A gnat at which a TV reporter strains ….
What with London having been inundated – with actual rainwater, not with illegal migrants – some rainwater might have afflicted the servers of some of the papers I rely on to get my blood pressure up. On the other hand, it may be the case that IT and tech personnel have been put into ping-quarantine and are thus unable to physically deal with a physical (a server) problem. Nowadays, who knows!
So I’ll look instead at one article in the DT. It is about re-infection and the number of reinfected people. This report is based on a tweet by ITV’s Robert Peston and a tweeted reply. It illustrates nicely that the MSM are perfectly capable of using twitter for a report – something they didn’t do when it was their duty to report on the Freedom Rally in London and elsewhere – I talked about that yesterday here.
This report is also indicative of three other things. One is that MSM journalists are heavily involved in driving covid policies, for the sake of personal aggrandisement of the TV ‘stars’ especially, and for the sake of looking good while pretending to attack No 10 because ever since covid they’ve taken over the role of the official opposition. The second thing is that it permits the MSM to wheel out yet another PHE expert who can surreptitiously sketch out a future reason for keeping us all tied to the T & T cycle.
Let’s start with the title: “Public Health England criticised for excluding reinfections from official Covid figures” (paywalled link) – that is terrible, innit like! Surely all PHE covid figures should be on the table, to suitable keep us frightened. But wait – the subtitle gives the game away:
“Figures show there have been about 23,000 total reinfection events since the start of the pandemic, compared to 5.6 million confirmed cases.” (paywalled link)
So it’s not exactly a horrific threat to the covid nation’s health, is it! This number is about 50% lower than those for unreported cancer ‘cases’. It’s hardly something about which to create an uproar – unless that uproar is being created for other reasons, for example to fashion a giant squirrel out of thin cloth because the pingdemic has now become old hat. One needs ‘news’, doesn’t one!
And thus we observe how ITV’s Robert Peston, who has swallowed lots of covid camels, is clearly straining at a gnat when he tweeted:
“that the fact PHE did not include reinfections in daily figures was “deeply troubling” and “bonkers”, adding that “there is deep disquiet among officials” on the topic.” (paywalled link)
No, he doesn’t tell us who these deeply disquieted officials are – ‘a SAGE source’, perhaps? – but I’m hazarding the guess that some such ‘official’ must’ve told Mr Peston about this ‘deeply troubling’ fact. After all, surely Mr Peston would’ve mentioned this ‘bonkers’ fact much sooner. But then we read that those figures seem to be included in PHE’s official weekly stats:
“Weekly figures published by PHE show this is a rarity, and that such instances account for around 1.2 per cent of all daily cases.” (paywalled link)
And then we read the official description of ‘reinfection’:
“A reinfection is when a person who has previously tested positive for Covid-19 recovers and then catches the virus and tests positive again.” (paywalled link)
This means that it’s about positive tests and nothing else. Unless we’re told how many of those ‘reinfected’ are actually ending up in hospital we don’t know if these numbers are simply an artefact of PCR testing. Next, we get a reply – and this time the expert is a proper ‘expert’ because she’s got so many followers on twitter:
“Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at PHE who has accrued 18,000 followers on Twitter due to her concise and insightful analysis of complex documents, called Mr Peston’s concerns a “storm in a teacup”. She explained that reinfections are not included in the daily updates because there is as yet no standard definition of what constitutes a reinfection.” (paywalled link)
What is this – PHE hasn’t got a standard definition yet? After so many months? Rest assured – they’re working on it: “PHE “leans toward” two positive tests separated by at least 90 days, she said, but experts are meeting weekly to thrash out the details.” (paywalled link), showing nicely how important this issue is, Mr Peston’s wail-tweet notwithstanding.
They will have to come up with something though because the T & T people need to know, in order to keep their industry going. The app techies will happily provide the necessary tweak:
“Pouria Hadjibagheri, the man in charge of the technical development of the UK Covid-19 dashboard, said that once the PHE working group reached a consensus on a reinfection definition, the tech team will consider creating a metric to track reinfections on a daily basis.” (paywalled link)
And so we get to the meat in this meagre report – the accusation of ‘number fiddling’:
“Mr Peston also implied that bosses at PHE and the Department of Health were reluctant to correct the reporting issue, leading to accusations of number fiddling and deliberate obfuscation of facts from members of the public.” (paywalled link)
Isn’t it wonderful how Mr Peston is so concerned for government putting all numbers on the table! He doesn’t seem to grasp that ‘obfuscation by numbers’ is what he and his ilk have been doing all along, producing ‘our daily scare graphs’ with hardly a word about actual hospitalisations, taking ‘cases’, i.e. +ve PCR tests, as being equivalent to ‘seriously ill and in hospital’. The reply from the PHE experts are beautiful:
“Ms Kall said PHE is not hiding anything and that the remarks from Peston are “diversionary and unhelpful”. Mr Hadjibagheri added that the reinfection caveat for the daily reporting of cases is clearly visible on the coronavirus dashboard.” (paywalled link)
Mr Peston’s tweet was meant to be ‘unhelpful’! It’s a nice diversion from talking about the pingdemic. The point made by the PHE tech expert is however truly delicious. Mr Peston could’ve found out about reinfection numbers all by himself – he’d only needed to read the daily updates properly. Oh dear.
As for us peasants, this ‘storm in a teacup’ means that there’ll be another definition added to the covid T & T arsenal, meaning that, no matter what, the testing will go on, regardless. Thanks to ever more refined tech tweaks to T & T, there’ll be covid cases in perpetuity. Any sniffle could be covid or a covid re-infection thanks to even more refined T & T. And then we’ll be told to get a booster jab, and another because one never knows.
Will we ever permitted to get off that covid treadmill?
KBO!
I am so bored with all of this! They created this farce for purely malign intentions. They are keeping up the farce knowing that their cover has been pretty well blown!
Hence the huge numbers now protesting! Unless and until they publish proper figures showing the true picture (which they never will of course) I’m no longer listening. The lies are now so big and so numerous that they are beyond evil!
My main concern is how to overturn this lot of treacherous rats in the shortest possible timescale. And absolutely before they finally wreck the Country beyond recall!
Refusal to cooperate and become ungovernable. .
And if only the English would learn from the French who I believe are bringing France to a standstill , transport strikes etc.
But one thing we really need is cooperation with us plebs by the police and authorities (no evidence of this in UK yet) like in France: if this is a true story which I hope it is: Macron’s guards have refused to protect him saying that he is not worth risking their lives for.
Indeed Frederica; it’s a numbers game. We need more of the indoctrinated to seize freedom and increase our numbers. As for the police etc. maybe they are a lost cause so must be considered the enemy?
Dare I suggest that two false positives within 90 Days is possibly reinfections. I personally have kept on the edges and have never participated in testing I intend it to stay like that. If one is sick you know it without testing as they call it. By the way , did you see the documentary showing the factory that developed the test. NOT reliable
Never mind re-infections after previously having Covid.
What a bout records of those who have caught Covid after having one or two jabs are figures kept or published for them ?
If not why not? And where does one find them?
Roger. There was carnage in many care homes after the residents had had their jabs. Here is the report on one of the homes in Devon that was hit badly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-56366575
Ceri. You don’t understand…
Once one enters a “Care Home”, one is written off by the establishment… unless they can make political capital out of it.
When half the residents of such a place are “Terminated” it can be written off as “…they would have died anyway”.
Dickatbarn. The teenagers sum it up when they refer to getting ‘the clot shot at the stabattoir’.
Ceri have teenagers really said that? Does that mean that the younger generation are beginning to ‘see the light’ about the whole Covid19 Scamdemic?
Is there any chance that this might turn into action against the way it has been used to impose a dictatorship on us?
I would jump off a cliff before entering a “care” home- prison!!
Me too Mike! “Abandon hope all ye who enter here!” Those poor souls were treated worse than animals. If you put an animal down it’s done humanely. There was nothing remotely humane about giving them all a jab of poison!
Ceri that is sickening! I’m convinced that ‘they’ must have known the likely outcome when they pushed this poison into the old folks. I’m sure poor Captain Sir Tom would have been good for much longer if he hadn’t taken the poison jab!
A certain strangely moustachioed man in the 1940s would have been thrilled with what has been achieved in the last 18 months!!!