Covid
Guardian
Britain faces the prospect of thousands of annual Covid deaths for years to come, scientists have warned.
They say waves of cases are likely to sweep the country every winter as Covid-19 joins other seasonal viruses, including influenza, in taking its toll of elderly and infirm people. Every year, as cold weather forces people indoors, virus transmission will increase, case numbers will rise, and some of these will result in deaths.
The warning comes as Covid case numbers look likely to stabilise through the summer, but with researchers saying incidence could rise again in autumn as vaccination rates falter and schools return. This could lead to a fourth wave this winter – one that could become an annual occurrence for years to come.
“We are going to see problems with Covid for a long time,” said Prof Adam Finn of Bristol University. “The virus has shown itself to be genetically more nimble than we expected, though not as much as the influenza virus. So I would envisage Covid being a continuing problem for some time, with annual death tolls reaching thousands and possibly tens of thousands.”
This view was backed by Prof James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute in Oxford. “We won’t see Covid-19 spread like wildfire again. There will be enough herd immunity in the population to ensure it will never kick off like that again.
“But everything will not be hunky dory. We will have waves of illness similar to flu, I think. And they will kill. The issue is: how many? That is difficult to assess but if you look at current Covid deaths, these are occurring at about 100 a day.
“So a wave that kills a few thousand seems a reasonable measure of what you might expect in a future winter wave. And then, you might get a bad wave one year and have the tens of thousands of deaths.”
Vaccine
Mail
Young adults will be lured into vaccination centres with the promise of cut-price taxis and takeaways, as Boris Johnson tries to tackle the relatively low take-up among the under-30s.
Uber, Deliveroo and Pizza Pilgrims are among the companies in discussion with the Government about offering incentives as part of the ‘Jab 18-30’ drive.
So far, only two-thirds of people in that age bracket in England have received a first dose since they became eligible in June, compared with 88.4 per cent across all age groups, meaning more than three million 18-to-30-year-olds remain unjabbed.
As part of the plan, Uber will be sending out reminders to its users throughout this month and, along with rival ride-hailing app Bolt, will be offering discounts for under-30s in both cars and food takeaway services.
Other companies will be offering vouchers or discount codes for food and films if users can prove through the NHS app that they have had the jab.
The Government’s jab push will also include a booster shot for all the priority group of the over-50s and clinically vulnerable.
Unlike the first two jabs, everyone will receive Pfizer – because it is the most effective against the Indian, or Delta, variant.
Similar stories can be seen in the Telegraph, Guardian, Mirror, Sun, Evening Standard
Order-order
Josh Pieters and Archie Manners have exposed Piers Corbyn in a sting accepting £10,000 to lay off criticising AstraZeneca’s vaccine after being bribed by a supposed shareholder in the firm. The video is excruciating. As a co-conspirator pointed out, it really does take a Corbyn to accept a bribe from an apparent AstraZeneca shareholder concerned that a treatment being sold at cost price might not make enough profit because of the competition. How will Piers get out of this with his followers?
Travel
Mail
The Chancellor has warned Boris Johnson that the UK’s travel restrictions are ‘out of step’ with its international rivals as he pushes for holiday rules to be relaxed, according to reports.
The Sunday Times reported that Rishi Sunak has written to the Prime Minister about the damage that the current border rules are doing to the country’s economy, particularly its tourism and hospitality sector.
He is said to be calling for Britain to take advantage of its successful vaccination programme by opening up further.
The No 11 Downing Street incumbent has reportedly told the Conservative Party leader that the UK’s entry and exit rules are ‘out of step with our international competitors’.
The newspaper quotes a source, who it claims is familiar with the letter, as saying: ‘Rishi has called time on the travel restrictions.’
The report comes before ministers are due to meet next week to set the travel rules that will be in place for most of August.
Treasury sources did not deny Mr Sunak had written to his Downing Street neighbour but said the communication was not related to next week’s review.
The UK Government has faced criticism over changes to its border policy during the coronavirus pandemic, with France the latest to be irked after it was placed on a newly-created ‘amber-plus’ list as part of the so-called traffic light system.
The fresh designation, in response to suggestions of growing cases of the Beta variant that was first discovered in South Africa, saw the quarantine exemption for the fully vaccinated scrapped, meaning those returning from France had to quarantine for 10 days.
Similar stories can be seen in the Independent, Times, Evening Standard, ITV News
The City
Express
BREXIT is ushering in a new era free of EU red tape which will cement London’s place as Europe’s financial powerhouse, a City analyst has said.
And Leigh Evans, the vice-chairman of the CityUnited Project, believes the Square Mile’s resilience since Britain quit the bloc has already confounded the Project Fear naysayers. Mr Evans was speaking in the wake of Rishi Sunak’s Mansion speech earlier this month, during which the Chancellor told attendees severing ties with Brussels would enable Britain to “do things differently”.
Earlier this year EY’s Brexit tracker estimated roughly 7,500 jobs and £1.2trillion in assets have left the City since 2016 – but Mr Evans said such employment losses were nevertheless vastly fewer than pessimists had predicted.
He told Express.co.uk: “Those pundits who forecast doom for the City of London and the UK’s financial services sector have been proved just as wrong as those who predicted 520,000-800,000 job losses as an immediate consequence of a vote to leave the EU back in 2016. (It was none other than the then Chancellor, George Osborne, who said this.)
“Employment actually rose by hundreds of thousands, rather than falling.”
Asylum seekers
Breitbart
Britain’s Home Office has been block-booking hotels along England’s south coast to host migrant youths as the country’s long-running Channel crisis continues to worsen, despite promises to end the practice.
The government department, broadly responsible for policing, national security, and border control and led by Priti Patel MP as Home Secretary, said in March that it did not “want to be housing [migrants] in hotels anymore”, with the policy acting as a pull factor for illegal immigration as well as angering British taxpayers. The government vowed to send them to reception centres instead.
Nevertheless, with the Boris Johnson administration continuing to fail to prevent a crisis first declared a “major incident” back in 2018 from getting worse, never mind alleviate it, The Times now reports that it is continuing to block-book hotels to accommodate new arrivals, some indefinitely.
The newspaper focused its coverage in large part on migrant youths arriving from France on their own — so-called “unaccompanied minors” — although Home Office sources told them that these were only around 120 of the over 3,000 boat migrants who have landed in England in July so far.
Mail
Dozens of asylum seekers are being housed in a hotel in one of London‘s most upmarket postcodes.
The Best Western Kensington Olympia, a short walk from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge‘s residence Kensington Palace, has been closed to paying customers and is instead putting up 55 migrants – in some cases for up to nine months.
The hotel is nestled in a corner of West London where three-bedroom flats sell for about £1.2 million.
The Mail on Sunday watched on last week as a group of young men gathered outside the hotel casually chatting and smoking together.
One strolled out of the building watching a video on an iPad.
Inside, rooms are equipped with wi-fi, air conditioning and flat-screen TVs.
Most of the residents said they did not understand or speak any English. One man named Mosin, 28, who said he was from Iran, told the MoS he had been living in the hotel for more than nine months.
He said: ‘There are 55 of us. We are all refugees. Many of us are waiting to know what will happen to us next.
‘We survive here but we are f****** bored. There is nothing to do and we cannot work.’
Breitbart
An Italian anti-terrorism prosecutor has expressed concerns that radical Islamic jihadists are among the wave of illegal migrants coming to Europe from North Africa.
National anti-mafia and anti-terrorism prosecutor Federico Cafiero de Raho expressed concern about the link between illegal migration and terrorism, particularly from migrants departing from Tunisia.
The prosecutor spoke at a meeting of the Schengen Parliamentary Committee and noted that the Tunisian terrorist behind last year’s attack at a cathedral in Nice, France that saw three people murdered had illegally entered the EU from Tunisia via Italy, Il Giornale reports.
There are also concerns of a potential surge of illegal migrants as the situation in Tunisia has destabilised in recent days, following the forced resignation of the country’s prime minister, Hichem Mechichi, who was allegedly physically beaten until he agreed to step down.
According to De Raho, Italy is still at risk of terrorist activity, although he claimed the Italian authorities have limited the risk due to their counter-terrorism operations.
Regarding Italian citizens who left to fight for Islamist extremist groups overseas, De Raho claimed that 56 had died, and of the 11 who had returned to Italy three were in prison and the remaining eight were being closely monitored.
People-smugglers are behind much of the migrant activity in the Mediterranean, and according to De Raho criminal organisations run people-trafficking in the area.
“The accompaniment of migrants is substantially controlled by the same criminal organizations that are based in the countries of origin of the migrants who are then destined for prostitution or work activities at below cost. These organizations take care of the transfer of migrants from one country to another,” he said.
Calais
Mirror
Welcome to the new Jungle – a refugee camp 25 miles from Calais complete with makeshift shops backed by gangsters profiting from migrant misery.
The sprawling settlement, in a forest at Grande-Synthe just outside Dunkirk, is home to over 500 people, including kids.
Mains electricity and water connects to the site.
Those there hope it is the last stop on their journey to Britain at the hands of people smugglers cashing in on their plight.
A source last night told the Sunday Mirror the traffickers “are taking a slice of shop profits” as well as charging thousands for the perilous journey across the Channel.
“The camp is a good money-maker for them and provides a base to sell and organise trips to Britain,” they said.
Aid workers estimate there are 2,500 migrants on the north coast waiting for a chance to cross illegally to the UK.
They expect the Dunkirk camp, which first sprung up in April, to keep growing.
Latin
Mail
Latin lessons will be offered to thousands of state school pupils as part of an effort to make the language less ‘elitist’.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said a new programme would ensure the subject was not ‘for the privileged few’.
The Department for Education’s £4million Latin Excellence Programme will see the ancient language offered to 40 state schools in England as part of a four-year pilot, according to The Daily Telegraph.
Covid. The Guardian should be called something like Garbledian, I think. How many deaths are there annually due to seasonal influenza?
In what way is Covid any different to the influenzas that have been killing us for years?
They have carefully not mentioned the obvious – that TPTB are intending to amalgamate covid jabs with flu jabs.
Everything has been commented on already except – LATIN! Oh dear, it’s a bit late for me. I’m still cross I was forced to do French at school and deprived of the one language common to all European countries.
Spanish should be taught, not French.
JF
So in the winter the frail and elderly can die of a raspatory disease – Apparently most raspatory deaths are from a cold not because it is more deadly but because many more people including the extremely frail catch colds far more than the flu or Covid – They are looked after so well that they become so frail any disease can be deadly.
So whats the excess deaths figure so far this year ??
Especially the age/ population adjusted measure ?
And can i have a pension bonus as I got my jabs staight away ?
It seems likely to me that the more jags we have, the weaker our inate immune systems will become. In the end, Big Pharma and shareholders will be massively, obscenely rich while people drop like flies from conditions that once upon a time we would have fought off with our own naturally-acquired defences.
That sounds like their plan. After all the evil globalists want to kill off most of us so they can have everything for themselves.
If they have to bribe the young with tawdry ‘freebies’ to get them to accept the vaccine, it just goes to show that there must be an ulterior motive (and how!!!) in getting the snake oil into everybody! This ‘government’ is mad, bad and dangerous! It should carry a’health warning’. What is it they say……sup with the Devil using a very long spoon!
“if users can prove through the NHS app that they have had the jab!
Another trap to get the unwary into the ‘pingdom’ clutches and thereby Gubmint control !
Quite so Bill. There is absolutely no way I could ever be persuaded to download the NHS app. My local Dr surgery is trying to push everyone to sign up to online services. To do that you also need the app!!!! No way! I’ll keep annoying them by telephone!!!!
Hey guess what? The ’scientists’ have just discovered that in the winter lots of people die. Many of them old and already unwell! Some deaths are hastened by virus illnesses like ‘flu and in a bad ‘flu year that might run into thousands!!! Yes? And so?……..‘Twas ever thus! Man is not immortal! These people are showing their mad side every single day now! People die! Its a bit like the old saw…….. dog bites man! – not newsworthy. Man bites dog!……the papers are all over it!
Done it again……. It’s Frederica……..not Fre! Getting far too trigger happy in my rage!
Debbie, today is August 1st not February 1st.
Thanks, now corrected …
“…Britain faces the prospect of thousands of annual Covid deaths for years to come, scientists have warned.
They say waves of cases are likely to sweep the country every winter as Covid-19 joins other seasonal viruses, including influenza, in taking its toll of elderly and infirm people…”
Wow! Fancy that! I never knew..!
Does that mean that if I get jabbed, wear a mask all the time and hide in my basement I will live for ever?
Of course not, and who would want to exist like that anyway.
EVERY winter thousands die of various seasonal illnesses and have done so for millennia, but never before have governments used it to instil fear into the population… with the sole intent of controlling them absolutely.
Exactly Richard! My sentiments entirely!
Moral maze If illegal immigration continues at the same alarming rate as most pundits expect, will the Labour/Lib Dem fearing, shire basedTory voters/supporters/members currently expressing alarm and outrage at the Tory Party’s failure to deal with this issue feel more able to continue their support for the Party if the majority of illegals continue to be directed to settle (they are unlikely to be deported) in urban Labour constituencies?
I don’t guess they will worry too much Jake if those ‘new honoured residents’ can be persuaded to vote Labour! It’s all about ‘power’ now. Naked power for power’s sake. Sod the Country and its people! They no longer count for anything other than to be fleeced for their hard earned cash and the odd occasional outing to the polling booths to maintain the status quo!