Tens of thousands of avoidable Covid deaths: is Cummings right?

[mikeyB]

There are 114 patients in hospital in Scotland with Covid 19. That's out of a population of approximately 5.5 million. Not exactly swamping NHS Scotland. I think the answer to your question is becoming apparent. We just have to live with it, and carry on vaccinating adults. In children, the death rate is lower than measles.

 

[pm133]

There are 114 patients in hospital in Scotland with Covid 19. That's out of a population of approximately 5.5 million. Not exactly swamping NHS Scotland. I think the answer to your question is becoming apparent. We just have to live with it, and carry on vaccinating adults. In children, the death rate is lower than measles.

Oh the answer is obvious to most people. It's politicians who need to explain clearly why they are behaving they way they are.

This week they are opening soft play centres for kids in level 1 areas but not in level 2 areas. Some areas border each other so people in level 2 are taking kids to level 1 play areas as they are allowed by the rules to do - you are explicitly allowed to travel between areas at different levels for any reason.
Yesterday our Health Secretary warned parents in level 2 areas that they could kill kids in level 1 areas by doing the very thing his own government has explicitly allowed them to do.
This is the sort of nonsense we're living with up here and I know it's the sort of rubbish the English are having todeal with as well. The Welsh too. I remember them taping off non-essential sections in Tesco for example.

We were told that this was all about saving the NHS, which we all agreed with but it's way past that now and they haven't updated us about the grand plan as regards why we are still under restrictions with empty hospitals.

All of our governments need to justify what the hell they are thinking with this stuff because very little of any of these restrictions make sense any more.

 

[pm133]

pm133,

So given it doesn't make any sense, have you been able to draw your own conclusion on why the governments are doing this, still.

Right. Grab a mug of tea. This is lengthy.

In my experience, when you see things like this happening, it's almost always incompetence.
Don't get me wrong here. I wouldn't know how to fix this problem without people dying either but the idea that Hancock and Johnson know what they are doing is frankly laughable.

Same goes for Sturgeon and Leitch up here.

None of them have the faintest idea what they are doing and they're making it up on the hoof. The people in charge have no experience whatsoever to call upon and those who are advising them are jostling for influence and power so they can't be trusted either. That's why so many loopholes are being discovered. Nothing has been thought through properly. Not one of them can explain the science behind why they think masks work. They have no idea. They don't know about pore sizes. They haven't an answer to the question about how they can possibly be doing anything when the masks leak 99% of all our outgoing breath going out the sides (because otherwise we'd suffocate). They talk knowingly about "droplets" without addressing the fact that this only helps with the relatively tiny amount of droplets produced when you cough or sneeze. They don't know about the vast majority of smaller aerosoled water particles which escape out the sides of the mask with every breath and are small enough to hang in the air for days carrying all your bacteria and viruses with them (which is why people get sick in offices). They don't have answers to points like these because they don't understand the basics of science.

So why make us wear masks? I believe they know full well that they don't work as they say they do. They know full well they are mandating them because it's a visual reminder to people that there's a pandemic but they won't admit this for fear of non-compliance with social distancing (which absolutely is worth doing).

Other nonsense includes having neighbouring areas at different levels from each other but allowing people to travel between both. One has pubs open and the other hasn't so you see people travelling to the lower level area for a pint. This continues to catch out their ever-so-clever behavioural experts whether it be pubs, restaurants or soft play centres.

The list of examples of this type of stupidity is long and I thnk I've made my point.

Let's be absolutely clear here. We have been incredibly lucky. Despite successive governments running science and healthcare into the ground, we have scored a massive fluke. It's proper, credible scientists who have dug us out of this - those who designed the various working vaccines. Proper, credible scientists who have not indulged in media whoring and power grabbing because they've been too busy actually working on solutions. We should have been clapping THESE people on our doorsteps. My fear is that they will simply be overlooked as others claim the credit for saving our skins. Many of them won't even have permanent employment contracts. That's worth letting sink in for a second.

One final point. Those scientists who actually found a solution via vaccines have been telling us repeatedly that their vaccines absolutely smoke every known variant out there, virtually ending transmission and infection. And yet we are still being told by idiots in government and a handful of computational modellers who wouldn't recognise a real virus if it bought them a pint, that we just don't know. And STILL we insist on listening to the wrong people.
I want our governments to shut the hell up now and get the vaccination program ramped up to the hilt and let the rest of us get back to our lives in the meantime. We need nothing more from them.

Right I've done enough wittering on.
Now it's your turn to say what you think is going on here.
Let's be having you...

 

[Bruce Stephens]

I want our governments to shut the hell up now and get the vaccination program ramped up to the hilt and let the rest of us get back to our lives in the meantime.

Yes to the first part. I'm obviously more cautious than you about the possibilities of significant harms to people before they're able to get vaccinated.

But yes, overall the evidence is still that the vaccines are working just fine. From the latest PHE variants they say

During the period of time that Delta became prevalent, there has been no increase in PCR-positive participants in the SIREN cohort overall (Figure 8) and reinfections remain at very low numbers in individuals previously either PCR positive or seropositive (Figure 9).​

That's on page 34, talking about a cohort of (now) fully vaccinated healthcare workers who get tested every couple of weeks.

So while they also warn that Delta is more transmissible and (they think) significantly nastier (2.6 times more likely to put someone in hospital if I read it correctly, though with a big confidence interval), the answer's still basically to get vaccines to everyone as quickly as we can.

 

[Docb]

Much in what you say @pm133.

I find the way terms like "risk" and "safe" are banded about by people who have no idea how to go about assessing risk level or safety very irrittating. Equally annoying are the journalists who let them get away with it largely because they have no idea either.

 

[pm133]

Much in what you say @pm133.

I find the way terms like "risk" and "safe" are banded about by people who have no idea how to go about assessing risk level or safety very irrittating. Equally annoying are the journalists who let them get away with it largely because they have no idea either.

Yes it's very frustrating.
The problem with journalists is that they are under pressure to write attention grabbing articles so they are then writing stories they think people will want to read and unfortnuately fear and panic sells - good new stories don't. We can't depend on them to ask good searching questions about the validity of continued restrictions.

We should be going through a period of national rejoicing over the success of vaccines. We should be rejoicing at yet another variant being utterly smoked by our vaccines beyond what even the most optimistic amongst us had predicted. We should be lauding those charts showing numbers of cases against age groups when we see that all the vulnerable groups are now showing virtually no infection, transmission, hospitalisation or deaths. It's an stunningly successful outcome. An absolute triumph for proper, credible science.

Instead we're being bombarded with wittering, garbled, poorly researched nonsense about vaccine-avoiding super-variants when there's no evidence that any of those exist. Honestly, if I hear one more uneducated politician using the phrase "we just don't know" I'm going to completely lose my ****. 🙂

Believe it or not, I'm not actually a ranter in real life. I'm a very positive person and I can put up with a lot. Masks have tipped me over the edge. It's funny to see what tips us into ranting buffoons. I wasn't expecting to be so enraged. It's probably the feeling of having my intelligence insulted by people who know considerably less about this stuff than I do. I remember hearing the news about it and, totally out of character, shouting "Are you f****g kidding me with this?" I remember my daughters coming into the room to find out what I was talking about. My eldest is a Physicist and she absolutely exploded when she found out. She's even angrier about it than I am.
I've certainly learned something about myself this last year. 🙂

 

[pm133]

Thanks @pm133

All sounds very much like typical office politics, power grabbing, promotion seeking, who shouts the loudest gets heard and noticed etc etc

I think that is certainly the rational answer to it all, but I think there are other things going on, beyond that, simply because we simply don't get told even a fraction of what is going on behind closed doors.

Take for example this; a £320 million pound contract for media, tv and radio covid campaigns which are set to continue until March next year (2022). Many of us may form the impression the government don't know what they are doing, but to me this £320m seems they are thinking ahead, they are planning and managing things.

Who knows what "they" think is ahead? what plans they have? how they really expect this all to play out?

Whatever it is, they certainly aren't going to tell us. We know that from last March when they "only" let us know it would be "three weeks to flatten the curve" and look where that took us!

COVID 19 - Media Buying Services - Contracts Finder

www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk

The problem is that you can tie yourself in knots over what you do or don't know for certain.

The reality is that right now Boris is sticking to the 21st June thing.
If he removes everything then Scotland will follow.

The key I think isn't the media contract.
It's the removal of furlough.
If they extend that then you can have a good degree of confidence that we're pretty much looking at next year before removing all restrictions.
In that context, yesterday's stuff with Sturgeon asking for an extension and Gove being open to that was very worrying.

 

[trophywench]

I was wondering about the general efficacy of masks this very morning as my glasses steamed up yet again before starting to do the 'grocery' shopping in Tesco. How much of anyone's breath is actually caught ......

 

[pm133]

I was wondering about the general efficacy of masks this very morning as my glasses steamed up yet again before starting to do the 'grocery' shopping in Tesco. How much of anyone's breath is actually caught ......

Almost none or you would suffocate. Try pressing the sides of the mask to your face to "seal it" and see how easy it is to breathe. That'll give you an idea how much of what you are breathing in and out will be going in and out the sides. Alternatively, try blowing really hard at a lit match through the mask and see how much breath gets through. If you can blow out the match you've got a stronger pair of pipes than me.

It's really only going to capture large cough or sneeze droplets which people rarely do anyway. If people coughing and sneezing was a regular thing in shops, I'd turn round and walk out anyway.

 

[pm133]

The other thing I would add that hasn't been said is, are those unnecessary deaths due to covid or did they just get the usual covid19 positive test treatment as so many others have during this pandemic.

What were the policies used in care homes? How were all those 25,000 elderly people from the hospitals treat in the care homes? How many had food and water withdrawn? Had their medical treatments stopped? How long will someone live without food and water? Does anyone have any answers on this?

Do you have any evidence that food and water were withdrawn?
That would be murder unless there was a good medical reason for it.

 

[pm133]

pm133,

These types of stories (below) are becomming more frequent, particularly as we head toward the 21st June. Double vaccinated and negative tested but still put into quarantine.

Football fans fume over being forced to quarantine

Hundreds of Manchester City and Chelsea fans who travelled to Porto and back for the football match last weekend have been ordered to self-isolate for ten days - as the country is axed from the 'green list'.

www.dailymail.co.uk

You can get tested at, say, 9am. By 9.05am you've come into contact with someone who is infected and now you have the virus. Your test result was from the time you were infection-free and so you get a negative result even though you have the virus. So, whilst a positive test result means you definitely have the virus (excluding false positives), a negative test means absolutely nothing. It's one of those "Absence of proof doesn't mean proof of absence" things.

You may well ask why we are mass testing perfectly healthy people. I understand the thinking behind track and trace but I'm not convinced that it's doing any good whatsoever. By the time you show a positive test, an asymptomatic person (the vast majority of covid cases are by the looks of it), you could literally have come into contact with hundreds or thousands of others. By the time all of those people have been tested, they would have done the same. The problem of isolating all of them is intractable. Then you have the problems of continual isolation where you come out of isolation only to be informed that you've passed a positive case in the street and back into isolation you go. Again, it's an intractable problem. There seems to be a desire to be seen to be doing something and this seems to be replacing the ability to think the problem through. It's morbidly fascinating to see this happening in real time.

As for doubly vaccinated people, the government are doing this because for some reason they are struggling to accept that all the evidence suggests that doubly vaccinated people don't seem to transmit the virus to any great degree.

 

[mikeyB]

If you vaccinate just over 90% of the population, and accept that folk who have had the illness will have immunity, then you will have herd immunity. The virus won't have the ability to spread. That is the aim of a vaccination program. That position may be reached by the end of July.

So the UK will probably be the only country that will have that herd immunity. Meanwhile, Brazil and India are letting the virus run wild, brewing up variants, so you have to keep the borders closed or quarantine visitors assiduously.