
You should have gone into lockdown and waited until there was no vehicle coming in either direction for three miles before crossing, and only then if wearing boot protectors.
Bad boy! You’re supposed to wait for the anti-traffic vaccine.
Well done! You are soooo brave!
(Why didn’t the headless zombie chicken cross the road? Because it was so scared of the other side that it preferred to drop dead where it stood?)
I’m saying that TY chose figures that supported his predetermined conclusion, while other equally plausible figures would have come to the unwelcome opposite.
The key phrase there is “equally plausible”.
Please present me with a scenario where wiping 20% off the GDP of the United Kingdom justifies a number of lives ever likely to have been lost to a virus that kills people largely over the age of 80 at a rate of 0.26% of infections. Of even 1% if you prefer.
What _are_ the plausible numbers? I really have spent a lot of time looking into the numbers, but I have yet to find a domesday scenario
The longer I follow this thread, the more the arguments suggest that using models might be a lot of fun but it’s very dangerous to base actual health and social policy on them.
And how much did Ferguson value the lockdown-generated deaths?
As you presumably will be aware from having read it, he did not address that question, in his Report 9, the no-action scenario, which was about the likely progress of the disease and the ability of the health service to cope with it.
Can you please provide evidence for a 1% IFR as at 16 March 2020 with a dataset wider than that supplied to Professor Ferguson from the small sample in China. For example, what was the IFR from the Diamond Princess – clue – nearer to the CDC figure?
Russell et al gave the Diamond Princess IFR as 1.2% (0.38-2.7) on 09 March. Ferguson’s “report 9” was using 0.9%, of course.
Time will tell but 1% seems somewhat implausible to me. We’re almost half way through this “pandemic” of what is supposed to be a highly infectious disease where there is no immunity in the population, and mortality is around 0.00625 of the world’s population. If my arithmetic is correct (I’ve wine taken) that suggests that less than 1% of the world’s population has been exposed to the virus, if you assume an IFR of 1%. That seems unlikely to me.
On the other hand, there’s a zipcode in New York City where nearly 0.7% of the entire population has died. That suggests IFR cannot be less than that figure. But I am not an expert. I merely point out that the experience of countries such as Brazil, India, Mexico, Chile, Peru and the USA suggests that we are far from seeing the end of things on the world scale.
Indeed we have not seen the end of things on a world scale – I guess we’ll have to wait a few more months for that, and then see if it is seasonal.
So far, seems to be disappearing in Western Europe and other countries that have had a proper “first wave”.
It just seems to me orders of magnitude below anything that would constitute the kind of threat that justifies shutting down the world, indefinitely.
I’m a hypochodriac, not as young as I was, and really don’t want to die, but I just can’t see the sense in the reaction there has been.
No, it doesn’t. It suggests transmission is nocosomial in certain environments, and that certain populations (i.e. that certain zip code) are populated by more vulnerable people, for whatever reason. Certain places have been disproportionately affected for reasons we still can’t completely fathom – and their figures are included in the general IFR, pushing it up. The point being it’s still incredibly low (CDC said 0.2%) even with those high rates included in the overral figure.
Those are plausible hypotheses, and indeed may well be true. In passing, we note that a single datum can suggest multiple hypotheses, more than one of which may be true. These are hypotheses about what is actually going on in the world, and highly important ones at that. Deciding between the various suggestions on the basis of what seems plausible to anonymous commentators on a personal blog, or even what seems agreeable to the blog owner himself, is less satisfactory than deciding on the basis of investigation and experiment carried out by people who understand what they’re doing and report them for peer-review.
Can you point us to some of these peer-reviewed investigations that justify their hypotheses with the data known to us so far?
Like the SAGE team for instance?
It doesn’t follow that the IFR in a zip code is representative of that for the national population.
The biggest problem is recording. Absolutely no standard method of recording so comparing results is next to impossible
Certain western countries (In particular UK) if you were sky diving. Your chute didn’t open. But tested positive then you get added to the statistics. An extreme example but even the NHS reported 95% of deaths had other serious illnesses.
Back in March Italy said the same thing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says
Surely you can see that the numbers reported by the governments are massively over counted
The global IFR Is 0.25% even using the over counter numbers.
I am sticking with a clinician’s take on this pandemic rather than another ‘scientist’, and I refer you to Professor Heneghan’s analysis:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
Note especially: ‘using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Comparing deaths onboard with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates using China data estimated a CFR 1.1% (95% CI: 0.3-2.4%); IFR 0.5% (95% CI: 0.2-1.2%)’,
Then, updating for new and more widely available empirical data: ‘We could make a simple estimation of the IFR as 0.28%, based on halving the lowest boundary of the CFR prediction interval. However, the considerable uncertainty over how many people have the disease, the proportion asymptomatic (and the demographics of those affected) means this IFR is likely an overestimate’
By all means take whatever figure makes you feel happy. It all tends to reinforce my point, which is that there are equally plausible and well-supported figures giving a very different answer to the one Toby Young would like to be true. And so the confidence in his assertion derives less from any form of scientific truth, or consensus, and more from what he wanted to believe before he started to write out his argument.
All of which supports the point: given how little was known, and still is, it was completely irresponsible, disproportionate, and morally bankrupt to impose a lockdown on the whole country.
Hear ! Hear!
Mr Pinch criticises Toby, whose analysis merely provides an opinion, which one can choose to reject. His opinion is harmless.
The same criticisms can be levelled at Ferguson, who’s analysis triggered policies that led to the destruction of the economy and the criminal number of excess deaths yet to come.
As a former scientist, married to a former scientist who is also an expert modeller, I do not need to rely on anyone else’s analysis and opinions.
77th Brigade
No doubt, One wonders how much stuff these guys read before it starts to sink in that they are being
lied to.
Yes. They’re all over the Telegraph comments.
I’m actually starting to think you’re right.
There’s always one in every comment thread and I refuse to believe people are so desperate to reinforce their lockdown zealotry that they would come to Lockdown Sceptics to do it, at this late stage in the game. Unless of course they’ve actually deep down seen the light and are now in the !triggered! stage, where they have to get all defensive in order to cling to the delusion.
Maybe they’re just employed to do so :/
— Hey, Correct The Record was a thing :/ (I’m still utterly flabbergasted the 77th Brigade is actually real – haven’t the MOD got anytihng better to spend our money on?!)
“desperate to reinforce their lockdown zealotry”. If that’s intended to apply to me, perhaps you’ld like to point to the comment where I advocated zealously for lockdown? I think you’ll find that I’m advocating for a serious examination of the science as opposed to a knee-jerk rejection of everything that does not support a predetermined conclusion.
Serious examination of ‘The Science’ that says we should extrapolate the worldwide IFR from *one* particularly bad local outbreak in New York? Which ‘Science’ is that?
Not what I said. I said it “suggested” something. A universal statement of the virus will need to accommodate these data points.
It doesn’t ‘suggest’ anything other than the fact that certain populations/areas are more affected than others. Welcome to viral transmission 101.
“The Science” doesn’t exist, therefore cannot stand up to serious exmination.
Intriguing to see on Malcolm kendrick’s blog one person assiduously going through and downvoting every comment with which it disagrees
Don’t be silly. But for the avoidance of doubt, no.
If anyone wondered why so many veterans end up homeless, lack of marketable skills and an inability to think would explain a lot of it.
First time here?
Yes. It’s been fun, but …
Do you really mean R or Ro?
R0, thanks.
It doesn’t matter wrt the Ferguson paper. He calculated Ro at 2.4 from Wuhan data, but his no-interventions model assumed that R would stay constant at 2.4 right up through 80% infected in August.
(even though herd immunity for that Ro should kick in at 63%).
Correct, he did.
And is there any evidence that any of his assumptions were anything approaching correct?
You really need to stop watching the bbc news
Nothing like this has happened in countries that did not lock down, so common sense says R has never equalled 3, and IFR is less than 1%. Body bags haven’t been “stacked” anywhere. I think you need to go to a beach somewhere, perhaps in Dorset, and relax a bit.
Common sense says all sorts of things. It said the earth was flat, and that cholera was caused by bad smells.
However, the paper 9 scenario that gave the 510,000 figure was not about failing to lockdown, it was specifically stated to be “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour”. Toby Young thinks the cost of that unlikely scenario would “only” have been £132billion and 140,000 deaths, and I’m saying that an equally plausible set of figures gives a cost for that unlikely scenario of between £500billion and £1trillion as the cost of the 510,000 deaths, together with the breakdown of the health service and likely civil society as well. I’m glad we never had to opportunity to find out which.
Common sense didn’t say those things. Pseudo-science did.
Civil society seems to have broken down anyway, by government mandate.
Did civil society break down during other pandemics in the 20th century?
Anyway, what’s not being included in the calculation is the cost to life and health of the lockdown, the damage to the economy and the restriction of liberty and the pursuit of happiness and a normal human life, of an entire nation, indefinitely.
I understand the maths, and I understand the difficulty of being the prime minister staring down the barrel of half-a-million deaths. But that was never the reality of the scenario and even accepting that it was terrifying, it must have been obvious very soon after that it wasn’t real. So where’s your argument that it should have been maintained once the maths was in? And where’s your argument that Ferguson’s model shouldn’t have been thrown out the window the moment it was brought in the room, given that there was a reasonable amount of data from other earlier outbreaks that made a nonsense of the assumptions put into the model (even assuming the model itself was sound)?
Mask because I would like to understand, not purely to be provocative.
I’m not making that argument. I’m criticising Toby Young’s purported calculations by showing that different but equally plausible figures lead to a radically different conclusion.
What makes you think civil society has survived unscathed? I would suggest that it’s been thrown under the bus to protect the NHS.
Cholera being caused by bad smells makes more sense than some of the covid nonsense people have been fed.
“But either way, with an R of nearly 3, the 140 to 500 thousand deaths would have occurred within a few months”
It’s interesting you say this yet the death toll in the entire world over 3 months is only just reaching 500k.
I think you’ll find that no country in the world opted for the do-northing scenario, and so the results of the hypothetical do-nothing scenario hardly apply.
All you have to do is look at the total population of the world and do some simple reasoning to see 500k deaths in the UK over 3 months would simply not happen.
Belarus?
Also Tanzania. They went even further actually. Their President actually BANNED FACE MASKS.
Lor, I love that man.
God bless him and his papaya.
And the sainted goat
This bloke posted under Toby’s DT article – 77th Brigade? Go back to barracks
I did indeed. I posted under my own name in an open way. Can you say the same?
Dr Richard Pinch from GCHQ?
Not quite. Vice-President of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the professional and learned society for mathematicians in the UK, although commenting in a purely personal capacity here of course. I’m interested in trying to show people how mathematical modelling can, and cannot, contribute usefully to the discussion. Modelling may be a blackbox to many, but the modelling process should not be. A well-built model should be the product of a conversation between modeller and domain expert, in which the underlying assumptions, the input parameters and the uncertainties in those parameters are made explicit and the requirements are also made explicit. The result of the model should include a reasonable quantification of the uncertainties, such as a confidence interval, and a statement of the robustness of the result with respect to plausible changes in the assumed parameters. It may well be that at certain stages the answer from the model is “We can’t tell”. There’s a strong temptation to give a meaningless answer at that stage – I recall reading of an instance where in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, the model produced an answer of “anything between zero and two million” deaths. That is of course… Read more »
If I recall correctly a lot of Ferguson’s calculations were based on what happened on cruise ships – probably the most idiotic starting point…a load of elderly people in confined spaces on a ship with a crew that might have only basic understanding of hygiene.
Except that the diamond princess had an IFR of 0.23%
All I know is “scientists” were caculating much higher rates:
Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/
Remember they were mostly under lockdown in their cabins so the epidemiologists ..
I’m guessing it was figures like that which generated the 500,000 domesday scenario.
I’m sure it was. The domesday scenario was genuinely terrifying – if I’d been a prime minister staring down the barrel of half a million deaths, I’d have panicked too. But it wasn’t many weeks in that the truth must have been obvious to SAGE if not to the government
And yet the Swedish experts looked at the ICL modelling and easily dismissed it.
Can we steal them? We have much better tax rates (or at least, we used to)
Exactly – and their projections have been closer to reality I would say, given they have not pursued a lockdown strategy. We also always need to remember that nowhere, literally nowhere, in the Far East has had a total lockdown strategy of the sort pursued in Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and the UK. The lockdownists were merrily predicting disaster for Japan. It never happened.
All the Far East Asian countries have done much better without lockdown than the total lockdown European nations have done.
So the argument that it is only lockdown that prevents deaths has clearly been disproven, even though that remains the staple of UK media coverage.
Maybe they took note of Ferguson’s previous track record and used a bit of common sense.
A cruise ship would have been a good starting point with real cases and empirical evidence.
Ferguson used nothing empirical, just a load of numbers and didn’t apply common sense to them.
You are assuming a “do nothing” scenario. I’m not sure many have actually advocated for that. It is a fact that the majority of the population either have no symptoms whatsoever or symptoms that are mild enough not to require hospitalization. Normal herd immunity occurs when about 70% of the population has been exposed to a disease. Some scientists actually believe that it may be way less for Covid (20%) but let’s go with 70% as the number needed. What percentage of the population are so vulnerable that they have a significant probability of requiring hospitalization and of dying of the disease? I think it’s pretty clear that whatever that number is, it’s less than 30% of the population. The logical solution therefore would be to totally isolate the vulnerable (and we have a pretty good idea of who they are) while the rest of the population are left free to go about their business as usual and build immunity. Once herd immunity has been acquired the vulnerable can then return to normal life. Under this scenario, you would have neither vast number of deaths nor a breakdown of the health system since the brunt of the disease would be… Read more »
“You are assuming a “do nothing” scenario. I’m not sure many have actually advocated for that.” But that is almost exactly what Toby Young is doing in the section I was commenting. His claim is that the do-nothing scenario would have been less costly than lockdown, using one set of figures. My point is that equally plausible figures show the cost some 25 times higher than his estimate, and much higher than his figure for the cost of lockdown.
N Fergusson based himself on a do nothing scenario didn’t he?
Folk standing like Anthony Gormley statues while a plague sweeps around them. That’s what report 9 put in my mind.
“N Fergusson based himself on a do nothing scenario”
I’m not sure exactly what that’s supposed to mean, but what Ferguson et al’s report 9 said, as the opening sentence of the Results section, was “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour” and followed that with “In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB”. So that part of the report was about the likely result of the do-nothing scenario (and it is these figures that TY wants to revise). The report then goes on to discuss the results of various mitigation scenarios. So, do-nothing was reported on as one, and the least likely, of a number of scenarios. So whatever the question is supposed to mean, I think the answer is “Not really, no”.
A brilliant summary of the case against Ferguson ‘Ferguson’s 500,000 deaths estimate. He used 1% IFR, which was the consensus figure at the time, coming out of China.’ But, ‘as any fule kno’: ‘From Jan 15 to March 3, 2020, seven versions of the case definition for COVID-19 were issued by the National Health Commission in China.’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30089-X/fulltext And Ferguson had available to him the best advice of locally based coronavirus experts: ‘“Compared to SARS and MERS, we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of eight to 10 times less deadly to SARS to MERS,” Nicholls said. “So, a correct comparison is not SARS or MERS but a severe cold. Basically, this is a severe form of the cold. Similar to a common cold, the surrounding environment of the outbreak plays an important role in determining the survivability and spreadability of the virus, he continued. Because of the impending shift in seasons, Nicholls said he expects the spread of the virus to be curbed in a matter of months. “I think it will burn itself out in about six months,” Nicholls said.’ https://www.accuweather.com/en/health-wellness/coronavirus-expert-says-the-virus-will-burn-itself-out-in-about-6-months/679415 11th Feb 2020 So, either a lack of basic competence on the part… Read more »
Toby . . . I too looked at that photo of a jam packed beach down south, and thought “Well, that’s what you get in an over crowded country when you stop a huge number of people from going abroad by imposing quarantine.”. What did they think would happen when the weather turns hot here?! We aren’t a nation that has outdoor swimming pools in our gardens and we normally get so little hot weather, we have to make the most of it. Watch out for more of this throughout the summer Boris . . . that was just the beginning. Lift the lockdown totally and ALL the quarantine. Get the planes in the air!
What’s going to be interesting is when there isn’t a massive spike in cases. How are they going to explain that?
Doesn’t seem to have worried them unduly with the BLM mobs.
Precisely!
Meanwhile in the Real World
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-death-data-in-england-update-24th-june/
just look at the indeasing numbers of hospital trusts reporting no deaths. That should be headline news. Oh wait . . .
increasing – time to cut my fingernails
Can’t blame that one on the barbers!
Podiatrist! I shall have to see if I can sneak in to get my toenails done but it will probably need a facemask
And when no one has to be a work or school any more…
Huh, so the line at which free speech becomes not ok is when it risks causing you financial harm. Interesting.
Free speech: Just wondering if there’s been any discussion here about the fact that the bloke who arranged the banner flypast in Burnley was sacked, and also (I’ve just seen) his girlfriend (apparently on the grounds that she declined to undertake ‘Intensive Racial Sensitivity Training’)?
Yes, covered a fair bit on the comments to the previous LS.
See yesterday’s comments page!
It’s just scary. It’s almost predictable now in state institutions / large corps etc. but piddling little engineering firms? Like….. what duty do THEY have to the party line? Like anyone is seriously boycotting them because they refuse to kowtow to the orthodoxy!
Man. The world is all wrong when you have to try and find a boss who agrees with your political views rather the one who’s just prepared to pay you for doing something.
It was extensively discussed in the previous comments section.
“The following day, the Isle of Man Creamery withdrew its sponsorship of his show“
This is a matter for people on the IoM I suppose, but there needs to be a campaign to boycott the Isle of Man Creamery. This intolerance of dissent will never end until companies understand that they will pay a price for pandering to antiracism as well as for failing to do so.
Hopefully Manx Radio has at least been embarrassed by this ruling.
What worries me most is that this sort of thing is just the latest in a long line of declaring someone guilty of an offence, whether actual or merely perceived, before they are allowed to defend themselves. Upending centuries of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. I really worry about my two lads, especially the elder one (20) who is slightly autistic and has a tendency to speak then engage brain. He is a good soul, and once he has things explained to him (my husband usually delegates that task to me!), he is usually very upset. How many young people’s lives will be blighted for a spur of the moment or awkward comment that was not intended to hurt. It’s scary.
We are coming into dangerous times, for sure, and it is getting ever more necessary to control what you say in public. We must teach our children the opposite of what we were taught: that “it’s a free country” and “our nation believes in tolerance for dissent”. The simple fact is that it isn’t and we (as a nation) don’t.
Yes, sadly I think that is the conclusion that must be reached. If possible take your revenge at the ballot box – assuming we don’t get to a situation (we’re close to it) where the Electoral Commission prevents new parties that want to take on the elites from being formed .
There is no party that is not fully on board with the woke agenda in my constituency (I include the “Conservatives”). At this stage I would definitely vote for an actively racist party just to try to balance things a bit.
2 bads don’t make a good!
Tyneside Tigress Re your boy with the good soul. I hear you. I have a boy of similar ilk – but ten years older. My boy too, is outspoken and fearless – brave as a lion. He doesn’t hesitate to speak out or act when something offends his sense of rightness. Its not that he’s unaware of the potential dangers at times… When he was younger his blurtings caused me no end of consternation and embarrassment. I was constantly putting out fires. As he’s grown older I’ve had to hold my nerve when I’ve heard that he’s broken up street fights, kept people in place until the police arrive, told off the whole neighbourhood, etc. He’s not come a cropper yet and seems to get along well enough with his neighbours to act as their local street mayor. There’s nothing PC about him – he can still make me cringe with embarrassment – but his blunt straight-outness seems to work for him. The fates have protected him so far. And the gods take care of their own, they say …try not to worry. Hope its okay to share where I’ve got to so far – that you’re not offended by… Read more »
Gina, thanks. Not offended at all. He did come a cropper on a couple of occasions at the ‘woke’ school. Again, husband sends me in to bat and teachers have tended to run for cover! We have had this since he was at infant school. Interestingly, he found his calling at one of the local clubs where he has volunteered for nearly ten years training and supporting deprived and disabled children. I hope he will be an asset to any neighbourhood and workplace, like your son – there is something refreshing about straight talking in a world of double speak.
“there needs to be a campaign to boycott the Isle of Man Creamery”
I see your point, Mark, but isn’t that the sort of thing that they are doing? How is coming down to their level going to help matters?
I doubt that everyone who works for the Isle of Man Creamery is a woke liberal. You would be punishing innocent employees of the dairy.
There’s no realistic possibility that such a boycott would affect jobs, at most it would affect the profits a bit. Nor am I saying it’s necessarily practical yet We may need to go further down the road to Year Zero before enough people begin to understand the costs of endless concession. The point is that the idea of not coming down to their level merely concedes defeat. No company will ever stop kowtowing to the cultural revolutionaries so long as it is a one way proposition: stand up to them and lose business, or give in and lose nothing. It’s a no brainer at the moment, which is why it is happening so often. Ideally, once there is resistance, a balance can be achieved, and a cessation of active hostilities based on mutual strength.That’s when people agree to accept freedom of speech for their political enemies – when they have to recognise that they have nothing to gain from this kind of thing. Weakness never dissuades aggression by zealots. It always encourages further pushing. That is the lesson of dealing with the left for the past century in this country and in the US. It’s how we got where we… Read more »
“The point is that the idea of not coming down to their level merely concedes defeat.”
I’m sorry, I strongly disagree with this attitude.
You assume that this is a war. I’ve said it before. That is their agenda. They want to fight you. They want to defeat their perceived enemies.
As all of this is psychological you “fight” them by not engaging in their tactics. By not playing their game. Taking up arms – psychological or tangible – is their victory. That’s when they have “won”.
Let me ask you a simple question: how would you define “victory”? When will we have “beaten” them?
They want to “defeat” racism. Can they do this? How will they know when they have achieved their aim?
And before you accuse me. No, I will not “take a knee” and nor would I suspend or sack anyone for exercising freedom of speech. But at the moment the Right is being stupid and playing into their hands.
Paul Embery was right to criticise the “white lives matter” flyover. There’s no law against being stupid. In this political climate that was dumb.
Be more intelligent about this and beat them at their own game!
No need to apologise. We disagree, that’s fine. We aren’t woke types, after all :=)
I think we addressed this point previously. There are both direct and indirect responses, and the direct responses do not have to be the kind that play into their hands. In the following exchange:
here
and here.
Even direct resistance that plays into their hands is not necessarily dumb, though. It is necessary to have both kinds of resistance. Ultimately there will be no compromise until they meet resistance. You cannot “beat them at their own game”, because you have already surrendered on the key points by playing their game.
Critics of the “white lives matter” flyover are mostly just continuing the long surrender that got us to where we are now.
I really don’t get these (relatively) small companies virtue signalling their way into political allyship with the Powers That Be.
What are they hoping to achieve here? Saintly pursuit of our dolla rather than just pursuit of our dolla? Surely they realise by now that people, by and large, couldn’t give a fuck about the politics of the people they buy their ice cream from, long as it’s tasty and cheap?
Two possibilities occur. It might just be run by a woke zealot, or there might have been some sort of quick approach from a woke group threatening a campaign and bad pr, and they panicked. Probably the first is more likely here, but I’ve no local knowledge to judge by.
The ‘brothers of the square’ should not be ruled out either.
The sheer volume of rubbish generated by visitors to Dorset will have been exacerbated by the government’s insistence on take-away only.
No doubt all those tutters clucking about social distancing won’t have thought how to cater for all these litter-creators. Shame about the poor souls who were trying to empty the bins though.
As for the traffic, I’ve made several attempts over the years to find a parking space in Bournemouth and inevitably given up and gone elsewhere. Hostile publc transport won’t be helping the current situation.
The wonderful local council decided a couple of years ago to add parking meters to the majority of roads near the beaches and built on a couple of public car parks.
I’m lucky as I usually work in Bournemouth and so if wanting to go to the beach would park in the work car park. But even in normal times I wouldn’t consider the beach in the height of summer.
The media knew where to look for a juicy story then. Interesting how all the reports from the Grad, the DT, the Times and the Mail are phrased almost exactly the same.
On the traffic point.
Is there visual evidence of half a million peoples conveyancing to the golden stretch of sand?
No visual evidence however the local travel news this evening said there were queues on the main A road out of Bournemouth and the beach road coming out of Sandbanks. From what they said it sounded like the usual summer traffic that builds up on a normal summer afternoon when people leave the beach.
Whether there were really half a million people on the beach today I don’t know, not seen an actual picture on social media apart from what is in the newspapers.
My son lives a stone’s throw from Sandbanks. When I asked him about the invading crowds, he just responded by moaning about the noise from concrete mixers that had been going for 12 hours behind his house all day. (He whatsapped me a recording. It was an awful racket and he’s having to work from home.)
Doesn’t seem the marauding influx bothered the locals too much.
The population of Dorset is only 420k ish. I don’t think it’s doubled today. Traffic is always bad in summer. This was entirely predictable with so few other options for a day out. Most of those people should be at school or work.
Two cars and a motorbike drove past Ferguson’s house. The figures were then extrapolated from this using a sophisticated model …
Two cars and a motorbike drove past Ferguson’s house. The figures were then extrapolated from this using a sophisticated model …
Briliant!
Even on a miserable November evening, parking can be difficult in Bournemouth. One other thing about the ‘state of emergency’ – last week the libdem council leader, who declared the emergency, was subject to a no confidence vote which she scraped through by 1 vote. Methinks a little politics may be going on here.
BINS!!!!! OMG they are LETHAL!
Clearly you missed the story about the refuse collectors being harrassed……
Can Boris survive? Quite a thought, perhaps worrying to those of us who are relying on him to drive the completion of the EU exit promise. However, as we emerge from lockdown, I’m reminded of an article I read somewhere a couple of years ago that pointed out that whether we would be better or worse off following Brexit would be the result of the post-exit decisions made by our government.
How strongly the economy emerges from its current comatose position rests on the same principle.
My sphincter is tightening.
Johnson can survive if the Parliamentary Tories stick with him, but if they do then I suspect the Tories will be wiped out come the next election.
Barring an economic miracle (and why should the national leadership that proved so non-existent for the coronapanic suddenly acquire competence out of nothing?), the only way for the Tories to get through without the kind of complete loss of credibility suffered by the Major government. imo, is for them to make a clear break from the coronapanic disaster, put the blame where it belongs, and distance a new government from it. But it might not be possible to do that at all, anyway, with no credible alternative leader in the wings. Such a leader must be a convincing Brexiteer as well, if we are not to reopen that can of worms,disastrously.
And changing PM mid-Parliament is a lot harder to get away with in these more presidential times.
I think the 1922 Committee may be priming Rishi for the throne. They will stab Boris in the back and do just what you say at the slightest sniff of public discord re: lockdown easing / end of furlough / disastrous emergency budget / more riots etc.
In fact, maybe they’ll let Rishi do his emergency budget in which he goes “Oh dear, tut tut, Boris and Cummings and Handjob done a booboo” in a roundabout way, makes a ‘heroic’ attempt to get the country back on an economic steer, ready to riDe to the rescue once Boris resigns due to ‘family commitments’.
Definitely a possible scenario. Might be a good one to time for after the formal EU departure as well, so that Sunak can have maximum freedom of action without that hanging over him and without have to spend any political capital on it.
That’s very likely. I read somewhere about rumours of growing discontent from backbenchers and that Rishi is their man.
I get the feeling that Boris and Cummings will stay to get Brexit done then they will have to go. I reckon that Hancock and Williamson will be forced out once lockdown and antisocial distancing is eased (and there will be loads of court cases waiting for them) or even earlier when rioting forces the real end of lockdown and antisocial distancing.
I too am worried, that the worst PM in British History will survive in office, to perpetuate the immense damage already done, and to avoid the vilification and political reckoning he and his government deserve.
I was/am strongly pro-leave but honestly I couldn’t give a toss one way or the other any more. Our parliament has failed us, we as a country have failed.
“Emerge from lockdown”. I beg to differ. The “new normal” is the continuation of lockdown by any other means. Millions are still furloughed, churches, schools and countless other places are closed or have had their activities utterly fucked up, the Coronavirus Act and associated legislation are still in place, among other things restricting who can visit us in our own homes. Propaganda and misinformation continues to spew forth.
And a Conservative government with one of the largest majorities in recent history, at the start of its mandate, has utterly failed to stand up for freedom of speech, in complete contradiction of the views of most of those who voted for it.
The PM and the others should be banished from office, forever, and publicly shamed.
I’d like to hang them by the testicles personally. Not sure you could do that without killing them and I wouldn’t want to kill anyone but….. yeah….
Working out the how would be a worthwhile project.
Practice on the lesser MPs and local busybodies? If you do mistakenly off Bojo can I dibs his scalp please?
I wrote elsewhere that they should be nailed upside down to a church door. The red hot poker would be good too. I got downvoted by a politician’s wife, who missed the point that those things were done in the past, unlike lockdowns
There’s a church in Essex, Hadstock, that is reputed to have the skin of a Viking nailed to the door. It probably isn’t true, but it’s pointing in the right direction. Hancock’s skin in Hadstock would be neat, but hard on the people of Hadstock.
They will probably limp on until 2024 thanks to the Fixed Term Parliament Act. They do, when all is said and done, have an 80 seat majority. But even if the government falls, who will replace it? I cannot vote for any party that accepted or demanded the lockdown. All political parties currently represented at Westminster supported the lockdown.
Yes, we so need a new Party, but the FPTP system makes that all but impossible, when combined with the fan-boys of the 3 ‘main’ parties who will never vote for any other party.
I’d say it’s very difficult but not impossible. If you can reach something like 28% under FPTP, you can start winning seats in large numbers. If you can mobilise some of the non-voters, a lot of the centrist Labour vote as well as the traditional Conservative -Brexit Party vote, and ensure that you concentrate the vote…maybe in the North of England, Midlands, East and South (outside London) then getting a majority is not impossible. I think people are ready to respond to a positive populist message but you need a leader or even better a team of credible people who can articulate the party’s policies. I think it needs to be a real party as well, not a personal vehicle like the Brexit Party.
Yes, we can get out of the EU, but getting the EU out of our increasingly useless politicians will become the real challenge.
I think lockdown effects are good and bad on the Brexit front…
The pandemic’s effects have been so hyped that the public are not going to differentiate between Pandemic and Brexit effects. Without the pandemic, the globalist media would have been able to present any disappointing economic news as “because of Brexit”.
But in a wider sense, yes, there are huge dangers. Blair and his sharks are constantly circling sniffing for blood. So are many “remainer in their hearts” Conservatives.
There is no doubt Boris or “Boris” (his image) has been terribly damaged by this nightmare. He seems not to have fully recovered from the virus yet though he looks a little better. But politicians are very ruthless – they can smell his weakness.
Pity they didn’t smell it last year. It was undeniably evident during the election campaign.
If I’d been in the vicinity if Bournemouth beach I’d have got hold of some of these morons and rammed their rubbish up every single bodily orifice. A good kicking would sort out a lot of people out who are simply too thick to care about the environment,
Of not if. Apologies for the typo. I wish you could edit posts.
They’ve added an edit function. Click on the cogwheel at the bottom right of your post, and then click on “edit”. Very useful!
‘Cogwheel’? I thought it was a virus! ;-}
I would LOVE it if some enthusiastic environmentalists would go and start litter picking around the sunbathers next time this happens ;oP
Why?
If anyone wants a laugh and a good summary of how to be politically correct check out Leo kearse at the comedy unleashed club
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=36Yfy0Aub1c
The PC bit starts about 17:45 in but the rest is just as funny
For the 33 spotters fraction.
33 tonnes of waste were removed on a day that reached 33C
Was Neil Ferguson weighing the waste by any chance?
Surely if it had been Ferguson it would have been 3300 tons of waste were collected…at a minimum.
I imagine if the Police were telling people to just “get off the beach NOW” a load of waste was left behind.
Neil doesn’t get involved with the actual verification of numbers using things like scales, he only models the amount of waste.
The next day he would model half the amount of rubbish and claim to have removed half the rubbish being the dedicated environmentalist that he is.
A child discarded a sweet wrapper. The figures were extrapolated from this using a sophisticated model …
Yes. The model was a Smarties box – increased in volume by 10,000% for no good reason but that it looked impressive. Bit like when they show teeth 4 feet high in a toothpaste commercial. 🙂
Thank you, I have added to my graph. I think I had 33 units of alcohol today too.
According to the DT’s interactive map a week or so ago, every sub-region in my part of Wales had 33 covicases. What’s with this magic number?
From the Telegraph today:
33 new cases in China and on Wednesday this week, 33 countries reported their highest numbers of new daily cases so far, including the United States and Brazil, which had the highest numbers of new cases globally.
No idea except 33 is the highest you can go in the masons and then ask who controls the masons?
Even if a return to large gatherings of people causes a few bumps in (true) total cases, how will government justify a return to lockdown given so few hospitalisations will result? The gatherings are of children and adults healthy enough to be on beaches and pubs, global death rate per case seems to be declining, the most vulnerable have already fallen victim, health service and care homes are surely (perhaps) better prepared, and it’s summer, along with many other reasons why worst-case scenarios no longer hold water.
Return to normality may long-term even push the demonstrated IFR below 0.25%, and make the whole charade look even more insane. Can we have our £450 billion back please?
Yes I expect that’s a best case scenario unfortunately
They’ll just make something up like the first time around. I’m sure Prof Ferguson is up for it.
The boss of the NHS wants people to celebrate the service every year with a clap on its birthday. He wants the event to start this year with an applause on the 5 July at 5pm.
Excuse me? How many people have they turned their backs on during the last three months? We’re supposed to clap for this?
How come the boss of the NHS hasn’t resigned, given that they had three years to prepare for a pandemic (since Exercise Cygnus) and still weren’t prepared? Never mind expecting us all to applaud him.
Over my dead body.
Which, if I have some sort of unfortunate accident or unforeseen health problem in the next few months, could actually happen yaaaaay!!
(And then they will test me until I come back positive for Rona and I’ll end up on the stats and you’ll all end up back in lockdown double yaaaaaay)
Thanks “friend”.
It really is a cult, especially the central organisations i.e. NHS England (I work there). Wouldn’t want the public to start questioning its persistent mediocre performance, so let’s encourage them to mindlessly clap instead.
This year, it’s the NHSs 72nd birthday, or some weirdly odd number. They were making a lot of noise about celebrating that. Anniversaries are usually celebrated on years that are a multiple of 5.
Actually, it’s more likely to be the last anniversary the NHS ever has.
Sounds like somebody looked at a calender and thought 2020 is a nice round number let’s celebrate then.
Far too logical!
No thanks.
Why should we clap for them when they’re being paid to do their job?
They aren’t doing their job. Unless Covvie is now the sole affliction of mankind.
A newly released meta-analysis on the use of face masks for reducing the transmission of viral respiratory infections within community settings shows the evidence for their effectiveness is equivocal at best.
https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/new-meta-analysis-raises-doubts-masks-work-prevent-covid-infection-and-transmissi
Quick question – is it actually against the law to hug someone? Reason being is that I know someone who has said that we should only be thinking about meeting in bigger groups when we’re allowed to hug?! Thanks.
Nothing in any law I have read about hugging people or distancing of any kind. The law is here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350
The distinction between law and guidance has been made deliberately vague by government and media.
Thanks.
I need to find the lord sumption quote about ministers statements being taken as law.
Boris stressed this week that the coronaregs are no longer law but merely guidelines. Therefore subject to interpretation – and common sense. Hurray!
My friend and I were discussing this today. For instance: It’s recommended that people sit back to back or a metre apart.
That surely means even small cafes can operate fairly normally. You sit opposite the person you’re with and a complete stranger can sit behind you only 6″ away at the next table, no problem!
Well, if it is, I’m a massive recidivist.
That someone is weird!
Well if it is against the law, I broke it yesterday. Twice. With a dear friend I haven’t seen in 3 months.
Seriously nobody tells me who I can or cannot hug.
Social distancing is just guidance according to the police, so I guess hugs are too.
That’s one of the nasty little side-effects of this bollox. Insofar as these horrible prohibitions are laws – and in Wales they all are – they turn (probably all) normal, decent people into criminals. Me, I’m approaching Al Capone status.
Annie Coronapone.
Ronnie and Rona Kray
How dare people enjoy themselves in the sunshine and sunbathe on Bournemouth beach! And how dare they spend money in local shops and help these businesses to thrive. How dare they top up their vitamin D levels and improve their immunity? Don’t they realise you can only go outdoors in mass gatherings if you are protesting in the name of BLM! Or if they are clapping our NHS heroes! Otherwise outdoor gatherings will kill us all and they will be de facto responsible for genocide.
ALERT! ALERT!
Track and trace!
Second wave!
Lockdown lockdown!
The way it is reported, you’d think this country has never had a problem with litter or gridlock before. “See what happens you let people out of their homes, they do stuff”. Just fuck off, please.
Hahahahaha.
THREE CHEERS FOR BOURNEMOUTH BEACH AND ALL THOSE WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THE MASS GATHERING TODAY!
Major incident for the mass media – not a ivory tower public health bureaucrat, pseudo-scientist or simpleton politician in sight.
If there aren’t literally hundreds of people dropping dead in a month’s time, this thing is officially OVER.
We owe the beach-goers a debt of gratitude.
Well, either they are proving lockdown isn’t needed OR they are building up herd immunity for us by catching the virus. Personally I’d lay odds on the first option. Either way, excellent! Carry On Down The Beach.
As a friend of mine asked we’ve had VE Day, Bank holiday weekends and BLM protests so how come we’ve not seen a spike yet?
They and the beach goers yesterday have shown that this is all bollocks.
It is double bollocks because even if we were right at the start of the epidemic with hardly any herd immunity a crowded beach like that would never have been a problem. When has anyone ever caught a cold from going to the beach? You’re outdoors with tons of fresh air, lots of sun and it’s often quite windy. The different families aren’t actually even going up to each other and talking to them (or coughing on them). They’re pretending they aren’t there and wishing it wasn’t so crowded. If anyone is shedding virus it won’t get far. You don’t catch a virus by just one or two particles touching you. You need a decent dose, which you get from sitting in a stuffy and crowded room for several hours with infected people watching reruns of Mary Poppins at Christmas.
The salt everywhere kills bad stuff too.
Beach goers are the true sceptics! Sign of the times.
In other news Carl Vernon just posted a depressing video about NHS waiting lists.
I’m glad someone is talking about it (the BBC keep making tokenistic little nods before getting back to their general fire and brimstoning of anyone who dares venture onto a beach) but man. Horrific.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDsBwWZf8DQ
It’s depressing but so true and its going to get worse – what about those suicide rates and increase in mental health issues like depression and anxiety? Not to mention ending up with a generation of socially madadjusted children who will see other people as potential biohazards and who will be unable to communicate face to face because they’ve not been taught the nuances of human communication and interaction.
We won’t have just a lost generation but a broken society as well.
I was on a train today terminating in Bournemouth (I got off a few stops beforehand). The train was busy with people heading there but not a ‘lethal’ lack of social distancing like the TSSA is making out. But this is what you get when you coop people up for months. I’ve been out and about this week on a mixture of leisure and work related train trips. In general, I would strongly suggest readers do get to see some of our historic city centres before tourism gets going again. I visited an open air tourist attraction in London this week and had an enjoyable time, but it must be said their ‘scheme’ of offering you food and alcohol with no bins is causing trouble. And the Pimms was being served by a stroppy Aussie woman shouting ‘social distance, social distance!!’. And on that note, certain areas of the Thames Path (I walked round Hammersmith/Wandsworth/Putney) are turning into a tip due to this ill advised al-fresco stuff. The Thames ferries have restarted if readers are interested (I realised this too late!) On my trip today, I visited a tourist area that has been overlooked so far. I am pleased to… Read more »
Littering’s bad enough, but in my city the council still haven’t opened the public toilets in the park I live next to. The park has been heaving for the past few days, with literally hundreds of people using the tree’d and bushy areas as a toilet. I’m sure you can imagine the consequences..
Yes this is also turning into a problem my way!!
Forgot to mention – South West Trains are using some hand sanitiser that seems to rip a layer of skin off….
That’s awful. Pity the poor staff who probably have to use it several times a day.
That’s awful.
One of the supermarkets I go to uses a brand of hand sanitiser that’s nasty – its caused my skin to peel rather badly and leave small wounds.
My local Aldi provides something but I’ve never been policed into using it.
There’s also spray and paper towels to disinfect the trolley handles but I always shop in the evening when it’s quiet and have never seen anyone bother to use them.
I only used it because my hands were rather filthy from having to pick one of my bags which had fallen in the park on my way to the supermarket.
As for the spray and paper towels to disinfect the trolley, yep, I barely see anyone use them either.
Squishiness abounds.
Soon to be followed by a plague of digestive infections?
All those photos in Daily Fail of the scenes on the beach have caused expats in Greece apoplexy. I’m back to trying to convince them that we aren’t all dropping in the streets with Covid and dying in corridors, and vainly trying to point out that there were only 4 current deaths from Covid yesterday (the rest were past deaths) and that’s out of a population well over 65 million. Any Amazon driver will tell you it’s more like 80 million if you count those not registered. There are screams of “don’t let the British in, we’re all going to die!” from British expats in Greece. The locals who actually need to make some money this tourist season, aren’t bothered, they’ve worked out the truth and don’t read the British newspapers, and will welcome any British person who wants to holiday with them, with open arms.