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Michael, what are you actually advocating? Removing all restrictions would guarantee protracted agony for around a million people in the UK, mostly pensioners. Are you saying you think that’s a high price, but worth it?
Unrestricted, covid-19 would rapidly infect almost the entire working population. It is impossible to isolate the care homes from all workers.
A public health crisis needs public health solutions. Economic problems need economic solutions. Politics is meant to coordinate the two, but it refuses to alter the latter so it fucks up the former.
Yesterday whilst out cycling I met a chap I slightly know who works at a main Waitrose Depot, there are over two thousand people working there in shifts and as drivers and office staff, he said as far as is common knowledge, not one employee has had covid-19 and they have worked all the way through, including eating together in the canteen.
No, not advocating all restrictions should go but am suggesting we have devastated our economy for little good.
Michael, the care home holocaust is a direct result of government policy:
Practically, these pieces of policy are merely details, because the vulnerable need care, but if covid-19 is permitted to run riot the carers will be carriers.
There seems to be a mistaken school of thought that just carrying on as normal will not affect the economy. With no lockdown soon places will have to close anyway because of staff sickness. It is not just the deaths it is the fact that 20% at least if those infected will be ill enough to be admitted to hospital and many more will stay at home with less serious illness.
Twelve countries now each have had more covid-19 victims each more than China, the world’s most populous nation.
Michael, that’s not that unlikely. According to the ICL model, on the day the stay-at-home order as imposed, March 23, new infections had risen to about 280,000 per day. Only six days earlier it had been 100,000 per day. The stay-at-home order immediately reduced it to about 80,000 per day, and it has now (or had) fallen to below 10,000 per day.
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19estimates/#/details/United_Kingdom
Those are figures for the whole UK, but most of the actual infections were concentrated in London and a few other major cities:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc811/multimap/index.html
Remember that people get better (or die) and become non-infectious. When R is less than 1, by definition it means that people are becoming non-infectious faster than other people are becoming infectious. So lets say each infected person is infectious for six days. At 10,000 infections per day there are only 60,000 infectious people in the UK, and if R is less than 1 that number is reducing all the time. So it isn’t that hard to find 2000 people together and no one has had it, especially away from hot spots.
This also shows how easy it could be to snuff out if only the government had half a brain. Infection numbers went up fast because R was about 4, so if we can get R down to 1 / 4 = 0.25, infection numbers will go down as fast as they went up, plus just the few days that a person remains infected.
The government needs to explain what we need to do, and why we’re doing it. They have to say “see this number, we have to reduce it to zero, and the harder we all work on this the sooner we go back to normal”.
You’re right that the first stay-at-home order was wasted. When you try to eradicate pests, you have to eradicate all of them or you were wasting your time; they just breed back. The solution isn’t just to put up with them.
Bloody government is making me furious, because they’re giving up without a fight. They threw a few punches, and they were winning, for God’s sake, and then they said “no the British people are bored with this, let’s give up”. Winston Churchill must be turning in his grave!
I suppose they took the care home deaths as failure. No. Half a million is failure. Johnson tells the British people to take it on the chin; bloody Boris should take it on the chin. He should have said “yes, I apologise deeply, the care home deaths were our fault, my fault, for a bad plan and starting restrictions too late. But we’re getting there, the death rate is falling fast and now we need to tighten the screws as tight as they go and together we’ll beat this. Our target is zero.”
SA, they’ll impose stay-at-home again before 20% of staff are off sick. If they’ve reserved 100,000 mortuary spaces they’re presumably planning to let it run through a fifth of the population before they reapply the brakes. Damn risky game if you ask me. And five shutdowns of the economy when we could do it with just two; the March to May false start, and one proper one.
I guess they want to reopen Eurotunnel and air passenger transport to business for the City, so they’ve assumed that zero infections is an unrealistic target. Maybe the rest of the country should seal off the City and its damn airport, like a white blood cell 😀
Damn hypocrites. They gained power by banging on about how they’d control the borders, but they were never going to secure the City against incoming viruses in Business Class.
Excellently researched article from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (who keep the Doomsday Clock):
https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/
Report from a Tesco branch in Scotland…
Today when serving me at one of the checkouts a staff member looked out of the window into the car park and said something about “[***], Man and a Van”. I asked what she was talking about, and she said that she had seen those words written on the side of a van, with [***] being the name of another Scottish town about 200 miles away.
“I don’t know what HE’s doing here,” she said, referring to the driver, before speculating as to what main road he may have driven a long distance along to reach where he now was. She then said “It’s AMAZING what you notice if you keep an eye out for people who aren’t supposed to be here”.
Those were her exact words: “people who aren’t supposed to be here.”
Put this against the currently promoted “issue” regarding whether or not to shake money out of the pockets of NHS workers who happen to be foreign citizens in return for “allowing” them treatment for illnesses they have – an “issue” which has been reported using dogwhistle words such as “migrant” and “overseas” before the more accurate word “foreigner” took their place. So much for saying “thank you, oh thank you, thank you so much” to “NHS workers”! Clearly the “gratefulness” applies only to some “NHS workers” and not others, given that generally it is not considered an act of gratefulness to allow a person who has helped you to die on the street unless they hand over some money. I have said before that what the excrement about “Thanks, NHS” really means is “Hail the government, hail the state, hail the Nation, and hail all experts and those who are in positions of hierarchical and professional authority” and that for that reason it is utterly contemptible. It is fascist. Those who don’t realise the purpose of communal clapping understand little about conditioning. Ask any trained salesman about the “yes ladder” or “lowballing”.
Now we see quite clearly that nurses and hospital cleaners and other health workers who happen to be from foreign countries are excluded from the supposedly automatic respect that the far-right Tory government supported by the so-called “opposition” tells us that “NHS” “workers” so richly deserve…Britain this, national that, Britons the other…but wait…should “migrants” and “overseas” types get HEALTH TREATMENT for FREEEEE? Should “we” give it to them? Are people getting the message here?
This woman working in Tesco’s certainly seems to have got some kind of message, some kind of OK for expressing not only her cretinous fear of those who aren’t “from here” but also her now constant vigilance against
black people walking down the streetsuch outsiders.How so many people have become so corona-batsh*t needs to be mass-sussed within a very short space of time or else what is happening, which is essentially FASCISM and WAR, will shoot up a curve that is far more likely to lead to mass flatLINING than “flattening”.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been noticing an unusual amount of coughing by ewes, which can be a symptom of ovine pneumonia.
@ N
A fear of the other is a natural response to a fear of a contagion, everywhere, and shows why the deep state PLAN-demic is proving so effective to intimidate the government and public with fear.
The only people not sharing the fear are those who think the whole things been hyped to serve non-medical purposes.
Hence why ironically, despite his distractors, Trump is acting against fear (and all the threats fear poses to governance and civil liberties) by saying “Keep America Open”!
N_, this man with a van was black, was he?
Or were you ranting about nothing, and the shop assistant was just complaining that someone was breaking the travel restrictions during a pandemic?
Go ahead, just ignore me…
Dave, do you realise that you can basically just walk into universities and talk to people? They’ll be glad to talk to you and explain what they’re researching about. It’s not like the MI6, you know. OK, these days they have a bloke on the gate, but an appointment with any member of staff will get you in. Try it. Mind, I do suggest you pick a subject you’re genuinely interested in and find someone to talk about that. If your approach is like it’s all a big conspiracy and you act all cloak-and-dagger you probably won’t get an appointment.
Not now you can’t Clark don’t you know there is a PANDEMIC going on.
The French have suspended letting us know how many have died from covid-19
https://www.france24.com/en/20200522-covid-19-france-doesn-t-provide-daily-death-rate-as-hospitalisations-continue-to-fallProfiting from coronavirus
Covid-19 is either man-made or just a complete fluke of nature, a leading team of scientists have concluded. Australian scientists at Flinders University in Adelaide and Latrobe University in Melbourne have studied how COVID-19 is transmitted among humans compared to other animals. Nikolai Petrovsky, Professor of Medicine at Flinders University, said the coronavirus is “almost perfectly human adapted” after the striking study found humans were the most susceptible to the virus compared to other animals; including bats.Now that is strange, more adapted to humans than bats, very fishy.
Sky News Australia – COVID-19 ‘perfectly adapted to humans’ from day one (YouTube)
Where did this virus come from?
Nope. Not fishy at all, Michael.
How “scientific” is this claim? Well for one thing it’s not an empirical finding. The claim is based on reasoning about scientific epistemology. Prof Petrovsky only claims we can’t say for certain that it came from animals – but that’s a very subjective claim for which he’s setting his own standards of proof. Presumably he would only concede the point if we found the animal it came from and tested it. But there are other ways we can deduce the origin.
To work on an RNA virus you must turn it into DNA and put it in a cloning vector so bacteria will grow it. This leaves traces: half restriction enzyme sites, for example. There are no such signs in the viral genomes of SARS-CoV-2. To assess the likelihood of synthesising it in a laboratory without leaving any traces, you’d have to quantify all the known synthetic RNA viruses and express those that show no signs of manipulation as a proportion of that total. But there aren’t any, to my knowledge. We can therefore deduce that the likelihood of the virus being synthetic is negligible.
But … but … it attaches so perfectly to human ACE2 (hACE2) receptors that it must have been designed specifically for humans – right? Wrong. It’s a product of natural selection rather than intelligent design.
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'” (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)
There are uncountable numbers of other novel viruses to which humans are exposed that are either blitzed by the immune system or cause no appreciable harm. This just happens to be a freak mutation that made it through all the obstacles. That’s why we’re talking about it. But don’t neglect all the other viruses that didn’t quite make it.
Bats have immensely strong immune systems which means they can host viruses but not get sick with them – which is what makes them powerful reservoirs of things like Ebola, SARS, MERS. So the fact that they are not as susceptible as humans to SARS-CoV-2 is hardly a surprise. Lots of mammals have ACE receptors in different configurations, and we don’t know how long this virus has been bouncing around between animals in the Wuhan wet markets and the hunters and market workers slowly getting adapted to people.
Thus Petrovsky’s musing may be derived from scientific fact, but the arguments based on it are epistemological – and philosophically ignorant. He fails to consider more plausible scenarios.
Here’s more information from Science Daily:
Possible origins of the virus
Based on their genomic sequencing analysis, Andersen and his collaborators concluded that the most likely origins for SARS-CoV-2 followed one of two possible scenarios.
In one scenario, the virus evolved to its current pathogenic state through natural selection in a non-human host and then jumped to humans. This is how previous coronavirus outbreaks have emerged, with humans contracting the virus after direct exposure to civets (SARS) and camels (MERS). The researchers proposed bats as the most likely reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 as it is very similar to a bat coronavirus. There are no documented cases of direct bat-human transmission, however, suggesting that an intermediate host was likely involved between bats and humans.
In this scenario, both of the distinctive features of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein — the RBD portion that binds to cells and the cleavage site that opens the virus up — would have evolved to their current state prior to entering humans. In this case, the current epidemic would probably have emerged rapidly as soon as humans were infected, as the virus would have already evolved the features that make it pathogenic and able to spread between people.
In the other proposed scenario, a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumped from an animal host into humans and then evolved to its current pathogenic state within the human population. For instance, some coronaviruses from pangolins, armadillo-like mammals found in Asia and Africa, have an RBD structure very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2. A coronavirus from a pangolin could possibly have been transmitted to a human, either directly or through an intermediary host such as civets or ferrets.
Then the other distinct spike protein characteristic of SARS-CoV-2, the cleavage site, could have evolved within a human host, possibly via limited undetected circulation in the human population prior to the beginning of the epidemic. The researchers found that the SARS-CoV-2 cleavage site, appears similar to the cleavage sites of strains of bird flu that has been shown to transmit easily between people. SARS-CoV-2 could have evolved such a virulent cleavage site in human cells and soon kicked off the current epidemic, as the coronavirus would possibly have become far more capable of spreading between people.
If you’re scientifically literate, you can peruse this paper from the Scripps Research Institute – COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin – which debunks the rumours in more detail:
There are also rumours that the SARS-CoV-2 was artificially, or intentionally, made by humans in the lab, and this is highlighted in one manuscript submitted to BioRxiv (a manuscript sharing site prior to any peer review), claiming that SARS-CoV-2 has HIV sequence in it and was thus likely generated in the laboratory. In a rebuttal paper led by an HIV-1 virologist Dr. Feng Gao, they used careful bioinformatics analyses to demonstrate that the original claim of multiple HIV insertions into the SARS-CoV-2 is not HIV-1 specific but random [15]. Because of the many concerns raised by the international community, the authors who made the initial claim have already withdrawn this report.
Evolution is stepwise and accrues mutations gradually over time, whereas synthetic constructs would typically use a known backbone and introduce logical or targeted changes instead of the randomly occurring mutations that are present in naturally isolated viruses such as bat CoV RaTG13. In our view, there is currently no credible evidence to support the claim that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory-engineered CoV. It is more likely that SARS-CoV-2 is a recombinant CoV generated in nature between a bat CoV and another coronavirus in an intermediate animal host. More studies are needed to explore this possibility and resolve the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. We should emphasize that, although SARS-CoV-2 shows no evidence of laboratory origin, viruses with such great public health threats must be handled properly in the laboratory and also properly regulated by the scientific community and governments.
I would advise people to perform basic checks before circulating rumours from conspiracy theory sites. Try a web search for counter-evidence. If the contrary arguments have more credible scientific support than the controversial claim, either mention that fact explicitly and give references – or even better, don’t post anything at all.
Seems that lack of jobs will do more damage to the young than the virus.
The Lock-Down is causing a global employment shock, not seen since The Great Depression, the effect may last decadesThe International Labour Organisation has said young people are disproportionately being affected by the coronavirus health crisis.
In a new report the ILO, which is a United Nations agency, warns there is a risk they could be scarred throughout their working lives.
They could become what the report calls a “lockdown generation”.
It says young women have been especially hit by the increase in unemployment.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52817670
Young people have been affected by what the report calls “a triple shock”.China changing its tune on origin of viral pandemic
The Wuhan wet market was a ‘victim’ of coronavirus rather than the cause, according to the Chinese Centre of Disease Control and Prevention.
Genetic evidence has confirmed that the virus originated in Chinese bats before it jumped to humans, but the exact location of the transition is unknown.
Chinese authorities previously said the first cases of the virus emerged at a local seafood market in Wuhan.
But a study of the animals being sold there rules this theory out, after all samples of the animals in the market tested negative for COVID-19, meaning they could not have infected shoppers.
It is sad that instead of us all uniting to expose the incompetence of the current Tory government we ae indulging in senseless conspiracy theories about covid 19 and about vaccines in another forum. I found myself spending too much time refuting silly conspiracy theories about how vaccines are used to reduce world populations and how the establishment wants us all to die slowly by spreading contaminated vaccines, and not spending more time on the current dire situation.
A very important documentation of the timeline of how our government dealt with the crisis of covid-19 shows a continuous serious of inadequate or late or incomplete responses and in some cases outright lies. These were not only perpetrated by the politicians but they seem to have recruited some of the medical or scientific advisers. But what is most galling is that SAGE, the supposedly independent scientific body is no such thing as Dominic Cummings sits on this committee which therefore completely invalidates its supposed neutrality. This is also bolstered by the fact that the decisions and how they are reached are not transparent. But what comes out of this extremely detailed and valuable timeline is that the government has decided from an early stage to go it alone in the face of the rest of the world, the WHO, and the EU. It is quite clear that the herd immunity theory was going to be the only way that the government will manipulate all its action. The herd immunity concept may have had a very small chances of succeeding if as they hoped, 60% of the population will have got the virus by now. But as it happens the figure is probably less than 5% and you can never achieve herd immunity with such low levels.
The government declared a triumph when the curve was ‘flattened’ and the NHS did not totally collapse. But what we have managed after about 10 weeks of wishy washy lockdown, with active quarantining of those infected in the community is a reduction of daily cases to about 2000 per day, far higher than plateau levels achieved by many European countries. This will mean that the disease will continue to be transmitted at high to very high levels the moment any easing of lockdown is permitted. But things have now gone out of hand already and I think that continued lockdown is not going to be achievable for a second wave, especially after the Cummings breaking of the law.
I would recommend
“A National Scandal”: a timeline of the UK government’s response to the Coronavirus crisis
It is an excellent depository of contemporaneous documentation of this debacle.
SA and Dr Edd,
SA: I agree that the debate on the “vaccine contaminants and safety” thread seems mostly unproductive, but I regard that debate as being more about conspiracy theory itself rather than the merit or otherwise of any specific proposition advanced on the thread.
SA and Dr Edd: but the debate about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be ongoing in the scientific community and the scientific literature, and I don’t understand why you dismiss one side of it, in a public forum. Dr Edd, your May 28, 20:02 argument seems convincing, but there are elements of it which, as a non-specialist, I would have to take on trust.
There are both scientific and political consequences associated with this debate. As I understand it, there are both political bodies and scientific institutions seeking to investigate SARS-CoV-2’s origin in China, but the Chinese government is preventing this. Surely such opacity is in opposition to the spirit and objectives of science? Yet your dismissal of possible lab origin would argue for such investigation being unnecessary. This could appear partisan, and I request clarification of your objectives.
There are serious concerns with such laboratories wherever they are located, and I have no doubt that, say, the US government would be opposing Chinese investigation in the US had the pandemic originated near a US biolab. That wouldn’t be right either.
Clark
“SA and Dr Edd: but the debate about the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be ongoing in the scientific community and the scientific literature,….”
Forgive me asking for a reference to this as I am not aware that there is a scientific debate about this. What I am aware of is this.
This is really not a piece of research but merely an opinion piece. The supposed authors postulate that the lab was the source of the infection on circumstantial evidence. This has been grasped upon by some in the right wing media, bolstered by Trump and Pompeo’s accusations against China for political reasons.
Here are some refutations of this, here and hereNow just to be clear what exactly we are discussing. I take it you fully agree with what Dr Edd has written and which is the consensus amongst many scientists that this is a natural virus because this has been proven beyond doubt. The next level of suspicion therefore is to say that the Wuhan lab stumbled across this virus before it started to infect humans. But where would they have got this virus from? A bat? Again this is highly implausible, even though they have a repository of many bat viruses as this is an important area of research post the SARS epidemics. The closest then known BAT virus had 96% homology with the SARS-Cov2 virus but lacked the determinants in the spike protein with specific affinity to the human ACE2 receptor. If they have isolated the active virus, it would have therefore very likely originated from another animal such as a civet or a pangolin or some other unknown animal and this would have been fishing in the dark. I guess another possible scenario to obtain such a virus is to ‘passage’ the virus in the lab, through some other animal or tissue culture and hope for the emergence of a mutated virus that can attach to ACE2. This would be a deliberate programme and would then involve a conspiracy within the Chinese authority to develop a bioweapon.
I guess one of the above scenarios are remote possibilities but until someone comes with more evidence it remains speculative, and I am afraid that there is no easy way to prove it in this heated atmosphere of antagonisms.
And Clark, I can’t help but comment on what you wrote in the other forum. You bade Paul good bye but then went back for more. I have to say I was tempted to do the same, but it seems that that forum thread is thriving on Pauls prolific input of misinformation. He must be a dedicated follower of the vaccine-autism-WHO-world government-bill gates community and there will be no way to refute his claims. You will be spinning round in ever changing topics around these.
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