Day: 6 January 2021

Now that we’ve entered into another lockdown, and all we’ve got to look forward to is baking banana bread and crying, I thought it might help to keep the phone lines at The Samaritans free for those most in need if I forced myself to engage with the following question: What would we sceptics have done differently? As we’re all too grimly aware, of course, lockdown zealots have spent the past year detaching themselves from reality, and now ride ghost-trains nervously around funfairs that they’ve built in their own minds. Scrutinising what, for want of a better word, we must describe as the ‘logic’ of the plan they’ve devised for the rest of us, however, we find ourselves unimpressed. Angry, even. Enforced participation in a socially destructive, deeply dispiriting negative feedback loop consisting of brief stop-offs at eight endlessly recurring and all equally dismal staging posts is, after all, not everyone’s cup of tea. But there it is. That’s state power for you. The whip is cracked, the organ plays, and Lo! Our hamster wheels just keep on turning. Curtailment of civil liberties, anxiety, depression, white elephants masquerading as ‘Nightingales,’ insolvent businesses, undiagnosed tumours, rising unemployment… and so it goes, day after day. Sifting through the rubble of our national self-respect, cataloguing artefact after broken artefact, and wishing all the ...

Fear of Covid now 70% more transmissible by James Ferguson Blind faith in authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein On December 20th the UK Government put 44% of the English population into Tier 4 lockdown, cancelling Christmas get-togethers for 24m people, following a recommendation from the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag). Nervtag had identified a new variant of the novel coronavirus in the South East of the country, which was 70% more transmissible than its predecessor, carried a viral load up to 10,000x higher and which the primer on the widely used Thermo Fisher TaqPath PCR machines failed to pick up. However, these conclusions are highly dependent on the interpretation of the data and logically (Occam’s Razor) none of the claims made at that time about the new variant’s increased transmissibility, higher viral load or ability to escape detection appear justified. The PCR test The primers used to detect short gene sequences in reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) machines under the COVID-19 protocol, search for three gene types: ORF1ab (or just ORF), N and the ‘spike gene’, S. Positive test results require at least two of the three genes to be found but since amplification is run to a very high cycle threshold (Ct) of 40-45, known as ‘the limit of detection’ (LoD), ...

Whitty: Lockdown May Still Be Needed Next Winter England's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said yesterday that as the vaccine is rolled out we might eventually get to a point where we will have "almost no restrictions at all" – until next winter, when we'll need to look at ramping them up again. The Mail has more. Office for National Statistics figures show an estimated 1.1 million people in private households in England had COVID-19 between December 27th and January 2nd – equivalent to around 2.06% of the population. Professor Whitty, England's Chief Medical Officer, said it was "really quite a large number indeed", warning people to take the Government's stay at home message seriously, owing to the new variant as well as winter.He said the risk level will gradually decrease over time with measures being "lifted by degrees, possibly at different rates in different parts of the country, we'll have to see"."We'll then get over time to a point where people say this level of risk is something society is prepared to tolerate and lift right down to almost no restrictions at all," he added."We might have to bring in a few in the next winter for example, that's possible, because winter will benefit the virus." Will they ever let us go back to normal? Oddly, the ZOE app showed only around ...