Does the Current Rise in Infections Prove the Virus isn’t Seasonal?
We’re publishing an original piece today by a retired Professor of Forensic Science and Biological Anthropology and an epidemiologist with a PhD from a Russell Group university asking whether the recent rise in infections from the Delta variant invalidates the hypotheses that SARS-CoV-2 is a seasonal virus. After all, if it was, you’d expect it to be declining in the U.K. and across other northern latitudes. But they suspect infections have peaked and are about to start falling. Here is an extract:
Does the recent rise in infections in the U.K. – despite mass vaccination and Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) – presage a substantial third wave in the summer? Does this rise effectively falsify the seasonality hypothesis?
Well, according to the Government’s own data, percent positivity in England is reported at 2.7 for the most recent available day (June 15th), having more than doubled from 1.3 on June 15th. Infections – number of positive tests reported – present a more complicated picture. They leapt to around 9,000 per day in England from 17th to June 18th, having almost plateaued at about 6,500 the week before. However, this jump occurred after the Government’s announcement of June 14th and may already be about to decline. The percentage change in the 7-day case rate has shown a steady fall since June 7th.
Worth reading in full.
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Of course not! It just shows that nobody did any mass testing for respiratory infections in previous years! And these are neither cases, nor infections in any meaningful sense.
the current blip is so small as to be unrecognisable. might happen every year with whatever is the dominant cold going round
there has been an outbreak of summer colds among the kids at local primary. nobody’s getting tested and just carrying on. the only difference is people are keeping their kids off school for a couple of days whereas in a normal year they’d send them in with some tissues.
I posted this earlier but it is relevant here also to show the virus looks like a seasonal virus and quacks like a seasonal virus.
Don’t really like this chart of English hospital covid labelled deaths (seven day average) by date of death, because it makes it look like there was a second wave bigger than the April 2020 wave. In reality much of the covid labelled deaths in the Autumn/Winter were normal winter deaths labelled up as covid.
But this caveat aside this is the up to date chart (based on deaths reported up to today) with an allowance for deaths that have occurred but not yet been reported at the end to avoid distorting the shape.
If you look at the far right of the chart it does show the nonsense of the talk of the third wave in the Summer.
and remember how they kept going on abut a third wave in europe
never existed
https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
“much of the covid labelled deaths in the Autumn/Winter were normal winter deaths labelled up as covid”
… as were a lot of deaths at any time you care to pick.
I doubt that a lot of pseudo-scientists are really that daft. They just prefer winding their necks in to doing proper science.
Thus – we’re back to the old truth that all-cause mortality is the only real data that we’ve got.
Total death rate was the first (in March 2020) and remains pretty much the only data point I care to mention to the fence-sitters. “Look,” I say, “this has never been anything other than a bad seasonal flu.”
Pathology is frighteningly difficult – especially with an ageing population.
Many of my acquaintances still label me a Conspiracy Theorist merely for pointing them in the direction of cold, hard facts on websites like our very own, government-approved Office for National Statistics. “Oh, you and your alternative “facts” “, they say to me.
Ah well.
The red line on my mod to your chart looks to me like the true path of a classic 2 wave infection curve, leaving the differnece as traditional winter deaths
“ Infections – number of positive tests reported”
Take no heed of anything else – it has to be bollocks in relation to the real world, even if interesting in terms of discovering bits of RNA.
See all them sports fans semi-populating the stadiums? The people trying to go on holiday abroad? There will have been a spike in number of people required to get a stick rammed up their nose to access social events since the start of summer. A lot of those sticks will have tested positive.
A lot of those sticks will have falsely tested positive.
fixed that for you.
Careless of me not to make that distinction, thank you.
Plus all the people on NHS waiting lists finally able to get treatment that it withheld until they get the swabs. It’s disgusting.
wave my arse
even by their own ludicrous statistics there isn’t one
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
“Oh, you and your alternative “facts”, Steve! Don’t you know people are dying? And all you can do is talk data! So callous…”
You are so right, people are dying from missed diagnoses, late diagnoses, hospital acquired infections, suicides and a massive backlog is building up and there is no vaccine for any of that.
Flu is seasonal in the USA. Covid peaked in the USA in the summer last year.
We have just one year’s complete data on seasonality. It is a brave statistician who makes a prediction for future years based on just one year’s data. Especially as the first year of a new virus is bound to be a bit different from the pattern when it has settled down and society has learned to live with it.
Nevertheless, I am guessing Covid will settle down into some kind of seasonal pattern based on its similarity to other respiratory viruses. But as no one has much idea how intense, reliable or long the seasons will be, that is not a very useful prediction.
Oh dear!
The diagnosis of seasonality (in itself a shorthand) isn’t based on ‘just one year’s data’.
It’s based on observation of climatic factors relating to spatial/geographic (and thus climatic) differences relating to the incidence of the virus across many countries.
What we have is a third wave of testing. Where is the illness? Where are the hospitalisations? Where are the deaths?
These are the latest data from Public Health Wales covering the pcr test results by test location for the past 2 days (they don’t report on Saturdays, so these figures are around double what you’d expect for a 24 hour period). Note, only 5 positive test results in NHS hospitals. For the whole of Wales. Over 2 days. What a scam!
The test means nothing! Its all a lie…
Exactly. I only had to read the heading ATL and thought “Here we go again. Another waste of time and effort by ‘Professors’ and ‘PhDs’ looking at minutiae and not at the simple facts of the matter which are there for all to see if they only looked. Do we really have to explain everything to these so called experts from the beginning?” Their only excuse can be that they are being paid to mislead.
It is quite clear that the impact of Covid over time has affected quite different age ranges. The first wave hit mainly the elderly and infirm and killed a high proportion. Cases were relatively few because testing was negligible so mainly symptomatic cases were picked up.
The second wave affected almost every age group but still it was mainly the elderly who died. Positive test rates were high but so was testing.
The current ripple affects only the younger age groups (predominantly 15 to 30). Case numbers are high because testing is high, deaths are very low and although hospital admission rates have gone up by small numbers (note they now use percentage rises because the actual numbers are so small) and hospital stays are very short, so the NHS capacity is nowhere near threatened.
Once the virus has worked its way though the youngsters, there is no group left to sustain any mass outbreak. There is plenty of evidence that current strain is not affecting anyone other than the young, so there really are no grounds to be worried about new strains.
I believe this i what is known as a casedemic.
Btw, speaking of summer excess deaths… during heatwave of 2003. in France, excess deaths peaked at the same height as during c19-lockdown excess in spring 2020 (even more equal when accounting for population difference between 2003 and 2020). When taking into account age difference, the heat wave peak was more pronounced among 15-64 age group than 2020 spring peak (and there’s no winter 2020/21 peak for this age group).
Off course the 2020-21 peaks (for all ages) are broader, but that’s not so important for reasons of health service capacity.
In any case, as I have read, the French politicians were on holiday during that heatwave of 2003. They were criticized for not preparing health services but that’s it. No one thought that you have to turn country upside down, just prepare the health service.
https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
An infectious disease allows plenty of scope for power grabs that other public health challenges don’t
If you had to invent a means for governments to increase their power easily it would look a lot like COVID
They did, and it is.
We had an exeptionally cold and late spring. So I don’t think the outbreak of “cases” necessarily disproves the seasonality.
In any case, the number of cases is more a function of the level of testing and the inadequacies of the test method, than any meaingful resurgence of virus prevalence.
Delta or Indian Variant – Real World Impact? We Now have the DATA! – YouTube
Deadly variant or political scariant?
If it’s not in part seasonal, how can one explain the disappearance of covid last summer in the UK, before vaccines and masks, with fairly light LD restrictions? And the same in lots of US States.
People also forget last spring/summer was by UK standards fantastic weather. It was hot, it was humid, it was sunny (loads of UV) and in addition this made people did more outdoors.
This year its much colder,much less humid, much less UV and much wetter which also forces people indoors more.
“Season” isnt important in as much its the actual climate and weather created by it.
Australia’s top medical officer on Monday urged countrymen who have received an AstraZeneca COVID shot to “not delay” getting the second dose – even though the vaccine has been linked to more deaths than COVID in Australia this year.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/06/21/covid-vaccine-variant-afghanistan-canada-mexico-delta/7765857002/
Aussie develops rare immune disease days after getting AstraZeneca jab
A ‘fit, healthy and active’ woman has developed a crippling immune disease just days after receiving the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/aussie-develops-rare-immune-disease-days-after-getting-astrazeneca-jab/ar-AAL6QQ6
Poor lamb. And if she’d got Covid, she’d have been fine.
So a Professor and a (Phd) Doctor have produced a dogs breakfast of an article.
May age adjusted excess deaths were at an all time low in the UK.
Who cares what ‘cases’ show, they are completely manipulated and at this time of year are likely to be overwhelmingly false postives.
Waste of space.
Every time you use the phrase “third wave”, even in ironic air quotes, and even in a piece where you cast doubt on it, you are using their vocabulary, just as surely as whnn they use it. When they drop it non-emphatically into a sentence as a justification for whatever – more testing, more restrictions, more worry, more segregation – with that weird glint of self-satisfaction in their eyes (the same glint as when they smile talking about the “new normal”). When you argue with them using theiv vocabulary, you’re playing their game. And their game is RIGGED. A study that concludes “this probably isn’t a third wave” is grist to their mill just as much as a Ferguson model. Stop all talk of waves, spikes and blips. Stop diddling about trying to prove to them that things aren’t quite as and terrible and scary as they want everyone to believe. I think that people, generally, are pretty clueless about statistics and probability. We saw this with the survey that showed respondents on average believing 7% (was it?) of the population had died of COVID. The numbers are too vast or too tiny to make sense of. Before the “pandemic”… Read more »
I’ve always been baffled by the “it’s like seasonal flu” idea. After all, Taiwan has just had a serious outbreak–which it has now got under control, showing the rest of the world how it’s done, by the way–and the weather is miserably hot–I’m there right now so believe me. Thailand has also seen cases rise dramatically in the last couple of months, and the weather there April through June is hot as Hades. And the Indian epidemic has raged during that country’s hot season (April to June) while cases started rising in the Indian spring (February March). This idea of COVID being a cold-weather or winter illness relies on a strange European or US mindset completely ignorant of what the weather is like elsewhere at which times (hint, not everywhere in the northern hemisphere has its hottest weather in June, July and August).
Um. Positive test results aren’t infections. Let’s help the Govt cook the books shall we? Add in a load of quite alive people as ‘Covid deaths’. They will die someday. It’s just that, Ferguson and Michie spend all day coming up with nonsense like this.