David Craig, on October 13th, 2020(Tuesday blog)
Here we go again. Lockdowns, bankruptcies, suicides, serious illnesses going untreated, lives ruined and the economy trashed to supposedly ‘save the NHS’.
All this is to protect us from the supposedly ‘deadly’ Chinese Xi-Flu. But how deadly is ‘deadly’?
How deadly is ‘deadly’?
I realise that most Brits are numerically-challenged. Nevertheless, here are some figures. They are for the Infection Fatality Rates (IFR) by age for the Chinese plague Xi Pingpong unleashed on the world:
- 0-19 years old 0.0003%
- 20-49 years old 0.02%
- 50-69 years old o.5%
- 70+ years old 5.4%
To put this into context, the Infection Mortality Rate for seasonal influenza is somewhere between 0.05% and 0.1%. We don’t (as far as I know) have age-related Infection Mortality Rates for seasonal influenza.
So applying a little basic arithmetic, we can see that Xi’s plague is much less harmful than seasonal influenza for anyone under the age of 50 years old and much more deadly for anyone over 50 years old.
However Xi’s flu is much more deadly than seasonal influenza for two key reasons:
- SARS-CoV-2 is more contagious with a basic reproductive number (R-naught) of 2.5. This means an infected person can pass the virus to two people or so, resulting in 2000+ infections after ten rounds of transmissions. The flu, by contrast, has an R-naught of 1.3, which equates to 56 infections after ten rounds.
- SARS-CoV-2 has a longer incubation period, the period between infection and symptom onset, than influenza (approx. 5–12 vs. 2 days). This means that asymptomatic people with the Wu-flu can stay infectious for a longer time and, thus, lead to more widespread silent viral transmission.
Hence the number of deaths in most Western countries has been above the expected level:
All the above suggests that the Government should be allowing the Wu-Flu to let rip among anyone under the age of 50 to build herd immunity in the younger demographic while shielding all those over 50.
Just one Tory MP has dared suggest this course of action
Charles Walker, the vice-chairman of the 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs, said on Monday “the fact is people in their 80s and 90s die”.
“We just can’t save every life,” he told BBC Radio 4′s PM programme. “Because the cost to the living is too high.”
The MP for Broxbourne said the threat of the virus had been overplayed. “The pandemic is not rampant,” he said. “This is an illness that very sadly really afflicts the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. Our focus should be on protecting them, not limiting the life chances of young people and people of middle age who are responsible for running and owning businesses.”
Walker said the economic impact of strict lockdown rules risked bankrupting the economy and pushing younger people into unemployment. “First world public services do require a first world economy.”
He accused scientists on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) committee of choosing to “ramp up” the “fear factor” with warnings about the disease. “It does seem the government, for the best of reasons, but mistaken reasons, is trying to abolish death,” Walker said. “You can’t abolish death. The fact is people in their 80s and 90s die.”
Walker added: “My real concern is these decisions are mostly being made by the middle aged and well-heeled, paid out of the public purse, so they’re not really going to bear the consequences off these decisions.”
No doubt the mainstream media will take these comments out of context and soon be howling and screaming and accusing this guy of being a typical heartless Tory who wants to condemn millions to their deaths etc etc etc.
World Health Organisation’s multiple reverse ferrets
Meanwhile, the Chinese-controlled World Health Authority (WHO) seems to have done yet another in a long series of stunning reverse ferrets.
First the WHO assured us that we could keep international travel open as the Chinese plague wasn’t contagious. Then the useless WHO admitted Wu-Flu was contagious but definitely NOT a pandemic. Then the WHO admitted Xi’s plague was a pandemic and demanded governments shut down their economies to stop the spread of Xi’s lab-created plague. And now the WHO is telling governments that we need to learn to coexist with Xi’s plague and not to use lockdowns as they are leading to impoverishment, misery and unnecessary deaths:
I’m still waiting to hear even one of our politicians telling us that we should be demanding reparations from the Chinese Communist Party for all the health and economic damage done by the Chinese Communist plague. But that would require a politician with some cojones and the only one in the world with those is President Trump.
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Exactly! (Charles Walker has always had more sense than a lot of his fellow Tories.) Let the young, the undergrads, all the schoolchildren and young working age people, get out and about and up close and personal as much as they like. They will need to accept that just a few, a very VERY few, might get unpleasantly ill and could even die, but that’s a price most, it seems, are ready – indeed eager – to pay, for the sake of maintaining their social lives. They would create herd immunity amongst themselves, which would in time halt the spread of the disease. Just tell them that they should stay out of the way of Granny and Granddad – unless, of course, those oldies are willing to face the possibility of illness and death for the sake of seeing and hugging the grandchildren they’ve seen and hugged for 20 plus years. Treat us all, young and old, like adults, for goodness sake Boris, Whitty and Co! Let us decide for ourselves our own personal, acceptable level of risk. The cost – actual cost in billions of £ – to the country, of all these lockdowns, a cost which will have to be repaid in future years, doesn’t bear contemplating. I expect I’ll be shot down in flames, but just a thought – rather than all this furloughing or whatever they are now calling it, across younger working age groups many of whom would prefer to be working, wouldn’t it actually be less hassle, and possibly no more expensive in the long run, to reduce State retirement age for men and women to 60, thus enabling older people who are currently working and at risk to shield at home if they so wish, whilst freeing up jobs for younger people? I know teachers past their mid-60s, still not elegible for State pensions, who are having to associate every working day with 17 and 18 year olds who, although in a “year bubble” at school, associate freely once outside the school gate with younger or older siblings, parents, friends. These teachers are at significant risk, as of course are nurses and other NHS workers of similar age. None of it makes any sense.
Stillreading is correct to say we should decide on the risks we are prepared to accept, but we cannot do that when governments interfere so much. When people are paid to stay away from work they are unable to determine the risk because they have to take earning capacity into account. When the government pays there is no risk to individuals, just greater undefined long term risk to us all. This is also the problem with State pensions. The government should not be providing them, we should be doing it ourselves. They are becoming unaffordable because governments always overpromise and ultimately fail to deliver. The health system is another example of government failure. Obama “reformed” US healthcare, but all he did was change the insurance system making it more expensive for everybody and making healthcare worse.
The information presented in the blog is not complete in my view and there are many factors to take into account which I suspect are not well known and never will be. A comparison with seasonal flu has problems because we have a vaccine so it is not a like-for-like comparison. I saw a reference to UK monthly deaths prepared by Dr Darko Butina. He has done a statistical analysis of global temperature data to put the average global temperature into a statistical context rather than emphasis on a single average number, which is a good piece of work. I don’t think he has written a paper on the death statistics though. His graphs show in 1999 there were a high number of deaths over the winter, and although the Covid deaths were at a different time the annual deaths are not that different considering Covid is a new virus. We may have to take into account that deaths have not been high in the years between so perhaps more people are living longer with serious illnesses and that is why they have died this year. Let us also not forget that around the world the healthcare systems have failed the elderly by putting them at greater risk. Boris, his gang of incompetents and the NHS have yet to apologise for that.
I gave up with the video when it came to finding a middle way. None of them have a clue what they should have done or what the middle way means. Importantly they don’t recognise the damage they are creating for the future. They cannot leave us alone to take responsibility for our own lives. Last night I suffered watching David Attenborough’s latest nonsense on Netflix. He thinks we can all have a wonderful life if the entire world is educated to the highest standard, has the best healthcare and is wealthy. But we have to give up eating meat, restore all the wilderness areas and get all our energy from renewables. He hasn’t a clue how this will be achieved and no understanding that it will not work. He only has to look to California today to understand why renewable energy will fail. The driving factor behind everything he had to say was reducing CO2 emissions to control the climate, which is complete nonsense. I was reminded of a comment by Reagan which can be adapted – the most frightening words in the English language are “I’m David Attenborough and I’m here to save the planet”.
There is an excellent article in the same vein by Professor Angus Dalgleish in last Saturday’s Daily Mail. The way things are, I can see Bumbling Boris announcing yet another lockdown in this country this time next year. Oh for an effective Opposition at this moment, why can’t whoever runs our supermarkets run the country as well? Meanwhile the final Brexit exit comes closer and with this lot negotiating our leaving terms, I hate to think what the Boris gang will sign up to; I’m anticipating a traitor Heath-like sold down the river once again scenario. Meanwhile, the media fell over themselves taking the pizz out of Trump when he recommended Hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for Covid. Well, this doctor has treated all his Covid patients with that drug and has yet to have one die.
I am not sure the death figures attributed to covid1984 can be trusted. Procedures have been changed and the normal rules no longer apply. Financial incentives are being offered to write covid1984 on the death certificate to trigger payments to the hospital etc. I understand a death can be classified as with covid1984 without a doctor even seeing the patient.
The government are merely recategorising some of the 600,000 people who die every year as covid1984. Everywhere you look nothing of what they present is true when you dig down into the detail.
Boris does seem to have woken up to the scam a bit and finally is not blindly enforcing what his rag bag collection of communists and vaccine carpet baggers on sage tell him. Maybe a glimmer of light but the damage is enormous.
The alleged C-19 figures for the over-70’s were caused –
1) by the NHS deliberately dumping thousands of untested elderly patients onto care homes, where they could infect others in an environment where patients couldn’t access proper medical care
2) by those care homes putting blanket ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders on their residents
3) by GP’s surgeries putting ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ orders into elderly patients’ medical files without their consent 4) by the NHS pressuring elderly patients into consenting to DNR by blackmail, telling them they would be ‘unlikely to be offered hospital admission’ and ‘certainly will not be offered a ventilator bed’. And that they could place added pressure on ambulance services and put first responders at risk of catching coronavirus if they did not sign away their right to life-saving intervention.
So I take all estimates of the actual risk to the over-70’s when going about their normal daily lives with as big a pinch of salt as I do everything else emanating from Johnson’s unsavoury team of millionaire Big Pharma propagandists.
William – the reason supermarkets work so well is they are private, and they have competition. If they don’t provide a good service, customers will go elsewhere. There is only one reason for people to use State services and that is to give them access to somebody else’s money.
twi5ted – the problem with death statistics is that there is very rarely just one cause, and if there is, that often means a violent death. I have only seen the death certificates of my parents and both died in their 80’s with multiple illness shown, but no assessment about how much each contributed to the death. I assume that is almost impossible to allocate with any degree of accuracy. The only reason I can see for identifying diseases contributing to death is to allocate research funding. I cannot see any reason for it to be used by the government for any policies that restrict our freedom of choice to decide for ourselves.