https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/04/18/sake-young-lockdown-must-end-sooner-rather-later/
COVID-19
COVID-19 is a disease defined by symptoms and is not a virus. It’s therefore not transmitted nor can you test for it using nasal or throat testing kits. SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that prompted the worldwide pandemic response.
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- UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based
- The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only
- This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”
- The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better
- The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact
- The paper was very much too pessimistic
- Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway
- The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown
- The results will eventually be similar for all countries
- Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.
- The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%
- At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available
Summary from 21st Century Wire.
Up to two thirds of people who die from coronavirus in the next nine months are likely to have died this year from other causes, a government advisor has said.
Professor Neil Ferguson, who is recovering at home from Covid-19, told the Science and Technology Committee that experts were now expecting around 20,000 deaths, although said it may turn out to be a lot less.
But he said that many of those deaths were likely to be old and seriously ill people who would have died from other conditions before the end of the year.
Stanford University study founds antibodies in 50 to 85 times more people than previously thought in Santa Clara County, California. Covid-19 lethality of 0.12% to 0.2% which is in the range of severe influenza.
London’s Nightingale hospital has remained largely empty, with just 19 patients being treated at the facility over the Easter weekend, HSJ understands.
The open letter raises questions about the behavioural science evidence that may have been used to justify this decision—though a lack of transparency from the government has made it hard to discern what the official policy is.
InProportion2 analyses the latest figures from Office for National Statistics, week ending 3 April 2020.
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/collateral_judgement.html
The knee jerk reaction, assuming any questioning of the lockdown demonstrates a cavalier, uncaring disregard is puerile. Grown adults shouldn’t simply believe everything they are told like mindless idiots. Critical thinking and asking questions is never “bad” under any circumstances whatsoever.
Colleagues around the country report their clinics have never felt emptier or their workloads lighter as hospitals have gone on a war footing.
Yes, of course it is a war we have to fight with every weapon at our disposal. But I read, with a growing sense of outrage, a leaked report this week claiming that over the Easter weekend just 19 patients were treated at the newly-created 4,000-bed Nightingale Hospital in East London.
“The supine capitulation to a de facto police state in a country long regarded as a cradle of liberty has been one of the most depressing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. In a matter of days, busybodies are ratting out neighbours for going for a run twice; these people would be pigs in muck in the GDR. The police taping over of isolated park benches and harassment of sunbathers or sea swimmers without a soul within 100 feet have no basis in epidemiology. “
Speaking may be a primary mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Considering that reports of asymptomatic transmission account for 50-80% of COVID-19 cases and that saliva has peak viral loads at time of patient presentation, droplet emission while speaking could be a significant factor driving transmission and warrants further study. We used a planar beam of laser light passing through a dust-free enclosure to detect saliva droplets emitted while speaking. We found that saying the words ‘Stay Healthy’ generates thousands of droplets that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. A damp homemade cloth face mask dramatically reduced droplet excretion, with none of the spoken words causing a droplet rise above the background. Our preliminary findings have important implications for pandemic mitigation efforts.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.02.20051177v1
“Barely a day goes by without a politician saying that they will be ‘led by the science’. But what we are seeing with Covid-19 is not ‘science’ in action.”
About 80% of patients have mild to moderate disease (including non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases), 13.8% have severe disease and 6.1% are critical (respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure). Individuals at highest risk for severe disease and death are people aged over 60 years of age and those with underlying conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and cancer. Disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild. About 2.4% of the total reported cases were individuals under 19 years of age. A very small proportion of those aged under 19 years have developed severe (2.5%) or critical disease (0.2%).