The common sense interpretation of the above data is that compared with the US, South America and South Africa, broadly speaking UK policy on the containment of the virus has been correct. Boris Johnson has not ‘lost his grip’ and government policies are a vindication for British pragmatism.
An alternative explanation is that the figures show a common form of behaviour among dangerous viruses: They arrive, kill a lot of vulnerable people and then weaken (attenuate) as they pass through the population. Like human beings viruses prefer to keep their food alive, so we may have reached a point where Covid 19 will stop killing us in large numbers and settle down to snacking.
(I suspect a bit of both; government restrictions and ‘normal’ viral behaviour)
Nobody had much of an idea of what we were facing at the start of this outbreak, and it would have been the height of folly not to implement social distancing, hand washing and masks which are the normal way infectious diseases are handled in routine hospital practice.
In my experience I have never seen anybody kill anybody by washing his or her hands, keeping a distance or wearing a mask. In different situations on the other hand I have seen people die from the reverse.
An important measure I think would be the Antibody Seroprevalence density. Just what is this for England, it must have been done, I mean of course just what is the estimated exposure through the whole country based on random blood serum tests, It seems to me that England will most probably be very well placed to quickly get back to normal, as will the USA, as their exposure will be greater than countries like Australia and New Zealand, after all we have to be opened up quickly and soon, in spite of viruses and this must as a priority include international travel in and out, and some antibodies in a large proportion of the population will be the key I think to just simply living with it all in the same old way, as we already do with colds, various flu strains etc. etc.etc.
No, Boris was not ‘right’.
Even my grandmother didn’t need extensive medical or scientific training to know that the prevalence of rhino, influenza and corona viruses in winter had little to do with temperature and more to do with the fact that we were hunkered down, in close proximity to one another, in still air closed environments with plummeting vitamin D levels. ‘Fresh air and sunshine banishes the sniffles’, she would say.
So, keeping people hunkered down in closed still air environments, maintaining low vitamin D levels and allowing in (potentially) infected people through porous borders, defied the wisdom of ages and was exactly the wrong thing to do…
…and the care homes fiasco was corporate manslaughter!
So why do virus keep Christmas?
Thank you for some common sense.
I am fed up with the constant attacks on Boris Johnson and the Government for implementing normal, sensible measures to try and protect us from what could have been a devastating onslaught.
Any sane person would have done the same.
We should all be wary of the removal of our freedom for whatever reason, and concerned that what has been taken away will not easily be given back. The ‘its for your own good’ argument so beloved of over promoted milk monitors, and prefects, should make the every red blood Briton bridle. The late Vladimir Bukovsky, a true friend of the United Kingdom, worried about the Sovietisation of the UK, as more laws and rules were introduced under the likes of Tony Blair, I have little doubt, he would have fiercely and correctly opposed lockdown ( a lockdown that we were told would only last three weeks, so that the NHS could prepare). Heather MacDonald writes with insight and clear headedness, in Imprimis https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/four-months-unprecedented-government-malfeasance/
Thanks for the article .
I still cannot understand why the death rate is so much higher in our country than in Germany. I believe that I am correct to say that excess mortality compared to previous years is also much lower in Germany.
What did we do wrong ?
Excess deaths are as difficult to pin down as all the other measures in dispute. There are roughly 600,000 deaths each year in the UK. If the number varies by only 2% year on year (a guess, can’t find a list) that would mean plus or minus 12,000 and make nonsense as a measure of covid fatalities.
Bojo and his timid group of Cabinet members did and still have lost the plot. Unlike the more enlightened Swedish govt for example who rightly chose not to put their country into economic and social lock-down with all its grizzly effects, whose infection and death rate graphs have followed exactly the same trend as ours.
This years corona-virus named Covid 19 ( albeit incapable of actually being scientifically isolated and identified ) has followed the path normally taken by viruses, a path you correctly describe.
The trouble is the incredibly reckless decisions our govt and many others around the World have taken has actually caused more deaths than the actual perceived problem, via suicides and undiagniosed and badly treated general medical conditions.
Meanwhile the sheep still graze falling for the psychological warfare the authorities have inflicted upon the population.
The statement that C19 is incapable of being scientifically isolated is totally wrong
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/grows-virus-cell-culture.html
It has also been grown and replicated in two types of lab animals in Oxford and no doubt elsewhere.I have checked the references and can send them if you want. If you think this is some type of fake news, or I am an agent of Bill Gates, exactly what are hundreds of laboratories working on around the globe ? And surely if the CDC offers the virus to a lab and they don’t receive it, or only fragments , would they not smell a rat ? And go to the press.
You all spout so many conspiracy theories at each other, the recent climate change nonsense being an excellent example, that it must be hard to know when anybody actually knows what they’re talking about.
I’m glad you think ‘climate change’ is nonsense. Welcome aboard.
Werdna. So the low number of infections as a result of social distancing, washing hands, and masks, standard routines for an infectious disease in any hospital, are nonsense? I don’t think so both as a doctor and one with a public health training. Look at the graphs in the article and tell me that is not a success. I think you are so blinded politically that you think anything said by conservatives is wrong. The term ‘blind fanatic’ comes to mind
Whilst you are incorrect to say that a virus sample hasn’t been isolated and grown (CDC did this back in February 2020), the actual tests being performed using PCR method are decidedly flakey in terms of hit and miss results.
According to a recent telegraph article there are at least six different coronaviruses in play with widely ranging severity, so whatever CDC did isolate is only a sixth of the picture.
Worth noting that the incurable unvaccinated common cold is itself a collective umbrella term for a group of 200+ viruses which includes various coronaviruses as well as a majority of rhinoviruses – for most people a case of covid and a case of the common cold are hard to tell apart so perhaps this point to what is really going on…
Sweden is a great benchmark to compare the UK fiasco against, even better is Australia and New Zealand who other closed their borders whereas in the UK heaven knows how many people arrived since lockup without any quarantine, so in effect the international flight sector has been cut some extraordinary in comparison with the rest of the economy and what a disaster this is as October will reveal I fear.
“grizzly effects” would be too much to bear. Quite grisly actually.
“grizzly effects would be too much to “bear”. Rather grisly.