But it’s clear that in their increasingly desperate search for a route out of the lockdown labyrinth, Ministers are giving serious consideration to some radical – and dangerous – schemes. One is the idea of some sort of continuing restriction on private social gatherings, along the lines of the ‘ten friends’ proposal.
My normal will not involve State-approved lists of people I can meet. Or State monitoring of when and where I meet them. Or a quiet acceptance of the division of my country into the pure and the plague-carrier.
Lockdown
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At least one man was arrested during to an anti-lockdown protest in Central London today (Sat 2nd May). The demo, which was organised on social media, saw demonstrators congregate close together outside New Scotland Yard. At one point, several protesters, including children, were seen to take part in a mass hug. They were campaigning for an end to lockdown procedures introduced by the government a month ago following the coronavirus outbreak.
With a purely statistical perspective, [Prof Michael Levitt] has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January, when most of us were not even aware of it. He first spoke out in early February, when through analysing the numbers of cases and deaths in Hubei province he predicted with remarkable accuracy that the epidemic in that province would top out at around 3,250 deaths.
Nobel prize-winning scientist: the Covid-19 epidemic was never exponential”
This phenomenological study assesses the impacts of full lockdown strategies applied in Italy, France, Spain and United Kingdom, on the slowdown of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends. Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.
As a concluding remark, it should be pointed out that, since the full lockdown strategies are shown to have no impact on the epidemic’s slowdown, one should consider their potentially high inherent death toll as a net loss of human lives.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717v1
[T]he Government overlooked two vital pieces of evidence that raise frightening questions about the impact of its draconian lockdown strategy – and whether lockdown was ever even necessary.
A decade of painstaking fiscal repair-work was undone within the first few hours; and that was just the start. The direct cost of Britain’s stimulus package is £70 billion which, as Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, confirmed on Friday, is considerably higher than in other countries.
The indirect costs are harder to assess, but will surely be gargantuan. The first nine days of the crisis pushed half a million more people onto the dole, wiping out five years of rising employment. With every day that our shops remain shut, the benefits bill will rise – just as tax revenues dry up.
I don’t think we yet understand how vast a hit we are taking. It has become commonplace to compare the coronavirus to the Second World War, but our domestic economy continued to function even at the height of the Blitz. Shops, pubs and schools stayed open, and cinemas were closed for only two weeks.
Lockdown might actually be slowing the tendency of this new disease to get milder with time. Which raises an important question: might the lockdown be causing more harm than good.
Two and a half thousand years ago Hippocrates told us that medicine should ‘First, do no harm’, and this is still a key tenet. Making absolutely sure that the treatment is better than the cure takes a long time and requires that we carefully examine as many angles as possible. Unfortunately, in the rush to apply the lockdown treatment for Covid, this principle was the first casualty.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/could-the-lockdown-have-side-effects-no-one-has-considered
This will affect the road haulage industry substantially, which already suffers from a HGV driver shortage of 59 thousand drivers according to an October 2019 FTA report. Government statistics show that there are approximately 300 thousand HGV drivers in the UK3, meaning if 20% of drivers are off sick at once, this will effectively temporarily double the driver shortage to 120 thousand. What this could mean on a short-term basis is that there is a marked increase in subcontracting out jobs to other hauliers, as some hauliers will be much harder hit than others in terms of driver numbers – due to various factors such as regional considerations and timing.
This video has been removed by YouTube so a Bitchute mirror is provided below. Please wait after pressing the play button. It may take longer than usual to load the video.
- Professor Neil Ferguson was not doing science.
- Lockdowns are worse than useless.
- It was known to everyone that the lockdown would cause a catastrophe.
- Isolating nursing homes would have prevented the load of hospitals.
- The lockdown approach taken by most governments was a human catastrophe that should never have happened.
- All we have done is slowed the spread of herd immunity and increased the risk to the elderly.
- We have wasted a lot of time, money and lives.
- The spread of respiratory diseases are predictable and relatively short.
- Bill Gate’s comments about the need to lockdown until a vaccine is ready is absurd and has nothing to do with reality.
- We don’t need a vaccine for COVID-19.
- “I don’t know where the government finds these so-called experts who very obviously don’t understand the very basics of epidemiology.”
- Tragic stories from some doctors are not representative of the general experience. We don’t stop living our lives because something goes wrong in a particular place.
- The Swedish approach shows that the draconian measures taken in other countries were unnecessary.
- We may see a ‘Second Wave’ rebound but it may be low.
- There is no reason to believe that COVID-19 will be fundamentally different from other coronaviruses.
- Having a novel virus is not novel.
- We have no science about the effect of social distancing.
- The COVID-19 disaster is a failure of the people to take control of the government.
- There is no reason to wait before opening up schools and businesses.
…this isn’t proof, but it’s pretty good evidence the lockdowns caused a lot of harm. Physical harm, at the least.
One next step should be making the lockdown voluntary, not mandatory. People can be asked — not ordered — to be careful. To keep their distance, not take undue risks. Return to work, where it’s safe to do so. Send young children back to school. Sweden has tried this approach and found a strong public response. Travel to Easter holiday hotspots was down 94 per cent; city streets, even now, are almost deserted. Sweden’s logic is that economic repair can happen more quickly if the pandemic is controlled by public consensus, with liberties protected.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-case-for-trusting-the-public-is-stronger-than-ever
When foreign commentators discuss Sweden’s light-touch response to Covid-19, they tend to adopt an affronted tone. Which is, on the surface, surprising. You’d think everyone would be willing the Nordic country to succeed. After all, if Sweden can come through the epidemic without leaving a smoking crater where its economy used to be, there is hope for the rest of the world. So far, many signs appear encouraging. The disease seems to be following the same basic trajectory in Sweden as elsewhere.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/25/sweden-succeeds-lockdownswill-have-nothing/
Over long periods of time, social isolation can increase the risk of a variety of health problems, including heart disease, depression, dementia, and even death. A 2015 meta-analysis of the scientific literature by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a research psychologist at Brigham Young University, and colleagues determined that chronic social isolation increases the risk of mortality by 29%.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/we-are-social-species-how-will-social-distancing-affect-us
Unlike covid-19, this is a killer we have created and that we can do something about. Boris called the first lockdown because the science pointed that way at that time, and the First Secretary, Dominic Raab, presumably renewed it because Boris was ill. But whoever renews the lockdown again would simply have blood on their hands.
The political reality is that the government has boxed itself in by allowing policy to be dictated by opinion-poll; it bowed to pressure to copy everyone else (apart from the free Swedes), then had to scare the public into compliance with the lockdown they’d demanded, and now the public is indeed scared. But look purely at the likely toll: even if declaring lockdown was originally the right move, leaving it in place can certainly be the wrong move. Protect the vulnerable, sure, but lift the lockdown: back to Plan A.
https://thecritic.co.uk/its-hurting-but-its-just-not-working/
Science is not a good guide for society. Of course science is essential to our understanding of the world and to the creation of the new insights, technologies and treatments our societies need. But it cannot tell us what is best for our societies in political, moral or economic terms…
If it is true that Boris put the country into lockdown partly in response to media pressure, then the media themselves may have a lot of questions to answer about the damage currently being done by this unprecedented freeze on working life and the economy.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/24/the-importance-of-courage/
The quality and quantity of individuals’ social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality.
Update 05 May 2020: Original video was removed from YouTube. Below is the mirror on Bitchute.