Currently, over 8 per cent of people who were tested in ‘pillar two’ have been told that their test result is ‘unclear’. Pillar two is the strand of the government’s testing strategy that deals with at-home tests and those carried out at drive-through centres. This pillar is designed for certain key workers and those who have been randomly selected for testing.
Yet the NHS instructions given to Sarah make clear that while the test might be ‘uncomfortable’, patients should stop if they ‘feel strong resistance or pain’. In other words, she was told to stop swabbing if it hurt. The tests may be accurate in a clinical setting but the problem comes when people are expected to try to carry out the procedure themselves in the real world.
A healthcare firm which employs the prominent Conservative politician Owen Paterson as a paid consultant has been awarded a £133m contract without any other firms being given the opportunity to bid for the work.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has given Randox the contract to produce testing kits to help respond to the coronavirus pandemic. It was awarded “without prior publication of a call for competition”, according to details of the contract seen by the Guardian.
Doctors have told The BMJ they are deeply concerned at the number of patients becoming infected with covid-19 in NHS hospitals in England and have called for more stringent infection control measures to combat its spread.
For the first time in my lifetime, a British government has drawn a utilitarian line in the sand and declared that no peaceful protest can be tolerated.
ENTIRE office blocks, schools or streets will be ordered into immediate new quarantines under the government’s tough new ‘track and trace’ plan.
It has emerged that the 25,000-strong contact tracing force will have a sweeping remit to issue targeted two week-long lockdowns of potentially hundreds of people, as well as individuals.
The new programme is deemed as key by scientists to stamp out new coronavirus outbreaks once the national lockdown is lifted from June 1.
It is hard to know where to start with transport. One certainly shouldn’t start from home, if at all possible. In our age of lockdown, transport away from the home is considered anti-social, if not downright dangerous.
In this atmosphere, it is worth recalling that democratic rights relate not just to free speech, but also to freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. Some restrictions on travel have been lifted recently. But with every new official statement about how we can and cannot move around, the government confirms that the state and only the state holds the cards in relation to our basic freedoms.
We spoke to Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and head of the team that released a study in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate could be as low as 0.1%.
In her first major interview since the Oxford study was published, she goes further by arguing that Covid-19 has already passed through the population and is now on its way out. She said:
On antibodies: • Many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable” • They do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity • “Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour” • “Much of the driving force was due to the build-up of immunity”
On IFR:
• “Infection Fatality Rate is less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.” • That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%
On lockdown policy: • Referring to the Imperial model: “Should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting that case is becoming more and more fragile” • Recommends “a more rapid exit from lockdown based more on certain heuristics, like who is dying and what is happening to the death rates”
On the UK Government response: • “We might have done better by doing nothing at all, or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable”
On the R rate: • It is “principally dependent on how many people are immune” and we don’t have that information. • Deaths are the only reliable measure.
On New York: • “When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn’t if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population.”
On social distancing: • “Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous” • “We used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.”
On next steps: • “It is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population” • It is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine.
On the politics of Covid: • “There is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown” • “The truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries.”
Bio:@4FreedomsSake is a grassroots activism group, based in Manchester, UK. We campaign against medical & government tyranny, lockdown & a police state.
It is imperative we reach a critical mass of awareness regarding the truth about the real risks of Covid19 and costs of lockdown to prevent the establishment removing more of our rights and freedoms under the pretext of health and safety concerns.
The mainstream media, particularly television news, has essentially become a state propaganda machine on this issue. Therefore it is up to individuals to get the truth out. Flyering and stickering are easy and anonymous ways to spread the message.
Manchester anti-lockdown campaign group @4freedomssake have done the work of putting the key messages together. All you need is a printer (or family member or friend with printer access) and a hour or so to get out into your local community and spread the word.
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Shockingly, the UK government was not alone in pushing the crisis into care homes. In New York, the centre of the world’s worst outbreak, it is a similar story. Care homes were not only neglected for PPE and testing, but were also ordered to take in Covid patients. Homes could be fined $10,000 or lose their operating licence if they refused to comply with the rules. In Lombardy, the hardest-hit region of Italy, care homes were paid extra to take in Covid patients from hospitals.
The carnage in care homes ought to be the biggest scandal of the Covid crisis.
NHS England figures reveal some infections were passed on by hospital staff unaware they had virus.
Up to a fifth of patients with Covid-19 in several hospitals contracted the disease over the course of the pandemic while already being treated there for another illness, NHS bosses have told senior doctors and nurses.
Letter dated 17 March 2020 to Chief executives of all NHS trusts and foundation trusts.
ANNEX: CORONAVIRUS COST REIMBURSEMENT This guidance sets out the amended financial arrangements for the NHS for the period between 1 April and 31 July. These changes will enable the NHS and partner organisations (including Local Authorities and the Independent Sector) to respond to COVID-19. We will continue to revise this guidance to reflect operational changes and feedback from the service as the response develops.
We will shortly be making a payment on account to all acute and ambulance providers to cover the costs of COVID-19-related work done so far this year, with final costs for the current financial year being confirmed as part of the year end processes. This initial payment will be based on information already submitted by providers. Future payments will be based on further cost submissions.
All NHS providers and commissioners must carefully record the costs incurred in responding to the outbreak and will be required to report actual costs incurred on a monthly basis. Accurate record keeping during this time is crucial – record keeping must meet the requirements of external audit, and public and Parliamentary scrutiny.
To support reimbursement and track expenditure we will in due course be asking all relevant organisations to provide best estimates of expected costs from now until the expected end of the peak outbreak. We will provide further guidance with relevant assumptions in order to support you in making these estimates.
Experts said the major study, which included all patients hospitalised with Covid-19 over 10 weeks, showed that diabetes – which is often fuelled by obesity – is driving Britain’s death toll.
Yet a sharp drop in vacancies signals trouble ahead. Vacancies fell 170,000 in three months to April, the biggest drop since the series began in 2001. Job openings had all but collapsed entirely by the time the lockdown was announced, according to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, with the decline coming across the wage distribution.
Benefit claims made by unemployed and underemployed people in the U.K. rose more last month than at any time on record, with the pain spread throughout the country. Jobseeker’s Allowance and related Universal Credit claims jumped by 856,500 in April alone. For context, the worst month during the 2008-09 financial crisis saw claims increase by 143,000.
Care home residents confined to their rooms and forbidden visits from loved ones are giving up on life and “fading away”, say staff and families.
“The virus won’t be the killer of these people, it’s the distress and fear of not seeing family that is doing it,” said one carer who asked to remain anonymous but has reported her concerns to the Care Inspectorate in Scotland.
The number of people claiming unemployment benefit in the UK soared to 2.1 million in April, the first full month of the coronavirus lockdown.
But the labour market is set to worsen, according to politicians and analysts, with Therese Coffey, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, telling the BBC on Tuesday that the unemployment rate was likely “to increase significantly”.
The Oxford University vaccine tipped as a “front runner” in the race to develop a coronavirus jab does not stop the virus in monkeys and may only be partially effective, experts have warned.
All of the vaccinated monkeys treated with the Oxford vaccine became infected.
Vaccine data suggests that the jab may not be able to prevent the spread of the virus between infected individuals.
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