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.
Opinion
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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
The scientific establishment in this country has had a bad war. Its mistakes have probably made the Covid-19 epidemic, as well as the economic downturn, worse. Britain entered the pandemic late, with lots of warning, so we should have done better than other countries. Instead we are one of the worst affected in Europe and one of the last to begin to recover.
Britain’s lockdown nightmare may be far from over, but an attempt to rewrite the history of the country’s greatest political blunder has already begun. With the UK now past the peak, the lack of evidence that lockdown served any useful purpose is glaring. And crucially, thanks to a growing abundance of raw data – from deaths and hospital admissions, to Covid-related 111 calls and mobile tracking intelligence –we now have the power to piece together what Britain’s lockdown achieved (or didn’t) in hideous technicolour.
Getting at the truth will be an uphill struggle, however: Downing Street has shown no appetite whatsoever for sifting through the evidence, even though it could inform (or, let’s face it, rip apart) its uniquely odd approach to easing lockdown. We must also beware the shape-shifting, scientific architects of the stay-at-home order; as criticism grows, are they attempting to dress their reconstructed reality in the language of scientific pedantry?
Are we going to stand for the pathological coercion of our nation – or finally start organising against it?
Many people who lived through the last war – or whose parents have vivid recollections of it – will tell you that they are infuriated by any suggestion that our present emergency is anywhere near comparable to that experience. We are not descending into bomb shelters at night, emerging in the morning possibly to find our homes and family possessions destroyed. The deprivations that we are enduring today are relatively trivial: locked in, as most of us are, with our myriad electronic devices and forms of entertainment which would have seemed magical to that stoical population gathered around the wireless every evening to listen to whatever the government permitted the BBC to offer.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/06/tell-mps-not-name-horrified-social-experiment/
Lockdown vs BLM protests compared
The anti-lockdown protests and BLM protests in London were only days apart yet the police and media handled them in very different ways. The double-standards are clearly displayed here.
Lockdown protests
BLM protests
News coverage
Independent
“Lizzie Dearden meets the conspiracy theorists happy to creak the law to oppose what they see as the ‘tyranny’ of coronavirus restrictions”
16 May 2020
“Black Lives Matter: All the peaceful protests happening in the UK this week.”
4 June 2020
The Sun
“COVIDIOTS – Scuffles as dozens of protesters including Jeremy Corbyn’s brother whinge about coronavirus lockdown in Hyde Park”
16 May 2020
“London Protest – Justice for Black Lives protest: What time is the Parliament Square demo on June 6?”
6 June 2020
The Express
“London lockdown protest: Huge crowd gathers in Hyde Park for idiotic coronavirus stunt”
16 May 2020
“London Protest: Black Lives Matter demonstration begins – organisers promise biggest ever”
3 June 2020
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One of the key things about science – obvious to its practitioners, but often obscure to outsiders – is that it is fuelled by doubt, not certainty. When the ‘facts’ change (as they often do), and when original assumptions are qualified or overturned, then any scientist worth their salt re-examines and, if necessary, alters their conclusions. The presence of cross-reactive helper cells in maybe half the population means that ideas about a possible second wave must be rewritten. This finding must make a second wave less likely, probably much less likely. And the fact that there has been no ‘second wave’ (as opposed to isolated outbreaks) anywhere where lockdown has been released also fits this hypothesis. It may well also explain why the first wave didn’t infect much higher proportions of the population.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/science-doubt-and-the-second-wave-of-covid
THERE IS a growing body of evidence which, if it is ever proved true and it may well be when our present nightmare is over, would leave the Government’s policy over the past 20 months in discredited tatters.
Trying to predict the future is the oldest delusion known to Man. It has never worked, save exceptionally by a fluke. This time we were told “Follow the science”.
If social distancing made things better, we would expect a positive correlation on both of these graphs – in other words, earlier social distancing would lead to both earlier flattening of the curve and lower total deaths, meaning these points would all sit close to a diagonal line sloping up from left to right. Instead what we see is very little correlation at all, and what there is is negative. So early social distancing is either doing nothing or making things worse. This is likely because the virus spreads mainly in hospitals, care homes and private homes rather than in the community, so social distancing of the wider population beyond a basic minimum (washing hands, self-isolating when ill, not getting too close, and so on) has little impact.
In the final analysis, our future depends not on a handful of ministers, but on us, the great majority of the British people, from schoolteachers and shopkeepers to car workers and business leaders.
Finally, we can say with confidence what many of us have suspected for weeks: not only is the end of the pandemic now in sight but also the people best-placed to recharge our economy have little to fear from it.
Thanks to definitive figures released yesterday by Public Health England, we know that Covid-19 is not a random killer, but one that targets specific groups – namely the old and those with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes or dementia.
Lockdown is over – Spiked
And yet the government and the media perpetuate the fiction that lockdown is still in place.
With lockdown at an effective end, this foolish belief will only do us damage. The UK’s GDP is estimated to have fallen by two per cent in the first quarter of 2020. Other factors are inevitably at play, but the first quarter only includes the first week of lockdown. What effect will the past seven weeks of lockdown have on the economy in the second quarter?
Misleading models based on the Spanish flu cannot be allowed to dictate our policy on lifting lockdown
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/01/no-evidence-suggest-coronavirus-second-wave-coming/
When you think about it, there is something very odd about the farrago of the last week. Endless numbers of MPs, many of them Conservative, and a similarly vast array of media outlets received outraged demands for the sacking of the prime minister’s adviser because he allegedly transgressed the rules which have damaged the quality of life of ordinary people. Those who complained said that the deprivations and sacrifices which they have endured at such cost to their personal happiness and welfare were mocked by Dominic Cummings’ actions.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/sleepwalking-one-denial-liberties-even-insidious-phase/
But we now have more evidence. We have learned, for example, that young people are at almost no risk and that outdoor transmission is extremely rare. Knowing what we now know, we would almost certainly not have imposed such draconian closures. But, like the citizens of Columbus, we don’t like to think about that.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-world-panicked-with-ineffective-lockdowns
- Fact #1: The Infection Fatality Rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.07-0.20%, in line with seasonal flu
- Fact #2: The risk of dying from COVID-19 is much higher than the average IFR for older people and those with co-morbidities, and much lower than the average IFR for younger healthy people, and nearing zero for children
- Fact #3: People infected with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic (which is most people) do NOT spread COVID-19
- Fact #4: Emerging science shows no spread of COVID-19 in the community (shopping, restaurants, barbers, etc.)
- Fact #5: Published science shows COVID-19 is NOT spread outdoors
- Fact #6: Science shows masks are ineffective to halt the spread of COVID-19, and The WHO recommends they should only be worn by healthy people if treating or living with someone with a COVID-19 infection
- Fact #7: There’s no science to support the magic of a six-foot barrier
- Fact #8: The idea of locking down an entire society had never been done and has no supportable science, only theoretical modeling
- Fact #9: The epidemic models of COVID-19 have been disastrously wrong, and both the people and the practice of modeling has a terrible history
- Fact #10: The data shows that lockdowns have NOT had an impact on the course of the disease.
- Fact #11: Florida locked down late, opened early, and is doing fine, despite predictions of doom
- Fact #12: New York’s above average death rate appears to be driven by a fatal policy error combined with aggressive intubations.
- Fact #13: Public health officials and disease epidemiologists do NOT consider the other negative societal consequences of lockdowns
- Fact #14: There is a predictive model for the viral arc of COVID-19, it’s called Farr’s Law, and it was discovered over 100 years ago
- Fact #15: The lockdowns will cause more death and destruction than COVID-19 ever did
- Fact #16: All these phased re-openings are utter nonsense with no science to support them, but they will all be declared a success
Was the lockdown worth it? – Spiked
In all of this, I could be wrong. Instituting the widest expansion of the state since 9/11, while suspending the boundaries of political power, quarantining healthy people and enacting a controlled demolition of our economy, might turn out to have been the ‘safest’ response to the pandemic. But my instincts, as well as a growing number of epidemiologists, virologists, economists, historians and journalists, tell me otherwise.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/29/was-the-lockdown-worth-it/
Rather than trusting in our innate common sense, ministers are getting caught up in pointless lectures about how we can host a barbecue
[I]f you believe herd immunity is only reached at 60 per cent, you should be terrified at any loosening of lockdown. If you don’t, then you must reconcile antibody testing that says 80 per cent are still susceptible with the difficulty the virus seems to encounter in marching very far past 20 percent of the population.
That is the reconciliation my hypothesis achieves. I propose that there may exist forms of human resistance to this virus that don’t show up in Covid-19 antibody tests.
[I]n focusing on that Covid antibody test alone as indicating a pass-or-fail immunity, we could be overlooking important ways in which humans may be endowed with, or acquire, other kinds of resistance.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-has-coronavirus-fled-london-
So as you read, in coming weeks, furious news stories about technical incompetence, citizen non-compliance, threats of stricter enforcement and blame in all directions, as if everything was hanging on the latest government policy, remember the humility of scientists instead of the solipsism of the political class. Yes, the Government action plan will most likely be ineffective, but politicians were never in charge of this anyway. It’s bigger than they are — the best they could ever hope to do is tinker around the edges. Coronavirus is nobody’s ‘fault’.