More Scaremongering From PHE About the “Twice as Deadly” Indian Variant
Infections are on the rise according to the ONS and, despite the vaccines (and the fact that fully-open U.S. states continue not to see a rise in infections let alone the prophesied mass hospitalisations and deaths), talk has once again turned to keeping restrictions going beyond June 21st. Portugal has been brutally struck from the green list, ruining the holidays of tens of thousands of Brits. Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, has suggested social distancing could continue for the rest of the year.
Driving the fear is the Delta (Indian) variant, which new data from Public Health England suggests could have more than double the risk of hospitalisation compared to the Alpha (British) variant. The Guardian reports:
An analysis of 38,805 sequenced cases in England revealed that the Delta [Indian] variant was associated with a 2.61 times higher risk of hospitalisation within 14 days of specimen date than the Alpha [British] variant. There was a 1.67 times higher risk of A&E care within 14 days. These figures take into account factors such as age, sex, ethnicity, area of residence and vaccination status.
It appears PHE has been up to its usual tricks again though. While the data adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity and so on might produce these alarming results, the raw data tells the opposite story. Here’s the relevant table with some key figures highlighted:
Far from showing double the risk of serious disease, in the raw figures a smaller percentage of Delta (Indian) cases versus Alpha (British) cases went to A&E (5.1% vs 5.6%), stayed in hospital (1.5% vs 2.5%) or died (0.2% vs 1.2%). The two groups are presumably very different demographically, which is why PHE’s adjustments were so radical. But the big question is, how reliable can findings really be when the reported results are adjusted so drastically from the raw data, bearing in mind the guesswork these adjustments involve?
Early Delta (Indian) variant hotspots also give reasons not to panic, with Bolton’s positive Covid tests and hospital patients already on the decline.
Is anyone else getting a wearying sense of déjà vu? As Ross Clark notes:
We have been here before. In January Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, held a press conference to announce, glumly, that the Kent variant appeared to have a mortality rate 30% higher than previous variants. That led news bulletins. Less noticed were two studies published in the Lancet and Lancet Infectious Diseases in April which analysed the data and concluded that, after all, the Kent variant was no more deadly than previous variants.
Who’d bet against a similarly quiet and belated admission happening here, once the panic has done its damage?
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Actually, this is quite good news.
It is true that the dim will swallow the fiction. But behind it is a desperation that is leading to more and more ludicrous claims that could lead to more suckers becoming un-suckered as light dawns,
Most of the “suckers” will soon be vaccinated and then it will be simply too late for these “dim” people. Next they will then come for those of us, who have so far resisted the allure of thrombocytopenia and the whole gamut of oher Covid vaccine caused illness and early death. Very dark times ahead.
Over 5,000 now dead post vaccine USA. Read the cDC VAERS mist recent numbers. Eye watering. Even more of a concern, a Harvard study believes VAERS represents only 1% of cases due to under reporting.
And the children. The children! Dark.
I’m afraid I’ll only believe that when I see it. Don’t underestimate the psychological damage done by 14 months of what one might call project fear on steroids.
In any case, what business have Public Health England to be desperate? They are surely supposed to be scientists working in the public interest and should avoid a (Patrick) Unbalanced view.
14 months of fear mongering, I grant you. Yet, if our societies were not totally decadent, that is, in a state of deep decay, they would have not succumbed.
This is indeed a good point, meaningless. consumer led, ‘celebrity fixated zomboids, awaiting a rallying point to go all ‘collective’ and self righteous…has it happened yet ??
That’s the true problem.
The clue’s in the name “Public Health England”. Their official goal is “to protect and improve the nation’s health and to address inequalities”, and they’ve used the Covid scare to advance their wider goals, many of which have been well-intended but misguided. (Trying to shift focus onto their wider role is also intended to mask their self-evident failure to prepare the country for the current pandemic, which was also a key part of their brief.) Once the “emergency” is over, they obviously fear that they will lose political traction so, naturally, they are trying to keep the Covid scare alive for as long as they can.
USA completely open. Internal flights completely booked. Early treatment for COVID available through FLCCC and other medics. What exactly is the UK waiting for?
Yesterday’s reports were of a weekly increase in ‘cases’ by two-thirds or even three-quarters.
Oh really?
Many ways that increase could have been engineered. Any clues as to what was behind the reported increase?
If person 1 is paid £1,000 a day and person 2 is paid £100 a day, the average payment is £550 a day but that’s not much comfort to person 2.
LIES, DAMMED LIES AND STATISTICS!!!
If you put the top of your body in a hot oven and the bottom half in a freezer, on average you are at the right temperature.
But that’s the whole point of statistics – any decent text is full of warnings about these sorts of manipulation and distortions – like the substitution of relative risk for absolute risk.
What you are describing is the sort of nonsense that a knowledge of statistical and scientific method will actually guard against – as in the example that this thread exposes.
Quite. If the cases rise from 1-2, that’s a 100% increase, but of no consequence whatsoever.
It seems utterly ridiculous that cases are increasing, yet jabs are being carried out on over half the population. 70% of those jabs are in the vulnerable groups. When will folk wake up to the hypocrisy of this statement.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Wow, another variant of a virus that doesn’t really affect healthy people. The only option must be more terrorism and more restrictions.
Here is a very interesting clip for the conspiracy theorists!
https://twitter.com/Bel_B30/status/1400959476937723906
It’s a good job they’re doing all this vaccinating with leaky vaccines because this allegedly creates the perfect breeding ground for genuinely worse disease, depending on who you believe/listen to, but it’s not without merit. Lovely inversion from the Satanists
Apparently India is expecting the high.y contagious UK variant. When will our commentators start laughing at the hypocrisy and gaslighting,
India is using early treatment with ivermectin with brilliant results. Don’t you wish little Britain would come out of its coma and start following the advice of world renowned scientists instead of the sad, tired, useless nervtag and sage props.
Quick question if anyone can help, despite my last post on a previous article about virusesarenotcontagious.com
Lets say germ theory is real, we get infected by viruses floating around or being expelled by droplets and aerosols etc
Now the so called isolation and purification of the sars cov 2 virus was far from satisfactory in the original Chinese paper, the RNA template for the jab wasn’t created from a sample from an infected person – see below
https://hive.blog/worldnews/@francesleader/email-exchange-with-uk-mhra-exposing-the-genomic-sequence-of-sarscov2
Do all these so called variants have the same RNA as sars cov 2 or are they saying every new variant they supposedly find as been isolated, purified and been proven to induce the same symptoms in a healthy person?
Ta
I don’t understand this “virus hasn’t been isolated and purified” malarkey.
The SinoVac vaccine is a traditional vaccine using inactivated whole virus.
By definition, the virus has been isolated and purified, and inactivated (assuming the vaccine manufacturer’s claims are true).
I think the confusion lies in the fact that seemingly nobody in the West bothered to do this process – we seemingly have relied entirely on China’s genome sequencing.
As for this Kaufman guy and his “viruses don’t exist” – I’m sorry but this guy is a lunatic. He’s like the people that say that nukes don’t exist, or outer space doesn’t exist. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s some disinfo agent to poison the well.
The fact that he bears a striking resemblance to James Corbett on video thumbnails also makes me highly suspicious.
It’s interesting how the July 2020 CDC real time PCR report, (page 39 maybe)
Since there are no quantified isolates of the 2019 NCov virus available we have used… – you’d have thought they’d have no problem acquiring this.
Kaufman speaks of a virus as an exosome, and the theory of contagion is hardly consistent.
Anyways, I’m not sure a computer sequence counts, and has it been proven to cause the same symptoms in a healthy person?
When will the Public finally get it that this is now a scam being played on them by a political class, and in this I include Public Health England and the “Scientists” that advise them. These people are politicised, they have forgotten what their vocation is about, data, questioning, challenge, review. All these people are doing is protecting their careers, their income streams, the power they have become used to, whilst upholding the mantra that they are supposed to be focused on getting rid of Covid only, they have not been asked or given the remit to look at or care about the consequences of their single minded focus on creating zero covid. All the Cancer sufferers, the heart disease sufferers etc. The elderly confined to solitary confinement whilst they pay the private sector jailors for the priviledge. The Suicides, the Children and Young people whose future prospects have been reduced in the trade off to give very elderly people (in excess of 82) another few months of life, whilst the counting house coffers become empty. Nope we are in this Scarient downward spiral for the longterm because the Cowards in Government and PHE know that if it is allowed… Read more »
Watch yesterday’s UKColumn. It features the wonderful Dolores Cahill who explains about the legal redress being put in motion as we speak. The liars and cowards who have caused so much harm aren’t going to get away with it. The tide is finally turning…
And on another positive note, in London yesterday there must have been at least 20% of the crowds not wearing masks – of all ages. People are getting tired of the constant crying of wolf and just want to get on with their lives
The most up to date Covid Death stats on The ONS still show over 75s accounting for the majority of deaths. I think we can reasonably assume that they have had both Jabz. I don’t understand why people think that a virus that targets elderly vulnerable people will start targeting anyone else, jabbed or not?
It’s like the flu vaccine in its efficacy and still mainly elderly people die of flu all the same.
This is why vaxxin young people and children is totally evil in my opinion.
You are right, it is totally evil. There is a petition to stop the vaccination of children until the Phase 3 trials are complete. (though even then they shouldn’t be vaccinated). But at least it would slow the vaccination program down. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/586017
Presently there are over 45,000 signatures but we need far more for it to be considered for a debate in parliament.
I’ve signed it.
Why are they doing this to this degree to the UK?
They’ve dug themselves a rather deep hole and cannot get out without their aim of the British population being digitised and constantly monitored being abandoned. It’s looking likely with Fauci and Gates being targeted and thrown under a bus that the globalists will have to think again. Our political class have shown themselves to be weak, greedy and appallingly unconcerned at the devastation they are creating. I’m hoping a second Nuremberg trial will happen.
I see that the so called lifting of restrictions on 21st June is likely (almost certainly) to be extended for another 2 weeks. Would this be to save Christmas?
Well, if it saves one Christmas…..
It seems to me that the age old problem of power going to the heads of mediocre managers who have no intelligence to discern what is right or wrong.
This corrupt cadre of politicians, scientists and medical professionals are in too deep now. They cannot stop, because once they do, they will rightly be held responsible for the catastrophic damage they have directly caused. Therefore they will do whatever needs to be done, however insane and irrational, just to delay judgement. Hence they won’t stop, so, they have to be stopped.
Tyrants rely on fear and lies to prosper. Once people see through the lies, only the use of fear remains. Just don’t fall for the fear trap.
The PHE report summarises the situation as:
early data from both England and Scotland suggest an increased risk of hospitalisation with Delta compared to Alpha; confirmatory analyses are required
This is hardly scare-mongering
Can I suggest it is scare-mongering. I will confirm it later, but in the meantime let’s shut this thread down. That’s how it works isn’t it?
Of course it’s scare-mongering. You have to be a bit slow not to cotton on to that (or a 77th Brigade troll)
Forget the detailed numbers – even if they don’t stack up; it only takes a neophyte statistician to work out that the basic premise of the analysis is entirely meaningless in terms of the inference it seeks to confirm.
There is no way you can establish difference in virulence on this basis. Pure spoof, typical of the SAGE nexus that has been engaged in manipulating data to fit a false narrative.
But the big question is, how reliable can findings really be when the reported results are adjusted so drastically from the raw data, bearing in mind the guesswork these adjustments involve?
How much guesswork is involved? The factors are age, sex, ethnicity, area of residence, index of multiple deprivation, week of diagnosis and vaccination status. I would have thought PHE knew all of these.
That’s eight I make it, factors to adjust for. You’re blithe assurance that you can know all these and how they interact with each other is not very plausible to me. But it’s certainly convenient for maintaining the narrative.
I don’t see why it is a blithe assurance. Testing details are routinely broken down by age, sex, ethnicity, area of residence, date of diagnosis and vaccination status. The index of multiple deprivation is easily derived from the area of residence. These are straightforward metrics. They are easy to gather and unambiguous.
I am not familiar with stratified Cox proportional hazard regression which they used but a little Googling confirms that is a perfectly respectable and appropriate method.
With over 100,000 alpha cases and nearly 10,000 delta cases there is masses of data to support such an analysis.
Here’s an idea. Instead of speculating about suspicious motives there are behind the analysis – why don’t we try to understand what they have done and assess its validity? After all, there is no secret about the data or the methodology.
No need to speculate. SPI-B stated their objectives quite openly, and they are driving this process. It’s blatant. More grandiose join-the-dots type theories are highly speculative and implausible, but are not necessary to understand what’s going on.
And what are those objectives? (A link would be handy)
MTF, would you mind having a go at the questions I posted at 12:00 today? I’d be greateful for a fuller understanding of this adjustment process. As an oversimplification, for example, if the Alphas were older than the Deltas, do you adjust down or up and why?
Ben Sorry I only just saw this. As I say, I am not familiar with the stratification process they actually used but I am willing to have a bash explaining the principle of stratification. I apologise if what follows is obvious – it is hard to know where to begin! Let’s take one factor age as an example. The principle is simple. Age is a confounding variable which can result in confounding bias if not allowed for. Because there are proportionally more young people with the Delta variant than the Alpha variant and young people have a lower chance of going to A&E it can appear that it is the Delta variant that is reducing your chances of going to A&E when it is actually your age. What we really want to know is for two people of the same age, one with Alpha and the other with Delta, which is the more likely to end up in A&E and how big is the difference. Stratification is one way round this. You break up the population by age and work out the chances of each age group ending in A&E. The paradoxical thing is that it can work out that… Read more »
That is a very interesting reply, much appreciated, and even though it’s midnight on a friday and I am a bit worse for drink I can see from the illustrative table you gave here that the age cut offs you choose are crucial. I have to say that it appears you can manipulate the results by choosing your age groups, is that correct? So the lumped together stats are at least equally valid.
But as Michael Yeadon says, in the end, does it matter if overall all cause deaths are within the normal range, which they are? Newspapers have to sell stories and the govt have to keep up their profile, and statistics and modelling give them the ammo to do this.
There used to be a saying, “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Pre Covid it was just that, a saying, which it didn’t matter whether you took it seriously or not. Surely you wouldn’t deny there was some truth to it? Post Covid though, to repeat it has become heretical.
Ben The only realistic way you could manipulate the age groups would be to try and hide the confounding effect e.g. by choosing over 80 and under 80. In reality you stratify into more than two groups and the more groups you choose the more you allow for any confounding effect.(The limiting factor being that if you have two many age groups then the number of cases in each group is no longer statistically significant). Wrt to call cause mortality – we have to get away from this idea that there is one measure that matters. It depends what question you are trying to answer and even then there may be more than one measure relevant to the answer. The following are possible questions followed by possible ways of measuring the answer in brackets. How many people so far have died prematurely due getting infected with Covid? (died within 28 days of testing +ve, Covid as cause of death on certificate) How many people so far have died prematurely due to the Covid epidemic and our responses – including for example cancer patients deferred because hospitals were under stress, suicides due to lockdown etc. (excess age standardised all cause mortality… Read more »
I appreciate the answer but to me, the focus on Covid compared to, well, everything, is the idea to get away from, not all cause deaths.I think your last bullet point demonstrates the difficulty in managing this by statistics.
Ben
I didn’t say we need to get away from all cause deaths. I said we have to get away from this idea that there is one measure that is “correct”. There are many measures and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. In particular you need to be precise about the question you want to answer.
All cause mortality is itself a number of different measures. Do you mean age adjusted? Do you mean absolute mortality (which has very limited use) or excess mortality? Excess is useful but highly dependent on how you assess expected deaths.
This is interesting
https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/01/covid-vaccines-a-faltering-framework/
Are they right to be concerned? While it seems they just keep crying wolf, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll be right eventually.
If the vaccines were really effective then a more transmissible virus wouldn’t be a particular concern since it would still be difficult for it to transmit through the population but 2 things are starting to look likely.
1/ The vaccines don’t prevent transmission. We probably suspected this anyway but hoped there was enough resistance to prevent large outbreaks.
2/ The vaccines are driving the variants. The “variants of concern” include spike protein mutations which reduce the effectiveness of antibodies. This is particularly worrying since it could present a scenario similar to the one described by GVB which implies a non-stop race between virus and vaccines.
I really hope I’ve got this wrong.
Even if what they claim is correct, so what?
Theoretically it shouldn’t be a problem since a decent proportion of the population have gained immunity through natural infection while many of the the rest have been vaccinated.
But, the ZOE symptom app is showing a doubling of symptomatic cases in the past 2 weeks. If this continues it will raise doubts about the level of population immunity.
Are we just over-estimating natural immunity? The vaccines are clearly not preventing transmission. Are they becoming less effective due to the spike protein mutations in the variants?
Thank you for this Will Jones.
Could someone explain to me HOW you adjust for age, ethnicity, whatever? For example, you find (directly from the table) that 1,720 of 138,774, or 1.2% of Alpha variant positive die, while only 17 out of 9,427 or 0.2% Delta’s die.
Then what? You say “Ah! but the average age of the Alphas was, lets say, 75 but the Deltas were average 50. The Delta’s were in a 55% economically more deprived area blah blah” and you arrive at page 46 of the report, “severity” “Using stratified Cox proportional hazard regression” with the adjusted scarier figures that the Guardian used.
What does the Cox business actually do in the interim?
If the Deltas were younger, so what?
Does that put them at a disadvantage or an advantage?
What is wrong with the UK? There are well known early treatments for COVID. For goodness sake, use them, open the damn country and get on with your lives. You are destroying the lives and livelihood of hundreds of thousands. Something smells rotten.
I recall all those who bought into the whole ‘Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes’ claim that took us to war in the Gulf once again back in 2003. At the time I could not find a single person who thought that going to war in the Gulf again was a big mistake – most people I knew had bought into the whole msm-led WMD narrative and Blair had the public pretty much on his side and were eager for war – almost twenty years later and I cannot find a single person who still thinks that the second Gulf war was a good thing or even admit that they believed the WMD plot nevermind a good enough reason to go to war in the first place – as you know no WMD’s were found. When this covid farce is all over (which it will be) I often wonder how many people out there will admit to being totally fooled … wearing the masks, keeping 2 meters apart and following the one-way arrows on shopping mall floors etc? From what I have witnessed I would say 99% of the people I see out there have… Read more »
Plus, no one will admit to voting for Blair. I have relatives in the north east who although I distinctly remember them almost boasting about how the PM’s constituency was up there and them voting for him now refuse to admit to any of it.
Meanwhile in the US the whole narrative seems to be falling apart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1RHyr6U9MY
At 7 55 you can see Fauci discussing restart of the gain of function work in a secure fashion(in practice outsourced to Wuhan)
Seems Patrick Vallance knows quite a bit more about the virus origins than he’s letting on. According to Fauci email investigation:
https://youtu.be/DNxoVFZwMYw
Thanks for the link.An excellent presentation what happened durng the firts days in the outbreak.UK very much involved in a potential cover up.Share this video videly still available youtube.
Does anyone know if the cycle threshold has been increased again to catch more Indian variant ? I get that surge testing is happening but that still won’t explain the jump in cases ?