- Sir David Spiegelhalter suggested the Government tried to ‘manipulate’ Britons
- Cherry-picked ‘worst-case scenarios’ to ‘instill a certain emotional reaction’
- No10 lambasted for its apocalyptic graphs and spurious data shown to public
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- Despite the fearmongering, the number of Covid-19 deaths is significantly lower than the peak back in April
- Latest ONS estimate shows that in the week ending November 14, new infections were already levelling off
- GCHQ has embedded a team in Downing Street to provide Boris Johnson with real-time updates of Covid-19
- Analysts will sift through vast amounts of data to ensure Boris Johnson has the most up-to-date information
- Government relaxed procurement rules to allow officials to award contracts
- PPE team of 450 staff handed out more than 6,900 contracts worth £12.3billion
- Officials paid £3.8million into the wrong bank account in one instance
- Sabi Mokeddem, 23, was given £880,000 to supply 55,000 coveralls
Our investigation – distinct from from today’s NAO report – uncovers how blundering officials paid £3.8million into the wrong bank account in one instance and handed an £880,000 contract to a 23-year-old with no relative experience in another.
Official data is ‘exaggerating’ the risk of Covid-19 and talk of a second wave is ‘misleading’, nearly 500 academics told Boris Johnson in open letter attacking lockdown.
The doctors and scientists said the Government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has become ‘disproportionate’ and that mass testing has distorted the risk of the virus.
Shelley Tasker, 43, from Camborne, Cornwall, resigned from Treliske hospital
Healthcare assistant made speech outside Truro cathedral and revealed what’s been going on behind closed doors of NHS hospitals
Claims she had no work for three weeks at height of pandemic due to no patients
“I can tell you on Friday in Treliske there were three people in with Covid. No extra deaths, three – and that covers Treliske, West Cornwall and Hayle hospital…The total deaths from these three hospitals in seven months, is 76 people – that’s about ten people a month over the last seven months, and we have locked down.”
Dr Jonathan Morgan is Director of Law at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge
He has put forward an argument around whether the Government can be sued
Says legal precedent suggests the amount of compensation could be billions
Comes after former Supreme Court judge said the Government had twisted law
* Beds have never been less than 85% full for a three-month period since 2010
* Spring this year was the first time, because patients were turfed out for Covid-19
* And occupancy remains below average levels despite second wave, stat shows
* Boris Johnson has returned to his ‘protect the NHS’ slogan for second lockdown
NHS hospitals in England appear quieter than usual for this time of year even though they are treating more than 9,000 patients with coronavirus.
One leading economist predicted lockdown will cost the UK £1.8billion per day
Business bosses slammed ‘disastrous’ restrictions could devastate High Street
Businesses and consumers expected to slash their spending in coming weeks
This will have a knock-on effect on the public purse as VAT takings slump
As more businesses struggle job losses are expected to rise in spite of furlough
- We have experience of SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, while in the UK there are at least four known strains of coronavirus which cause the common cold.
- Many individuals who’ve been infected by other coronaviruses have immunity to closely related ones such as the Covid-19 virus.
- Multiple research groups in Europe and the US have shown that around 30 per cent of the population was likely already immune to Covid-19 before the virus arrived – something which Sage continues to ignore.
- Prof. John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology at Stanford University in California, have concluded that the mortality rate is closer to 0.2 per cent – 1 in 500 infected die.
- Around 45,000 Covid deaths in the UK
- Approximately 22.5million people have been infected – 33.5 per cent of our population – not Sage’s 7 per cent calculation.
- Not every infected individual produces antibodies.
- The human immune system has several lines of defence:
- Innate immunity which is comprised of the body’s physical barriers to infection and protective secretions (the skin and its oils, the cough reflex, tears etc);
- Inflammatory response (to localise and minimise infection and injury), and the production of non-specific cells (phagocytes) that target an invading virus/bacterium.
- Antibodies that protect against a specific virus or bacterium (and confer immunity) and T-cells (a type of white blood cell) that are also specific.
- T-cells that are crucial in our body’s response to respiratory viruses such as Covid-19.
- World Health Organisation says 750million people have been infected by the virus as of October and almost none have been reinfected.
- Mortality in 2020 so far ranks eighth out of the last 27 years.
- The death rate at present is also normal for the time of year – the number of respiratory deaths is actually low for late October.
- Not only is the virus less dangerous than we are being led to believe, with almost three quarters of the population at no risk of infection.
- I am convinced this so-called second wave of rising infections and, sadly, deaths will fizzle out without overwhelming the NHS.
- Only 17 people under 40 died with Covid between the end of August and the middle of this month.
- Increased infections among children and young adults has not led to their hospitalisations or deaths.
- One person under the age of 20, and another 13 under 40, have died with coronavirus in English hospitals since the start of September.
- 1,425 patients over 80 have died over the same period, along with another 1,093 aged between 60 and 79.
- 247 deaths among working-age people since the end of summer compared with 2,026 among pensioners
There’s just one curious problem: flu, it seems, has all but vanished.
The disappearing act began as Covid-19 rolled in towards the end of our flu season in March. And just how swiftly rates have plummeted can be observed in ‘surveillance’ data collected by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8875201/Has-Covid-killed-flu.html
* Government borrowing has hit £208billion in six months of coroanvirus crisis
* Debt pile has topped £2trillion and at 103.3% of GDP is the highest since 1960
* September borrowing figure of £36.1billion was the third highest on record
In fact, it is now becoming clear [Lockdown] is simply the wrong policy. Those who dissented from the Government’s Covid-19 strategy have been dismissed as mavericks on the fringes of the scientific establishment. However, this is no longer the case. I am afraid that the broadcast media has been particularly slow to reflect a shift in outlook among international scientists.
- The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
- 40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
- The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
- Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
- When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
- Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
- This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
- One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
- Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
- It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
- But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
- The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
- 40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
- The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
- Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
- When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
- Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
- This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
- One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
- Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
- It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
- But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
- Coronaviruses are as old as humanity and have resisted every attempt at a vaccine or a cure. One project to wipe out the common cold was funded for more than 40 years — and got nowhere.
- Today’s flu vaccines are less than 50 per cent effective, and there is no chance whatever that a hurriedly developed Covid-19 vaccine could be anything like as good as that.
- UK Government’s pandemic policies ‘violated the fundamental human rights of vulnerable older people in care’, Amnesty report claims.
- Measures exposed elderly residents to Covid then blocked them from care.
- Ministers ‘know from the outset’ that the virus posed ‘exceptional danger’ to 400,000 residents of UK care homes, many of whom are vulnerable.
- Care home residents were subjected to ‘inhuman and degrading’ treatment.
- Report says UK Government is ‘directly responsible’ for the care home tragedy.
- 8,186 excess deaths recorded in care homes, with 18,562 of these attributed to Covid-19 – 40 per cent of all deaths from the virus.
- Care home residents with suspected Covid-19 were ‘outright refused’ hospital treatment and died in distress from the virus without appropriate medical care – despite local hospitals having ‘hundreds’ of empty beds;
- Health chiefs instructed GPs to pressure care home staff to put blanket ‘do not resuscitate’ orders on all residents without discussion. Instructions were often given verbally rather than written – leaving no paper trail;
- One manager who tried to get a severely unwell resident into hospital in March was told: ‘He’s at the end of his life anyway, so we’re not going to send an ambulance’;
- Care bosses have continued lockdowns – banning families from visiting loved ones, causing further distress and death – because they feared not following ‘excessive’ Government guidance would lead to them being sued or stripped of their licence to operate;
- Despite repeated appeals, the Government and public bodies have withheld crucial data about the spread of Covid-19 in care homes and refused to reveal how many key decisions came to be made.
- 75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown to devastating official figures in a 188-page document from SAGE.
- 16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.
- A further 26,000 will die within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E.
- An additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.
- Official COVID-19 death toll on 29 September 2020 is 41,936.
Covid-19 patients are currently occupying fewer than 2 per cent of all hospital beds in England, official data suggests.
The most NHS recent snapshot — released three weeks ago — shows just 478 out of 110,000 beds in use were by Covid-19 patients on September 3.
…Even at the peak of the crisis in Britain, only a quarter of all beds were occupied by virus patients. On April 7, 26.5 per cent of the 67,206 people in England’s hospitals were being treated for coronavirus — the highest proportion on record.
Professor Russell Viner, from University College London, demanded schools should instead remain fully open in the face of a second wave and cease their ‘flip-flopping’ between closures and openings which are ‘harming’ the education of youngsters.
He was speaking after his recently published study revealed those under 20 are 44 per cent less likely to be infected with the virus than adults.
…’We need to be thinking: “Are we testing too many children?” because of our understandable but probably unscientific and misplaced concerns about children being infected in schools.’
Care home chiefs fear deadly mistakes made at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic risk being repeated as councils offer them extra cash to take Covid-positive hospital patients.
…Now, despite a Government pledge to place a ‘protective ring’ around vulnerable residents, care homes in Cumbria are being offered £1,500 – double the local weekly fee – to take Covid-positive patients from hospital.
…Tony Carling, a care home operator in Cumbria, has decided not to take Covid-positive patients, but fears it could be a costly move. He said: ‘The majority of our clients are funded by local authorities, so it’s very difficult to turn down. You are under extreme financial pressure as to whether you get further business from that authority if you don’t support their needs.’
Have we all gone mad, and become so afraid of the virus that we’ve lost the ability to read, to think and to question? You could argue that the fear of Covid-19 has become so all-consuming that it has become even more of a killer than the virus itself.
- The national debt: £36 billion borrowed last month [August] alone.
- The national debt: Our overall figure of more than £2 trillion is the biggest ever recorded, and will take at least two generations to pay off. Redundancy looms for millions.
- Of the 52,514 virus deaths registered by the Office for National Statistics, 89 per cent have been over-65s.
- More than 22,000 over-85s have died, as well as some 17,000 aged between 75 and 84.
- Only 314 people under the age of 40 have died of the disease since March.
- NHS England figures show that more than 95 per cent of patients who die from coronavirus in hospital have an underlying health condition, such as diabetes, heart disease or obesity.
- New report estimates that there will be a total of 74,000 deaths over the next five years due to the long-term financial and health impact of the pandemic.
- Oncologists warn of an extra 30,000 deaths from cancers currently going undiagnosed.
- Dr John Lee: COVID-19 is currently killing fewer than 40 of the 1,600 people who die every day in the UK.
- There were 2,000 extra deaths from strokes and heart attacks this summer.