The posts also record, to be frank, in the days before lockdown, the scientific prediction that the measures would reduce the number of excess deaths to around 20,000. Well, they were way off with that one. We've already had 64,000 excess deaths.
In fact, as emerging evidence now suggests, everyone was already taking isolating measures a week before lockdown, again reported in the Speccie. We really aren't just sheep, and given the right information, we can make decisions for ourselves.
The confused but anti-government media are already making much of the testimony given by the discredited scientist Neil Ferguson to the Commons Science Select Committee. Testimony that is patently false given the probability that the disease had peaked a week before lockdown.
It seems that there is still a lot of crap science out there, and I have great sympathy for Boris and ministers who can't tell in advance who is a crap scientist and who is pukka, and even some sympathy for journalists who dropped all science in the fourth form in favour of arts and media subjects, and can't even add up a shopping bill let alone understand pandemic maths. The idiocy comes when, as Peston does, they then attempt to explain science they don't themselves understand.
Add to this the downright mendacity, distortion, omission and misrepresentation by scientific and government bodies when faced with scientific evidence they don't like, ably documented by both Dick Puddlecote and Christopher Snowdon. Some crap science is because they don't know better, some is because they refuse to listen. We need to be wary of both.
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| Bristol study from the Speccie - virus peaked a week before lockdown |
31 comments:
No Radders on this one I disagree.
It is hard to imagine how the crisis could have been more disastrously handled, and Boris is to blame.
The end of the idiotic lockdown is long overdue, it is causing far more deaths than it is saving, nd the economic damage is on a par with the Second World War.
Unbelievable stuff.
And in just a few months, not in five years, Jack.
Collating all the antibody tests etc. that have been done points to around 7% of the population having been infected, and that has led to 60,000+ deaths it appears.
So if 70% were to be infected - as the Survivor Immunity pushers want - then that would give around 600,000 dead.
The estimates were in the right range.
Was the lockdown a good idea? Nobody knows although plenty of people have opinions depending on what they value.
Will there be a second wave? Nobody knows.
Will COVID 19 become an annual infection? Nobody knows.
Could there have been 400,000 or 600,000 dead? Probably not because a formal or informal social distancing and lockdown would have happened as people became more and more alarmed. But nobody knows.
Nobody knows how it is, and nobody knows how else it could have been. In ten or twenty years we might have a good handle on the actual science, but even then there will be 'error bars'.
There's a peculiar quality of inertia in the British state. It was clear back in early February that the virus was fast approaching and that prompt action was needed. But SAGE and HMG did nothing. (That SAGE members knew that doing nothing chimed with Boris's instincts is perhaps pertinant.) There were never any restrictions in inbound flights and the lockdown only occured after businesses started locking down on their own initiative. (From memory, the football league shut up shop about ten days before official lockdown.)
AEP in the Telegraph highlights the case of Hinckley Point C, and the other new nuclear plants. These are still planned to go ahead long after the price of offshore wind electricity, and grid scale energy storage has fallen through the floor. One might add HS2 to that, after the events of the last couple of months have shown that commuting numbers will be down in future.
The need now is to open up the economy in a robust manner, such that the virus will continue to die out and won't return in the Winter. There are now plenty of studies showing that making mask wearing compulsory will allow this, without 2m separation. And also the examples of other European countries where masks are required. Yet still nothing from HMG. I despair, really.
I should add that as well as masks, a working track trace and isolate system is needed. But again, central government seems incapable of doing anything that works.
Boris and the Carry On Governing team around him aren't going to be able to blame this omni-shambles entirely on "crap science from crap scientists."
Politicians in other countries which have done far better were also relying on varying scientific advice. Ferguson had quite a track record in being spectacularly wrong with his dire predictions, so why rely on a man whose advice was discredited BEFORE Wuhan Flu came along?
The disgraceful Project Fear campaign they ran, in order to terrify the public into complying with the lockdown, is a significant factor in why we can't now get the economy back up and running. If they think re-opening shops with social distancing enforced is going to see people flocking back to the High Street, they're sadly mistaken. They've killed the High Street, along with many of our pubs, cafes and restaurants.
But hey .... shortly after the Government was warned that if zoos weren't allowed to re-open, many would close with their animals having to be destroyed, suddenly re-opening zoos became a priority. They couldn't possibly have pictures all over the media of nice cuddly animals being killed, could they.
Perhaps that's a lesson in how we could get them to focus on re-opening the schools? 6 months of no education for a generation of schoolchildren is not the fault of dodgy scientists, is it!
From page 6 of the .pdf referred to:-
"This paper does not prove that the peak in fatal infections in England and Wales preceded lockdown
by several days. Indeed the failure to undertake the sampling that could have gathered data to directly
measure infections early in the epidemic means that it will never be possible to be certain about timings,
given the severe biases in clinical data other than deaths and fatal disease duration. ............."
What is does say that is useful is:-
"These facts have implications for the policies to be adopted in the coming autumn, particularly given
the peculiar ethical issues associated with lockdown. .............."
We can bitch and bind about Boris being slow off the blocks and we can pontificate about the low numbers of intensive care beds back in March and shoving infectious oldies out into care homes. We can drone on about the epidemic strategy being worthless and the procurement being null. Water under the bridge, until 2024.
What matters is the second quoted snippet. Without being explicit it tells us to do nothing, no lockdown when/if a second wave comes along. Why does it tell us this? Because the cost of locking down is too high, the lives saved are not worth the cost - harsh but true. We have been softened up for this message, we shall see how the message is delivered.
Come November I shan't be buying any green bananas.
Jim - that's the clear message I got from a former minister last week - without a vaccine, the total death toll will remain 500k-600k, however we want to stretch it out.
Ferguson gets unfairly blamed in this. The SAGE minutes make it clear that there were several independent modelling groups predicting what would happen without a lockdown. They all came to roughly the same conclusion. And Boris *was* slow to act. This is an international crisis and comparisons are being made. Some leaders with or without scientific advice acted promptly, and their countries have the benefit. Want to visit a sunny country for a holiday? You won't be allowed in until the UK case numbers are down.
Talk of 'project fear' or lives being not worth the cost (whose cost, whose lives?) rather misses the point. We could remove all restrictions now, and even ban the ONS from collecting statistics, as they have done in Brazil, but the number of deaths would then start to accelerate upwards and news of overflowing hospitals would leak out. People would draw their own conclusions and stay home whether they were ordered to or not.
If your concern is to get the economy moving then we need to defeat the virus first, and find a way to keep it defeated. See Czech Republic, Austria, Oz, NZ, etc for successful examples of what to do. See Brazil, Mexico, UK for what not to do.
The point surely is whatever mistakes were made, whether through a lack of understanding or just incompetence/dithering, these mistakes are not repeated.
This will happen again. An army is always well prepared for the previous war. Not a good position in an actual war but rather better here.
Raedwald: Your former minister is selectively quoting what somebody has told him. Without a vaccine, and without surpressing the virus then eventually about 600,000 of our fellow citizens will die. But the resulting crisis will have toppled the government long before that. Covid-19 is not influenza and it can be defeated. Try reading the foreign press to see how sadly people now view Britain. We should emulate those countries where the death toll is measured in 10s or 100s and the economy still functions.
DJK, there is plenty of evidence that mask wearing is ineffectual, the early photos from Wuhan show virtually everyone wearing masks, didn't help there did it.
Mask wearing also entirely screws the hospitality/pub/eating out industry, which we need back on its feet to absorb some of the massive unemployment coming our way.
Interesting how few politicians want to look at how certain countries like Turkey are managing to keep their numbers low, despite 2nd world healthcare.
How well prepared are we for a big solar flare ?
Don Cox
There is a Harvard retrospective study which suggests that Wuhan Flu began as early as early-mid October. The Chinese government withheld the truth for a very long time. Given the close links between Lombardy and Wuhan, it's likely that the Italian epidemic was much further along the curve than believed at the time. Consequently, the R number was seriously over-estimated in the early phase of the epidemic here. That would be the phase when data is scarce and estimates have very wide error bars. No armchair expert was making any of those points back in March - including me.
What we know now is: that we have to keep a much closer eye on China because the CCP will lie; that Public Health England had and has no robust corpus of expertise in epidemic management, something that ought to be a core competence; that while PHE remains eager to be the lapdog of every campaign group that wants to make some private dietary choice a public health issue, it will waste its time and our money on vanity projects. That is a start on an actionable list of high value improvements that should start immediately.
haha, Don, that will make toast of the man-made Climate Change models...literally :-)
When the real death rate is calculated (months? years?) in line with what other countries have done the UK will not be so bad...not good and definitely not the best but nowhere near the worst either. By the way 100K + excess winter detahs in 1950/51 with the popualtion +/- 50 million was a shocker too. And 90K in 1962/63. probably a few other examples.
Firstly, Despite the announcements,I believe the lockdown was necessary to deal with the rising panic, even though I didn't think it useful in fighting the disease.
Sweden officially had no lockdown, but people still stayed home and kept apart anyway, and the disease ran its course the same as anywhere else.
It would be helpful to recognize that expertise has its limits. It is highly likely that the people in Sage know more than others, in their own fields anyway. That doesn't require them to know very much of what there is to know.
What worries me is the panic. People die every year, the old and infirm especially, yet the prospect of a few more doing so this spring, inevitably followed by a few less later made us lose our minds.
We could not face the simple fact that bad things happen and mostly have to be endured.
I have 2 theories as to the reasons for the 'outperformance' of the UK during CV-19 (ie the fact we appear to have been hit harder than similar sized countries of similar social make up).
Firstly it is due to the fact that the population is far higher than the official data tells us. If we add 5m to the official population data (I think analysis done by Thames Water on sewerage flow rates in London suggest a population there 1.5m above official levels) you reduce the per 100k death rate by about 4-5 per 100k. Its also likely that having a large number of illegals means them living in poor and cramped conditions, and thus being more likely to get the virus, and die.
Secondly I would posit that our excess death rate is the result of the inefficiency of the NHS, in that it has exposed the fact that the so called health care system in the UK is not caring for people's health at all. It's inability to provide decent long term aftercare has resulted in a vast swathe of the population suffering quite significant ill health, which while not fatal in normal conditions is enough to make the person at high risk of dying if they get infected with CV-19. In my extensive experience of the NHS via family members and friends who have had long term illnesses and complaints, the NHS is great if you are literally dying in a ditch, it will swoop in, stop you from dying and patch you up, and then want you out of its care. Thats about it. The rest of the NHS, which is supposed to deal with ongoing care over a long period of time in order to get a person back to full health is utterly sh*t. It just doesn't do anything. The long term chains of care are consistently broken by NHS failures to follow through with care plans, medications, equipment, meetings and appointments. The UK having the NHS thus results in a population that is far less healthy than neighbouring countries that have healthcare systems that work, because they are not 1940s Stalinist monstrosities.
The outcome from this plandemic is precisely what TPTB want it to be both numerically and factucally. To believe that any figures presented to us are anything other than propaganda is sheer gullibility and previous pandemics expose this quite clearly.
The decision to remove the requirement for two doctors to certify death or even be PRESENT at the time of death to issue such a document PLUS 'permission' to use Covid as a cause of death when even SUSPECTED let alone proven is criminal deception.
Statistics have been used on many occasions to distort reality and force policy changes - too often and too conveniently for many peoples liking - and this plandemic is no exception.
As ever it comes down to what you see 'on the ground' and I've seen no real reason for ANY of the iniquities imposed on us - nothing other than the usual media induced BS exaggeration.
Johns Hopkins says 41213 deaths in the UK to date. What's the 60000 figure about?
Ed P - 64,000 more deaths overall, from all causes, than the 5 year average for the same period. These are termed 'excess deaths'. Will include higher figures for suicide, lower figures for RTAs. The best international comparator for the effect of a pandemic.
Do watch Dolores Cahill take a sledgehammer to the scientists who fucked this up so very very badly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZdWXonPzA
https://dolorescahill.com/pages/experience
"These are termed 'excess deaths'. Will include higher figures for suicide, lower figures for RTAs. The best international comparator for the effect of a pandemic."
Not really, because we have no way of knowing how many are of the virus itself, and how many are as a result of the cack-handed way we've reacted to it. Some of course being a combination of the two - the decision to empty the NHS to 'save' it is directly responsible for a large proportion of the CV deaths within the care home network.
@ Elby the Berserk
I did. Not a chance that any of it will ever be aired in the MSM.
Any rising panic was fomented by the press, so lockdown to deal with a panic is excessive, better to have had a stern word in a few ears.
Most probably Covid was well advanced in UK as well long before admitted, given no of people with symptoms similar to over late winter.
NHS has demonstrated ability to make situation worse by decanting old folk.
PHE / NHS are still making a c*** of testing.
There is now no point in test and trace unless you are doing antibody test to find out who has had it.
US states, Turkey & other parts of world that embraced HCQ + zinc have seen lower death rates, UK establishment quite prepared to see excesss deaths as acceptable to justify drug/ vaccine profits.
Too many people here a clinging to totems of facemask social distancing, despite no robust evidence.
Need to embrace concept of panic is over and take brakes off economy, so there is still something to pay for all the nice to haves like health & education
Elby, they won't have her on but not because she talks so much sense about COVID. They're more scared of her IREXIT views.
Just opened up the summer house in Maine. Looking through the mail I see a nice postcard from the White House advertising the Trump Coronavirus. Looks like there's a bit of rivalry for that Wuhan virus.
The consensus at Hectors place,examining the SAGE minutes, is that Boris cannot 'hide behind the science' because SAGE did not actually recommend doing so.
Yet yesterday 11/6 a member of SAGE was telling Jeremy Vine Radio 2,that Boris is responsible for X,000 deaths because he only imposed lockdown 2 weeks after they did so recommend.
Can't both be right.
Sorry, missed saying recomend lockdown or not.
Beyond sad!
If Boris is directly responsible for Chink flu deaths and there are calls for his head, why is B-liar still walking the streets?
Looks like the science here may be a bit suspect but unlike Iraq WMDs, I don't think anybody (apart from China) is being accused of a actually falsifying or making things up.
Just askin
To be fair, I would expect the virus numbers to peak in the week before Lockdown.
That is, after all, the entire purpose of the Lockdown in the first place....
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