Maybe venues and even shops should be segregated? One place for the young and one for those over 30 and one for over 50s?

Tiny. Sounds like you’re advocating changes that could end up beginning a descent into the scenario depicted in H.G. Well’s The Time Machine.

Only if it was forever AK. To a certain extent social venues are age segregated naturally.

It took a while to find the new season all causes mortality report but it it there. October is the start of the new season.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/weekly-all-cause-mortality-surveillance-2020-to-2021

This from an NHS nurse :

https://lockdownsceptics.org/#interview-with-a-registered-nurse

Result of this?

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/when-killing-people-is-government-policy/

retweeted by Bishop Hill :

https://twitter.com/Francis_Hoar/status/1314914454077943809

BH flagged a series of tweets by Michael Yeadon about an Ofcom survey of the public's reactions to misinformation on Covid. People don't like misinformation apparently and think it should be banned. OFCOM seems to agree and be preparing itself to ban anything they don't agree with., I've done a quick write up here:
https://cliscep.com/2020/10/13/ofcoms-bonkers-covid-19-survey/

On last night's News at Ten there was a report from Kingston/Richmond that 25% of the "local" Covid cases were actually students away from home at unis in other parts of the country. Apparently positive tests get reported back to the "home" GP and thus picked up in the local figures. The head of the local council confirmed the claim in an interview.

If this is happening across the country then it is a major distortion in the figures driving policy because student cases are clearly being reported at their uni as well.

Further, towns and cities with a big student population could be getting a double whammy comprising the actual cases at their unis plus the cases amongst youngsters away at other unis that are reported as "local".

Extraordinary article on WUWT on errors made by SAGE in handling the virus.
The author makes some very strong claims with powerful supporting arguments. To this layman his points make sense but there may be equally strong rebuttals to follow.
However I found it most significant that he offers predictions of how he expects the pandemic to evolve in England in the near future so it should be easy to verify his views: I'm keeping a copy. If he is proved correct by events there will be some very serious explaining required.

Oct 20, 2020 at 7:33 PM | MikeHig

Crucially, I will show that because the proportion of the population remaining susceptible to the virus is now too low to sustain a growing outbreak at national scale, the pandemic is effectively over and can easily be handled by a properly functioning NHS. Accordingly, the country should immediately be permitted to get back to normal life.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/19/what-sage-has-got-wrong/

That's quite a claim, based on two probably wrong pieces of speculation. UK deaths spiked today to 241. My own reading leads me to believe a month from now we will routinely be seeing >=500 deaths / day. I hope I'm wrong.

Phil C; for the best possible reasons I too hope that projection turns out to be wrong.

A lot of that Yeadon article strikes a chord simply because it fills the gaping hole of the lack of information/explanation from the government team on so many issues.
One example is young children. It seems to be almost universally acknowledged that youngsters up to at least 10 years old don't get the virus, nor can they pass it on. Yet, in England, said youngsters are included in the "Rule of Six".
Further, they constitute about 12% of the population so would make a dramatic difference to the percentage assumed to be immune, were they so recognised.
Another one is false positives. Matt Hancock was all at sea on this in a radio interview yet, afaik, there has been no follow-up to elaborate on his vague "less than 1%" answer nor on what measures are taken, if any, to double-test all positive results to avoid the huge cost and disruption of unnecessary isolation, tracing, etc.. At the time he was asked the question a false positive rate of 1% would have accounted for around half of the reported cases.
Returning to immunity, what is the official position wrt to those who have definitely had the virus? There seems to be no recognition that they are almost certainly immune so they are still liable to be required to isolate via contact tracing, for example. This is just bizarre: if getting the real virus does not confer immunity, what on earth is the point of seeking vaccines that work by faking the disease?
Apologies, I'm venting. No doubt everyone has their own frustrations with the manifest failures and appalling cack-handedness of those "in charge".
Another positive aspect of the article: he explains his reasoning, quotes his sources and references and nails his colours to the mast by making clear predictions. Those will be tested in the near future.

Like so much surrounding this pandemic, the identity of (Dido) Harding’s team at NHS track and trace was withheld from the public, until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal last month. Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee. There is space, however, for a former executive from Jaguar Land Rover, a senior manager from Travelex and an executive from Waitrose. Harding’s adviser at the agency is Alex Birtles, who, like her, previously worked for TalkTalk. She has subsequently made a further appointment to the board: Mike Coupe, an executive at another of her old firms, Sainsbury’s.

The “world-beating” test-and-trace system she oversees has repeatedly failed to reach its targets. Staff were scarcely trained. Patients have been directed to nonexistent testing centres, or to the other end of the country. A vast tranche of test results was lost. Thousands of people, including NHS staff, have been left in limbo, unable to work because they can’t get tests or the results of tests.

Having demonstrated, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, that she was the wrong person for the job, Harding has now been given an even bigger role, as head of the National Institute for Health Protection, to run concurrently with the first one. This is the government’s replacement for Public Health England, which it blames for its own disasters. Harding’s appointment looks to me like a reward for failure.

The test-and-trace system might be a public health fiasco, but it’s a private profit bonanza. Consultants at one of the companies involved have each been earning £6,000 a day. Massive contracts have been awarded without competitive tendering. Astonishingly, at least one of these, worth £410m and issued to Serco, contains no penalty clause: even if Serco fails to fulfil its terms, it gets paid in full. Serco has indeed missed its targets, achieving an average by September of only 58.6% of contacts traced, against the 80% it was meant to reach.

Source

"If you are not incandescent with rage, you haven’t grasped the scale of what has been done to us."

In the US state of Kansas, the 90 counties without mask mandates had lower coronavirus infection rates than the 15 counties with mask mandates. To hide this fact the Kansas health department tried to manipulate the official statistics and data presentation

Phil C: that Graun article makes very unpleasant reading although I can't say I was overly surprised by any of the allegations.
The sentence: "Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee." caught my eye because it echoes the comments in the Yeardon article about the composition of the SAGE team.especially its over-abundance of modellers.
The broadening of Harding's remit is incomprehensible and scandalous: having shown that she cannot handle her present job, she gets a bigger one as well! Makes me wonder if she's related to Chris Grayling...

tomo: hopefully the timing and location of those games were just a coincidence. I doubt we will ever know because it must be impossible to check whether those athletes and their contacts were afflicted with something they would probably have thought was flu in the weeks between the games and the outbreak in Wuhan.
It does give some background to that early Chinese claim that the virus was "planted" by Americam military personnel - not that it was ever credible.

Oct 21, 2020 at 10:40 AM | Unregistered CommenterPhil Clarke

Good article. Our public servants aren't even Austin Allegro, never mind Rolls Royce.