Omicron BA.5 Wave Begins in U.K. as Infections Rise
Reported infections are heading up again in the U.K. After two successive waves associated with each of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2, this one is associated with BA.4 and BA.5. The ONS infection survey shows a small rise in the week ending June 2nd.
The reported infection data in the last week bears out that this trend is continuing.
ONS variant data show the rise is being driven by some combination of Omicron BA.4 and BA.5, the new subvariants first detected in South Africa. Data on CoVariants suggest BA.5 is likely to be the more dominant.
The rise is across most age groups and regions.
Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 were very undeadly in South Africa but BA.4 appears to be causing a new wave of Covid deaths in Portugal.
This is interesting as Portugal is much more highly vaccinated than South Africa.
Whatever happens in the U.K., let’s hope that the days of panic and aping authoritarian China are behind us.
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Already got that one. Voice a bit hoarse for 3 days, caused a singe 10s coughing fit. Again, no luck with the deadly new variant we kept being promised not that long ago.
PS: Making people pay for contributing useful and/ or intestesting stuff to the site is not a good idea. I’ll watch this for another month, then, I’ll probably leave, too.
I agree that BTL was in many ways the lifeblood of this excellent website. But taking our bats and balls home just because many of us have contributed some interesting material every so often is no reason not to help keep it alive with a small amount of cash (or big, if you can afford it). And after all, where else will you find such a collection of wonderful minds to communicate with? Think of it like a club membership fee – nothing comes for free.
We should arrange some in-person events – Toby?
I’ve been making a monthly donation of £13.33 every month since August last year and absolutely don’t mind continuing to do this. But most of the people who used to write the comments I was most interested in seem to be gone. In addition, this is also a bad idea because it stops people who usually don’t comment from just writing something because they really believe it should be said.
I might be mistaken about this, but I think this site is about to turn into another mostly-dead preaching outlet where the local high priests educate the local unwashed (and silent) masses about their idea of what the scriptures really mean. And this is much less interesting to me than what used to happen here before the idea with fiver-a-month comment subscription.
I wholeheartedly share your concerns. For me, however, DS has saved my sanity, and for that I owe them something; at the very least I need to give this thing a chance.
Absolutely. I am surrounded by Covid Believers who are vaccinated as much as they can be and some are looking forward to getting their next booster. Reading this site and knowing there are others out there who are Unbelievers like me is a source of comfort – and I genuinely mean that.
I do get that it’s annoying to have to pay for something one has got used to getting for free, but I’m not going to forget easily the lifeline that Lockdown Sceptics lent me in the darkest most depressing moments of this covid madness.
I’m also hopeful the BTL commentary will pick up. When they did their first overhaul of the site and moved from the single comments section to one for each news item, the number of comments collapsed but in time picked up and became pretty vibrant again. Hoping the same will happen again..
I am not sure it’s so much the paying as having your PayPal or payment details associated with your login. We all saw what happened in Canada.
For goodness sake, aren’t we getting a bit hung up here? This is a very small ask: A fiver a month to do comments, the main content for FREE and a bit of advertising! All you who think that their own personal saviours on the internet can keep providing their services for diddly squat are going pie-in-the-sky.
How about doing your own research? That’s the beauty of the internet… It’s FREE… and it’s free only because of ADVERTISING.
Get a grip, people. There’s this little thing called COSTS, and they have to be covered. This site has provided an excellent service at minimal cost since the start of 2020, but it’s scaled up since then and obviously need an extra bit of juice to power it on. Take the finances out of any enterprise and it will disappear into the ether.
Much appreciated.
Ok Toby.
Hear hear!!! Toby and his crew deserve every penny they get they have literally saved many many people like me from going completely bonkers. Paying a fiver a month to keep one’s sanity has got to be excellent value for money. I really can’t thank them enough. As you say David 101 “get a grip people” nothing in life is free.
And in these days of genocidal maniacs, it is pretty certain that they have literally saved people by helping them to make informed choices about their health, and by pushing back against the lethal lockdowns.
As for the btl comments, thinking of it from Toby’s point of view, there were over 1,000 comments a day when I first signed up. There are probably all sorts of people demanding that he keep some sort of order (re. libel, abuse etc.). He only has a small team, and none of them are getting rich running this site. One can hardly blame him if he does want to make it more manageable. Yes, there may be a downside, particularly at first (though picking up a bit now – over 100 comments for one day!). But we need to remember that the real enemy are people like the duplicitous Times muppet who tried to dismiss us all as “anti-vaxxers” (I suspect a more accurate description for most of us would be “covid ‘vaccine’ ” realists).
I don’t look upon the £5 as a charge for being able to comment-just seems like a fiver well spent if it means the site carries on
It doesn’t matter how you look at this. It’s a charge for commenting which apparently drove loads of people away who used to spend a considerable amount of time and effort contributing useful or interesting stuff here, IOW, it’s doubly counter-productive: It cannot generate much revenue and makes the site vastly less interesting. In the long run, this benefits no one, including that it doesn’t benefit the people who had this idea. So far, this literally seems to be a case of Let’s try what happens when hitting one’s own thumb with a hammer. And the answer to that is It’s gonna hurt.
Let me make a suggestion – if you can set up a site as good as DS, entirely self funded and as well run I promise I will sign up. You won’t get a penny off me but I will contribute at the very least a very dry sense of humour and the occasional comment that skewers.
I will of course continue to support DS.
Let me know when you are up and running.
So, if this site disappears, any ideas what’s left?
FWIW I’ve gleaned so much from contributors here, mostly like minded.
We have medics, statisticians, virologists/ immunologists etc. contributing and commenting.
It’s a bit like the BBC. Lol.
We’ve got to get ready to combat the next wave – of attacks on the refuseniks who are being set up to be blamed for the continuing refusal of covid to go away despite the miracle jabs.
The reality though is it’s BECAUSE of the bloody jabs. GVB et al.
And, for God’s sake please spread this round :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
We saw friends last night who were waiting to find out if their son-in-law would be allowed home from hospital. He’s gone earlier in the day with breathing problems and pains in his chest. He was diagnosed with micro-blood clots as a result of having had Covid and sent home late in the evening. I asked if he was vaccinated. Of course he’s been vaccinated. He’s also had Covid. I asked which came first, Vaccine or Covid. The answer was vaccine. I asked if they knew that the vaccine caused micro clots in young men of his age (36) and the look of shock on their faces was astonishing. I suggested they look it up on the internet but somehow I don’t imagineer they will…
You want free at the point of reading – go to the BBC.
Exactly, EppingBlogger. Ya gets what ya choose to pay for.
This is kind of the opposite of the BBC, where people who don’t want to pay for their rubbish still have to pay – whereas we are choosing to pay for a quality service.
And exactly how do you think this site and others like it will pay for themselves?
Ta ra.
Your comments by and large suggest you are one of the following:
A person currently employed in public service.
An ex public service employee.
Somebody on state benefits.
Aside from whether one should donate or not, I don’t see the option to upload a picture any more.
Yes, I struggled with that yesterday. No more memes or screenshots.
I’ve just signed up. I don’t comment very often so was in two minds when the announcement was first made, as it also seemed like a bit of an own goal to do this. But I’ve been thinking about it this week (impossible to avoid due to the massive drop in comments) and the following occurred to me: (all very much speculation!) it is likely that DS got a D notice which is why that article was pulled I’m pretty sure that there is a legal (?) requirement to monitor content so BTL comments could have been included in that. Making people pay does help minimise the trolls. £5 a month isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. If we shy from paying this little, where do we go? What other websites are out there? LS really made me feel less like I was going mad during the lockdowns. They have been less great on the Ukraine war, but that leads back to my first point if I find I am paying too much in subscriptions I will cancel my DT one, which these days is just a lesson in bad propaganda anyway. and on a personal note I’d… Read more »
Use it (and make a small contribution in order to do so) or you’ll lose it.
I’m retired and on a fixed income which is now under pressure … but I decided to make a small cutback elsewhere to pay £5 a month for this site ….. because it helped keep me sane for 2 years.
This reads like something from May 2020 to be honest.
Sh1tt1n6 hell! Oh god, not again! QUICK! Close down all small businesses! Let Tesco stay open, but with social distancing and mask mandates! Superglue face masks to unborn children! Rush out experimental gene therapies – no time to test them – everyone will be dead in a few weeks unless we get several jabs in all arms on the planet Turn all western democracies into totalitarian nightmares, encourage the police to beat the crap out of anyone not following the “rules” – go for a 70 mile drive to test your eyesight with your kids in the car “just to make sure you are safe”. Take the p155 out of the public on an industrial scale while getting drunk and having a laugh (that last one is for elected officials only) Close churches, ban Easter and Christmas, force everyone to carry vaccine passports to be able to buy a loaf of bread! Tell everyone to pretend to be ill even if they are not. Ban autopsies. Send infected old people back to care homes to kill a few more old people off. Ban travel. Murder everyone’s pets just in case they’re “spreading it”. Weld people into their houses. Insist on… Read more »
Tell everyone to pretend to be ill even if they are not.
Act like you got it was the most baffling COVID message I ever encountered. How am I (or is anyone) supposed to play act being infected with a virus? Maybe something like the medieval procedure for leapers in Germany, walk around with a handbell you keep ringing while shouting “Unrein! Unrein!” (Unclean! Unclean!) to warn others?
Do you think BA4 and 5 will replace the monkeypox?
The cynic in me says that it won’t replace it, but instead it will “breed” with it to form a never seen before super virus called “coronapox”. I simulated this on a computer just now (in just 5 lines of BASIC), so we know it exists. This new virus / disease causes previously fit and healthy adults to die suddenly of strokes, blood clots, heart disease and suffer from shingles-like rashes. It will explain the excess death we’ve been seeing and is the reason that many doctors are “baffled” at the moment as to why young people keep dying for no particular reason. As it’s a new type of virus (the bastard child of monkeypox and covid) which spreads in all sorts of different ways (airborne, via any surface, via people doing cash transactions, via radio waves / internet meetings) and it can only be killed by exposure to gamma radiation, money will be banned and we’ll just have to be locked up without power until a suitable mRNA jab can be rushed out. As it has a mortality rate of 99.97%, The only way out of this mess is to jab everyone (even the unborn in the womb) every… Read more »
Quite the visionary…
Excellent review 👍 + don’t forget Wancock laughing as he announced William Shakespeare as the first Jab recipient on morning TV ! Bull Shit , from start to “finish“ .. oh hang on .. 🤯
That is a cracking post CB2. A well deserved top of the leader board post.
Small rise – not a trend yet.
More of a ripple in the UK than a wave I’d say.
Let’s not forget about the level of accuracy with the technique used. With any luck, a lot of ONS people will be off on Summer holidays soon.
So what?
Loving those safe and effective vaccines.
Ah, well. Time for another lockdown methinks.
Check out Dr. John Campbell on this one. The latest round of boosters might be the smoking gun…
“Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 were very undeadly in South Africa but BA.4 appears to be causing a new wave of Covid deaths in Portugal.”
“This is interesting as Portugal is much more highly vaccinated than South Africa.”
says it all, really.
We keep hearing about highly vaccinated countries getting more Covid cases and deaths but do they show up in excess mortality statistics? I’m sure there must be a lot of mis-attribution going on with normal deaths being attributed to Covid in countries that are highly tuned in to the narrative.
Article exploring further the link between percentage of population injected with the toxic bioweapon, infections & deaths.
https://www.conservativereview.com/portugal-as-an-enduring-embarrassment-of-the-failure-of-the-mass-vaccination-campaign-2657482411.html
According to the HSJ – Health Service Journal – the number of patients with covid admitted to hospital rose in the seven days to 7 June – although the proportion being treated ’primarily’ for the condition dropped to a record low, official data suggests.
Why are they still doing the ‘tests’?