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Opinion

Lockdown failed. We must follow the Swedish model and learn to live with Covid – The Telegraph

I knew a second lockdown was on the cards before we’d had the first one. In mid-March my team at the University of Edinburgh modelled a lockdown that ended in June and was followed by a slow, initially imperceptible rise in cases over the summer, culminating in a second lockdown in late September.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/19/uk-needs-follow-swedish-model-learn-live-covid/

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Opinion Videos

Andrew Neil interviews Anders Tegnell – a second wave and what Sweden got right – SpectatorTV

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News

Europe’s ‘second wave’ has fizzled out – The Spectator

Has the Covid ‘second wave’ already run out of steam? On 9 July, just when Britain was reopening the hospitality sector and other businesses, the World Health Organisation announced that the pandemic was ‘accelerating’. Much of the coverage in Britain also implies that we are possibly in the early stages of a second wave. But that talk is lagging behind the data. Globally, the number of new recorded cases peaked on 31 July at 291,691 and has shown a slight downward trend ever since. In terms of deaths, they peaked at 8,502 on 17 April and have also been on a slight declining trend ever since. On the worst day in the past week – 2 September – 6,312 deaths were recorded. Most of the worst-affected countries are now showing downward trends in both daily cases and deaths, including the US, Brazil, Russia, Peru, Colombia, South Africa, Mexico, Chile and Iran. Among the top dozen worst-affected countries, only India is now showing an upwards trend in deaths. Spain and Argentina are showing slight upwards trends in new cases, but not deaths. All these figures, of course, have to be read in conjunction with a huge increase in testing – so a slight increase in new cases does not necessarily imply that the disease is in fact spreading.

As for Europe’s ‘second wave’, that, too, has fizzled out – with new cases now declining in Germany, and Sweden, and remaining flat in Italy, Ireland and Belgium. There is no obvious trend either way in Poland, Denmark or Portugal. The country with the clearest rising trend is Croatia. There was, until last week, a sharply-rising trend in Greece, although this has flattened off in recent days. You can follow country by country data on new infections and deaths here.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/europe-s-second-wave-has-fizzled-out

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News Opinion

‘There is no second wave’: Oxford expert says rise in UK Covid cases is because of ‘increased testing’ and those infected are ‘young, healthy, symptomless people’ who are unlikely to die or be hospitalised – Daily Mail

Britain is not entering a second wave of coronavirus infections and rising numbers of cases are a result of increased, more accurate testing picking up infections among younger people, experts say.

Professor Carl Heneghan, a medicine expert at the University of Oxford, said: ‘There is currently no second wave. What we are seeing is a sharp rise in the number of healthy people who are carrying the virus, but exhibiting no symptoms. Almost all of them are young. They are being spotted because – finally – a comprehensive system of national test and trace is in place.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8689021/There-no-second-wave-UK-Oxford-expert-says.html

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Opinion

Coronavirus ‘getting less angry’ and we shouldn’t fear second wave – Dr. Ron Daniels, The Mirror

A front line medic says there is no reason to fear a second wave of because the virus was “getting less angry”.

Dr Ron Daniels, an intensive care consultant at Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, says Covid-19 is not now as deadly as at the start of the pandemic.

Dr Daniels said talk of a second wave was “hype” and told BirminghamLive : “I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump – but if you test more people, you will find more cases.”

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-getting-less-angry-shouldnt-22563045

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News

No, Europe isn’t being engulfed by a deadly second wave – The Telegraph

An uptick in cases hasn’t been matched by an increase in deaths. It’s about time we had a more intelligent conversation about risk

Hard luck to those who switched their holidays to Greece when Spain was put back on the quarantine list. The Greek government has just officially declared a “second wave”. Once holidaymakers have explored the Aegean they face getting to know a lot more about the insides of their own homes upon their return, as Greece is now a favourite to be added to the ever-growing list of countries whose air bridges with Britain have collapsed.

But how real is this “second wave” apparently sweeping Europe? Look at the chart of new recorded infections in Greece and, sure enough, you can call it a second wave. Recorded cases began to inch upwards from mid-June onwards. The figure for Sunday – 202 – was markedly higher than the peak in new recorded infections in Greece’s first wave, which reached 156 on April 21. But then look at the chart for Greece’s Covid deaths and there is not the slightest trace of a second wave.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/11/no-europe-isnt-engulfed-deadly-second-wave/

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News Opinion

UK second wave fears quashed? Top doc claims Britain almost ‘reaching herd immunity’ – Dr. Ron Daniels, The Express

  • Official data from NHS England points to a huge drop in the number of coronavirus patients being treated in hospitals today compared to mid-April, during the height of the pandemic.
  • Dr Daniels: Britain is “almost reaching herd immunity”.
  • Increase in hospital admissions nor a second wave to hit the UK.
  • “I think that’s highly unlikely because the pubs have been open for over a month, people have been socially interacting heavily during that time, and the natural history of this disease is that if you contract the virus and you’re going to end up in hospital, you’re pretty much in hospital within 15 days of contracting it.”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1320683/uk-coronavirus-news-latest-second-wave-death-toll-infection-rate-herd-immunity

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Opinion

Viral second wave fear will drive us into another lockdown – The Telegraph

But with no sign of a second summer wave nor an autumn eruption reminiscent of 1918, the commentariat has amended the definition. Suddenly, a “second wave” meant Covid’s seasonal return, in winter, a year on. Widespread adoption of a new phrase in the Covid lexicology – “winter wave” – has academically formalised the idea.

But instead of looking us square in the eye, the Tories have chosen Big Brother’s panopticon; No 10’s new Joint Biosecurity Centre, which will drive “whack-a-mole” local lockdowns, is slickness posing as strategy – and, as it happens, reporting into track-and-trace app failure Dido Harding. When the public twigs that the infection is unlikely to be controlled in this way, the sheer panic could send us back into national lockdown. Three scenarios might help avoid the latter: a vaccine comes along; the Government gets its act together with a plan to protect the vulnerable; or we put in place safety valves against mass hysteria.

Imperial College’s research needs to be particularly scrutinised, as its international influence grows. Dr Seth Flaxman – the first author in the paper that notoriously claimed lockdowns may have prevented over 3 million deaths in Europe – this week won fresh funding to model the pandemic across several countries.

Revelations that disrupt the narrative also need to find a stronger voice: within 24 hours, the scandal of PHE’s inflated daily death figures was running out of mileage. This week’s London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine modelling on the impact of the pandemic on cancer deaths never gathered steam. So too a paper by Oxford’s Prof Sunetra Gupta, which elegantly combined those uneasy epidemiological bedfellows – theory and evidence – to find some parts of the UK may already have reached herd immunity.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/07/23/viral-second-wave-fear-will-drive-us-another-lockdown/

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Opinion

The Media’s Jihad against Sweden’s No-Lockdown Policy Ignores Key Facts – The Mises Institute

  • Sweden’s total deaths per million in population as of July 14 is 549. That’s considerably lower than the deaths per million rate in the UK, which is 662, and in Spain, which is 608. In Belgium, the death rate is 884.
  • Sweden deaths per million is many times better than the rates found in New Jersey and New York: 1,763 and 1,669.
  • Articles condemning Sweden’s “failure” rarely if ever mention these comparisons.
  • Nonlockdown Sweden has a death rate similar to harsh-lockdown France can only be explained by claiming France didn’t lock down harshly enough or long enough.
  • Two weeks after the WHO’s prediction that Sweden will have a resurgence in COVID-19, both cases and deaths in Sweden continue to trend downward.
  • Thanks to Sweden we know what both lockdown and nonlockdown countries look like: they look remarkably similar in some cases.
  • After all, after failing to implement a lockdown for months, Sweden is still nowhere near matching the death rates reported in New York.

https://mises.org/power-market/medias-jihad-against-swedens-no-lockdown-policy-ignores-key-facts

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Opinion

Former Health Min. Director: Don’t let them brainwash you about coronavirus – Israel National News

Prof. Yoram Lass, the former director general of the Ministry of Health, continues to press for calming panic over coronavirus.

“There was no first wave – a lie. In March, April and May, 115 less people died in the State of Israel compared to the same period last year. There was no first wave, it is in the hysterical mind of you know who. In Europe and America there was a very respectable first wave, and no second wave,” Lass said in an interview on 103fm.

“No government in the world can stop the virus. This is shown by the fact that the only place in the world where there is no virus is Antarctica. The entire world is full of the virus.

As you do more tests, you find more people – who are healthy – testing positive. And the government insists on calling them sick.”

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/282879

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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

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Opinion

Day by day, the coronavirus edges ever closer to extinction. Time to get back to normal – The Telegraph

It’s becoming clear that the social distancing rules – even if the new one-metre rule – are unnecessary.

Across the United Kingdom, epidemiologists, public health officials and local bureaucrats are stamping their feet and gnashing their teeth. They’re furious about the fact that daily deaths from Covid-19 are continuing to decline at a precipitous rate. Contrary to their dire warnings, the easing of lockdown restrictions hasn’t led to an uptick in the rate of infection. The much ballyhooed ‘second spike’ has refused to materialise. The virus has all but disappeared.

The extent to which Covid-19 has vanished isn’t immediately apparent from the figures. The death tolls announced each day refer to all those deaths involving coronavirus that have been ‘registered’ in the last 24 hours. That includes people who died weeks ago – sometimes months ago – but whose paperwork has only just been completed. If you look instead at the number of actual deaths in English hospitals in the last 24 hours, that gives a clearer picture. The number on June 23 was four – all in the north west. Fewer than 20 died in London hospitals in the past week.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/25/day-day-coronavirus-edges-ever-closer-extinction-time-get-back/

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News

The Government’s coronavirus response remains trapped in ludicrous second wave pseudo-science – The Telegraph

It is official. No 10 is too entangled in lockdown spin to do what it takes to save Britain. For the sake of our ailing economy, political clarity, and basic scientific honesty, this was Boris Johnson’s moment to declare to the nation that the overwhelming evidence suggests lockdown was a mistake – and we must never lock down again. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/23/governments-coronavirus-response-remains-trapped-ludicrous-second/

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Opinion

Lockdown was unnecessary, claims German virologist – The Telegraph

One of Germany’s most prominent virologists has said the country’s lockdown was unnecessary to defeat the coronavirus.

“We went into lockdown too quickly because the prevailing concern was that there might not be enough intensive care beds and that there was pressure from the public,” Prof Hendrik Streeck said.

“We are seeing a lot of asymptomatic cases, that is infections with no consequences. This means we can assess the danger from the virus better. I still don’t believe that at the end of the year we will have had more deaths in Germany than in other years.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/10/lockdown-unnecessary-claims-german-virologist/

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Opinion

Science, doubt and the ‘second wave’ of Covid – Dr. John Lee, The Spectator

One of the key things about science – obvious to its practitioners, but often obscure to outsiders – is that it is fuelled by doubt, not certainty. When the ‘facts’ change (as they often do), and when original assumptions are qualified or overturned, then any scientist worth their salt re-examines and, if necessary, alters their conclusions. The presence of cross-reactive helper cells in maybe half the population means that ideas about a possible second wave must be rewritten. This finding must make a second wave less likely, probably much less likely. And the fact that there has been no ‘second wave’ (as opposed to isolated outbreaks) anywhere where lockdown has been released also fits this hypothesis. It may well also explain why the first wave didn’t infect much higher proportions of the population.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/science-doubt-and-the-second-wave-of-covid

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Opinion

There is no evidence to suggest a coronavirus ‘second wave’ is coming – The Telegraph

Misleading models based on the Spanish flu cannot be allowed to dictate our policy on lifting lockdown

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/01/no-evidence-suggest-coronavirus-second-wave-coming/

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Opinion Videos

Professor Karol Sikora: fear is more deadly than the virus – UnHerd

  • Professor Karol Sikora says that COVID-19 behaves like pandemics in the past.
  • Society is scarred all over the world.
  • The virus will go but the fear will do the damage.

Note: YouTube has taken down the video. Please go directly to UnHerd’s site:

https://unherd.com/thepost/professor-karol-sikora-fear-is-more-dangerous-than-the-virus/

Professor Karol Sikora has become something of a celebrity in the UK over the past months for his expert commentary on the pandemic, and his unusual tendency for optimism rather than pessimism.

Virus ‘getting tired’
– In the past two weeks, the virus is showing signs of petering out
– It’s as though the virus is ‘getting tired’, almost ‘getting bored’
– It’s happening across the world at the same time

Existing herd immunity
– The serology results around the world (and forthcoming in Britain) don’t necessarily reveal the percentage of people who have had the disease
– He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible
– Pockets of herd immunity help *already* explain the downturn
– Sweden’s end result will not be different to ours – lockdown versus no lockdown

Fear more deadly than the virus
– When the history books are written, the fear will have killed many more people than the virus, including large numbers of cancer and cardiological patients not being treated
– We should have got the machinery of the NHS for non-corona patients back open earlier

Masks and schools
– Evidence on masks is just not there either way so it should be an ‘individual decision’
– We should move to 1m social distancing which means restaurants and bars could reopen
– More schools should reopen in June as ‘children are not the transmitters of this virus’
– We should be getting back to the ‘old normal’ not a ‘new normal’

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Opinion

Coronavirus: Second wave of deadly virus described as ‘very unlikely’ by Professor Hugh Pennington

The renowned microbiologist suggested to Holyrood’s health committee on Tuesday that fears a fresh wave of deaths could hit Britain in the autumn or winter were based on the mistaken assumption that the coronavirus acts in the same way as influenza.

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Videos

There never was a surge but we’re in danger of losing our capacity to deal with the second wave because we panicked – Tony Heller

Tony Heller compares COVID-19 with other pandemics and explains why the lockdown may create an even more devastating second wave.

Medical professionals say there never was a surge, hospital activity is at a low and we’re in danger of losing our capacity to deal with the second wave because we panicked.