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UK Govt Coronavirus Response: Sceptics Thread


sancho panza

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sancho panza

vis lockdown sceptics

https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/

There Is No Evidence Lockdowns Saved Lives. It Is Indisputable They Caused Great Harm

by BriggsPosted on May 14, 2020

The US has a little more than 4% of the world population. Yet, throughout the end of April and through mid-May, the US claimed to have about a third of the reported coronavirus cases and a quarter to a third of reported death worldwide. What accounts for these amazing numbers?

By any measure, the US has a much better healthcare system than the Philippines (PI). The country has about a third of the US population, at 106.7 million. Just to pick a date, on May 12, 2020 the PI reported 11,086 cases and 726 deaths, according to Worldometer. This represents 213 cases per million residents, and 7 per million deaths. The US reported 4,187 cases per million, and 247 deaths per million, 20 and 30 times higher than the PI. The PI also had variable lockdowns, as did the US, with Manila reportedly facing the strictest measures, similar to some areas in the US.

One obvious difference in numbers is the level of testing. The US surely carried out testing more assiduously than did the PI. The same site claimed the US carried out 29 thousand tests per million, with only 1,600 per million in the PI. But with lower deaths, a country needs fewer tests.

Without question, the media, including non-American media, focused on the US. And perhaps the US was quicker to ascribe deaths to coronavirus. Who knows what the PI policy was for ascribing deaths. The weather in the PI, too, was much better— that is, hotter and sunnier—than in the areas of the US with the largest deaths, New York, Chicago, and Detroit metropolitan areas, which all had lousy weather. A late spring, with cool temperatures and a lot of rain.

Taiwan is a country of 24 million people and had, on the same date, 440 cases and 7 deaths, or 0.3 per million. With no lockdowns and relatively good weather. We heard much about Sweden, which only took modest measures. Sweden has less than half the population of Taiwan. Sweden had 26,670 reported cases, and 3,256 reported deaths, or 2,641 and 322 per million, respectively. It had worse weather.

Belgium has about as many people as Sweden, 11.5 million, though more spread out. They had 53,449 reported cases and 8,707 reported deaths, or 4,612 and 751 per million respectively, the worst of all countries. Three times worse than the US. The Belgian and US lockdown were similar, with the Belgian being slightly stricter, and easier to monitor and control given the country’s size.

There were 12 countries (with at least a million people) that had, on May 12, reported death rates greater than 100 per million. These were, from worst to best, Belgium, Spain, Italy, UK, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Ireland, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Portugal. Each country besides Sweden (which had some impositions) had lockdowns, in varying severity.

There were 31 countries (of at least one million) with reported death rates from 11 to 99 per million. These included, from worst to best, Denmark (92), Germany (91), Iran (80), Norway (41), Israel (30), Mexico (28), Russia (14), and Greece (14). Lockdowns varied widely, as we’ll see.

There were 51 countries (of at least one million) with reported death rates from 1 to 10 per million. These included Japan (with modest measures), South Korea (with more stringent measures), both at 5 per million, Singapore, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Paraguay, India, China, and a host of African countries.

Finally, there were 30 countries (also at least one million) with reported deaths under 1 per million. These included Thailand, Taiwan, Jordan, Hong Kong, Botswana, Syria, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and so on.

Let’s look at in pictures. I first went through every country and classified whether that country had a government-imposed lockdown of at least half its population, for any time in 2020. The sources were saved, so you can check for yourself. I welcome correction and amplifications! Download the data here. Or ignore it altogether. The spread in death rates is more then sufficient proof against lockdowns, as we’ll see.

lockdown1.png?resize=750%2C417&ssl=1

This is a histogram of the deaths per million population for those countries with at least a population of one million, broken down by lockdowns and no lockdowns. Iceland, population about a third of a million, did not have a lockdown, thus does not appear. They had a death rate of 29 per million.

The scale is by log base 10, a necessity because of the enormous variability in death rates. Countries which did not have lockdowns are in green. If anything, these are are clustered at the lower end of death rates, but the evidence is far from conclusive.

Another way to look at it, because of the potential for population density to play a role, is a plot of the death rate per million by the population, for countries with at least one million.

lockdown2.png?resize=750%2C417&ssl=1

The two top population points are, of course, China and India. The highest death rates were discussed above. Again, death rates were more than highly variable: they were all over the place! Vietnam, which reported 0 deaths, does not appear.

Lockdowns ranged from severe, as in China’s Wuhan, to practically non-existent or highly localized, as in Botswana, where major cities saw greater control. If lockdowns worked as advertised, then we would not expect to see such enormous variability in the reported death rates. Belgium, again, had 751 per million, and Ethiopia, population 109.2 million, had the lowest reported non-zero death rate of 0.04 per million. This is a difference of 19 thousand times!

Ethiopia did declare a state of emergency, but had no lockdown. They also had from the US a “$37m package which encompassed case management, infection prevention and control, laboratory strengthening, public health screening, and communications and media campaigns, among others.”

Vietnam, population 95.5 million, which had a lockdown (they reported 18,000 businesses were forced to close), reported 0 deaths.

Sweden did better than the UK, and there couldn’t have been a greater difference in strategies. In the US, South Dakota, which had no lockdown, did 7 times better than Chicago (or all Illinois), which did.

Brazil did not have a country-wide lockdown, but a handful of cities threatened, and some carried out local measures. Same kind of thing in the US, with of course harsh mandatory measures in more enlightened cities, to nothing in all in some flyover cities. Japan did not have a lockdown and did fine, relatively speaking. It’s never mentioned in the press, though. Wonder why? Georgia (the country) appeared only to lockdown Tblisi.

Some countries locked down only a few major cities or ports, others cut off foreign travel, and either left their citizens alone or only issued warnings. Some lockdowns were esoecially harsh, with food shortages happening fast, like in Paraguay. Lithuania required people to wear coronavirus bracelets to indicate their health status. Foreign workers in Qatar concentrated on their lockdowns in camps. Albania scanned the grounds using drones to find lockdown scofflaws. Even nomads in Western Sahara were ordered to stay in their tents!

There is a sort of trend of lower death rates in hotter countries, or in areas of larger countries with better weather, like the US. Population density also played a part. It easier to spread any bug in tightly packed quarters, than when people are spread far apart. People mattered, of course. Australia and New Zealand, both locked down, and both had 4 per million death rates, but then it was summer in both places at the start of the pandemic, and the people are largely similar.

Obviously, many, many other things varied between countries. Age and healthy of citizens. Old and decrepit in Europe? Younger and more robust in Africa? Compliance of people was of every possible status. In some countries, there was not as much oversight on lockdowns, and even in those without lockdowns some measures were taken, as in Taiwan. In Guinea police fired on lockdown protesters. In Somalia police fired and hit their targets, killing lockdown protesters. In Michigan no shots were fired, but the politicians began sweating.

Reporting also varied widely, and wildly. The West went with hour-by-hour breathless updates for every number. The press trumpeted each new increase, besides themselves with glee for an opportunity to feel important. We hardly heard from, or about, African countries.

And then the medical systems are also vastly different among all these countries. Some numbers seemed more reliable than others. Tajikistan only a few deaths (2 per million), which some said was a lie. Who knows? Everybody is sure China lied. Did Japan? Did Belarus? Over-counting and excessive nervousness caused uncertainty in the numbers in the West. Incapacity, or lack of interest or resources, or even government intervention, as in China, muddied the numbers elsewhere.

In the end, it does not come down to country- or even city-level statistics. It comes down to people. Each individual catches the bug or not, lives or dies. Not because of their country, but because of themselves, their health, their circumstances. Any given individual might have benefited from self-quarantine and loss of job. Just as any given individual might have come to a bad end from a lockdown. The only possible way to know is to measure each case. Which can never happen.

What should we conclude? Strike that. What can we conclude. Only one thing: we cannot conclude that lockdowns worked.

The only evidence for lockdowns is the desire that lockdowns worked. That, and the embarrassment (and worse) in admitting to error. What politician anywhere will cop to ruining their economy and the lives of millions of their citizens? Who can say “Ah, it was only a few trillion”? This will not happen. It just won’t. All politicians will and much go on repeating that their lockdowns “saved lives”.

They have to. It’s suicide not to. They are all talking out their nether regions. What’s the answer, the realpolitik? Let those leaders say “My plan worked” get away with it. And dispose of those who revealed themselves a petty martinets, dictators in training, and assholes. You can read into “dispose” whatever you like. Whatever happens to politicians should happen harder and longer to journalists. In any case, a global purge of braggarts will not happen.

This virus, as viruses will, found its way to all corners of the world, and it affected different areas differently. End of story.

There is a distinct tendency, at least in the Western media, to ascribe merit and blame for every event to people. What egos we all have!

In the US it went like this. The virus was caused or exacerbated by the political party I disfavor. If persons in the party I favored were listened to, this would not have been as big a crisis. The virus spread so rapidly because of the actions of the party I disfavor. The party I favor helped stem the tide and saved lives. The crisis would have ended sooner, and more lives would have been saved, if the people in the party I hate were ignored. Science saved us!

Nature gets no credit. Not for the creation of the virus, not for its highly variable spread, not for its highly variable infection rate, and certainly not for its hugely variable deaths caused. All those things were believed to be the responsibility of people. Nature has no real power, we think. It can be controlled to any degree of precision desired, if only we can muster sufficient political will and suppress our enemies.

We can credit, as we’ve already seen, the lockdowns for causing any number of difficulties, such as massive job loss, grief, disharmony, terror, and even death. It cause hubris to rise to the bursting point.

But the pandemic numbers suggest that this was yet another in an endless string of viruses that came, did its damage, and is fading into the background. It was not nearly as deadly as others, not even in the last 100 years, and it was worse than some.

Chances are we can do little to prevent pandemics like this. It’s the expectation that we can that inspired the panic. If we don’t remove that expectation, we’re going to have to go through this again.

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On 15/05/2020 at 23:53, sancho panza said:

 

The Blavatnik School of Government provides an estimate of Lockdown “stringency” (100 being complete lockdown). I put the numbers for a few countries into a spreadsheet. What you find is that there is no statistical relationship between the stringency of lockdown (at the end of March) and a country’s rate of COVID-19 infections and deaths (per million of population – numbers from Our World in Data). There is, as you would expect, a stronger statistical relationship between the degree of stringency and projected fiscal deficits (estimated by the IMF, and already massively understating the problem).

Never have some many sacrificed so much for so little…

 

So little, i spent time with the kids, built a pond, a tree house, taught my boy to jump a bmx bike.. 

I hate to say it but i really enjoyed lockdown.. If i could have 5 weeks off paid every year + my 6 weeks holiday I would love it..

Do we not all think on this website that the economy was dead anyway? 

productivity is down

manufacturing sector has been destroyed

We are just a floating housing ponzi scheme and a place for rich Russians to hide they're money..

An economy can never function with so many badly paid jobs topped up with benefits.. 

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Chewing Grass
45 minutes ago, macca said:

An economy can never function with so many badly paid jobs topped up with benefits.. 

It can if you can just print money/debt and have off-shored most of the manufacturing of the goods you need to those who will take your money.

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16 minutes ago, Chewing Grass said:

It can if you can just print money/debt and have off-shored most of the manufacturing of the goods you need to those who will take your money.

unless we have a currency crisis from all the printed money.. then with our 50% food imports comes the riots when people start to run out of food..

we have not been able to feed ourselves for many years.. too many people

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back at work now and finding out people i know have had covid with tests to prove it..

Indian guy i work with and his wife have had it, the wife who works in the NHS has had an x ray that shows permanent scaring to her lungs

He also told me he knows 3 other indian people who have died from it and 2 others that have had it in Watford where he lives..

mother and daughter 19 and 41 both died and a man he knows 40 also died..

There have been reports that black and Asian people seem more susceptible to the virus but the ages of all those that have died are not exactly the old people we are being convinced are the problem..

As we all go back to work, who trust's Boris.. 

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sancho panza

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-coronavirus-europe-lockdown-excess-deaths-recession/

With governments across Europe reopening their economies for business, it’s a good moment to look back on the different paths taken to control Covid-19 outbreaks to try to see how effective they were.

The chart below shows the relative severity of Europe’s restrictions based on work done by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, which tracks a range of measures and scores how stringent they’ve been each step of the way.

Reaction Time

For many European countries, stringency levels increased substantially after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, even when their case loads were low
image.png.0f0632ffef4dc0f81cb8488d26b5d493.png

While not a gauge of whether the decisions taken were the right ones, nor of how strictly they were followed, the analysis gives a clear sense of each government’s strategy for containing the virus. Some — above all Italy and Spain — enforced prolonged and strict lockdowns after infections took off. Others — especially Sweden — preferred a much more relaxed approach. Portugal and Greece chose to close down while cases were relatively low. France and the U.K. took longer before deciding to impose the most restrictive measures.

But, as our next chart shows, there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

Deadly Outcomes

Deaths above normal ranges shows the European countries that struggled to contain their Covid-19 outbreaks

While not a gauge of whether the decisions taken were the right ones, nor of how strictly they were followed, the analysis gives a clear sense of each government’s strategy for containing the virus. Some — above all Italy and Spain — enforced prolonged and strict lockdowns after infections took off. Others — especially Sweden — preferred a much more relaxed approach. Portugal and Greece chose to close down while cases were relatively low. France and the U.K. took longer before deciding to impose the most restrictive measures.

But, as our next chart shows, there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

image.thumb.png.ec6cbc5e71219e56371d36697862c66b.png

In Europe, roughly three groups of countries emerge in terms of fatalities. One group, including the U.K., the Netherlands and Spain, experienced extremely high excess mortality. Another, encompassing Sweden and Switzerland, suffered many more deaths than usual, but significantly less than the first group. Finally, there were countries where deaths remained within a normal range such as Greece and Germany.

Yet the data show that the relative strictness of a country’s containment measures had little bearing on its membership in any of the three groups above. While Germany had milder restrictions than Italy, it has been much more successful in containing the virus.

The overall impression is that while restrictions on movement were seen as a necessary tool to halt the spread of the virus, when and how they were wielded was more important than their severity. Early preparation, and plentiful health-care resources, were enough for several countries to avoid draconian lockdowns. Germany, with better testing and contact tracing and more intensive care units than its neighbors, could afford to keep the economy a bit more open. Greece, by acting quickly and surely, appears to have avoided the worst, so far.

As one would expect, the countries with the most intense lockdowns look likely to suffer the most economically. What’s not clear yet is how much economic benefit countries with relatively lax curbs really stand to gain, given the integrated and trade-driven nature of the European economy. The export-led Swedish economy is set to shrink 7% this year, its government said on Tuesday. Germany, whose economy was shrinking before the pandemic, is already in recession. These countries may bounce back earlier than others next year, but this is a painful moment for all.

The Economic Pain of Shutting Down

Early data show that countries with harsher responses to Covid-19 also suffered more economically

image.png.5f97e54fd19bff972d778811c5316abf.png

The economic data for the lockdown period are only just appearing, and they may be revised substantially in the future given the obvious difficulties of collecting data during a pandemic. Regardless, what the past few months suggest is that the economic cost is not the only downside to a draconian lockdown. The Covid-19 experience has taught us that it’s far better to respond quickly and smartly, with the right technology and mass testing and tracing, rather than only relying on the crudest of shutdowns. If there are second waves of the virus, we shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the first.

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sancho panza

Great piece from Prof Ramesh Thukar re Australia and Asia.

https://johnmenadue.com/ramesh-thakur-coronavirus-data-prove-australia-is-in-asia/

RAMESH THAKUR. Coronavirus data prove Australia is in Asia

Cross-jurisdiction comparisons are notoriously difficult and it’s almost impossible to prove lockdowns have saved lives, except by falling back tautologically on the epidemiological model’s own projections of mortality figures with no lockdown.

Yet, in most cases countries with different lockdown strategies show broadly similar coronavirus curves that reached its inflection point before lockdown measures began to affect it. Yinon Weiss, writing for RealClearPolitics (21 May), has a sharp and succinct summary of the Covid-19 story thus far:

In the face of a novel virus threat, China clamped down on its citizens. Academics used faulty information to build faulty models. Leaders relied on these faulty models. Dissenting views were suppressed. The media flamed fears and the world panicked.
That is the story of what may eventually be known as one of the biggest medical and economic blunders of all time. The collective failure of every Western nation, except one, to question groupthink will surely be studied by economists, doctors, and psychologists for decades to come.

Fig-1.1.-CV-deathsmn-300x192.png

For this article I am going to become a ‘graphodisiac’. Figure 1 depicts the lack of correlation between lockdown measures and coronavirus deaths in selected countries. The visually striking worst, despite having had a lockdown for two months, is Belgium with a Covid-19 death rate of 804 per million people. Over 56,000 Belgians have been infected and over 9,000 have died. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research examined the US states and concluded: ‘we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group’.

A Bloomberg article by Elaine He (20 May) crunched data from 17 European countries from 1 January to 15 May, looking at severity of restrictions and dates when they were implemented. According to her analysis, ‘the data show that the relative strictness of a country’s containment measures had little bearing on [success] … in containing the virus’. More important than the stringency of the measures is their timing and manner of implementation, with early preparation and adequate healthcare resources being especially critical.

‘R’ is defined as the mean number of people cross-infected by one case. It is the magic number informing all epidemiological models of the likely progression of the virus under different scenarios and how to keep it below 1, the threshold at which infections grow in the overall population. A good example of the R number falling below 1 before a lockdown was imposed and staying so throughout comes from Germany. This chart from the Robert Koch Institute shows that by 23 March, when the most severe lockdown measures were imposed, R was already below 1 and in the following weeks did not decline any further (Figure 2). That is, the lockdown made no appreciable difference to R.

Fig-1.2.-Germanys-curve-300x160.png

Geography seems a far more striking feature of the variance than lockdown and other policy interventions. For reasons as yet unknown, coronavirus hit Europe and the US (especially New York) particularly hard, while Asia and the Pacific have so far been spared its worst ravages. Europe and North America combined host only 14% of the world’s population but make up 75% and 86% of the world’s total of the coronavirus infected and dead people. By contrast Asia (using the UN definition that includes West Asia), with 60% of the world’s population, accounts for just 16% and 8% of infections and dead, while Africa’s shares are 17%, 1.5% and 0.8%, respectively. One line of speculation looks at the possibility that Europe and the US were hit by a particularly virulent mutation of Covid-19.

No doubt the scientific explanation will come in due course. As a generalisation, it would appear that seasonal flu tends to be more lethal per infection in developing countries that do not have prophylactic vaccination programs, while Covid-19 has been deadlier in the developed world because of the greater cohort of elderly people already afflicted with other serious ailments.

Meanwhile the statistics point to an interesting geographical counterpoint to a long-standing geopolitical discourse about Australia’s national identity. Based on our low number of infections and deaths, we quite clearly belong to Asia rather than the North Atlantic community. Or deaths stand at 4.0 per million people. But when put into the Asian context, this is not quite so impressive as the politicians would have us believe, which is also the narrative that journalists seem mostly to have bought hook, line and sinker. Against Asian benchmarks, with lockdowns Australia and New Zealand are at the higher end of the spectrum despite the reality that very few of our Asian neighbours locked down their countries (Table 1).

Table-1.1.-CV-deaths-300x56.png

More on this later, but for now let’s note another critical point of relevance. We have the massive advantages of being an island country well distant from the China-based origins of the virus, vast open spaces, sunshine as the best disinfectant, largely single family dwellings, low reliance on mass transit, etc. And unlike in the northern hemisphere where the pandemic’s full fury struck mid-winter at the height of the flu season, it arrived in Australia in the latter part of summer. By contrast Taiwan, which lies just 130km offshore from China, has 1.2mn people living or working there, and 3–4mn travel between the two territories annually. Vietnam too shares a border with China yet, as of 20 May, quite remarkably it had not recorded a single death from Covid-19. It’s worth reflecting for a few minutes on the relative geographical, seasonal, demographic and housing circumstance of Australia and Hong Kong. The comparison puts Australia’s sense of triumphalism into perspective.

Fig-1.3.-India-CV-cases-deaths-300x96.pn

There’s one other curiosity about Asia worth noting. On 25 March, when the lockdown began, India’s total Covid-19 cases were only 606 and deaths just 10. As at 23 May, India had 1131,423 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 3,868 deaths. Its rate of Covid-19 deaths is still well down at 2.9 people per million. But, worryingly, despite one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns in place since 25 March, its cases are still rising (Figure 3). That is, two months since the nationwide clampdown, there is absolutely no flattening of the curve. Like Belgium, then, it’s a demonstrable example of the ineffectiveness of lockdowns.  The government claims that by 20 May approximately, the lockdown had averted 1.4mn-2.9mn cases and saved 37,000-78,000 lives. But then they would, wouldn’t they?

Countries with lockdowns also face an exit trap of their own making. Having rejected a herd immunity strategy in favour of suppression and elimination, how long will they remain shut down, especially as a vaccine may never become available? Little wonder that governments are extremely nervous about being swamped with second and third waves of infections as they cautiously open up.

On 18 May, I received a mass email invitation from the managing editor of the journal Perspectives on Politics that began: ‘In late April 2020, declared US fatalities from Covid-19 exceeded American battlefield deaths in the war in Vietnam’. It was a call for papers for a special issue on ‘Pandemic Politics’. Now let’s put this in perspective. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) writes thus about the 2017–18 flu season in the US:

… the burden of illness during the 2017–2018 season was high with an estimated 45 million [11mn children, 28mn 18–64 working age, and 6mn adults aged 65 and older] people getting sick with influenza, 21 million people going to a health care provider, 810,000 hospitalizations, and 61,000 deaths from influenza.

Thus the 2017–18 flu season took more US lives than 18 years of Vietnam, but of course was never reported as such. How could the US media have missed such a big story? Meanwhile, Covid-19 as at 20 May: global confirmed cases 5mn, deaths 328,000; US deaths 93,439 (New York, 28,636; New Jersey 10,749). For most people, Covid-19 is not dangerous; only for the age-stratified with serious comorbidities. Covid mortality for people under 50 is tiny (Table 2). A fit and healthy person under 50 has a 99.9% chance of survival.

Table-1.2.-NY-stats-300x139.png

The worldwide death and damage to the economic and social health of peoples caused by the draconian lockdowns may in the fullness of time exceed the relatively modest toll of Covid-19, even by the standard of pandemics since the Second World War. It becomes clearer by the week that the world’s governments went into meltdown in an orgy of pandemic panic porn not justified by the science or the data but provoked by grossly flawed modelling. Yoram Lass, former director-general of Israel’s Health Ministry, believes the coronavirus has created worldwide panic because it got cross-fertilised by the virus of social networks. He said in a recent interview:

The government… implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data.

Some day there will have to be a full Royal Commission into the modelling and the national responses to complement the distracting (deliberately so?) obsession with a global inquiry into the origins and spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world.

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sancho panza

ahttip @dnb24

https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/09/alistair-haimes-the-virus-that-turned-up-late/

This is an article by Alistair Haimes, who has worked with data professionally for 25 years. Alistair has recently published two articles in the Critic magazine.

Covid-19 is no more than a nasty, but basically normal, viral respiratory infection, though you’ll be regarded rather as a mullah regards a blasphemer if you say so. Why is this?

After all: it is precisely because its symptoms seemed so similar to viral pneumonia that the initial outbreak in Wuhan was missed until the numbers built, and it is now clear that we have been missing Covid-19 cases diagnosed as pneumonia in Europe at least as far back as December, probably earlier. In the vernacular: it looks as though it was bubbling away for ages before we noticed.

But if this is really the killer that has forced the biggest suspension of civil liberties since Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, what is so unusual about it? Where are the Emperor’s clothes?

Given that my daughter is having a tap-dancing lesson on Zoom in the neighbouring room as I type, one obvious difference is that we declared lockdown for this but for no previous killer disease; but rewinding, what is so unusual about the virus that produces the disease that provoked the lockdown?

The clue is right under our noses. Let me play a latter-day Poirot.

Below is a graph showing the numbers of Covid-19 patients who have died each day in NHS hospitals in England (clickable larger version at end of article):

a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph

The shape is textbook normal – and I mean ‘normal’ mathematically: as in, it’s an epidemic bell curve, and it’s a great ‘fit’. Forget trying to spot the hockey-stick impact of lockdown: this curve is basically identical to Free Sweden’s; and if the lockdown hypothesis were true, Stockholm would by now be a morgue and Greater Tokyo (population 38 million) a necropolis. (When I complain about people fearfully embracing their incarceration I can no longer even use the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, and that makes me angry.)

How about the numbers who succumb to the disease (the y-axis, i.e. the height of the bars)? Deaths per day, as is well-reported, peaked around Easter; and because deaths lag infections by something around three weeks, this implies that infections peaked sometime in mid-March. If you add up all the bars in the chart and fill in the blank area of deaths still to come, we are looking at a killer that, in scale, is bad-but-nothing-special compared to killers of previous years. Panning out: as a killer worldwide, it looks as though Covid is going to take a toll perhaps 1% of 1918’s Spanish Flu.

So what’s so unusual? Actually, look again: the clue is in the dates running along the bottom of the graph, showing that deaths peaked on 8th April. Deaths followed a regular path up to that date, and are following a regular path down again; but the middle of the bell-curve is just before Easter.

And that really is unusual – very unusual. At least as far back as I can find reliable data (about 1990), seasonal epidemics always strike slap-bang in mid-winter, not in spring.

Is that all? Please: don’t tell me we’ve suspended civil liberties, shut our schools and put our economy into a coma just because it’s turned up later than these germs normally do? Have we honestly moved 8 million people (and counting) onto the government’s payroll over a virus that has done little more than miss its train?

Let’s have a look. It is actually possible to re-write history and, roughly, see how the epidemic would look if it had struck in mid-winter rather than spring. Here’s the spadework:

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes weekly all-cause mortality (i.e. death) figures for England and Wales, at least back to the early nineties. Since the start of the epidemic, they have also published weekly numbers of people dying with Covid-19 mentioned on death certificates, and they also publish 5-year average numbers of deaths per week, which 2020 was following until Covid-19 came along. So, you can work out excess deaths during the epidemic (i.e. weekly deaths minus 5-year average deaths), and, if in turn you subtract the Covid-19 deaths from this excess figure, you get to what the CMO Chris Whitty calls the “indirect deaths” associated with the epidemic, largely through missed A&E admissions (largely cardiac) and, later, through missed referrals (largely cancer).

Once you have these numbers, it’s simple. Firstly, subtract Covid-19 deaths from March/April and just add them to December 2019/January 2020. Secondly, remove indirect non-Covid excess deaths (‘lockdown deaths’, if you like) from March and April, on the basis that life would have gone on as normal with no lockdown under our imagined scenario, so no missed admissions or referrals. We’re simulating a situation where Covid-19 appeared in mid-winter but life went on as normal.

Two final adjustments: sorry, I said this would be simple, but we’re nearly there. The ONS also publish population figures each year, so in order to compare Covid-19 with previous killer germs you can inflate previous years so that you are comparing ‘apples with apples’. Finally, to make the graph more legible, I have also played the medieval pope and shifted the months so that mid-winter is in the middle of the graph.

So: the dark blue line is 2019-20, with Covid-19; the turquoise and red lines are the bad flu years of 1998-99 and 1999-2000 (clickable larger version at end of article).

a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph

Awkward? It would be snarky to suggest that we should retrospectively classify the millennium celebrations as a super-spreader event, so I’ll simply point out that Covid-19 is narrowly in third place as a killer to remember, behind the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 influenzas (2017-18’s ‘Beast from the East’, the green line, doesn’t place), a point also made by American statistician William Briggs.

Hopefully the sage eggheads on SAGE have tried something similarly basic, given these are ONS figures and it took me about half an hour, but if so it’s slightly difficult to see why we are still locked down and why the media seem to have moved Covid-19 up a weight-class.

Thing is: how many of us do remember the winters of 1998-99 and 1999-2000 as being particularly bad flu seasons? I confess: I don’t, but there’s no ‘just’ flu about it: Covid-19 is a serious killer, and so is influenza. One viral disease we seem to have in perspective; the other not so much.

There are really only two particularly unusual things about the Covid-19 epidemic: the timing of its arrival and the lockdown some countries declared. And if we ask “Covid, where is thy sting?”, it is lockdown that will sting: in the UK, the death-toll of people not turning up to hospital with cardiac issues (admissions are down 50% across the country) is now unmissable in the weekly non-Covid excess death figures published by the ONS, now running over 3,000 per week just for England and Wales. The downstream toll from missed cancer diagnoses (referrals are down 67%, as stressed by Professor Sikora) is heartbreak yet to come.

This is to say nothing of the toll on education, liberty and the economy. We’ve given up everything we should hold dear for a virus that just turned up three months later than similar viruses normally do.

 

Clickable larger versions of the graphs:

  • a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph1b1732-300x202.jpg
 
  • a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph2b1667-300x184.jpg
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Long time lurking
3 hours ago, sancho panza said:

ahttip @dnb24

https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/09/alistair-haimes-the-virus-that-turned-up-late/

This is an article by Alistair Haimes, who has worked with data professionally for 25 years. Alistair has recently published two articles in the Critic magazine.

Covid-19 is no more than a nasty, but basically normal, viral respiratory infection, though you’ll be regarded rather as a mullah regards a blasphemer if you say so. Why is this?

After all: it is precisely because its symptoms seemed so similar to viral pneumonia that the initial outbreak in Wuhan was missed until the numbers built, and it is now clear that we have been missing Covid-19 cases diagnosed as pneumonia in Europe at least as far back as December, probably earlier. In the vernacular: it looks as though it was bubbling away for ages before we noticed.

But if this is really the killer that has forced the biggest suspension of civil liberties since Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, what is so unusual about it? Where are the Emperor’s clothes?

Given that my daughter is having a tap-dancing lesson on Zoom in the neighbouring room as I type, one obvious difference is that we declared lockdown for this but for no previous killer disease; but rewinding, what is so unusual about the virus that produces the disease that provoked the lockdown?

The clue is right under our noses. Let me play a latter-day Poirot.

Below is a graph showing the numbers of Covid-19 patients who have died each day in NHS hospitals in England (clickable larger version at end of article):

a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph

The shape is textbook normal – and I mean ‘normal’ mathematically: as in, it’s an epidemic bell curve, and it’s a great ‘fit’. Forget trying to spot the hockey-stick impact of lockdown: this curve is basically identical to Free Sweden’s; and if the lockdown hypothesis were true, Stockholm would by now be a morgue and Greater Tokyo (population 38 million) a necropolis. (When I complain about people fearfully embracing their incarceration I can no longer even use the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, and that makes me angry.)

How about the numbers who succumb to the disease (the y-axis, i.e. the height of the bars)? Deaths per day, as is well-reported, peaked around Easter; and because deaths lag infections by something around three weeks, this implies that infections peaked sometime in mid-March. If you add up all the bars in the chart and fill in the blank area of deaths still to come, we are looking at a killer that, in scale, is bad-but-nothing-special compared to killers of previous years. Panning out: as a killer worldwide, it looks as though Covid is going to take a toll perhaps 1% of 1918’s Spanish Flu.

So what’s so unusual? Actually, look again: the clue is in the dates running along the bottom of the graph, showing that deaths peaked on 8th April. Deaths followed a regular path up to that date, and are following a regular path down again; but the middle of the bell-curve is just before Easter.

And that really is unusual – very unusual. At least as far back as I can find reliable data (about 1990), seasonal epidemics always strike slap-bang in mid-winter, not in spring.

Is that all? Please: don’t tell me we’ve suspended civil liberties, shut our schools and put our economy into a coma just because it’s turned up later than these germs normally do? Have we honestly moved 8 million people (and counting) onto the government’s payroll over a virus that has done little more than miss its train?

Let’s have a look. It is actually possible to re-write history and, roughly, see how the epidemic would look if it had struck in mid-winter rather than spring. Here’s the spadework:

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes weekly all-cause mortality (i.e. death) figures for England and Wales, at least back to the early nineties. Since the start of the epidemic, they have also published weekly numbers of people dying with Covid-19 mentioned on death certificates, and they also publish 5-year average numbers of deaths per week, which 2020 was following until Covid-19 came along. So, you can work out excess deaths during the epidemic (i.e. weekly deaths minus 5-year average deaths), and, if in turn you subtract the Covid-19 deaths from this excess figure, you get to what the CMO Chris Whitty calls the “indirect deaths” associated with the epidemic, largely through missed A&E admissions (largely cardiac) and, later, through missed referrals (largely cancer).

Once you have these numbers, it’s simple. Firstly, subtract Covid-19 deaths from March/April and just add them to December 2019/January 2020. Secondly, remove indirect non-Covid excess deaths (‘lockdown deaths’, if you like) from March and April, on the basis that life would have gone on as normal with no lockdown under our imagined scenario, so no missed admissions or referrals. We’re simulating a situation where Covid-19 appeared in mid-winter but life went on as normal.

Two final adjustments: sorry, I said this would be simple, but we’re nearly there. The ONS also publish population figures each year, so in order to compare Covid-19 with previous killer germs you can inflate previous years so that you are comparing ‘apples with apples’. Finally, to make the graph more legible, I have also played the medieval pope and shifted the months so that mid-winter is in the middle of the graph.

So: the dark blue line is 2019-20, with Covid-19; the turquoise and red lines are the bad flu years of 1998-99 and 1999-2000 (clickable larger version at end of article).

a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph

Awkward? It would be snarky to suggest that we should retrospectively classify the millennium celebrations as a super-spreader event, so I’ll simply point out that Covid-19 is narrowly in third place as a killer to remember, behind the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 influenzas (2017-18’s ‘Beast from the East’, the green line, doesn’t place), a point also made by American statistician William Briggs.

Hopefully the sage eggheads on SAGE have tried something similarly basic, given these are ONS figures and it took me about half an hour, but if so it’s slightly difficult to see why we are still locked down and why the media seem to have moved Covid-19 up a weight-class.

Thing is: how many of us do remember the winters of 1998-99 and 1999-2000 as being particularly bad flu seasons? I confess: I don’t, but there’s no ‘just’ flu about it: Covid-19 is a serious killer, and so is influenza. One viral disease we seem to have in perspective; the other not so much.

There are really only two particularly unusual things about the Covid-19 epidemic: the timing of its arrival and the lockdown some countries declared. And if we ask “Covid, where is thy sting?”, it is lockdown that will sting: in the UK, the death-toll of people not turning up to hospital with cardiac issues (admissions are down 50% across the country) is now unmissable in the weekly non-Covid excess death figures published by the ONS, now running over 3,000 per week just for England and Wales. The downstream toll from missed cancer diagnoses (referrals are down 67%, as stressed by Professor Sikora) is heartbreak yet to come.

This is to say nothing of the toll on education, liberty and the economy. We’ve given up everything we should hold dear for a virus that just turned up three months later than similar viruses normally do.

 

Clickable larger versions of the graphs:

  • a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph1b1732-300x202.jpg
 
  • a_haimes_virus_that_turned_up_late_graph2b1667-300x184.jpg

Yep we hit peak before the lock-down started 

I think there is either more to all this (tin foil hats at the ready ) attempted  regime change in China ?

The track and trace APP is either about being seen to be doing something or another way to drag this out even longer in an attempt to achieve the above or another motive,as the app will be next to useless when 50-80%+ of people are asymptomatic  

 

 

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sancho panza
9 hours ago, Long time lurking said:

Yep we hit peak before the lock-down started 

I think there is either more to all this (tin foil hats at the ready ) attempted  regime change in China ?

The track and trace APP is either about being seen to be doing something or another way to drag this out even longer in an attempt to achieve the above or another motive,as the app will be next to useless when 50-80%+ of people are asymptomatic  

 

 

Govt doubling down to make it look like the lock down worked.

Worth noting that at my work -NHS- there's no sociall distancing measures at all.We come into contact with covid every day probably and there's zero chance theyll be sending me home for 14 days with my feet up.

It's pure and utter bull

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52862588

President Donald Trump has been criticised at home and abroad after announcing he is ending US ties with the World Health Organization (WHO).

The EU urged him to reconsider the decision, while Germany's health minister called it a "disappointing setback for international health".

The head of the US Senate's health committee, a Republican like Mr Trump, said now was not the time to leave.

Mr Trump said the WHO had failed to hold China to account over coronavirus.

The WHO, a UN agency that helps countries promote healthcare and tackle outbreaks of disease, has faced regular criticism from the US president over its handling of the outbreak.

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22 hours ago, Long time lurking said:

Yep we hit peak before the lock-down started 

I think there is either more to all this (tin foil hats at the ready ) attempted  regime change in China ?

The track and trace APP is either about being seen to be doing something or another way to drag this out even longer in an attempt to achieve the above or another motive,as the app will be next to useless when 50-80%+ of people are asymptomatic  

 

 

When you read the analysis and look at the graph it hits home the crazyness of the last 3 months. The fact that the adjusted 2019-20 numbers comes in at 3rd place, I cant even remember the flu seasons that took first and 2nd place. This whole pandemic hysteria has been entirely manufactured. To what end though, the data shows the outbreak peaked in early April, the data is easily available and for whoever wants to see they can access it. So why trash the whole economy for a bad flu season and why continue doing so when it is so evident that it is just a bad flu season and why continue on when it is largely over

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sancho panza
3 hours ago, Talking Monkey said:

When you read the analysis and look at the graph it hits home the crazyness of the last 3 months. The fact that the adjusted 2019-20 numbers comes in at 3rd place, I cant even remember the flu seasons that took first and 2nd place. This whole pandemic hysteria has been entirely manufactured. To what end though, the data shows the outbreak peaked in early April, the data is easily available and for whoever wants to see they can access it. So why trash the whole economy for a bad flu season and why continue doing so when it is so evident that it is just a bad flu season and why continue on when it is largely over

Much as I'd love to pin ulterior motives on Bojo and his band of pompous henchmen/women in cabinet, I think the reality is that they've been played by the hard left here.Quite whether it's a Marxist/climate change/AN Other conspiracy I'm not sure.It may well be that Prof Magoo/Imperial College just wanted the attention.

There's only two things we know for sure now and that's that Western civil liberties got trampled in the rush to impement a lock down and there's a huge bail out package for the stock/bond markets.The Chinese must have been delighted when the Italians rang up and asked for help locking down it's population........then stood back in awe as some British police forces started droning dog walkers and clearing parks of people seeking Vitamin D and mental health wellbeing.

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22 hours ago, sancho panza said:

Govt doubling down to make it look like the lock down worked.

I suspect so. They don't want to admit failure.

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sancho panza

turns out Bojo was doing the Lone Ranger thing.SAGE which last met 18 March never recoomended Lockdown according to the minutes of the meeting whcih have been realesed as part of teh Simon DOlan court case.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/05/31/latest-news-47/

Was the Government Really Following “the Science”?

A few weeks ago I linked to an excellent Newsnight report by Hannah Cohen which asked whether the Government really was following “the science”? Now that the Government has released the minutes of the SAGE meetings in the period leading up to the lockdown announcement on March 23rd – this was on Friday as a direct result of Simon Dolan’s lawsuit – we can get closer to answering this question.

The former barrister Paul Chaplin has gone through the minutes in a lengthy blog post and concluded that placing the entire country under virtual house arrest was a political decision and not “based on the science”. His analysis is compelling.

Chaplin finds plenty of evidence in the minutes that various different containment measures were discussed by SAGE, but at no point before March 23rd did the group recommend the quarantining of the whole population. The measures SAGE considered were home isolation of symptomatic individuals, the isolation of everyone in a symptomatic individual’s household for 14 days and the cocooning of those over 70 and those with underlying health conditions – the three measures introduced by the Government on March 16th. But at no point did SAGE discuss anything resembling a full lockdown. Indeed, SAGE noted at a meeting on March 10th that banning public gatherings would have little effect since most viral transmission occurred in confined spaces, such as within households.

The last SAGE meeting before the lockdown was on March 18th where it was noted that the impact of the social distancing measures introduced thus far would not be known for two or three weeks. The attendees did not at that stage know whether those measures would be sufficient to prevent the NHS’s critical care capacity being overwhelmed and in the absence of more data could not offer any advice on whether additional measures – such as closing bars, restaurants and entertainment centres, and limiting use of indoor workplaces – would be necessary. The only further measure SAGE recommended at that meeting was closing schools.

SAGE advises that the measures already announced should have a significant effect, provided compliance rates are good and in line with the assumptions. Additional measures will be needed if compliance rates are low.

Minutes of the 17th SAGE meeting on COVID-19, March 18th 2020

The attendees discussed locking down London but no conclusion was reached. However, they did say that if additional measures were going to be necessary, it would be better to bring them in sooner rather than later. According to the minutes: “If the interventions are required, it would be better to act early.”

In other words, Boris Johnson and his advisors were not following “the science” when they took the decision to lock down the country on March 23rd – they weren’t acting on any specific recommendations by SAGE. Nor can the Government claim this is one of the options that was discussed at SAGE meetings and it was basing its decision, in part, on SAGE’s analysis of the impact of a full lockdown. That option was not discussed at any of the meetings before March 23rd. In this respect, it was a political decision.

This dovetails with Christopher Snowdon’s analysis of the decision-making in the period leading up to March 23rd published in the Critic last week, although Snowdon only had access to the broad summaries of the SAGE meetings that the Government has released, not the more detailed minutes released on Friday. Snowdon concluded that the Government’s scientific advisors never explicitly recommended a lockdown; on the contrary, at various stages they recommended against it.

Snowdon says that even Neil Ferguson’s March 16th paper, predicting 510,000 Covid deaths if the Government took no measures to stop the spread of the virus and 250,000 if it stuck with its “mitigation” strategy, stopped short of recommending a full lockdown:

Contrary to popular belief, the infamous study did not call for a full lockdown, nor did it model the effects of a full lockdown. It looked at school closures, social distancing and household quarantine for suspected cases and those living with them. It concluded that the greatest benefit would come from a combination of social distancing and household quarantine, with further benefits likely to come from closing schools, although it conceded that school closures would prevent many people from working.

There is no doubt that Ferguson’s model was impactful. It suggested that hundreds of thousands of people would die from COVID-19 if the Government continued to pursue a policy of mitigation. This put containment back on the table and gave legitimacy to more coercive action from Government, but the measures it recommended did not amount to a full lockdown. Its social distancing recommendations were far from trivial and yet they seem modest after nine weeks of genuine lockdown (the authors anticipated most people still going to work, for example). The only time Ferguson and colleagues use the word “lockdown” in the text is when they are making a distinction between their proposals and an actual lockdown. They implicitly dismiss a lockdown as being too extreme for the UK, saying that their favoured policies are “predicted to have the largest impact, short of a complete lockdown which additionally prevents people going to work”.

Snowdon’s conclusion is remarkably similar to Chaplin’s:

The founding myth of the lockdown is almost the opposite of the truth. Science did not triumph over politics on March 23rd. It would be more accurate to say that the strategy which preceded the lockdown, unpopular though it now is, was based on science whereas the decision to go into lockdown was political.

Snowdon’s article – and Chaplin’s analysis – is in some ways helpful to the Prime Minister since it debunks the myth that he was told to lock down the country by SAGE long before March 23rd and failed to act on that advice due to “dither and delay”. That was the story told by the Sunday Times in its May 23rd article entitled: “22 days of dither and delay on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives.

But if you’re a sceptic, this analysis isn’t helpful to the Prime Minister since it lays the blame for the lockdown squarely at the door of 10 Downing Street.

Stop Press: I emailed Christopher Snowdon to see if he’d had a chance to look at the SAGE minutes and he got back to me to say he had and they did indeed corroborate his analysis:

The minutes fully support what I wrote in the Critic. The social distancing measures discussed by SAGE – and modelled separately by Neil Ferguson et al. and John Edmunds et al. – are not well described in the documents, but it is clear that they are more moderate than the lockdown that was introduced on March 23rd. Even at the late stage of mid-March, SAGE was never seriously entertaining a full lockdown, nor did the attendees expect their more modest measures to be in place for more than 12 weeks. To claim otherwise is to rewrite history.

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On 30/05/2020 at 11:44, Long time lurking said:

I think there is either more to all this

Seems you could be right.  I suspect it's more to do with the necessary global macroeconomic reset and all the blame can be laid at China's door.

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8 hours ago, janch said:

Seems you could be right.  I suspect it's more to do with the necessary global macroeconomic reset and all the blame can be laid at China's door.

Indeed.  Whether the chicken or the egg, here we are.  I'm beginning to think the previous Chancellor had principles!

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sancho panza

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/06/05/latest-news-50/

Stop Telling Lies About Sweden

Great column by Fraser Nelson in today’s Telegraph which nails the lie that Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s coronavirus response, has admitted that not locking down the country was wrong. Worth quoting the first few paragraphs in full:

Has Sweden finally repented of its error in rejecting lockdown? “Light touch cost us many lives, Swedish scientist concedes” ran an Australian headline.

“Swedish faith in Covid strategy plunges after errors revealed,” said an American newswire.

“Sweden’s Tegnell admits too many died,” revealed the BBC.

Only one country seemed to miss this story: Sweden. Anders Tegnell, its state epidemiologist, was quoted talking about other issues – but not renouncing his strategy. Which raises the question as to whether something was lost – or, rather, added – in translation.

Tegnell was asked if too many had died from Covid. “Yes, absolutely,” he replied. Hence the headlines. He went on to underline doubt, as he often does in his daily televised conferences. Everyone is learning all the time, he said, so if this happened again, of course he’d do things differently.

But it’s still too early to say what, he said. Perhaps he would not have closed down sixth-form colleges. He says he has still seen nothing to make him think lockdown worked – and points to Britain as an example of its failure. Will he have made mistakes? Certainly. Which ones? Only time will tell.

This is why scientists tend to stay out of the political arena: honesty backfires. Admit doubt, and it’s spun as a humiliating admission of failure. Admit regret, and it’s a declaration of incompetence. But science is full of doubt: positing a theory, inviting challenge and welcoming refutation.

LancetGate

Screenshot-2020-06-05-at-18.32.40-1024x3

Anyone extolling the benefits of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is immediately accused of touting “fake news” – and any posts doing so on Facebook or YouTube will likely be removed, having been red-flagged by the small army of “independent” fact-checkers employed by the social media companies.

But in fact, it’s respectable publications like the Lancet which are guilty of disseminating fake news, not sites like this one.

On May 22nd, the medical journal published a blockbuster peer-reviewed study which found that the antimalarial drug, heralded by Donald Trump as an effective treatment of coronavirus, was associated with a higher mortality rate in COVID-19 patients and increased heart problems. Three days later, the WHO announced it was dropping HCQ from its global study into experimental coronavirus treatments due to safety concerns. Other medical institutions and a number of national government quickly followed suit. It was official: HCQ was dead in the water.

Turns out, the Lancet study was fake news. The data were from a little-known US healthcare analytics company called Surgisphere. According to a report in the Guardian:

A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.

A science fiction writer and a nude model?!?

The Lancet has now retracted the dodgy paper and the WHO has resumed its HCQ trials.

The question is, why did the “independent” fact-checkers fail to spot this bit of fake news when they’ve been so quick to jump on anything purporting to show HCQ is effective? Could it be that they’re not actually independent at all, but Establishment lackeys determined to discredit anything that suggests COVID-19 isn’t the deadly pathogen it’s made out to be by governments around the world, particularly if it emanates from the White House?

In other drug news, Russia is rolling out a new antiviral and Gilead has announced results from a new trial of Remdesivir that look promising,

And in other research news, there’s evidence that COVID-19 is a blood vessel disease, which would explain the high incidence of blood clots, strokes and heart attacks among its victims. Although this evidence was published in the Lancet so TREAT WITH CAUTION.

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sancho panza

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/06/03/

Leaked Report by Civil Servant at German Ministry of Interior

Many readers have emailed me to draw my attention to the leaked report by a German civil servant at the Ministry of Interior accusing the German authorities of over-reacting to the pandemic and, in all likelihood, causing more harm than they’ve prevented. Among other things, the report says:

  • The dangerousness of COVID-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level.
  • The people who die from Corona – and, by extension, those we are supposedly protecting from the virus by locking down whole populations – are predominantly those who would otherwise die later this year, because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with any random everyday stress (including the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation).
  • Worldwide, within a quarter of a year, there have been no more than 250,000 deaths from COVID-19, compared to 1.5 million deaths (25,100 in Germany alone) during the influenza wave 2017/18.
  • The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.
  • A reproach could go along these lines: During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of fake news.

This is great stuff – there’s lots of strong support here from an authoritative source for the sceptical case. But can I remind those readers who’ve drawn my attention to this document that I covered it – extensively – when it was first leaked some three weeks ago. Indeed, there is an entire page in the right-hand menu entitled “Leaked analysis of the impact of the lockdown by a senior official at the German Ministry of the Interior” that contains a detailed summary of the document.

I don’t mean to sound irritable. The reason readers are flagging this up is because the report is finally beginning to get the kind of traction in the mainstream media that it should have received three weeks ago. I can’t complain about that.

 

 

Is Coronavirus Refusing to Die in Sweden? Fraid not, Vultures!

IMG_2421.jpg The Swedish daily death toll has dwindled to almost nothing in the past week

One of the most unedifying spectacles of this crisis has been watching lockdown zealots gleefully swoop on any news suggesting the death toll in Sweden is higher than its neighbours. This, in spite of the fact that the Norwegian Prime Minister has apologised for not following Sweden’s example and the recent leaked emails showing that Denmark’s most senior public health officials advised the Danish Prime Minister not to impose a lockdown. Even our very own Professor Lockdown – Neil Ferguson – admitted under questioning by a House of Lords Select Committee yesterday that Sweden had achieved the same result as the UK when it comes to suppressing infections, but without a lockdown. (More here and some good stuff here, including a transcript of Matt Ridley cross-examining Ferguson about the wildly inaccurate Swedish projections his model spat out).

And last weekend brought even more bad news for the Swedish death toll vultures. There were no Covid deaths AT ALL reported in Sweden on Sunday, the first time that’s happened since March 12th.

The epidemic is petering out in Sweden, as it is everywhere else

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comment by  lockdown Sceptic

 

 

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/06/01/latest-news-48/#comment-19654

 

 

Cassandra
5 days ago
 
 
 

Hi all. I’m a lurker of some time, but finally got round to creating an account and commenting. Firstly, can I just thank you guys, and this website for keeping me sane these last few months.
 
For background, I am a doctor, and I work primarily in a hospital setting. Initially, way back in March, I was ambivalent towards the lockdown – I was concerned regarding the precedent it set – and felt very uncomfortable with such a stringent curtailment of rights. However, a lot of my colleagues were sharing pictures etc from Italy, and COVID at that point was an unknown risk – to me at least. Amongst young, fit doctors like me there was a genuine worry that we might become seriously unwell. I was asked to update my next of kin by the trust I worked at, some of my colleagues made wills. There was much anxiety in the medical profession. So I bought into it. I naively believed the lockdown would be a stop gap measure, lasting only a few weeks, as reasonably no country could keep everyone in their house for such a long time period – and no electorate would allow such a thing, right?
 
As the first three weeks passed, I saw first hand quite how quiet the hospitals were, and how few non-COVID patients we were seeing. Whole wards were empty. On some days, I saw more suicide attempts than COVID. Combined with this was the growing body of information regarding the lethality of this coronavirus – the likely IFR, the propensity for mortality in high risk groups, but not in the young, and the clear evidence of the profound and deleterious effects of lockdown on the population. My mindset shifted, and I no longer saw lockdown as a necessary evil, and coronavirus was no longer an existential threat. I naively assumed that society was having the same realisation. This was not the case.
 
Over the last few weeks I have become increasingly frustrated and horrified by what has occurred. I cannot understand how we can continue such a wholesale curtailment of freedom, without any real backlash. I am livid at the lack of treatment for cancer patients, and quite how little society seems to care about anything other than COVID. I believe that the effects of lockdown will be far, far more significant than COVID. I am also angry about the fetishisation of the NHS, clap for carers, the TikTok videos and all of the nonsense that has taken place around this. I am involved in none of it, and resent my colleagues that are, because they should know how underserved that praise is, and how much they are letting down patients.
 
I am angry at the complete lack of empathy shown by huge sections of society. People bleat for more lockdown and the “new normal” to defend themselves against a mild virus. In the meantime, they ignore domestic violence victims locked in houses, children needing education, patients needing treatment that has been withheld, the mental health of millions. It’s so cruel and ruthless. I know fear corrodes empathy, but I am genuinely surprised about how callous people can seem to be.
 
I am thinking of the new laws regarding sex being illegal between people from different households – surely this is plainly absurd, and a level of intrusion into private lives never seen before. How have people accepted this?
I also think about the 2m distancing requirements everywhere – even though this will destroy large sections of the economy. How has there not been a national outcry? What is wrong with people? The rules themselves are horrifying, but more terrifying to me is the complete acceptance of said rules.
 
I have discussed this with several medical colleagues and they seem to fall into several categories: those that believe the rules should continue and see no issue with them (startling and worrying, considering these are supposed to be rational, empathetic people); those who believe in lockdown, but then are happy to break it, and to suggest that I break it (these are hypocrites); and finally those who also agree that this is mad, but somehow don’t find it all as deeply distressing and as enraging as I do.
 
Some of my friends (who hold the same views as me) have told me the “new normal” will never be tolerated. That people will revert back to normal, and that society will see how ludicrous this all is. But I no longer trust that to be the case. If in January you had told me that I would be shut in my house for weeks, unable to see anyone aside from at work, I would’ve said that was madness. But we have accepted such a thing wholesale. I no longer trust in the rationality of society to get us out of this, and that scares me.
 
I have attempted to speak to some people in the media, despite this being forbidden by the trust I work for, but I have had no replies – no one seems interested in my story as it doesn’t fit the narrative.
 
The final straw was when I myself contracted COVID. I had minimal symptoms aside from a slight cold and a slight a loss of taste and smell. Normally I would not even pay attention to such symptoms. Many of my friends refused to believe it was COVID, as they said I would be sicker. I got a swab anyway and was positive. I was told by pro-lockdown friends that I was very lucky to have it so mildly – I replied saying no, I was the norm. People did not listen. People do not listen to anything that contradicts their view. They are brainwashed.
 
I have never been more disappointed. I was always maybe a touch idealistic, and went into medicine to help people. I genuinely believed society wouldn’t let people fall between the gaps, and would ultimately be caring and rational. I was a warm fuzzy liberal. I am so upset and angry with what has been permitted. I expected better. I have never been more disappointed to be a doctor, or to be a British citizen.

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I've almost completely stopped living by lockdown rules. The government can fuck right off if they think they can make it illegal to shag my girlfriend xD

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sancho panza
1 hour ago, Hardhat said:

I've almost completely stopped living by lockdown rules. The government can fuck right off if they think they can make it illegal to shag my girlfriend xD

The shagging rule runs so well alongside the Black Lives Matter protests that the govt has actively connived in.

 

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Castlevania
11 hours ago, Hardhat said:

I've almost completely stopped living by lockdown rules. The government can fuck right off if they think they can make it illegal to shag my girlfriend xD

During lockdown the more enlightened Dutch allowed all single people to have one fuck buddy.

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