‘Evidence’ has been turned into a gospel truth and that’s bad for political decision-making.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/20/why-the-government-should-not-always-follow-the-science/
With ministers and officials involved with the country’s coronavirus strategy braced for an eventual public inquiry, this week we’re being given a glimpse of how it might play out. During a morning broadcast round on Tuesday, Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey set the cat among the pigeons when she was asked about mistakes the government may have made. It’s clear that this is a row No. 10 does not wish to be having right now.
Coffey replied by saying ministers can ‘only make judgments based on the advice’ they are given. She went on to say that on issues such as testing capacity, if the scientific advice at the time was ‘wrong’, she would not be surprised if people think ‘we made the wrong decisions’. Those comments were quick to gain traction – with critics claiming Coffey was attempting to scapegoat scientists for the government’s U-turn on testing.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-government-blaming-the-scientists
[O]ne thing the Coronavirus pandemic has shown us is that rather than turn away from experts plenty of people appear to ascribe almost supernatural powers to them.
The bottom line is this: if Shipman were killing under the Coronavirus Act, he might have gotten away with even more murders. And if the safeguards held others back from killing their patients, well, they’re not anymore.
“What’s happening, exceptionally, with Covid is that not only do you not have to be an attending doctor to make a statement that someone has died of Covid, you don’t have to discuss it with anybody else, you don’t even have to be medical, you don’t have to have any test positivity – you can even deem a death to be due to Covid if it’s not mentioned on the death certificate and, say, you’re a care home provider and you think it ought to be mentioned.. and few of these cases are being autopsied. So we’re not building up any sort of knowledge about what this disease actually does to the body, or even whether it was present in the body of somebody who was said to have died of Covid. We actually know less about who’s dying of what now, particularly concerning Covid, than at any time in the past. So it really is a complete mess”.
https://thecritic.co.uk/under-the-corona-act-dr-shipman-could-have-got-away-with-more-murders/
Shockingly, the UK government was not alone in pushing the crisis into care homes. In New York, the centre of the world’s worst outbreak, it is a similar story. Care homes were not only neglected for PPE and testing, but were also ordered to take in Covid patients. Homes could be fined $10,000 or lose their operating licence if they refused to comply with the rules. In Lombardy, the hardest-hit region of Italy, care homes were paid extra to take in Covid patients from hospitals.
The carnage in care homes ought to be the biggest scandal of the Covid crisis.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/19/how-covid-panic-caused-the-carnage-in-care-homes/
NHS England figures reveal some infections were passed on by hospital staff unaware they had virus.
Up to a fifth of patients with Covid-19 in several hospitals contracted the disease over the course of the pandemic while already being treated there for another illness, NHS bosses have told senior doctors and nurses.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/17/hospital-patients-england-coronavirus-covid-19
It is becoming clear that the severity of a lockdown does not correlate significantly either with the spread of the coronavirus or the rate of deaths. I noted in this column a couple of weeks back that the states that had remained open had, if anything, fared better than the rest. We can now also see that the states that ended the closures early, such as Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, are not suffering any noticeable new surge. It is a similar picture in Europe, where Spain and Italy, with very harsh quarantines, suffered worse than the Netherlands and Germany, where the restrictions were moderate.
But none of that will alter the verdict. The counterexample of 1930s Britain does not dent the confidence of New Deal enthusiasts. The counterexample of Iceland, which refused to rescue its bankers and bounced back quickly from the financial crisis, does not dent the confidence of bailout enthusiasts. And the counterexample of Sweden, which left shops and businesses open and told people to use their common sense, will not change the minds of lockdown enthusiasts.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-warped-thinking-behind-the-worlds-lockdowns
Letter dated 17 March 2020 to Chief executives of all NHS trusts and foundation trusts.
ANNEX: CORONAVIRUS COST REIMBURSEMENT
This guidance sets out the amended financial arrangements for the NHS for the period between 1 April and 31 July. These changes will enable the NHS and partner organisations (including Local Authorities and the Independent Sector) to respond to COVID-19. We will continue to revise this guidance to reflect operational changes and feedback from the service as the response develops.
We will shortly be making a payment on account to all acute and ambulance providers to cover the costs of COVID-19-related work done so far this year, with final costs for the current financial year being confirmed as part of the year end processes. This initial
payment will be based on information already submitted by providers. Future payments will be based on further cost submissions.
All NHS providers and commissioners must carefully record the costs incurred in responding to the outbreak and will be required to report actual costs incurred on a monthly basis. Accurate record keeping during this time is crucial – record keeping must meet the requirements of external audit, and public and Parliamentary scrutiny.
To support reimbursement and track expenditure we will in due course be asking all relevant organisations to provide best estimates of expected costs from now until the expected end of the peak outbreak. We will provide further guidance with relevant
assumptions in order to support you in making these estimates.
Source:
Experts said the major study, which included all patients hospitalised with Covid-19 over 10 weeks, showed that diabetes – which is often fuelled by obesity – is driving Britain’s death toll.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/19/one-third-covid-19-deaths-england-have-among-diabetics/
Yet a sharp drop in vacancies signals trouble ahead. Vacancies fell 170,000 in three months to April, the biggest drop since the series began in 2001. Job openings had all but collapsed entirely by the time the lockdown was announced, according to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, with the decline coming across the wage distribution.
Benefit claims made by unemployed and underemployed people in the U.K. rose more last month than at any time on record, with the pain spread throughout the country. Jobseeker’s Allowance and related Universal Credit claims jumped by 856,500 in April alone. For context, the worst month during the 2008-09 financial crisis saw claims increase by 143,000.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-uk-unemployment-benefits-covid-19/
Covid-19 appearance and fast spreading took by surprise the international community. Collaboration between researchers, public health workers and politicians has been established to deal with the epidemic. One important contribution from researchers in epidemiology is the analysis of trends so that both current state and short-term future trends can be carefully evaluated. Gompertz model has shown to correctly describe the dynamics of cumulative confirmed cases, since it is characterized by a decrease in growth rate that is able to show the effect of control measures. Thus, it provides a way to systematically quantify the Covid-19 spreading velocity. Moreover, it allows to carry out short-term predictions and long-term estimations that may facilitate policy decisions and the revision of in-place confinement measures and the development of new protocols. This model has been employed to fit the cumulative cases of Covid-19 from several Chinese provinces and from other countries with a successful containment of the disease. Results show that there are systematic differences in spreading velocity between countries. In countries that are in the initial stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, model predictions provide a reliable picture of its short-term evolution and may permit to unveil some characteristics of the long-term evolution. These predictions can also be generalized to short-term hospital and Intensive Care Units (ICU) requirements, which together with the equivalent predictions on mortality provide key information for health officials.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101329v1
“It is so transmissible, it’s so successful, we’re so susceptible, that actually it’s a little bit of a red herring to worry about it getting worse, because it couldn’t be much worse at the moment in terms of the numbers of cases,” he told the House of Lords Science and Technology committee on Tuesday.
“If you contrast with Ebola, which has very high virulence, kills many, many people, it makes it very controllable and you can very readily identify the infected people.
“Lockdown is having a significant impact on our economy and we are likely to face a severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/19/lockdown-uk-news-coronavirus-boris-johnson-update/
Care home residents confined to their rooms and forbidden visits from loved ones are giving up on life and “fading away”, say staff and families.
“The virus won’t be the killer of these people, it’s the distress and fear of not seeing family that is doing it,” said one carer who asked to remain anonymous but has reported her concerns to the Care Inspectorate in Scotland.
The argument that vitamin D deficiency may contribute to more severe cases of Covid is gaining ground. It is now reaching the point where it is surprising that we are not hearing from leading medical officials and politicians that people should consider taking supplements to ensure they have sufficient vitamin D.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-growing-evidence-on-vitamin-d-and-covid
- Professor Karol Sikora says that COVID-19 behaves like pandemics in the past.
- Society is scarred all over the world.
- The virus will go but the fear will do the damage.
Note: YouTube has taken down the video. Please go directly to UnHerd’s site:
https://unherd.com/thepost/professor-karol-sikora-fear-is-more-dangerous-than-the-virus/
Professor Karol Sikora has become something of a celebrity in the UK over the past months for his expert commentary on the pandemic, and his unusual tendency for optimism rather than pessimism.
Virus ‘getting tired’
– In the past two weeks, the virus is showing signs of petering out
– It’s as though the virus is ‘getting tired’, almost ‘getting bored’
– It’s happening across the world at the same time
Existing herd immunity
– The serology results around the world (and forthcoming in Britain) don’t necessarily reveal the percentage of people who have had the disease
– He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible
– Pockets of herd immunity help *already* explain the downturn
– Sweden’s end result will not be different to ours – lockdown versus no lockdown
Fear more deadly than the virus
– When the history books are written, the fear will have killed many more people than the virus, including large numbers of cancer and cardiological patients not being treated
– We should have got the machinery of the NHS for non-corona patients back open earlier
Masks and schools
– Evidence on masks is just not there either way so it should be an ‘individual decision’
– We should move to 1m social distancing which means restaurants and bars could reopen
– More schools should reopen in June as ‘children are not the transmitters of this virus’
– We should be getting back to the ‘old normal’ not a ‘new normal’
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/
The number of people claiming unemployment benefit in the UK soared to 2.1 million in April, the first full month of the coronavirus lockdown.
But the labour market is set to worsen, according to politicians and analysts, with Therese Coffey, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, telling the BBC on Tuesday that the unemployment rate was likely “to increase significantly”.
The Oxford University vaccine tipped as a “front runner” in the race to develop a coronavirus jab does not stop the virus in monkeys and may only be partially effective, experts have warned.
- All of the vaccinated monkeys treated with the Oxford vaccine became infected.
- Vaccine data suggests that the jab may not be able to prevent the spread of the virus between infected individuals.
