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glenn_uk, they might not want Dave on a covid ward. If he won’t mask, won’t wash his hands frequently, won’t socially distance, no way anyone would let him work there, and rightly so.
Dave, 12:45 – “Maybe, but its certainly helped kill off the flu, this year!”
Well that’s consistent with masks, social restrictions and distancing being effective against infectious respiratory viruses.
Constitutionality is frought with difficulty. An application was brought before the Irish Supreme Court to take a case challenging the constitutionality of lockdown legislation. It was rejected on the basis that the applicants hadn’t made a case that the legislation was unconstitutional but “Rather, the attack on the regulations was based on the view of the applicants that the restrictions in question were disproportionate.” See link. That might seem like it was rejected out of hand but people who oppose the lockdown and think it is unconstitutional should be grateful to, rather than angry at, Justice Meenan for not hearing this case, because it would not have succeeded for the reasons outlined. They’d be better off finding a good lawyer and identifying actual reasons why the legislation is unconstitutional.
Personally, I actually think that a Supreme Court ruling on the matter would be helpful whichever way the ruling goes. The problem with proportionality is that is more a political matter than a constitutional one. I also think it would be easy for both the UK and Irish governments to argue that their legislation was proportionate.
“The UK government is ruling by decree and have banned all social and political gatherings….”
They are legislating to combat a new infectious disease that has in one year become the leading cause of deaths in the UK. If you feel so strongly challange it in the Supreme Court or support others to do so. You are not alone, a number of MP’s feel the same as you.
They have kept legislation focused on containing infectious disease spread. They haven’t as yet legislated to round up and incarcerate without trial everyone called Dave. If they do I’ll be right behind you in protesting as I suspect everyone else reading these forums would be too.@ Clark
“Dave, 12:45 – “Maybe, but its certainly helped kill off the flu, this year!”
Well that’s consistent with masks, social restrictions and distancing being effective against infectious respiratory viruses”.
So the restrictions stop flu, as covid “cases” soar?
@ ET
Simon Dolan of Keep Britain Free did crowdfund a Judicial Review of the government’s use of the 1984 Public Health Act to impose lockdowns, but the courts have refused to hear the case. The Coronavirus Bill was passed to give the Executive powers to rule by decree.
They are tightening the ratchet, and people sitting on park benches are fined, as an excuse to go heavy on certain types of political protests. Piers Corbyn was surrounded by police at Speakers Corner and told he was breaking social distancing rules and he’s been fined/arrested numerous time, albeit I don’t think he’s been found guilty after a trial at court, because the restrictions are illegal, so they don’t want a court case becoming the de facto Judicial Review.
Dave the Denier: “So the restrictions stop flu, as covid “cases” soar?”
That’s right “Dave”. Because Covid-19 is vastly more infectious than “flu”. Get it yet? Of course not.
Incidentally, did you know the Earth goes around the Sun? Why should that be, and how do you know?
What is your particular expertise and/or profession, and what level of education have you attained (formal or otherwise)? Just asking. Because I wouldn’t want to offend someone who’s, well, “challenged” in certain regards as far as learning abilities are concerned, and you do show some unfortunate leanings in that direction. No offence – just saying.
Dave, 19:18 – “So the restrictions stop flu, as covid “cases” soar?”
glenn_uk is right; SARS-CoV-2 is more infectious than the influenza viruses, and there’s residual immunity in the population to ‘flu, whereas SARS-CoV-2 is new, so at the outset, no one’s immune systems had any record of how to make antibodies against it.
There’s a lot of media talk about the R number, but it isn’t very clear. There are actually various R numbers. Each type of virus has its own R-zero, which is how infectious it is. SARS-CoV-2 is more infectious than ‘flu ie. it’s R-zero is higher. The measles virus is even more infectious. We can’t change a virus’s R-zero.
The R that’s in the news media a lot is R-t, which is the infectiousness in a given set of circumstances. We can change a virus’s R-t with our behaviours, eg. “stay away from me, I don’t want you to catch my cold”. R-t is the number of people each infected person is likely to infect, on average. If it’s above 1, infections spread and increase. If we can get it below 1, the number of infections decreases, sometimes even to zero, extinction. The stricter restrictions in Scotland drove two variants to extinction there, while those variants continued to increase in England.
An effective vaccination programme decreases a virus’s R-t; it becomes too unlikely for the virus to find new hosts. That’s how smallpox was wiped out. It nearly worked with polio too, but a conspiracy theory in Africa made people too scared to get vaccinated.
The US military really fucked things up in Afghanistan over a decade ago. They sent teams round vaccinating people, but they were also taking genetic samples to try and identify “terrorism” suspects. Word got out and it made Afghans distrust vaccination.
When restrictions are imposed, it pushes down the R-t numbers of all infectious respiratory viruses. The lockdown restrictions have pushed the R-t for ‘flu to well below 1, so ‘flu is strongly suppressed this year. But SARS-CoV-2’s R-zero is higher than ‘flu’s, so its R-t doesn’t get pushed as low as ‘flu’s.
The social restrictions are working; check these graphs, and click the “7-day moving average” box to smooth out the effect of weekends on the collection of statistics. Infections have just started falling quite fast. The death rate is still rising because lots of people were infected about a couple of weeks ago, but it’s rising a bit slower than it was and within a week it should be falling too.
Sorry, I should have said; the graphs to look at on the page I linked are “Daily New Cases in the United Kingdom” and “Daily New Deaths in the United Kingdom”. Click both “7-day moving average” boxes.
The Cases peak last spring looks tiny compared with autumn/winter but that’s because there were hardly any test kits available then. Useless bloody government; can’t the UK make stuff any more? We were even short of masks for doctors and nurses; FFS, they’re just a bit of fabric and some elastic. In China they built hospitals in ten days; couldn’t the UK have built a mask factory in February? But that’s globalisation for you!
@ Glenn-UK
You say you don’t want to insult disabled People, but then say I’m disabled and insult me. You’re a bully! Clark, have a word, or are your tears fake too?
@ Clark
You say the restrictions have stopped a microscopic respiratory virus, deadly flu, but not another microscopic respiratory virus, milder corona, because covid-19 is more infectious and totally new. Typically audacious, as its not totally new and a healthy immune system soon fights back.
But if so that explains why the country has already reached herd immunity, hence the need for a new mutant strain to prolong the charade, but which for propagandist reasons, virus terrorism, they still choose to call covid-19 rather than covid-20!
Promoting experimental synthetic pathogens (falsely calling them vaccines) on behalf of the drug cartels as the solution, rather than healthy living and therapeutics, just shows you’re a Dr Mengele type, as ‘vaccinating’ the frail elderly, the most vulnerable, was always a quack idea from the start, due to their weakened immune systems and other medication, but more so following reports from Norway.
Curiously when I implied we don’t have flu this season, Clark and Glenn-UK didn’t show any scepticism at this remarkable news, they didn’t doubt me, they immediately agreed!! Is the unprecedented absence of flu this season also a worldwide phenomenon?
I won’t be shedding any more tears for you Dave.
Deception and manipulation are like littering or violence. It only takes a minority to corrupt things for everyone.
The usual double-speak, we’re only killing everyone to save lives!
Dave, Jan 16 @18:14: ” … despite there only being a 0.07% mortality rate, of mostly the elderly.”
ET, Jan 17 @ 00:34: “Show me how you got to 0.07%. … I contest the 0.07% figure and I ask you to show your derivation of it. “
I still can’t figure out how you arrived at that figure, Dave. When you got your sums wrong at school did your maths teacher not tell you to show your working? (“I just thought up a number” doesn’t qualify.)
Perhaps you didn’t derive it yourself but picked it up from another source. I went on a web trawl and found it repeated here.
“The prospect of a very expensive 95% effective novel-vaccine may seem good news, except anything counts as a 95% effective vaccine against a virus with a mortality rate of less than 0.07%!”
That guy’s status as a local politician might seem to lend him some credibility but he actually seems to be a bit of a nutter with an “extreme libertarian ideology” whose “comments have sparked a backlash from the local community” – Rainham councillor condemned for claiming Covid-19 threat has been inflated.
Did you pick it up from there or another antivaxxer fansite? If it came from an extreme right-wing echo chamber then that hardly counts as a valid source. BNP types aren’t renowned for their statistical abilities!
It [the flu] is not absent; it is reduced. I pointed to this in this post at the bottom where the respiratory deaths are listed for 2019 and 2020. The flu season varies from year to year anyway. Coronaviruses, all of them affecting humans including Sars-Cov-2, and influenza viruses are spread via the same mechanism, airborne.
Weekly national Influenza andCOVID-19 surveillance report
Is it really that surprising that measures to reduce airborne transmission or one virus will reduce another?
Social distancing, hand washing and gel use, masks, closures of indoor gatherings and all the rest will reduce transmission of BOTH influenza virus and coronavirus and any other airborne virus too.
There are other factors. The flu vaccine uptake has been higher this year than any other. There is more informaton than you could need in the above link.Dawg
I think there are two much more influential sources of this figure, one is the go to website for covid denialists, which is Offguardian“Seven of the 12 inferred IFRs are in the range 0.07 to 0.20 (corrected IFR of 0.06 to 0.16) which are similar to IFR values of seasonal influenza. Three values are modestly higher (corrected IFR of 0.25-0.40 in Gangelt, Geneva, and Wuhan) and two are modestly lower than this range (corrected IFR of 0.02-0.03 in Kobe and Oise).”
But the origin of this quote comes from a paper by Ioannides.
@ Dawg
Are you describing Piers Corbyn as extreme right-wing?
@Dawg
At the risk of banging on and on about this particular aspect. These crude deaths rates are used. It’s not that it’s wrong to say that your risk of dying from covid in 2020 was 0.116%, because that is your non age adjusted risk. What’s is wrong is to use that to convey that covid is oh such a small risk whilst at the same not putting that figure in context and pointng out that your risk as an individual of dying from any cause of death in 2020 was 0.89% which is also small. Covid is a significant proportion of that risk at approx 13%.
@Dave
“Are you describing Piers Corbyn as extreme right-wing?”
I didn’t say anything about Piers Corbyn. But now you come to mention it, he does seem quite chummy with a notorious antisemite in these photos – Daily Mail: EXCLUSIVE: Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers gives a speech alongside a notorious Holocaust denier and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist
It’s interesting how extreme left and extreme right tend to meet at the ends, like a political circle more than a spectrum. Extreme libertarianism can be viewed as either, depending on your perspective. But I think I’m preaching to the choir here.
@ ET
I agree with you, lets take respiratory viruses seriously, and proportionately. The health care improvements possible from the money wasted underwriting a closed economy is vast, but now a more than 1% prospect, is for the NHS to be declared bankrupt, and privatised/sold to the drug cartels who have received massive public funding, to Protect the NHS! I.e. the lockdown is a bad not good health policy.
Dave, are you Rainham ward Councillor David Durant?
Getting back (more or less) on topic, I’ve been poking around the Havering Daily news site (which I linked to earlier). It turns out that Havering, a well-off borough in the North East of London, leads the way in flouting the lockdown rules and neatly demonstrates the folly of disregarding them.
Havering is notoriously home to stuffy old gammons shouting and waving their sticks at pigeons. They weren’t going to be told what to do by no government. Well, now the pigeons are coming home to roost. Havering has the highest rate of Covid infections and deaths in London.
The local MP is Andrew Rosindell, a Thatcherite trougher who gratuitously thumbed his (uncovered) nose at facemasks and social distancing.
“MP Andrew Rosindell is now advocating publicly, on Channel 4 news and BBC London news, that the Prime Minister and government scientists’ guidelines and regulations for controlling the pandemic should be rejected.
No wonder Havering has the highest number of Covid cases in the whole of London.
… As has now been widely viewed on Facebook, Rosindell was seen travelling on the tube blatantly breaking the law about wearing face masks … very close to another man, having a lengthy conversation.”
— Havering Daily News, 14 Dec 2020It’s quite fitting that Boris sacked Rosindell from his role as trade envoy for voting against the Covid restrictions. He’s a blustering covidiot.
Incidentally, the district with the worst Covid rates in Britain is Rainham, the ward represented by Cllr David Durant – a vaccine sceptic who also spurns facemasks and other lockdown rules, arguing that the Covid crisis is fuelled by “fear porn”. Just like our Dave, he cautions about the danger to the NHS:
“I fear the government is destroying the NHS and when the money runs out will say, there is no alternative but to privatise the NHS and then sell it to the Drug Cartels who fortuitously were given £100s Billions in public funding to produce a COVID-19 vaccine that isn’t needed and doesn’t work. Not needed because by the time its produced the population will have acquired herd immunity to the virus, if it hasn’t already.”
He also told Extinction Rebellion that he thought climate change is a “scam”.
With an attitude like his, he ought to represent Barking.
Clark : “Dave, are you Rainham ward Councillor David Durant?”
Here’s a quote for you:
The Havering Daily spoke to Councillor David Durant and asked him for his views on this matter.
He said ‘I believe climate change is an elementary scam. There are many things that determine climate change. Carbon monoxide is essential to the earth, we need it to breath. Man made emissions are minute.
—
“An elementary scam”. Huh, what a curious turn of phrase.
