Categories
Opinion

Government may increase the death toll with unjust and insane measures, why are they doubling down on failure? – Lord Sumption, The Sun

  • Instead of indiscriminate rules, we should be concentrating on protecting the vulnerable.
  • The rest should be allowed to get on with normal life and acquire some natural immunity.
  • The Government’s policy is founded upon a great lie — that we are all vulnerable to Covid so it is necessary to take over the lives of everyone.
  • For healthy people under 60 the symptoms are usually mild or non-existent. 
  • About 90 per cent of deaths have been of people aged over 70. Most are in their 80s or 90s.
  • Infections don’t matter a row of beans unless they lead to hospitalisations or deaths.
  • Out of nearly 43,000 dead with Covid-19, just 41 have been under 25.
  • What we are seeing now…is the first spike…which has come back to hit us. Just as their advisers told them it would, back in February and March.
  • So why are Johnson and his crew doubling down on failure? This is about covering politicians’ backs.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12886627/lord-sumption-government-death-toll-coronavirus-crisis/

Categories
Opinion

My manifesto to beat coronavirus crisis: Protect the elderly and vulnerable, let the rest live their lives, and throw Britain open again – Prof. David Livermore, Daily Mail

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.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8816651/PROF-DAVID-LIVERMORE-manifesto-beat-coronavirus-crisis.html

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Opinion Videos

Covid experts: there is another way – UnHerd

  • Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
  • Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
  • We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.
  • COVID-19 is less dangerous for children than many other harms, including influenza.
  • All populations will eventually reach herd immunity.
  • Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
  • Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19.
  • Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.
  • Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.
  • Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.
  • Restaurants and other businesses should open.
  • Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume.

https://unherd.com/2020/10/covid-experts-there-is-another-way/

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News

‘Inhumane, degrading, inexplicable’: Britain’s Covid care home policies ‘violated the fundamental human rights of vulnerable elderly residents’, Amnesty International report finds – Daily Mail

  • 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.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8801287/Coronavirus-UK-Care-home-policies-exposed-residents-virus-BLOCKED-medical-care.html

Categories
Opinion

Snitches and snoopers, students and the elderly shut away… a nation cowering and an economy in tatters. Now BEL MOONEY asks: How could once-indomitable Britain be reduced to slaves to fear? – Daily Mail

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.
Categories
Opinion

This second wave of coronavirus is simply not as deadly… if we panic, so many more lives will be lost, says PROFESSOR KAROL SIKORA – Daily Mail

Britain is now in grave danger of sleepwalking into a second national lockdown. The consequences of doing so would be disastrous.

We find ourselves in this wretched position partly because the Government’s main achievement since the pandemic first emerged in China has not been suppressing the virus or saving lives or the economy, but in spreading irrational fear.

  • A blanket lockdown is the last thing we should be contemplating if we are serious about the nation’s mental and physical well-being.
  • This second wave will not trigger the explosion in deaths we saw in the spring.
  • Not a single young child has died in the UK from Covid without some other serious pre-existing condition.
  • According to Cambridge statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter, anyone under 50 is more likely to die in a car crash than from the virus.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8748883/This-second-wave-coronavirus-simply-not-deadly-says-PROFESSOR-KAROL-SIKORA.html

Categories
News Opinion

‘Australians must know the truth – this virus is not a pandemic’: Alan Jones, Sky News Australia

Sky News host Alan Jones says he has warned time and time again the political leaders who are the architects of this coronavirus response will not be able to escape the criticism that is now finding its way into the public place. It comes as an economist in the Victorian Department of Finance and Treasury, Sanjeev Sabhlok, on Wednesday penned an article in the Australian Financial Review announcing his resignation from his position.

  • Policies are a sledgehammer to kill a swarm of flies.
  • The Spanish Flu killed killed at least 50 million out of 1.8 billion people out of worldwide.
  • To compare with Spanish Flu, COVID-19 would need to kill 210 million people. It has only killed 0.9 million.
  • 60 million people worldwide normally die each year.
  • There are strong scientific arguments against lockdown.
  • The data was clear from February that the elderly should be protected but this wasn’t done.
  • Epidemiological models have badly exaggerated the risk.
  • There was never any reason to mandate measures such as face masks.
  • COVID-19 is no worse than the Asian Flu.
  • Lockdowns cannot eradicate the virus.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6191311935001

Categories
News

Pandemic isolation has killed thousands of Alzheimer’s patients while families watch from afar – The Washington Post

Since the pandemic began, Goerke’s wife, Denise — 63 years old and afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease — had declined dramatically. Left alone in her nursing home, she had lost 16 pounds, could not form the simplest words, no longer responded to the voices of her children.

In recent weeks, she had stopped recognizing even the man she loved.

Goerke, 61, could tell the isolation was killing his wife, and there was nothing he could do but watch. “Every day it gets a little worse,” he said. “We’ve lost months, maybe years of her already.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/16/coronavirus-dementia-alzheimers-deaths/

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News

Hopes for normality grow as Covid shifts to the young: Two-thirds of new UK infections are in under-40s while rate in older people FALLS – raising hopes deaths will remain low without lockdowns – Dail Mail

The number of over-50s with Covid-19 represents a fifth of those nationwide

Just three per cent are aged over 80, down from 28 per cent six months ago

Peak age range for infections is now in the 20s but used to be in the 80s 

Sparked hope further restrictions could soon be reduced as older people shield 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8700399/Covid-shifts-young-Two-thirds-new-infections-UK-40s.html

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News

Quarter of Covid victims in England and Wales have dementia – The Guardian

People with dementia accounted for a quarter of all Covid-related deaths in England and Wales, and three-quarters of all deaths in care facilities globally, data shows.

The London School of Economics and University College London are looking at the mortality rate of those with dementia in a regularly updated report. According to their research, up to 75% of Covid-19 deaths globally in care facilities are those with dementia as an underlying condition.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/01/quarter-covid-victims-england-wales-have-dementia-study

Categories
Opinion

Delaying herd immunity is costing lives – Spiked

The choice we face is stark. One option is to maintain a general lockdown for an unknown amount of time until herd immunity is reached through a future vaccine or until there is a safe and effective treatment. This must be weighed against the detrimental effects that lockdowns have on other health outcomes. The second option is to minimise the number of deaths until herd immunity is achieved through natural infection. Most places are neither preparing for the former nor considering the latter.

The question is not whether to aim for herd immunity as a strategy, because we will all eventually get there. The question is how to minimise casualties until we get there. Since Covid-19 mortality varies greatly by age, this can only be accomplished through age-specific countermeasures. We need to shield older people and other high-risk groups until they are protected by herd immunity.

Among the individuals exposed to Covid-19, people aged in their 70s have roughly twice the mortality of those in their 60s, 10 times the mortality of those in their 50s, 40 times that of those in their 40s, 100 times that of those in their 30s, and 300 times that of those in their 20s. The over-70s have a mortality that is more than 3,000 times higher than children have. For young people, the risk of death is so low that any reduced levels of mortality during the lockdown might not be due to fewer Covid-19 deaths, but due to fewer traffic accidents.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/29/delaying-herd-immunity-is-costing-lives/

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News Opinion

UK lockdown was a ‘monumental mistake’ and must not happen again – The Express

LOCKDOWN will come to be seen as a “monumental mistake on a global scale” and must never happen again, a scientist who advises the Government on infectious diseases says.

Mark Woolhouse said lockdown was a “panic measure” but admitted it was the only option at the time because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do”.

But it is a crude measure that takes no accounts of the risk levels to different individuals, the University of Edinburgh professor said, meaning that back in March the nation was “concentrating on schools when we should have been concentrating on care homes”.

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1320428/Coronavirus-news-lockdown-mistake-second-wave-Boris-Johnson

Categories
News

Care homes ‘ordered not to resuscitate’ as coronavirus pandemic took hold – The Times

Care homes were asked to introduce blanket “do not resuscitate” orders for all residents at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, it has been claimed.

The Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI), a charity promoting community nursing, found that one in ten care homes were ordered to introduce the measure without discussion with staff, family members or the residents. It was intended to help keep hospital beds free.

Half of staff members who said that they had been asked to change DNRs worked in homes for people with learning or cognitive disabilities. The other half worked in homes for the elderly.

Alison Leary, professor of healthcare and workforce modelling at London South Bank University and the author of the report, described the findings as worrying…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/care-homes-ordered-not-to-resuscitate-as-coronavirus-pandemic-took-hold-3gsslg6jt

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News

Restrictions have turned care homes into ‘prisons’, charities warn Government – The Telegraph

Care homes have been turned into prisons, with residents “losing the will to live” as they are deprived contact with families, charities for the elderly have warned.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on coronavirus was told that restrictions on visiting homes have become so extreme that vulnerable people are being left distressed and lonely, in some cases unable to recognise their loved ones.

Charities said belated attempts to keep residents safe from the spread of coronavirus were too often creating misery and isolation.

They criticised the Government for acting so slowly to attempt to protect care homes from the pandemic that 6,000 deaths had occurred by the time testing was introduced.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/12/restrictions-have-turned-care-homes-prisons-charities-warn-government/

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News

Sedation to manage ‘lockdown distress’ may have led to dementia deaths – Glasgow Times

A RISE in the use of sedation to manage ‘lockdown distress’ amongst the elderly may have contributed to a stark increase in dementia death rates, a charity has warned.

Figures show in all the deaths involving Covid-19 between March and June 2020, 92% had at least one pre-existing condition with dementia accounting for almost a third.

https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/18590724.sedation-manage-lockdown-distress-may-led-dementia-deaths/

Categories
Opinion

Why vaccines are less effective in the elderly, and what it means for COVID-19 – The Conversation

A critical factor that makes the elderly more susceptible to infectious diseases is what immunologists call “immunosenescence”: the decline in the immune system’s functionality as people age. This is also associated with an increase in the incidence of inflammatory diseases, because an elderly body tends to be in a state of chronic low-grade inflammation. This “inflamm-aging” is one reason why older people have tendencies to develop more severe forms of respiratory diseases.

The key problem with SARS-CoV-2 infection is inflammation in the respiratory tract, which can be exacerbated in individuals predisposed towards potent inflammatory responses.

Immunosenescence also results in diminished responses to vaccination. Indeed, annual flu vaccines are notoriously less effective in the elderly. This phenomenon is very important in the context of the massive efforts and funds being invested worldwide into the ultra-rapid development of vaccines for COVID-19.

The fact that elderly people do not respond well to immunizations has largely been ignored in most discussions of COVID-19 vaccines, despite this being the group in greatest need. Most of the scientific community’s experience with vaccine development for any disease has been focused on vaccinating the relatively young.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200721234031/https://theconversation.com/why-vaccines-are-less-effective-in-the-elderly-and-what-it-means-for-covid-19-141971

Categories
News

Revealed – 16 care homes given £1,000 to take Covid-positive hospital patients – Birmingham Mail

  • From late-February 2020, Birmingham City Council gave care homes a £1,000 extra cash to take in hospital patients in a hurry, including some with coronavirus.
  • Reason: more NHS beds could be freed up for coronavirus patients.
  • Care home had to bid for the resident in a four hour window and, if their bid was ‘winning’, organise admission within 24 hours – regardless of the citizen’s Covid-19 testing or diagnosis status at the point of discharge.
  • Care home manager, Jane Farr, of Digby Manor care home in Erdington, believes her rejection of the offer is one of the reasons none of her residents have been infected.
  • From late February, any in-patients deemed ‘fit to discharge’ were rapidly moved out of hospital so hospital staff could focus on coronavirus patients.
  • Dr David Rosser, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) said the city created too much capacity – indicating some of the frantic measures to empty beds turned out to be not needed.
  • From April 15 the Government’s rules changed and all discharged residents were supposed to undergo a test first.

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/revealed-16-care-homes-given-18550503

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Visitor Contributions

Covid 19 X-Factor in Spain – Nursing Homes: UNDERSTANDING WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

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.

Author

Alfonso Longo


Covid 19 X-Factor in Spain – Nursing Homes: UNDERSTANDING WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Hypothesis

The nursing homes, their structure and management, explain the impact of the covid-19 pandemic in Spain.

DIRECTLY: because of the weight of its mortality

CAUSALLY: because of its effect on the transmission of the virus to the rest of the population

Therefore, in order to minimize the impact of covid on society, its impact on nursing homes must first be minimized.

Download the document here.

(Note that the document is hosted on Google Drive.)

Categories
Videos

T-cell immunity and the truth about Covid-19 in Sweden – Dr. Soo Aleman, UnHerd

“Intensive care units are getting empty, the wards are getting empty, we are really seeing a decrease — and that despite that people are really loosening up. The beaches are crowded, social distancing is not kept very well … but still the numbers are really decreasing. That means that something else is happening – we are actually getting closer to herd immunity. I can’t really see another reason.”

“I can’t say if the Swedish approach was right or wrong – I think we can say that in one or two years when we are looking back. You have to look at the mortality over the whole period.”

“I don’t think that we have more new cases, I think we are just detecting more cases”

“We found that if you have a mild case you can be negative for antibodies afterwards … in those almost all of them had strong T-cell activity. This study says that there are cases that you can have a strong T-cell response even though you have not had antibodies, meaning that you have encountered the virus and built up immunity.”

Categories
Opinion

Coronavirus: Why everyone was wrong – Dr. Beda Stadler

Professor Dr. Beda M Stadler is the former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern, a biologist and professor emeritus.

Novelty:

Sars-Cov-2 isn’t all that new, but merely a seasonal cold virus that mutated and disappears in summer, as all cold viri do — which is what we’re observing globally right now. Flu viri mutate significantly more, by the way, and nobody would ever claim that a new flu virus strain was completely novel.

Immunity:

In mid-April work was published by the group of Andreas Thiel at the Charité Berlin. A paper with 30 authors, amongst them the virologist Christian Drosten. It showed that in 34 % of people in Berlin who had never been in contact with the Sars-CoV-2 virus showed nonetheless T-cell immunity against it (T-cell immunity is a different kind of immune reaction, see below). This means that our T-cells, i.e. white blood cells, detect common structures appearing on Sars-CoV-2 and regular cold viri and therefore combat both of them.

…almost no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have made the argument that children clearly have to be immune. For every other disease that doesn’t afflict a certain group of people, we would come to the conclusion that that group is immune. When people are sadly dying in a retirement home, but in the same place other pensioners with the same risk factors are left entirely unharmed, we should also conclude that they were presumably immune.

Modelling:

Epidemiologist also fell for the myth that there was no immunity in the population. They also didn’t want to believe that coronaviri were seasonal cold viri that would disappear in summer. Otherwise their curve models would have looked differently. When the initial worst case scenarios didn’t come true anywhere, some now still cling to models predicting a second wave.

Asymptomatic transmission:

The term “silent carriers” was conjured out of a hat and it was claimed that one could be sick without having symptoms.

The next joke that some virologists shared was the claim that those who were sick without symptoms could still spread the virus to other people…But for doctors and virologists to twist this into a story of “healthy” sick people, which stokes panic and was often given as a reason for stricter lockdown measures, just shows how bad the joke really is. At least the WHO didn’t accept the claim of asymptomatic infections and even challenges this claim on its website.

Testing:

So if we do a PCR corona test on an immune person, it is not a virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral genome. The test comes back positive for as long as there are tiny shattered parts of the virus left. Correct: Even if the infectious viri are long dead, a corona test can come back positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction of the viral genetic material enough [to be detected]…The crux was that the virus debris registered with the overly sensitive test and therefore came back as “positive”. It is likely that a large number of the daily reported infection numbers are purely due to viral debris.

Kawasaki Syndrome:

If an infected person does not have enough antibodies, i.e. a weak immune response, the virus slowly spreads out across the entire body. Now that there are not enough antibodies, there is only the second, supporting leg of our immune response left: The T-cells beginn to attack the virus-infested cells all over the body. This can lead to an exaggerated immune response, basically to a massive slaughter; this is called a Cytokine Storm. Very rarely this can also happen in small children, in that case called Kawasaki Syndrome. This very rare occurrence in children was also used in our country to stoke panic. It’s interesting, however, that this syndrome is very easily cured. The [affected] children get antibodies from healthy blood donors, i.e. people who went through coronavirus colds.

Second Wave:

The virus is gone for now. It will probably come back in winter, but it won’t be a second wave, but just a cold.

Face masks:

Those young and healthy people who currently walk around with a mask on their faces would be better off wearing a helmet instead, because the risk of something falling on their head is greater than that of getting a serious case of Covid-19.

Lethality:

People below 65 years old make up only 0.6 to 2.6 % of all fatal Covid cases. To get on top of the pandemic, we need a strategy merely concentrating on the protection of at-risk people over 65.

https://medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigkeit/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong-fce6db5ba809