There is no sign of a second coronavirus wave, experts have said as new Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures showed that deaths are just 1.5 per cent above the five-year average and tracking on a normal trajectory for the time of year.
Statistics
Official statistics for COVID-19 are publicly available and anyone can download the data for analysis. All the numbers so far show that the virus is far from being a ‘once in a century’ plague.
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More people died in Scotland during a flu epidemic at the turn of the 1990s than the first wave of coronavirus, official figures show.
Public health experts fear the consequences if flu breaks out alongside coronavirus this winter.
In 1989 the seven days to Christmas Eve was Scotland’s deadliest single week since records began in 1974, with 2,400 deaths, which was 1,092 more than the five-year average.
This is far more than the 1,978 people who died in the worst week of the coronavirus pandemic — the second week of April — which was 878 above the five-year average.
By the end of the eight-week cycle of excess deaths in the second week of January 1990 the death toll had reached 14,594 people, 4,122
- [The fight against Covid] ignores the devastating social and economic impact of Covid restrictions, and exaggerates the threat the disease poses.
- Despite all the hysteria, this is not a modern plague.
- In the week ending October 2, Covid accounted for just 3.2 per cent of all fatalities in British hospitals.
- Even with the recent rise in infections, Covid mortality levels are drastically lower now than at the peak of the pandemic in the spring.
- That toll may increase, but it is highly unlikely to reach the levels we saw in spring.
- Covid-19 is a cruel disease that targets the old or those whose life expectancy is compromised by ill-health.
- While every life is precious, the average age of patients who die with Covid-19 is 82.4.
- Since August, just one otherwise healthy person under 30 has died with the disease, while in the same period only 97 victims have been younger than 60.
- One study in June by the Office for National Statistics found 91 per cent of people who died with Covid in England and Wales between March and June had at least one pre-existing condition.
- Contrary to the depressing propaganda, six in every seven people who are infected over the age of 90 actually survive.
- [T]here is little convincing scientific evidence to support the belief that these venues are significant arenas of transmission.
- Much of the North and the Midlands has been living with Covid restrictions for months, yet it has not stemmed the rise in positive cases.
- There is not a single documented case of any student this autumn yet dying from Covid.
- In 40 years, scientists have never found an HIV/AIDS vaccine, nor has one been discovered for the SARS virus in 18 years.
- A vaccine will probably be more like an annual flu jab — which will give some protection but not stop you contracting the disease — rather than a measles vaccine, which provides a lifetime’s protection.
- Edinburgh University argued that heavy-handed use of lockdowns and social distancing could cost between 149,000 and 178,000 lives over the course of the pandemic — far more than have died from Covid.
- The Government likely borrowing more than £350 billion this year — will have be paid by generations to come.
- 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/
- As of October 2020, there are >1 million documented deaths with COVID‐19.
- Many early deaths may have been due to suboptimal management, malfunctional health systems, hydroxychloroquine, sending COVID‐19 patients to nursing homes, and nosocomial infections; such deaths are partially avoidable moving forward.
- About 10% of the global population may be infected by October 2020.
- Global infection fatality rate is 0.15‐0.20%
- Global infection fatality rate in those younger than 70 years old is 0.03‐0.04%.
- Targeted, precise management of the pandemic and avoiding past mistakes would help minimize mortality.
- The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
- 40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
- The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
- Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
- When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
- Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
- This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
- One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
- Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
- It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
- But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
- The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
- 40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
- The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
- Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
- When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
- Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
- This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
- One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
- Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
- It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
- But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
- Coronaviruses are as old as humanity and have resisted every attempt at a vaccine or a cure. One project to wipe out the common cold was funded for more than 40 years — and got nowhere.
- Today’s flu vaccines are less than 50 per cent effective, and there is no chance whatever that a hurriedly developed Covid-19 vaccine could be anything like as good as that.
To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. The charts below show the daily case curves for the United States as a whole and for thirteen U.S. states. As in almost every country, we consistently see a steep climb as the virus spreads, followed by a transition (marked by the gray circles) to a flatter curve. At some point, the curves always slope downward, though this wasn’t obvious for all states until the summer.
…The evidence suggests, then, that the sweeping, mandated lockdowns that followed voluntary responses exacted a great cost, with little effect on transmission. We can’t change the past, but we should avoid making the same mistake again.
The cost of adding one more year of life to someone who is dying of coronavirus is more than five times higher than the maximum the NHS can spend on other illnesses, according to a statistician.
- The cost of adding one more year of life to someone who is dying of coronavirus is more than five times higher than the maximum the NHS can spend on other illnesses.
- Professor Simon Wood has calculated that it costs approximately £180,000 per extra year of life to rescue a dying Covid-19 patient.
- NHS watchdog will only spend up to £30,000 per year of life on any new treatment, deeming any higher cost a bad cost-to-benefit ratio.
- Many people left in worse physical or mental health, or in poverty, as a result of policies brought in to slow down Covid-19 could see years chopped off their life expectancy.
- The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted the UK’s national debt would grow by £550billion next year as a result of spending during the epidemic.
- The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which makes decisions on which drugs are good value for the NHS, considers £30,000 to be at the upper end of its good value limit.
- Statistical organisations across the UK, meanwhile, suggest that there have been around 59,000 ‘excess deaths’ during the epidemic, which includes people who died of Covid-19 but never tested positive, as well as those who died because of indirect effects of lockdown, such as being unable to get hospital care.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8795383/How-year-life-saved-Covid-19-costs-180-000.html
More than a third of UK employers plan to make staff redundant over the next three months, according to research warning of a cascade of job losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
- 75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown to devastating official figures in a 188-page document from SAGE.
- 16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.
- A further 26,000 will die within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E.
- An additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.
- Official COVID-19 death toll on 29 September 2020 is 41,936.
Covid-19 patients are currently occupying fewer than 2 per cent of all hospital beds in England, official data suggests.
The most NHS recent snapshot — released three weeks ago — shows just 478 out of 110,000 beds in use were by Covid-19 patients on September 3.
…Even at the peak of the crisis in Britain, only a quarter of all beds were occupied by virus patients. On April 7, 26.5 per cent of the 67,206 people in England’s hospitals were being treated for coronavirus — the highest proportion on record.
The committee also heard that under the World Health Organization case definition, if a patient has a heart attack and is also found to have Covid-19, the case will be recorded as a Covid-19 death.
- Chief Executive Paul Reid said the cost of testing this year is estimated at €450 million and the estimate for next year is €700m.
- He said that, to date, the highest level of weekly testing has been 90,000 tests.
- 4,328 children and teachers have been tested and the positivity rate in school cases has been 1.9%.
- Out of 27 deaths in September 2020, 20 of these cases, the patients had an underlying illness.
- The median age of those who died was 79.
- Humans have lived with infectious diseases for at least 15,000 years.
- Until the early 2000s when we started to vaccinate for flu, we accepted that outbreaks would kill 20,000 to 50,000 people every winter without much comment.
- Self-isolation is not appropriate if you do not share the living conditions of the elites who make the rules – and that the risk does not seem proportionate to the benefits for ordinary people.
- Face covering, as practised, is irrelevant in most circumstances. The whole country should not be driven by the exceptional circumstances of rush hour in major cities. If most people are currently wearing face coverings, acknowledge that this is because they want to avoid trouble rather than to achieve protection.
- We will never eradicate the threat from coronaviruses because they are so widespread among animal populations.
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.
Life expectancy at birth in the UK in 2017 to 2019 was 79.4 years for males and 83.1 years for females; slight improvements were observed from 2016 to 2018 of 6.3 weeks and 7.3 weeks for males and females respectively.
Coronavirus accounted for 1% of all deaths in England and Wales in the second week of this month.
That’s among the lowest figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) since March when the pandemic took hold.
- ‘Circuit break’ may be a grave error with terrible consequences for the health of the British people and for the health of the country.
- The Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic.
- The latest reliable data from Spain (up to September 3) which does not indicate any sort of upward curve in infections, let alone one coming to get us here in Britain.
- Anyone with clinical experience of dealing with respiratory viruses knows that the only certainty is uncertainty itself.
- Making comparisons between countries using different national data with different definitions is no more useful than trying to compare apples and pears.
- Latest study shows that nearly a third of all Covid-19 deaths recorded in July and August might have actually been the result of other causes –cancer, for example, or road traffic accidents.
- Sweden has probably suppressed Covid-19 to the same level as Great Britain but without draconian measures.
- Anyone going down with a new respiratory illness is likely to be suffering from a cold – not Covid.
Covid-19 accounts for an average of 11 of the 1,687 deaths in Britain every day, according to official statistics.
| Cause | UK deaths per day |
| Heart disease | 460 |
| Cancer | 450 |
| Dementia | 240 |
| Flu and pneumonia | 124 |
| Lung disease | 84 |
| Accidents at home | 16 |
| Infections | 16 |
| Suicide | 15 |
| COVID-19 | 11 |
| Road accidents | 5 |
- Sweden never went in to full lockdown. Instead, the country imposed a partial lockdown that was almost entirely voluntary.
- The only forcible restriction imposed by the government from the start was a requirement that people not gather in groups of more than 50 at a time.
- People followed the voluntary restrictions pretty well at the beginning, but that they have become increasingly lax as time has gone on.
- After an initial peak that lasted for a month or so, from March to April, visits to the Emergency Room due to covid had been declining continuously, and deaths in Sweden had dropped from over 100 a day at the peak in April, to around five per day in August.
- Dr. Rushworth hasn’t seen a single covid patient in the Emergency Room in over two and a half months.
- COVID has killed under 6,000 people.
- On average, one to two people per day are dying of covid in Sweden at present, and that number continues to drop.
- In the whole of Stockholm, a county with 2,4 million inhabitants, there are currently only 28 people being treated for covid in all the hospitals combined.
- Sweden seemed to be developing herd immunity, in spite of the fact that only a minority had antibodies, was due to T-cells.
- Immunity may be long lasting, and probably explains why there have only been a handful of reported cases of re-infection with covid, even though the virus has spent the last nine months bouncing around the planet infecting many millions of people.
- Almost all cases of reinfection have been completely asymptomatic.
- People develop a functioning immunity after the first infection, which allows them to fight off the second infection without ever developing any symptoms.
- England and Italy have mortality curves that are very similar to Sweden’s.
- Lockdown only makes sense if you are willing to stay in lockdown until there is an effective vaccine.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/19/covid-19-does-sweden-have-herd-immunity/
The great 20th-century pandemics, comparable in so many ways to their 21st-century heir, accounted for myriad private tragedies. Yet, unlike this novel coronavirus, their public, political significance was negligible. They were treated as public-health challenges, problems for clinicians, virologists and epidemiologists. And there were arguments at the time that more should have been done to mitigate their harm. But there was no sense of a world ending. No talk of a new normal. No attempt, that is, to reorganise the entirety of societal life around the threat they posed.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/18/making-an-apocalypse-out-of-a-pandemic/