Latest News
How to Keep Pubs and Schools Open? Merge Them
This piece in the Daily Mash is quite funny.
TEACHERS have announced that they would be willing to relocate schools to pubs as a compromise to keep both open.
As scientists warned that curbing coronavirus might mean closing pubs so schools can operate normally, educators have volunteered to teach classes from behind the bar.
Primary teacher Lauren Hewitt said: “The wellbeing of children is at the forefront of everything I do as a teacher, and drinking heavily is at the heart of everything I do out of school.
“It’s a visionary solution. There are blackboards at both, beer gardens can double as playgrounds, dividing up a bill between six is a maths exercise, and the kids can go on Tripadvisor to review the pub for their creative writing.
Worth reading in full.
Victorian Police Chief Threatens to Smash Car Windows and Drag People Out for “Non-Compliance”
This video is pretty shocking. A black-shirted police chief in Victoria threatens to break car windows and drag out the occupants if they refuse to tell police officers why they’re out of their homes. Chilling.
Government’s Test-and-Trace App to be Relaunched
The Government has concluded that the world-beating test-and-trace app it has already spent more than £10 billion on isn’t fit for purpose, something the rest of us concluded long ago. The Times has the story.
Ministers will launch a scaled back version of the coronavirus app this month after accepting that it was not accurate enough to be used for contact tracing.
A version that tells people about infection levels in their area and allows them to use personal information to calculate a risk score will be trialled.
The app was originally developed as an automated form of contact tracing, but is likely to begin instead as an individualised information and advice service informing people about their personal exposure to coronavirus.
The functions being explored include alerting users when they have been in contact with more people than usual.
While Bluetooth signalling showing that phones have been near each other is not yet trusted as a basis for instructing people to self-isolate for two weeks, officials hope that giving people data on how many close contacts they have could encourage them to stick to social distancing guidance.
These new functions are due to be tested in trials in coming weeks with the hope of having an app available nationwide in time for winter. NHS Test and Trace is planning to launch an app with whichever functions prove effective, in the hope of being able to add automated contact tracing later.
The service has previously announced plans to allow people to book coronavirus tests through the app and use it to scan Quick Response codes at pubs and restaurants so patrons can be alerted if other customers test positive. Although contact tracing was the original stated aim of the app, it is now being downplayed by a business plan that refers to the technology as an “app that supports the end-to-end NHS Test and Trace service”.
The revival of the app came as Times Radio uncovered evidence that some contact tracers have done minimal work since the NHS Track and Trace programme was launched three months ago. One said: “Since mid-May I’ve done two calls. I know some people who’ve had no calls in that time and some who’ve had four or five . . . Most of the time you sit around and watch Netflix.”
£10 billion of taxpayers’ money up in flames so tens of thousands of people can sit around watching Netflix all day. Couldn’t they have done that at home?
Worth re-reading yesterday’s magisterial round-up of the failures of trace-and-test apps around the world by our very own test-and-trace app correspondent.
Stop Press: Richard Dobbs, former McKinsey Director, has devised an ingenious way of measuring the effectiveness of the Govt’s test-and-trace app in the Spectator. According to his Harding-Hancock Test, it’s not faring well.
My initial estimate is that at the moment, Harding-Hancock Efficiency is at a potentially catastrophic level of less than 5 per cent for England. That means that for every person successfully isolated, there are around 20 not isolated, potentially spreading the infection.
Ambulances Reluctant to Take People to A&E
A reader with a friend who works in the care department of a Midlands local authority has passed on an alarming bit of intel.
Another reason for increased home deaths I’ve come across is the practices of ambulance crews. I’ve visited people who are having some sort of crisis or relapse and are waiting for an ambulance. The crews are still operating on the basis of treating people at home and only very reluctantly taking them to A&E. This is the policy still, despite the crisis having passed months ago of no critical care beds. Previously the policy was “if in doubt take them to A&E”.
One of the crew members said last month that they haven’t been so unoccupied in his career.
How Reliable is the PCR Test?
A scientist has got in touch to weigh in on the subject that’s been debated on these pages over the last couple of days: How reliable is the PCR test?
Having read Lockdown Sceptics today, I thought I’d add in a bit more about screening. I’m senior scientist in a biotech company and have been involved in some diagnostic development so have some experience in this area.
This is a useful article that explains some of the issues with the PCR test in relatively understandable language.
Although I don’t think there is much doubt about SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19, your reader is absolutely right to be concerned about false positives in PCR screening.
The main focus on understanding the PCR test’s performance is on the high “false negative”, which means that the test isn’t very sensitive, i.e. many patients with virus don’t test positive. However, what I cannot seem to find within the literature (and maybe another reader can point me in the right direction) is what the “false positive” rate is. All the studies I can find are on patients with COVID-19 and working out how often the test fails to identify them as infected (depending on sample type, between 10 and 70% of the time). But I can’t find a study where a large number of known negatives patient samples have been screened to work out how many would come out as positive. This is assumed, probably reasonably given the nature of the test, to be low and that a positive result probably indicates you have the virus, meaning the test is quite selective. But the actual false positive rate for the test is either not known or is very difficult to find, especially in the context of screening labs where they do handle positive samples and so there is also the risk of cross-contamination.
So what the problem? It is this: we base policy decisions on positive results and not negative ones.
To illustrate the issue, imagine we have a false positive rate of 0.1%, i.e. 1 in 1000 results. Pretty impressive for a test. However, we are screening 10,000s of individuals. If within this screening population there are a lot of infections then the 1 in 1000 false positives is not an issue as it is lost among the multitudes of true positive results. Even the false negatives are not too much of an issue as trends within such an infected population are probably meaningful. However, what if you screened 30,000 individuals without COVID-19? Then you’d get 30 positive results. In fact, at a large population level you can never get to a “0” and COVID-19 will be with us forever!
Given that policy decisions affecting millions of people are being based on small changes in positive results within a large sample size then understanding both your false positive rate and false negative rate is really important in deciding if a trend is real or just statistical noise based on screening artefacts. The errors (over- and under-estimates) are really critical in deciding if there is a trend: is 19 positive tests in 30,000 tests different from 24 positives in 28,000? What are the error bars on the tests? Taking it for granted that all positives are real and that the test is always under-reporting the true figure (based on the false negative rate) is not a safe assumption, especially as we don’t do confirmatory tests in the vast number of cases. However, given Prof. Heneghan’s recent blog regarding the “increase” in COVID-19 cases in England, which was posted earlier in the week, it seems that in England we can’t even normalise data to account for number of screening tests, let alone take a more sophisticated analytical approach which attempts to include an understanding of the analytical error in assessing data trends.
There’s something really dispiriting about his final point. He’s quite right of course. If public health officials can’t even control for increased testing when analysing trends in the testing data, what hope is there of them factoring in something more complicated?
Another reader has got in touch to flag up this letter to the BMJ by Brendan Healey of the Public Health Wales Microbiology Department, warning of the dangers of widespread testing when prevalence is low because of the risk of false negative and false positive results. He concludes that it may cause more harm than good.
The harm afforded by false positive results should not be ignored and the potential for adverse consequences during periods of low prevalence needs to be taken into account when deciding on testing strategies. We recommend that testing strategies need to be more agile and decisions on screening of various populations should be flexible and respond to the changing prevalence in the community/setting that is being investigated. Large volume screening at a time of low prevalence has the potential to do more harm than good and some of these strategies should be temporarily suspended. Some of these strategies are likely to be of greater benefit in interrupting transmission during periods of high prevalence and we propose that they are re-instated when the prevalence in the community or particular settings warrant such an approach.
Finally, a retired Professor of Forensic and Biological Anthropology has got in touch with his thoughts on the PCR test. What’s interesting about this email is the detail concerning how false positives might arise.
I’m writing to comment on PCR tests from a forensic science perspective. DNA based PCR tests used in forensic labs are extremely sensitive – like RNA based RT-PCR tests used to detect Covid-19. They will reliably detect in the region of 10 or fewer copies of the source DNA or RNA. Contamination with intrusive DNA or secondary transfer of DNA is widely recognised as a persistent risk in forensic. The tests are so sensitive it is realistically impossible to totally exclude the possibility of contamination – of the source or during the analytical process. Amplified DNA (PCR product) is a particularly potent source of contamination of the next DNA PCR reaction. The use of appropriate controls at all stages is necessary to reduce the risk of contamination and permit its detection. Unfortunately, there are examples of both lab and scene based incidents of contamination that were not detected until rather late in the prosecutorial process. There has also been a big scandal – involving Randox – of drug control tests allegedly being faked (hence compromising the actual results).
I’ve just been looking over the publicly available NHS Guidance and SOP and – while it does emphasise the need for proper viral containment and describes ‘positive control’ RNA to make sure the reaction has worked and reduce the risk of false negatives – the document offers little or no consideration of contamination or cross-contamination as a cause of false positives. These are systemic issues, not just related to the choice of test kit.
I would be reassured to know what measures the NHS have in place to detect false positives via the inclusion of negative ‘blank’ controls 1) at the virus RNA extraction step, 2) in the RT-PCR reaction step and 3) to detect contamination of the RT-PCR reaction with previously amplified DNA (or other measures, where appropriate); and what the rate of contamination of negative extraction and RT-PCR controls has been during testing.
Frankly, if we are doing 100,000 tests a day, I’d be surprised not to see more than a few contaminated blanks and by implication contamination-based false positives of this kind, but this may have more significance to earlier results, as now there seem to be hardly any covid positive cases left to provide a source of cross-contamination (although in certain circumstances the positive control RNA might).
In such situations, complacency can easily arise.
I’ve been in science and technology for 38 of the last 40 years, and if Boris and Chris Whitty et al. are doing anything based on the science, then sadly I’ve learned nothing.
He concluded by pointing me to a commentary on the PCR test in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences by Stephen Bustin and Tania Nolan published in April. They conclude:
RT-qPCR testing programmes for SARS-CoV-2 are wholly inadequate, poorly organised and surrounded by confusion and misinformation. Comprehensive testing is not hindered by availability of suitable assays, reagents, equipment or testing capacity. It is delays in the bureaucratic validation and approval process and lack of involvement of the wider research and commercial service provider community by public health laboratories that are at the heart of the testing conundrum.
Ouch!
Could Possession of the Bible Become a Hate Crime in Scotland?
There’s an excellent piece by Andrew Doyle in today’s Spectator about the awful Scottish Hate Crime and Public Order Bill. This dreadful Bill promises to make Scotland the least free-speech friendly country in Europe, including Hungary.
Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Bill was ostensibly proposed to repeal outdated proscriptions against blasphemy, but will instead usher in a range of new blasphemy laws by stealth. Most controversially, part two of the Bill pertains to the offence of ‘stirring up hatred’, which criminalises anyone who ‘behaves in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner’ or ‘communicates threatening, abusive or insulting material to another person’.
Moreover, the Bill explicitly allows for intention to be put aside. If behaviour or material is ‘likely’ to stir up hatred against any protected groups (defined by age, disability, racial or ethnic identity, sexual orientation, transgender identity or ‘variations in sex characteristics’) then whether or not the perpetrator intended to do so is immaterial. Even an actor playing a bigoted character could be prosecuted under the proposed laws. An entire section of the Bill is devoted to the ‘public performance of a play’, which specifies that actors and directors can be found culpable if members of protected groups find the material offensive. So if you are troubled by the anti-Semitism of Shylock’s detractors, or the Islamophobia of Tamburlaine’s decision to burn the Quran, you can complain to the Scottish police. Next year’s Edinburgh Festival should be interesting.
The implications for stand-up comedy are similarly dire. As practitioners of an art form that often teases the limits of public tolerance, comedians frequently find themselves involved in free speech battles. The dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Roddy Dunlop QC, has already warned that stand-up would not be exempt from the SNP’s Bill, and that even an old-fashioned ‘Scotsman, Irishman and Englishman’ joke may be perceived as discriminatory. Certainly, some of the more subversive acts that regularly appear at Comedy Unleashed, a night I co-founded in London, would be at risk of prosecution should they venture north of the border.
The Bill even goes as far as to criminalise the possession of ‘inflammatory’ material, which is why senior Catholic bishops have raised concerns that possession of the Bible could become a criminal offence. Let’s not forget that Leviticus 20:13 calls for the execution of gay men.
It won’t surprise you to learn that the Free Speech Union is vigorously opposing this Bill. We have submitted evidence to the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament drawing attention to its shortcomings that you can read here.
Round-Up
- ‘New cancer diagnoses fell sharply as the coronavirus pandemic first hit‘ – Cancer diagnoses in the US fell dramatically between March 1st and April 18th
- ‘McDonald’s nugget horror: Aldershot girl, 6, chokes on blue face mask found inside chicken‘ – The sheer extent of the collateral damage caused by every measure associated with the lockdown continues to surprise me
- ‘Sluggish footfall in first full week of mandatory face coverings‘ – The Retail Gazette reports that the introduction of mandatory face masks in shops only increased footfall by 2.8% compared to the previous week. Footfall is down 36.7% compared to the same week last year
- Alan Jones eviscerates Kim Jong Dan – Marvellous tirade against Victoria state premier Daniel Andrews by Sky News Australia commentator Alan Jones
- ‘COVID-19 Measures Have All but Wiped Out the Flu in the Southern Hemisphere‘ – Interesting piece in the WSJ. Suggests we don’t need to worry about the NHS being overwhelmed this Winter
- ‘Never has a virus been so oversold‘ – Lionel Shriver on top form in the Spectator
- ‘Voters will turn on Boris Johnson if there is a second lockdown‘ – Sherelle Jacobs’ column in the Telegraph is always worth reading
- ‘Checkpoints in New York to keep all visitors out‘ – A taste of things to come?
- ‘Covid Incoherence‘ – Another Medium post by Lockdown Sceptics contributor Omar Khan
- ‘British workers lag behind Europeans in returning to the office‘ – Shock!
- ‘Bank of England: UK economy to have biggest annual decline in 100 years‘ – The Bank of England says it expects the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) to shrink by 9.5% this year, the worst contraction in a century
- ‘Yorkshire Nightingale Hospital “extended for two weeks”‘ – Harrogate Convention Centre was converted into a Nightingale Hospital and, needless to say, has never been used. The local council faces a £9m deficit as a result of the pandemic, most of which is lost income from the convention centre
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just one today: “Last Night (I Dreamt I Had a Job)” by Blancmange.
Small Businesses That Have Re-Opened
A couple of months ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have re-opened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you.
Now that non-essential shops have re-opened – or most of them, anyway – we’re now focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. As of July 4th, many of them have re-opened too, but not all (and some of them are at risk of having to close again). Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet – particularly if they’re not insisting on face masks! Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
Forums Back Up and Running
I enjoy reading all your comments and I’m glad I’ve created a “safe space” for lockdown sceptics to share their frustrations and keep each other’s spirits up. But please don’t copy and paste whole articles from papers that are behind paywalls in the comments. I work for some of those papers and if they don’t charge for premium content they won’t survive.
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums that are now open. Initially, they became a spam magnet so we temporarily closed them. However, we’ve found a team of people wiling to serve as moderators so the Forums are back up and running. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
I thought I’d create a new permanent slot down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (now showing it will arrive between Sept 9th to 18th). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from eBay here and an “exempt” card that looks like as if it’s been issued by the NHS for just £2.79 from Etsy here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. If you feel like donating, however small the sum, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here. I may not be able to manage an update every day over the next few days as I’m off to Wales today to do some walking in the Brecon Beacons.
And Finally…
In my Spectator column today, I weigh in on the Policy Exchange report laying bear the extent of the Free Speech Crisis in Britain’s universities.
About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude and Archie Norman, on whether there was a free speech crisis at British universities. One panellist, Professor Jon Wilson of King’s College London, vigorously denied that any such problem existed. Various people pointed to examples of right-of-centre academics being no-platformed — Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Linda Gottfredson — but that was scarcely conclusive. It was anecdotal evidence, not hard data.
The same cannot be said any more. This week, Policy Exchange published a paper by three academics — Remi Adekoya, Eric Kaufmann and Tom Simpson — which proves beyond reasonable doubt that free speech is in trouble in the higher-education sector. They commissioned a YouGov survey involving a randomly-collected sample of more than 800 professors and lecturers, some working, some retired, who represented the 217,000 academic staff in British universities in 2018-9. Surveys of academics have been done before, some involving larger sample sizes, but none as rigorous as this.
Their findings won’t surprise anyone familiar with the sector. For instance, 75 per cent of UK academics voted for left-of-centre parties in the 2017 and 2019 elections, compared with less than 20 per cent who voted right-of-centre. Just over half said they would feel comfortable sitting next to a Leave supporter at lunch, while only 37 per cent said they would risk sharing a table with a dissenter from trans orthodoxy. Among the small minority of academics who identify as ‘right’ or ‘fairly right’, 32 per cent have refrained from airing their views in front of colleagues.
Worth reading in full.
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A pint of ‘Critical Thinking’ is needed for the nation.
First round on Tobes!
From a comment in the Guardian Live. Nice to at least have proof against one pig in the trough:
The background story:
‘50m masks bound for NHS workers deemed unusable’
The government has admitted that 50m masks bought as part of a £252m medical supplies contract awarded to an investment firm have been deemed unsuitable for use by NHS workers.
Two organisations are seeking judicial review of the decision to award the contract to Ayanda Capital, which describes itself as specialising in “currency trading, offshore property, private equity and trade financing”.
And the comment:
By now it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that someone in government made a lot of money on this deal.
Thread here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1291244082145177600.html
Is that not part of the case Jolyon Maugham has started? About the government not putting contracts out to tender but instead just awarding them to their mates?
Anyone heard how that case is going?
Reminiscent of the Brexit ferry contract with the company without ships.and no visible method of getting any.
Re. the comments on PCR testing, the following point is made :
“…. public health officials can’t even control for increased testing when analysing trends in the testing data, what hope is there of them factoring in something more complicated?”
But things are far worse than that. PH officials can’t even use basic time-served mortality data to distinguish an exceptional disease from a pretty normal up-turn in one
year’s mortality – such as we’ve just had.
Nor can they identify and distinguish the factors involved with any analytical accuracy.
On such poor evidence is the pharmacological industry funded by massive amounts to produce a poorly tested vaccine, whilst having no responsibility for its safety.
Last Thursday, Wankock locked down the whole of Kirklees (pop ca 450,000) for 13 positive test results. Leicester is already going door-to-door for testing. So this bit chilled me to the bone:
The harm afforded by false positive results should not be ignored and the potential for adverse consequences during periods of low prevalence needs to be taken into account when deciding on testing strategies.
There is much more literature on the flaws of the PCR test in German, as the test was invented there. The Drosten PCR test was officialy established by INSTAD to have a specificity of 98.6%, meaning a false positive AND false negative rate of 1.4%, or 1400 cases per 100.000 tests. If the virus had completely disappeared, those 1400 would obviously all be false positives, the false negatives would be impossible and as such irrelevant then. The more the virus is still in circulation, the more do the false negatives become an issue, the less, as currently, the less, and the false positives become the main issue, up to the point of absurdity as stated above. There are many other things that are wrong with it and the lab procedures: the inventor of PCR itself stated that it was designed for production, not testing; it might well identify other coronaviruses but give a (false) pisitive for SARS Cov2 then, labs are have and are often skipping the confirmation part of the test, etc.. Drosten himself inadvertently signalled yesterday that the test was useless for determining infection, but claimed it could detect the intensity of infection or infectiousness (?!), as that… Read more »
Got a link on that last para pertaining to Drosten? Very interesting.
https://multipolar-magazin.de/
Is that the test in use here in the UK? If so, then the false positive rate is significantly higher than the case rate coming from testing at present (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/)
https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/maskenpflicht-hoechste-zustimmung-bei-den-waehlern-der-gruenen/
New poll in Germany.
Vast majority still in favour of mandatory muzzling.
Particularly the woke/supporters of the Green Party.
Unison comments: no wonder, they are not into science, only into faith.
And above all into patronizing others.
Just had a good laugh in B+M.
At the tills is a product recall notice for the KN95 masks they’ve beens selling. Turns out that although they are CE marked they were being sold as PPE and did not have the relevant safety standard/EN certification so they’ve all been recalled. These masks have gone from their website as well.
Didn’t have my mobile with me to take a picture of it but it made me laugh.
Wonder if they are part of this:
https://www.factorydirectmedical.com/pub/media/wysiwyg/pdf/MDEL-Bulletin-2020-05-11.pdf
My family’s business is PPE (we’ve nearly gone broke as you cannot get it) but the racketeering going on, and the sub par stuff being shifted is just shocking.
100 years ago there was a black market for alcohol, today it’s for PPEs.
Pssssst, HEY! Buddy, wanna buy a face nappy?
It’s got flowers on it…..
On my Mum’s kitchen workshop is a Mail On Sunday offer for a Free* Laura Ashley “scarf mask”. Unbelieveable!
I am going to iron a patch of Saturn on mine. A cartoonish version. I asked for Beethoven but they haven’t ordered any yet.
Chatting unmasked in the local Morrisons to the lady telling you what till is becoming available next we got talking among other things about the old man in his 80s that I had already spoken to about his breathing and he really needed to remove his mask. As I’m nearly deaf I asked to her to remove her mask so I could hear her properly which she had no problems doing. Neither did the butcher who looked quite relieved not to have it on for a while as we had a good gossip about things in general while he sorted out the order. The lady and just told him (and a few others) exactly the same. Turns out they are wearing them as they are vulnerable. I explained that they are in more danger wearing the masks due to bacterial build-up and that they will most likely end up with a nasty bacterial lung infection which is not good at there age. Anyway the lady then says along the lines of “that’s strange. We’ve had no staff off sick for months and in the past 2 weeks we’ve had a couple come down with lung infections and are now off… Read more »
I’m getting ready to order an exemption card for myself on eBay. I’ve got asthma although I’ve had no problems with it for decades. I wear a snood on the bus since I cannot deal with confrontations with the drivers (I’ve seen two other women thrown off the bus for not wearing masks). But my asthma is starting to play up again. It’s definitely tied to the face covering. Hopefully I’m not opening myself to verbal abuse on the bus since I use it to go to my allotment which is the only source of sanity left in my life.
You get verbal abuse, you cite the Disability Discrimination Act.
And/ or they get verbal abuse back. Let your inner abuser loose.
Thanks, I am capable of verbally defending myself. But as someone with complex PTSD, the emotional cost of doing so is very high, and can leave me in a state of high anxiety and paranoia for days. Of course, I understand that people with mental health issues matter as little as people with non-covid physical health issues these days. I’m already at the point where I have cut off almost all contact with other people. I don’t need anything making me more even more unwilling to talk to people.
Sorry to hear that, PTSD (it’s not really a D, more an I for injury) is really badly misunderstood, particularly complex, and particularly how it manifests physically.
Correct, release your inner Anti-muzzle asshole! Giver them both barrels
My wife “had” asthma which was getting steadily worse so GP put her on 2nd nebuliser and told her to up how many times a day she used it.
She got worse.
Repeat above.
Read the enclosed leaflet with said nebulisers – side effects include breathing difficulties and asthma – and research don the interweb..
She stopped them that day. never an asthma attack since.
Hi, Try not to panic. It’s not as bad as you think. Try to enjoy the bare-faced cheek of yourself. It’s been OK for me so far. Just do it. You are exempt. So is everybody else.
Perhaps print out a few copies of this document:
http://laworfiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Face-Covering-Exemption-Notice-with-Law-Explained-24-July-2020.pdf
It’s a notice of court action if anybody give you any kind of shit about not wearing a mask. They can be liable for a fine of up to £5000 which will shut up any mask zelot pretty quickly.
I have been on some travels and I can say that in a few towns we through maskatistas were outnumbered heavily, 85% bare-faced. At least in the streets anyway but also in shops that I got a chance to see into. I went into few shops and garages, no problem. Social distancing is on the up….Idiots.
That will get the solicitors back to work.
OOOhhhh yeeeerrr….A tsunami of bacterial mouth/throat/lung infections…here we go.
I heard a GP on the radio say this, they’re seeing a big spike in pleurisy cases which they think was masks, but I’ve been unable to verify the story anywhere else.
If GPs are saying this, hopefully people will take them seriously! If you get ill as a result of wearing a mask, can you sue the government for making you wear it?
Desperately need this story on Jeremy Vine or something…
Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Hahahahahahahahaha
Sorry.
Wouldn’t be surprised – people with pre-existing lung disease wearing masks whenever out of the house…never airing their lungs. Could easily lead to worsening of their condition. These masks are not like the loose cloth coveriings of old.
Good work!
I know at least two people who have developed runny nose and bad headaches as well as sinuses acting up. They’re thinking its all down to the muzzles.
As I told them, get thee an exemption lanyard posthaste!
I’m really having problems with this £10B figure for the track and trace app. There is absolutely no way that they could flush this much cash away on the app apone. It is simply not correct but it keeps being repeated.
This figure is for the entire track and trace costs. Equally disgusting, especially as they have recruited a small army or compliant idiots with no work to do.
The app cost is in the low £10s of millions. Even this cost is mind-blowing as they need little to no licensing or IP. And using pretty much out of the box APIs should result in minimal development and a tiny development team. Some scumbags have trousered an amount of money from this that makes the millennium bug panic look frugal.
I also couldn’t believe it when I heard (a while ago) the app had cost that much. I suspect that figure includes training + payment for people employed in the track + trace scheme, not just the cost of developing the app, but all the same this suggests either incompetence, corruption or a mixture of both on a massive scale. Which also seems to be a good description of the government’s overall policy over the last few months!
This is correct.
Germany spent around €30 million on its useless and flawed app.
In contrast to the UK, it already had an army of civil servants in its Gesundheitsaemter to perform the t&t tasks.
But those civil servants cost it many more tens of billions per year though, up until their and their spouses death.
I recall in an article or it’s mentioned in a parliamentary committee a month or so ago the cost was in the range of £10-15 million which is believable, a few zeroes been added on somewhere along the line.
Johnson’s public sector job creation scheme?
I heard the name Marc Ferguson in relation to test and trace. Obviously he is a relation of “the modeller”.
A while ago I saw a list of companies that the government had used for procuring PPE – none of them had delivered and the total cost amounted to £830m. I wouldn’t know how to verify the info but it wouldn’t surprise me. The government and civil service are highly skilled at wasting taxpayers money.
We desperately need people with business sense and experience in government, the civil service and our institutions.
Agree with all comments £10bn is a stupid number for an app.
The previously slightly professional bmj has this recent story: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3037
Since it is no longer reasonable or sensible to trust anything that comes out of gobshite organisations that have mission statements about high standards and care blah – treat with the right kind of scepticism.
One consequence if the lockdown and abhorrent lack of discourse is that every single institution is complicit and as such untrustworthy and discredited. Charalatans or criminals.
Obviously a bunch of scamming, thieving, lying, dishonest, conniving, sneaky, dirty rotten tricksters.
£10b – slightly more than building a nulcear attack submarine./ ( 4 for £30b. Vickers buy three get one free scheme)
It probably would have cost less if the contract had been put out to tender, but instead it was given to a friend of the government…who probably got to name their price…
B -> M = typo?
It’s all a load of BMs whatever.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/05/analysis-italy-worlds-coronavirus-pariah-avoided-second-wave/
The figures in this article on Italy seems to me to suggest the opposite of what the article’s claiming. It looks like the really hard-hit areas like Lombardy must be close to herd immunity now, but (due to the strict lockdown earlier on) many areas like Sicily and the southern mainland have a much lower antibody count, and hence are surely vulnerable to a so-called “second wave” (really a resurgence of the first) like some US states and parts of Spain have experienced. I suspect this is only a matter of time!
The criticism on the efficiency and effectiveness of the Covid-19 response seems to be emanating from experienced experts, e.g. Dr John Lee and the retired Professor of Forensic and Biological Anthropology et al contributing to this bulletin. In many cases they are pointing out lamentable basic errors in both science and statistics accepted by current government ‘experts’. Does this indicate that the academic and intellectual rigour traditionally associated with UK universities is not what it was?
Yes.
Possibly, and possibly combined with an increased willingness to compromise principles to gain and retain power and funding.
With some notable exceptions (Heneghan) the thing that those seem to have in common is that they’re either retired or otherwise untouchable (e.g. Nobel Laureates). I think this says some interesting things about 1) the dangers of a largely government-driven research funding model and 2) the dangers of having a single monolith employer for healthcare professionals (the NHS). But I’m conscious I’m guessing.
In the absence of transparency guessing is all we have.
does government driven equate to big pharma driven?
always always follow the money
Depends on what’s being researched, partly. But just as importantly, pharma now spends an absolutely eye watering fortune on in-house research, leaving less for funding research in academic institutions. This probably means that they’re attracting some of the better brains to work for them direct (higher pay, cooler equipment, more interesting projects) but also that more academic funding has to be found through governments, meaning that politics become more important.
The agenda problem with big pharma doesn’t come at the research funding end, it comes at the end where they’re involving themselves in political lobbying to create bigger markets for products that have already been researched.
Published June.
The article states on average 2.5% false positives.
Uk is testing about 200k test per day.
“This means that under laboratory conditions, these RT-PCR tests should never show more than 5% false positives or 5% false negatives.”
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/895843/S0519_Impact_of_false_positives_and_negatives.pdf
Good find! It must be better than that or Pillar 2 would be finding 2.5% positives instead of about 0.5% or so.
The most likely conclusion is that it is around 99.5% specific and therefore completely useless now the prevalence is 1/10 of its false positive rate (based on the ONS test which must be more reliable).
Consternation in The Guardian today that contact tracers are only tracking contacts of 72% of positive “cases” down from about 76%! Oh my gosh!
To put things in perspective, Pillar 2 are finding about 600 positives per day. Assuming (generously) that their test is 70% sensitive and 99.5% specific that means 6.55% of those are true positives. So they’re finding about 40 real infections per day.
The actual number of new infections per day estimated much more accurately and transparently by the ONS, using a much better randomized sample, is about 3000.
So T&T is finding about 1.3% of the actual cases… And then we’re fussing over a drop of 4% of 1.3%? And this world-beating program is the reason bodies aren’t piling up in the streets?
Can you provide definitive proof that there are actually any infections in the UK? These figures are so tiny, and dribbling on for so long, that surely the test has to come under suspicion. I’m not even criticising the tests; merely observing that in the real world, you have to have some cut-off point where you realise you can no longer find what you’re looking for. We are (literally) amplifying background noise and occasionally ‘finding’ a spurious pattern.
i know, it’s hard, look at Bono he’s still not found what he’s looking for
You’re right, there is no definitive proof. All the ONS tests could easily be false positives as there are so few.
But it would be extremely unlikely for the virus to have completely disappeared, and we still have hospitalizations for it (about 50 a day or so I think).
So the most reasonable conclusion is that there is somewhere between zero and about 30,000 cases in the UK.
The ONS reckon that because the asymptomatic ratio hasn’t been changing in their testing as prevalence has gone down that the false positive ratio hasn’t been going up. In other words that their test is very good. This seems like a reasonable claim.
If it had completely disappeared then I would be worried because then there would less evidence that we have herd immunity. If it stopped because we ran out of viruses rather than out of hosts (as Australia did after their first lockdown) then it implies it can come back in a big way when it’s reintroduced as it inevitably will be.
Many thanks.
we still have hospitalizations for it
What does that entail? Do we know that ‘it’ is Covid and not some other respiratory disease? If the fragments of RNA can last 83 days (thanks Swedenborg) after symptoms start and still give a positive test, how do we know that this tiny number of cases is not just the statistical inevitability of a few people out of the entire UK population who (a) have succumbed to flu (b) following a bout of mild Covid two months ago (c) with persistent fragments up their nose?
It could be and you’d need to look at individual patients to decide. These days you could also PCR test them for other viruses but I don’t know if anyone does that. Usually not.
I have the sense (can’t prove it, have no evidence) that there is a proportion of people going for tests who have no symptoms. I suspect this will end once people realise “have a test, get a lockdown” but for now it seems to be true.
Which will be playing merry buggeration with the ONS asymptomatic estimations.
The ONS survey is random and they ask people if they have symptoms. Good quality data.
Pillar 2 is voluntary so you would expect more people with symptoms to turn up. I would really like to know how many symptomatic and asymptomatic positives and negatives they are finding.
I cannot fathom how it is possible to spend £10 billion on developing any app. Even with an enormous software development team of 1,000 people involved on one project, that’s £10 million each for 3 months work. Very nice work if you can get on that gravy train.
Honestly, for an app development project – however significant – I also can’t see how you could engage a team of 1,000 on it. Even if you went for the most expensive option possible and gave it to IBM (for example) to design and execute, they would typically be charging in the high 10s of millions for a years-long enterprise wide software development and deployment programme. An app – any app – should cost a fraction of that.
As others have said, the £10Bn can only possibly include the costs of the whole T&T programme – even then, it’s staggeringly wasteful.
Government program, staggeringly wasteful!? Surely not…?
Yes, but I mean jaw-dropping as opposed to your average run-of-the-mill appalling
Fair point.
Best of it is, it’ll be a couple of 15 year old computer geeks sat in their bedrooms shitting themselves because they’ve accidentally took on a government contract..”just tell them £10 squillion….!”
I have just sent a FOI for the breakdown of expenditure. Probably be refusing but got to be worth a go.
I recommend the What Do They Know.com FOI website. It means all questions and answers are in the public domain so everybody gets to see them. You can search on authorities, key words etc.
Interestingly that old NHS IT upgrade project from the 2010s also cost £10 billion, which was describe at the time as
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn
History repeats itself. Except this time they managed to spend the same in three months on just an app (vs an entire Health IT system).
Well, not a total whitewash, I guess.
Thousands of Covid deaths ‘to be removed after counting blunder’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8599213/Thousands-Covid-19-deaths-wiped-governments-official-toll-counting-fiasco.html?ito=native_share_channel-home-preview
I like the way the DM describes it as “a glitch”. No, it’s deliberate falsification of data.
Ahh but they have now clarified the following: if you die within 28 days from having had a positive Covid test, you will be a Covid death statistic . Previously there was no limit.
That’s Krankie’s policy, ie the 28 day limit. It was highlighted this week, because she keeps saying there have been no deaths in Scotland for the past whatever, but the figures do show deaths & it is because of thus 28 day limit. Something like that. I’m afraid the statistic side of things is now noise, as it is not possible to trust any figures published.
Now noise. Spot on. Deliberately so.
This is on top of the rebasing of the cumulative number of those testing positive in the first week of July in the order of 10%. I think I am correct in saying they have rebased aspects of the dataset several times now. This should always set off alarm bells. Hancock cannot be allowed to get a free pass on this. As the SoS, and someone who is supposed to have a Masters degree in Economics, he ought to be able to interrogate data and statistics. This is before we even consider some of the other things that have happened, including the latest revelations that various ‘mates’ have been gifted contracts to supply PPE.
Read the comments in the Daily Mail article. I haven’t read them all, but, from a few minutes’ perusal, I’d say a big majority are saying the things we’ve been saying for weeks. A glimmer of hope that the tide is turning?
I was going to comment today along the same lines, not only the DM, but Telegraph too – see the ones after the Sherelle article. Apart from the debacle we are currently in, judging by the Telegraph comments, who would think are ‘safe’ Conservative supporters, Nanny Doris doesn’t stand a chance.
There are at least a couple of serial commenters on the Telegraph who have a vested interest in keeping the panic going. My suspicions were aroused by the fact that some people seem to be posting day and night, hundreds of times, always attacking anyone showing indepdendent thought. Googling the names of these people revealed one who works for Imperial College (Adam Hill) and another who is the CSO of a company working on a vaccine (Mark Bodmer). The first few pages of search results on both names were all links to said involvements, so I think it’s unlikely to be coincidence. I challenged one of them at one point and he tried to duck the question. What do we do about these people? We can hardly spend all day replying to their every comment with a “please note this arsehole has a financial interest in keeping the panic going.”
I switched to DM a few weeks ago. I’m normally a Guardian reader, but it was too depressing. The majority of articles I see have lots of comments from those opposed to lockdown, including many talking about the side effects that are well known here. It’s a good place to work on getting critical mass, so I try to post a few comments every day. I’ve even gone back to the Guardian on occasion and I’ve noticed a few anti-lockdown folks there as well. Even posted a couple of comments myself, although they’re usually met with crickets.
It was thanks to a Grad BTLer that I found my way here. So even though you have to grit your teeth and hold your nose, you’re performing a valuable public service when you post in there.
I do hope so as I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Mrs Fiat is getting a bit concerned.
Buy her a Ferrari.
Speaking to a committee of MPs, Mr Hancock was pressed on whether he was reforming PHE.
He said: ‘There will be a time for that. My priority now is on controlling the virus and preparing for winter… we need a public health agency that isn’t only brilliant at science but also able to go to scale quickly.’
Brilliant at science? What a great sense of humour the man must have!
Another Cock & Bull story.
Just had a survey sent to me by a survey app I am signed up to that was clearly the Irish health service paying for it as it was all about COVID19 and the State’s response to it.
Most questions had a free form box to explain your Yes/No answer and I took the opportunity to let rip against the State and its policies in this regard.
Nice one.
I do studies on Prolific. Right after lockdown, there were loads on the virus. Not so many now, but I’ve enjoyed giving them a different take on the situation than they were expecting. Also the studies pay, some more than others, so if you’re looking for a source of casual money, it’s a good place to go. I leave the window open whenever I’m home during the day and earn £30-40 a month from it.
Well di r,yes, rip ’em.
Donald Trump has had a message removed by Facebook and Twitter because it contains Covid-19 misinformation. He says that small children are almost immune to Covid-19. Which we know is true. But whenever Trump says something it immediately becomes an anti-fact. Which means that he is actively encouraging people to believe that young children are extremely vulnerable to Covid-19. Which is misinformation.
Well done Twitter and Facebook!
“But whenever Trump says something it immediately becomes an anti-fact.” Indeed. There’s a way of thinking about the world emerging, seems to be very prevalent right not, and a big part of the problem, where people base their positions on WHO is saying something rather than WHAT they are saying. “Bad” people (Trump) are always wrong, about everything, and “Good” people are always right. That’s fine if you really want to see the world like that and base, say, your political decisions on it. But when you use that kind of thinking to rule on matters of science, where the decisions are life-changing and you need evidence, you run into trouble. Eventually these idiots will blow themselves up by basing things on emotion and groupthink rather than evidence and logic. Trouble is, they’ll take sane people with them.
“Eventually these idiots will blow themselves up by basing things on emotion and groupthink rather than evidence and logic. “
Some would say (and I think you and I’d be among them), that’s exactly what just happened.
Indeed it has in many ways, though of course those in power and with secure, well-paid jobs are still relatively unscathed by this, and many sadly will continue to be. I was more thinking that the longer this trend continues, and the more extreme they get, the bigger hole they will dig themselves and eventually they’ll start to select brain surgeons, bridge engineers, airline pilots etc on the basis of their political views rather than their competence, and stuff will start malfunctioning more and more. Maybe they’ll be so far gone then that they won’t notice. I suspect though that, like middle class SJWs, they’ll want their cake and eat it and will at some point realise that what underpins their comfortable, pleasant lives is not emotion and groupthink but logic and reason. Give them their own country and some AI robots and let them get on with it.
What about Mars ?
“…. eventually they’ll start to select brain surgeons, bridge engineers, airline pilots etc on the basis of their political views rather than their competence ….”
Like this?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/06/sharp-drop-in-bame-leaders-in-englands-fe-colleges-spurs-call-for-action
Children aren’t immune, they get infected, but they don’t get very sick from it, and possibly don’t transmit it as effectively as adults. Sure, Trump should have been clearer, but shame on Facebook for pulling the statement on what amounts to a technicality.
For numbskulls like me, could you define ‘immune’? Seems to be used loosely by some.
I don’t think you are a numbskull, but immune would imply that someone cannot become infected, or at least does not despite exposure that you would expect to cause infection.
I don’t know of any data showing that children are less likely to get infected than adults.* Once they do get infected, children do seem in general to have a far milder disease course than adults. This is backed up by the extremely low number of deaths among children compared to the high-risk elderly groups.
*: We also won’t be able to know that unless and until widespread population-based testing gets implemented.
Thank you.
Remember how Pantsdown claimed he could safely ignore lockdown in order to screw another man’s wife, because he ‘considered himself immune’?
Nice for him.
Telegraph at it too.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/06/voters-will-turn-boris-johnson-second-lockdown/
Closing of bars in Aberdeen seems to me to be a good idea. Here is the procedure if you wanted to get a drink in Siberia Bar on Belmont Street. On entry you will have to queue accordingly and enter via Belmont Street using current physical distancing measures When queuing on entry please refrain from smoking and vaping to prevent the spread of the virus Customers are requested that they will need to bring face coverings with them in order to safely use toilet facilities Our Front of house staff will greet you and confirm your booking or take your walk in details Bookings will be restricted in size for the time being to tables of 6 At this stage also we will have to confirm names and contact details of all guests in your party, as set out by the First Minister. The details of how we do this and store your information will be made available on our website in due course. A temperature check will be carried out at this stage, and if your temperature exceeds 37.8 degrees entry will be denied to safeguard our staff and other customers Hands MUST be sanitised at point of entry, and frequently throughout your time… Read more »
Clearly they want to go out of business.
Who the fuck can be bothered.
And why aren’t they asking themselves this question?
Is this pub part of a chain? Was reading about a pub in Edinburgh with similar rules. I think it was somebody – maybe Basics – that was reporting on it.
If it’s a chain it’s an adamantine one.
any rules on what to do when you’ve drunk too much, hit on some bird, she’s rejected you and now you’ve thrown up and pissed yourself?
normal rules of engagement apply in these circumstances. Go in a massive huff and or cry uncontrollably in a corner.
Don’t worry Biker, she was a lesbian. Move onto the drunk hippocrocodonkey that’s pissed herself and passed out in the corner
I’ll be your wingman, and take her friend that’s outside having an argument with a postbox home
So this is all panning out like a standard night out in ABZ for me then. Home alone, reeking of shame and desperation for an angry wank and another cry.
This is what happens when you carry out a detailed Health & Safety Risk Assessment but forget the bit about mitigating risk in the most reasonable manner. That is.in a considering where the measures necessary for averting the risk (money, time or trouble) are grossly disproportionate, that is the risk is insignificant in relation to the sacrifice.(Edwards vs. NCB, 1949, Court of Appeal)
But maybe they are happy with the loss of business???
Sounds brilliant. Loads of fun. Just f off
Well, some of these businesses deserve to go bust. That sounds like a barrel of laughs.
Silly thing is you can have a few bottles of wine between you at home for a fraction of the cost of putting yourself through this nightmare.
Absolutely. Its not advertising a good social atmosphere nor a relaxed night out. I think to experience it knowing what is going to happen and then to accept it as your night out and enjoy it is …perverse?
Wow!!! I think they have a death wish with those nonsensical rules!!!
The death of you as an individual.
Given how widespread the censorship is now, we ask you to please share this video on your social media feeds.
Devastating Lockdown Consequences – Can we afford another one?
“Interestingly, in the UK there has been no coverage by the mainstream media on the protests in London or Berlin on Saturday that we can find. Instead, we include footage from personal Facebook pages in the video below.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRSsVMN0xaA&feature=youtu.be
The German media steadfastedly sticks with its bogus number of 17000 participants.
The police stays quiet.
The bus companies alone transported well over 150.000 people to Berlin that day.
Never get a Covid Test
Hi Victoria, was over your way this morning. Waitrose very quiet, we thought. Bought fruit and veg at market.
Hope you had fun. I also thought Waitrose was very quiet.
Serve ’em right. Mrs Bugle refuses to darken their door.
Agree 100%! There’s a sign up ‘somewhere in Derbyshire’ which says: Want a Lockdown? GET A TEST! (and of course that’s not the only reason not to.) The local PO yesterday was staffed by Ms Terrified in a visor, behind a screen. ‘Hard to hear what she was saying. Then we went in a local small shop for the first time since muzzles came in. I had our exemption cards in my hand as we like the shopkeeper and didn’t want to give her hassle. Her reaction: A puzzled stare and ‘No need for a mask in here, lots of people don’t wear them.’ But two very young women came in (separately) while we were browsing – no need to tell you what they were wearing….. On the way home, we bumped into a woman we know a bit. She had a mask in her hand and pulled a face at it. We told her we don’t wear them and she looked intrigued. She then proceeded to tell us she thinks the whole thing is very dodgy and agrees it’s about money, power and vaccines. And, guess what, that’s despite her niece with COPD apparently having CV19 quite badly at… Read more »
Great ‘slogan’ for Lockdown Truth
I was thinking about getting cards printed to start leaving in public places. Of course, people would be terrified to pick them up since they might be “infected”.
Stickers!
Glad you like it – feel free to use.
How about: Want a Punishment Beating?
Slogan on a T-shirt at London demo a few weeks ago:
“I tested positive for common bloody sense.”
I suffer from Sapere Aude.
Latin has lots of great quotes that could be used. Any experts here?
Marcus Aurelius too.
Lot of false positives from that test though
Unfortunately commons sense is no longer common. You elitist!
Sound advice. Listening to local guff up here in Abergloom, there seems to be an appetite for naming and shaming the scamps that don’t adhere to the rules if they test positive…..
The discussion around PCR tests is essential to getting us out of this mess. Now, I don’t have a biochemistry background, but I’ve been on a heavy diet of published studies since this fiasco began. From what I can tell, the problem with reliance on the PCR test is the lack of a “gold standard”. That is, the lack of a purified virus culture that fulfills Koch’s postulates. In other words, we need to see that the purified and isolated Sars-Cov2 is the causative agent in producing Covid-19. Sars-Cov2 needs to be isolated and visualised using electron microscopy and then needs to be animal tested to ensure that symptoms of Covid-19 develop. Because this is a coronavirus, of which there are many types, we need to be absolutely certain that we’ve isolated this and not another variant. That means that we don’t get viral RNA or any other culture with potential contaminants. This is essential to prime the PCR test. As far as I can tell, some of these PCR tests are primed with assays that are so non-specific that they are much worse than useless. Engelbrecht and Demeter have done some work on this for OffGuardian, in which they… Read more »
As guy153 has been saying, the PCR test when there is a lot of virus going round, is actually quite good in recognising that those strands are present. Yes a gold standard for characterisation and calibration would be better but I agree we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Trouble was we didn’t have a lot of testing at the start, nevermind an idea of just how many people had it, which would put a kibosh on the whole lockdown idea.
But the problem is dealing with what having SARS-Cov-2 really means? And like the bullet holes in the WW2 bombers, you have to look for the gaps and what they mean in context. If SARS-Cov-2 and hence Covid-19 is a passenger virus with only mild symptoms but leads to other ailments maybe you should know that to recognise the pathology.
And considering the systematic effects (humans and healthcare) the response to attributing Covid-19 has much higher devastating consequences, not just in immediate patient death but in society as a whole and how it functions. That is massive risk to take when you don’t really know
Here the UK HSE KN95 mask official recall from June 2020:
https://www.hse.gov.uk/safetybulletins/use-of-face-masks-designated-kn95.htm
Part of ti says:
“A substantial number of face masks, claiming to be of KN95 standards, provide an inadequate level of protection and are likely to be poor quality products accompanied by fake or fraudulent paperwork. These face masks may also be known as filtering facepiece respirators.
KN95 face mask
KN95 is a performance rating under the Chinese standard GB2626:2006, the requirements of which are broadly the same as the European standard BSEN149:2001+A1:2009 for FFP2 facemasks. However, there is no independent certification or assurance of their quality and products manufactured to KN95 rating are declared as compliant by the manufacturer. ”
Hoisted by their own petard.
I’m sorry, but how could anyone believe that a flimsy-looking thing like that could offer protection against anything, let alone a virus?
No idea, looks like a dust mask to me but millions of people believe it.
They’ve got magic powers.
Yes, it’s a lucky charm.
Charm??
Against dust!
Idiots.
looks like a coffee filter to me! 🙂
Yup, upcycling at its finest.
N95 mask must be fit tested using sweet/bitter spray to test for leaks. Anyone wearing an N95 mask that wasn’t fit tested might as well be wearing a scarf. That’s the end of it.
Yes, but the government says that a scarf is an acceptable face covering. I wear a snood which is hardly any kind of protection at all. In fact, it’s only one layer thick but still has allowed me to be minimally compliant with the stupid rule.
I don’t know if these masks were intended for the public, but they could be said to actually meet the non-standard that’s been set.
Well, the government is concerned with people “feeling” safe vs being safe so whatever works (despite the fact that you can get skin erosion, dry patches, acne, hyperpigmentation, perioral dermatitis, contact dermatitis, candida infection, rosacea flare, or potentially other side effects, but hey who cares about their own health so long as the right message is being telegraphed to others, right? 😉 )
If the government is to be believed (?) wearing a scarf to cover nose and face is fine as an alternative to a mask
The point I was trying to make was that it’s pointless spending money on N95 masks if you can’t use it properly
I laugh in the face of your N95 and tweak the nose of your BSEN149:2001+A1:2009!
20.3.20 A concerned GP has criticised the NHS in Scotland for providing
doctors with out-of-date surgical face masks and “inadequate equipment” to see patients who are potentially infected with coronavirus.
https://www.scotsman.com/regions/coronavirus-out-date-masks-offer-no-protection-says-concerned-gp-2502770
26.3.20 Action has been taken to bring an additional 1.5 million protective respirators into use from NHS Scotland’s central stockpile.
The tightly-fitting facemasks, which provide a high level of protection for staff working with coronavirus patients, were not previously used because they had recently passed their expiry date.
However, scientific evidence from stringent independent tests has shown the FFP respirators continue to be safe to use.
https://www.gov.scot/news/keeping-healthcare-workers-safe/
4.5.20 Nurse finds 2016 expiry date under new 2021 label on NHS-issued face mask
Glasgow health chiefs insist the equipment has been tested and is perfectly safe to use.
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/nurse-finds-2016-expiry-date-18194038
Standards schmandards. Piffle, get a rag on your face and go.
An N95 – a proper one – is a respirator. That looks like the filter from a hoover repurposed.
I’ve been seeing loads of people with alleged N95 masks like the one you posted. I may not be a medical professional but they didn’t look like N95 to me. They were poorly fitting, no better than dust masks or those cloth muzzles. Not helped by the usual issues – constant touching and fiddling and difficulty in breathing.
Child and adult traumas you didn’t know could wreck your life
“The draconian restrictions imposed upon citizens in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic has plunged vast numbers of adults and children into an emotional crisis that isn’t of their making. The physiological effects arising from the social, economic, medical and moral impacts are likely to be long-lasting, even permanent if specific actions aren’t undertaken to recognise and restore health resilience.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5980StrUvE&feature=youtu.be
More grist to the mill regarding PCR tests:
https://principia-scientific.com/covid-tests-scientifically-fraudulent-epidemic-of-false-positives/
Without doubt excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the “COVID-19” death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a “positive” test result whose value could not be more doubtful.
What is interesting would be during this period how many respiratory deaths were put down explicity as not having Covid as a contributing factor?
i.e. where is Popperian falsification?
Using PCR tests to detect covid infection scientifically unsound “A recent op-ed published by Off Guardian questions the veracity of PCR tests and the conventional claims that they can identify the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus deemed responsible for covid-19 infections. Off Guardian state that having questioned the authors of scientific papers claiming to have isolated the virus, not one was able to say for certain that they had ever actually achieved this. Meaning that there may be no scientific certainty – or consensus – that the RNA sequence that PCR tests are used to detect, is actually that of SARS-CoV-2. Whilst scientifically controversial, it’s worth noting that to date no experiments have satisfied all four Koch’s postulates, which is held up as the gold standard for demonstrating a causal relationship between a microbe and a disease. The article also damningly reveals that virologists at Charité Berlin assumedthe RNA they found was viral. Yet, there is no gold standard as yet with which to assess the tests against. In short, it would appear that there is no evidence that PCR tests can measure viral load, bringing their use into serious doubt. In fact, the scientist who developed the PCR method, and won the Nobel prize for doing… Read more »
That off-guardian article is full of distortion and misinformation.
SARS2 does cause Covid-19 with almost complete certainty. The PCR test can detect a current (or recently recovered) SARS2 infection with probably about 70% sensitivity and 95% specificity.
There are huge problems with the way the UK government is using PCR tests right now, which does indeed make them essentially meaningless. But it has nothing to do with any of the bluster in that article.
We just take your word for it? ‘SARS2 does cause Covid-19 with almost complete certainty’. Some sort of proof please.
SARS2 has been sequenced dozens if not hundreds of times. Electron microscope photographs have been taken of it. We know that it is a coronavirus, closely related to SARS1. I’ll post these pictures again because they’re pretty: https://www.flickr.com/photos/niaid/49645120251/in/album-72157712914621487 You can see the virus with your own eyes, including the famous corona. You can even see from these pictures that some of the heavily infected cells have reacted by apoptosing. There is a very strong correlation between hundreds of thousands of positive tests for this virus and symptoms ranging from a mild cold to a nasty viral pneumonia, sometimes even fatal. Autopsies have been done in some of those fatal cases and SARS2 virus was extracted from their lungs. During vaccine trials, mice and also monkeys have been infected with cultured SARS2 viruses and developed temperatures and pneumonia. “SARS-CoV-2 strain nCoV-WA1-2020 (MN985325.1) was provided by CDC, Atlanta, USA. Virus propagation was performed in VeroE6 cells” (https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195). In figure 4, the top row, you can see pictures of one of the control monkey’s lungs, showing both signs of pneumonia and detection of SARS2 antigen. We know of several other related human coronaviruses, including SARS1, that cause similar disease in humans and other… Read more »
Interesting thanks, ruined it with the cheap slur though. I’ve spent 45 years designing building structures that don’t fall down and working out why old buildings are still standing. I have a reasonable grasp of science and how the world is put together.
Sorry didn’t mean it personally. It’s just no other explanation has been offered by anyone that I know of apart from the (hopefully obviously) ridiculous 5G theory.
Bhakti, Wodarg, are they 5G lunatics?
Electromagnetic wave fields can harm bodily tissue, penetrate the skin and invade the insides of your body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioelectromagnetics
Yup, keep clear of operating radar. I designed the space frame structure that supports the radar on Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, Bermuda. Survived ‘Fabian’ I’m happy to say. I also inspect historic church towers to make sure they can supprt mobile phone equipment installations.
How do we know they’re not exosomes?
An exosome that leaves the body and starts replicating inside someone else’s (which this, whatever it is, does) _is_ a virus. There’s no difference that I can see.
And what is Covid-19? What are the symptoms? It seems there are so vague that they could be The Devil.
And if you don’t know the symptoms you can then misdiagnose and mistreat.
The difference between “unknown respiratory ailment’ and “It’s Covid-19” causes an order of magnitude reaction in how it is addressed, including affects on statistics and hence society.
So I’m coming round to the idea that PCR will tell you SARS-Cov-2 is present, when there’s a lot going round. But still there is a lot of uncertainty in what the symptoms are and how they have been attributed
My point is that even if you knew 100% SARS-Cov-2 is present that’s only half the battle and the costs are very high for many people for being wrong
The disease is less clear cut. Basically Covid-19 is whatever disease a SARS2 infection might cause by definition.
We can define what the virus is very precisely by means of genetic sequencing (it mutates a bit but that’s OK, we can keep track of that).
But what disease does it cause? Usually a cold, a fever, sometimes pneumonia, perhaps blood clotting problems, ageusia and anosmia seem to be common. All of these things can be caused by other pathogens (or even toxins– you can get flu like symptoms from inhaling chemical fumes).
But this is the kind of thing doctors have to deal with all the time with a combination of tests and other detective work. If you just got off a plane from NY in the middle of April, Covid-19 is likely. If you’re a rabbit hunter from Arkansas it might be tularemia. If you’ve just been welding on a lot of galvanised metal perhaps zinc poisoning. Your doctor will ask questions and do tests. Well you hope so anyway.
Just remember, it’s never lupus.
Dr House in the house?
As I commented on further up, it’s actually academic. Even if we didn’t know what it was and even with the measures put in place for Covid that are looking very likely to had led to more deaths it still isn’t any different than the flu. There just aren’t enough people dying of respiratory ailments.
Of course this is now more obvious because lockdowns have little to no effect on how the disease propagates.
It’s the belief that it could have been way worse, which is based on a hypothetical model shown to be poorly designed and certainly would have me in jail if I released this to customers.
So at many stages we could have been back to work. At most a 2 week lockdown and then “let’s not do that again please”
Yes agree. If we hadn’t sequenced it and didn’t have PCR people in hospitals would have noticed something was going around and treated it like any flu season. Perhaps worse than an average year but not that unusual. The overall outcome would have been much much better without the overreaction. In fact this was probably already happening in a few places last winter.
I think the blood coagulation factor would have meant that people would have noticed that something was different.
“Recently recovered” is the biggest problem we have here.
I’m starting to think most positive tests now the virus is low level/endemic level are basically people who have had a recent minor infection and are now recovered. If this is possible months after the infection, this means testing actually *inflates case numbers massively (even beyond the seek, and ye shall find factor).
That’s very likely I think too. Have you seen the latest CEBM post about this:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/infectious-positive-pcr-test-result-covid-19/
And then of course having found it, there’s more risk of contamination. If it had died out completely people would stop finding it (but that isn’t going to happen).
Forbes issues strong call to stop own research and accept ‘expert’ view
“A frankly tyrannical article in Forbes aims to shut down critical thinking and discussion and debate around science. We are told that we shouldn’t engage in our own research, even if we are a scientist by profession, because we lack the “…relevant scientific expertise to critique the science” and are likely to reach the “wrong conclusions”. We should instead rely on ‘the experts’ in a particular field to tell us what we need to know and believe. The authors choose particularly contentious areas for the mainstream that include the fluoridation of water, vaccinations and covid-19 to illustrate their point. As the authors point out, “…if you go by the evidence and by the data you’re speaking the truth”. It all depends what evidence and data you’re considering and which lens you’re looking through at the time.”
https://www.anhinternational.org/news/news-alerts-week-32-2020/
“The experts” (using ‘The Science’ of BMI) would tell Jessica Ennis Hill that she’s obese.
And Andy Farrell morbidly obese.
And Boris that he’s a lissom willow wand?
TBH it wouldn’t surprise me if Boris’s BMI wasn’t much worse than JEH’s – given her comparative small stature and his tallness.
Except of course with him weight is all fat and with her it’s all muscle
This is Lysenkoism.
Ethan Siegel – astrophysicist – think Sheldon Cooper !
Sheldon Cooper would be appalled. Sheldon Cooper is a theoretical physicist, not an astrophysicist.
You’re right, my bad – Raj Kootripali, then, the guy with the sexual thing going on with his dog.
RIP Enlightenment.
We are in a New Dark Age
FFS!
“We are told that we shouldn’t engage in our own research, even if we are a scientist by profession, because we lack the “…relevant scientific expertise to critique the science” and are likely to reach the “wrong conclusions”. We should instead rely on ‘the experts’ in a particular field to tell us what we need to know and believe.”
LOL! Right on cue for one of the points made in a comment here by Barney McGrew on yesterday’s LS, discussing an article on “the rise of the midwits”:
“Credentialism. These people aren’t really intellectually equipped to seek the ‘truth’, so their version of an argument is the trading of credentials. An aspect of this is that in their view, people from outside a field cannot comment on fields they are not formally qualified in; their arguments are not admissible.”
Though I’m pretty confident that if a specialist scientist were saying something the Forbes editors regarded as unacceptable, they’d pretty quickly decide it would be ok to critique it, after all.
Otherwise known by the logical fallacy of “appeal to authority.” Can’t remember its fancy Latin name.
With an added convenient dismissal of the other side’s authority.But the problem is, any significant problem is inevitably multidisciplinary. When coronapanickers dismissed Levitt’s (since proven accurate by events) criticisms of the consensus modelling-based views of establishment approved epidemiologists (which turned out to be nonsense), he was dismissed on this basis. “He’s not an epidemiologist, Who is he to question the experts?”
But his criticisms were based on analysis of the numbers, which is precisely what he is an expert in.
And he was right and they were wrong, as we now know, though we are only slowly coming to understand exactly the mechanisms involved.
Forbes: “It means that you need to be brave enough to turn to the consensus of scientific experts….If we listen to the science, we can attempt to take the best path possible forward”
Accepting the consensus of experts as “The Science”, uncontestably authoritative. What could possibly go wrong?
(We’ve just seen what could go wrong, in all its mendacious, disastrous ingloriousness.)
If you can get a multi-disciplinary group of scientists together in a room and get them to come to a consensus, you know that there’s something fishy going on.
It’s a bit like when all the press agrees on something.
We have both on this,
Anyone who listens to “The Science” is as credible as someone who gets all their covid facts from watching the BBC.
argumentum ad verecundiam
Ah, that’s how you spell it!
Ad vericundium?
One of the comments under Karol Sikora’s latest column in the Sun:
Asking a cancer specialist about a pandemic is not too far removed from asking the guy behind the bar.
These Sun readers have pretty high standards.
True sceptics. Tell them the sun will rise in the morning and they’ll ask who the hell you think you are to make such a prediction, an astronomer?
Speaking of Cancer a dinosaur was just discovered that supposedly died of Cancer millions of years ago.
You don’t have to be an expert in bullshit to be able to tell if something is bullshit.
Preach.
Exactly and well said.
And how is that working out for us so far?
Hydroxychloroquine hit job
“…… a hard-hitting piece from the Children’s Health Defense team asking why a ‘contract’ has been put out to discredit a treatment that works for patients in the early stages of the disease.”
https://www.anhinternational.org/news/news-alerts-week-32-2020/
Good find. Also this big metastudy has just hit the press – early use of HCQ results in 79% lower fatality rate measured across many countries with over 2bn population involved.
https://c19study.com/
Send the link to Cock o’ the Walk.
The video of the Australian police man is quite disturbing. It’s unacceptable to go to McDonalds! Come on Aussies, you’re a tough lot, don’t stand for this. What I found interesting was he kept referring to the medical officer and not to an appointed minister or even the law!
Turns out, like a lot of “tough guys”, your typical Australian is a flat track bully (to use their own slang), and is a total pussy when faced with authority.
Not that Brits have any room to talk on that score any more, either…
This report from a month ago:
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/news/2020/research-from-loughborough-and-sheffield-universities-suggests-new-approach-to-r.html
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3635548
Few snippets:
“Currently COVID-associated deaths or excess deaths are used to track the impact of the virus. However these figures may be distorted as to record a COVID-associated death you require only weak evidence that COVID ‘may’ have contributed to the death”
“Actual deaths due to COVID are some 54% or 63% lower than implied by the standard excess deaths measure, and reported excess deaths likely include a significant number of non-COVID deaths.”
“Over the lockdown period as a whole Government policy has increased mortality rather than reduced it.”
“They also assert that the overall increase in mortality is a result of significant unintended consequences of the lockdown, for example, reduced A and E attendances and reduced cancer and cardiac treatments.”
Sounds like sense to me.
The Government of Death. Death to the body, and worse, death to the rational mind and the immortal soul.
WHO Admits: No Direct Evidence Masks Prevent Viral Infection According to the World Health Organization’s June 5, 2020, guidance on face mask use, there’s no direct evidence that universal masking of healthy people is an effective intervention against respiratory illnesses While masks do not prevent the spread of viral infections, the WHO still makes a case for universal mask-wearing, citing benefits such as reduced stigmatization of people caring for COVID-19 patients in nonclinical settings, making people feel like they’re doing something to help, serving as a reminder to be compliant with other measures, and economic benefits for people who can sew homemade masks Despite the fact that cloth masks are far less effective for blocking potentially infectious respiratory droplets, the WHO recommends cloth masks should be worn by infected persons in community settings A policy review paper published in the CDC’s journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that masks did not protect against influenza in non-healthcare settings Harms and risks of mask-wearing include health effects associated with poor air quality and toxic ingredients in the mask, self-contamination caused by manipulation of the mask by contaminated hands, general discomfort, facial skin lesions, irritant dermatitis or worsening acne, and a false sense of… Read more »
Masks are a compliance test and a psychological transformation ritual. The end.
Surely the main argument against universal mask wearing is the climate of fear it creates and the debilitating effects that produces – they’ve missed that one out..
My neighbour runs a small chain of gift shops. We are in the south west. He told me three or four days ago that many of his elderly regular customers have now said they will no longer be going to his or any other shops because they see the masks as a sign that the danger for them has increased. They are asking “why masks now if things are supposed to be getting better?”. Presumably, the government’s about-turn on masks (initially accepting advice that masks were useless but now compelling ing them) was designed to get people back to the shops, because masks will supposedly keep them “safe” (when they were safe anyway, of course).
It’s almost as if the govt hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing!
That’s what World Fascism wants.
In other words, it’s pure virtue signalling.
Anyone go in for existentialism? C’est un geste, ce n’est pas un acte.
serving as a reminder to be compliant with other measures
I think the evidence shows that masks have the opposite effect – people think if they’re wearing them they don’t need to socially distance (which does have an effect on the spread of the virus, whether it’s necessary for the UK at this stage is another matter)
I suggest we need to demand autopsies on every Covid death from this point and for a certified pathologist to determine that Covid was the cause of death (not that the person died while testing positive). The number of deaths has reached such a level that the temporary death certification procedures in force during the pandemic must be lifted. We cannot accept any more that the country is locked down or there are any infringements on civil liberties based on what may well be a phantom due to appalling testing standards.
I may well be wrong, so I would value others’ perspectives on what I’m going to say: my understanding is that the need for a second doctor’s signature if the deceased is to be cremated (for which the doctor, of course, gets paid: so-called “ash cash”) was suspended if there were grounds to suspect the death was due to covid. I believe this requirement was brought in years ago to avoid another Harold Shipman scandal, since foul play cannot be investigated once the deceased is a pile of ash.
Presumably the logic offered for this suspension would have been, if true, that with 500,000 bodies piling up, as per Prof Ferguson’s crystal ball, we couldn’t afford to mess about with getting two signatures. Your call for autopsies, sadly, would thus be futile. I was told that care home managers and funeral directors were given powers to certify death if covid was suspected (!), but a GP acquaintance told me that that was not true. Fake news? Anyone know?
i understood the same about death certification Aremen but it is possible I read it here some weeks ago and it may not have been the totally accurate? I gathered that at the height of the coronopanic in April nursing home managers were able to phone a Dr and their description of the death was enough for the death certificate to be signed even if the Dr had not seen the patient recently which was necessary. But someone here this week directed us all to the new regs on the gov site about this – and although I read it, I didn’t think it was terribly clear (but I’m not the Dr here!) and thought there might have been room for ambiguity? It would be great if there was someone here who could explain?
Thanks.
You are correct. A guy called Ronan Maher did an in-depth article on Hector Drummond’s website about the changes to certification of death legislation – he also posted a shorter version of it on his Twitter account. A very interesting read!
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/08/ronan-maher-clauses-in-the-coronavirus-act-changed-how-we-record-deaths-its-time-to-change-them-back/
Carrie: thanks for that link. Very useful.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/05/31/covid-deaths-how-accurate-are-the-statistics/
…. What advice was given? It varied throughout the country, and from coroner to coroner – and from day to day. Was every person in a care home now to be diagnosed as dying of COVID? Well, that was certainly the advice given in several parts of the UK.
Where I work, things were left more open. I discussed things with colleagues and there was very little consensus. I put COVID on a couple of certificates, and not on a couple of others. Based on how the person seemed to die.
I do know that other doctors put down COVID on anyone who died from early March onwards. I didn’t. What can be made of the statistics created from data like these? And does it matter? ….