Categories
News

Tens of thousands of coronavirus tests have been double-counted, officials admit – The Telegraph

Two samples taken from the same patient are being recorded as two separate tests in the Government’s official figures

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/tens-thousands-coronavirus-tests-have-double-counted-officials/

Categories
Opinion

Britain’s chilling slide into totalitarianism – Spiked

For the first time in my lifetime, a British government has drawn a utilitarian line in the sand and declared that no peaceful protest can be tolerated.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/22/britains-chilling-slide-into-totalitarianism/

Categories
Opinion

‘Nothing can justify this destruction of people’s lives’ – Professor Yoram Lass, Spiked

It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.

Compared to that rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering. In developing countries many will die from starvation. In developed countries many will die from unemployment. Unemployment is mortality. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners. They are younger. Among the people who die from coronavirus, the median age is often higher than the life expectancy of the population. What has been done is not proportionate. But people are afraid. People are brainwashed. They do not listen to the data. And that includes governments.

Any reasonable expert – that is, anyone but Professor Ferguson from Imperial College who would have locked down everybody when we had swine flu – will tell you that lockdown cannot change the final number of infected people. It can only change the rate of infection. And people argue that by changing the rate of infection and ‘flattening the curve’, we prevented the collapse of hospitals. I have shown you the costs of lockdown, but this was the argument in favour of it. But look at Sweden. No lockdown and no collapse of hospitals. The argument for the lockdown collapses.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/22/nothing-can-justify-this-destruction-of-peoples-lives/

Categories
Publications

A systematic review and meta-analysis of published research data on COVID-19 infection-fatality rates – medRxiv

Introduction: An important unknown during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the infection-fatality rate (IFR). This differs from the case-fatality rate (CFR) as an estimate of the number of deaths as a proportion of the total number of cases, including those who are mild and asymptomatic. While the CFR is extremely valuable for experts, IFR is increasingly being called for by policy-makers and the lay public as an estimate of the overall mortality from COVID-19.

Results: After exclusions, there were 13 estimates of IFR included in the final meta-analysis, from a wide range of countries, published between February and April 2020. The meta-analysis demonstrated a point-estimate of IFR of 0.75% (0.49-1.01%) with significant heterogeneity (p<0.001).

Conclusion: Based on a systematic review and meta-analysis of published evidence on COVID-19 until the end of April, 2020, the IFR of the disease across populations is 0.75% (0.49-1.01%). However, due to very high heterogeneity in the meta-analysis, it is difficult to know if this represents the “true” point estimate.

Categories
News

Stanford study suggests coronavirus might not be as deadly as flu – The Spectator

COVID-19 Infection fatality rate (IFR) estimated between 0.02% and 0.4%.

Seasonal influenza is often quoted as having an IFR of 0.1 to 0.2 per cent.

Note: this is in-line with Professor Sunetra Gupta‘s estimate of 0.1% as stated in her UnHerd interview on 21 May 2020.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-might-not-be-as-deadly-as-flu

Categories
News

Lockdowns failed to alter the course of pandemic and are now destroying millions of livelihoods worldwide, JP Morgan study claims – Daily Mail

  • JP Morgan research said infection rates had fallen since lockdowns were eased
  • It suggested the virus ‘has its own dynamics’ which are ‘unrelated’ to lockdowns  
  • Report said they were imposed with little thought of ‘economic devastation’
Infection rates after national lockdowns were lifted
R0 during and after lockdown by US state

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8347635/Lockdowns-failed-alter-course-pandemic-JP-Morgan-study-claims.html

Categories
News

Colmar: des traces du coronavirus détectées sur un scanner dès le 16 novembre – Le Figaro

Radiologists at the Albert Schweitzer hospital in Colmar have detected traces of COVID-19 since November 2019.

https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/colmar-des-traces-du-coronavirus-detectees-sur-un-scanner-des-le-16-novembre-20200519

English article on the same topic:

http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200520-scans-show-french-patients-were-sick-with-covid-19-in-mid-november-doctors-say-colmar-haut-rhin

Categories
News

Europe’s Bread Lines Get New Faces in Warning of Crisis to Come – Bloomberg

Food banks see higher demand from professionals, self-employed

 Higher income inequality could lead to voter backlash, unrest

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/europe-s-bread-lines-get-new-faces-in-warning-of-crisis-to-come

Categories
News

Lockdowns made NO difference to coronavirus but destroyed millions of livelihoods worldwide, JP Morgan study claims – The Sun

LOCKDOWNS have not altered the course of the coronavirus pandemic but have devastated the global economy, a study by JP Morgan has claimed.

A paper by Marko Kolanovic, a strategist at the investment bank, argued that governments were “spooked” into imposing lockdowns that were “late” or “inefficient”.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11687699/lockdowns-difference-coronavirus-destroyed-livelihoods-jp-morgan/

Categories
Publications

Increased Risk of Noninfluenza Respiratory Virus Infections Associated With Receipt of Inactivated Influenza Vaccine – NCBI

We randomized 115 children to trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine (TIV) or placebo. Over the following 9 months, TIV recipients had an increased risk of virologically-confirmed non-influenza infections (relative risk: 4.40; 95% confidence interval: 1.31-14.8). Being protected against influenza, TIV recipients may lack temporary non-specific immunity that protected against other respiratory viruses.

In the prepandemic period of our study, we did not observe a statistically significant reduction in confirmed seasonal influenza virus infections in the TIV recipients (Table 3), although serological evidence (Supplementary Appendix) and point estimates of vaccine efficacy based on confirmed infections were consistent with protection of TIV recipients against the seasonal influenza viruses that circulated from January through March 2009 [16]. We identified a statistically significant increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infection among TIV recipients (Table 3), including significant increases in the risk of rhinovirus and coxsackie/echovirus infection, which were most frequently detected in March 2009, immediately after the peak in seasonal influenza activity in February 2009 (Figure 1).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404712/

Categories
Publications

Face Mask Use and Control of Respiratory Virus Transmission in Households – NCBI (2009)

The key findings are that <50% of participants were adherent with mask use and that the intention-to-treat analysis showed no difference between arms. Although our study suggests that community use of face masks is unlikely to be an effective control policy for seasonal respiratory diseases, adherent mask users had a significant reduction in the risk for clinical infection. Another recent study that examined the use of surgical masks and handwashing for the prevention of influenza transmission also found no significant difference between the intervention arms.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657/

Categories
News

Schools, office blocks & entire STREETS could be ordered into coronavirus quarantine under tough track and trace plan – The Sun

ENTIRE office blocks, schools or streets will be ordered into immediate new quarantines under the government’s tough new ‘track and trace’ plan.

It has emerged that the 25,000-strong contact tracing force will have a sweeping remit to issue targeted two week-long lockdowns of potentially hundreds of people, as well as individuals.

The new programme is deemed as key by scientists to stamp out new coronavirus outbreaks once the national lockdown is lifted from June 1.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11681005/coronavirus-tough-new-track-trace-plan/

Categories
Opinion

The war on transport – Spiked

It is hard to know where to start with transport. One certainly shouldn’t start from home, if at all possible. In our age of lockdown, transport away from the home is considered anti-social, if not downright dangerous.

In this atmosphere, it is worth recalling that democratic rights relate not just to free speech, but also to freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. Some restrictions on travel have been lifted recently. But with every new official statement about how we can and cannot move around, the government confirms that the state and only the state holds the cards in relation to our basic freedoms.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/21/the-war-on-transport/

Categories
Videos

The epidemic is on its way out – Professor Sunetra Gupta, UnHerd

We spoke to Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and head of the team that released a study in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate could be as low as 0.1%.

In her first major interview since the Oxford study was published, she goes further by arguing that Covid-19 has already passed through the population and is now on its way out. She said:

On antibodies:
• Many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable”
• They do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity • “Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour”
• “Much of the driving force was due to the build-up of immunity”

On IFR:

• “Infection Fatality Rate is less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.”
• That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%

On lockdown policy:
• Referring to the Imperial model: “Should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting that case is becoming more and more fragile”
• Recommends “a more rapid exit from lockdown based more on certain heuristics, like who is dying and what is happening to the death rates”

On the UK Government response:
• “We might have done better by doing nothing at all, or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable”

On the R rate:
• It is “principally dependent on how many people are immune” and we don’t have that information.
• Deaths are the only reliable measure.

On New York:
• “When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn’t if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population.”

On social distancing:
• “Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous”
• “We used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”

On next steps:
• “It is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population”
• It is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine.

On the politics of Covid:
• “There is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown”
• “The truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries.”

Categories
Videos

Why We Might Not Need A Vaccine for COVID-19 – Professor Karol Sikora, This Morning ITV

Categories
News

Two-metre coronavirus rule ‘will bankrupt businesses – The Times

Business leaders have warned that companies will be bankrupted if staff and customers have to keep two metres apart after government advisers opposed relaxing the rule.

The Sage scientific panel has concluded a review into the two-metre rule and advised ministers that it should stay in the belief that blurring it would be confusing. Downing Street said yesterday that it had no plans to change the “sensible and safe distance”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/two-metre-coronavirus-rule-will-bankrupt-businesses-nqmr93vqw

Categories
Opinion

No 10 is hiding behind secretive Sage pseudo-science – The Telegraph

There’s almost a whiff of superstition about No 10’s secretive “evidence-based” approach to lifting lockdown. Ministers are peddling an esoteric assortment of “precautionary” measures, from a scientifically baseless two-metre rule to a pointless 14-day holiday quarantine. They are obscure and enigmatic on risks and trade-offs. And, in the daily press conferences, they continue to bewitch an already hyper-paranoid public with lurid graphs and charts that propagate bogus science.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/21/no-10-hiding-behind-secretive-sage-pseudo-science/

Categories
Publications

COVID-19 does not spread easily from touching surfaces or objects – CDC

This is a screenshot and excerpt from the CDC page updated 13 April 2020.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-covid-spreads.html



Person-to-person spread

The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person.

  • Between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet).
  • Through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks.
  • These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs.
  • COVID-19 may be spread by people who are not showing symptoms.

The virus spreads easily between people

How easily a virus spreads from person-to-person can vary. Some viruses are highly contagious, like measles, while other viruses do not spread as easily. Another factor is whether the spread is sustained, which means it goes from person-to-person without stopping.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is spreading very easily and sustainably between people. Information from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic suggest that this virus is spreading more efficiently than influenza, but not as efficiently as measles, which is highly contagious.

The virus does not spread easily in other ways

COVID-19 is a new disease and we are still learning about how it spreads. It may be possible for COVID-19 to spread in other ways, but these are not thought to be the main ways the virus spreads.

  • From touching surfaces or objects. It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes. This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about this virus.
  • From animals to people. At this time, the risk of COVID-19 spreading from animals to people is considered to be low. Learn about COVID-19 and pets and other animals.
  • From people to animals. It appears that the virus that causes COVID-19 can spread from people to animals in some situations. CDC is aware of a small number of pets worldwide, including cats and dogs, reported to be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, mostly after close contact with people with COVID-19. Learn what you should do if you have pets.
Categories
Videos

COVID19 Never Grows Exponentially – Professor Michael Levitt

Part 1: Exponential Growth is Terrifying

This is my first podcast and they will improve. This is Part 1 and it describes how COVID may grow exponentially and how we flatten the growth curve.

Part 2: Curve Fitting for Understanding

This is Part 2. Fitting viral growth data with simple mathematical functions can give important insights into how epidemics will grow. Here we illustrate two commonly used growth curves, the Sigmoid Function and the Gompertz Function. While superficially similar, they are really very different.

Part 3: COVID19 Never Grows Exponentially

Part 3. The total case numbers in South Korea and New Zealand have exponential growth rates that decrease linearly on a log-scale. This is not ever exponential growth.

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Visitor Contributions

4FreedomsSake

Authors

Bio: @4FreedomsSake is a grassroots activism group, based in Manchester, UK. We campaign against medical & government tyranny, lockdown & a police state.


It is imperative we reach a critical mass of awareness regarding the truth about the real risks of Covid19 and costs of lockdown to prevent the establishment removing more of our rights and freedoms under the pretext of health and safety concerns.

The mainstream media, particularly television news, has essentially become a state propaganda machine on this issue. Therefore it is up to individuals to get the truth out. Flyering and stickering are easy and anonymous ways to spread the message.

Manchester anti-lockdown campaign group @4freedomssake have done the work of putting the key messages together. All you need is a printer (or family member or friend with printer access) and a hour or so to get out into your local community and spread the word. 

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In the interest of public debate, we allow visitors to share opinions, experiences and research that may be of value to others. This is a visitor contribution from our Discussions page.

The views expressed are those of the individual posters themselves. Please read our Comments and contributions disclaimer.