UK Govt Coronavirus Response: Sceptics Thread

[Talking Monkey]

3 minutes ago, janch said:

If enough of us don't wear them and comply, I doubt they will fine the lot of us.  I'm not going to wear one next week and see what happens.

Yup I am planning on not wearing one, it makes no sense

[logana]

Fat people should wear one

[sancho panza]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53443724

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has called for an urgent review into how coronavirus deaths have been recorded in England.

It follows confirmation from Public Health England that reported deaths may have included people who tested positive months before they died.

Other UK nations only include those who die within 28 days of a positive test.

Officials say the publication of daily death figures will be paused while the issue was "resolved".

A note on the government's website read: "Currently the daily deaths measure counts all people who have tested positive for coronavirus and since died, with no cut-off between time of testing and date of death.

"There have been claims that the lack of cut-off may distort the current daily deaths number."

There have been 40,528 deaths linked to the virus in England.

• How many confirmed cases are there in your area?

Prof Carl Heneghan from University of Oxford, who spotted the issue with the data, told the BBC there was "huge variation" in the numbers of daily deaths reported in England by PHE.

While NHS England currently reports 30-35 deaths per day, Public Health England (PHE) data often shows double that or more, he said.

The reason is that anyone who has tested positive for coronavirus but then died at a later date of another cause would still be included in PHE's Covid-19 death figures.

"By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness," Prof Heneghan says.

"We need correct and accurate statistics so we can really understand the trend - otherwise it's very difficult to know what's going on," he added.

Figures release from PHE today show that just under 10% of coronavirus deaths in England happened more than 28 days after a positive test.

In almost half of those cases, Covid-19 was recorded as the main cause of death.

 

 

[sancho panza]

 

 

[sancho panza]

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-lockdown-may-have-indirectly-caused-16-000-excess-deaths-study-12044923

 

Coronavirus: For every three COVID-19 deaths, lockdown may have caused another two

For every three deaths caused by coronavirus, there were another two caused by the impact of the lockdown, a report says.

Tom Rayner

Political correspondent @RaynerSkyNews

Saturday 8 August 2020 06:55, UK

The national lockdown may have indirectly caused 16,000 excess deaths in two months, according to government analysts.

The new report says a reluctance to attend A&E and difficulties accessing medical assistance likely meant that for every three deaths from coronavirus itself, a further two occurred because of the wider impact of the lockdown.

 

The findings provide a possible explanation for the prime minister's recent claim that another full national lockdown would only be considered as a "nuclear option"

The estimates, made by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and analysts from several government departments, suggest there were 38,500 excess deaths in England connected to COVID-19 between March and 1 May.

However, the report concludes 41% of those deaths were the result of missed medical care rather than the virus itself.

Of the 16,000 deaths, the paper estimates 6,000 were as a result of a "significant reduction in A&E attendances and emergency admissions".

It states: "Some of this is unmet need, possibly due to patients' reluctance to seek medical attention or other changes to protocols."

The report says the other 10,000 excess deaths likely occurred in care home settings due to patients having been discharged from hospitals, or not wanting to be transferred to hospital.

Image: Fears of going to hospital are among the reasons behind the extra 16,000 deaths in two months

Although the calculations found that 2,500 lives may have been saved by people adopting healthier lifestyles during lockdown, the modelling suggests there could be a further 26,000 excess deaths by March 2021 as a result of ongoing restrictions to medical care.

Overall the analysis estimates there could be a total of 81,500 non-coronavirus excess deaths over the next 50 years as a result of longer waiting times for non-urgent elective care, as well as increased deprivation resulting from a deep recession.

The document was presented to the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) last month, but was only released on Friday.

[sancho panza]

anyone see the problem?

 

 

[sancho panza]

https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/08/07/how-bad-is-covid-really-a-swedish-doctors-perspective/

How bad is COVID really? (A Swedish doctor’s perspective)

180 Replies

7th August 2020

A doctor working in Sweden as an emergency care physician contacted me to discuss all things COVID-19. He has also written a blog, which can be seen here.

I asked if I could reproduce it on my blog as I felt it was a fascinating persepctive on what was happening in Sweden. It is also incredibly well written, in English, for someone who is Swedish. Most humbled. I hope you enjoy it.

Ok, I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden.

As many people know, Sweden is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed attitude of any towards the COVID pandemic. Unlike other countries, Sweden never went in to complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continues to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public.

COVID hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was COVID. Practically everyone who was tested had COVID, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had COVID. They came in with stomach pain and they had COVID.

Then, after a few months, all the COVID patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single COVID patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative.

At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of COVID in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more.

If we assume around 0.5 percent of those infected die (which I think is very generous, more on that later), then that means that three weeks back 1,000 people were getting infected per day in the whole country, which works out to a daily risk per person of getting infected of 1 in 10,000, which is miniscule. And remember, the risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually do get infected. And that was three weeks ago. Basically,COVID is in all practical senses over and done with in Sweden.

After four months. In total COVID has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. Considering that 70% of those who have died of COVID are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway. That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.

That is why it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics, like the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. COVID will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies, stopped children going to school, and made large portions of their population unemployed in order to deal with this disease.

The media have been proclaiming that only a small percentage of the population have antibodies, and therefore it is impossible that herd immunity has developed. Well, if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? Why has the rate of infection dropped so precipitously? Considering that most people in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks, there should still be high rates of infection.

The reason we test for antibodies is because it is easy and cheap. Antibodies are in fact not the body’s main defence against virus infections. T-cells are. But T-cells are harder to measure than antibodies, so we don’t really do it clinically. It is quite possible to have T-cells that are specific for covid and thereby make you immune to the disease, without having any antibodies.

Personally, I think this is what has happened. Everybody who works in the emergency room where I work has had the antibody test. Very few actually have antibodies. This is in spite of being exposed to huge numbers of infected people, including at the beginning of the pandemic, before we realized how widespread COVID was, when no-one was wearing protective equipment.

I am not denying that COVID is awful for the people who do get really sick or for the families of the people who die, just as it is awful for the families of people who die of cancer, or influenza, or an opioid overdose. But the size of the response in most of the world (not including Sweden) has been totally disproportionate to the size of the threat.

Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly. At present that means Sweden has one of the highest total death rates in the world. But COVID is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more.

I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway. Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.

COVID has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza. Does that mean COVID is ten times worse than influenza? No, because influenza has been around for centuries while COVID is completely new.

In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for COVID is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.

This conclusion makes sense of the Swedish fatality numbers – if we’ve reached a point where there is hardly any active infection going on any more in Sweden, in spite of the fact that there is barely any social distancing happening, then that means at least 50% of the population has been infected already and have developed immunity, which is five million people.

This number is perfectly reasonable if we assume a reproductive number for the virus of two: If each person infects two new, with a five day period between being infected and infecting others, and you start out with just one infected person in the country, then you will reach a point where several million are infected in just four months. If only 6000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no-one is the least bit frightened of, and which we don’t shut down our societies for.

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[janch]

This zereohedge post sums up my feelings about what's really happening but of course we must all believe "the science" as if it's a fixed entitiy and all scientists are in complete agreement:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/corona-totalitarianism-invasion-new-normals

[janch]

Sorry it's zerohedge again but Sweden took a different course and didn't wreck their economy as we have done........

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/swedens-success-kryptonite-lockdown-and-mask-advocates

[sancho panza]

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/08/11/latest-news-100/

 

Amazing to see the brutality here,especially if it was for not wearing a mask(that's the story).There are a range of holds I've seen employed to bring subjects under control for handcuffing.Seems quite dangerous to sit on ubsject whilst her diaphragm isn't free to move.

 

[macca]

It’s nice to see that we finally have a functional Track and Trace App.. You simply track any recently awarded government contract and you can trace it directly back to one of their mates.

[sancho panza]

 

Truly astounding whats coming out.Carl Henghan appears to be saying that 75% of the covid deths in July and August acutally weren't...................................scandalous what they've been up to.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/08/13/

Day: 13 August 2020

 

Latest News

By Toby Young / 13 August 2020 / 1,303 Comments

The Re-Adjustment Bureau

Hats off to Carl Heneghan and Yoon Loke. Three weeks ago, they wrote a post on the Centre For Evidence-Based Medicine blog drawing attention to a peculiarity in the way Public Health England (PHE) recorded Covid deaths. They discovered that if you’d ever tested positive for COVID-19 and you subsequently died, even if several months had elapsed since the test, your death was recorded as being from coronavirus.

PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested Covid positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE Covid death figures.

By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.

After their post was published, Matt Hancock announced a review into the way in which PHE collects Covid data and temporarily suspended its publication. Yesterday, that review was concluded and PHE has said that henceforth it will only record a death as being from coronavirus if it occurs within 28 days of a positive test. (Heneghan and Loke suggested 21 days.) As a result, PHE’s Covid death toll has been revised downward by over 5,000. This is more than even I expected. The BBC has the details.

The new methodology for counting deaths means the total number of people in the UK who have died from COVID-19 comes down from 46,706 to 41,329 – a reduction of 12%.

And figures for deaths in England for the most recent week of data – July 18th to 24th – will drop by 75%, from 442 to 111.

That 75% drop for the third week of July is astonishing. As Heneghan and Jason Oke point out in a new blog post, this doesn’t just apply to July 18th to 24th, but to the whole of July.

under the old PHE system, 2,086 deaths were reported in England in July by date of death, with the 28 days cut off this number is 574 – nearly a quarter of what was previously reported.

The same applies to August. For instance, if you look at the last two days, under the old reporting method 100 people were recorded as having died from coronavirus yesterday and 77 today. Under the new method, those numbers are revised downwards to 11 and 15. Heneghan and Oke have illustrated the difference with a graph showing the seven-day moving average for July.

Incidentally, the Government still hasn’t updated its own dashboard. If you look at this page, you’ll see that the number of Covid deaths recorded yesterday was 100 and the number today is 77.

Raise your game, Handy Cock.

British Public More Terrified Than Everyone Else

Does PHE’s over-counting matter? Yes, obviously, not least because it brings the official method of counting deaths in England into line with Scotland’s, making it harder for Nic Sturge-Un to claim she’s handled the crisis better than Boris. (Although she couldn’t have done much worse). More importantly, the over-counting may have contributed to the coronaphobia that has gripped the British public and which may in part account for why the UK has suffered a 22% fall in GDP since the beginning of the year.

The above graphs from the Economist show that the British are more frightened to leave their homes than the citizens of France, Germany, Italy or Spain, particularly when it comes to returning to the workplace. Not the sick man of Europe, exactly, since the UK’s Covid deaths per million are in line with those of France, Italy and Spain. Rather, the hypochondriac of Europe.

Excoriating Op Ed by Editor of Sunday Telegraph

Alastair Heath, the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, has written a damning piece about the Government’s handling of the crisis in today’s Telegraph. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

So now we know: Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Our arrogant quangocrats and state “experts” should hang their heads in shame: their reaction to coronavirus was one of the greatest public policy blunders in modern history, more severe even than Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Suez or the ERM fiasco. Millions will lose their jobs when furlough ends; tens of thousands of small businesses are failing; schooling is in chaos, with A-level grades all over the place; vast numbers are likely to die from untreated or undetected illnesses; and we have seen the first exodus of foreigners in years, with the labour market survey suggesting a decline in non-UK born adults.

Alastair has always leant towards scepticism, but this is his most sceptical piece to date. Great stuff. Worth reading in full (if you can get past the paywall).

No ‘Second Wave’ in Europe

We often hear alarmist reports of a ‘second wave’ in Europe, with rumours swirling about which countries are about to be removed from the travel corridor. According to the Telegraph, as many as 14 countries could soon be removed from the list, including the Netherlands, Gibraltar, Monaco, Malta and San Marino. But in the case of every ‘second wave’ country, all we’ve seen is an uptick in the number of people testing positive each day, no corresponding uptick in the number of daily deaths. I’m grateful to the FT for helping to make this point with a couple of graphs.

First the graph showing the increase in daily infections.

And now the graph showing the daily deaths.

In other words, the uptick in infections is almost entirely due to increased testing and nothing to worry about.

[Noallegiance]

Yeah but wear a mask otherwise we'll take your money.

So there.

[sancho panza]

1 hour ago, Noallegiance said:

Yeah but wear a mask otherwise we'll take your money.

So there.

£3200 apparently.I was ina local tescos tonight.Half the people in the place didn't wear a mask.Which is an improvement on last week.

WHat an utter crock of shit.

[Hardhat]

On 14/08/2020 at 12:56, macca said:

It’s nice to see that we finally have a functional Track and Trace App.. You simply track any recently awarded government contract and you can trace it directly back to one of their mates.

Absolute shower 

[Noallegiance]

The CV19 skeptics thread. What better place to put these:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3571/text

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/paper/2020/central-bank-digital-currency-opportunities-challenges-and-design-discussion-paper

Those of a suspicious disposition shouldn't look at the publishing dates.

For those in the US, look over here at this disease thing. By the way you'll all have a new Fed-issued-and-controlled bank account on Jan 1 2021.

[sancho panza]

8 minutes ago, Noallegiance said:

The CV19 skeptics thread. What better place to put these:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3571/text

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/paper/2020/central-bank-digital-currency-opportunities-challenges-and-design-discussion-paper

Those of a suspicious disposition shouldn't look at the publishing dates.

For those in the US, look over here at this disease thing. By the way you'll all have a new Fed-issued-and-controlled bank account on Jan 1 2021.

Stunning timing.Especially considering these would have been months in the writing.........

[XswampyX]

This won't be worth the paper it's not printed on.

Can you imagine the amount of digital currency that would be hosed down on the great unwashed. 

[Loki]

1 minute ago, XswampyX said:

This won't be worth the paper it's not printed on.

Can you imagine the amount of digital currency that would be hosed down on the great unwashed. 

Exactly. Everyone gets rich. Duh. 

[janch]

15 hours ago, Noallegiance said:

The CV19 skeptics thread. What better place to put these:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3571/text

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/paper/2020/central-bank-digital-currency-opportunities-challenges-and-design-discussion-paper

Those of a suspicious disposition shouldn't look at the publishing dates.

For those in the US, look over here at this disease thing. By the way you'll all have a new Fed-issued-and-controlled bank account on Jan 1 2021.

So the UBI is to be digital and cash phased out presumably.  This is massive and we will all be completely under their control.  Maybe those with a stash of physical PMs or even banknotes are being sensible.

[Noallegiance]

Add this to the mix:

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/bond-bull-lacy-hunt-warns-huge-monetary-risk

Cue massive inflation to start Jan 2021 if the Fed bank account plan gets the green light.

[Harley]

On 15/08/2020 at 20:05, sancho panza said:

British Public More Terrified Has The Most Shitiest MSM Than Everyone Else

 

[janch]

Sweden did it right:

www.zerohedge.com/medical/swedens-covid-19-measures-hint-herd-immunity-us-experts-rethink-lockdown-strategies

[sancho panza]

Don't read the article behind a paywall,but the comments are free and funny as fubar.Tories are losing the plot now that Bozza is taking his lead from kim Il Sturgon.

Think the Tories might have some problems calming their sceptic vote down...:-)

https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/08/26/latest-news-115/

“The risk of contracting COVID-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a child’s development and their health and wellbeing to be away from school any longer,” he said on Sunday.

But now he’s changed his mind – apparently influenced by Krankie’s decision to make face coverings mandatory in Scottish secondary schools. Henceforth, kids aged 11 and older will have to wear masks in local lockdown areas.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/25/childrens-sake-wrap-face-coverings-not-cotton-wool/

6 Aug 2020 3:43PM

 

 

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But why on Earth is The Telegraph giving space to such complete and utter drivel?  Is it trying to cause readers blood pressure problems?

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Nikki Willis 26 Aug 2020 3:34PM

 

 

Drivel.

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Austin Spreadbury 26 Aug 2020 3:05PM

 

 

For me, no one puts the practical absurdity of this policy better than Katharine Birbalsingh here: https://twitter.com/Miss_Snuffy/status/1298523535669952512

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Damien Bush 26 Aug 2020 2:35PM

 

 

I think we have already had quite enough Epstein child abuse for one year... truly pathetic. And utterly devoid of reason.

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Snake Oil Pussy 26 Aug 2020 2:30PM

 

 

Wrapping kids in face nappies IS "wrapping them in cotton wool".  It teaches them that there is hidden danger from every other human being and they need the State to protect them from it. 

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Andrew Rogers 26 Aug 2020 2:21PM

 

 

No. There is zero reason to require children to wear masks, it’s nothing short of disgusting. It’s bad enough that adults are being forced into such an inhumane behaviour, but children? Sickening.

Edited August 26, 2020 by sancho panza

[Loki]

Those comments are encouraging

Edited August 26, 2020 by Loki