We’re publishing an original piece today which is the third part in a series called ‘The Flu Hypothesis’. (You can read Part I here and Part II here.) The author, an academic economist, believes that the pattern of the Covid epidemic in each country – or region – resembles the trajectory of a seasonal flu epidemic, in some cases quite aggressive, in others quite mild. In Part III, he considers the possibility that the UK and Germany are experiencing different, flu-like epidemics and wonders whether that explains their different rates of infection.
By the end of February, I had concluded that Britain’s COVID-19 season in 2020-21 had followed an aggressive path. It had accelerated quickly and burned out early. But given that the probabilities were what they were, if the flu hypothesis had anything to it, we should have expected some other countries to have gradual rather than aggressive seasons.
This, I believe, is precisely what we are now seeing in Europe. This week Angela Merkel announced that Germany was having a “new pandemic“. Her language was nothing short of hysterical. She said that a vicious new variant had arrived that was more contagious and more deadly. Looking at the data I cannot see it. It seems more likely that Merkel is trying to deflect blame. Europe’s rollout of the vaccine has made their politicians look incompetent relative to British politicians who were until recently portrayed as bungling due to their embrace of Brexit.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Good info Toby ,
But the whole edifice is constructed on what is a “case” and how is it defined and confirmed.
All this endless chewing of govt provided data is unreliable because there is no test and no way of correlating one country with another for objective comparison.
The data is flawed , the “tests” are managed differently, but the govt actions are the same.
why not get one of these boffins to compare UK “data” with any Far East country , for example .
Absolutely, Bill. As you say : “The data is flawed”. Critically so – to the point that no-one has the foggiest how many people have had Covid-19, which is not the presence of hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Thus the ‘Covid Deaths’ are pure fiction.
We do know that ‘case’ and ‘infection’ data is irredeemably polluted, and that an unknown number of deaths have been attributed to ‘Covid’ for innumerable reasons.
An interesting question is why different trajectories happen in different countries. I assume that with flu one of the main factors that explains the difference between years is the strain of the virus that is most common. If this was also the case with Covid it would mean that the Kent variant which was common in the U.K. was in fact far more transmissable, meaning it spread rapidly before burning itself out due to rapidly increasing immunity in the population, where as Germany has largely had the old variant that spreads slowly but keeps spreading as the population is much slower to build up immunity.
Initially I thought claims that the Kent variant was more transmissable was an invented scare story to frighten us into accepting the 3rd lockdown, but now I’m starting to wonder.
Actually, we do know some key, if negative, things – principally that inter-country comparisons in the present state of knowledge and data are pointless – the pattern of variables have not been teased out, and also the data (see above) is shit.
But we do know with fair certainty that government NPIs are largely irrelevant.
‘The author believes that the pattern of the Covid Pandemic in each country resembles the trajectory of a seasonal flu outbreak. . .’
Which was pointed out many times in Hector Drummonds blog late spring early summer of last year; the only difference to the shape of the March April 2020 bell curve and that of the usual autumn flu outbreak was that it occured in spring and not late autumn/winter.
Health professionals told me at the time that were it not for the dodgy dates and being given a scary name they might barely have noticed Covid as anything special.
I thought I might have saved a screenshot of Hectors work but found only this, from before masks were much of a thing.