Only a third of the excess deaths seen in the community in England and Wales can be explained by covid-19, new data have shown.
Of those 30 000, only 10 000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis, “the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back . . . this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”
UK
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Police have no powers to enforce two-metre social distancing in England, says new guidance for officers in England and Wales.
Officers should only enforce what is written in law which does not include the two metre rule, says the guidance issued on Wednesday by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).
The main thing that went wrong, I believe, was a failure to understand that hospitals would become the vectors for COVID, the epicentres for the infection. We – the hospitals, the decisions taken by the NHS managers with their clipboards – spread the disease, especially among the elderly vulnerable in care homes. A disease that we were trying to stop… killing the elderly and vulnerable.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/488075-nhs-made-covid-19-crisis-worse/
It is now the left that wants working people to be decommissioned, put out to pasture, languishing on state-paid wages or Universal Credit and uncertain of whether their job will even exist once the lockdown is finally lifted. And it’s the Tories saying: ‘Erm, don’t you think it would be better if working people worked?’
Of course, the left’s justification for its new policy of preventing the working classes from working is that they might catch Covid-19 and die. They’re ramping up the culture of fear in a desperate effort to present their bizarre, historically unprecedented anti-work outlook as a good, noble thing. Actual facts – like the fact that under-40s have made up just 0.75 per cent of deaths from Covid – don’t get so much as a look-in. No, keep all workers at home, even the fit, healthy young ones.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/13/the-lockdown-left-is-no-friend-of-the-working-class/
[Humans Rights Watch] considered how the technology has been used by China, Israel, South Korea, the United States, and other governments, and gives guidelines to governments on ‘human rights risks’ posed by using mobile location data.
The is the worst interference with personal liberty in our history. For what is by historical standards not a very serious pandemic except for particular categories of vulnerable people who can isolate themselves voluntarily.
The problem about law is that it excludes common sense.
Government scientific advisers are furious at what they see as an attempt to censor their advice on government proposals during the Covid-19 lockdown by heavily redacting an official report before it was released to the public, the Guardian can reveal.
About 8,000 more people have died in their own homes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic than in normal times, a Guardian analysis has found, as concerns grow over the number avoiding going to hospital.
Of that total, 80% died of conditions unrelated to Covid-19, according to their death certificates. Doctors’ leaders have warned that fears and deprioritisation of non-coronavirus patients are taking a deadly toll.
“The two Chinese companies were offering a risky proposition: two million home test kits said to detect antibodies for the coronavirus for at least $20 million, take it or leave it.
The asking price was high, the technology was unproven and the money had to be paid upfront. And the buyer would be required to pick up the crate loads of test kits from a facility in China.
Yet British officials took the deal, according to a senior civil servant involved, then confidently promised tests would be available at pharmacies in as little as two weeks.”
Rapid antibody tests “have limited utility” for patients, the World Health Organization warned in an April 8 statement, telling doctors that such tests remained unfit for clinical purposes until they were proved to be accurate and effective.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/world/europe/coronavirus-antibody-test-uk.html
A confirmation that The UK Government is using psychological techniques to attack the minds of the British people.
For commentary, see:
Source document:
“There are really only two particularly unusual things about the Covid-19 epidemic: the timing of its arrival and the lockdown some countries declared.”
Deaths per day, as is well-reported, peaked around Easter; and because deaths lag infections by something around three weeks, this implies that infections peaked sometime in mid-March. If you add up all the bars in the chart and fill in the blank area of deaths still to come, we are looking at a killer that, in scale, is bad-but-nothing-special compared to killers of previous years. Panning out: as a killer worldwide, it looks as though Covid is going to take a toll perhaps 1% of 1918’s Spanish Flu.
…the dark blue line is 2019-20, with Covid-19; the turquoise and red lines are the bad flu years of 1998-99 and 1999-2000.
…Covid-19 is narrowly in third place as a killer to remember, behind the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 influenzas (2017-18’s ‘Beast from the East’, the green line, doesn’t place), a point also made by American statistician William Briggs.
Johan Giesecke, a state epidemiologist who advises the World Health Organisation, said the UK’s death toll suggested instating harsh social restrictions was not the best method of tackling the pandemic.
The risk of coronavirus for the young is “staggeringly low”, the UK’s top statistician has said – as he condemned the government’s “embarrassing” handling of Covid-19.
He made withering criticisms of the Government’s handling of the crisis, saying its treatment of statistics was “not trustworthy” and amounted to “number theatre” rather than an attempt to properly inform the public.
Normal life will be virtually impossible. Previously simple actions will be endlessly complicated and expensive. And while this farce continues, businesses will continue to close and jobs continue to vanish, visiting misery and sickness on millions.
I have seen this before in the old Communist world, a mad, fixed idea pursued by dense men relentlessly and without opposition or thought, until the whole thing collapses or explodes. Now I see it here.
The grim threshold was supposedly crossed when the UK’s mortality rate reached 29,427 deaths, seemingly surpassing Italy’s figure of 29,029. But those bald figures are like any other statistic, utterly devoid of meaning when stripped of context.
The government’s daily briefings on #Covid_19 are “not trustworthy communication of statistics” says Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter from the University of Cambridge
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is “deeply riddled” with bugs, “a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen”.
I have not seen the police like this before. Sure, I’ve seen police heavy-handedness; I’ve actually encountered it, on demonstrations many years ago. I’ve seen police harassing homeless people for no good reason. I’ve seen the over-policing of certain streets and certain communities and seen how dispiriting people find it. But this arrogant, sneering barking of orders at sunbathers and mums and homeless people resting under trees on a warm day is completely new. It is lockdown fanaticism in action. This rude and heartless officiousness is the logical conclusion of the culture of hysteria our political and media elites have whipped up over Covid-19.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/09/in-london-today-the-police-behaved-disgracefully/