Covid-19 could be “petering out by itself” before the world comes up with any vaccine, a leading academic, formerly the World Health Organization’s (WHO) top oncologist has said.
https://www.rt.com/news/488900-vaccines-covid19-natural-scenario/
Opinion
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One reason why the models failed is that they – just like most countries’ politicians – underestimated how millions of people spontaneously adapt to new circumstances. They only thought in terms of lockdowns vs business as usual, but failed to consider a third option: that people engage in social distancing voluntarily when they realise lives are at stake and when authorities recommend them to do so.
As countries plan how to leave lockdown, they can look at Sweden and ask: what happens if you don’t involve the police, if you don’t issue edicts about how many of your relatives or neighbours you can visit, and just ask people to be careful? Might that work? The Swedish experiment casts huge doubts on the models, and makes the case for trusting the public.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-we-trust-covid-modelling-more-evidence-from-sweden
- COVID-19 is about as deadly as flu, averaging between 0.1 and 0.8 per cent death rate.
- The general population under 65 with no pre-existing conditions are more likely to die in a road accident.
- Infections peaked and began to decline in many places including the UK before lockdown began
- Social distancing shows no consistent relationship to the slowdown of infections in cities around the world?
- Studies show that people confined to their homes may be as at much risk as those out and about.
- ‘R number’ rise happened in the middle of lockdown and probably linked to ongoing spreading in hospitals and care homes.
- Shutting down the world economy may result in of the order of 1,157,000 additional child deaths and 56,700 additional maternal deaths in low- and middle-income countries.
- Former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption: “The lockdown is now all about protecting politicians’ backs. They are not wicked men, just timid ones, terrified of being blamed for deaths on their watch. But it is a wicked thing that they are doing.”
It remains true that deaths from Covid-19 peaked in this country on April 8, well before the shutdown could have taken effect.
Nobody has ever seen so much wild spending of non-existent money before in peacetime. Some idiots nowadays think you can do this without consequences. In wartime it was disastrous. This kind of debt really hurts.
Professor Michael Levitt, Stanford Prof. of Biophysics, Cambridge PhD and DSc, 2013 Chemistry Nobel Laureate (complex systems), says that Europe’s COVID19 Excess Deaths plateau at 153,006, 15% more than 17/18 Flu with same age range counts.
- Keeping R below one is not the only way to map a route out of lockdown.
- R is an artificial construct and not even a number we know with any certainty.
- R is calculated using mathematical models which have repeatedly been found to reach wrong-headed conclusions.
- R is not a strong enough number to bear the burden of any Government policy.
- Epidemiology models share the same serious problem as meteorology because of weak data.
- Lack of testing means we don’t know how many people have been infected, or have recovered.
- Changes to death certification during this epidemic mean that we genuinely don’t even know how many people have died as a direct result of COVID-19.
- It is becoming increasingly clear that assumptions central to the models that generate R are flawed.
- Worries that R was apparently heading back towards one were missing the point. For some segments of society, including most people of working age, that would be a good thing.
- Another implication of seeing R this way, which is quite a relief, is that social distancing can be consigned to the dustbin of bizarre historical episodes.
- R is calculated in ways that the Government can produce at will to justify a policy that is no longer tenable.
This level of social distancing cannot go on indefinitely. It will break down, more than it already has. As much as people tell the pollsters that, if anything, the current regime is too soft-touch, many are already bending if not breaking the rules on meeting friends and family, weighing the risks, being careful, and deciding for themselves. And it’s not just among the supposedly selfish young, either. Older people want to see their kids and grandkids and to make the most of the time they have left.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/17/social-distancing-corrodes-society/
Most people have accepted a temporary period of ’social distancing’ to contain the spread of COVID-19, but it seems that some in authority, like UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, would like to see us keep our distance from each other indefinitely. We must never let this happen because if we do, humanity is dead.
A rise in the Covid-19 infection rate actually means that lockdown is working
Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns will supersede the failed Venus space probe and could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.
The argument for a lockdown was overwhelming. When Boris Johnson addressed the nation eight weeks ago, it appeared as if a killer virus was about to engulf the population at astonishing speed. You had to be mad or bad, it seemed, not to back the Prime Minister as he urged us all to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. The moral justification for collective action was crystal clear. “Squashing the sombrero,” as Johnson colourfully put it, was needed to buy time for the NHS to fight this thing. And we did it. Britain achieved that aim.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/16/moral-case-blanket-lockdown-fading-fast/
For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000. Malaria, 620,000 in 2017, almost all in Africa (so who cares, right?). In 2018, tuberculosis, developing treacherous antibiotic resistance, killed 1.5 million people. Why haven’t we closed down the whole world for TB?
What is destroying lives and livelihoods is not predominantly the illness. The UK economy is not in a tailspin because it can’t survive without the labor of the 32,000-plus fatalities, however much we may miss them as individuals. This is not a natural disaster but a manmade one.
https://spectator.us/natural-disaster-manmade-united-kingdom-costly/
The idea that government advisers can separate science and politics is bogus, says Melanie Smallman
…having spent seven years in frontline science advice, I find the persistence of the idea that scientific advice can be separated from politics surprising.
…because it was impossible to describe the science without revealing the policy advice. The questions being asked and the particular science being used were all shaped by the direction that policy was taking—and vice versa.
At a time of a global pandemic, bringing more—and more diverse—expertise to bear on the issue has to be welcome. But the danger is that, in pursuing some ideal of scientific independence, political issues get disguised as technical matters. This risks handing decisions to scientific experts rather than elected politicians, hiding both decisions and politicians from public scrutiny.
Today’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 show Britain’s economy shrunk by two per cent, but that takes into account just a few days of lockdown (and suggests that the recession started some time before). The March figure is more like it: despite only formally being in lockdown for eight days in March, the UK economy contracted 5.8 per cent that month alone. As Capital Economics puts it ‘in just one month the economy has tumbled by as much as it did in the year and a half after the global financial crisis.’
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-coronavirus-crash-could-be-even-worse-than-we-feared
Categories
Fear kills – Spiked
The media in this country have no shame. For two months they’ve been ramping up fear and hysteria over Covid-19. They predicted apocalypse. They reported the daily death tolls like gleeful grim reapers.
And now, after all that, after pumping out 24-hour rolling doom for weeks on end, they have the gall to wonder why so many people have been too scared to visit a hospital during the pandemic. And why there has been a huge number of excess deaths from treatable ailments other than Covid-19. And why there was a policy of ‘Protecting the NHS’ at all costs from the coming viral calamity that involved sending even infected elderly people away from hospitals and back to care homes. ‘How could this happen?’, they cry.
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How apocalyptic is now? – UnHerd
When you read diaries of people who lived through the revolution in Russia, you find them looking on in disbelief as the vast, centuries-old empire of the Romanovs melted into nothing in a matter of months. Few then accepted that the world they knew had gone forever.
As the world comes out of lockdown, the regional approach is being used everywhere. London is the safest place to try it here
The biggest political ruse of our time has now spiralled so far out of control that it has become almost impossible to distinguish fact from deception. Every day we are besieged with such a selective and biased artillery of “scientific” assertions that it makes a mockery of expert insight.
Every day we are subjected to yet more bitesized epidemiology that gives an utterly false impression of risk. And every day we are bombarded with terrifying death figures so out of context that they are effectively meaningless.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/14/official-covid-story-biased-selective-point-deceit/
But if we are going to be served up with the daily death toll from Covid-19, isn’t it about time we were also provided with the number of deaths caused daily by the national lockdown? If you are prepared to dig around a bit, it is already possible to work this out from officially released figures.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/13/can-no-longer-ignore-excess-deaths-caused-lockdown/