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The North Forced Into Second Lockdown
Liverpool will be among several Northern cities to be plunged into a “three tier” lockdown, with pubs, bars, bookies, casinos and gyms ordered to close. The Mail has the details.
The Prime Minister will chair a COBRA meeting on Monday morning to hammer out the final details before setting out the new nationwide three-tier system of restrictions in the Commons.
From 5pm on Wednesday, hundreds of pubs in the northwest will be closed for four weeks, the Telegraph reports, while the Sun says that overnight stays in the northern hot spots are to be banned for the same period.
Locals will only be allowed out of their areas for essential travel such as work, education or health, and must return before the end of the day, with the country divided into ‘medium’, ‘high’ and ‘very high’ risk sectors.
Needless to say, the rumoured announcement provoked fury in Liverpool. Mayor Joe Anderson made his displeasure clear on twitter last night.
In Manchester, politicians launched a last-ditch appeal to ministers not to shut all pubs and restaurants and instead hand them the power to only close those which are not meeting coronavirus safety restrictions. Five of the city’s MPs yesterday warning Boris of the “devastating impact” of closing businesses. But these please are expected to fall on deaf ears.
Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, is no less incandescent than Joe Anderson.
“To be called to a meeting with 10 Downing Street on a Friday evening, to be effectively presented with proposals that needed to be agreed over the weekend, I mean that isn’t adequate or acceptable consultation to me,” he said. “That is being railroaded into a position. It’s all come too late.”
The Government is expected to announce these measures in spite of the fact that Britain recorded 12,872 new Covid cases yesterday, just 9% more than last Sunday’s adjusted total. What happened to “doubling roughly every seven days”? 12,872 is a long way off the 50,000 new cases that Britain was predicted to reach on October 13th (see below).
According to the Telegraph, Boris is expected to announce his new “three tier” system in the House of Commons and at a television Downing Street press conference, with the measures being debated and voted on in the Commons later this week. Let’s hope there’s a full scale rebellion.
What Became of the Graph of Doom?
Prof Carl Heneghan and his colleagues at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine have been taking a look at the daily case numbers and comparing them to the prediction projection made by Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance last month. Readers will recall that in the Graph of Doom, Witless and Unbalanced warned that we could reach 50,000 daily cases by October 13th. That’s tomorrow, folks. So how did the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Officer do? The original CEBM post was written on September 28th, but the data on the graph was updated on October 11th.
Last week, Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientist, said: ‘At the moment we think that the epidemic is doubling roughly every seven days.’
We reported last week on the rule of four on how to make sense of COVID cases. The Government’s data today shows that cases assessed by specimen date have not yet doubled over 21 days. On the 23 Sep they were 4,914 compared to 2,614 on 2 Sep – 88% higher, but not yet double.
Vallance said “If, and that’s quite a big if, but if that continues unabated, and this grows, doubling every seven days… if that continued, you would end up with something like 50,000 cases in the middle of October per day.
We put the doubling to the test by creating a tracker of the projection. At the moment there is a significant divergence in the case data with the 49,000 cases that were projected by the 13 Oct. We will keep this tracker up to date to monitor the changes.
The seven-day moving average takes account of four days before and three days after to provide an estimate and takes into account the latest reporting – the specimen date takes five days to stabilise and therefore lags the current reporting by this amount.
It’s just as well Witless and Unbalanced didn’t become weather forecasters.
Stop Press: David Patton, a lockdown sceptic on Twitter, has found some data showing that in several university towns the number of daily new cases is declining.
A Senior Doctor Writes…
More from my friend who’s a senior doctor at the NHS on why the so-called “second wave” isn’t as bad as the first and the NHS should be able to cope. One of the points Jonathan Van-Tam is expected to make when the Government unveils its new “three tier” scheme today is that the Royal Liverpool University Hospital was on course to admit more people suffering from Covid than during the peak of the pandemic in the spring, implying that unless Liverpool is locked down local hospitals could be overwhelmed by Covid patients. But as my friend points out, Covid hospitalisations exceeding those at the peak of the pandemic isn’t necessarily a cause for alarm if survival rates are going up and discharges are happening sooner.
An extract from Sarah Vine’s column in the Daily Mail:
“My mother sent me this from a Facebook post by an Italian doctor – it should be required reading in the Department of Health.
“On Covid, he writes: ‘The hospitalisations are growing, but fortunately also the discharges. Compared to the terrible days of last spring, we are witnessing on average shorter hospitalisations, slightly lower average age (67 years today), more manageable disease and practically zero lethality. We still have a few more complex cases, but these represent the minority.
“‘We have the drugs, we know how and when to use them, and we are more confident in what we do. It is therefore necessary to avoid giving messages of terror.'”
Co-incidentally he mentions shorter hospitalisation times and more discharges in Italy – similar to the effect I noted from the PHE data released on 8th October.
An extract from a piece by a French doctor in the Spectator:
“Daphnée Gotheil, a junior doctor at the Necker Hospital in Paris, tells me that the situation is much less severe than in the spring and that, in her view, ‘there is no cause for real concern yet’. And why not? ‘Our hospitals are now better equipped, doctors are more knowledgeable about the virus and they have developed new techniques to treat patients. We do not ventilate patients anywhere near as much – as we know now that it is something to do only as a last resort.’ Eight regions in France still have no Covid patients in ICU beds.
Critical reference to reduced proportions of ventilated patients – makes the problem a whole lot easier to manage than in April.
Despite predictions, I noted in the delayed Birthday honours list that there were no awards for Boris Johnson’s carers at St Thomas’s. Was that a political omission? Might this suggest Johnson has used up a substantial amount of his political capital within the Conservative parliamentary party (the current de facto opposition) to inhibit his customary self-indulgent generosity?
And finally… I read the letter from the GP published yesterday with interest. Would we have such a problem with patients getting hospital appointments if doctors were paid ‘fee for service’ (i.e., paid per patient they actually saw) instead of being salaried staff on the government payroll? At present they get paid the same for seeing no patients as they do for seeing a normal daily workload. Just a thought.
Stop Press: If you’re wondering why all the doctors and nurses that contribute to Lockdown Sceptics do so anonymously, it’s because they’ve been forced to sign NDAs as a condition of employment. Consequently, can I ask you to sign this petition calling on the NHS to nullify all such gagging orders when it comes to COVID-19?
Has the WHO Changed its Mind About Lockdowns?
David Nabarro, one of six Covid envoys appointed by the Director General of the WHO, was interviewed on Spectator TV on Thursday and – to everyone’s astonishment – said the WHO wasn’t in favour of lockdowns. News.com.au has more.
The World Health Organisation has backflipped on its original COVID-19 stance after calling for world leaders to stop locking down their countries and economies.
Dr. David Nabarro from the WHO appealed to world leaders yesterday, telling them to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” of the coronavirus.
He also claimed that the only thing lockdowns achieved was poverty – with no mention of the potential lives saved.
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.
“We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr Nabarro told the Spectator.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Dr Nabarro’s main criticism of lockdowns involved the global impact, explaining how poorer economies that had been indirectly affected.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said.
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
You can watch Dr Nobarro’s entire interview with Andrew Neil here.
Is this now the official position of the WHO or has Dr Nabarro gone off-piste? If it’s official and the WHO has done a U-turn on lockdowns, that will have the censors at YouTube chasing their tails. Earlier this year, YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said any content that “goes against” WHO guidance would be removed. Does this mean YouTube’s censors will have to remove every pro-lockdown video that’s been posted since last January? Or will YouTube finally acknowledge that there is no scientific consensus about how best to respond to this pandemic – no monolithic body of opinion called “the science” – and allow scientists and others to set out their stalls on the lockdowns, both for and against, in a spirit of free and open inquiry?
Edinburgh Campus Branded “World’s Most Expensive Prison”
Students at Edinburgh University are getting fed up with being forced to eat out-of-date junk food, in spite of paying £8,500 a year for food and accommodation in halls of residence. The Mail has more.
A first-year economics student, Tess Bailie, 18, has started a social media campaign to protest the poor conditions her fellow undergraduates are being forced to isolate in.
Her Instagram account, The UK’s Most Expensive Prison, has revealed that some students with nut allergies are being given foods with nuts in.
Another anonymous picture sent to the account shows dead mice allegedly in the pantry of one of the university’s halls of residence.
One student claimed they hadn’t been given food for two days while another said they had been given out of date food.
Worth reading in full.
Bedwetter Jibe to be Retired
My readers have spoken. By an overwhelming majority, you think we should retire the bedwetter jibe. The feeling is that it alienates potential allies and the purpose of Lockdown Sceptics is not just to preach to the choir, but to make converts – and many of those converts will be people who, initially at least, were concerned about getting COVID-19.
Another reader made the point eloquently:
My concern is more to do with a sort of ‘sectarianism’ which of course we saw during the Brexit debate – Remoaners vs Gammons – where the white heat of disagreement degenerates into insults that further divide. There is a temptation to abuse one’s opponent which is perfectly natural but doesn’t always help to communicate with those who are neither vehemently for or against something – in fact these people can just begin to see the debate itself as childish mud-slinging. I was very much in favour of Peter Hitchens’s description of masks as “face nappies” and “muzzles” because he seemed to be pitching it as a description of the government trying to infantilise us, or to shut us up. But the undertone, and possibly the intention of those who use the insult, is often actually to infantilise their fellow citizen (“Who other than a bed-wetting mask-wearer would wear a nappy?”) or suggest they are just obedient dogs. I don’t think that was or is Peter’s intention, but that is how things have ended up.
Which immediately raises the question: what should we call those who are excessively cautious about the risk posed by the virus, as well as those that spread fear in the Government and the media? Panty-waists? Chicken Littles? Chin wobbler? Any suggestions, email us here.
Stop Press: One reader has a suggestion:
I’ve long since felt that bedwetter is not strong enough. The lockdown zealots have morphed from being hysterical to something much more sinister. The difficulty is finding a word that captures my disgust with the patronising immunity-deniers who think it their duty to scare the great unwashed into submission regardless of the evidence and consequences. To me the pseudo-scientific commentators, scientists and medical practitioners who chose to ignore the growing evidence – that the cure is worse than the disease – have lost their humanity so perhaps we should call them aliens.
Round-Up
- “As a lockdown sceptic, I now know what it must feel like to have been a Remainer” – Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph cannot understand why the public is still behind the absurd restrictions
- “Scott Morrison reveals the four countries Australia will build ‘travel bubbles’ with first – but says Europe and the US are off the cards until 2022” – Is this all part of the ingenious ‘zero-Covid’ strategy?
- “The PM committed to ‘levelling up’. Instead his government is targeting the North for oblivion” – Ross Clark on fine form in the Telegraph
- “Arts groups to receive cash lifeline from £257m bailout fund” – Government planning to save 1,300 arts organisations with a £250 million bailout fund
- “Darren Grimes is being investigated for stirring up racial hatred – and that’s patently absurd” – I weigh in on the Darren Grimes scandal for the Telegraph
- “Dame Cressida Dick facing questions over ‘politically motivated’ investigation into Darren Grimes” – There has been widespread condemnation of the decision to investigate Darren Grimes for publishing an interview with Dr David Starkey
- “Prosecutor criticises ‘sinister’ Met for investigating Darren Grimes over interview” – Lord MacDonald, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, condemns the Met’s investigation of Darren Grimes in the Times
- “The persecution of Darren Grimes” – Brendan O’Neill says the police’s investigation of Darren Grimes is a disgraceful attack on press freedom
- “For how long can we keep locking down before there’s nothing left?‘ – Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph says the Government needs to urgently switch tack and embrace a herd immunity strategy
- “Lockdown has caused a mental-health crisis” – Dave Clements asks why mental health charities haven’t condemned the Government’s handling of the crisis, given the toll the restrictions are taking on mental health
- “California Mandates All Food Must Be Consumed Through IV To Ensure Masks Are Never Removed” – Excellent stuff from the Babylon B
- “Lab Coat Tyranny” – Christopher Rufo in City Journal reveals that California’s attempt to leverage the pandemic to railroad through progressive policies is no laughing matter
- “Thousands of excess deaths from cardiovascular disease during the COVID-19 pandemic” – A new study claims there were 2,085 excess deaths in England and Wales due to heart disease and stroke during the peak of the pandemic. On average, that’s 17 deaths each day over four months that could have been prevented
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just one today: “Highly Likely – Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads” written by Mike Hugg and Ian La Frenais and sung by Tony Rivers.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Sharing stories: Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics. The answer used to be to first click on “Latest News”, then click on the links that came up beside the headline of each story. But we’ve changed that so the link now comes up beside the headline whether you’ve clicked on “Latest News” or you’re just on the Lockdown Sceptics home page. Please do share the stories with your friends and on social media.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today we bring you news that Lord Nelson’s “heroic status” is to be reviewed by the National Maritime Museum. The Telegraph has more.
Horatio Nelson towers over the pantheon of British heroes, and even his nemesis Napoleon kept a bust of the admiral in admiration – but such a statue would now be suspect.
Lord Nelson’s “heroic status” will be reviewed by the National Maritime Museum as part of efforts to challenge Britain’s “barbaric history of race and colonialism”, the Telegraph can reveal.
The admiral’s legacy is enshrined at the museum in Greenwich, which holds personal effects ranging from love letters to the coat Nelson wore when he was fatally shot during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
Internal documents seen by The Telegraph reveal that the museum will capitalise on the “momentum built up by the Black Lives Matter movement” to make changes at the repository of naval treasures and address “aspects of slavery relating to the Royal Navy”.
Nelson displays could be subject to “wholesale changes” in future, and the “more complex” nature of his heroism will be tackled by curators re-evaluating historical events and people as part of a new strategy.
The publicly-funded museum is seeking to communicate the “often barbaric history of race, colonialism and representation in British maritime history”.
Sounds like a great day out. Can’t wait to take the kids.
Stop Press: Dominic Sandbrook in the Mail says the Museum’s plans to review the “heroic status” of Nelson is an assault on the integrity of history itself.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop 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 (takes a while to arrive). 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 with lanyard for just £1.49 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory masks in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (offer protection to the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched last week and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it. If you Google it, the top hit you get is a smear piece in the Guardian headlined: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this hit job the day before it appeared). On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now shows up in the search results – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports a suppression strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics, so expect no let up in the attacks.
You can find the petition here. Please sign it. Last time I checked it had over 300,000 signatories.
Stop Press: Hospitalisations and deaths in London have stabilised. Could it be because Londoners have achieved herd immunity? The latest infection survey data suggests about one in eight Londoners have got Covid antibodies, not far off the 15% that Dr Gabriela Gomes et al estimate is the average herd immunity threshold. (There is even some suggestion that widespread immunity is shielding the South of England more widely).
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
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And Finally…
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first time I’ve posted
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan What does the Covid data really tell us? 11 October 2020, 8:00am https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-does-the-covid-data-really-tell-us- Another week has passed with more restrictions piled on – but as lockdown measures become ever more restrictive, the demand for evidence grows. Sir Keir Starmer, for instance, has asked to see evidence for new lockdown measures. In mid-August, Andy Burnham called on the government not to put Oldham into lockdown as Sir Richard Leese, the lead for health in Greater Manchester, pointed out that there is ‘no evidence’ that additional lockdown measures would improve the chances of halting the virus. Tomorrow, we’re told, there will be more restrictions still. But on what grounds? The main evidence presented to us by the government is the new daily total for new Covid infections. But how severe are the cases? Severity can be assessed quantitatively starting from the clearest and unquestionable outcome – death. But even there, the evidence is not clear. Is a ‘Covid death’ someone killed by the virus, or someone who died from other reasons who also had the virus? Our understanding of ‘Covid deaths’ Evidence from Italy casts new light on this. ISTAT, Italy’s national statistics institute, and Istituto Superiore… Read more »
The student son of a friend of mine went to stay with some people in Oxford a couple of weeks ago. Some of them felt unwell, were tested for covid and tested positive. The next day my friend’s son also felt shivery and headachy and he too turned out to be positive. My friend’s husband is in his seventies, though very fit and my friend had chemo for bowel cancer two years ago. She doesn’t seem worried about the boy, who is already feeling better, but since she and her husband could be considered “vulnerable” she doesn’t want him coming home till he tests negative. At one time that type of symptom would probably have been put down as freshers’ flu. Mum and Dad might well have told the boy to stay away since they didn’t want to catch it. It would never have occurred to them that they could die from it. Is freshers’ flu with covid likely to be more deadly to your relations? Am I going too far in continuing to believe that without the covid label and the test nobody would have noticed anything different about this year’s return to university?
Nevermind this year’s return to university, I don’t think anyone would have noticed anything different about 2020 at all were it not for the MSM and government’s hysterical overreaction.
We now know that covid was circulating weeks before anybody was really aware of it, so it clearly didn’t cause any issues that made the medical profession really sit up and take notice.
Covid-19, whatever it is, only became a problem only after the government decided to act against it. Government is the problem.
You are not going too far and are almost certainly not going far enough.
”More restrictions – but on what grounds?” On the grounds that ‘They’ need to keep everyone under control while promising them a vaccine will soon appear, so that the take-up will make it worthwhile. After all:
“Hopeful people are more easily controlled, but the volume must be managed. Too much hope leaves a person emboldened and resistant. Too little leaves them disabled and useless. But just the right amount of hope subjugates them. They cradle it like a dying ember, and they’ll do anything to keep the wind from extinguishing it…..”
Welcome jamie
Not all ‘cases’ of Covid are created equal Ministers are starting from highly questionable assumptions https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/12/not-cases-covid-created-equal/ telegraphnews/2020/10/12/not-cases-covid-created-equal/ DR JOHN LEE 12 October 2020 • 7:00am Dr John Lee It is a commonplace of science, medicine and everyday life that in order to solve a problem you must first of all frame it correctly. If you ask the right questions, finding solutions can be straightforward. But if you ask the wrong ones you can grope in the dark forever. So having the right perspective really matters. Unfortunately, the Government’s Covid approach has all the hallmarks of groping in the dark. In the name of “keeping everyone safe” we have endured local and national lockdowns, social distancing, masks, curfews, shutting cafés and pubs. Now we face further restrictions, based on naive modelling and virtually no evidence. Our societal response doesn’t seem to have advanced much since 1665, the year of the Great Plague. Getting the framing wrong then cost many lives. If you believe (as people did) that plague is caused by corrupted air, not by a bacterium, you will take the wrong actions and make things worse. The authorities locked ill people in their homes with all who lived there, increasing… Read more »
The Black Death was not bubonic plague. Why are people still pushing this falsehood?
??? what was it ??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
Probably a viral infection, something similar to ebola. See W.H.McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples.
As I recall from A Level history, the black death was pneumonic plague.
Because most people don’t know. And isn’t it still under some debate??
Thanks for reproducing that. The paragraphs about ”cases” needs to be disseminated far and wide.
This use of the word ”cases” is playing the government’s ”be afraid” game, in order to keep scared witless the Terminally Terrified.
We should just called them ”infections” and leave it at that – and point out they’re results (often dodgy) from healthy people.
I’d say it’s even worse.
If you had a cold, and got over it after a few days, got tested a month later and the PCR test picked up some dead virus particles, under the current scenario, you’d be counted as a “case”.
And you’d be quarantined along with your contacts. What a fiasco!
Welcome
I’ve been reading LS comments for probably over a couple of months now. Thanks to all of you for helping me keep my sanity fully intact, in knowing I’m not alone with my anger, frustration and insomnia.
The information supplied by this website has been briiliant for proving what any sane, normal human being should be feeling and how they should be reacting to this manmedia made hysteria.
Sorry, I’m sounding like a bit of a snowflake, I can assure you I’m not. Just a very pissed off sheep farmer.
Just about to write another email to my MP, regarding PCR test and cycle thresholds.
I wonder when we’ll be allowed to know the amplification answer to this??
It was over 10 years before the 2001 Foot and Mouth Inquiry proved it was wrong to contiguous slaughter over 6,000,000 of the UK’s livestock.
Excellent, we have a sheep expert on-board, this could be very useful indeed. Perhaps we can finally work out why they do what they do.
There’s nothing snowflakey about a sheep farmer! Welcome, Jamie.
Good luck with your MP! I wrote this to mine last week: In March 2020 NHS England set the covid 19 PCR positive test cycle threshold: https://www.england.nhs.uk/coronavirus/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2020/03/guidance-and-sop-covid-19-virus-testing-in-nhs-laboratories-v1.pdf This official guidance appears to state (on Page 21) that 45 cycles are undertaken. It also says that a positive result at or above 40 cycles, requires the following:- “Results where: •the Ct value is ≥40 and/or •there is an abnormal assay curve and/or •the clinical context makes the positive result highly unexpected should be considered interim or held until reviewed by a laboratory clinician. Laboratories will undertake the following actions: •defer telephoning the uncertain result to the clinician looking after the patient (or telephoning it with the clear caveat of uncertainty) •re-extract the original sample and repeat the PCR in the original and new extract in duplicate •perform testing on a further respiratory sample (or samples) from the same patient •confirmwith an alternative, equivalent sensitivity assay locally or,where none is available, forward the sample to Colindale •regularly review the performance of reagents, particularly control materials.The actions taken should be expedited to minimise the delay in obtaining a definitive result for the patient. Only confirmed results are expected to be notified to public… Read more »
Thanks Cheezilla
Very useful info
I’ve already seen the March NHS link and already sent it to my MP.
I’m not holding any hope I’ll get answers.
The PCR test is now the virus. Until the cycle threshold of each positive test is included and made publicly available. We will all be held hostage in our own country. Even after we are all put in a sheep race: vaccinated and ear tagged
It must be nice to spend time with intelligent animals like sheep, as opposed to zombies.
HI Jamie. Welcome to the BTL! Sue/AngloWelshDragon (I post as either depending where I am logged on)
You can be near certain that they are over amplifying the cycles, anything over 40 is dodgy and the rumour is they use 45, which renders the PCR test meaningless. However, the test is fatally flawed from the outset regardless of cycles, as it supposedly looking for RNA fragments from Sars-cov-2, a virus which has never been isolated and has yet to be proven to actually exist.
So what are they actually looking for and how do they know these particular fragments belong to the elusive Sars-cov-2. Of course, the answer is they don’t know, but that doesn’t matter one jot, as long as the positive “cases” keep piling up the agenda is being furthered.
And very impressive you’re first today to post too! – but you must be up all night to secure such success.
It’s tupping time
The slow appearance of your first post was just because first posts are moderated
Great excuse! Love your post. This is my first post ever, but this site has kept me sane. Every govt. scaremongering briefing eventually has be returning here for a dose of sanity. 🙂
Or in a different time zone.
Excellent – welcome!
Amnesty International Care Home Report
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/care-homes-report
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2020-10/Care%20Homes%20Report.pdf?kd5Z8eWzj8Q6ryzHkcaUnxfCtqe5Ddg6=
And why is this colossal, murderous scandal not headlined in every newspaper, discussed on every news programme, a burning issue in Parliament… as it would be in a democracy?
It’s called corruption.
Stop with the one post, get out while you still can.
get out to where?
Sweden?
Think I’ll stick around.
The fixed term parliament act kicks in again in 4 years.
Hello all!
And a very good morning to you
Sweden deaths (Worldometers) 7 day rolling average 1 a day
There is a West Indian saying that goes “Well, if you do not know, you just don’t know”. In the Y2K debacle, there were hundreds or thousands of people making dire predictions about what would happen at the turn of the clocks at the turn of the century but all of them just did not know, they were guessing, because nobody actually understood the computer code. Back then there was a simple way to find out. In the last days of 1999 I reset all the clocks on my computers along with some factory automation controllers to 1/1/2000 to test them and see what happened. Well, as we all know, nothing did. Here we find ourselves, 20 years later, in the same situation where nobody knows what is going on with the PCR testing. Questions have been raised by Professors, FOI requests have been submitted to Government, questions have been made in Parliament but yet nobody can answer what the false positive rate is, whether a positive test result is for live or dead virus particles, whether a positive test result implies infectiousness or not. Nobody seems to know and if someone does it must be a closely guarded classified… Read more »
They are still getting it wrong, a couple of years ago I was told by a computer generated letter that I had to renew something because I had last renewed it in 1899.🤦♂️
The library near me is a lot stricter that.
I have been reminding people of the Y2K bullshit printed in all the tabloids. Stuff like “planes will drop from the sky”, Nuclear power stations would stop working” and even “your washing machine could stop working”.
I was a computer engineer at the time and saw that most of this was just hype, there were pretty easy workarounds for most problems. Washing machines had a realtime clock in them, but it was not used for anything except timing the wash (they did not know what the date was).
Reading the comments in this Have your say article, back then it seems that BBC readers were Y2K zealots.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/586938.stm
Rich, I beg to differ. Perhaps you didn’t have problems here in the UK, but I worked in the US, and we had many programs with a two-year date in them.
Sure there were things that needed fixing, but it was all over-hyped. As I said, for the most part the workarounds were pretty straightforward.
It may have kept you busy for a while, but it was not the end of the world.
Newspaper headlines should have been “computer programmers work tirelssly to fix date problems” not “planes will drop from the sky”
I had loads of people come into my computer shop, worried their computers would stop working. they would not stop working just display the wrong date. A simple dos program inserted into startup fixed this in minutes.
This is a tabloid-esque degree of superficiality.
Business critical systems, national security systems, ‘risk-to-life’ systems, etc. could not be left running without analysis, amendment where needed, and testing. Most of the problems I remember (long time ago !) were in week/month/year-end routines, where date comparisons were more frequent.
Individual PCs were not a big deal, but multi-linked complex systems required work, if only to be as sure as possible they would carry on working.
But hardly that much more work, than systems people should be used to.
I worked for a large engineering company which started thinking about Y2K in 1990. Around 1997 they made available a software wraparound “trans-century date simulator” to test what needed to be done. In most cases the only issue was display of dates for information. More care was needed where calculations were done with dates, e.g. the time interval between events. Various date and time routines embedded within company software were identified as needing to be updated to cope with four-digit year numbers rather than two-digit, and once that was done everything worked fine.
Me too.I work for a major UK bank. We had a dedicated test cell, where we moved system dates back and forth over the “scary date” and…..nothing went wrong at all. We found only one issue with our (ancient) payroll and HR system, that was patched by 1998. Total non-event. I earned a lot of overtime though, and it bought me my first house in 1997.
Were your years already four digits ? By the mid/late 90s, new systems tended to be.
Now wishing I’d kept bug reports of the issues – I could write a book ! 🙂
(Best to declare an interest, the overtime was indeed very welcome.),
It was even bigger than that.
Several articles I read said everything with a microchip would be affected! Funnily enough the guitar amp I bought in 1992 still works fine.
As a Mechanical Engineer I was involved in checking all the PCs we used where I worked. We simply set the date to Feb 2000 then ran everything to see what happened. However that got me into trouble with the MD who had been told by experts that simply setting the date forward was very dangerous and the software code should be reviewed instead!
On your live system ? This is usually not an option for financial, stock control, sales, personnel, etc. systems.
thats what test systems are for, any bank or large would have a near complete replica of their systems to test upgrades and system patcthes which ALL need to be tested against a copy of a live system before the upgrade is actually performed. Patches are a fairly regular event, but can still go horribly wrong.
I am all too aware of this, ian. Presumably you are informing others ? 🙂
We had a stock control system, ironically named “Millennium”, that was not Y2K compliant. The company was only concerned that its mainframe remained intact and that sales software would continue to work. We mere warehouse operatives had to make do with a temporary paper ledger system.
In the event, it wasn’t needed.
Two of us came in that Saturday morning especially to check the computer. The year was wrong. Badly wrong. It had gone from 31st December 1999 to 1st January 19100.
Heh. Separate century and year fields. 🙂
The Y2K agenda seems to have been –
beforehand, It Will Be the End of the World.
afterwards, Nothing Happened, Complete Waste of Time/Effort.
I’d suggest the truth is somewhere in between.
Easy workarounds for most problems maybe, but the remainder ?!?
As a former programmer, I can assure you that lots of my colleagues worked endless hours fixing programs so that they would work properly. The problem wasn’t that everything would cease working, it was that a large, but unknown, number of programs used a two-year date instead of a four-year date. My colleagues and I wrote program that way ourselves until the problem was recognised. Then it became necessary to review code and find where two-year dates were used.
Now the PCR test is another thing altogether.
I tried the argument about the PCR test picking up dead fragments of the virus with my lockdown zealot family and was told that this means that people have had the virus. To which I responded ‘great, that means they are no longer infectious’. I was then told that there is no other means of detecting whether the presence of the virus is live or dead and therefore the PCR test has to be used regardless of the consequences.
I wonder what they’d have done without the PCR test!
“I wonder what they’d have done without the PCR test!” They would have failed miserably to spin this out. That’s why the PCR test was prepared well ahead of time! In reality, it was essentially an 8 week mini-demic, already in rapid decline before any lockdown measures. Which in itself, is rather a strange phenomenon, and lends considerable weight to my hypothesis that this virus self-attenuated rapidly (either by design or quirk of nature). Way too quick for collective immunity. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, because it is exactly what happened with SARS 1, which also self-attenuated and just went away.. Except it didn’t really go away; it just stopped causing any uniquely characteristic symptomatic illness, and people simply stopped looking for it. And it joined the ranks of thousands of other endemic or semi-endemic viruses, that are of virtually no individual or specific clinical significance. If we stopped ‘looking’ for SARS-CoV-2, I’m sure the same would happen. However, if a location was re-seeded with the original full-fitness wild-type virus (slight contradiction in terms because there is nothing ‘wild’ about it), then we would see a recurrence of high consequence infections. When NZ and Victoria eventually stop their virus… Read more »
A theory as yet unsupported by evidence.
Well, yes not fully supported by genomic evidence, I’ll grant you! But that sort of research looking to identify mutation or deletion leading to a low consequence pathogen, will be hard to fund and publish, because it would potentially represent a strong counterpoint to the prevailing narrative. That being that this remains a deadly virus that can strike anybody, anytime. And that is their continuing justification for the lockdowns and the masks. But in my opinion, it is nearly as good as self-evident! I have yet to see an alternative hypothesis to explain the distinct disease kinetics seen in this virus all over Europe (rapid peaking of deaths after 6-8 weeks, followed by sustained decline.) And if I’m not too wide of the mark, then, regardless of the distorted picture portrayed by the official figures, there will actually be virtually no Covid cases that progress to acute or critical second stage illness necessitating ICU treatment. I think we have already been in that situation for three months or so. Yes, there has been some apparent continued use of mechanical ventilation. But then we discover that if a patient is occupying a ventilator-equipped bed, then it would seem they are recorded… Read more »
Please people, find an example/comparison that everyone agrees on.
It wasn’t a debacle. One could argue it was not needed, but not that it was a debacle. Of course people understood the code. The issue was data storage, where the year was commonly held as two digits i.e. 99 rather than the four digit 1999. And thousands of people, if not more, were engaged in changing databases to hold four digit years. And performing the necessary system amendments this change made necessary.
Do you work on government IT projects, Bob ? 🙂
No, but I hear there is good money in it. Give me a few billion and I will be happy to make you an app that does not work.
It seems near certain that the PCR test has been very carefully set up to do exactly what it is now doing. In other words, we are being scammed on a colossal scale.
Blimey! Is Toby suffering from insomnia?
Just woken up. Is the pig dictator still in power?
One day nearer to the chopping blick.
Who ordered the army to be deployed on the streets?
Who made the decision to disguise them council as employees?
Was it a government minister, or did the army act independently of the government?
Statement in the house please?
Should read ‘them as council employees ‘
Not a very good disguise with their uniforms visible.
Yep, wearing camos…with a nice high viz over the top!
Camouflage with hi viz, so deadfully common.
The army doesn’t act “independently of government”. The civil authorities have to request their assistance.
And they are doing!
My guess would be Tobias Elwood MP (77th Brigade) who is pushing Boris to use the army and introduce immunity/vaccination certificates
Just seen Ferguson has released a new model. Apparently he was hit on the head by an acorn yesterday. He’s run the numbers and can confidently predict that if we don’t do anything the sky will fall down.
There have been a lot of acorns about this year. I’ve noticed, The number being projected on to your head is set to double every seven days. If we don’t immediately chopdown every oak tree in the country we are heading for oakageddon.
I’ve noticed this too! Masses of them
Me too, what does this tell us about the fertility of the natural world when human activity is interrupted?
What about conkers, they’re far more dangerous.
They were Banned years ago, just as well considering.
But conkers come in cases.
Be afraid.
Worse, they come in cases that look like the Rona..
I love you guys!
Conkerona!
I saw a brilliant comment in DT a while ago “there is an absolute straight line between banning conkers in the playground (oh how we laughed) to the mess we are in now “
The Prime Minister will chair a COBRA meeting on Monday morning to hammer out the final details before setting out the new nationwide three-tier system of restrictions in the Commons.
Seven months down the line and this incompetent bunch of useless morons that passes for the government goes from hysteria to complete madness. I’ve got to the stage now where I feel like a disconnected spectator at a dystopean horror film. To be honest, I gave up paying any attention to what these renegades were saying months ago and these ‘restrictions’ are just something else I shall ignore with impunity. By the day they dig their grave deeper and deeper. It will give millions of us great pleasure to see them buried forever.
Someone crash the COBRA meeting with the new memo from WHO.
Boris, you know those nice people at WHO wot changed their mind about masks ?
They’ve gone and done it again about lockdown so you’ll just have to cancel todays announcement, bit of a bummer I know.
WHO changed its mind on face rags due to ‘political pressure’. What changed its mind on universal incarceration? Surely it isn’t bothered about millions starving to death, or dying of other diseases? I mean, it isn’t as if the World Hysteria Organisation has anything to do with health, or life, or sanity, is it?.
It knows that if civilisation is destroyed due to lockdowns then it won’t be much fun trying to spend the cash they’re going to make. They’ve overshot, and they know it.
They do not need money, just control of resources and power.
And they don’t need 95% of us. Now everybody roll up your sleeves, Uncle Bill has something for you.
Because everyone has been softened up and is begging for a way out. Cue the health passports.
Exactly!
Cue the genocidal vaccines.
The WHO is largely representing the interests of pharmaceutical companies. (Pretty much every layer of health care is in some way representing the interests of pharmas). Lockdowns don’t particularly help pharmas. On the other hand immunity passports, track and trace systems… let’s see the WHO come out against those..
I think it remains to be seen if the Nabarro statement is just an outlier opinion or the new official view.
An easing of community-wide lockdowns might be considered judicious at this point, because their broader aims can still be achieved by individual health persecution and health tyranny, by masks and track and trace with mandatory individual isolation, if it is done on the grandest possible scale.
Hence Project Lunar C.
Political pressure from China who make the things.
I don’t doubt there’s intent. Collateral damage wink wink.
Well OK
I think it is painfully obvious that no matter how much evidence is presented against lockdowns, Boris and his criminal friends running Her Majesty’s Government (where is the Queen, by the way?) are going to continue locking things down until a sizeable minority refuse to comply. There are grim implications for this view of things, not least for non compliers. What do others think?
thank you Toby et all for all your hard work both here and for free speech. Good night all.
She’s been going around her gift shops removing all the Prince Andrew tat.
And the Ginger prince
Isn’t Ginge on his way over for a visit imminently?
Our wonderful Queen is fully supportive of everything that’s been inflicted on her subjects.
Obviously.
Is it a North v South civil war?
So far it’s a coup.
Given the stance of the Northern “Leaders”, I don’t fancy my chances with them on my side either!
By the way, nobody who has been following the shameful biased extradition hearing of Julian Assange should be in the least bit surprised at the treatment of Darren Grimes.
Tommy Robinson has been constantly subjected to the same treatment for round about a decade now. It’s nothing new.
I am not a fan of Tommy, but his treatment in prison was disgusting.
I followed TR for a good few years. His Oxford Union speech was an eye opener and so was his free speech/enemy of the state presentation.
The way the state uses it’s levers of power to character and financially assassinate it’s targets is frightening!
His working class status and some of his behaviour certainly didn’t help him (as one of his followers), but I didn’t see him as the far right racist as reported in the mainstream media.
As a ‘brown’ man(of Indian heritage), I know for a fact that he has a sizable following within the Sikh & Hindu community.
Surely, locking people up without evidence has to be a violation of human rights. Not even the Prime Minister should have that power. Can’t the government be sued for human rights violations? Can’t we have a Nuremberg trial of our own?
The original lockdown violated seven key principles of the Human Rights Declaration. With total impunity. Clearly it is an umbrella that can only be used when it isn’t raining.
That’s because we allowed them to.
This time they do not have the power since we did not renew it.
Keir Starmer was a lawyer with a special interest in human rights.. what an opportunity he has has to use that experience!
No doubt he will use this experience to tell Johnson not to ‘lose his nerve’ just like he told the Swedish authorities not to drop the trumped-up rape charges against Julian Assange. MW
Because my MP (one of the most useless human beings ever to enter parliament) Nadine Dorries no longer replies to my e-mails (hasn’t since 2007), I just sent her a copy of “The Nuremberg Trials” using Amazon. It’s arriving at parliament on the 5th of November.
Well done!
I don’t think Nadine Dorries can read.
It’s one with pictures – it has several pictures of some of her heros standing in a dock looking very unhappy. If she looks at the pictures, she might get it.
Does she have a facebook page? Might work well on there!
The revised 1984 Health now Act allows “them” to lock anybody up without evidence, no problem.
Where are the Conservative Party offices in Liverpool and Manchester?
Gone I expect
Why, do you want to burn them down ?
No, send a letter of protest
Try the address in the footer of https://www.liverpoolconservatives.org/
Yes
7 Dudley Court, 51 Carlton Road, Manchester, M16 8DA
10 Parkfield Road, Liverpool, L17 8UH
Re Toby’s woke gobledgook piece. National Maritime Museum is going to review ‘the often barbaric history of race, colonialism and representation (wtf?) in British maritime history’. Last week BBC R4 Womans Hour told of a privileged black woman who was a member of Queen Victoria’s Imperial Court. The guest explained that she had been presented as a child slave to an RN Captain by the King of Dahomey, present day Benin, West Africa. She further explained that Britain had already banned the slave trade throughout the Empire and was enforcing it more generally on the High Seas (no gasp of admiration from the host). The King of Dahomey was still very active in slavery and the Navy Captain was negotiating with him him to stop selling his own people to the few Europeans still in that vile trade. No “excuse me, did you just say that Africans were selling other Africans into slavery and Britain was trying to stop them?” from the host either. The RN West Africa Squadron was actively fighting slavery when our country was in an existential war with France and continued to do so until the 1920s in the Red Sea. Much of the diplomacy that… Read more »
Slave trading is alive and well almost everywhere except in the West. Even so, it is only the West that is accused of slavery. As anyone with more that two brain cells to rub together can perhaps figure out, this is because only people that despise slavery would be concerned about being accused of slavery. If the Western world was indeed built on slavery no one would even care about all these accusations. But we do, and that is the leash we’re being lead by.
Much of the people traffic across the Channel leads the victims into slavery of various sorts.
Question is, who are their enslavers ?
Cressida Dick seems to have some disguised as TSG.
End users include Middle-Eastern diplomats; fruit farmers; sewing sweatshops; factories. Enslavers are largely the criminal gangs.
Especially cannabis farms and other food processing factories, coincidentally all with the sort of battery hen conditions where CV 19 thrives. I’ve stopped buying pre packed sandwiches.
Still buying weed though Sylvie ?
Lauren Southern has a pretty good documentary on the topic called “Borderless”.
It’s just called human trafficking in the West.
Some more information about Queen Victoria’s black goddaughter – Sarah Forbes Bonetta:
https://enoughofthistomfoolery.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/tv-review-victoria-christmas-special-itv-comfort-and-joy/
Thank you Bart, the guest did indicate that she had been educated discovering things about Queen Victoria that she did not expect.
You’re welcome. ITV’s Victoria for all its faults did attempt to present a fairly rounded picture of Queen Victoria as a young woman.
last night BBC2 put out two programmes about slavery with Samuel Jackson.. Some very angry black presenters. Some interesting information, a lot of nice diving scenes (especially for an elephant tusk!). A lot of time spent about the wreck of the Douro as example of slave ships (but as this was wrecked many years after UK slavery ended some doubt about this). They also looked at another wreck which had been sunk after being chased by Royal Navy in their role of stopping slavery . The worst of the whitewashing was about the Africans involvement in the trade. Particularly an interview with an Ashanti woman who admitted that in the past they had slaves. Except they were not referred to as slaves. They were referred to as “unfree”. And justified the selling of these Unfree people to “white slavers” because they needed the guns they received in trade to defend themselves from other tribes. Otherwise very little about african tribes being heavily involved and selling captured tribes to european traders and the amount of slavery that already existed . (see Mansa Musa who once made a pilgrimage to Mecca with a procession that included 12000 slaves. Apparently Mali today has… Read more »
Well said.
I wonder how many young BLM twerps eat chocolate ….
Was there any mention of the current booming slave trade in the previously-‘best-developed’-country in Africa? And how that state of affairs has come about?
(Clue: R2P) AG
Quite. In fact, she would have been manumitted the moment she stepped aboard a British warship, as such is considered British territory. Queen Elizabeth I had said no man who stepped on England’s land was a slave, and this was upheld in Law by Sir John Holt, then the Lord Chief Justice, in a case in 1701.
Often ignored, but apparently always honoured by the Royal Navy, who happily recruited runaway slaves in the Caribbean.
Patrick O’Brian, describing a slave boarding Jack Aubrey’s ship –
(Ignorant crew member (Killick)) YOU FREE MAN NOW !
(Ex-slave) Pardon me sir, but my name is Smith.
🙂
https://thecritic.co.uk/confessions-of-a-bar-owner/
Another bar owner has had enough
Tim Martin will be rubbing his hands in glee at all his independent rivals going bust. Actually he’s a very nice man, who I’ve met three times, but there is no doubt that it will be the big operators in many fields of activity that will be the long term winners out of all this.
Data on the fortunes of billionaires supports you.
Sort of the point of the whole thing really
Just as Big Ag swallowed up the small farms after the F&M scam.
If pubs and bars go bust Amazon and the supermarkets will get increased alcohol sales.
Sad, especially considering what he’s already gone though, including all that ghastly covid signeage he’s had to deface the premises with.
I didn’t see it posted yesterday but the Sunday Times reports that contact information being harvested by QR code in pubs and restaurants is being sold on marketing, credit card and insurance companies.
No surprises there then.
Test & trace even during its early days has been violating GDPR and there were reports that people who gave their details were later spammed with calls from various marketing companies.
This doesn’t surprise me.
Understood, but I wouldn’t know; I never give my true phone number anyway.
Toby seems to have missed that – maybe needs sending to him?
North face, South face. Always two faces with the pig dictator
I don’t know which face to slap hardest, but I do know Wanksock is the most smackable
‘Wanksock’ excellent, my suggested bedwetter alternative is coronanist.
Kickable!!
I’ll keep bedwetters, not having a supposed free speech enthusiast telling me what words I’m allowed to use
Likewise. Mort aux pissenlits.
Going to censor us, are you, Mr Dandelion?
I never used the term ‘bedwetter’ until I couldn’t resist putting it in a post yesterday. Being of an okkerd persuasion, this frankly infantile non-issue brought out the worst in me. If someone visits here and can’t cope with something so mild, they are not going to have anything to do with the things most of us are saying. And how will they cope with the language of, say, Biker ( 🙂 ) or people happily bandying around the ‘cunt’ and ‘twat’ and other profanities?
Anyway, Annie, I just love Dandelion/pissenlit. If you don’t object, I am going to borrow it for future use.
Maybe ‘Mr Dandelion’ will just encourage us to shame each other up if we transgress as advised by SPI-B and Dame Dick. (Seriously, I think those posters who say he has retired the term for UTL use may be correct although I did notice that he sneaked it into his links section underneath that letter yesterday!) MW
I prefer ‘murdering cunts’
That’s for everyone involved in making lockdown happen and sustain it.
Basically Westminster and media and SAGE. They should face summary execution and made to dig their own graves
Everybody who wears a mask is sustaining it.
Too kind!
Solitary confinement with the refusal of healthcare would be much more apppropriate.
Even better if they’re given mouldy sarnies, like the students.
The CU iN Two weeks brigade?
Me too. Besides the whole concept of kids wetting the bed in fear of the imaginary monster fits the whole Corona panic too well.
Toby is not telling us what we can say, just retiring the word from his writings.
Exactly.
Me too, but I will be open to alternatives also. Since the offenders formerly known as bedwetters are behaving like total idiots about Covid, we could use a snarky portmanteau based around that – something like ‘Covidiots’, perhaps.
Well said
I can now access the GB Declaration, but it no longer shows the numbers of signatories.
???
https://gbdeclaration.org/view-signatures/
Thanks!.
Thr number appears to have gone down substantially since yesterday.
???
Probably weeding out the ‘Mickey Mouse’ ones attempting to discredit the declaration CCP bots probably.
I’ve had some correspondence with someone who thinks that the April spike is proof that Covid-19 is a dangerous and lethal disease and that lockdown has worked in saving lives.
What are the facts concerning that spike and where can I find good sources on an explanation for it?
Was it actually a normal distribution but we’ve not had such a hard Spring for some time so it looks strange on the five year average?
Was it because we put lots of Covid patients into care homes?
Was it that the closing of hospitals in lockdown caused a spike due to other illnesses being untreated?
All of the above? Something else?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UvFhIFzaac
That was exactly the thing I was gonna link to. An excellent review of THE DATA. Brilliant.
There’s some stuff here:
https://sluggerotoole.com/2020/05/31/what-is-the-evidence-for-and-cost-of-lockdown/
And a summary of some immunity research here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563/rr-6
Google ivor cummins covid 19 april spike for more and maybe network from there.
Reuters report on the care home disaster
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-elderly-sp/special-report-in-shielding-its-hospitals-from-covid-19-britain-left-many-of-the-weakest-exposed-idUKKBN22H2EI
Well they did say it was only to protect the NHS!
The bell curve for the spring Covid exactly matches those of a normal bad winter flu, just arrived 3 months later than usual after a mild winter flu. Had last years winter flu been severe half this years Covid dead would have already gone.
Don’t bother explaining, they will be dead from starvation this time next year
CEBM did a chart a week or so back that showed deaths from flu & other respiratory conditions (Inc COVID) for 2020 was not especially abnormal vs prior 10 years. 2 other Aprils in the past decade have seen as many deaths.
Obviously we saw higher excess mortality in April this year, but they were not COVID deaths. Lockdown deaths.
Thanks Sophie. I had a look on their website and couldn’t find that chart. Can you remember any more details?
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/summary-of-the-ons-report-on-deaths-registered-weekly-in-england-and-wales-29nd-september/
Thanks.
Can I check I’ve got this right?
The first table on that webpage shows that in the April spike there were 20000 (Twenty thousand) deaths recorded. But the graph posted above and the coronavirus data on the government’s website say that the highest number of deaths with respiratory disease was 2000.
So the huge spike in overall deaths in April was not connected with respiratory disease in any way? (18000 non-respiratory related deaths).
Am I reading that right?
I suspect there is a difference in definition at play.
You are correct in reading a spike of just under 2,000 deaths this year on the “comparison of respiratory disease” chart, but the ONS figures for “deaths-with-COVID-19” show a spike of just over 8,000. Given that COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, I don’t know how to reconcile this difference without access to the underlying data and definitions.
Here’s a chart that I prepared myself a few days ago from ONS data. It shows the peaks of both all-cause-deaths and deaths-with-COVID-19.
Of course, deaths-with-COVID-19 is a misnomer. It should be called deaths-within-28-days-of-having-a-positive-test-for-SARS-CoV-2-viral-fragments, but that’s another matter.
Ok, I think I’m getting somewhere.
Data here https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/deaths has deaths with 28 days of a test peaking at 2000-ish.
Deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate peaks at 8000 as your graph demonstrates. That’s 6000 deaths assumed to be Covid-19 without any verification. (Am I right in thinking that autopsies were seriously curtailed in this period?)
Can we say this based on Sweden’s experience and the UK’s (and drawing on Ivor Cummins):
There is a novel virus which was an contributory factor in the deaths of very old and very ill people in March and April. Previous low flu seasons meant that there was more “dry tinder” in the population. However, the response to that virus by discharging older people from hospitals into care homes increased the number of deaths and lockdown measures leading to restricted care added more.
If we had carried on as normal, adding capacity to our medical services we would have saved many more lives and the spike would have been less and much in line with previous bad years for deaths.
How is that for an interpretation of the facts?
Spot on.
Seems fair.
I agree with Ivor (I think it was him that he said this) that in the absence of PCR testing, we would have just shrugged and said “bad flu this year, wasn’t it?”
Yes. I keep pointing out that if the banned the pillalr 2 tests, apart from saving £billions, the “epidemic” would disappear overnight.
There was news last night that NL has realised this and abandoned testing. Any further info on that?
I remember seeing a letter from a retired GP to the Telegraph, I think, at the beginning of this who said that in the days before the Internet the GPs would have said exactly that.
This is a crisis concocted by our dependence on the television, internet and globalism.
COVID19 has a different ICD10 code of 100 so is not recorded in that dataset.The plot shows that for all other respiratory diseases of interest, this year is little different to the past five. However comparing all deaths to the same Week 39 time point, 66,000 extra people have died from something that they did not die of in the past five years.
Lockdown, maybe?
Thanks
There’s an irony in that the better a country is at routinely keeping old people alive, the bigger the spike you’d get if you just stopped their treatment. Which is what happened when the NHS became the National Covid Service. The numbers we’re talking about (40,000, say) are not so huge that they couldn’t just be a slight upset in the equilibrium. A problem for the government in wanting to keep the hysteria going, is that perhaps they killed off the driest tinder earlier in the year and are going to have to work very hard to create a convincing number of deaths now, even if it’s a strong flu season. Their only option is to lock down strongly and claim it’s this that is keeping the deaths down. They can play the ‘cases’ like a violin by just modulating the number of tests.
Seeing a face is the problem nowadays.The ‘scientists’ and the Pissenlits see a cloud of viruses loosely wrapped in flesh. The rest of us see nappies.
Not The Naughty Word.
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan What does the Covid data really tell us? 11 October 2020, 8:00am https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-does-the-covid-data-really-tell-us- Another week has passed with more restrictions piled on – but as lockdown measures become ever more restrictive, the demand for evidence grows. Sir Keir Starmer, for instance, has asked to see evidence for new lockdown measures. In mid-August, Andy Burnham called on the government not to put Oldham into lockdown as Sir Richard Leese, the lead for health in Greater Manchester, pointed out that there is ‘no evidence’ that additional lockdown measures would improve the chances of halting the virus. Tomorrow, we’re told, there will be more restrictions still. But on what grounds? The main evidence presented to us by the government is the new daily total for new Covid infections. But how severe are the cases? Severity can be assessed quantitatively starting from the clearest and unquestionable outcome – death. But even there, the evidence is not clear. Is a ‘Covid death’ someone killed by the virus, or someone who died from other reasons who also had the virus? Our understanding of ‘Covid deaths’ Evidence from Italy casts new light on this. ISTAT, Italy’s national statistics institute, and Istituto Superiore… Read more »
Thanks HawkAnalyst!
OOOOps I forgot the smokescreen measures!
oh yes now I see what the masks are for to protect us for ALL THE SMOKE
The portrait of Nelson shows the missing chelengk on his hat. A almost literally priceless gift from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to mark his victory at the Battle of the Nile stolen from (and lost by) NMM in 1951. Its loss a potent symbol of NMM’s current campaign.
Sky news Australia big hit piece on the great reset https://youtu.be/GeykREAlYSg
UK talkRadio belittling it’s audience https://youtu.be/w1TrBMyEqLA
Sky well worth 10 minutes, that Schwarb guy looks really dangerous.
Old big ears said we had 36 (48?) Months to save the world how long ago ?
I believe it was John Major that signed us up originally, in 1992…
It was the bit about China’s role, at the end, that worried me… They have a traffic light system for access to society and BJ seems to be introducing that here now…
Yes this is one of the very important questions..
Chinas part in this?
That’s the goal. The vaccine is a red herring on the way.
A lying, dangerous one!
Toby has far too much to lose to speak the truth.
That’s the reality.
Or much less to lose. Which is more likely imo.
You are both correct
Paradogma
Long but with watching
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrJR1Xz-WV4
James D did at least warn us months ago about the planned October lockdown. I’m waiting to see if he will tell us anything more about future plans…
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More lies from the BBC
They are not ‘due to appear in court’
They have been reported for summons, which means the CPS will decided if it goes to court or not
The third ‘covid is a hoax’ photograph is false. That is not the Bay in the background
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54501281
But hey, if fabrication saves just one life
Not all ‘cases’ of Covid are created equal Ministers are starting from highly questionable assumptions https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/12/not-cases-covid-created-equal/ telegraphnews/2020/10/12/not-cases-covid-created-equal/ DR JOHN LEE 12 October 2020 • 7:00am Dr John Lee It is a commonplace of science, medicine and everyday life that in order to solve a problem you must first of all frame it correctly. If you ask the right questions, finding solutions can be straightforward. But if you ask the wrong ones you can grope in the dark forever. So having the right perspective really matters. Unfortunately, the Government’s Covid approach has all the hallmarks of groping in the dark. In the name of “keeping everyone safe” we have endured local and national lockdowns, social distancing, masks, curfews, shutting cafés and pubs. Now we face further restrictions, based on naive modelling and virtually no evidence. Our societal response doesn’t seem to have advanced much since 1665, the year of the Great Plague. Getting the framing wrong then cost many lives. If you believe (as people did) that plague is caused by corrupted air, not by a bacterium, you will take the wrong actions and make things worse. The authorities locked ill people in their homes with all who lived there, increasing… Read more »
I think Toby has previously asked folk to refrain from posting entire articles from behind paywalls. Seems fair to heed that advice
“In Manchester, politicians launched a last-ditch appeal to ministers not to shut all pubs and restaurants and instead hand them the power to only close those which are not meeting coronavirus safety restrictions”
This would actually be a disastrous and divisive policy, basically forcing pubs and restaurants to enforce coronapanic theatre nonsense, empowering snitch scum, and giving local authority busybodies yet more power to bully dissenters.
Just when you thought the pub experience couldn’t get any worse…
Agreed. The Northern “leaders” are making things as bad as possible. Politics before people yet again!
So back in April and May it was Lives not Money.
Now it’s Money not Lives.
Funny that.
OK, so we aren’t allowed to use ‘bed-wetters’ anymore.
I’m going to use ‘complicit murderers’ instead.
I’m going for “collaborators”
“Quislings” perhaps?
‘Collaborators’ works well
I’m assuming that applies above the line. I don’t think he’s saying anything about what we in the peanut gallery can write.
I hope if he’s going to self-censor on “bedwetter”, he’s going to do the same for “pantywaist”, which imo is far worse. Apart from anything else, it’s an Americanism, and not a useful or sensible one.
What in God’s good name is a ‘pantywaist’?
An American term used for the time-honoured practice of insulting effeminate males, or implying male rivals are effeminate.
What kind of twat uses an expression like that?
An American male, if you mean that particular one. If you are talking in general about insults implying effeminacy then it’s almost universal in some form or another. Inherent to humanity.
I’ve never heard of pantywaist and can’t even begin to imagine what’s it’s supposed to denote. However, it does sound extremely puerile and that in itself would do the site no favours.
We have free speech BTL. It was pointed out that if we want to spread the word, it’s best not to alienate the waverers on their first visit above the line.
Very common expression in the US a few generations back. Old fashioned now, I think, even in the US.
We are allowed to call them whatever we want, however I do not think bedwetters is strong enough.
See above re Americanisms.
How about “phobic lemmings”, driven to self destruction by an irrational fear of something that posses little danger.
The lemmings’ thing itself was a hoax.