The UK government blusters its way through excuses for its poor response to coronavirus. It must be held accountable.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/apologies-coronavirus-deaths-good-200416115612897.html
EvidenceNotFear
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Writing for the Telegraph, Professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, from the University of Oxford, said there is little evidence to support the restriction and called for an end to the “formalised rules”.
The University of Dundee also said there was no indication that distancing at two metres is safer than one metre.
The results are now in. Lockdowns are toxic for a world in which people travel to work on buses or commuter trains, spend eight hours with their colleagues at the office, spend their lunch hour doing a bit of shopping, and head off in the evening to the pub, the theatre or the football.
The sad but unavoidable fact, that the disease is little danger to most young and healthy people but is especially deadly to the old and ill, is also now beyond dispute…
The ceaseless assumption of the Government and the BBC that the shutdown ‘protected’ the NHS is simply not borne out by any facts. The NHS was never going to be overwhelmed. Covid deaths in this country peaked on April 8 – an event far too soon to have been caused by the shutdown announced on March 23 and begun the following day.
In fact, the country with the highest number of deaths per head is Belgium (843 per million). Yet Belgium introduced one of the tightest and most severe shutdowns on the planet. Sweden, without a shutdown at all, has suffered 472 deaths per million.
The UK figure of 620 per million may be inflated by our lax recording methods but hardly suggests that we did better than Sweden by throttling our economy and grossly interfering in personal liberty. Japan, which also did not shut down, suffered just over seven (yes, seven) deaths per million…
I believe that forces hostile to our country, its history and nature, have seen this as an opportunity. Probably incredulous to begin with, they realised the British people really had gone soft, accepting absurd and humiliating diktats, believing the most ridiculous claims.
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Mask Facts – AAPS
Mask facts from The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons:
- Conclusion: Wearing masks will not reduce SARS-CoV-2.N95 masks protect health care workers, but are not recommended for source control transmission.
- Surgical masks are better than cloth but not very efficient at preventing emissions from infected patients.
- Cloth masks will be ineffective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, whether worn as source control or as personal protective equipment (PPE).
- Known patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 wore masks and coughed into a Petrie dish. “Both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.”
- Medical masks offered no protection at all from influenza.
- The wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks.
- If you are sick, stay home!
In June 2020, The Office for National Statistics released their Gross domestic product (GDP) report for April 2020. They calculated that GDP fell by 10.4% in the three months to April. This was directly caused by the UK government’s policy of lockdown.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/gdpmonthlyestimateuk/april2020
Swarms of accounts are amplifying Beijing’s brash new messaging as the country tries to shape the global narrative about the coronavirus and much else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/technology/china-twitter-disinformation.html
No test gives a 100% accurate result; tests need to be evaluated to determine their sensitivity and specificity, ideally by comparison with a “gold standard.” The lack of such a clear-cut “gold-standard” for covid-19 testing makes evaluation of test accuracy challenging.
A systematic review of the accuracy of covid-19 tests reported false negative rates of between 2% and 29% (equating to sensitivity of 71-98%), based on negative RT-PCR tests which were positive on repeat testing. The use of repeat RT-PCR testing as gold standard is likely to underestimate the true rate of false negatives, as not all patients in the included studies received repeat testing and those with clinically diagnosed covid-19 were not considered as actually having covid-19.
Further evidence and independent validation of covid-19 tests are needed. As current studies show marked variation and are likely to overestimate sensitivity, we will use the lower end of current estimates from systematic reviews, with the approximate numbers of 70% for sensitivity and 95% for specificity for illustrative purposes.
Most Flu Is Asymptomatic
On average, roughly 20% of the unvaccinated had serologic evidence of influenza infection, but up to three quarters of the infected were asymptomatic. The proportions did not vary significantly between seasonal and pandemic influenzas. The pandemic H1N1 strain was associated with less severe symptoms than the seasonal H3N2 strain.
NEJM Journal Watch, 17 March 2014
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(14)70034-7/fulltext
A new report by the National Audit Office confirms that 25,000 people moved from hospitals into care homes between mid-March and mid-April.
Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative former health secretary who now chairs the Commons Health Committee, said the findings were “extraordinary” and came “despite widespread knowledge that the virus could be carried asymptomatically”.
Members of the public could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting coronavirus by wearing face masks, one of England’s most senior doctors has warned.
Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer, said the masks could “actually trap the virus” and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.
“For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea” to wear a face mask in the hope of preventing infection, she added.
Jake Dunning, head of emerging infections and zoonoses [infectious disease spread between humans and animals] at Public Health England, told The Independent there was “very little evidence of a widespread benefit” from wearing them.
- Non-COVID patients were put in with COVID patients, then marked with Do Not Resuscitate orders.
- Hospitals have a financial incentive to mark patients as COVID-19.
- Doctors stopped treating people as humans. Inexperienced doctors were practicing on patients.
- COVID-19 has been proven to be easily treatable with the Hydroxychloroquine/Zinc/Antibiotic protocol
- People were coming in too late due to fear.
- Patients were unnecessarily put on ventilators. “They want to use the vents.”
- Patients were put in restraints “due to laziness.”
- New York may have been hit hard because their hospitals were already struggling. They couldn’t afford to keep them open.
More than 1.6 million Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and >10 times that number carry antibodies to it. High-risk patients presenting with progressing symptomatic disease have only hospitalization treatment with its high mortality. An outpatient treatment that prevents hospitalization is desperately needed. Two candidate medications have been widely discussed: remdesivir, and hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin. Remdesivir has shown mild effectiveness in hospitalized inpatients, but no trials have been registered in outpatients. Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin has been widely misrepresented in both clinical reports and public media, and outpatient trials results are not expected until September. Early outpatient illness is very different than later hospitalized florid disease and the treatments differ. Evidence about use of hydroxychloroquine alone, or of hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin in inpatients, is irrelevant concerning efficacy of the pair in early high-risk outpatient disease. Five studies, including two controlled clinical trials, have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy. Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin has been used as standard-of-care in more than 300,000 older adults with multicomorbidities, with estimated proportion diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmias attributable to the medications 47/100,000 users, of which estimated mortality is <20%, 9/100,000 users, compared to the 10,000 Americans now dying each week. These medications need to be widely available and promoted immediately for physicians to prescribe.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586
One of Germany’s most prominent virologists has said the country’s lockdown was unnecessary to defeat the coronavirus.
“We went into lockdown too quickly because the prevailing concern was that there might not be enough intensive care beds and that there was pressure from the public,” Prof Hendrik Streeck said.
“We are seeing a lot of asymptomatic cases, that is infections with no consequences. This means we can assess the danger from the virus better. I still don’t believe that at the end of the year we will have had more deaths in Germany than in other years.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/10/lockdown-unnecessary-claims-german-virologist/
The Covid-19 death toll may be less than half what has been recorded because many victims of the pandemic would have died soon anyway, one of Britain’s leading medics has said.
My experience of testing positive for coronavirus antibodies clearly struck a nerve. Two weeks ago I wrote that I’d had no recent symptoms but dismissed a bout of pneumonia in January because it was weeks before the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the UK.
Many of you responded with your own experiences of having Covid-like symptoms – some as far back as November – and urged me to investigate further…
…No individual has yet been identified as “patient zero”, the first person to get infected with the new virus…
…But plenty of people are doubting the official timeline.
School children under the age of 15 are more likely to be hit by lightning than die from coronavirus, new figures suggest, amid mounting pressure for the government to get more to get pupils back into classrooms as quickly as possible.
Scientists from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford have called for “rational debate” based on the “tiny” risk to children and have suggested that if no vaccine is found in the future then it may be better for younger people to continue with their lives, while shielding the more vulnerable.
It comes as the government was accused of “losing the plot” after Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, scrapped the Government’s target of getting all primary school pupils back in the classroom before the summer holidays
Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, says transmission of the coronavirus by people who aren’t showing symptoms is “very rare.” She spoke Monday at a briefing in Geneva.
Mirrored video:
Britain is trapped in lockdown purgatory. In Liverpool, where I live, we are back to square one, with an “R” rate estimated to be hovering at or just over 1. That means the vast majority of people have been staying indoors, not sending their children to school, or seeing their friends and family for nearly three months, only to find that coronavirus, and the risk of transmitting it to others, is still in circulation. Now what?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/09/british-people-coronavirus-lockdown