Mental Health
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- Hospital chaos will have led to 46,000 avoidable deaths by end of next month
- Cancellations to routine operations may cause 18,000 excess deaths overall
- Another 40,000 people may die due to the economic impact of lockdown
More than 100,000 people are likely to die from non-coronavirus causes because of the pandemic, according to an official government estimate.
By the end of next month the chaos in hospitals and care homes will have led to 46,000 avoidable deaths, Department of Health research has suggested.
Cancellations to routine operations may cause 18,000 excess deaths in the long-term, on top of hundreds more from cancer.
Officials calculated that over the next few years another 40,000 people may die due to the economic impact of lockdown, including rising unemployment and mental health issues.
It has been called a “second pandemic” with charities across the UK warning of a growing mental health crisis since the first Covid restrictions began.
But because it takes months for suicides to be formally recorded, there are, as yet, no official figures on suicides over the past year. That means its too soon to know whether the virus has affected the number of people taking their own lives.
However, new figures from England’s ambulance services, shared with ITV News, suggest some areas have experienced a spike in calls related to suicide or suicide attempts.
In the first six months after lockdown, from March to November 2020, London Ambulance Service recorded 15,541 calls relating to suicide or attempted suicide. That compares to 11,703 calls over the same period in 2019.
If you or someone you know if struggling with your mental health, you can get help here:
- Samaritans operates a 24-hour service available every day of the year, by calling 116 123. If you prefer to write down how you’re feeling, or if you’re worried about being overheard on the phone, you can email Samaritans at [email protected]
- Rethink Mental Illness offer practical advice and information for anyone affected by mental health problems on a wide range of topics including treatment, support and care. Phone 0300 5000 927 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-4pm) or visit rethink.org
- Mind also offer mental health support between 9am and 6pm, Monday to Friday. You can call them on 0300 123 3393 or text them on 86463. There is also lots of information available on their website.
- Campaign Against Living Miserably’s (CALM) helpline and webchat are open from 5pm until midnight, 365 days a year. Call CALM on 0800 58 58 58 or chat to their trained helpline staff online. No matter who you are or what
Depression among pupils is at ‘frightening’ levels, paediatrcians have warned, as they urge the Government to reopen schools or risk a ‘calamitous,’ impact on children’s mental health.
Ten of the UK’s top exerts in child health say anxiety, self harma nd suicidal thoughts have reached frightening levels among children.
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The Cruise Ship Suicides – Bloomberg
Confined mostly to tiny cabins as the pandemic unfolded, crew members struggled to cope.
Lockdowns cannot eradicate the disease or protect the public. Indeed, Matt Hancock nearly said as much this week. They lead to only economic meltdown, social despair and direct harms to health from other causes.
In fact, lockdowns may be worse than just useless. There is some science to suggest – perhaps ironically – they actually drive the disease to spread more easily.
This danger lies in the evolutionary nature of the coronavirus. Like all viruses it mutates all the time. More than 20,000 variants of the Covid-19 virus have already been identified, which is why it is so wrong of the Government to whip up hysteria over two new strains, a reportedly more infectious strain in the South East of the UK and a ‘South African’ strain.
When children and teens are overwhelmed with anxiety, depression or thoughts of self-harm, they often wait days in emergency rooms because there aren’t enough psychiatric beds.
The problem has only grown worse during the pandemic, reports from parents and professionals suggest.
With schools closed, routines disrupted and parents anxious over lost income or uncertain futures, children are shouldering new burdens many are unequipped to bear.
So we’re in another lockdown – which will surely do so much more harm than good.
That’s a view also taken by nearly 70 GPs, led by high-profile names such as Dr Ellie Cannon and Dr Phil Hammond.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/saira-khan-continuous-lockdowns-human-22973982
The harmful consequences of public health choices should be explicitly considered and transparently reported to limit their damage, say Itai Bavli and colleagues
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge for governments. Questions regarding the most effective interventions to reduce the spread of the virus—for example, more testing, requirements to wear face masks, and stricter and longer lockdowns—become widely discussed in the popular and scientific press, informed largely by models that aimed to predict the health benefits of proposed interventions. Central to all these studies is recognition that inaction, or delayed action, will put millions of people unnecessarily at risk of serious illness or death.
However, interventions to limit the spread of the coronavirus also carry negative health effects, which have yet to be considered systematically. Despite increasing evidence on the unintended, adverse effects of public health interventions such as social distancing and lockdown measures, there are few signs that policy decisions are being informed by a serious assessment and weighing of their harms on health. Instead, much of the discussion has become politicised, especially in the US, where President Trump’s provocative statements sparked debates along party lines about the necessity for policies to control covid-19. This politicisation, often fuelled by misinformation, has distracted from a much needed dispassionate discussion on the harms and benefits of potential public health measures against covid-19.
Our mission: save the NHS by neglecting ourselves and the NHS. I received numerous CCG advice and flow-charts on the coronavirus-centric mass processing of patients. Most of it was about whom not to see, and who could pass the pearly gates of the hospitals. Then there was the advice on the parallel IT and video-consultation medical industrial revolution: our new NHS normal.
…For clarity, the “D” in coronavirus means “disease”, the second “S” in SARS-CoV-2 means “syndrome”. In a sense, the WHO had already decided Covid-19 was a distinct disease entity caused by a novel coronavirus before characterising it as a syndrome called SARS-2, and before the naming of the virus as SARS-CoV-2. The importance of scientific syntax and semantics cannot be overemphasised. Such cognitive slip-ups trickle unnoticed into general parlance and may have fatal consequences for us as a species.
Without a definite cause, one cannot definitively conclude to treat anything in particular. Is Covid-19 a syndrome, a mixed bag of symptoms and signs that has been negligently and politically globally fast-tracked to a scientifically wrong conclusion? Is it, in practice, a conflation of different, distinct disease entities including influenzae, rhinoviruses, pneumoniae and other coronaviruses, not to mention other non-infectious phenomena?
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-covid-physicians-true-coronavirus-timeline/
- AIDS was a testing pandemic, just like COVID-19.
- Many of the excess deaths for COVID-19 were due to inappropriately high dosages of hydroxychloroquine during experimental study trials.
- High COVID-19 excess deaths stopped after the trials were ended.
- Professor Martin Landry, leader of the UK-based Recovery trial, may have made a mistake in proposing high dosage of hydroxychloroquine. It seems he confused it with diiodohydroxyquinoline, treatment for treatment of amoebiasis.
- The treatment caused the damage.
- The danger of over-treatment is everywhere because the industry wants to sell diseases.
- COVID-19 is a self-limiting disease.
- The data shows that COVID-19 has no more killing potential than the yearly flu.
- Masks and lockdowns are ridiculous and damaging the whole population.
- It’s a political thing and not a health problem.
- Remdesivir is an immunosuppressant and useless against COVID-19.
- You have to live with viruses and you can’t fight against them.
- There is no treatment against COVID-19.
- The treatment against COVID-19 is to rest, like the flu.
- The problem is testing. If you stop the test, you’ll see nothing.
- Lockdowns were an overreaction.
- Vaccines are probably not a solution. You’ll have to vaccinate everyone every year. It’s good businesses.
The Greater Manchester ‘local lockdown’ and the more extreme economic lockdowns have both failed to control the number of positive tests within the Borough of Bolton, which has inexorably risen.
During the lockdown, Bolton has seen 20,000 fewer GP referrals to hospital when compared to last year, while many others have not accessed vital treatment because they have been too frightened to do so. By taking our current approach to Covid-19, we are creating many other health problems that are leading to pain, suffering and death.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-i-m-resigning-from-the-government
We have had plenty of anecdotes about people failing to be diagnosed with serious diseases during lockdown. This is thanks to either to hospitals cancelling appointments, GP surgeries stopping face-to-face meetings or people picking up the message that they should protect the NHS by trying not to use it.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/quantifying-the-cost-of-lockdown
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.
Our study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a large number of potentially missed or delayed diagnoses of health conditions, which carry high risk if not promptly diagnosed and effectively treated. Primary and secondary care services must proactively prepare to address the large backlog of patients that is likely to follow. Should a public health emergency on the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic occur in the future, or if subsequent surges in COVID-19 cases arise, national communication strategies must be carefully considered to ensure that large numbers of patients with urgent health needs do not disengage with health services.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30201-2/fulltext#
- The ‘rule of six’ has no scientific evidence to back it up, and may well end up having major social consequences.
- Increased activity at the end of summer leads to an increase in acute respiratory infections, as it does every year.
- Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine: no scientific evidence on the effects of measures such as distancing on respiratory viral spread. No study pointing to the number six. If it’s made up, why not five or seven?
- Admissions for Covid, critical care bed occupancies and deaths are now at an all-time low.
- There are currently 600 patients in hospital with Covid compared to over 17,000 at the height of the epidemic. An average of ten patients a day die with Covid registered on their death certificate, compared to over 1,000 at the peak.
- Shift in focus away from the impact of the disease is a worrying development.
- Severity of the pandemic was monitored by numbers of cases, numbers of admissions, and deaths. All three measures are open to misinterpretation if their definitions are not standardised.
- Cases are being over-diagnosed by a test that can pick up dead viral load.
- Hospital admissions are subjective decisions made by physicians which can vary from hospital to hospital.
- Even deaths have been misattributed.
- Cases will rise, as they will in winter for all acute respiratory pathogens, but this will not necessarily translate into excess deaths.
- Models ignore the vast expertise of our clinicians and public health experts who could provide a more robust approach based on their real-world healthcare experiences.
- The current Cabinet is inexperienced:
- the Health Secretary has been in post for just over two years now;
- the PM and the Chief Medical Officer a year;
- The Joint Biosecurity Centre is overseen by a senior spy who monitors the spread of coronavirus and suppresses new outbreaks;
- New chair of the National Institute for Health Protection who has little or no background in healthcare.
- The recognised alert threshold for ‘regular’ acute respiratory infections is 400 cases per 100,000.
- Britain’s mental health has deteriorated. During lockdown, a fifth of vulnerable people considered self-harming, routine healthcare came to a standstill, operations were cancelled, and cancer care put on hold.
- The most glaring initial blunder was not observing what was going on in other European nations and learning from their mistakes.
- Life should return to as close as possible to normality.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-needs-to-bin-the-rule-of-six
The face mask requirement at school is bad for children’s general well-being and should be abolished, 70 doctors wrote in an open letter to Flemish Education Minister Ben Weyts.
…The doctors mentioned anxiety and sleep problems as well as behavioural disorders and germaphobia, which is a pathological fear of germs. They are also seeing an increase in domestic violence, isolation and deprivation.
“Mandatory face masks in schools are a major threat to their development. It ignores the essential needs of the growing child. The well-being of children and young people is highly dependent on emotional attachment to others,” they wrote.
Moreover, “there is no large-scale evidence that wearing face masks in a non-professional environment has any positive effect on the spread of viruses, let alone on general health. Nor is there any legal basis for implementing this requirement.”
FORCING school children to wear masks is part of a scattergun approach by a government “lacking the political will” to study the actual evidence, a professor warns.
Dr Carl Heneghan said that the mask doctrine came into place even as the deputy chief medical officer admitted there was no strong evidence they would help with the disease. This was despite the social and psychological damage masking pupils would cause, he said. He pointed out that with drug interventions, high quality testing was required before they were implemented.
…He said: “Wearing masks can interfere with social wellbeing. We clearly understand with drugs the need to do proper research on the benefits against the harms before we use them.
This is a huge intervention to impose on society with many unknowns and potentially damaging consequences, but we are not doing the research to justify it.”
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The Lockdown Lobotomy – The Critic
While naysayers may pick holes in specific studies, the quantity and consistency of evidence is overwhelming: lockdown is stressful, it harms cognitive function, and it makes you susceptible to disease. Ultimately, the toll is high. A meta-analytic review (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015) found that social isolation increases the likelihood of mortality by 29%. In short, lockdown is murder.
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Live NHS Special – Unlocked
We get to grips with the unintended consequences of lockdown on the NHS & the health of the nation.
Martin Daubney interviews Ex-director of the WHO Cancer Programme Professor Karol Sikora.
Consultant Neurologist and MS specialist Dr Waqar Rashid
Dr Ellie Cannon NHS GP and Mail on Sunday Columnist
Dr Tom Jefferson Clinical Epidomilogist- University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine
Dr John Lee Former Clinical Professor of Pathology at Hull York Medical School and Consultant Histopathologist at Rotherham General Hospital & Director of Cancer Services at Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust.