The prime minister’s former business adviser Andrew Griffith – elected as an MP in December – has warned that every day the UK economy is in lockdown, and its competitors aren’t, means lost business.
“It’s easy to like lockdown if you are being paid close to the same to stay at home as you would to go to work,” says one MP. Another adds: “People like lockdown? Wait until the furlough scheme ends.”
Disruption to tuberculosis services due to the Covid-19 pandemic could lead to as many as 6.3 million additional cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths worldwide over the next five years, a new study has shown
Trials of experimental coronavirus vaccines are already under way, but it’s still likely to be years before one is ready and vaccination may not even be possible
It is far from guaranteed that the vaccine will be safe and effective. 2013 study calculated that, before entering clinical trials, the average experimental vaccine has a 6 per cent chance of ultimately reaching the market. Of those that make it into trials, a 2019 analysis suggests the probability of success is 33.4 per cent.
If Sweden stops at about 5,000 or 6,000 deaths, we will know that they’ve reached herd immunity, and we didn’t need to do any kind of lockdown. My own feeling is that it will probably stop because of herd immunity. COVID is serious, it’s at least a serious flu. But it’s not going to destroy humanity as people thought.
Intubation and ventilation were billed as the only way to treat Covid19 patients in the early days of the outbreak, but now some medical professionals are questioning the practice.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that according to this article 66% of UK Covid19 patients put on ventilators are dying. A recent study found that, in New York, 88% of ventilated Covid patients died. In Italy it was over 81%, in Wuhan it was 86%.
Conversely, South Korea has reported good early results treating Covid19 patients with other forms of oxygen therapy, or “non-invasive ventilation”.
The question arises: If ventilators are not recommended for respiratory infections, may do more damage than they prevent and are less effective than non-invasive ventilation, why are they being so widely used?
Well, one possible reason is that, according to the WHO guidelines, non-invasive ventilation could contribute to the spread of the virus via “aerosolisation”. This is repeated in guidelines from the CDC, ECDC and other national institutions.
The UK’s NHS goes one step further again, with their March 19th protocol actually calling mechanical ventilation the “preferred” option over non-invasive ventilation or other oxygen therapies.
This leaves wide open the possibility that hospitals are using treatments known to cause harm, simply to avoid the hypothetical spread of the virus.
Perspectives on the Pandemic – Episode 6: When Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Antin Massihi held a press conference on April 22nd about the results of testing they conducted at their urgent care facilities around Bakersfield, California, the video, uploaded by a local ABC news affiliate, went viral. After reaching five million views, YouTube took it down on the grounds that it “violated community standards.” We followed up with the doctors to determine what was so dangerous about their message. What we discovered were reasonable and well-meaning professionals whose voices should be heard.
An astonishing 1.8million have claimed Universal Credit, 250,000 claimed jobseekers’ allowance and 20,000 claimed Employment and Support Allowance between March 16 and the end of April.
Even now UC claims are still running at around 25,000 a day – double the usual rate, MPs heard.
The new figures suggest around 5million people may now be on Universal Credit in the UK – many of them in work on low incomes.
A team led by Gabriela Gomes of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine argues that it is wrong to assume that herd immunity will only be achieved when 60 per cent of people have been infected. It is more likely, they argue, that the true figure lies between 10 and 20 per cent. The 60 per cent figure, they say, is based on the idea that we are all equally likely to contract the virus. In reality, there is a wide variation in an individual’s susceptibility to becoming infected. People who are frail or who have greater exposure to the virus – perhaps because they are working in an intensive care unit – are in practice far more likely to contract the disease. As the epidemic progresses the pool of easily-infected individuals dries up and the virus has to search out new victims who are less-easily infected.
A failure to provide care homes with enough NHS expertise and hospital equipment has exacerbated the growing coronavirus crisis among their residents, senior care figures have warned.
Viruses don’t just go away. This one will never disappear unless and until there is enough exposure to it to produce collective immunity or an effective vaccine appears.
Talk of compulsorily ‘shielding’ (in plain English locking up) the old and vulnerable until one of those things happens is a cruel mockery of basic human values.
Tens of thousands of stroke and heart patients are risking their lives by not getting symptoms checked out by a GP or avoiding hospital due to fears over Covid-19, i can reveal.
Nobody will be able to say, when the much-needed inquiry eventually sits in judgment on these times and on those responsible, that criticism is just hindsight and that nobody pointed out at the time that a grave mistake was being made.
But it’s clear that in their increasingly desperate search for a route out of the lockdown labyrinth, Ministers are giving serious consideration to some radical – and dangerous – schemes. One is the idea of some sort of continuing restriction on private social gatherings, along the lines of the ‘ten friends’ proposal.
My normal will not involve State-approved lists of people I can meet. Or State monitoring of when and where I meet them. Or a quiet acceptance of the division of my country into the pure and the plague-carrier.
At least one man was arrested during to an anti-lockdown protest in Central London today (Sat 2nd May). The demo, which was organised on social media, saw demonstrators congregate close together outside New Scotland Yard. At one point, several protesters, including children, were seen to take part in a mass hug. They were campaigning for an end to lockdown procedures introduced by the government a month ago following the coronavirus outbreak.
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