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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

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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

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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/

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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

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Opinion

The warped thinking behind the world’s lockdowns – Washington Examiner

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

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News

U.K. Jobless Claims Surged in April as Lockdown Kicked In – Bloomberg

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.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/u-k-jobless-claims-surged-by-856-500-in-april-as-virus-struck

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News

Furloughed and Frustrated, Workers Are Struggling Across the U.K. – Bloomberg

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/

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News

UK facing ‘severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen’ warns Chancellor – The Telegraph

“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/

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News

Huge rise in number of people claiming benefits – BBC

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”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52719230

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Opinion

When will our leaders wake up to reality? – The Conservative Woman

  • 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.”
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News

UK Column News – 18th May 2020: Vaccines by the Autumn

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News

Some 42% Of Jobs Lost In Pandemic Are Gone For Good – Forbes

Only some of roughly 36 million jobs lost since the beginning of the lockdowns designed to protect hospitals from surging cases of COVID-19 patients are not coming back in a V-shaped or a U-shaped recover. The University of Chicago estimates that 42% of the recent layoffs will result in permanent job losses.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/05/15/some-42-of-jobs-lost-in-pandemic-are-gone-for-good/

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Opinion

Furlough billions? Just a giant payday loan in YOUR name – Peter Hitchens, The Mail on Sunday

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. 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/05/peter-hitchens-furlough-billions-just-a-giant-payday-loan-in-your-name.html

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Videos

Covid-19 – Britain’s Disastrous Response Will Have Devastating Consequences – David Starkey

What is unique about this pandemic–apart from the fact that it’s rather small–is that the damage that it does is self-inflicted.

This is a very odd plague. It’s rather small in scale but it’s gigantic in consequences because we have chosen to inflict a form of economic suicide on ourselves.

This week on “So What You’re Saying Is…”: Dr. David Starkey argues that a calamitous series of events and decisions caused a panicked British government to recklessly abandon its sensible coronavirus plan for one that is likely to harm the nation far more than the virus itself.

Comparing this virus with historical pandemics Starkey believes the dire situation we are encountering today has a different cause. Earlier pandemics such as the Black Death eradicated up to half of the population of Europe. In contrast, although it is profoundly tragic on a personal level to the individuals and familiies it afflicts, coronavirus is nowhere near as devastating on a population-wide level as previous pandemics. Consequently, Starkey argues, the Conservative government was correct to follow a similar path to Sweden which was far more relaxed than elsewhere in Europe.

This approach suited Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s libertarian attitude and personality. But on a single weekend there was a calamitous confluence of events and decisions that caused the Tory government to panic (Northwick Park hospital overwhelmed, Imperial College modelling showing potential 500,00 deaths etc.) and enforce an extreme lockdown without any plan to deal with the epidemic. It was simply a goal to protect the NHS.

Protect the NHS: The Tory Government, says Dr. Starkey, was desperate not to be seen as responsible or the NHS being overwhelmed. Eager to prove to the traditional Labour “Red Wall” that the Conservative Party really was their natural home, the British government prioritised the NHS’s capacity to deal with Covid-19 over everything else– but disastrously this included its treatment of cancer patients etc. A bizarre and unprecdented abandoning of the Hippocratic oath that we have not seen in other countries, argues Starkey.

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Opinion

The moral case for a blanket lockdown is fading fast – The Telegraph

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/

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Opinion

This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one – The Spectator

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/

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Opinion

The coronavirus crash could be even worse than we feared – The Spectator

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

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Opinion

It’s time to relax London’s lockdown and trust the capital to return to work – The Telegraph

As the world comes out of lockdown, the regional approach is being used everywhere. London is the safest place to try it here

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/15/time-relax-londons-lockdown-trust-capital-return-work/

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Opinion

Poverty won’t cure coronavirus… we MUST get back to work, writes hotel chain magnate SIR ROCCO FORTE – Daily Mail

The real and overwhelming tragedy is the devastation it is causing to previously profitable businesses, and even worse to the millions of working people previously in secure and productive jobs. This should be the Government’s overriding priority

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8317531/Poverty-wont-cure-corona-work-writes-hotel-chain-magnate-SIR-ROCCO-FORTE.html

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News

Coronavirus: Chancellor Rishi Sunak warns of ‘significant recession’ – BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52641807