Categories
Opinion

We need a Covid reality check and to focus on getting our economy back – The Telegraph

Here is the good news: No matter how old you are, you are extremely unlikely to die of Covid-19. Even if a lockdown had not been instituted and no social distancing implemented, and assuming Imperial College’s controversial worst-case scenario estimate of 500,000 deaths, there would have been a 99% likelihood of surviving the pandemic.

This is no bubonic plague. That killed very nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population in the 14th century. Here is some more good news: a lockdown was instituted and social distancing measures are now well entrenched in our behaviour. As a result, the chance of surviving the pandemic is more like 99.9%.

If you are fortunate to be under the age of 45, your chances of dying from the virus are negligible. You are more likely to die from a lightning strike. The Office of National Statistics estimates that only 0.07% of the population in England is currently infected by the virus. That equates to about 35,000 people.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/07/need-covid-reality-check-focus-getting-economy-back/

Categories
Opinion

‘The lockdown is causing so many deaths’ – Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, Spiked

Lockdown deaths:

The really concerning thing is that if all the deaths taking place during lockdown are put down as Covid-19 deaths, we are going to miss the fact that the lockdown policies have caused an increase in deaths from many other things. There has been a 50 per cent reduction in people turning up to A&E. It is clear that people just do not want to bother the doctors. And a number of these people will be dying. If we muddle the Covid-19 statistics in with the other statistics, we might think the lockdown has prevented a certain number of deaths, when it has actually caused a large number of deaths.

NHS capacity:

You hear this idea that all NHS staff have been working 20 times as hard as they have ever done. This is complete nonsense. An awful lot of people have been standing around wondering what the hell to do with themselves. A&E has never been so quiet.

The chances of children dying from COVID-19:

How many people aged 15 or under have died of Covid-19? Four. The chance of dying from a lightning strike is one in 700,000. The chance of dying of Covid-19 in that age group is one in 3.5million. And we locked them all down. Even among the 15- to 44-year-olds, the death rate is very low and the vast majority of deaths have been people who had significant underlying health conditions. We locked them down as well. We locked down the population that had virtually zero risk of getting any serious problems from the disease, and then spread it wildly among the highly vulnerable age group.

On vaccines:

It is not clear that getting the virus actually makes you immune to it in the future, and it is not clear a vaccine would either.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/26/the-lockdown-is-causing-so-many-deaths/

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Videos

Alistair Haimes – on being a lockdown sceptic – Freethinking with Laura Dodsworth

Laura Dodsworth interviews Alistair Haimes on Freethinking with Laura Dodsworth.

Support Laura Dodsworth through Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/lauradodsworth

Interview notes and charts

  • The difference between what the government was telling us and what their information was telling us was so extreme and outrageous.
  • Exponential means a “constant rate of growth.” The government data in March was clearly showing that the COVID-19 was declining, not growing exponentially. This was the same in all countries you could see the data. [See chart 1]
  • A constantly declining growth rate will make a bell curve. The government were standing in front of bell curve graphs during their briefings yet they were telling us we were in the middle of the epidemic.
  • It was very clear that we were heading to a peak sometime around early to mid-April.
  • You don’t have to be complicated mathematics to see that COVID-19 was running out of steam almost from day one.
  • The conclusion from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine seems to be that it’s impossible to predict if there will be a second wave.
  • Sweden’s epidemic looks identical to the UK’s but they did not lockdown. Their datapoint indicates there won’t be a second wave. There has been no spike in Denmark either. [See chart 2]
  • Unknowns: has summer affected COVID-19 and will there be a mutation?
  • Will illnesses during the autumn and winter be mis-attributed to COVID-19? Poor media coverage means that we can’t be sure.
  • Symptoms of COVID-19 are very similar to the flu. Something could look like a second wave but will we really know?
  • The lockdown is costing a Brexit bill a week.
  • The government response seems to have been skewed by Neil Ferguson’s modelling data. The make-up of government advisors seems to be a recipe for groupthink, which is very dangerous.
  • Epidemiology (the way a disease spreads through the population) is not complicated science. The government could have had lots of people who were very good at this but they didn’t.
  • We should have cocooned the vulnerable, make sure the NHS has capacity and “let it rip” through the population.
  • We should never have had an open-ended lockdown.
  • The ‘R number’ is just the difference of in the number of people infected after each generation of a disease. Britain crossed the ‘magical R of 1’ line a few days before lockdown and the same day as Sweden. Whatever interventions have been done doesn’t seem to have had any effect. [See chart 3]
  • COVID-19 is mostly a care home and hospital disease. This was obvious very early on. Old people should not have been moved from hospitals into care homes. It seems as if we knowingly seeded the most vulnerable environment with the disease.
  • 37% of our deaths are care home residents but they are only 0.5% of our population. Of them are dementia sufferers.
  • Over 20% of the infections were picked up in the hospitals. COVID-19 seems more like MRSA than influenza in that it’s an infection control problem.
  • COVID-19 is much more comparable to flu for the rest of the population.
  • 1968 flu killed 80,000 people in the UK.
  • This last winter was a low flu winter. It’s quite possible that the people who died of COVID-19 are those who didn’t die.
  • If you overlay COVID-19 deaths with the 2000 flu season, they look very similar. [See chart 4]
  • 95% of deaths have had another serious disease. Most people have almost no chance of dying from COVID-19.
  • If you are under 40, you have more chance of being struck by lightning that dying of COVID-19.
  • If you are under 60, you have more chance of drowning.
  • At any age, you have more chance of dying on the roads than dying of COVID-19.
  • Lead indicators of 111 and 999 calls with COVID-19 symptoms show there was no spike after VE Day celebrations or BLM protests. In fact, it was even coming down at lockdown. That lockdown was big change for COVID-19 is invisible in the data. [See chart 5]
Charts

Chart 1: COVID-19 was declining in Europe as of march. It was not growing exponentially

Heading to zero? @AlistairHaimes, 29 March 2020

Chart 2: Sweden’s epidemic looks similar to the UK’s but they did not lock down.

Sweden has had fewer covid deaths per capita than Belgium, Spain, Italy or the UK, and its children <16 have missed no school. @AlistairHaimes, 17 June 2020

Chart 3: Britain crossed the ‘magical R of 1’ line a few days before lockdown

UK Rt (“R number”), late Feb to early April. Lockdown did the square root of nothing. Hand-washing advice early March does look to have caused a massive drop in R, as you’d expect. @AlistairHaimes, 5 May 2020

Chart 4: COVID-19 deaths overlayed with the 2000 flu season

If covid deaths had happened in winter rather than spring. Shown against two recent moderately bad influenza years, for comparison. @AlistairHaimes, 23 June 2020

Chart 5: No spike after BLM protests

No uptick in covid cases following the BLM protests. @AlistairHaimes, 22 June 2020
Categories
News

School age children more likely to be hit by lightning than die of coronavirus, analysis finds – The Telegraph

School children under the age of 15 are more likely to be hit by lightning than die from coronavirus, new figures suggest, amid mounting pressure for the government to get more to get pupils back into classrooms as quickly as possible.

Scientists from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford have called for “rational debate” based on the “tiny” risk to children and have suggested that if no vaccine is found in the future then it may be better for younger people to continue with their lives, while shielding the more vulnerable.

It comes as the government was accused of “losing the plot” after Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, scrapped the Government’s target of getting all primary school pupils back in the classroom before the summer holidays

Categories
Publications

Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters – medRxiv

 CONCLUSIONS: People <65 years old have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in pandemic epicenters and deaths for people <65 years without underlying predisposing conditions are remarkably uncommon. Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic.

COVID-19 is largely harmless to the general population under 65 with no pre-existing conditions, who are more likely to die in a road accident.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054361v2