Handy Cock’s Brilliant Solution to Ending the Covid Crisis – Even More Tests!
In a move that will surprise no one, Matt Hancock has announced that the Government will carry out even more tests in an attempt to better understand how prevalent the virus is. The BBC has the story.
The Office for National Statistics’ Infection Survey will test 150,000 people a fortnight in England by October, up from 28,000 now.
The survey is separate from the mass testing programme of people with symptoms to diagnose cases.
For the survey, a random sample of the general population is tested.
That means it can provide estimates for the true spread of the virus.
The diagnostic testing programme, which provides daily totals, largely relies on people with symptoms coming forward.
Some people do not display symptoms when they are infected so the daily totals are an underestimate of the amount of infection that is around.
As part of the expansion of the programme, data will also be gathered in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the survey was the “single most important tool” the government had for making policy decisions around coronavirus because it helped it understand how the disease was spreading.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Mr Hancock said expanding the ONS survey would allow the government to be “more accurate and more localised” in its response.
He added that it would help the government with its “biggest challenge”, which was finding people who were asymptomatic but could still pass the virus on.
Finding people who are asymptomatic but who can nonetheless pass the virus on may well be a “challenge”. Let’s not forget that at a World Health Organisation (WHO) press conference on June 8th, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the pandemic, said the following:
We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare and much of that is not published in the literature.
From the papers that are published there’s one that came out from Singapore looking at a long-term care facility. There are some household transmission studies where you follow individuals over time and you look at the proportion of those that transmit onwards.
We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.
The WHO immediately attempted to “clarify” Dr Van Kerkhove’s comments, saying it simply didn’t know whether asymptomatic people are infectious because not enough studies have been done (even though those that have been done show there’s little or no secondary transmission). And here’s some new evidence – a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on August 13th.
In this study, a team of Chinese researchers looked at 3,410 close contacts between infected and uninfected people that mainly took place in Guangzhou. That is, they looked at the contact that 391 infected people (some symptomatic, some asymptomatic) had had with 3,410 other people. They found that of these 3,410, 127 became infected. But here’s the kicker: 126 of them were infected by symptomatic people and only one by an asymptomatic person. And to infect that one person, the asymptomatic group had to have close contact with 305 other people. So that’s a secondary transmission rate for asymptomatic people of 1:305.
The researchers conclude:
Our results showed that patients with COVID-19 who had more severe symptoms had a higher transmission capacity, whereas transmission capacity from asymptomatic cases was limited. This supports the view of the World Health Organization that asymptomatic cases were not the major drivers of the overall epidemic dynamics.
Limited! That’s one way of putting it. Hat tip to Phil Kerpen, who flagged up this study on Twitter yesterday.
Incidentally, one of the researchers’ findings, duplicated numerous times in other studies, is that the secondary attack rate was highest in household settings. Does this mean that locking people down in their homes, making transmission within households much more likely, may not have been such a good idea? Who would’ve thunk it!
New Zealand Lockdown Unlawful
Congratulations are due to Andrew Borrowdale, a Kiwi lawyer who brought a Judicial Review against the New Zealand Government alleging, among other things, that the restrictions introduced by the Director-General of Health on March 26th were unlawful. The High Court released its judgment today and found that, on that point at least, Borrowdale is correct. Here is the relevant paragraph:
By various public and widely publicised announcements made between March 26th and April 3rd 2020 in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis, members of the executive branch of the New Zealand Government stated or implied that, for that nine-day period, subject to limited exceptions, all New Zealanders were required by law to stay at home and in their “bubbles” when there was no such requirement. Those announcements had the effect of limiting certain rights and freedoms affirmed by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 including, in particular, the rights to freedom of movement, peaceful assembly and association. While there is no question that the requirement was a necessary, reasonable and proportionate response to the COVID-19 crisis at that time, the requirement was not prescribed by law and was therefore contrary to s 5 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.
I like that final sentence – no question indeed! Needless to say, the NZ Government has since passed a law prescribing the draconian rules so any attempt to JR the present restrictions would probably fail. Nonetheless, Borrowdale has scored a significant victory, showing that – for nine days at least – Saint Jacinda was in breach of the NZ Bill of Rights.
Andrew Borrowdale is my Sceptic of the Week.
Ship of Fools
There’s a good piece by the Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner on the hapless fools running the country.
In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates describes a ship on which the sailors mutiny and try to pilot the vessel with no knowledge of “the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his [a pilot’s] art”. Success on this “Ship of Fools” is defined not by having the skills to navigate the vessel but only by the ability to persuade others that such skills aren’t actually necessary and that the job can be done regardless.
The story is intended as an allegory on the downsides of democracy, of the danger that in such a system of government, ignorant fools elect persuasive fools and are then led to ruin. After the Government’s latest shambolic, Covid-related failing, it seems an appropriate description of today’s political leadership.
I’ve used it before, admittedly, but make no apology for repetition; each day brings further confirmation of its legitimacy. No doubt much of the blame for the myriad misjudgments lies with the incompetence of the public sector and its accompanying quangocracy, the latter seemingly deliberately created to absolve the politicians from responsibility for day-to-day management. However, the fish rots from the head. Buck-passing is itself a symptom of poor leadership.
After giving numerous examples of the Government’s financial incontinence and warning of the dire reckoning to come, Warner says we shouldn’t expect a policy shift any time soon.
Ministers cannot bring themselves to admit they got the Covid response wrong. Too many egos, too many careers are now fully invested in the strategy adopted. Rudderless, the ship of fools sails on.
Warner’s piece reminded me of the verdict a reader sent in yesterday, summing up why the Government, its most senior officials and their advisors have made so many mistakes:
It’s what’s to be expected when you place incompetent people in positions where they have authority, but no real responsibility, where there are no sanctions for poor performance and where people do their best rather than doing what they’re best at.
If you think that doesn’t apply to senior civil servants, think again. Today I’ve published a piece by an anonymous senior civil servant on how Whitehall has mismanaged the crisis. Here’s an extract:
There are few among our political elite and the supporting Senior Civil Service who have STEM degrees and the consequence of this narrow pool is a failure to understand basic concepts, e.g. they believe “the science is settled” when it comes to climate change, and that they’re “following the science” regarding COVID-19. What they fail to appreciate is that science is rarely settled. By its nature, it is about investigating and challenging assumptions, collecting and evaluating evidence to test hypotheses, and seeking to avoid bias and misrepresentation of results. The current narrative regarding testing and ‘cases’ is a classic example of this lack of numeracy and statistical knowledge. If you test more you are likely to find more occurrences and they may be actual positives or false positives.
Worth reading in full if you want to understand why the Government has made such a complete hash of everything.
Ireland Introduces More Pointless “Containment” Measures
The Government of Ireland has announced another raft of measures prompted by an uptick in the number of cases – 533 last week, up from a low of 61.
The measures include:
- All outdoor events limited to 15 people, down from 200
- Indoor events limited to six people, reduced from 50
- All visits to homes limited to six people from no more than three households, whether indoors or outdoors
- Football matches and other sporting fixtures can only take place behind closed doors
- Restaurants and bars can remain open, but must close by 11.30pm
Needless to say, the rise in cases is almost certainly due to a rise in the number of PCR tests being done. In the week from August 10th to 16th, more than 50,000 tests were carried out, a significant increase.
As of Noon today, the total number of cases in Ireland is 27,499 and the total number of deaths 1,775.
Stop Press: I suggest the Taoiseach and his Keystone Kabinet read this piece in the Conversation entitled “Seven Ways to Manage Your Coronaphobia“.
Supermarket Sales Decline, Thanks to Mandatory Face Nappies
Colour me shocked. According to Kantar, there were two million fewer supermarket visits after mandatory face coverings were introduced in England and Scotland. The Guardian has the story.
Supermarket sales have begun to slow in Great Britain since the easing of lockdown restrictions, as the introduction of compulsory face coverings in stores in England and Scotland initially deterred some shoppers.
Growth in total take-home grocery sales slowed to 14.4% year-on-year in the three months to August 9th, from 17% in the three months to July 12th. Supermarkets felt the impact as more shops and hospitality venues reopened, making consumers less reliant on food retailers, according to the data analysis firm Kantar, which examined shopping trends in England, Scotland and Wales.
Kantar said there were two million fewer supermarket visits in the week after the face-covering rule was introduced in England than otherwise have been expected.
Meanwhile, online shopping continues its upward trajectory, with a record 13.5% of all grocery sales ordered through the internet.
The online delivery firm Ocado, which will start a new contract supplying Marks & Spencer food instead of Waitrose products from September 1st, has been a significant beneficiary of the switch to online food shopping, according to Kantar.
Ocado had a 1.8% share of the grocery market in the 12 weeks to August 9th, up from 1.4% a year earlier. Its sales were up 45.5%, compared with the same period last year.
False Positives in Care Homes
A reader has made an interesting observation about his mother’s care home.
I want to tell you about the care home my mother lives in. As you know, residents are effectively imprisoned in these for the foreseeable future. The residents undergo Covid tests and my mother was recently tested positive and placed in isolation for 14 days as per PHE’s rules, I am told. She has no symptoms, has not been outside the home, and if she has Covid it can only be through transmission from a member of staff. Under these circumstances one would expect to see a widespread outbreak in that home. There is not.
There have been similar occurrences there recently and the care home has admitted that there has been no Covid outbreak and confessed to a number of false positive test results. It would seem from my simple analysis that at this home the number of positive test results that are actually false positives is 100%, because no one testing positive has had any symptoms of COVID-19.
If this is applied to community testing, what does this say about the apparent increased number of infections (cases)?
The reader may be on to something. I’ve published a piece on false positives today by a Professor of Genetics who believes that about 0.17% of tests yield false positives, almost certainly due to contamination in the PCR testing labs. Here’s his conclusion:
A hidden/ignored contamination positive rate of 0.17% would lead to authorities declaring (on average) a minimum of 170’cases’ per 100,000 tests. Curiously, this is exactly the kind of rate that is being declared in many regions, and is very close to the level at which travel quarantines kick in.
Worth reading in full.
Give Yourselves a Smoked Salmon Treat
I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to give my readers a food tip: A side of smoked salmon from Bleiker’s, a family business established in 1993 by Jürg Bleiker, a Swiss chef who settled in the Yorkshire Dales. I ordered a side of the Yorkshire peat-smoked salmon a couple of months ago and it was so good I’ve just ordered it again. Postage and packing is free. Place your order here. Highly recommended.
Postcard From the Algarve
A reader has sent me a short postcard from the Algarve. Sounds heavenly.
We are very lucky to have a property in the Algarve but sadly had to make the decision to come on holiday for the summer without the children and grandchildren as Portugal is still on the naughty list and they are unable to quarantine due to not being able to work from home.
All the cafes, restaurants, shops and beaches are open and dare I say it it but life is so lovely and normal here. People do not jump six feet in the air when you walk past them but are more than happy to pass the time of day.
Sitting down at a cafe you are not presented with a sheet of paper with all the new government restrictions and asked for your name and mobile number. You’re presented with a menu.
The only negative is that you have to pop a mask on in the shops and if you go into a restaurant to pay the bill. But even we have decided that it’s a small price to pay to be treated like a human being again and to have our sanity back.
Round-Up
- ‘Are you sitting comfortably? This is Not the Six O’Clock News‘ – Must-read column by Allison Pearson in which she imagines what a conversation between a numerate Hugh Pym and his innumerate co-newsreader Sophie Raworth would be like on the BBC Six O’Clock News. Comments are hilarious too. And here’s a YouTube video of an actual interview between a Raworth-like, bedwetting newsreader on Spanish TV and a hospital doctor who knows his onions. It’s spookily like Pearson’s imaginary exchange
- ‘Argonaut’s Norris: “Fraud” lockdown was the “biggest policy error since WWI”‘ – Good piece in Investment Week about top financier and leading lockdown sceptic Barry Norris
- ‘Gaining Immunity From Propaganda‘ – YouTube video in with Tony Heller debunks the CDC’s claim that Covid antibodies only give you immunity for three months
- ‘Scientists see signs of lasting immunity to COVID-19, even after mild infections‘ – And here’s a new paper showing the CDC is wrong – once you’ve had it, you’re immune
- ‘NYC is dead forever – here’s why‘ – Depressing blog post by James Altucher on why New York is unlikely to ever recover from being locked down
- ‘Is there science or fiction behind the Government’s COVID-19 decisions?‘ – Good article by Oliver Watson in Hector Drummond Magazine
- ‘Gavin Williamson may sound like a nitwit… but has he just pulled off a strategic masterstroke?‘ – Funny piece from Michael Deacon, the Telegraph‘s parliamentary sketch writer
- ‘Mel Brooks is cancelled‘ – Not a spoof – it’s actually true. HBO Max forces anyone watching the film to endure a three-minute health warning from a film professor, according to Paul du Quenoy in the Critic
- ‘We can’t lock down forever‘ – Good piece by Fraser Myers in Spiked on the ineffectiveness of the lockdowns in Argentina and Peru, among other places
- ‘Farewell, Public Health England‘ – It’s good riddance to PHE from Christopher Snowdon, Britain’s leading opponent of the nanny state
- ‘Dido Harding’s unstoppable upward rise is an egregious example of the chumocracy at work‘ – Ross Clark again, this time on Dido Harding, the new head of the Institute for Health Protection, PHE’s successor
- ‘Why weren’t we wearing masks at the start of the crisis?‘ – And here’s Ross Clark in the Spectator posing a question to which he knows the answer
- ‘In defence of Claire Fox‘ – The redoubtable Ruth Dudley Edwards comes to the defence of Free Speech Union Advisory Council member Claire Fox
- ‘History to “vindicate Swedish COVID-19 strategy”‘ – Good piece on Sky News Australia’s Outsiders
- ‘Countries using hydroxychloroquine have far fewer COVID-19 deaths than countries that don’t, study from Association of American Physicians and Surgeons shows‘ – More evidence HCQ is effective (although treat source with caution)
- ‘Pizza Express closures: The full list of chain’s restaurants shutting down in the UK‘ – Pizza Express, one of my favourite high street restaurant chains, is closing 73 branches and making 1,100 employees redundant
- ‘Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional: week ending August 7th 2020‘ – The ONS’s weekly data release showing deaths in Week 32 were below the five-year average for the eighth week in a row. Incidentally, all-cause mortality in private homes was 702 higher in Week 32 than the five-year average. Why? Collateral damage from the lockdown. More on that here
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Two today: “Lousy Reputation” by We Are Scientists and “No More Waves” by Nigel.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums that are now open, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We’ve also just introduced a section where people can arrange to meet up for non-romantic purposes. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Small Businesses That Have Re-Opened
A few months 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 re-opened, 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 re-opened – or most of them, anyway – we’re focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. As of July 4th, many of them have re-opened too, but not all (and some of them are at risk of having to close again). 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 – particularly if they’re not insisting on face masks! Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
A reader has made a good suggestion.
I was wondering if your map of businesses who have opened could be expanded to businesses who display “No mask? We won’t ask” sign? That would allow us mask-refusers to know where we are safe to visit without risking a drama with a Covid loon, and also reward those plucky businesses with our custom. It’s been interesting to see how the Covid terror only seems to last as long as financial necessity allows (note previously hysterical pub landlords get much less worried when they are allowed to re-open) so I’d be interested to see if a line of mask free customers outside one shop tempted its neighbours to risk the plague.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
I’ve created a permanent slot down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (now showing it will arrive between Oct 3rd to Oct 13th). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £3.99 from Etsy here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here (now over 29,500).
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
Stop Press: The BBC has flagged up a story of a mask exempt woman with an autistic child being harangued in a supermarket by a mask Nazi in Whitley Bay. She had a panic attack and had to leave the supermarket. The BBC’s advice, echoed by the National Autistic Society, Asthma UK and the Alzheimer’s Society, is to treat non-mask wearers with courtesy and understanding. Meanwhile, in Connecticut, the Governor has signed an order requiring non-mask wearers to get a note from their doctor to prove they should be exempt.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is a lot of work (although I have help from several people, including one indefatigable techie who doesn’t want to be named). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
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King for a day.
In a leather thong!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j53hFzwrYcg
https://www.lockdowntruth.org/post/they-wouldn-t-would-they
Please no.
But going by the pattern of Government decisions during this fiasco, you may be spot on with your prediction 🙁
Where I drink (which shall remain anonymous) less and less staff are wearing masks (although they are required to) saying it’s all bulshit
Cheers!
Of course they will!
Please stop fear-mongering! MW
As someone who has to wear a face covering at work, luckily “only for about 5h30min, I really hope not.
I come home exhausted, with a numb lower face, have developed a sore throat and sore stomach as I breath in too much CO2. I am afraid for the long term effect on my health, and am considering quitting my job for my healths’ sake.
I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone what to do, but I know I could not tolerate it for one hour let alone 5+ hours per day. I’m so sad for all of you who are being forced to decide between your job and your health. It’s diabolical what they’re doing.
Wear it just under your nose.
Or, just cut holes in it for your mouth and nostrils.
Most people don’t notice, and if they do, they don’t really give shite.
It is not worth making yourself sick.
Time for creative passive aggression.
Can you not use the same exemptions that the public can use to avoid wearing a mask in shops or on transport? Your employer has a duty of care to you.
You may want to consult a solicitor if your employer won’t honour their duty of care. I’m not trained in the law by any stretch of the imagination, but if your employer forces you to do something that harms you, and you feel forced to leave your job, it sounds like constructive dismissal.
I’m just after reading a post in Linkedin, some guy had stuck a post on with a tick box ‘masks in shops, agree/disagree. Its got 21k likes or positive thumbs up things and 2500+ comments. This ain’t going away any time soon, and the general consensus seemed to be in the agree camp. – and I quote one loonies comments , ‘If you disagree, you’re basically a prick’… I’m flabbergasted at people..!
That’s social media for you. Army, be the bestest.
LinkedIn is a 100% virtue signalling platform. Everyone wants to impress everyone else as money and reputation are at stake. So it’s groupthink all the way or just plain fear of letting people know how you feel.
Hi all
I’ve asked this before and I’m still unclear.
If I tested 1,000 people who didn’t have “Covid 19” with the current PCR test how many false positives would I get on average?
5 ish would be 0.5% false positives
Really? SAGE mention PHE verification showed 95% specificity. EQAs showed median 2.3% false positive range (IQR 0.8–4%). But that was back when SAGE was attempting to do science properly (3rd June 2020).
Here’s their document: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020
Their reasoning starts getting faulty and they engage in post hoc ergo propter hoc to argue a slightly lower rate (they basically argue if you flip a coin 10 times and 7 out of those are heads, then obviously the probabily of tails can never exceed 3/10).
50ish out of 1000 would be 5%. The real number of false positives must be much lower than that based on the ONS fortnightly infection survey (the one that’s about to be expanded up to 150,000 tests a fortnight, above).
The raw result from the last release on August 14th was 17 positive tests out of 30,522. If all of those were false positives that would only be 0.056%.
Therefore specificity better than 99.944%.
Trouble is that the *actual* positives don’t indicate an infective virus. The whole process is flawed beyond belief.
If you believe that all of this is a whole lotta bull then I would call Matt H’s latest announcement stalling for time, i.e., vaccines still not ready.
It’s all smoke and mirrors.The only statistic that matters is deaths and they are non existent.
Where is the fight back?
Yep
I think the answer is nobody knows, because the PCR test has never been tested.
Yep – should only be used to narrow down the infectious agent if a subject has symptoms, does not indicate infection in the absence of symptoms and should always be calibrated/backed up by a gold standard test as it’s only a proxy test.
And the gold standard test for C-19 – the PCR test!
So of course our lamestream media let this one pass without challenge. On re-opening schools our associate chief medical officer of health said the following when asked about routinely testing teachers:
“If you test somebody today, you only know if they are infected today,” she explains. “In fact, if you’re testing in a population that doesn’t have much COVID, you’ll get false positives almost half the time. That is, the person actually doesn’t have COVID, they have something else, they may have nothing. It will just complicate the picture.”
A high-ranking medical office of health actually quoted as saying testing will yield false positives almost half the time and nobody says boo. So let’s ramp up testing in a population that does’t have much Covid so we can keep the casedemic going, keep people scared, and maintain a “state of emergency” so that our politicians can continue taking advantage of their emergency powers. Makes perfect sense…if you’re a psychopath.
That’s what I’m worried about.
Who in the world actually knows this stuff for real?
Do you have names e.g. Nobel laureates who aren’t in bed with WHO etc?
We need to establish exactly what is being tested here because the ramifications are ridiculous. We are going to have another “lockdown”for NO REASON at all!
We have had local ones for no reason.
We have people being quarantined for no reason.
Just say they test us all – and we have nothing – 10 % show positive falsely then they will probably lock up that 10%, their family and their recent contacts – probably half the country – under house arrest or if NZ are anything to go by it’ll be relocation to camps…
The Nobel laureates, doctors and scientists who know the truth are being censored. It’s widely known that the creator of the PCR test had said it ought not be used as a diagnostic tool. All it measures is fragments of RNA that are, generally, non-infectious and are most often the remnants of this or another coronavirus. The test is rubbish and everyone knows it, and yet all we hear is more testing, more testing! The bloody governor of Ohio tested positive with no symptoms and then tested negative, but he still calls for more testing. Do you think the average person gets a follow-up test when they test positive? I suspect they’re put under house arrest immediately. Do not pass go…
Who is the creator of the PCR test?
was it kary mullis?
“casedemic”
Love it!
Lamestream media was also a good one.
Americanism.
I like today’s Heath Robinson reinterpretation! Here’s the original: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/illustration/heath-robinson-rare-illustrations/#6
Further to yesterday’s article about cases of covid trickling across the border into Scotland. If we are being infected by Angleterrible people you would expect the regions bordering England to have the highest number of new cases. In fact, the two health boards comprising 200,000 people have 6 cases. For August! Grampian on the other hand has 400 this month so far, and Grampian is strikingly unadjacent to the English border, indeed we’re more distant than around 85% of Scotland’s population. So I’m afraid the Prof is speaking unmitigated bollox, this is a home grown “surge”
The prof specialises in unmitigated bollox. Unfortunately, the MSM never call her out on it.
Perhaps she thinks Longshanks’ Warwolf is catapulting them in!
Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
English bugs will strike ye dead.
Pay ye heed to Krankie’s order,
Keep the English from the border.
English accents tire our lugs,
And we prefer our Scottish bugs.
Possibly using a trebuchet when necessary.
How about this as a motto for the Old Normal Club? “We’re only human.”
only human ?
Nah. 🙂
We’re the only humans.
From 2015:
A POSITIVE PCR TEST MAY NOT MEAN POSITIVELY SICK
https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_8pwxdv0o
I see Wancock has announced they are going to test “150,000” every fornight for a ONS survey, but I wonder if that target will actually be (and what the point of this survey actually is).
I had a letter through the post last week from the NHS inviting me to take part in a similar survery on behalf of Imperial College and Ipsos MORI which went straight through the shredder. I imagine a lot of people who recieved the invitation also ignored it, so will they find 150,000 willing volunteers to stick a swab up there nose and down their throat every 2 weeks?
No way is Wanksock going to shove anything up my nose!
Cockhanwanker.
I am reliably informed by YouTube, that the politically-correct phrase is “shitweasel”. It has a most pleasing ring to it.
Why on earth would anyone risk being quarantined for no reason at all?
Another winner from our boy.
I genuinely think there are a whole lot of very dim people out there who would like to volunteer and feel their moment of ‘fame’ for a day without fully understanding what the outcome would be – and indeed quite like to be ‘quarantined’. I have been stunned at the general lack of curiousity around these ridiculous rules and chaotic actions. The young really have reason to kick against it – and those still in employment whose employers might have a sense of humour failure about the deliberate risk to take the test. But the older generations (and I’m heading that way) seem to welcome it. Utterly bizarre. Utterly bonkers.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vaccine that is going to save us all from certain death pops up just before the festive season. I bet all the eager masked morons will be queuing up down the street with their sleeves rolled up begging to be pumped with poison….
I’d be inclined to ‘Return to Sender’ with some choice remarks added.
Perhaps a possible little cash incentive could be on the table? I did hear that other countries could/would be offering this. In fact did I hear that this WAS being considered in the UK? Plenty of takers then.
As the conspiracy realists keep telling us, government assistance in the form of a universal basic income (or some such) will be contingent on doing what the government tells you. Part of the bigger plan is to keep people dependent on the government as dependency gives them the ultimate control. Call me crazy, but does anyone here think that receiving benefits WON’T at some point mean submitting to testing and taking the vaccine?
Or travelling. Or attending school. Or entering any public premises.
I mean no one is forcing you to take the vaccine but…
Exactly. I said that to my wife months ago. She said I sounded like a ‘Sun reader’. She likes her foreign holidays so she’s getting a tad worried now!
I’ve been saying it since the beginning. Travel was supposed to be a huge part of our lives upon my husband’s retirement and being empty nesters. I could cry thinking about not being able to travel again.
likewise – i could cry just thinking of staying on this miserable grey island called UK with all the sanctimonious, nappy-wearing cretins watching the bbc mantra!! (sorry having a bad/grumpy day).
Thinking of going to greece in a couple of weeks to escape!
Good luck with that Sue. What ever you do don’t go to Spain, they’re desperate for a 2nd wave!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwlkumcRf6w
So we were in Spain from mid-February to mid-March to get away from our Canadian winter. We’ve been to Spain so many times and I have a real affinity for the people and the country. We were having such an amazing time, but when Italy locked down the whole country we got nervous and decided to get out of Spain ASAP at huge cost. Spain locked down the day after we left. I can’t believe that at one point I thought it wouldn’t be too bad to be “stuck” in beautiful Spain a little bit longer. OMG, we’d still be there and it would have been torturous. Now that Spain is flirting with fascism again, I can’t imagine ever wanting to go back. The bloom is off the rose. Not sure where we’d even go next — nowhere so long as masking on planes is mandatory. Most of the world has lost its lustre for me now. I really hope that changes at some point, but the longer this nonsense persists the more pessimistic I become.
Honestly, that’s the bit that upsets me the most.
It’s taken years to finally persuade MOH to go on a cruise. We’re both retired now, spent the first several years running around between our parents, all of whom became ill at the same time. We spent almost as much time in hospitals as we did when working in the NHS.
We lost three parents, and my mother is in a care home with advanced Alzheimer’s.
Last year we finally went on two cruises, and loved them. We booked up two more for this year, and both were cancelled, including a rebooked cruise under the cruise line reassurance programme. So we’ve been nowhere this year.
I don’t know how much time either of us have left, and I don’t want to spend the time we do have left, and are still well enough to travel, stuck at home, or forced to wear a muzzle if we venture outside, or coerced into having a vaccination which hasn’t been properly tested, with side effects unknown.
Plus: I don’t trust the basta*** who are pushing us into this. They are known and provable liars and not the philanthropists we’re told they are.
They’re psychopaths! I feel for you, of course. I know of many older people (I’m solidly middle-aged) who are becoming more and more resentful of how much time is being taken away from them. Many do not want to live like this, and they surely don’t want to die like this. As I heard Dr. Sunetra Gupta say, “This life has a pulse but no soul.” Frankly, it’s barely got a pulse now.
We had a trip booked in April with our kids and their families to celebrate her 60th….gone. We’ve booked Turkey next month instead but now that looks as though it’s about to be flushed. If bodies were piling up, I wouldn’t sound so selfish but……
Good point no doubt.
I’m thinking I’ve made my last trip out of Canada if this vaxx to freedom thing becomes reality.
Yep! Just announced this week, in Massachusetts, that children must get flu vaccine to return to school. Even in school systems doing remote learning, the children must have the vax. I’ll bet this will just increase the number of parents who decide to home-school, further endangering the very existence of public schools. Of course working parents have fewer options .So guess whose kids get to have the jab, and any side effects or subsequent consequences. Plus, poor families suffer most from the school madness.
A new variation on the Means Test?
A friend of mind gets £25 every couple of weeks to get his nose and mouth swabbed. The irony is, he doesn’t need the cash!
Kidnap him!
Bribery would be a clear sign of desperation.
The point? If people don’t test positive the spin will be we haven’t reached ‘herd immunity’, brace ourselves for 2nd wave. If they do test positive the spin will be a ‘surge’ in cases. No matter what, we’ll be living in this pantomime for a very long time.
Anyone getting one should film themselves sticking the swab into a banana and returning it.
As President of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Bananas I must register a protest at this point.
Remember how much of your DNA. you have in common with bananas, and show some respect to your little yellow relatives.
Mellow Yellow.
from the World Health Organisation Website
“Older people and younger people can be infected by the COVID-19 virus. Older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, and heart disease appear to be more vulnerable to becoming severely ill with the virus.”
Only ‘appear to be’? Proved beyond doubt back in March I would have thought
They are doing that lying thing again. Trying to imply that normal people, albeit with medical conditions like asthma and diabetes, are affected. In reality 25% of fatalities had dementia or alzheimer’s. Think about that: 25%! Then include terminal cancer, advanced heart disease, incapacity through stroke and all the other things the terminally ill die of. And these are people in hospitals and care homes. What are they in a hospital or a care home for? A bit of a break from doing the washing up at home??
People taking prescription drugs appear to be more vulnerable?
http://www.frombehindenemylines.org.uk/2020/04/more-on-sars-cov-to-ace2-binding-and-true-covid-19-that-discredits-uk-governments-pretext-for-creating-economic-disaster/
I wondered right at the beginning what medications the younger badly affected people might have been taking.
The Spanish interview Toby refers to above is well worth a watch. Made my day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFa9JHMFO9s&feature=youtu.be
Definitely, I really hope we see more of this sort of thing from doctors/medical personnel (maybe even in the UK).
He did undermine himself a bit at the end, though, by saying the media “didn’t talk about the pandemic” back in the spring – if the Spanish media is anything like the UK media, they surely were talking about little else!
Isn’t strange how the media seem to take it personally when it’s suggested it’s not as bad as they think. Challenge is fine but they actually get angry about it. How is that conducive to finding the truth?
Did that male journo actually say he saw dead bodies and sick people on the streets??!!!
Couldn’t agree more, and I’ve downloaded it in case it gets pulled. I found it a bit difficult to follow the subtitles at the same time as watching the good doctors face – this was as revealing as anything he said!
the doctor should have Toby’s award … Best Foreign sceptic.. You could see in his attitude that he knew he was talking to an imbecile and that it was all he could do to keep calm.
Apologies for posting again (above) but wasn’t it jaw dropping how the interviewer was just desperate to twist the truth!
yes!
Brilliant! The statement re no discussion of the pandemic was obviously a confusing formulation, but the journos jumped on it to discredit everything else that Dr. Benito said. The presented themselves as knowing more than he. Instead of a follow-up question on misinterpretation of the data, they attacked him. The guy attacked him. Funny how the guy took over from the gal. Benito was obviously getting the better of the dialogue. Enter guy with guilt-tripping messageing and distraction over “pandemic reporting” issue to cancel out the refreshing effect of hearing The Truth!
I often find Chinese articles confusing and difficult to follow https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7219423/ A study on infectivity of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers “During the quarantine, seven patients plus one family member appeared new respiratory symptoms, where fever was the most common one. The blood counts in most contacts were within a normal range. All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. No severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections was detected in 455 contacts by nucleic acid test. Conclusion In summary, all the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection and we conclude that the infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak.” This article is supposed to say that an asymptomatic patient did not transmit. But there were 8 with symptoms which might not be extraordinary 8/455 in the winter season but there is no discussion if alternate URI agents were tested. But then they say that their blood counts were normal (supposedly lymphocytes) and CT lungs were normal thus they didn’t have severe acute respiratory syndromes coronavirus 2. In the earlier part of the pandemic when they didn’t have PCR test yet, they used mass CT lung investigations and this was included in severe cases definition if… Read more »
Part 2
This is a false conclusion as not all were PCR tested. They have not showed any proof of it. This, in the conclusion, should send this paper into the dustbin let alone be published in Respiratory Medicine.
I then realized that the same authors have published with the same populations, also a paper on the effectiveness of face masks. That article was appalling and almost laughable that it was accepted as a serious reference in the famous meta-analysis of face masks commissioned by WHO. Quite important as all the mask nonsense in based upon this meta-analysis reportedly.
This paper is useless and can’t be taken seriously and unfortunately, can’t be an evidence of non-transmission from an asymptomatic.
i always find that after i have read a chinese article i feel that i need to read another soon after 🙂
A hidden/ignored contamination positive rate of 0.17% would lead to authorities declaring (on average) a minimum of 17 ‘cases’ per 100,000 tests. Curiously, this is exactly the kind of rate that is being declared in many regions, and is very close to the level at which travel quarantines kick in.
From todays post, I’m pretty sure this is incorrect.
We are (still ridiculously, dont get me wrong) kicking in travel quarantines at ~20 cases per 100,000 people in the population, NOT tests…
For every 100,000 tests we’re doing in the UK I think we’re currently ‘finding’ roughly 300-500 positives, so as many as 50% of the positives could be false if it is only 0.17% false positives rate… I would’ve thought, from what I read previously though, that 0.17% is being generous to the test…
Note: I think .17% of 100,000 is 170, not 17 – just a missed 0 typo I assume, or maybe my maths is off.
Your math is correct. 20 cases per 100,000 is 0.02%. Not sure of the generosity of 0.17% but all 20 cases per 100,000 could easily be false positives.
Phew, glad you cleared that up – I was thinking I must be mathematically illiterate!
Yes, the convincing evidence presented of a 0.17% false positive rate equates to 170/100,000 (not 17/100,000). I note the error is corrected in the main article. So as you say, on that basis, half of the ‘cases’ in typical reported prevalence rates in UK are erroneous. And that does not consider those remaining ‘true’ positives that were infected more than 7-10 days before being tested, as they will carry detectable virus fragments but not be infectious. So almost no-one is walking around today in an infectious state.
Told you! There it is! Their excuse for a new lockdown. As i said, they will lock us down from September-October until June.
Until June which year? If the government get away with a second lockdown, I predict it will to all intents and purposes be permanent. Multiple generations will know no other way of living.
You’re just going to let it happen?
Over my dead body! And I mean that literally.
OK, good stuff. But I don’t think it will come to that. UK Government is actually very weak. See comment below.
https://dailysceptic.org/2020/08/19/latest-news-108/#comment-94843
Never!
They might legislate – or issue ministerial diktats. That’s not quite the same thing.
Everyone and their dog will ignore them.
No they won’t because the population won’t stand for it and without consent the policy will be unenforceable, especially if the MSM starts to become more sceptical which, slowly, appears to be happening.
We are still locked down – most people are consenting
UK Government has found a level that a lot of people are ok with. This can, and will change.
I just can’t see a popular rebellion in anything like the numbers required to overthrow this government. Regardless, we only have a couple of months before finding out the answer.
I don’t think a popular rebellion in the pitchforks/arson sense – more going to the pub, the seaside and countryside, and to see friends/family whenever people want to.
Absolutely. UK Government must become irrelevant. Deny money, votes and access.
http://www.frombehindenemylines.org.uk/2018/05/so-the-british-government-is-entirely-corrupt-what-happens-next/
Don’t pay the fines.
I’m a believer in avoiding the fines in the first place. 🙂 Will use the money saved to buy more weapons.
The government doesn’t need to be overthrown – not immediately any way. People can deny it the things it needs. Money, votes, and access – and openly disobey, of course
http://www.frombehindenemylines.org.uk/2018/05/so-the-british-government-is-entirely-corrupt-what-happens-next/
Absolutely, non-violent non-compliance is the simplest and most effective approach. The battlefield in 21st century warfare is primarily digital, not physical. For my part I am trying to sow seeds of doubt in every single interaction I have with family, friends and colleagues. Many of them bitterly resent me for it, and constantly complain, but I will not stop.
Good man! That is a very effective form of resistance.
Need some first class hackers.
Here, here. I’m doing the same and it is clear that everyone is fed up. As soon as schools go back and the rain starts lashing down, everything will go back to normal, as the guidance is ridiculously impractical and parents are at breaking point.
Yes, I keep saying to the wife since we saw that stupid Quisling advert on TV showing the idiots queueing up with their trolleys in a supermarket car park 6 feet apart. I took one look and said “Just wait till there’s two inches of snow on the ground. Then we’ll see how many shops try to keep customers outside in the cold snow and rain.” It’s a case of letting them all in, or having them all go home.
Some people have been saying that the supermarkets will try to keep people in their cars with a sort of “remote queueing” system, but the way things are going, the “browsing” element of female shopping will be completely gone. How much money did that previously put through the tills? Now I just buy exactly what I need. No impulse purchases, you know, the ones that pay for the electric lights to be on…
Remember that (theoretically) we’ve got to wait nearly 4 years before that option exists. And if – God forbid – it takes this long, all that will happen is very few votes get cast and this shower (or the other lot) will STILL get in, with a tiny proportion of the country having actually approved. Until there’s a change in the law requiring “None Of The Above” to be put on all ballot papers, and those votes to be taken into account, I fear nothing will change…
We can’t wait for a pointless election. Time is running out.
There was an interesting discussion on the radio this morning, where it was suggested that even with an 80 seat majority, the government could still become destabilized, if enough MPs think they won’t get voted in again at the next election. They’ll turn on Boris if they think the public’s turned against them.
For that to happen, they have to be bombarded with messages, emails, etc, from the public saying that they have no confidence in Boris or his government.
That would be the only way to get them to change. And any such public campaign has to be sufficient to drown out the noise from Twitter.
Need a 21st Century non-violent, social media blitzkrieg.
Write to your MP (a paper letter is said to be more effective). Say something along the lines of: if he/she doesn’t grow a backbone and start holding the government to account you will (a) never vote again or (b), probably better, vote next time for his/her nearest rival. So, incumbent Tory, Libdem runner up last time, vote Libdem. Etc. Frankly my big toe would make a better MP than the drooling idiot I’ve got, so it hardly matters who wins the seat.
All these creeps care about is getting back in, so this is quite a good way of exerting pressure.
Edit — just seen what Lms2 says below; excellent point!
I think they will follow public opinion. But public opinion has to change. We desperately need a massively well funded media campaign, that will need to last many months or maybe years. I think it will take £millions and professionals to make a difference, because that is what the other side have had – free or paid for publicity from national and global media, “health” organisations, Big tech, Behavioural insights etc.
We have truth on our side, but it needs a nudge. I’m happy to chuck in some of my savings and I am sure others are, but it needs some benefactors from business to underwrite it
Anyone with any ideas how to make this happen, I really think it’s the only way forward unless we want this campaign to last decades
“ the population won’t stand for it”
Have you been away in isolation for a long time? 🙂
So when you ask the ONS to be more honest, this is what I got: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/separationofu071andu072codesforcovid19deaths
So this is supposedly the most dangerous pandemic since Spanish Flu, on which trillions have been wasted and lives wrecked, and it’s too difficult to say what people are actually dying of?
I don’t have the time to dig around in their guide yet, but I suspect their “suspected” COVID-19 might actually mean that the person wasn’t diagnosed with COVID-19 prior to the issue of the death certificate… Otherwise why bother differentiating it from U07.2?
Another stalling tactic.
To be fair – I think you are asking too much of the ONS at this stage. They were landed with the mess made by the confusion of death registration. There is, in reality, no way of unpicking this mess except by going through each certification within a new framework, – and even then, I doubt the damage can be undone.
You’re partially right, but as statisticians why on Earth did they actually record things this way in the first place?! It’s a very very very daft move, epidemiologially speaking…
A week or so ago, I asked them to split COVID-19 into part I and part II on the death certificate mentions, I have a feeling they’re going to come back with a similar response because why bother keeping proper account of “pandemic”?..
I take your point – but I reckon they have a practical one, too.
All I’m really saying is that the ONS is as much a victim in all this, rather than an agent of deception.
I’m not saying they’re an agent of deception, I’m just saying their doing an inept job… But then again, so do seem many: I asked the local police what the counts were for criminal damage, and criminal damage by fire, and other offences against property in the whole of their area and they came back with “we haven’t a clue because we will need to look at each crime report”… Actually knowing their data seems to be an optional extra in the various state-run “institutions,” which might explain why the various actions are so abysmally idiotic.
Keep finding and highlight gaps/failures is a valuable tool in fighting back.
Currently I’m burying myself into the blackhole of PCR. The more I get in it, the more I ask what is it testing for…
matt hancock’s interview on BBC radio 4, this morning, left me alarmed. In his waffle he said that there will be, soon, at saliva test which will deliver results in 10 mins.
If PCR testing is highly dubious, a saliva test?
I void my rheum on it.
I imagine you’re right. My comment was more directed at governments, and various national and international bodies who chat a lot about what a grave situation we are in but do f all to gather meaningful data to understand it better because they haven’t the interest in doing so – they are too busy pushing their agendas.
What has the government or SAGE or any of those other “experts” told us about the virus since it started, that they have learned about it? Nothing that I’ve seen. They just waffle about “we have to be careful”.
I think they (both SAGE and the State) have learned plenty, just don’t have the balls to admit to a massive inept over-reaction!
Because analysing the death certificate and coding the ‘underlying cause’ of death is a process that takes time. The full figures for a complete year are published in the summer of the following year. 2019 figures published 1 July 2020: DatasetDeaths registered in England and Wales Annual data on deaths registered by age, sex and selected underlying cause of death. Tables also provide both mortality rates and numbers of deaths over time. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsregisteredinenglandandwalesseriesdrreferencetables . That will show a full breakdown of causes. These are not normally shown at all on the weekly releases, the COVID19 and Respiratory figures have only been added in since March. There is are several interesting articles on these problems from the ONS Measuring pre-existing health conditions in death certification – deaths involving COVID-19: March 2020 A method for deciding which pre-existing condition mentioned on death certificates is the main pre-existing condition. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/measuringpreexistinghealthconditionsindeathcertificationdeathsinvolvingcovid19march2020 Analysis of death registrations not involving coronavirus (COVID-19), England and Wales: 28 December 2019 to 1 May 2020https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/analysisofdeathregistrationsnotinvolvingcoronaviruscovid19englandandwales28december2019to1may2020/technicalannex and the process of certifying cause of death: Completing a medical certificate of cause of death (MCCD)Guidance notes for doctors covering issues doctors often ask about, and clarifying best practice under current legislation, including the… Read more »
I think you’re misunderstanding what they’ve replied with: they’ve coded COVID-19 already, and they are not going to re-code it using proper ICD-10 codes—otherwise what you’re suggesting is they will be doing the same task task twice—if they’ve already processed that data and they don’t have the breakdown, they are not going to have that at the end of the year—the data is already processed.
I think you’re also mistaken in that you think that COVID-19 is only mentioned in part I (underlying cause of death), the way I’ve read the ONS statistics guidance is that they count both mentions in part I and part II (contributing factors).
They were clear about this from the beginning. It was done “for transparency”.
Actually, I thought they were also count third part mentions (unsure whether it’s IIb or 3) – “also known to be present”.
Yes, they were clear about it from the begining, I stressed it when the first lot of data came out. The problem is: there is a difference between the actual data and presenting the data for public/media consumption. It seems the ONS have taken a deliberate step to remove clarity and lump everything together rendering the data not worth the bits that are used to store it… and that’s a real problem.
It could actually mean going through a patient’s medical notes to really determine cause of death
(not all of them, just a representative number, to get an idea). I’ve read too many anecdotes of GPs recording the death as being from or with CV19, where the relatives have said the person had no symptoms of CV19….
Thank you for asking the question on our behalf.
Over a fifth of these deaths (23.0%) involved the coronavirus (COVID-19) (50,335 deaths)……In the majority of cases (46,736 deaths, 92.8%)
I thought covid related deaths were ~41000.
I not a statistician: it took me days to figure out how the NHS were reporting their deaths and I eventually made sense of it when I started matching them to the reported ones in Health Service Journal.
At the beginning I was interested in the reports of the ACE2 receptor site allegedly found in SARS Cov2, so I got really sidetracked.
Hubby and I were keeping eye on areas (BRICKS) known to have higher risk of cardiovascular diseases.
For weeks I kept a tally from worldometer in particular for Italy and the UK (Istituto della sanita’ superiore -equivalent to PHE- was very easy to follow in the early days as they were keeping records of comorbidities prevalence in covid related deaths)
The ONS way of reporting was beyond my comprehension.
They count all mentions of COVID-19 on death certificates, so I suspect that includes both Part I and Part II mentions (don’t worry—I’ve already asked them for a breakdown of the two, doubt they kept those stats though)!
Am sure a few of the postcards recently have contained this sort of thing:
The only negative is that you have to pop a mask on in the shops and if you go into a restaurant to pay the bill. But even we have decided that it’s a small price to pay to be treated like a human being again and to have our sanity back.
Feels like _they’re_ winning and successfully grinding people down into accepting the imposition of masks in order to achieve ‘sanity’ or being treated ‘normally’ – whereas I’d say it’s not a small price to pay, and you’re not being treated normally if you’re being forced to stick a mask over your face just to go pay for a meal or go into a shop, there’s nothing normal about it.
Agree
I agree, and will continue to boycott everywhere until such time as every single one of the regulations are abolished. If that means forever, then so be it. I cannot be around anyone wearing a mask.
Agreed, it’s nauseating.
It is taking a lot for me to keep my frustration under control when surrounded by the muzzled collective,I just cannot bear the sight of them,I don’t think I can find strong enough words anymore to describe the contempt I have for most of them.
Absolutely. Mask-wearing can never be normalised if you’re a sceptic.
Agreed – compulsory mask wearing was the Rubicon that should never haven crossed. Mandatory masks take us into the world of compulsory medicine, re-education camps, thought crime and persecution of the non-compliant.
In Germany, you must have a medical certificate if you want to shop maskless.
The absurdity is, that many shops won’t let you in regardless, claiming their Hausrecht to prevent you from entering in that case.
Unfortunately, you cannot even sue them for discrimination under the disability act.
sounds awful!
Absolutely right Mark,those type of comments have struck me too,any price,however small,is too high to pay for our right to live life as we did before this madness,a small compromise soon becomes a bigger and bigger one,boiling frog syndrome again.
This is Lockdown Sceptics. No surrender.
This is Sparta!!
Couldn’t agree more…given an inch and they’ll take a mile. I was supposed to go out for dinner with a friend on a patio the other night but the weather was looking iffy. I’ve discovered that if there’s no indoor seating option they’ll pack up your uneaten food and send you on your way. She thought there was an indoor seating option, but I said no way am I going to wear a mask to walk to my table or to go to the bathroom. Restaurants are also putting time limits on diners. So no, I will not pay full price to have my dinner packed up in the rain, to walk into the restaurant with a mask, and to be told I have to leave after 1.5 hours. In the end, she came to my place and we ordered food in. Had a 4-hour catch-up instead of 1.5 hours and spent time on my patio with no restrictions.
I have asked a few people at work about mask wearing, and whilst they do not agree with them , it is just easier to go along with it. I fear many have this attitude, it is just easier.
When I remind them that the freedoms of their children and in some cases grandchildren are being taken away they do not seem to understand.
Look at it this way. When the mass starvation starts…. we eat these people first.
Zombie Vindaloo. Now that I would enjoy.
There’d be no taste to them even vindalood.
Or what about Zombie au vin? Or Zombie Adobo? The latter is a popular dish from my native country (the adobo that is).
Hancock au vin.
I suppose Hancock au vin would taste better than Zombie au vin
Nubbly, as the ‘stute fish said,
Enough to turn you vegetarian
That man should be cooked like a lobster, boiled alive.
Would be interested in the recipe, minus zombie.
You can do adobo with chicken or pork. Here’s a recipe:
https://www.kawalingpinoy.com/chicken-adobo/
Pork version:
https://panlasangpinoy.com/filipino-food-pork-adobo-recipe/
And you can even combine both:
https://www.kawalingpinoy.com/chicken-pork-adobo/
Will they taste good?
Google “Long Pig”.
Fortunately, since DDT was made illegal, we are now fit for human consumption – except the brain, which can give you Kuru. Must keep ourselves healthy.
I’ve managed to get at my sister by pointing out the mental torture all this garbage is inflicted on her two young daughters. Since then I think she’s certainly making an effort to question things a lot more.
Yes, that’s exactly what I thought. Just ‘pop a mask on, nothing to see here, it’s just a bit of cloth.’ No it is not normal and must be resisted! Just because you’re on a nice foreign holiday does not entitle you to try to get us to go along with other countries’ oppression and tyranny just because the weather is nicer, and it’s in a different language!
Or are we ‘Lockdown-only-slightly-sceptics’ now? MW
Just “pop it on” as if pressing your face into a filthy face-rag is a mild inconvenience, instead of a major health hazard. Fortunately, I saw a minister taking off his muzzle and putting it into his pocket for future use; here’s hoping the illness is a severe one.
Yes, I thought that when I read it.
It’s not only not normal, it’s dangerous because there is no good reason for it. Agreeing to do things that make no sense in the knowledge that they make no sense is extremely corrosive to our mental health and to the health of our society in general. It makes other stupid and irrational behaviour acceptable and more likely.
Agreed.
Someone asked a few weeks ago whether people would be so compliant if they were told by the government to go around with dog poo on their head because “Covid!”
They would do it.
And require us to do it.
Well said. That’s why I’m still boycotting – I’ve realised I don’t really need non-essential shops, as for bookshops, well, Amazon does offer free previews as well for browsing so its not been a problem.
The museums have been a bit of a challenge but I was born and spent the first 27-28 years of my life in a country that is sadly a cultural desert but I managed. I can do so again.
Yup, Edinburgh is pretty bad with the masks. On the plus side, I never wear one on the bus or train, in the supermarket or in high street shops, and have had no hassle from anyone at all. There are a few others who don’t. And, entertainingly, on the late trains all the people who have had a few drinks start taking them off. Maybe we need to aim for getting people drunk on the way into the supermarket.
Although not the man in charge of the Swedish response it’s good to remind ourselves of the thinking behind their approach. No wild claims, just a simple message (my emphasis below): The invisible pandemic – Johan Giesecke https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext It has become clear that a hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes—a population the lockdown was designed to protect. Neither does it decrease mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK’s experience with that of other European countries. Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future —it will not prevent them. Admittedly, countries have managed to slow down spread so as not to overburden health-care systems, and, yes, effective drugs that save lives might soon be developed, but this pandemic is swift, and those drugs have to be developed, tested, and marketed quickly. Much hope is put in vaccines, but they will take time, and with the unclear protective immunological response to infection, it is not certain that vaccines will be very effective. In summary, COVID-19 is a disease that is highly infectious and spreads rapidly through society. It is often… Read more »
In a nutshell!
I pointed out in April the lack of a government strategy to get the country fully operational again post-lockdown, thinking at the time that it would be when, rather than if, a strategy was introduced. Four months later and there is no coherent strategy in place – the government is still putting in arbitrary obstacles preventing the return to normality for people and businesses. However, it’s become too easy for the government to introduce random knee-jerk measures without any kind of responsibility for the outcomes. These seem to be based on a “something-must-be-done” policy. So, my suggestion is this: From now on the default position has to be an immediate return to the “old normal” for people and businesses. If the government decides that it wants to bring in a particular restriction, be that geographic, or a business sector, or behavioural, or age-based, then a named government minister has to set out in writing specific reasoning for that measure. This will state what facts are being used to justify why such a restriction is being put in place, for how long, (suggest a maximum of two weeks) and what the measurable benefits are. That document has to be signed by that minister who… Read more »
That’s what should have happened from the start
The idea that locking down was the safe or standard response is the opposite of truth – it was the risky approach as it had never been done before
Hopefully Simon Dolan’s Judicial Review appeal will put an end to this nonsense.
The problem is that a judicial review can only judge whether an action is unlawful. Whether it is functionally reasonable is another issue.
Don’t count on it. The judiciary is becoming more and more unreliable at upholding human rights.
It is a coherent strategy if the objectives are a frightened confused populace and a global reset.
They aren’t going to reset me. Too late.
Absolutely; “never take away too much from someone, otherwise you will leave them with nothing to lose.”
Don’t be ridiculous Clarence! That’s far too sensible approach for this government to take. What on earth are you thinking??? !!! Ministers having to justify their actions and take personal responsibility? Never!
Wish you were Prime Minister!
Are we completely sure the government is in any hurry to return to normality?
I realise there may be a big overlap between Brexit supporters and sceptics and so may be sticking my neck out a bit here, but it could be that economic damage from this epidemic conveniently covers up any possible economic side effect of Brexit?
In the US it is being suggested quite openly that Democrat governors and mayors are unnecessarily extending lockdowns because a bad economic situation reduces Trump’s chances of reelection.
It is certainly not beyond politicians to put their personal interests before that of the population they are supposed to serve.
For Boris Johnson the calculation is simple. Politicians around the world are finding that there is little price to pay for being overcautious with the pretext of saving lives. But the responsibility for economic fall out from Brexit is entirely on him. If I was a self-serving politician, I know what I would do.
The government is not only not in a hurry to return to normality, they have no interest in doing so. Why on earth would they? They have almost limitless power, attention, lack of scrutiny and it’s all in the name of saving lives. What’s not to like, if you’re a power-hungry politician.
They will care about winning the next election, when it comes, and having enough money to buy the votes they need, but to think they have any interest in moving on or getting us back to normal flies in the face of all the evidence from their actions.
I have been offered to join the ONS survey, they’re offering £50 for the first test, and £25 for any subsequent tests.
Great. Another way to f*ck the poor. Those with money won’t bother; those in dire need will be happy of the extra cash.
Poor but not daft. I foresee many pets/fruits/vegetables being phoned up and told to isolate.
Won’t be surprised if someone takes the piss and tests a book say the Bible and it turns up positive as well.
Why would you want to take the test?
Too many false positives.
Paying you to take a test. It’s you the taxpayer who is paying with your hard earned cash. No such thing as a free lunch.
Don’t do anything they want. Ignore them. Make them cry and throw tantrums.
Take the money and test any pet, fruit or vegetables you may have nearby at the time.
My cactus has Covid,
My cactus is sick.
And if you’ll believe that
By God, you are thick.
The silliest sight
That I’ve ever een
Is my poor little cactus
Now in quarantine.
Possibly your best yet…
A cactus is for life not just covid
During the 2008 U.S. election campaign there was a woman who called herself suzycolorado. She was an expert at creating limericks about Sarah Palin. They were hilarious. You remind me of her. Keep up the good work!
Is that being paid for with magic money?
If it was the ONS I would cooperate and I don’t think they will quarantine you.
If it’s the government or Hancock’s new Waffen SS or whatever his new PPE replacement is called they’re getting swabs of cheese from the fridge.
Give them some Stilton.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it probably is a ………
If you do not have a temperature, or a cough, or an aching body then you don’t have covid
Anyone ever heard of asymptomatic flu? No? Why not do you think?
(a) Symptoms….positive test… symptoms ….hospital?…..treatment?…..recovery or death?
(b) No symptoms…..positive test,,,, no symptoms
(a) make sense
(b) makes no sense at all
Occam would require that it’s proved that the tests are accurate before it’s possible to move on to any other theory
You can have an asymptomatic infection with an influenza virus.
It’s not flu. It’s an asymptomatic infection. The same with SARS-COV2. You can be infected without having Covid.
This is true. I researched it when I heard how many people allegedly got flu each year and wondered why, in my late 40s, I’d managed to avoid it given its prevalence every year. And everyone always says “oh you KNOW when it’s flu. If you can pick up £20 it’s not flu” and I have never been THAT ill.
Reality is I have probably had it but asymptomatically. Or with very mild symptoms. Which was self-diagnosed as a cold.
So I propose we treat COVID like flu. If you’re well enough to pick up £20, then it’s just a cold. Otherwise it’s flu or COVID and you can PCR that if you are desperate. But otherwise just stay home with a lemsip.
Yes I learnt this from you the other day about the ~75% asymptomatic for flu. As you say it explains a lot.
i can’t find the Lancet link now, but this NHS link describes the study
https://www.nhs.uk/news/medical-practice/three-quarters-of-people-with-flu-have-no-symptoms/
That’s the one yes.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(14)70034-7/fulltext
I’ve saved the pdf now before I lose it again 🙂
Occam was a clever lad. The shmucks in the Johnson government are not.
This is getting surreal. Old Normal: I feel ill so I go to see a Doctor. The doctor diagnoses me and recommends a cure. Or the doctor needs a test to help them diagnose me and then recommends a cure. If I might be infectious then I am also recommended not to go out so as not to spread the virus. Sensible. New Normal: I feel fine. But I must wear a mask just in case I have the illness, even if a mask has zero demonstrated impact. Matt Hancock also tests me anyway just in case I have the virus too. The test then finds a fragment of a virus or potentially falsely diagnoses it. There is no “cure” needed because I am not ill but I must quarantine anyway. Based on multiple test results of this type and as a “precaution” the government then decides to close down whole cities. This is based on the possibility that all these well people with positive test results may pass on whatever has been found to other people, who might then become unwell. At the same time, no one has been able to show with any sensible evidence that any of… Read more »
Not “will cause death too” they are causing death.
Death merchants.
Meanwhile, if you feel ill you’re probably not going to be able to see a doctor …..
I have never experienced an Old Normal like that in the UK…usually it’s take paracetamol, stay hydrated, try honey & lemon etc. GPs basically play the odds and take a punt that you’re almost certainly not seriously ill. If it turns out you are and end up at A&E then you might get tested.
The only time I have ever been given any recommendations to stay isolated not to spread anything before now was norovirus.
This graph, produced by the Govt , shows the overstated deaths they have now accounted for. The red bits are the overstated ones. This is just another, unbelievable piece of manipulation they have been caught out on. https://t.co/yUIPWnt1l8
https://twitter.com/simondolan/status/1296093298331918336?s=09
Send it back to them and tell them to try harder next time.
It is so obvious what is happening. The health professionals don’t understand the virus and can’t account for the data. They have now become engaged in a quest to understand the virus, in a real world live experiment that coopts the entire population into the test. They have completely lost sight of the original objective.
We now have a £300 billion bill for something that, on the face it, happens normally with flu every few years.
If this were a business venture, the whole operation would have been shut down. As it is, they will probably all get knighthoods for services to public health.
There’s a good chance that £300 billion would have achieved a great deal more in terms of public health if spent on diabetes, obesity, cancer, education etc. This is pursuing a medical chimera for the sake of it, now.
I don’t think the medical chimera is being pursued for the sake of it, it is being pursued as part of a deeply cynical exercise to cover up the utter folly of the lockdown policy and to claim credit for “victory” over the second wave which doesn’t exist.
Rather more than a “good chance”, a dead cert.
Most doctors don’t understand how shit comes out of their own assholes. Hence why they perpetually have their heads rammed up there trying to figure it out.
Seriously though, there is a tiny handful of absolutely brilliant physicians in the world. The rest are excellent students who otherwise couldn’t figure out how to screw in a light bulb if a textbook didn’t break it down into 12 steps.
A question about PCR tests.
I’ve read that the tests-and they are legion, cannot differentiate between a fragment of dead virus, the result of someone being ill several weeks ago, and a living virus capable of reproducing and causing health problems.
If a positive test picks up a dead fragment of Coronavirus and that person is tested again in a couple of weeks, won’t there still be traces of the dead virus inside them and won’t they still test positive?
I’m trying to get my head around this.
The designer of the PCR test never thought it should be used for daignosis due to its limitations, but it still gets used anyway.
According to OffGuardian, fact checkers dispute this because he was talking about a test for HIV, even though it works in principle the same way for any virus.
The trouble is Handcock and Co are basing policy on a pretty rubbish test. Kary Mullis who invented the PCR reaction said it was never intended or suitable as a diagnostic test. An unknown false positive and false negative rate, picking up viral fragments as well as active viruses, no gold standard test to calibrate it with are just a few of the problems!
Does that mean it’s possible to keep on and on testing positive because they will keep on finding dead fragments of virus?
I think swedenborg linked to a study that found a maximum 83 days between symptoms and a positive test – because fragments were hanging around in the person’s nose.
Here it is: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.25.20162107v2
Maximum duration of SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding reported in URT, LRT, stool and serum was 83, 59, 35 and 60 days, respectively.
Nostrilitis?
Possible but unlikely. Very few tests are perfect. It’s all about probabilities.
The PCR test is about 70% sensitive and 99% specific. This makes it very useful in some circumstances but you have to be careful to interpret the results properly in the light of prior probabilities.
Fussing over asymptomatic positives when prevalence is very low at the end of an epidemic is meaningless and pointless. You get too many false positives.
The test is also no good for keeping covid out of a country that didn’t have it (like the NZ of Ardern’s imagination) because of the. 30% false negative rate.
Using the test as part of diagnosing covid in someone who had symptoms however could be very useful.
Essentially, a PCR test makes assumptions about the relationship of an RNA fragment and a live, infective virus.
The flaw is in not recognising that this is an assumption – that may not be correct in many cases.
Good point Margaret and something I’ve thought about too. It’s clear that there is something to be found otherwise countries showing low or no positive cases would be expected to return higher and non-zero numbers.
We should remain objective and not simply dismiss it as the test being useless.
The way I see it is that somebody testing positive today (usually younger and healthier) is not the same as somebody testing positive in March (older and ill enough to be hospitalised). However the government are acting as if they are the same.
That only applies if those countries that are returning low/ zero numbers are actually testing people in any sort of number.
If a country is sensible, such as Denmark or Finland, and requires the most rigorous proof of a covid death so they respectively and miraculously, end up with comparable or greater excess deaths than Sweden, which has much looser death certification protocols, whilst having fewer covid deaths, do you really think they would be so naive as to test the bollocks out of a perfectly healthy population? Sorry but I cannot see it. I think the Italians are being fairly cute as well.
Handcock is ramping up testing to try and “prove” the existence of a virus that has disappeared so he and his pig headed boss can claim credit for “beating” said virus.
It is extremely unlikely that there are no real infections in England.
My estimate is that out of the 600 or so positives they find per day around 40 are true positives (but the total number of people actually positive if you tested everyone is probably around 30,000, with 3000 new infections per day and about 3000 recoveries.)
So there are many more infections than they’re finding, but most of what they’re finding aren’t real infections.
It’s like looking for quite a lot of needles spread through a very large haystack. What you find is mostly straw but there are still a lot of needles in there.
So the argument is a little nuanced. They get all excited about the 600 which is both an overestimate (because only 40 are real) and an underestimate because the real number is more like 3000 (because they would need to test everybody to find them all).
And if you tested everyone, you’d find 45,000
I reckon they’d find about 300k if it was the government “Pillar 2” tests as it looks like they probably have about a 0.5% false positive rate. But we can’t estimate this very accurately as they don’t report important information like the asymptomatic ratio.
But that would be 30k new “cases” per day which is about the same as your 45k so yes that sounds about right.
300k? Jesus. They need to lock us down NOW – that’s more than in March!
You are quite right, unfortunately this could go on for weeks. I read about an old man in Wuhan, back in March or so, who had a positive test, showed no symptoms. He tested positive for several weeks, and unfortunately his whole block of flats therefor had to isolate, and he of course, too.
Yes but the longer you wait the less less and likely it becomes that you will test positive.
When you’re actually properly infected, a week or after catching the virus, you will have a 70% chance of testing positive. A couple of weeks after you’re better that drops to probably less than 1% and then continues to drop after that. Eventually, after several months, the chance will be almost zero. Everything’s getting gradually washed out of your body all the time.
Something really stood out to me in this piece. Worldwide devastation and…430 Australians. He, like most leaders, talk as if the only option was to self destruct in the process of avoiding this virus (not even attempting to manage it):
Global report: Australian PM backtracks on plan to make coronavirus vaccine mandatory
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/19/global-report-australian-pm-plans-to-make-coronavirus-vaccine-mandatory
With governments around the world anticipating resistance to compulsory inoculation from anti-vaxx groups and a sceptical public, Scott Morrison said on Wednesday morning in Sydney the aim was to get 95% of the population to have the jab and that he was “expecting” that it would be compulsory except on medical grounds.
“I would expect it to be as mandatory as you can possibly make,” Morrison said in a radio interview. “We’re talking about a pandemic that has destroyed the global economy and taken the lives of hundreds of thousands all around the world, and over 430 Australians. So, you know, we need the most extensive and comprehensive response to this to get Australia back to normal.”
Australia will never be back to normal at that rate.
Unless ‘normal’ means totally devoid of meaningful human rights.
They mean normal in Australia circa 1790.
Before the convicts first arrival?
They never have been normal, they’ve been winging it for hundreds of years.
Translation: we need to justify acting like shit-flinging morons. Better to risk severely damaging the population with barely tested vaccine than admit they fucked up. These people need to be skinned alive in a public forum.
over 430 Australians
Out of 26 million. Geez!
“Some people do not display symptoms when they are infected so the daily totals are an underestimate of the amount of infection that is around.”
See, this looks to be all wrong. I am currently working on a piece (to appear here: http://www.frombehindenemylines.org.uk/ ) using an academic source that states that more than 90% of symptomatic cases show viral pneumonitis. Basically, if you’re infected with SARS-COV, as rare as that might be, you know about it.
If 90% of symptomatic infections had pneumonia I would expect the IFR to be much higher. This was a recent study in Iceland (where they did some of the most testing during the actual epidemic) reporting on the spectrum of symptoms:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.09.20171249v1.article-metrics
But whatever happens in 90% of symptomatic cases is not relevant to whether you would know you had it. That depends on how many cases are asymptomatic.
I’m interested in the rehearsal of this olsd chestnut :
“There are few among our political elite and the supporting Senior Civil Service who have STEM degrees “
… as an explanation of governmental incompetence.
It doesn’t stack up. Those with STEM degrees have been prominent in constructing the mythology leading to the Covid political measures.
There are plenty of ‘scientists’ who seem incapable of grasping the basics of scientific inquiry – a necessary precursor to judging ‘The Science’ in all its contradictory aspects. In short : remember masks; remember PCR testing.
For an illustration of the distinction, have a look at this illuminating argument :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7167&v=_1u_yworTco&feature=emb_logo
The BBC was constantly rolling out Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Adviser and Emeritus Professor in physical chemistry at the University of Cambridge, to argue that the lockdown should be sooner, harder and longer.
And the man responsible for incinerating millions of healthy animals on the basis of a, back of a fag packet, model supplied by another CU next Tuesday, Neil Ferguson….
You’re both spot on.
One of the real eye-openers of this Panicdemic has been the number of (obviously) technically accomplished holders of STEM degrees and doctorates who stumble around blindfolded in what should be the precursor : the nature of scientific method, examination of data, basic probability and logical analysis.
The most obvious example is that of Ferguson and Co. who played around with a black box computer model without validating at the most basic level either input or output.
You are missing the point. It is the job of the decision makers in receipt of the model output – ultimately the PM and Cabinet – to interrogate the model, dataset and output before making a decision. The ‘scientists’ often have an agenda – they are political animals – as do the funding bodies. It’s a bit like a City analyst with a ‘buy’ recommendation on a company whose investment bank employer is the main adviser to the company. As an investment institution do you take the analyst’s word without questioning whether his recommendation is tainted by the corporate relationship? Google Henry Blodget/Merrill Lynch.
It is just not realistic to expect a politician to evaluate conflicting scientific advice and reach an independent judgement. That’s what the senior civil servants should do. They should be able to provide two or more solid well-researched options, with simple decision criteria.
If you are being asked to make a decision of the magnitude of the one Johnson faced in March, I absolutely would expect any worthwhile leader to require considerably more persuasion than Johnson evidently needed.
What was the cost side of the cost/benefit analysis for lockdown?
Why was he unable to recognise at once that Ferguson’s bullshit failed to pass the most casual of sniff tests? Why was he unable to go outside the groupthink bubble of scientists and find credible voices to warn him how nonsensical it was?
You don’t need to check every step of a scientist’s calculations to raise questions and seek answers to them from independent sources.I’m not Mrs Thatcher’s hagiographer, but I don’t believe for a second that she would have allowed herself to be led by the nose by these second raters. I don’t think even Blair or Brown would have, either, unless they saw opportunities for personal and political profit in it. Wilson certainly wouldn’t. Not going to commit on Cameron, Major, Callaghan or Heath – they were all pretty half-witted themselves.
Thatcher would be too busy molesting kids with Savile and Dominic Lawson.
I think that Ferguson was used to give cover for the lockdown as the decision had already been made.
You cannot get a free pass on evaluating conflicting advice on something so fundamental to the future of the nation. A total abdication of responsibility, in my view.
Like a Data science or business analysis degree?
While it is clearly not the case that only STEM-based graduates are capable of holding the ‘scientists’ to account, it is almost certainly the case that those responsible for making decisions (Boris & Co) were lacking in the basic analytical skills and experience that tend to follow from a STEM-based background. In my view it is highly unlikely that Margaret Thatcher would have allowed the ICL ‘model’ to have been adopted without interrogating both the model and the dataset herself, and certainly would not have entrusted that task to someone such as Dominic Cummings’ interpretation of it.
“ the basic analytical skills and experience that tend to follow from a STEM-based background.”
Clearly such skills do not necessarily ‘tend to follow’. That has been comprehensively shown in this disaster (I’ll leave aside comments on Thatcher’s limited thinking skills 🙂 )
Which Government ministers, charged with the task of making political decisions, have STEM backgrounds and what examples are you using to cast Thatcher’s thinking skills as ‘limited’?
Yes. As discussed before you can have STEM or any other degrees and still be a muppet.
Perhaps the best example is Devi Sridhar. She is really a challenge to Hanlon’s Razor. Can she really be that stupid? Or perhaps just drunk on power now that she gets to be witch doctor in chief of Scotland.
I agree, but would also question Devi Sridhar’s STEM credentials (2 years of Biology between the ages of 16 and 18) before migrating to social policy.
Social Policy=Social Engineering.
Retail Report
Happy to report that a visit to my local filling station only resulted in one person masking up before entering the mini supermarket area to pay for fuel.
You would have thought someone driving a LandRover Defender would have been a bit more anti-mask, but obviously not, even the Waitrose driver paid for his fuel completely bare faced.
use a ‘pay at pump’ filling station – maybe the larger supermarket ones – i use tesco pay at pump to avoid having to go into the shop…
I’ve got no problem with anyone who wants to wear a mask, wearing a mask. They are just not for me, besides the people who run the cash registers at the fuel station will be out of work if we all go down the pay at till route.
Twitter has been used by the government to cause needless panic and slavish adherence to a futile and profoundly illiberal set of measures designed entirely for propaganda purposes.
How it works:
The government pushes out messages via ‘GDS’, the government digital service. Grovelling secret agent stool pigeon tweets tweet away across the land, racing each other to be the most obsequiously oleaginous in retweeting the ‘GDS’ propaganda and, hey presto, 17 million other tweets leap to the government’s every command
This secret society of government stool pigeons is secretly known by all the very secret people as the SSS (Soshlmija Stockholm Syndrome) but is really just a bunch of silly old tweets.
An early stool pigeon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPi76KvQF1g
We have to find a way to intercept the GDS messages and insert our own. Time for a new codebreaking initiative, like Enigma in WWII. Any Turing-like geniuses out there?
Out having a meal at a local restaurant here in a London last night because we were meeting with friends…arranged a long time ago and not because of Rishi’s so called incentive. Place packed, social distancing ignored, people queuing and waiting outside to get a table, no social distancing and no bedwetters. Celebs and media personalities there too also ignoring regulations enjoying life as it should be lived. The people are speaking.
Same in our pub, except no C.A.M.P
PS. How can you bear to be in the same room as ‘celebs and media personalities’ (whatever they are). I would not be able to stop vomiting
Always interesting to see their other persona.
Was drinking in Bloomsbury last week, total opposite experience. Zealots manning the doors, getting aggressive when you tell them you are opting out of track and trace, and their hand de-moisturiser. Got shouted at for standing around 3m away from an empty bar to see what beer they had. Was much worse than most places in the Midlands. In fact every place I went to claimed to have never had anyone opt out of track and trace, FFS Londoners, come on, sort it.
Most of population of Bloomsbury live in densely packed properties.
Well, they evidently are dense.
Bloomsbury is mostly a ghost town anyway. Hardly anyone lives there.
Just the ghosts from a hundred years ago.
Charles Mingus playing Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5PKZdR6w3Y
I love Mingus!
(Face) Rag Waltz would seem appropriate too?
“Midtown Manhattan, the center of business in NYC, is empty. Even though people can go back to work, famous office buildings like the Time-Life skyscraper are still 90% empty. Businesses have realized that they don’t need their employees at the office. In fact, they’ve realized they are even more productive with everyone at home. The Time-Life Building can handle 8,000 workers. Now it maybe has 500 workers back. …. NYC has never been locked down for five months. Not in any pandemic, war, financial crisis, never. In the middle of the polio epidemic, when little kids (including my mother) were becoming paralyzed or dying (my mother ended up with a bad leg), NYC didn’t go through this. …. Summary: Businesses are remote and they aren’t returning to the office. And it’s a death spiral — the longer offices remain empty, the longer they will remain empty. In 2005, a hedge fund manager was visiting my office and said, “In Manhattan you practically trip over opportunities in the street.” Now the streets are empty. ” This is similar to the conclusions drawn in discussions here about London. These two centres are perhaps going to be among the worst hit, because they are the… Read more »
Exactly. We should say it again and again, loud and clear:
NEVER AGAIN
In mid March I was in my local (now closed and gone forever). It was after most companies had started at least trialing having all of their people working from home, but before everyone had been told to go home. At the bar was one of the regular barflies and we had a brief conversation. He worked (works?) on one of the trading floors of an investment bank and his whole floor was working from home. Slight side-story, but relevant: an acquaintance of mine made an absolute fortune in the 00s. He had been a BT engineer and he had worked out how to shave nearly 2 seconds off the speed of an electronic trade. He then sold this improvement to the banks in succession at a fraction of a second each time. Goldman got 0.1 seconds, then Morgan Stanley got 0.2 seconds then Barclays got 0.3 seconds… and so on. He never needed to work again and I doubt his grandchildren will ever have to work because of how valuable those little 10th of a second parcels were to the investment banks. Faster trades are more profitable trades. Anyway, I was surprised that a trading floor could possibly work… Read more »
While it is surely possible – from a basic technical perspective – that traders, salesmen and analysts can all work from home (although high frequency trading depends on physical closeness to the server), I cannot see it being a sustainable proposition. Husband was a commodities trader and shares this view. I’m not sure how compliance works and then there is the inevitable need for interaction between sales and trading, between different bits of trading (cash and derivatives). It’s a good idea for analysts to be separate from sales and trading – Morgan Stanley put the analysts in their own rooms when it moved to Cabot Square in the early 1990s – as trading floor noise can be a distraction and impromptu interactions with investment bankers might be better in ‘private’. I had coffee yesterday with a friend whose husband is CEO of a bank, and he is on the verge of ordering everyone back to the office due to lack of communication (those bits that matter, but which cannot be communicated on Zoom calls etc). Knowing salesmen and traders, my bet will be on the desire to be back in the office by September – the run up to bonus… Read more »
Proximity to the server is certainly an advantage, in the same way that physical proximity to the exchange used to be an advantage when communication relied on runners, but I wonder whether massively increased connection speeds are limiting that advantage.
You make a good point about compliance – it must, surely be a worry. But what you say is encouraging. I walked from Blackfriars to Aldgate a couple of weeks ago on a Wednesday. I probably saw about 200 people – and almost all of them were standing outside pubs. I gather Lloyds has one floor operating. All of the offices looked empty.
Trading floor politics heats up on the run-up to Christmas – out of sight, out of mind – they will be heading back soon, fear not!
Ex analyst here. Compliance is a big issue, but the bigger one in what is essentially a gussied up sales job, is that client interaction is now all virtual. And though you can sustain existing relationships remotely, it’s incredibly hard to build new ones. Or train juniors. This will be the death of what is, at the end of the day, a relationship driven business.
Agree. I was also an analyst, and team lead. Terrible for the next generation. Internal ‘chatter’ for sales and trading is important for capturing the other side of trades etc. Yes, also, how do you get new business.
My role is sales focused and I completely agree. Luckily for me, most of my relationships are established, so it’s not the biggest worry, but people move roles and it is next to impossible to really build a relationship with someone you’ve never met face to face.
Remote working is great for mid-career and upwards, but you can’t train people remotely. I can see many jobs turning into two or three days a week in the office having meetings, mentoring junior colleagues and team building, with the remainder wherever you wish, be that in the office or at home. How this will be staggered across the working week and across organisations is the interesting bit. I can see busier than old normal on Tues, Wed, Thurs due to everyone wanting to avoid commutes near the weekend. This may then even out over time as public transport gets more crowded mid-week. It will also be interesting to see how easy it is to stagger days in the office between working parents. Oh, and the train companies will resist 2-days-per-week season tickets, as it will hit them hard.
Funnily enough, this is what I suggested to my team today, from September. We have new starters who are struggling (how do you learn an organisation remotely?! You can’t), juniors who need to watch and learn, but most of all I need my external contacts to be able to meet face to face again. Ridiculously we can only meet in bars and restaurants now. Hard to discuss sensitive corporate matters in those settings.
Good points, and an interesting discussion from all the contributors in this sub-thread. Bandwidth is clearly a key (as indeed the writer quoted, James Altucher points out) but how the issues raised concerning limits to home working for finance workers will be dealt with will determine how quickly things go downhill I suppose. A lot of jobs are going to be AI’d anyway, I suspect, mid-term, as we move towards the mooted “singularity”.. The thing is that there is a huge difference between a slow shift allowing new interests to emerge, and the crash change we have just seen as a result of the coronapanic. Altucher points out the loss of so many of the other attractions of living in NY, all the cultural and social highlights. With those in place, it would be much easier to attract new people in and to sustain the city economy, but with such an abrupt crash, and if a lot of those are unable to reestablish themselves, it seems likely there might be real depressions in store for these cities. Good question as to how Paris, Milan, Madrid will go. Frankfurt also. Perhaps the cities that are also seats of government rather than… Read more »
Pfft to Frankfurt. I lived there for 4 years – it’s a village by comparison with the others. Population of 650,000 and it’s a cultural desert, with nothing to recommend in its architecture either (the alte Oper is quite nice, but that’s about it). Most of its 2M working population live in the villages of the Taunus hills surrounding it. London is unusual on that list because there’s such a stark divide between City, West End and Westminster. I assume that the West End will revive at some point, but I suspect it will be slow. If Tigress is right, there’s hope for the city because once the banks go back, it will force life back. Actually, if the banks start standing up and saying “bollocks to social distancing, you’ll all be at your desks by 8 and you will like it” that could make a very quick difference. Speaking to a client at a… er… major tech manufacturing firm the other day, they’ve been told that white collar jobs won’t be expected back in the office until at least June of next year. Globally. I’ve had no indication that my company is opening any of its UK offices, well,… Read more »
Met a chap last week who had been working from home as IT Support for provincial police HQ. He’d just been promoted to the single role that required his actual presence on site, not a happy bunny.
The Mayor of New York is a criminal.
Not going to contest that one…
I will never forgive the bahaviour of the various authorities responsible for this. Northamptonshire police threatening to search your trolley. Derbyshire police screaming at people to go back home instead of walking in the fresh air. Council staff in the Wirral trying to forbid people from walking round a seaside pool.
And where on earth do I begin with the reasoning behind stopping people from using indoor swimming pools! FFS, they are bathing in disinfectant!