Don’t panic? No – panic we must, it’s our latest civic duty!

 

One look at the headlines of the print media this morning was sufficient for me to bounce off the walls in righteous anger. The fear and hysteria campaign is in full spate although the various chief editors aren’t quite clear of what is going on. Is the 2nd wave already here or is it only ‘beginning’? Is it already ‘striking’ or is it just Lockdown ‘striking for 56 million people’? Who knows! It’s best, isn’t it, to panic and to comply because this time, surely, the proposed two-week Lockdown will work? It will only be for two weeks, right? Right?

Looking at some of those articles which swamp the online papers this morning it’s now obvious that we’re again being governed by slogans coming straight from an advertising agency. They’re trying to sell us this two-week Lockdown with the slogan: ‘a circuit breaker’. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this ‘2nd wave’ more akin to those wet things we see rolling in on the beaches around our coasts rather than an electric current? How does one ‘break the circuit’ of a wave coming in from the sea?

It’s only Dishi Rishi who seems to warn about dangers to our economy, but when you see the ‘measures’ being proposed you have to wonder if this ‘circuit breaker’ is actually more about destroying our national spirit (or what’s left of it) than about getting to grips with ‘that’ virus:

“The measures could include asking pubs and restaurants to close for a two-week period or to observe limited opening hours. Crucially, it is understood the plan would see schools and workplaces kept open.” (paywalled link)

Naturally, it’s all the fault of pub-goers, so let the plebs go to work, masked up, and let the kids go to school, masked up – but no after-work socialising, not in cafes, not in pubs, and of course (“Rule of Six”, remember?) no meetings with friends at home. That, according to the Treasury, would ‘help the economy’, and that’s what we plebs are there for. Just break the circuit of socialising and all will be well.

The unscientific idiocy of the panicking government and their PR machine shines out when the PM compares this so-called 2nd wave to the second hump on a camel. Seriously, he said that!  Wasn’t it about sombreros in March this year which needed to be flattened? Has common sense now finally left Whitehall altogether? It seems so because we’re back to modelings, surveys and government ‘advisers’ extrapolating from survey numbers while hedging their bets with ‘might, could, possibly’. Meanwhile

“Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, conducted a round of broadcast interview which left no doubt about how rattled some in the Government were by the latest data.” (paywalled link)

Well, he’s rattled because he doesn’t understand the data he’s being fed and which he regurgitates. Look at this morning’s LockdownSceptics newsletter (here). They explain patiently those numerical facts to ‘innumerate Hancock’. Not that certain ‘science editors’ understand these data either, given that they again warble about ‘exponential growth’ when looking at articles published in their papers would show them that there’s no such thing.

We’re told that ‘more people will die’, but will it be of Covid, or will it be because of pre-existing illnesses especially amongst the elderly? We haven’t forgotten the atrocious ‘advice’ to count all deaths as ‘caused by Covid’, even if people died of something else. We remember that PHE deemed it ‘proof’ of dying of Covid when someone had had a positive test 28 days before admission to hospital. And here they’re at it again!

Furthermore, you might wonder how that circuit will be broken by that proposed 2nd Lockdown when the numbers are about what happened two weeks ago. You might also like to take a look at the ONS page (here). ‘Our MSM’ quote their numbers, again dazzling and baffling us, even though they clearly haven’t looked at the graphs which don’t look that scary. It’s the PHE numbers however which seem to panic Hancock and Johnson, their ‘science’ advisers and ‘Our MSM’. More on that below.

It’s surpassingly annoying that even the SAGEs are fixated on ‘preventing deaths’, as if nobody dies of anything except Covid! It’s even worse when you see what the SAGEs’ rationale is:

“The chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and the chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, came to Mr Johnson with what appeared to be a solution. Warning that the number of deaths would rise significantly by the end of October without further interventions, they proposed a time-limited “circuit break” – essentially curfews and targeted restrictions on activities. […] Modellers on [SAGE] believed the package could prevent a return of exponential growth of Covid-19 without kicking the knees out from the economy.” (paywalled link).

It’s driven by ‘caring’ for the elderly – who have mostly been so frightened that they’ve kept in self-isolation anyway – or so The Times reporter insinuates:

“Public Health England (PHE) said that the number of people older than 85 taken to hospital last week almost doubled. Outbreaks in care homes, schools and workplaces are also rising.” (link, paywalled)

I’ll spare you the statistical details taken from the ONS – follow the link for their site above – but as these aren’t sufficiently scary, The Times, just as the DT, had to quote the good old PHE:

“While the ONS survey did not pick up an increase in cases among those older than 70, a PHE report covering the week to September 13 caused officials to say that they were worried. It found that Covid-19 hospital admissions among those older than 85 had almost doubled in a week and intensive care admissions were rising. The survey showed a rate of 10.2 hospital admissions per 100,000 people older than 85, up from 5.2 a week earlier. The report also showed a jump in the percentage of Covid-19 tests for over-85s coming back positive, at 8.4 for men and 11.8 per cent for women, up from 2.1 and 3.2 respectively a fortnight earlier.” (link, paywalled)

Crikey – those intrepid over-85s must have been swamping the pubs! That’s where they obviously got infected! Obviously they have no other age-related illnesses for which they were hospitalised …

In case you thought this 2nd Lockdown is solely driven by consideration for us, the peasants, and especially for us, the old peasants – think again! Here’s the reason given by one of those modellers:

“Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), from Edinburgh University, who helped model the effectiveness of a “circuit break” lockdown in March, said the measure offered much-needed breathing space. “It buys you more time and puts us in charge, rather than just responding to the virus as we have been doing with local lockdowns, […] It depends on the numbers, but you can double your money and maybe get four weeks benefit from just two weeks of shutdown before the numbers start climbing again. That’s quite a lot of time, and Matt Hancock said he needed a few weeks to get testing capacity sorted – and this could buy them the time to do that.” (paywalled link)

Is he for real? Has he lost sight of the fact that we’re not some items in his model which he can tweak with ‘tools’ from his box, but people with lives to live? But Hancock ‘needs time’, so off into that circuit-breaking lockdown we go – it helped so much in spring!

Meanwhile, the blame game over testing is hotting up, with SAGE members refuting the Test-Czarina’s accusation that their SAGE models didn’t predict so many tests were needed (paywalled link). Well, if such need was ‘predictable’ according to SAGE then why wasn’t it equally predictable for ‘Our NHS’ that people catch other viruses (anyone heard of the flu?), especially in view of the ONS data last week that more people were dying of flu and pneumonia than of Covid? Janice Turner in her opinion piece in The Times is spot on:

“At every step the British people complied: we stayed home to protect the NHS, ate out to help out, put on masks and washed hands until they were raw. We kept our side of the deal, yet from PPE supplies to the new private Lighthouse labs, the government’s promises were delivered late, came with a flatpack shoddiness, wreathed in excuses. […]The government had a whole summer when cases were low to build a robust system which could swat minor outbreaks. […] Will the government use that [2nd Lockdown]  fortnight to attain sudden competence? Or will it only kick the epidemic further into winter?” (paywalled link)

Just so! I’d also like to know why no-one in ‘Our MSM’ , never mind the government, is talking to clinicians  Why are those severe decisions again based on models, on extrapolations, no questions asked? Are they scared that “we” will have to see photos of tents outside hospitals as in Madrid (link, paywalled)? Ah – but ‘Our NHS’ is dusting down the moth-balled Nightingale hospitals, ‘just in case’ …

I leave you with the thought that this latest total panic is again fuelled by ‘Our MSM’.  It’s a gigantic face-saving exercise, for panicking, scientifically illiterate Hancock and the equally scientifically illiterate Johnson. They’ve swallowed the “Test” mantra whole, they believe the SAGE models but won’t listen to those, like Prof Carl Henegan, who keep showing that these scare numbers aren’t credible.

Our peacocking MPs, sat at home, are obviously equally innumerate and are incapable of asking such questions. They’d rather rise and rebel against a perfectly legal Internal Market Bill than asking why government isn’t even talking to those who have warned about unnecessary deaths because ‘Our NHS’ thinks that there’s no other illness but Covid! Might an ‘education campaign’, by sending emails with those facts, be useful?

Meanwhile, I ask: will no-one rid us of these panicking, scientifically illiterate and innumerate ‘Covid-priests’?

 

 

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