https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/foreign-holiday-quickest-and-easiest-way-of-getting-coronavirus-test-20200916200514

From the Spectator:
"Just 315 cases of influenza have been recorded in Australia in the peak winter months of July and August, compared with 137,000 cases in the same period in last year. Flu cases across the southern hemisphere have dropped during the pandemic due to lockdown and social distancing measures, as well as the prevalence of Covid-19."

A silver lining?

tomo. If anything I think the reverse is true. The drive to push the flu-jab seems much more intense this year - both from our GP's surgery and from national promotions.

"The drive to push the flu-jab seems much more intense this year - both from our GP's surgery and from national promotions."

Sep 18, 2020 at 5:08 PM AK

I am deemed to be high risk and a priority for a flu jab, and was contacted 2-3 weeks ago. The earliest slot available was this weekend.
If it is 5 minutes per person, that is 12 per hour per nurse including ticking boxes and paperwork, though I seem to remember jabs at school were less than a minute per pupil.

I think the take-up of jabs by priority patients has been very high this year!

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1307039314803658752

A round-up of studies on mask effectiveness:

https://www.technocracy.news/masks-are-neither-effective-nor-safe-a-summary-of-the-science/

"According to the epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, you should do just about the opposite of what’s being preached by college presidents, teachers’ unions, political leaders, and the scientific and media establishment. Unless you’re elderly or particularly vulnerable, you shouldn’t be wearing a mask all day, or shaming others for going unmasked. You should be careful not to endanger the vulnerable, but otherwise you should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity.

“It’s such a disservice to this generation of students,” she says. “Teachers and students who are vulnerable should have the option to go online, but for the rest of us this virus is no bigger than other risks we take in daily life. It’s not rational, and certainly not communitarian, to avoid being infected with a pathogen that carries such a low risk to you when there’s a high benefit to the community by helping to create herd immunity.”

https://www.city-journal.org/achieving-herd-immunity

"Prof Gayet, famous infectious disease doc & hygienist Strasbourg Univ Hospital ”Virus must circulate among young. In my opinion, it’s only way epidemic can be extinguished”.

https://www.sudradio.fr/societe/covid-19-on-peut-affirmer-que-cest-une-maladie-immunisante/

Take precautions, but allow the virus to circulate, especially in schools and universities.

The Spectator website has an article on the consequences of lockdown :
"Sums have been done by officials. Depressed A&E use: an extra 16,000 non-Covid dead. Early discharges and general Covid-induced hospital chaos: an extra 26,000 dead. Delays to surgery: 12,500 in the long run. Delays to cancer diagnosis and treatment: 1,500. And the economic collapse carries the biggest toll of all: an extra 18,000 dead in coming years. So: 74,000 souls in all, more than the current Covid-19 death toll."
It's an overview of a longer article in the DT, if anyone has access.

Collateral damage:

"The Mail has discovered the figure the Government has put on the number of collateral deaths caused by the lockdown buried in a SAGE report.

Nearly 75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown, according to a devastating official figures buried in a 188-page document.

The startling research, presented to the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), will further increase pressure on Boris Johnson to hold back on introducing further coronavirus restrictions.

The document reveals 16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.

It estimates a further 26,000 will lose their lives within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E and the problems in social care persist.

And an additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.

The toll of deaths directly linked to the virus last night stood at 41,936.

The estimates, drawn up by civil servants at the Department of Health, the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office, were presented to Sage at a meeting on July 15th. The documents stressed that had nothing been done to stop the spread of the virus in March, 400,000 people could have died of Covid.

And if the NHS had been overrun, this figure might have even soared to 1.4 million. But they acknowledged the restrictions had significant unintended consequences."

Source -

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8774141/Coronavirus-UK-Lockdown-kill-75-000-thats-OFFICIAL-projection.html

"The core problem is that the UK is relying upon a set of policymakers who appear to be neither competent nor willing to be honest about the choices that are being made. Selling policies to credulous journalists is simple. Convincing a wider public that contains a significant number of people who have the expertise and willingness to challenge what appears to be irrational policy is a different matter. The UK Government appears to believe that honesty will further reduce already low levels of willingness to comply with current policies. What they – and their public supporters – should recognize is that the unwillingness to admit and discuss the complexity of the cost-benefit calculations that surround testing merely fuels the lack of trust in current policies. Many of the public statements are so obviously wrong that it is hard to give credit to the more generous view that the policymakers are not really incompetent but merely dealing with a very difficult situation."

More or Less is from the BBC.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/testing-muddle-and-myth/

Wear a mask, and all of this will go away :

https://twitter.com/HelenMcArdle3/status/1303463650745888768

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/05/coronavirus-treatments-president-trump-receiving-know-far/

What? no Hydroxychloroquine?

Stewgreen, too often sceptics fall for the opposite, assuming that those who deviate from the main must be right. Initial claims from Gupta was that herd immunity could be as low as 25%. It might be true, but rising cases in New York, the best candidate for true herd immunity suggests otherwise. Areas in New York got to as high as 65% infected. How was that possible if it could be reached at 25%? How are cases now rising again in the city? Where is her proof?

There's no doubt about it, the pandemic isn't spreading exponentially across the planet but that may be down to the close relationship with age and that many people, even in the poorest areas, are doing what they can to slow this down. In the UK, we've not only increased protection for the elderly but we've got treatments now. Places in the far east which initially had good control of the virus are seeing cases bubble up again. This is not over.

If we assume that CFR was 1% and we've had between 6% and 8% infected we'd expect about 40,000 to 54,000 deaths. Ring a bell? While the total excess deaths is higher than official covid deaths, many of those were down to the disruption of the disease, not lock down. Most of them could not have been avoided. Contrary to claims, there hasn't so far been a marked drop in normal deaths to balance the spike earlier in the year. With herd immunity at 25% you'd still expect upwards of 168,000 deaths, especially if they happened over a short, chaotic period. Maybe that is a price the country is prepared to pay? Really? CFR may now be dropping because of treatments but those treatments that have taken time to develop. Please note that it was those treatments and not Hydroxychloroquine that has speeded Trump back to his current health level. Some of them are still under test and Remdesivir is still in short supply.

But maybe we're in a different situation now. Maybe we can go for herd immunity and still protect the elderly despite the demographics of carers? Maybe it's not worth waiting for a vaccine? Maybe if we let it rip through the population the Tories will be hailed as heroes and hoisted aloft by grateful students and the surviving elderly into a new stonking general election? Maybe.