Nobody knows how many people died as a result of the UK/US Coalition of Death led destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, by proxy, Syria and Yemen. Nobody even knows how many people western forces themselves killed directly. That is a huge number, but still under 10% of the total. To add to that you have to add those who died in subsequent conflict engendered by the forced dismantling of the state the West disapproved of. Some were killed by western proxies, some by anti-western forces, and some just by those reverting to ancient tribal hostility and battle for resources into which the country had been regressed by bombing.
You then have to add all those who died directly as a result of the destruction of national infrastructure. Iraq lost in the destruction 60% of its potable drinking water, 75% of its medical facilities and 80% of its electricity. This caused millions of deaths, as did displacement. We are only of course talking about deaths, not maiming. This very sober analysis from Salon makes a stab at 2.4 million for Iraqi deaths caused by the war.
The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble.
An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble. A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood found 3,353 more bodies, of whom only 20% were identified as ISIS fighters and 80% as civilians. Another 11,000 people in Mosul are still reported missing by their families.
For a vivid illustration, here is a photo of Sirte, Libya, after it was kindly “liberated” by NATO aerial bombardment. NATO carried out 14,000 bombing sorties on Libya.
Sirte, Libya, after NATO bombing
The neo-con drive to dominate the Middle East, in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel, has caused an apocalyptic level of death and destruction. It really is very difficult indeed to quantify the number of people killed as a direct result of the policy of “liberal intervention” in these countries. Bombing people into freedom has collateral damage. There are also the vast unintended consequences. The destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria launched a wave of refugee migration which led to politicial instability throughout Europe and contributed to, among many other consequences, Brexit.
For the purposes of argument, I am going to put an extremely conservative figure of 5 million on the number of people who died as a result of Western military intervention, direct or proxy, in the Middle East.
Now compare that to the worldwide death toll from coronavirus: 220,000. Let me say that again.
Western aggressive wars to coronavirus: 5,000,000 : 220,000.
Or put it another way. The total number of deaths from coronavirus in the UK so far is about half the number of civilians killed directly by the US military in the single city of Mosul.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? There are four horsemen of the apocalypse, and while of course I do not blame people for focusing on the one which is riding at them personally, do not forget the others. Coronavirus has not finished killing. But then nor have western wars.
The sight which I cannot stand is the mainstream media which cheered on the horseman of war as they argued for the invasion Iraq on the basis of lies – and still defend it as a “liberation” – who now pretend massive concern for human life. The hypocrites are disgusting.
I was wrong when I initially wrote about the coronavirus.
Before I detail where I was wrong, let me say where I believe I was right. Large general population sampling antibody studies are now just beginning to emerge, and I feel reasonably confident that I was in fact correct that the mortality rate of coronavirus is under 1%, and probably not too different from the 0.5% generally quoted for Hong Kong flu. The term “infection fatality rate” is now being used to describe this true mortality rate. The “infection fatality rate” is the percentage of those who get the disease who die.
These are very early days for whole population sampling antibody studies, and the true picture should become more plain over the next month or two. I must say I have found it alarmingly difficult to explain to people the rather simple concept that you cannot infer a mortality rate among everybody who catches the disease, from the results you get when by definition you have only been offering tests to the most acute cases presenting as needing serious treatment. Of course a fair proportion of the worst cases don’t make it through the disease. But there is a population of millions in the UK (and nobody has a serious idea how many) who have had the disease with no or mild symptoms, and who do not figure in the statistics.
The very large majority of people in the UK who have had coronavirus have never been tested. That is simply true. How many, nobody knows. That is also true.
I do not endorse the extrapolation from New York to the UK, in this Daily Mail piece, to try to calculate how many people may have had coronavirus in the UK. But buried in there is the best collection I can find anywhere of what sampling antibody studies are indicating for the “infection fatality rate” across various US and European locations, and there is a strong clustering under 1%. Now these are preliminary studies, though almost all from reputable institutions. Proper, large scale, antibody testing programmes to produce peer reviewed and authoritatively published studies are on the way, but not here yet. I repeat, though, that I think the infection mortality rate is somewhere below 1%.
Where I was wrong, was in not realising that what is different about this disease from a flu is that it is really very, very contagious. So a far higher percentage of the population get it, all at once. Over two seasons, only about 30% of the UK population got the Hong Kong flu. Unchecked, it seems this coronavirus can spread very much quicker than that. I do not know why, but it appears that it can. So the lockdown policies to prevent health services being overwhelmed are needed and do have my support.
I do not however support the level of alarmism and panic. Of course the disease is really appalling for those who get it badly. It is a painful, protracted and terrifying experience. But a similar level of scrutiny of extreme illnesses of other kinds would bring similar stories. I have had three brushes with death in my own life.
In 2003 I had multiple pulmonary emboli (bloodclots in both lungs), which left me in a coma for days, was incredibly painful and I understand very similar in terms of experience to the end phase of this coronavirus. In 1986 I was actually declared dead in a hospital in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria (salmonella paratyphoid B), and was woken up on a morgue trolley by a cockroach eating my nostril. In 1974 I had emergency surgery for peritonitis, and was in hospital for 5 weeks and then a convalescent home. Retailing the experience or images of any of these illnesses would be as capable or more of generating the terror being created by the detailed coverage of extreme cases of coronavirus.
Yes the coronavirus is horrible if you get it badly. Almost all severe disease is horrible and death very seldom consists of peacefully stopping breathing, despite Hollywood. I wonder if having lived so much in Africa has changed my attitude to death. We do not see death much in the UK. Did you know the British have a 350% higher propensity than the Italians to put their elderly into care homes? That is why the deaths in Italy were so much more visible, even though the truth is that the UK government is doing not significantly better, and quite probably worse, than the Italian government, at containing the virus. It is only now making a start at adding English care home deaths to the official statistics (Scotland has for weeks).
I do support lockdown, I do support every sensible precaution being taken because the virus is so contagious. I utterly deplore the vast quantities being spent on war, the $220 billion being squandered on Trident missiles while the most basic precautions stockpiling against the much more real threat of a pandemic were not undertaken, because Tories begrudged spending a few millions on the NHS. I get all of that and I repeat it. But we must not be panicked into believing that the threat is greater than it is. You have approximately a 99% chance, (still nobody knows for certain) of surviving this disease if you catch it. If you are under 60, your chance of death is almost certainly at worst 1 in 500 if you catch it. If you are older or like me have heart and lung issues, it looks a bit bleak. But we are not immortal, nor would I wish to be.
But remember this. Your odds of survival are massively better than were those of a civilian in a country that your country chose to invade in recent years. Did you, personally, do enough to try to stop that?
Remember, there are other horsemen.
——————————————
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
Paypal address for one-off donations: [email protected]
Alternatively:
Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB
Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.
Great article as usual
Great Post Craig.
Putting the west’s war crime Murders beside CoV-19 dead.
And the threats – crimes too – never stop..Like Trump telling Iraq ” they can vote all they want, USA are going nowhere ” …Then tonight, 29 / 30th Trump’s repeated threats to China. Sick Madmen.
And now the deranged defence editor at The Times, Lucy Fisher..Wants a Red Arrows flyby Tribute to NHS workers.. That might Only cost £8 / 9,000..But it could be better spent on some PPE
A great interview here with Professor John Ashton…Slamming the UK gov – Very Detailed Info –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnO42YecJBA
Stay safe all.
(On-topic): so Tim Gowers was at that SAGE meeting, and a guy from Google.
Hello Palantir too. Interestingly one of Peter Thiel’s favourite books is “The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State”…co-authored by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father William.
Said book by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg is online here.
This is a serious problem, that Cummings interferes with the Sage composition potentially to get his ideas across.
Government can no longer blame “scientific advice” for mistakes when they cherry picked the scientists.
Also, does this mean Gowers is now officially a Cummings croney? I know you’ve hinted this before, and I was reluctant to believe it. Either way it is a bit damaging to Gowers’ reputation.
Also, why mentioning Palantir? Are they represented on Sage too?
I don’t know whether Ben Warner, brother of Marc Warner whose company Faculty has teamed up with Palantir, sits on SAGE, but it has been hinted that he does, with tightly bunched references to Cummings and SAGE, Cummings being “close” to Ben, and Palantir. Palantir are also all over the NHS now.
Cummings is almost certainly influencing the reporting about SAGE, and he will be pleased to purge it of those who aren’t sufficiently with his programme. Everything is war for him. In the space of a few months it has been bye-bye (either with an actual departure from office or an annoucement of impending departure) to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Governor of the Bank of England, and the Director-General of the BBC.
Thanks, I see now. Good to see the Guardian is having a try at this one.
To be clear about Palantir, several UK universities have banned donations from Palantir and Palantir-funded research for some time now. It’s regarded as a scandal waiting to happen. Universities very rarely turn down money. That’s how obvious it is.
As a retired biochemist/virologist I disagree with the statement that Corona viruses are more contagious than influenza viruses. The two groups of viruses share a lot in common including the contagion path they use. That results in very similar statistics of time versus infections for both groups.
Where Corona SARS is more of a problem is that there is a “silent” phase in the progression of SARS. Patients who display minimal symptoms can have seriously compromised dissolved oxygen levels in their blood. Consequently they can deteriorate very quickly if the disease develops further.
Ironically our only way of treating this is by mechanical ventilation which for elderly patients often results in ventilator induced pneumonia and may in fact contribute to a fatal outcome.
Taiwan has shown the world how to handle this disease. It has not used a national lockdown. Western Governments have lost the trust of their people and consequently introducing track and trace technologies applied in Taiwan would be resisted.
They say their are trying to contain the virus but leave our airports open to all comers ??? As I say it is like trying to secure your house by fitting locks and alarms etc., but leaving your back door open madness the gov., response has been pathetic trying to divert us by creating heroes to turn our attention away. From their awfull performance we are being ruled by greedy buisness men who are so stupid they don’t realize that no people means no business and no customers they are puting wealth before health I mean paying virgin to flyin Ppe when we have the RAF pilots and planes already paid for yes the loonies are in charge of our madhouse the liars war mongers while the churches say nothing
Blair Patterson
“greedy buisness men who are so stupid they don’t realize that no people means no business and no customers ”
If we have reached a point where either a few large banks have to go broke or everything else has to, then an excuse is needed to bail out the banks again while forcing everything else to shut down and go broke. SARS type viruses come along often enough that you would only have to wait for the next one. Not so stupid then.
Hospitals which have been using oxygen masks and nasal cannulae instead of ventilators have reported very positive outcomes.
A well argued and mature case, in the main, if you had just left your Brexit obsession out of things.
As for CoVid19 and lock-down, I hope you can be part of an equally mature debate about whether lockdown actually has any function worth destroying an economy for. All debates about lockdown must openly acknowledge all the deaths caused by lockdown, not merely the ones claimed to be saved. Vast numbers of people are not having their NHS check-ups/appointments/surgerey because of the neurosis about CoVid19. I repeat, the NEUROSIS about CoVid19. The NHS is not the NCovid19S, it is the National HEALTH service. It is the greatest outrage of 21st century Britain that doctors are getting away with mass murder pushing this ‘everything but coronavirus is now meaningless’. I would be putting at least 100 of them on trial with 20 years in prison and lifelong bans for practicing medicine.
Old people are dying of loneliness and lack of NHS treatment. People having mild coronary incidents are not reporting them and are thus far, far more likely to die of heart disease/a heart attack in future. Cancer cases are going to surge because of a complete lock down of care. Domestic violence is going up because lock-down is so ridiculously unhealthy: taking regular, vigorous exercise is an essential part of a non-violent domestic society.
Human beings are gregarious beings and self-isolating is deeply damaging to emotional health. Doctors are incapable of understanding that as the vast majority of senior doctors are emotionally illiterate and in the main need schooling by members of the general public (I speak with personal experience of a number of doctors whose emotional deficits would see them in special measures if they were not senior members of the Hierarchy).
Millions of small businesses are being destroyed as we speak and I guarantee you that many, many suicides are going to occur as small business owners lose their hopes and dreams, their life’s work, because scum in the world elites think that destroying the economy is a price worth paying to save a few old people. Saving 80-year-olds at the price of suiciding 40-year-olds is a society with no future. Non-negotiable and end of story. The people who need suiciding are the world’s parasitic controllers, not the honest business owners who actually serve societies.
As for ‘large infection rates’, that is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. The quicker the virus spreads through the young and vigorous, 99.999999% of whom will experience nothing worse than a cold, the quicker strong immunity in the population will build up. If you stop people seeing germs, there are just complications later. Not seeing EBV in early childhood can cause glandular fever. Anyone who was exposed aged 5 will never suffer from that teenager’s disease.
Let us all also be clear: the ‘figures’ for ‘Covid19’ deaths are being ruthlessly augmented by assigning any- and every death to Covid19. Large numbers of people are just dying of something else, but the ‘crisis’ cannot be maintained if honest figures were published. So organised lying has been going on since the start. You need to ask why.
I have zero doubt that Lockdown is an economic genocide which the Civil Service, its useless eater Scientific/medical ‘advisors’ should carry the can for. The pensions of those advisors should be confiscated, their houses taken away, their careers jettisoned. These people need punishment, not their never-ending get out of jail free cards.
These people have acted with the opposite of the UK people’s interests at heart and are incapable of even understanding what those interests are.
Those interests are a viable economy and an acceptance that people die of disease, sometimes more in some years.
Anyone trying to claim that a society will have to be completely disease-free is in need of being sectioned for being off-with-the-fairies, and I am confident in saying that Bill Gates would need to justify NOT being sectioned in that regard. He would have a very hard time convincing me……
I do not expect any honest debate any time soon, especially not from socialists.
Socialists have an unparalleled ability to wipe the slates of fellow socialists, no matter how heinous the crime. They are a morality free zone, living only in the ‘socialists can do no harm’ arena of madness.
Sane adults know that both socialists and capitalists are capable of pathological lying and they engage in all arguments with that as their primary point of departure.
Let us see who can actually debate like adults about the horrific downsides of Lockdown.
And let them argue about who is going to pay for it, because the price will be 5 million times higher than what it would have been without lockdown.
Any sane debater will demand that those who pay must be those whose clarion calls for Lockdown shouted down all reasoned dissenters.
We have to assume that the ‘Lock Down’ has been effective at preventing national health systems from becoming overwhelmed ? And ought to remember that were that to have happened, the excess deaths from not being able to access medical treatment would have outweighed many times over the supposed numbers you are suggesting.
I have to doubt even the idea that any meaningful numbers have been denied treatment because of covid19. My local hospital in what was an early hotspot has continued to function at a reasonably normal level, as evidenced by a neighbour of mine going in for a week to have a lung drained. As I understand it, and as a 700 bed hospital, it had a peak of maybe 200 covid19 patients, so no doubt pressure, but not of a disabling sort.
As for the rest of your argument, it is a fact that the Covid19 crisis has become a vehicle for a world and his wife group who are now claiming to have been so badly affected by the imposition of free time for many, that they must now be entitled to compensation.
Mercifully, the G here in the UK seem to have handled such things reasonably sensibly, and we have not seen the levels of corporate welfare granted in the USA.
“We have to assume that the ‘Lock Down’ has been effective at preventing national health systems from becoming overwhelmed ?”
No, we do not. South Korea has had a very limited lockdown, instead relying on testing and contact tracing. They have had about 10,000 confirmed cases and less than 250 deaths, with no new domestic cases reported today. Syria, with nothing more than a sporadic evening curfew, has had an even better outcome with 43 confirmed cases and 3 deaths. Sweden, with it’s very limited lockdown has slightly better per head figures than the UK despite getting it’s first known infection before the UK.
And your doubts about numbers being denied treatment are misplaced. Most regular clinics are cancelled, and ongoing treatments have been stripped to the bare bones. Indeed, I was talking with a friend earlier today who is recovering from cancer. She told me that all her routine hospital appointments have been cancelled (though she is still getting all her medication). And all this is before we get into speculation about people not seeking treatment because of fears about catching covid19 in hospitals. The excess mortality figures do show a significant number of deaths that are not covid19-related though.
“because scum in the world elites think that destroying the economy is a price worth paying to save a few old people.”
A price worth paying to save a few banks more like.
So far, it is not known whether immunity is imparted by infection by SARS-CoV-2 and subsequent recovery from CoVID-19. Previous infection by the virus may even make things worse (Nature). So I ask you to consider whether your following prediction was made in ignorance:
– “As for ‘large infection rates’, that is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. The quicker the virus spreads through the young and vigorous, 99.999999% of whom will experience nothing worse than a cold, the quicker strong immunity in the population will build up”
Increasing indications are emerging that CoVID-19 frequently causes long-term and possibly permanent damage to multiple organs including the neurological system. The lockdown, which could have been avoided (see my comment below), buys us time to understand what we are dealing with; we have had only since January.
Clark,
Sensible comment, Clark. Dr Jaggar was once an immunologist/molecular biologist working on such things as cancer angiogenesis, gene therapy and other obscure areas. He is NOT (from a search his publications) any kind of virologist or epidemiologist. He appears no longer to be working in science – and doesn’t appear to have risen beyond the level of post-doctoral research assistant.
From the evidence of his prolific output on this site, he is a rather angry and embittered man. He also seems incapable of distinguishing between his strongly-held (often bizarre) opinions, and an objective appraisal of scientific evidence.
Whilst I would be the first to be wary of the use of science and statistic by the government and also extremely sceptical about much’science’ carried out, commissioned, stolen and misrepresented by greedy and and corrupt Big Pharma, there is, and will be substantial scrutiny of all data, there nevertheless are serious and scrupulous medics and scientists out there looking objectively at the numbers, and bringing substantial knowledge, expertise and judgement to their interpretation.
One such is Prof Allyson Pollock earlier cited her by Willie
https://www.scer.scot/database/ident-12745
Pollock’s body of work is substantial, scrupulous and informative.
The problem, perhaps, for Dr Jaggar, is that its conclusions run contrary to much that he appears to believe in his rather singular world view.
Their a’ oot o’ step except oor wee Rhys!
https://www.scer.scot/database/ident-12745
Dr Doom
Thought about it but couldn’t have put it better myself.
” It is the greatest outrage of 21st century Britain that doctors are getting away with mass murder pushing this ‘everything but coronavirus is now meaningless’. I would be putting at least 100 of them on trial with 20 years in prison and lifelong bans for practicing medicine. ”
Incitement to hatred against the whole medical profession does not seem to be a pronouncement based on balance and consideration. I wonder whether this 100 will be chosen at random?
South Korea has confirmed that all it’s cases of reinfection have turned out to be false positives. Apparently, dead virus RNA is often left behind after the virus has been cleared, which is picked up as a positive by the PCR test. This is sometimes an issue with other viruses, such as HCV.
“because scum in the world’s elites think that destroying the economy is a price worth paying to save a few old people”
However, do they really think that?
To me the give away is India, where thousands must die on a daily basis from easily preventable diseases such as diarrhoea and abandoned children litter the streets of Mumbai prey to early death from all sorts of horrors.
Do the Indian “elites” care? They don’t give a tuppenny f**k!
The idea this elite are closing down their entire country to save “a few old people” is laughable.
They have their orders like the rest.
Rhys: my attention was caught by the term 99.999999% in your comment. It’s use suggested to me that the writer might be prone to exaggerate. How about ‘most’ as a substitute?
I mostly agree generally with what you are writing. But here are a few things you didn’t mention that are worth considering as well:
– One obstacle to determining what proportion of those who get COVID-19 really die is that the disease is increasing exponentially and deaths occur much later than the infection events causing them. Unfortunately, official numbers are often the result of dividing those known or estimated to be dying of the disease today by those known or estimated to have it today. If this is very roughly aound 1% during the growth phase (which we are still in), the ratio of those who get the disease today and will die from it divided by all who get it today will be very roughly around 4% or so. These are just two different mathematical ways of measuring like degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit. Obviously the second number is what we all want to know, but disease experts often communicate in terms of the first number, and journalists are doing a very poor job of translating this for the general public.
– Another problem when comparing COVID-19 deaths to influenza deaths, and again a fundamentally difference in how you measure things mathematically, is that in contrast to how COVID-19 deaths are measured at the moment, for influenza the usual numbers are surplus deaths: When the influenza season peaks, a lot more people die per day than when it is basically absent. Mose of these surplus deaths are officially unrelated to influenza. But with many years of good data it is possible to estimate these surplus deaths (normalising for the same weather etc.) and also estimate the number of people who have influenza. This is where the numbers normally mentioned for influenza come from. Again there is a major discrepancy. Neither is inherently better. If you measure in the influenza way, you include people who ‘just’ die half a year earlier than they would have died otherwise, e.g. by catching influenza on top of late-stage cancer, and you include suicides ultimately triggered by someone else’s infection. These are not included in currently available COVID-19 data.
– SARS 2, the COVID-19 virus, is very similar to the earlier SARS virus, which is known (or at least strongly suspected for good reason) to have spread, occasionally, even by polluted air.
– Many of the major outbreaks can be traced back to single events where apparently a single person infected dozens or hundreds of others in a single day. This came as a surprise because it’s definitely not like that for influenza. (I am not sure about SARS.)
– There is reason to be afraid not just of dying of coronavirus but also of having other serious complications. Long-term effects short of death are much harder to measure. We simply can’t know what percentage of those who catch the disease today will have crippling heart, lung or brain problems in a year from now. But there is anecdotal evidence making some experts very concerned about the possibility that this percentage will be substantial. Possibly so substantial that cynical plans to use COVID-19 for getting rid of pensioners might backfire.
– In regions with very good testing, it is known that even after a major outbreak was contained, less than 5% of the population have antibodies. So we haven’t seen what a totally uncontrolled outbreak can do yet. On the other hand, we don’t know whether it is really 70% or so of the population with antibodies that are required for obtaining herd immunity. E.g., it might be the case that 50%, or even 80%, of the population are naturally immune. (There is nothing to suggest this, but also no reason to believe it is impossible.) While this would be already priced into the COVID-19 growth rate (making it even more remarkable), it could mean that herd immunity kicks in much earlier than expected.
Even with these additional considerations, the death and destruction caused in the world by our politicians is likely still worse than COVID-19. However, those who already suffer from our aggression are likely to be hit stronger by COVID-19 as well, and containing the disease here won’t hurt them and in fact may help them a little bit by slowing down the global growth.
All the current real world statistics based on testing of infection rates to deaths ratio are coming up with death rates in the region of 0.1% and lower.
The one thing about this virus that has made me erupt in belly laughs is that Belarus (you know, the country in Europe that literally everyone forgets) had the sanest, healthiest response.
As for horsemen, apparently, everyone forgets that the WHO itself estimates that 7 MILLION people die every year from air pollution. Ironically, this means that coronavirus shutdowns are indubitably saving quite a lot of lives, in this regard.
http://www9.who.int/airpollution/en/
Very pertinent article in our present situation and worth being very very angry about. Still, the two items you are examining are different. I am pleased you have modified your earlier expressed opinions about this virus, I was one of those correcting you at the time.
You can be angry about 1. but really worried about 2. They are not mutually incompatible emotions.. With regard to Coronavirus and ‘flu, I am not sure that ‘flu is that much less infectious than Coronavirus – at least in a virus naive population. The infectivity of ‘flu nowadays is much modified by prior exposure and immunisation, so quotes about the lower infectivity figures of flu need to be considered in this light If this Coronavirus had spread without any effort to contain it, as you agree we needed to, we could have been looking at 40-50 million infections over about six to nine months, with about 1% deaths or higher (recalling the fact that the UK has an ageing population – 12 million people over 65 yrs – many live with urban deprivation and air pollution, and levels of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease are high (that’s another story) – we could have had the NHS and medical services dealing with 400,000 deaths, likely much more, and as many again seriously ill, many of who will probably end up having some sort of permanent debilitating health sequelae – lung disease, renal disease, stroke etc We don’t yet know how bad this might be. This would totally overwhelm our society, as jobs vanish, social cohesion reduces further and as other serious illness such as cancer are unable to be catered for a year. And the virus hasn’t even got full hold yet, in Africa, Asia, S America it will likely sweep through the population like a scythe, the vast majority of victims unknown and uncounted.
I am writing from NZ where yesterday there were three new cases and no deaths. 19 deaths in total, barely a blip of the normal number of death notices, and around 1500 cases. We haven’t “beaten” the virus, but we have battered into a temporary submission with a strict lockdown and closing the borders. The problem is “where do we go from here’, because we now 99.99% virus naive population, who we have to protect now for quite a long time, until we get an effective, affordable and available treatment or better still, an effective, affordable and available vaccine. It’s going to be a long and difficult road.
Perhaps we should look to Sweden’s way of “dealing” with the virus, which is to damp down the rampage of the virus, whilst still preserving some semblance of normal social and economic activity, looking for the much maligned, but not completely scientifically misguided, “herd immunity”. There are just so many unknowns about this approach too, and Sweden, socially, is very different that most other countries. They have had 20,000 cases and 2.500 deaths, and there’s no sign of any tailing off of cases – you wouldn’t expect this with the strategy they’re pursuing, until 40-50% of the population have caught the virus. However, for Sweden, this might still prove a better strategy, as long as a few thousand deaths don’t worry you too much. I think politically in many countries, this would be unsustainable, for instance here in NZ, and additionally our culture is very different from Sweden’s. Nor will Sweden escape the economic consequence of this global pandemic, but I suppose they’ve been able to enjoy a glass of Schnapps with their friends whilst their country’s economy goes down the gurgler just like everyone else’s.
As for Rhys + Jagger’s arguments, there is no “neurosis” here. Coronavirus is nasty and unforgiving, and as a retired GP I resent being tarred with the brush “Doctors are incapable of understanding that as the vast majority of senior doctors are emotionally illiterate and in the main need schooling by members of the general public ” I think any consultation I had with this contributor might get off to a bad start, unfortunately, thus reinforcing his ill considered prejudices. . Many nurses and doctors have died both or suffered serious illnessin the UK and other countries looking after their fellow citizens with or without the protective equipment they need, they’ve worked anyway. Doctors like this need no “schooling” from Rhys/Jagger, thank you very much. Rhys + Jagger’s shrill political grandstanding is exactly the sort of nonsense no-one in the UK or elsewhere needs just now. Compassion works both ways – there seems little there.
But whilst I see the disconnect in so many people’s attitudes, our hypocrisy as you put it, though perhaps I’d say the double think or the cognitive dissonance between 1. deaths at our hands in the Middle East and 2. Coronavirus – I am not sure this is the problem. One wrong does not necessarily infer another. Separate events need a separate analysis but it’s still worth pointing out this double standard, and being enraged, as any self- respecting humane and informed person should be.
Some NZ/UK comparisons.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/compare/new-zealand/united-kingdom
Intriguing much, that it seems the committed Left, and Alt Right, seem to be in agreement that the covid19 is overblown, sort of a less strident version of ‘Its just the Flu brah’ that those on the left flank of the Bell Curve are fond of expressing at every opportunity.
Yep, at the moment it seems to be the elderly and infirm bearing the brunt of the case fatalities, but its worth bearing in mind that the virus is still far from being understood in any meaningful sense by a medical establishment that despite its own propaganda is still far from anything seen on Star Trek.
There seem to be some indication that those in the older cohort develop more antibodies after a brush with the virus than do the younger folk. So assuming that covid19 makes a reprise next winter, its not entirely beyond the realms of reason that it could strike the young more than the old. If that were to be the case, I’d have to think that the public perception might be rather different ?
Of course its entirely possible that the antibody proposition is entirely wrong, just as the idea that Nicotine may have a protective effect as posited by the French governments placing restrictions on Nicotine products a few days ago may be. Only today we have the spectacle of the BBC stating that the drug Remdesivir shows promise, when it was only a few days ago it seems when the drug was pronounced a bust with its makers taking a consequent spank in the markets.
There’s not enough known at this point about covid19 to make any supposed ‘Experts’ anything other than potential Hucksters. What is known is the spike in deaths from all causes information revealed by the various national statistics bodies. And its fair to say that were the numbers so revealed to be from any other cause than a pandemic, they would be justification for a mummery of national grief.
In the meantime wear a F’ing mask in Tesco’s, just in case you’re like that guy back at the start who went from Singapore to the Alps and infected a shed load of people, but never really got sick himself 🙂
I would like to thank John Manning, Hans Adler and John Munro; thank you for your comments.
Hospital care does more than save lives; it alleviates pain and suffering. People protesting this lockdown, please contemplate how you would wish to spend your final days and hours before death. Please consider the slow and agonising mechanism by which covid-19 kills.
Then please direct your anger to where it is most appropriate – towards those who neglected preparation after the 2016 pandemic exercise, and then this January delayed until covid-19 was widespread, denying us the opportunity of containing covid-19 at small numbers by testing and contact tracing, as a handful of countries have demonstrated.
We can still get back to small enough numbers for contact tracing, but it is much further from where we are now than from where we were in January:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
And please, let’s stop making the same mistake about emissions and global warming. The sooner we act, the easier the necessary actions.
Clark
I second your thanks to John Manning, Hans Adler and John Munro.
As you also say, we must still keep an eye on climate change, and perhaps that is the replacement fourth houseman instead of beasts.
Nobody should underestimate covid-19, there is still too much we do not know about it. The situation is so rapidly evolving that world leaders have had to swallow their words (but sadly not their pride and admit negligence). This compilation shows the changes of attitude over time.
And the covid 19 epidemic couls also be an opportunity to reflect on how we deal with climate change. Maybe a lot of air travel for business meetings could be cut by reducing business travel as we now have the abilities to meet remotely. This could be a small step but re-evaluation of all our unnecessary journeys could be a good start.
@SA Air travel for “business meetings” is a tiny portion of all air travel, which in total accounts for c2.5% (c905million tones in 2018) of global CO2 emission (c36billion tones in 2018). Fossil fuels supply 86% and rising of global energy, so railing against business air travel misses the point. Instead, lets put our energy (pun intended) into ushering in nuclear power to make carbon neutral fuels, thereby replacing Big Fossil, rather than pander to the ineffective & misleading idiotic austerity rhetoric.
Yeah well let’s not build a load more pressure-cooker PWR reactors at sea level, eh? Not with sea level rising and the polar icecaps due to melt away in a decade or two.
How about wind and solar with a high voltage DC global grid? Our total energy demand is only 0.1% of the solar energy incident upon Earth, and every country would become dependent on all the rest, rendering war unthinkable.
Wind & solar energy are myths. Instead lets burn gen 3 waste in gen 4 reactors and get far cheap electricity for 100s of years and get rid of the waste safely. The laws of thermodynamics (let alone politics) forbid expansion of wind & solar much above a few % of global supply, because they need literally orders of magnitude more land & mining extractivism i.e. colonial plunder see Africa S. America etc… c/w nuclear – uranium can be extracted from sea water enough ’till the sun goes supernova! Wind & solar need liquid & gas fuels i.e. big fossil, for build out and to maintain whilst we wait for electrification of liquid & gas fuel processes, only viable with nuclear. More here tinyurl.com/atomichuman
I concur with Clark.
Compare the salaries of a Westminster MP and a Staff Nurse.
Salaries of Members of the UK Parliament
The basic annual salary of a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons is £81,932, as of April 2020. In addition, MPs are able to claim allowances to cover the costs of running an office and employing staff, and maintaining a constituency residence and a residence in London. Additional salary is paid for appointments or additional duties, such as ministerial appointments, being a whip, chairing a select committee or chairing a Public Bill committee.’
Wikipedia
Pay by Experience Level for Staff Nurse.
An entry-level Staff Nurse with less than 1 year experience can expect to earn an average total compensation (includes tips, bonus, and overtime pay) of £22,395 based on 113 salaries. An early career Staff Nurse with 1-4 years of experience earns an average total compensation of £23,315 based on 848 salaries.
https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Staff_Nurse/Salary
Such a staff nurse would have been working in St Thomas’s Hospital where the life of the blond buffoon was saved from all accounts.
Hello Mary, what is the wealth distribution among Boris Johnson and his Cabinet? For decades, the upper levels of politics have been dominated by very wealthy people, and I doubt the current lot are any different. Such wealth insulates its holders from life’s dangers, thereby engendering the irresponsible attitudes responsible for the current crisis.
Well said Clark. We are underestimating the effects’help pollution adds to the spread and or effectiveness of covid 19, we do not know how it reacts with regards to PM10’s and PM 2’s or the annual pollen spread.
I have not heard any advice as to the annual pollen count and that the symptoms, i.e. a stuffy runny nose and weeping eyes have got nothing to do with this virus, but that they could exacerbate an already infected situation. Go with it Hangcock, stop pretending you care when you clearly did not take the right measures to protect the elderly, when you could have done. Its your ignorance or your multiple spads are mere blow hearts.
“We can still get back to small enough numbers for contact tracing, …”
…. or to put it another way “I demand that any time anybody goes anywhere, their movements and meetings are tracked and recorded.
……….
… oh sorry, I should have added “… for their own good.”
Quarantine and contact tracing are standard methods of limiting infectious disease. Unless we want to go back and live in isolated communities, this is the price we pay for staying healthy. No conspiracy there.
Quarantine and contact tracing are standard methods of limiting infectious disease.
… and tracking the movements and meetings of everybody at all times is the gold standard of a surveillance state.
The use of modern technology to facilitate a desirable end is not itself a bad thing. If you live in a complex society you have to abide by some rules, otherwise you can go and live in the jungle, if you can find one these days.
You might just as well remark that those wearing masks are presumed to be robbers.
Having greater control over events is not helpful to our psychology. Fears get worse , to the point where the powerful actually believe that the goldfish, or China, are plotting against their election chances.
US politicians normally batty, now seem to be in nervous breakdown.
Control is inverse to sanity.
Trust however is highly conducive to sanity.
If our politicians had not spent 40 years trashing their human and animal neighbours, we would probably trust them.
If they hate the people of the world SO much, it doesn’t bode well for their feelings towards us.
I’m sure the Tories have a death graph, death target and are measuring the efficiency of this virus.
They have the means to stay permanently in power and the means to destroy the world in their hands. And yet it only seems to increase their insanity, to the point if projecting onto their rivals, all the crimes they themselves are guilty of.
I hope there’s no shortage of clinical straightjackets when the politicians finally snap.
– ““I demand that any time anybody goes anywhere, their movements and meetings are tracked and recorded”
They already have been for over a decade. About time it did us some good.
You sound a bit cynical in today’s report. If you need more money to reach your legal costs, please say so, we are all concerned that you get the best representation possible and that the authorities know you have a wide base of public support.
“Backing the wrong Horseman”
Of the four we have more or less tamed the wild beast but the three others are very active. But it is not a question of either or, it should be fighting all of the remaining three.
We haven’t so much tamed the wild beasts as exterminated them, replacing and displacing them with livestock for consumption in the more affluent parts of the world:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
The IFR of covid is thought to be less than 0.5% and as this link makes clear, the number will likely go down.
“Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.36%”
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
I am aware of another study by Ioannidis that corroborates this range.
“Where I was wrong, was in not realising that what is different about this disease from a flu is that it is really very, very contagious. So a far higher percentage of the population get it, all at once. Over two seasons, only about 30% of the UK population got the Hong Kong flu. Unchecked, it seems this coronavirus can spread very much quicker than that. I do not know why, but it appears that it can. So the lockdown policies to prevent health services being overwhelmed are needed and do have my support. ”
Why not support isloation of teh vulnerable and quarantine of the sick? Why support complete lockdown when it is kiling 2000 a week in teh UK alone? Where, in teh past, has complete lockdown of a society been used, and if it has been when and how successful was it? Hospitals lie with an unprecedented level of empty beds.
The following model has successfully predicted spread and fatality rates in multiple countries. Blue shows the prediction of the model, with error bands, and brown shows real-world statistics; the fit is remarkably good:
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/details/United_Kingdom
Please look at the extremely fast rise in the first graph, and consider where we would have been without lockdown. The IFR also soars when hospitals overload, as has been seen in multiple countries.
This model is obviously fake – and is bound to be since no-one has the first clue as to the actual number of infections. There has been a deliberate policy not to seek an understanding as to the aggregate infection level. It therefore follows that there has been a deliberate policy to rely on fake models.
Some work has been done in both California and New York to determine actual infection rates, and other data has been provided by both cruise ships and military vessels. All of this work and data can be criticized and all contain biases and errors. However the trend is clear – infection rates are much more prevalent than official data suggests.
The question is, why is the government so keen not to develop an accurate understanding of the true picture. Some may think that it has to do with providing a cover for printing upwards of $3 trillion in newly created money – very little of which is intended to flow in your direction.
Some may think that it has to do with providing a cover for printing upwards of $3 trillion in newly created money – very little of which is intended to flow in your direction.
Some indeed do think that, and furthermore they think that on top of that $3 trillion donation to the banks from the USA, there will be ten times that much in similar donations worldwide, plus the mortgages and markets of a million small to medium businesses. Some indeed think that we are witnessing the biggest transfer of assets from the many to the few in world history.
‘Some indeed think’? Count me in.
So how do you propose a Fuller understanding of the infection rates be achieved ? Testing maybe ? Good idea in principle but it seems the G are having trouble testing even all those with symptoms. Then there’s an antibody test to see who may have had it. Again great idea in principle thats stymied by the lack of any tests that produce a reasonable degree of certainty in their results.
In the meantime, there’s no shortage of people who have been badly managing businesses, now finding that sailing close to the wind made things go pear shaped at the first interruption, and now wanting a bailout. It also seems said micky takers have no trouble finding folk with impressive sounding academic qualifications, to produce reports that cannot be backed up by anything more than guess work 🙂
In the meantime, there’s no shortage of people who have been badly managing businesses, now finding that sailing close to the wind made things go pear shaped at the first interruption, and now wanting a bailout…
This is an unprecedented nightmare for anyone trying to run any kind of small business that doesn’t actually directly benefit from the lockdown. I have a strong sense that you have never in your life run anything more complicated than a bath.
– “This model is obviously fake”
It’s open source, twit. You can download the source code from github, so anyone can examine it.
It works the other way around; from R0, incubation period, and time from infection to death, you can use the number of deaths to infer the number of infections.
And it has proven itself by accurately predicting change of death rates over time in multiple countries.
Calloo callay, pay day today, fifty quid is on the way. ;O)
You had better hurry up and spend it before the whole thing goes belly up. The financial news is grim, worse than the banking crash as far as I heard it. Share prices collapsing which will affect private pensions. But never mind, Boris is on shortly to tell all and gloss over it.
Hi Craig, don’t forget the depleted uranium from these shells and bombs, just to add to the suffering.
Let’s not forget those innocent citizens murdered by Western puppet dictators across the globe .
I refrain from using the UK trademark, the Engerlish use it
To big themselves internationally.
Or, As I like to say, using the UK logo, the Engerlish try to show they have a bigger dick than they really have.
Lol.
Keep safe and healthy.
Regards
??
I very much miss Felicity Arbuthnot’s writing. She lived in Iraq and loved the country and the people. She wrote extensively on the horrors of the Bush/Blair war on Iraq, and the earlier one(s), the killing and maiming of the people and the destruction of the country and its infrastructure.
Some of her work survives on this site and a few others.
http://word.world-citizenship.org/wp-archive/1796
there is hardly any info as to who the UK’s representatives at Last Tuesday’s Petersberger climate conference in Berlin were, or what they contributed to the debate.
whilst there is nothing on Reuters this comes from DW on one of the four horsemen.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanysangela-merkel-calls-forclimate-friendly-coronavirusresponse/a-53272768?maca=en-rss-en-ger-1023-xml-atom
whilst the longer German version is from der Spiegel’s journalist Susanne Goetze.
‘there is no reason to stop climate change measure because of the corona virus pandemic’, declared chancellor Merkel and UN chief Guterres at the Petersberger climate dialogue. The greening of the world can be accelerated by this crisis.
It is in German and too long to translate it all.
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/klimaschutz-beim-petersberger-dialog-staaten-wollen-klimarettung-und-corona-hilfen-koppeln-a-e923c622-f569-4c88-a1f6-cefea31f484a
…and so people are encouraged to flagellate themselves over the horrors of Iraq and the bombing of ancillary countries such as Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. It seems pretty clear that a significant component in these crimes was the fact that governments lied to their populations. When challenged they then lied about the fact that they had lied. Official inquiries were established to whitewash the lies and the liars were never held to account.
Fast forward to today and large swathes of the population believe the government when it opines on the measures necessary to combat Covid-19. Scientists are wheeled out to talk in educated terms as to exactly how a virus can be contained by the simple expedient of printing $3 trillion. It is acknowledged that there is some degree of uncertainty with the $3 trillion figure and that potentially much more printing may be necessary to finally defeat the virus. Luckily they have the back of the people are absolutely prepared to print without limit
That people actually believe this is a sight to behold.
I think your article misses the issue entirely. The main thrust appears to be to admonish everyone for panicking, and to that end you present us with a salutary appraisal of your own stoicism in the face of death. Personally, I find the assumption that the rest of us are cowering in the cupboard under the stairs too frightened to come out rather insulting. Like you, I am reconciled to death, and have been for many years. I could die in a garret on my own and be at peace with myself. It’s ok. But the issue is not your stoic acceptance which you would have us all emulate, or mine; it is this: “what is different about this disease from a flu is that it is really very, very contagious. So a far higher percentage of the population get it, all at once”. You acknowledge that a lockdown is necessary to prevent our health services from being overwhelmed. You then move on to the main theme of your own stoicism versus, presumably, our spinelessness, which is compounded, for reasons that escape me, by the scale of the numbers killed by our governments in illegal foreign wars.
No one should have to die unnecessarily, including over a hundred health workers, as a direct consequence of criminal negligence, no matter how many people their governments have killed. “I do support lockdown, I do support every sensible precaution being taken because the virus is so contagious. I utterly deplore the vast quantities being spent on war, the $220 billion being squandered on Trident missiles while the most basic precautions stockpiling against the much more real threat of a pandemic were not undertaken, because Tories begrudged spending a few millions on the NHS. I get all of that and I repeat it.” Well, now that you’ve expressed your obvious disdain for our lack of fortitude, perhaps you might consider writing an article about it, since it is a far bigger issue than the widespread panic you assume, and goes to the heart of the political and economic ideology destroying us.
^Does exactly what it says on the tin.
No one should have to die unnecessarily, including over a hundred health workers…
For some magical reason, health workers seem particularly resistant to covid-19
The NHS is the biggest single employer in the UK. NHS England, NHS Scotland and NHS Wales employ roughly 1.5 million people (Wikipedia estimates over 1.7 million). That’s over 4% of the 38 million working-age adults, or 2.5% of the entire population of the UK.
As such, you would expect roughly 2.5% of the Covid19 victims to be NHS employees (assuming proportionate distribution).
However, the 106 NHS employees represent only 0.58% of the UK’s 18,200 total Covid19 casualties as of April 22nd.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/27/coronavirus-fact-check-4-why-are-so-many-healthcare-workers-dying/
“However, the 106 NHS employees represent only 0.58% of the UK’s 18,200 total Covid19 casualties as of April 22nd.”
Is that all they represent? I’d no idea. Oh well, fuck ’em, then. It’s just a numbers game, after all. There’s no need to relieve any pressure on the NHS, obviously. It can cope just fine. Health workers are particularly resistant to COVID-19. You should tell them. Shout it from the rooftops at a hospital near you.
Remarkable how many of you end up sounding like Dominic Cummings. On this issue, off-guardian could be written by him.
The point is that every time you examine the figures behind the sensationalist headlines, they don’t add up.
OffGuardian is a cherry picking website which collects all the dross written by retired and disgruntled scientists and politicians, many of them have beens, and dresses the arguments up as pseudo scientific analyses, which sound like what Forthestate has said, like Dominic Cummings. Too much indulgence in reading there can literally damage your health.
No that isn’t your point. I mentioned over a hundred health workers who have died in our hospitals. You gave me the percentage of their deaths of the total, and informed me that they’re particularly resistant to COVID-19. Your point, in case you missed it, is that, as a statistic, they’re barely worth considering. I repeat, you should make your views on the resistance of health workers known to them. No doubt they’ll find your figures as reassuring as you do, and will welcome your summation of the current crisis they face as a non event, along with the deaths of their unprotected workers. Only 5.8%!
If you spent as much energy on highlighting the abysmal failure of our government to prepare for or manage this crisis as you do offering statistics to prove that it doesn’t exist in the first place I think your efforts would be better directed. Telling us that health workers are practically immune, given what they have to face every day, is pretty low, frankly.
SA : “OffGuardian is a cherry picking website”
Can you give me a specific example of an article where you think they have misrepresented the evidence?
Node
“The NHS is the biggest single employer in the UK. NHS England, NHS Scotland and NHS Wales employ roughly 1.5 million people (Wikipedia estimates over 1.7 million). That’s over 4% of the 38 million working-age adults, or 2.5% of the entire population of the UK.
As such, you would expect roughly 2.5% of the Covid19 victims to be NHS employees (assuming proportionate distribution).
However, the 106 NHS employees represent only 0.58% of the UK’s 18,200 total Covid19 casualties as of April 22nd.”
Why is this a completely false analysis?
Because it is a simple back of envelope calculation of one number compared to another. Crude statistics. If you wish to do any sort of meaningful comparison then you will have match death rates according to age, co-morbidities, sex and maybe other factors. ,
Crude statistics. If you wish to do any sort of meaningful comparison then you will have match death rates according to age, co-morbidities, sex and maybe other factors. ,
Ha ha, when you say “crude statistics”, are you referring to ones which include people who die with rather than of coronavirus? Ones which include people whose cause of death is guessed? Ones which are released as a day’s total but actually the majority are people who died over the previous 5 weeks? … to name just some recent dodgy government statistics.
There is a statistical sleight of hand here. From the ONS website here are the statistics up to 17th April:
Total Covid 19 deaths 19,112
Covid deaths above 65 years 16,690
Covid deaths below 65 years 2,422
So if number of NHS staff who died are 108 then the proportion of deaths is 4.4% not the 0.58%
So there is an increase of deaths in NHS workers of almost twice the expected.
So this is also why I think OG is cherry picking.
Assuming most NHS staff are below the age of 65 years.
@SA
Now that is a clear analysis of the available evidence. It was inconceivable that health workers should have experienced a 75% drop in their average mortality rate during this pandemic. Astonishing what a load of old toot people will fall for just because they’re accessing what they consider to be a radical site.
So it’s not a statistical sleight of hand or a statistic falsehood as you claim further down, it’s a statistic based on accurate data. However it emphasises a point which you would rather it didn’t.
Remember that in 2017,
32,120 people died in the UK from influenza and pneumonia, a rate of 230 per million.
32,295 people died from lung disease (such as COPD and TB), a rate of 236 per million. Most of these deaths would occur in winter.
See https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/united-kingdom-lung-disease
Deaths per million for these diseases in India are, respectively, 640 and 969. Deaths in India from covid so far are 0.8 per million. See worldometers. It seems strange that Indians should have to stay at home to protect themselves from a respiratory disease which is obviously far less lethal than the ones they face in a “normal” year. If the lockdown strategy being imposed virtually at gunpoint makes no sense in India, you really do begin to wonder if it makes sense anywhere.
@Forthestate – It is obviously just a numbers game, how could it be anything else?
If you are going to shut down an entire economy then you need to know and to be able to measure the magnitude of what you are seeking to protect against.
Every year just under 1,800 people per year die in UK road traffic accidents. This cause of death could be eliminated by simply banning motor vehicles. Rightly or wrongly society prefers to live with this level of death in exchange for the perceived benefits of motor vehicles. Very few media outlets or citizens rake over the individual tragedies that lie behind road death fatality statistics.
If you are motivated by a concern to relieve pressure on the NHS then you could ban all trade in alcohol and tobacco and introduce draconian jail sentences on anyone consuming either product. Society does not do this and this would indicate that there are other pressures in play other than a sole focus on the health service. Is this wrong?
I really am at a loss as to why some people find it impossible to comprehend that estimates ranging between thirty and fifty thousand people dying in about seven weeks is not comparable to deaths from driving every year, or smoking and drinking, figures entirely predictable, and ones with which the NHS copes. It seems the problem really needs to be spelt out.
This virus appears extremely contagious. Large numbers of people have fallen ill in a very short space of time. This means that more people than usual are being hospitalised. Our hospitals are underfunded. When lots of people are admitted over a short period of time, this creates pressure. That pressure can lead to services completely breaking down, with people dying on the floors of hospitals, as happened in Spain. Had there been no lockdown, that would almost certainly have happened here. The fact that there are other forces out there which will seek to take advantage of the situation to curtail our liberties and effect the final eradication of what remains of the middle class is certainly true, but forgive me, I desperately need, at this time, to hold more than one idea in my head. It is also true that without lockdown, our health services would be overwhelmed. This doesn’t obviate the first point, and the first point doesn’t obviate this fact. They are not mutually exclusive. They both exist, at the same time. Care homes are already overwhelmed, and have been for a while. The situation there is horrifying. I don’t need the media to inform me of that. I’m aware of the situation at our local homes. This isn’t propaganda, designed to hoodwink you into surrendering your liberties, no matter how much you want it to be, it’s fact.
If you think many more thousands of people entering our hospitals at this time, and the consequent collapse of already overstretched services is the price we need to pay in order to safeguard our freedom and protect our economy, then say so, but don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting that there is no problem other than the deep state, and it’s all just a ruse fabricated by them. That’s desperate. The deep state is deeply worrying, and will seek advantage. COVID-19 is a major problem for our health services. Astonishingly, both these things are true – at the same time! I repeat, if you think collapsing our health services is a price worth paying, then say so.
Forthestate
Some deny that there is a crisis and some say that the cure, the lockdown, is worse than the disease. The first are just hiding their heads in the sand, I think you have had to be hibernating since the beginning of the year to deny the seriousness of what is happening. The second lot do not recognise that a major unchecked pandemic will also destroy the economy and our lives, not only our freedoms.
SA:
“Some deny that there is a crisis and some say that the cure, the lockdown, is worse than the disease. The first are just hiding their heads in the sand, I think you have had to be hibernating since the beginning of the year to deny the seriousness of what is happening. The second lot do not recognise that a major unchecked pandemic will also destroy the economy and our lives, not only our freedoms.”
For the first lot: not at all. All you have to do is switch off your TV as soon as you realise both the hectoring brainwashing going on and that the convenient little pandemic was intended to destroy the economy or, to be more precise, to pre-empt the inevitable collapse by disguising it as a medical catastrophe while simultaneously justifying a police state.
Isn’t this a totally bogus and misleading number because the most of the covid victims are over 67 i.e. retired?
I think you’ve been played.
What percentage of working age covid victims are NHS employees?
This is a typical false analysis. To compare mortality of the virus in health workers you have to look at how many health workers die on the job each year from effects of being at work, much as if workers in factories may die of injuries related to their work. So if you feel smug pointing out that we should only be concerned if say 20,000 health workers die of covid-19, then I would say that that is a sign of a rather disturbed mind.
So if you feel smug pointing out that we should only be concerned if say 20,000 health workers die of covid-19, then I would say that that is a sign of a rather disturbed mind.
yeah but I didn’t so your straw horse exposes your lack of valid argument.
See the statistic falsehood I point to above.
See the straw horse I pointed to above, and how is it a statistic “falsehood”?
So Off Guardian picking up the wrong denominator is not a statistical falsehood, but my pointing it out is a straw horse?
So to summarise the situation so far …
The world is in lockdown on the advice of the WHO which is predominantly funded by global pharmaceutical corporations who will make obscene profits from compulsory vaccines, and we are being told how necessary it is by a media whose owners will make trillions from the fallout, and we are advised that only total surveillance, cashless commerce, and police state powers can prevent it getting worse.
… and it is dangerous and irresponsible to mention the above.
That’s entrepreneurialism culture for you, a completely self referential philosophy with no inherent cultural potential beyond private monopoly.
they can’t force anyone to get vaccinated with their vaccine, you can opt out Node. Anybody who have made their peace, like forthestate and Craig can opt out. I will opt out of a vaccine that is not properly tested and out of any measures that track my mobile. I do npot have to have a mobile with me at all times and I don’t.
“they can’t force anyone to get vaccinated with their vaccine”
No, probably not but they can prevent you mixing in society if you haven’t had one.
I do not have to have a mobile with me at all times and I don’t.”
Me neither, but I predict that we will either have to get one if we want to mix in society, or we’ll have to wear a tracking bracelet.
Both measures will be justified on the grounds of preventing the irresponsible few from negating the sacrifices of the responsible many. The pressure to conform will come as much from your peers as the law.
At least here in the U.S., forcing people to have a cell phone for which they have to pay a private firm would be a violation of the Fifth Amendment.
most people’s movements can already be traced via their phones. what is your worst fear of what would happen if yours could?
Which is a very good reason never to carry a cell phone away from home.
The concern is that vaccinations will form the bedrock of some form of “immunity passport” scheme. Whilst there will be no formal compulsion the fear is that those without vaccinations will be denied access to a range of services. Perhaps they will not be allowed to travel on public transport, perhaps they will be denied access to leisure venues and perhaps they will be denied access to certain shops etc.
I have no idea as to how valid such concerns are – but appear valid if attention is paid to the public utterances of people like Bill Gates.
I found this clip of Gates on some obscure media platform, It’s so damning that it’s hard to believe it’s genuine, any thoughts?
https://governmentslaves.news/2020/04/30/watch-bill-gates-literally-laugh-at-the-destruction-of-millions-on-cnn/
‘which is predominantly funded by global pharmaceutical corporations’. True that. Don’t forget the Clinton Criminal Cabal. And…Gates the eugenicist. He would like a billion or so reduction of population. Hey Bill, let you be the first to be depopulated! And take your missus with you.
Another excellent interview of Knut Wittkowski in which he (again) speaks of the inadvisability of lockdown for all. He’s by no means the only expert saying this, there are many more, and well credentialed, if you go looking for the information. Well worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Q4naYOYDw
Because life is too short to listen to over an hour of interview of a very defensive self styled ‘expert’, and because there are many other actual experts working on the coal face, I did a quick shortcut and found this:
https://thebulwark.com/newsletter-issue/knut-wittkowski-the-coronavirus-truthers-newest-expert/
Knut is one of the sanest voices around. And…he’s a cheeky fucker. ‘Frankenson’! Delivered perfectly. Gallows is my fav. humour.
cheers!
Thanks Peter N.
As Watts says, Knut is indeed a voice of sanity in a world of hotly debated insanity.
This whole comment section is proof of how our society is almost completely incapable of logical and coherent debate. Everything is based on emotional or axiomatic premises.
With the fear factor solidly as its basis, the issue is polarising to the extreme.
If it wasn’t so sad, it would be truly comical.
Future generations will look upon us in utter disbelief.
Pretending to be so knowledgeable, while showing with every word to be so unbelievably dumb.
“The real question is why would government and media rely so uncritically on such a figure?”
He’s “sound”.
Adviser to the (British) government Eyal Winter, the Israeli who was once director of the “Center for the Study of Rationality” at the “Hebrew University of Jerusalem” (much of which operates on territory “cleansed” of its Arab inhabitants by the Zionist military when it occupied it in 1967), says that for pubs to reopen, drinkers could be rationed to two or three pints before being politely asked to go home.
That will stop viruses spreading, will it, or is there something else going on?
Eyal Winter is a psychologist-economist… Is there a difference any more? Don’t ask any of the movers or shakers in Silicon Valley… The worldwide web runs on behavioural psychology… And here we’re talking about more than the web…we’re talking about pubs.
I don’t know whether Eyal Winter has ever been to a pub in his life, but in British culture it is common when patrons are in a group of friends for drinks to be bought for everybody in the group in what is known as a “round”. First one member of the group goes to the bar to buy a round, and then he takes them back to the table, and then when everybody has finished their drinks another friend goes to the bar and buys the next round, and so on. (Are you taking notes, Eyal?) Will bartenders be expected to notice in a crowded pub when for example the fourth member of a group approaches the bar, so that they can say “Sorry mate – your table has already had three rounds. I don’t make the rules, you know?” And does Winter think there’s never another pub within a short walking distance of a given pub?
My point is this: surveillance technology features in the plan.
My point is this: surveillance technology features in the plan.
Most people here can’t get enough of it.
Node, that’s just an insult to your fellow humans; no one here wants a lockdown and intrusive surveillance; they’re just lesser evils to the alternative of mass suffocation.
We deal with this crisis from our existing circumstances, not the circumstances we’d have preferred. The evils of neoliberalism, mass surveillance, and dominance by the software we use had all existed for decades before covid-19, and now that background is causing widespread distrust of the actions we need to take. But we need to take those actions nonetheless, to minimise suffering.
Just wait until contact tracing tech moves beyond that function and sends you a text telling you its your round…
x
I wonder when this will be over and how much society will change with it. 1 year? 2? 5? And will there be any change? People do not seems to learn from mistakes/situations like this. Perhaps something else will come up and push the attention away from this pandemic?
I’m absolutely disgusted that 100 year old pensioner Captain Tom Moore has been politicised, and propagandised by the media and the British government.
A government that’s hiding its terrible failings with regards to the underfunding and attempts to destroy the NHS. Mr Moore’s extraordinary achievement is remarkable and should not be looked upon in any other light.
Its the British government, who’ll soon sell out the NHS, in an post Brexit deal with the EU, to the USA, in a one sided deal with them, that I find appalling.
Listening to Johnson on the radio this morning praising Mr Moore, then go on to call the NHS beloved by all smacks of hypocrisy to me, when Johnson and his band of Tory blaggards cheered when a vote in the House of Commons produced the result of halting a rise in salary for nurses.
No matter who raises what for the NHS, and I’m pleased that they do so willingly, it will be politicised by the media and the British government, in the fashion of the Great British Dunkirk fighting spirit, instead of been seen for what it really is, the failings of a right wing, heartless self serving government.
“haters gonna hate” …
Tell me do you think that a 100 year old man having to raise money for the NHS is a good thing?
Doesnt it say to you that the NHS instead of systematically being underfunded and privatised by consecutive Tory governments, that (Mr Moore, whom I think did a wonderful thing) instead of destroying the NHS, they shouldve funded it properly to begin with, and Mr Moore and countless other caring private citizens would not have to do fund raising events to keep such a vital and important public sevice afloat.
“I do support lockdown, I do support every sensible precaution being taken because the virus is so contagious.”
I don’t support the lockdown, at least not for everyone, though the elderly and those with serious illness are special cases and should have supervised preventative segregation to protect them against getting COVID-19. The rest of us should all be allowed to go to watch football matches (which should never have been stopped) to build up herd-immunity. Instead the target has been herd-mentality – brainwashing us into believing there is a serious pandemic when it is simply another manifestation of Cornavirus.
There is a bigger plan in the offing. Aaron Russo talked about this some 15 years ago and nothing has changed. Once the master-race (those who own the media, those who own Big Pharma, those who own social-networking and other spy-on-you electronic resources) have us all micro-chipped their power of control is limitless. Russo got that from Nathan Rockefeller. There will be no escape. Step out of line and your financial income will be stopped, speak out of turn and your voice will cease to be heard, do anything against the controllers considered serious enough and you will be droned out of existence (you cannot pass your personal UID on to an enemy like you might a phone).
And this is why they are creating situations like social-distancing, lockdowns and no gatherings in groups or on beaches, where people might perhaps organise a rally or say something different from what everybody for the last three months has been brainwashed to repeat. It is as transparent as glass and yet the majority still cannot see through it.
I’m dismayed at how easily the vast numbers of the UK population have swallowed all of the fear porn and panicdemic theatre. Indeed the true horror will be that total surveillance now coming very soon. With ‘adequate’ intrusive’ implants your every shit will be timed and weighed!
Never mind where you went, who you met, or why. What you did, will now not be hid! Ever.
And walked right into it. This lockdown will be enforced till people are begging for release, and then the trap is sprung. Job done.
Not so cheers.
Yes, luckily there are still quite a number of sensible commenters here!
Thank you for this, John!
Gordon Jackson QC, Alex Salmonds lawyer during his trial, claims that the exchange in conversation on a train after Mr Salmond was acquitted was a set up.
Of course anyone viewing the actual footage can clearly see someone hiding two seats down from Mr Jackson filming the exchange with what looks like a flexiwire camera and not a mobile phone.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18416634.alex-salmonds-lawyer-claims-victim-set-up/
Meanwhile Julian Assange along with unjustly held Catalan political prisoners, have all signed a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, deeply criticising their illegal detention during the Covid-19 pandemic.
So Dominic Rabb has said that leaving the EU in the middle of this pandemic, (which will cause untold economic damage), will avoid more uncertainty.
The British government loathe the EU and Johnny Foreigner so much that they’re prepared to further damage, not just Englands economy, but Scotlands as well by cutting us off from the EU by the end of this year, in a poor deal, or more likely a no deal.
It’s very unlikely that a change of heart from the British government will arise on a further extension on the deal. Indeed the British government refused vital PPE that could’ve saved lives from the EU, such is their animosity to all things of a EU fashion.
Where does Scotland stand in all this, answer nowhere, we’ll do as we’re told because our own leaders are spineless and compliant, If England wants to crash our economy so that they can leave the EU they will.
Craig, it’s being projected the UK will rank 3rd in the entire world for Corona fatalities, perhaps even higher. Any reflections on the culpability of Tory ideology as HM Fourth Estate does not see any at all.
Nor do Sir Keir and his crew.
Who is projecting that the UK will rank 3rd in the entire world for Corona fatalities?
Given that individual countries have markedly different criteria for assigning Covid-19 as either the cause of death or as a contributing factor in death then on what basis are these projections being made?
Are the, so far un-named, people making these projections simply accepting numbers as reported by the Chinese government? If so why? and if not on what basis are Chinese numbers being adjusted?
There are apocalyptic warnings about the potential threat to Africa. Is it suggested that the UK will fare worse than Africa? Take a country like the DRC – do you really believe that the DRC has the necessary infrastructure and systems in place to accurately identify and record victims of this virus?
Or could it possibly be that the answers to these questions are deeply uninteresting as any answers could obfuscate the main aim that being to blame the entire pandemic on “Tory ideology”? Something else which you fail to expand upon.
The rawest of neoliberal nerves touched. Lovely.
I note I was correct in that the answers to obvious questions are deeply uninteresting for purely ideological reasons.
Allow me to spell out your ideology for you. A refusal to proceed on a reasoned basis does nothing more than provide cover for the kleptocratic class. In the US there are 540 individuals with an aggregate wealth of more than $1 billion. Within the last month, and as a consequence of government policy, these individuals have, on average, increased their personal wealth by some $500 million.
I hope that this small coterie of billionaires that you so dutifully create cover for appreciate your efforts. Sadly I suspect that they really don’t know who you are and couldn’t care less about you. There is nothing so tragic as unrequited love.
“Who is projecting that the UK will rank 3rd in the entire world for Corona fatalities?”
Loony.
Actually its the (ONS) the Office for National Statistics which is a executive office of UK statistics authority and a non ministerial department that reports directly to parliament.
The (ONS) now publishes weekly accounts of all deaths in England and Wales in which Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate.
For now the UK is on track to be (maybe with the exception of Italy) one of the countries with the highest death rates from the virus in the world, of which the USA currently has the highest death rate so far from the virus.
Of course, Johnson going AWOL from COBRA meetings, and the UK doing nothing for five weeks except promoting herd immunity, combined with the eye opening Panorama account of the British governments downgrading of Covid-19 to save on the purchasing more PPE, and when they did purchase it, not informing anyone that a fair percentage wasn’t actually PPE but cleaning equipment classed as PPE, might have something to do with the UK’s projection of having a very high death rate compared to other more vigilant nations.
RoS – “of which the USA currently has the highest death rate so far from the virus.”
Depends which stats you use. USA has at 1st May 198 deaths per million. Spain (531/m), Italy (467/m) and UK (405/m) have far higher rates by that stat. Numbers from Worldometer.
The UK tallies of covid-19 deaths have been misreported out of all proportion.
Here is the gold standard for the UK GOV. reporting of infectious diseases, of which covid 19 is one. All infectious disease patients, suspected or actual MUST be reported within 3 days. Mandatory, statutory in fact.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/notifiable-diseases-and-causative-organisms-how-to-report
And here is the total for week 17 ending 26/04.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882380/NOIDS-weekly-report-week17-2020.pdf
See page 14. You can check how many cases in your own council area!
Of those 753 cases we generously expect 0.4% to maybe die.
cheers.
I don’t know why that’s happening, but something has more than doubled the total death rate:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending17april2020#deaths-registered-by-week
I wonder wether the ‘Tony Blair research foundation’ used for the Bbc”s figures last night, has realised this doubling Clark.