Covid

[Danny]

Nov 17, 2023 0:09:34 GMT lens said:

I seem (hope) to be in the group who Covid seems to have passed by, as johntel refers to.

Do you mean you have never had it? No potential infections late 2019, or any time 2020 before it officially got going? The other alternative is you had some other infection in the past which generates cross immunity with covid. I would expect some people are more innately immune than others, we had evidence of historical past infections of covid causing detectable genetic shift in asian populations, not sure how they worked that out. But in general yes, some can be more effectively immune than others. We do not know what proportion of the population they are, it could explain a lot if it turned out to be something like 50%.

Nov 16, 2023 18:57:44 GMT alec said:

Whatever the cause, the central point remains sound, I think; getting infected as a means to develop immunity isn't working.

Well, yes. Such a policy sounds a little bit like giving all your money away so you don't have to worry about being robbed!

More like paying to stay in a hotel when you are stranded by the airline. The issue was whether it was ever possible to prevent most people being exposed. But that gets complicated if we start to look at the population as being in segments, some of which are often exposed and some seldom. Which is the reality. Which do you belong to? As to not working...theres evidence it already did work in Hastings winter 19/20, which made Hastings immune to covid until the new kent strain arrived, as the government stats prove.

And surely it's better to acquire as much immunity as possible through vaccination first?

Well that is the core of the issue. Abstractly, yes. But the problem becomes if the cost of waiting to be vaccinated is nine months of lockdown to be effective, or various restrictions even to be partially effective so that people dont just catch it anyway while they wait out the time to develop a vaccine.  Never before in history has it been possible to create a vaccine on the hoof quick enough to use it before everyone got infected anyway, and its a nice question whether it was this time.  For countries which kept covid out, the cost of waiting was a year or two of international isolation.

Statistically, the death rate from Covid varies hugely with age, whereas the (very small) risk from vaccines doesn't seem to.

I think the vaccine risk increases the younger you are, as do all side effects. Its probably because there is a standardised regime of same dose for everyone, but many vaccines use a bigger dose for old people. Whereas covid risk rises with age. This came up when assesing whether it was ethical to ask younger people to be vaccinated, because the balance of risk became more dangerous to be vaccinated. Its likely the dose was deliberately chosen to be as high as they dared, to try to create herd immunity.

[Danny]

Nov 24, 2023 14:24:10 GMT lens said:

That anyone showing symptoms should completely isolate, but also that everyone else in the household should stay apart and not go out at all, precisely because that - even if not showing symptoms - there was considered a risk that they still may transmit it on. If that wasn't an awareness of possible asymptomatic spread, I don't know what is!

Hmm. that wasnt what I was thinking of. I was thinking of asymptomatic as meaning never showing any symptoms, not that they just hadnt developed yet. In Sweden of course they only advised (not ordered) someone who was ill to stay home, and their family, cohabitees, could do what they wanted unless they got actual symptoms too. They basically ignored any sort of asymptomatic spread and it worked for them. Nor did they bother with community testing. I dont think though that telling others from the household to stay home was about asymptomatic spread, just that it was likely they would catch it, so lock em up.

[lens]

Nov 24, 2023 16:31:19 GMT Danny said:

Nov 16, 2023 18:31:57 GMT lens said:

But what about my point, Danny ? What about the 1,000 or so extra hospitalisations that would also have been expected?

yes I started to look into that, but found stats seemed contradictory. But here are some! www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/02/Covid-Publication-06-04-2021-up-to-200731-DQnotes.xlsx

So thats all covid admission for England up to 31 Jul 2020. The total is....25,000. For simplicity, lets say the population of England is 50 million, so that is 0.05% of the population. Interestingly thats a lot lower than the assumed 0.1% death rate from covid. Curious that. 5000 of them were over 85, 10,000 65-84. 400 under 18, 8500 16-64. (Which doesnt add up, but hey I didnt compile the figures)

But anyway, there werent enough admissions to the NHS to account for all the deaths, never mind account for extra beds being used up! Does that imply many died at home or in care homes?

The maximum number of beds occupied at any one time was 19,000, so thats out of the 100,000 or so total NHS beds. But pro rata that comes out as about a maximum of 38 beds for a hospital serving a 100,000 population.

These numbers are far, far below the scary numbers whitty and co were warning government about...........................

But that's changing the subject. And in a way you're defeating your own Hastings argument by saying "look how small the {national} numbers were!" Point being that the pandemic STILL registered to the health authorities. And at that point in time the spread was very granular - high case numbers (and hospitalisations, deaths) in some areas, but virtually zero in other areas. The point being that where many cases were confirmed, the pandemic was very obvious - and obviously in some areas that meant figures way higher than the national average. But at that time, in some rural areas, there may have been hardly any cases at all.

You just can't have your cake and eat it. If Hastings did have a widespread outbreak at the end of 2019 - it would have been obvious at that local level.

But I've done some of your work for you. I believe the main hospital in Hastings ( the Conquest hospital?) has 418 beds? Let's be generous and allow for some beds in surrounding areas, and call it maybe up to 1,000 beds for the 100,000 people in the area? And let's say, what?, about 80-90% of those beds would normally be occupied for elective reasons and non-Covid patients (eg heart attack, etc). So they've got about 100-200 beds at most to play with.

Then at the end of 2019 - if Hastings really had had a substantial Covid outbreak (enough to give a high level of community immunity) - about 1,000 hospitalisations (many needing ventilation) would have been expected, many for a number of weeks, and all within a month or two. Yet you seriously expect us to believe that in a health authority with only about 1-200 beds "spare", that would have gone unnoticed!!?? For heaven's sake! Subsequently, when Covid was spreading widely, hospitals only coped by putting off elective surgery to free up beds. Yet you ask us to believe Covid came and went in Hastings without the health authorities noticing? That is simply not credible.

Danny - you do make some salient points at times, but insisting on your Hastings hypothesis - in the face of common sense - just undermines your credibility. Just give it up.

[lens]

Nov 24, 2023 19:36:26 GMT Danny said:

And surely it's better to acquire as much immunity as possible through vaccination first?

Well that is the core of the issue. Abstractly, yes. But the problem becomes if the cost of waiting to be vaccinated is nine months of lockdown to be effective, or various restrictions even to be partially effective so that people dont just catch it anyway while they wait out the time to develop a vaccine.  Never before in history has it been possible to create a vaccine on the hoof quick enough to use it before everyone got infected anyway, and its a nice question whether it was this time.  For countries which kept covid out, the cost of waiting was a year or two of international isolation.

Well, for the friend of mine whose life was effectively ruined directly by Covid I think it is anything but abstract. Even more so for the people who died. And "everyone got infected before the vaccine was created?" I really don't think so.

Where I have some sympathy with you is in regard to restrictive measures (lockdown, restaurant etc closures) not being zero cost, and I think that can't be stated too strongly. It's a question of knowing when to draw lines. And the reason for lockdown wasn't just to slow case rates until vaccines were ready, but also to stop the health service being overwhelmed. Don't forget many hospitals only coped at all by cancelling much elective surgery to admit covid cases.

And again I must point to New Zealand as an example of the closest we have to a control for what would likely have been the result in the UK if Covid could have been kept out until vaccines were there - about 1/3 as many deaths per capita, last time I looked. (And that much more than it would have been if they had achieved 100% vaccination rates - subsequent death rates were disproportionately far higher eventually amongst the unvaccinated.) Where NZ did get it wrong was not opening up immediately the vaccination programme had happened. All the extra 6-9 months of isolation then achieved was delaying the inevitable - at the cost of severe extra economic harm.

[alec]

There has been a fair bit of coverage of the Mycoplasma pneumoniae outbreak in China, which is pretty serious. As anticipated, some of this has been from those insistent that lockdowns created 'immunity debt', citing the fact that China was the last country to lift restrictions. Prof Balloux of ICL and Heneghan of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine have both issued statements, with Balloux claiming that China had a "far longer and harsher lockdown that essentially any other country on earth..".

That's the sound of established Professors desperately trying to make the facts conform to their preconceived beliefs. It's completely wrong. Contrary to western myth, most of China had next to no lockdown measures (16 days of restrictions in total is the average across China) although some cities had longer periods. These were longer and very harsh, but in reality much shorter in most cases that Western lockdowns. The main control of covid was to close the borders and then quickly eliminate covid where it occurred through very strict controls, with most of the country operating normally most of the time. 'Lengthy Chinese lockdowns' turns out to be a western myth.

It could logically be argued that citizens took their own defensive measures, and this effectively curtailed viral transmission sufficiently to create so called 'immunity debt', but that just isn't supported by any evidence - quite the reverse. The data here -

shows clearly that China had normal levels of flu and RSV circulating throughout the period, so it would be highly odd if other respiratory infections were selectively curtailed through voluntart covid measures. The immunity debt claims made about the Chinese outbreak are also undermined by the fact that France is now also suffering a major wave of the same infection, and it appears that other countries are starting waves as well.

The immunity debt claims are patent nonsense, pushed out by a small group of scientists who have been wrong countless times throughout the pandemic. They are completely wrong again here.

This leaves the question as to what is causing the surge in Mycoplasma pneumoniae cases. Many more sensible scientists are flagging up the fact that this organism is typically associated with compromised immune systems, and is an opportunistic infection that we all carry but which rarely causes problems. This, they say, suggests that immune dysfunction caused by covid is a far more likely cause than immunity debt, which just doesn't fit the facts. Alternatively, it could just be that this is a cyclical year for Mycoplasma pneumoniae, or a slightly new variant. It does swing round in cycles typically of 1-3 years, but French doctors are describing this as the worst in memory.

Given that we now know that recent waves of RSV in children are related to prior covid infection, and we also know that covid does create adverse impacts on the immune system, it is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that the Mycoplasma pneumoniae cases are covid related, but this is not yet proven.

Whatever, we can be very clear that it is nothing to do with restrictive measures against covid, and once again we are seeing a concerted effort to rewrite facts to protect some very damaged academic reputations.

[Danny]

Nov 25, 2023 0:16:42 GMT lens said:

But that's changing the subject.

Sorry, dont get your point? Alec said there would be lots of people ill who didnt die but needed hospital attention. I wondered how you get statistics on people ill enough to need hospital, and the only numbers I can see are people who actually were admitted to hospital during the epidemic. So I looked up stats for this, and it was only 25,000 for all England for the first spring wave. The mortality estimate too is based upon what actually happened. So whats wrong looking at this as answer to his point? The numbers suggested about 50 extra deaths and 50 additional covid admissions at peak.

And in a way you're defeating your own Hastings argument by saying "look how small the {national} numbers were!" Point being that the pandemic STILL registered to the health authorities.

No...One reason why it might not have been noticed in Hastings is exactly its an urban area of only 100,000 isolated by miles of countryside. If it had been London then it would have spread sideways amongst ten million people, thats x100 more cases and x100 more hospital admissions. People like the flu monitoring dont look at how many cases in each town, they look, I think at whole counties, and regions. The total population of Hastings (and Bexhill, they adjoin) just isnt enough to get national attention at these sorts of admissions rates. And I am assuming that even if the entire rest of the 99,900 or so of the 100,000 got flu and stayed off work, lets say for a week over a total period of three months, (about 10% sick at any one time), it still not going to ring any national alarm bells, because there werent any national alarms! We dont bother medical services about colds and flu. Totally no point. Covid has always been a hidden disease until enough people get seriously ill. That happened in China, in Italy, in Spain, in the UK (bit different, we noticed it because we had started testing, not because of huge numbers of cases)

Now we get to the difference between experts. Such as Mclean who just gave evidence, would argue that lockdown stopped further cases, which would otherwise have just soared and soared. But Heneghan would say (and did) this is just an assertion based upon experience of other diseases and assuming everyone who hasnt come to official notice as ill could get just as ill as those who have. Some disease spread like that, some do not. In terms of genuine evidence, all we have is what actually happened in the real world. No one did a control group experiment where they took an unsuspecting country, deliberately introduced covid, deliberately didnt tell anyone, to see what would happen (and secretly counted what happened). And thats why Hastings is important. I am convinced I had covid and the town had covid. Its the only reasonable explanation why it did not get covid for all the period we were monitoring during 2020 up to the arrival of the new Kent strain. Its an academically accepted method of determining the start point of an epidemic, look where no cases were recorded. Because they happened before counting began. Plus there is my own experience of being ill in 2019, and others were too. This is an actual experiment of the sort I decribed, and the outcome was pretty good! Sure, some died, I could identify one if I had to and another who was hospitalised, but the total wasnt vast and may have been lower than was achieved with interventions. The Swedish example shows it was possible to do better than we did by doing less interventions.

Obviously if you could have kept it out completely then the deaths outcome would have been better, but the economic outcome might have been worse because of closed borders. We are not self sufficient like New Zealand. Sweden found major industry had to close, because it couldnt import parts. But if all the world had not used lockdown, then more parts would have been available and integrated industries would not have had that hit.

And at that point in time the spread was very granular - high case numbers (and hospitalisations, deaths) in some areas, but virtually zero in other areas.

There was a gradient of cases from more in the south, to fewer in the north of England. (approx). Consistent with the disease having spread from the south, you could argue from London, but you could also argue first from Hastings. I did some spot checks looking at what happened when schools resumed. It seems to be accepted the strain of covid then was the same as at the start. Or at least, genetic analysis showed many changes from the first detected strains but none were important enough that we were reacting to it differently, until along came Kent. Anyway, when the disease came back a bit, as predicted, when schools re-opened, its was worse in the north. An interesting study would be to take all the regions and compare how April cases correlated with september cases, to demonstrate that fewer in spring meant more in autumn, and the reverse. Bearing in mind that Hastings had its cases in the winter without them being counted, and this must have spread to other close areas and even into London. I have reports from a north London school which had its worst ever absences for illnesses with a flu type disease before lockdown, it was massively infected and I cannot believe this was not covid, but it would not have been officially counted as cases. NHS even went round the place later doing antibody testing, they knew all about it. I cannot say if this was typical, my informant is a teacher I know who comes from Hastings. You see the link to hastings again?

I should point out the schools resumption wave also gave very low numbers in SW region, which correlates with the absolute lowest case count in the UK  spring 2020 being at Torridge in Devon. I dont claim Hastings was the first or only early infection. I do claim early covid infection is difficult to spot untill either it reaches collections of old and vulnerable people, or it has already infected a sufficient number, which could be a million or more. I know much more about Hastings because I live there. I have the added evidence from being part of the early wave.

  Its entirely possible  other places had early covid, in fact it might be surprising if they didnt. Look for travellers from Wuhan. Statistically UK is a reasonably popular place to visit from China.  Covid is propagated by young people, not old people. If the entire UK population had been old people following their normal social patterns, covid would never have become endemic.  Ok, I know thats impossible because the old rely on the young for services, but thats how the transmission dynamics work as part of the whole system. Its how they are naturally protected even if no one changes anything (though, we do always automatically protect the old if we have a cold this week). On the opposite extreme, if the entire population of the Uk had been under pension age, there would have been a fraction of the deaths and no real grounds to do much. If we had all been under 50, we probably wouldnt even have noticed it except as a bit of a nuisance.

I also found a problem in determining catchment areas for hospitals - there is case date by hospital trust, but it isnt connected to data on the local population. Ditto local authorities, its not immediately obvious how many people live in an area to try to normalise their case numbers per head of population. Its not at all surprising is one hospital serves twice as many people it got twice as many cases, but we cannot account for that in apparently granular data. And again, Hastings is much lower density than London, so I would expect a lower R0. It isnt directly transferrable to what you would predict in a tight big city, but it does indicate that in some places the natural outcome of covid is much better than was believed, and probably in all places. I think you talking about granularity hits the nail on th had - what went wrong in predicting outcomes was taking this simple assumption we are all the same. We just arent, some are high risk some low, some are in high risk situations, some low. We know initial dose affects outcome, its the same as the concept of using attenuated live virus to create vaccines, if it begins slowly in someone, they have a better chance to respond to it and it will never get so bad. There was this thing that bus drivers got it bad, presumably because of all the passengers walking past them breathing on them. Sort of an infection parade.

The point being that where many cases were confirmed, the pandemic was very obvious - and obviously in some areas that meant figures way higher than the national average. But at that time, in some rural areas, there may have been hardly any cases at all.

Yes, but we dont know. Could have been just as many cases, but very mild, and still creating immunity. Recorded cases are only serious cases.

You just can't have your cake and eat it. If Hastings did have a widespread outbreak at the end of 2019 - it would have been obvious at that local level.

It would have been obvious lots of people had a bad cold/flu. And it was obvious. People were sick. Except from the public health monitoring perspective, it would have been tested and deliberately igored by the flu monitoring service, because it would have tested negative for flu. I spoke to someone from a hospice charity, who said they had a wave of deaths in their homes. But my point is, overall it was not so out of scale from a normal winter. There was no wave of young people dying, of course not because they do not die from covid. It was never on the scale of eg SAGEs worst credible case, which became the benchmark justification for taking action. Its very obvious from watching just Mclean, Whitty and Heneghan's verbal evidence at the tribunal that intervention was driven by the group who believed this MUST be massive,contrasted with eg Heneghan who argued there was no evidence to support it would be. (Heneghan by then was speaking with benefit of experience up to Spetember 2020, by which time none of the dire predictions had come true, anywhere on earth)

But I've done some of your work for you. I believe the main hospital in Hastings ( the Conquest hospital?) has 418 beds? Let's be generous and allow for some beds in surrounding areas, and call it maybe up to 1,000 beds for the 100,000 people in the area? And let's say, what?, about 80-90% of those beds would normally be occupied for elective reasons and non-Covid patients (eg heart attack, etc). So they've got about 100-200 beds at most to play with.

Then at the end of 2019 - if Hastings really had had a substantial Covid outbreak (enough to give a high level of community immunity) - about 1,000 hospitalisations (many needing ventilation) would have been expected,

You were doing ok until you suddenly said 100 beds would be needed for covid patients. What do you base this on? I started out with NHS figures showing how FEW beds were actually occupied by covid patients even at the height of the first wave. You cannot just claim it would have been much worse in Hastings than it was in the general outbreak.

hospitals only coped by putting off elective surgery to free up beds.

Thats actually official policy for the NHS every winter. Nothing strange if they had to do so that winter as well. But I dont know if they did or didnt, we didnt get figures published about specific illnesses before covid, and since we have only had data about covid itself in such detail.

Yet you ask us to believe Covid came and went in Hastings without the health authorities noticing? That is simply not credible.

Thing is, you are assuming it isnt credible without actual evidence to back that up. You made two particular assertions above, the first the same as Alec about number of expected hospitalisations. Thats pure SAGE guesswork. The second, that hospitlas are not entirely accustomed to doing less elective work in winter. That is simply built into the system. The amusing thing was that at the time of the April wave, the Conquest was ordered to set aside wards for the expected covid patients. But they never came. I was told they sat there essentially empty.

Lens, you need to step back and think how much of what has been said about covid was guesswork, and how much substantiated by fact. There is a justification at the outset of something like this to plan for the worst it could possibly get. But after years when it never does get that bad, you need to reassess and consider how much of that intial guesstimating was simply wrong. If Covid was never as bad as thought, then its obvious why it could go undetected in Hastings, and obvious why it never killed on the scale claimed...anywhere...whatever anyone did or didnt do.

[Danny]

Nov 25, 2023 0:41:52 GMT lens said:

for the friend of mine whose life was effectively ruined directly by Covid I think it is anything but abstract.

You know as well as anyone, that personal cases make bad public decisions. Of course people died and had bad outcomes. It is not relevant to national decision making. What IS relevant is how many had these bad outcomes, and is it worth trying to mitigate them considering the cost of doing so. Both direct financial cost of intervention but also other costs to the individual such as loss of liberty, or future financial impact, all the stuff about people now not bothering to go to school, mental illness, changes it has caused in society.

Where I have some sympathy with you is in regard to restrictive measures (lockdown, restaurant etc closures) not being zero cost, and I think that can't be stated too strongly. It's a question of knowing when to draw lines. And the reason for lockdown wasn't just to slow case rates until vaccines were ready, but also to stop the health service being overwhelmed. Don't forget many hospitals only coped at all by cancelling much elective surgery to admit covid cases.

I try to make clear a distinction I see between whether action was right based on knowledge at the time, and whether in hindsight it wasnt. We now know, yes KNOW, covid was less dangerous than believed and upon which belief actions were chosen. People like Heneghan were arguing in September 2020 that by then the knowledge base had already substantially changed invalidating what eg Mclean was arguing. Although by then its also true vaccines were much closer, boosting the argument to try to delay cases before those vaccines arrived. (vaccines failed to deliver on optimisitc claims however, and thats another piece of missing knowledge at that time.)

There were two separate rationales for lockdown. One was as you say to prevent hospital overload. Again, we argue above about how few cases there actually were so that hospitals never were overloaded to the extent people were left untreated for lack of resources (people WERE left untreated by deliberate triage choice to conserve resources, which actually never ran out).  Also it turned out plain oxygen was better than intensive care for most patients. WHO changed their advice on lockdowns, saying it should only be used to prevent overload, or if there was some overriding reason to think extending it could bring benefits.  They particularly had in mind countries where people had begun starving because of lockdowns. But the UK also experinced more subtle effects, and the not so subtle financial cost. Its clear from enquiry testimony that SAGE predicted the NHS would be overloaded even given all the measures inroduced at the dates they were.  Other evidence challenged whether they had been wrong to make those predictions even then, but they did. Sage got it wrong and called it more critical than it was. (again in part deliberately erring on the worst case side)

The second rationale was to slash levels of covid, so the death rate would fall. It was accepted such a policy cannot work  by itself to save lives and has to end eventually, except that if a vaccine could arrive before it did, then the final death toll would be significantly lower.  This was the rationale for extending lockdown beyond the first month. Indeed, arguably beyond the first fortnight. An alternative strategy might have been the circuit breaker approach talked about later. just to keep cases within capacity thereby making sure anyone who could be saved by medicine would get that chance. 

This was the reason for extending lockdown for the second and third months. But as I said, this did not go to plan. Cases stopped dropping as they should have done if covid was behaving exponentially- it should fall exponentially as well as rise exponentially, on the whole it never really did either.  Thats important, there was never a clear run of exponential growth much longer than it took to establish a pattern. It always ended quicker than expected.

Mclean (and I think she was speaking for the SAGE consensus as chair of a number of meetings), believed we could slash cases and move to something like Australia. This simply did not work. This is now being downplayed, but it was totally what she was aiming for. Sure, there were other arguments for extended lockdown, but this outcome was one potential plus for this policy, which in the end was never achievable. Again, its logical to argue that if Austalia could do it, why couldnt we? I think thats a very good question to which she concluded we could. But it didnt work and the question becomes why.  And one possible answer is that the pacific region had help - the whole area had corona virus infections in recent years which gave it pre existing cross immunity to covid. They always had a head start.

As to elective surgery. It is NHS strategy to do elective surgery in the summer, and manage seasonal disease in the winter. Thats just how it is set up and part of the economic case why it reduced its bed numbers so much. It decided that rather than have empty spare beds in summer, it would adopt a seasonal working pattern.  We might now wish to reasses our choices on bed numbers, but we made that choice so as to get best value for money and that calculation is not changed by covid. It might be changed by the growing number of older people who therefore need more care whatever time of year.

And again I must point to New Zealand as an example of the closest we have to a control for what would likely have been the result in the UK if Covid could have been kept out until vaccines were there - about 1/3 as many deaths per capita, last time I looked.

See above, I'm sure Mclean and co had this in mind. However NZ is self sufficent in food -we would starve quickly if internationally isolated. It has a tiny tourist trade compared to us. No finance industry I know of with international exchanges. No educational trade in students. It was so much better placed to literally end people crossing borders, whereas we could never do that and stay alive. And I have never seen an international comparison table of how much measurable immunity to covid different countries had at the start of the epidemic. All I know is that such existed because studies identified it. Plus, we dont seem to have real tests for low level immunity, the standardised commercial tests simply say if you score '1' you have enough antibody to fight off an infection without perhaps even noticing. But blood antibody falls over a few months to below this even where we know immunity remains effective for life. We have never been able to quantify how many people are either effectively truly immune, or suffciciently immune they will not get seriously ill.

(And that much more than it would have been if they had achieved 100% vaccination rates - subsequent death rates were disproportionately far higher eventually amongst the unvaccinated.) Where NZ did get it wrong was not opening up immediately the vaccination programme had happened. All the extra 6-9 months of isolation then achieved was delaying the inevitable - at the cost of severe extra economic harm.

[/quote][/div]

[Danny]

Nov 25, 2023 8:41:27 GMT alec said:

'Lengthy Chinese lockdowns' turns out to be a western myth.

Isnt it odd then how it was held out to us that we would have to introduce draconian restrictions like the chinese if we didnt comply with what restrictions we had. Are you saying our government LIED about China imposing tough restrictions?

shows clearly that China had normal levels of flu and RSV circulating throughout the period,

Thats curious, because the zoe data shows how depressed was such circulation of other diseases in the Uk aside from covid (they had to sort out who had covid and who other stuff being reported to them). Are you suggesting the UK had stricter controls than China? I wonder why that would be necessary? Maybe because China was always somewhat immune to covid?

I see the tweet you post says 'chinese lockdowns WERE very harsh, but nonetheless other disease kept circulating. Again this suggests that in general a lockdown does not work to stop infectious diseases. And would not have worked in china any better against covid than whatever else. Further evidence it was something else which stopped covid, and the most likely candidate is acquired immunity post infections. Either they caught it anyway without noticing all the cases, or were significantly immune before the epidemic even began. The latter being pretty likely because of recent past corona virus outbreaks, plus the obvious fact that if china was home to covid amongst animals it must have broken into the human population from time to time in the past, even if not enough to cause noticeable waves of illness.

[alec]

Danny - "Thats curious, because the zoe data shows how depressed was such circulation of other diseases in the Uk aside from covid (they had to sort out who had covid and who other stuff being reported to them). Are you suggesting the UK had stricter controls than China? I wonder why that would be necessary? Maybe because China was always somewhat immune to covid?"

To be honest, I struggle to maintain normal human communication with someone who deliberately tries to behave as if they are completely thick. I know you're not, so why do it?

Yes, discounting border controls, overall the UK had far stricter restrictions than China. That is clear from my post. The vast bulk of the Chinese population had very limited periods of lockdown, but with some areas subject to longer, harsh 'total lockdowns' that were stricter, but shorter, than UK lockdowns. However, only a small % of the Chinese population endured these.

It's not remotely curious that China had normal levels of flu/RSV, because social mixing was normal.

"Again this suggests that in general a lockdown does not work to stop infectious diseases."

My posts suggest nothing of the kind. The precise opposite. Why behave in such a ridiculously childish manner? Isn't it time you grew up a little?

[lens]

Nov 25, 2023 11:27:39 GMT Danny said:

Nov 25, 2023 0:41:52 GMT lens said:

for the friend of mine whose life was effectively ruined directly by Covid I think it is anything but abstract.

You know as well as anyone, that personal cases make bad public decisions. Of course people died and had bad outcomes. It is not relevant to national decision making. 

Danny - And I never said anything about it in relation to national decision making. You just referred to a generalist comment about being better to get immunity from vaccination than infection (which I would have thought was stating the bleeding obvious) as being "abstract". To anyone who has badly suffered - or families of those who have died - on a personal level it is anything but "abstract".

On the wider level, then no - I'm not saying policy should be guided by individual cases, but that in no way makes the point about how the immunity is gained (vaccination or infection) "abstract".

Nov 25, 2023 11:27:39 GMT Danny said:

Nov 25, 2023 0:41:52 GMT lens said:

And again I must point to New Zealand as an example of the closest we have to a control for what would likely have been the result in the UK if Covid could have been kept out until vaccines were there - about 1/3 as many deaths per capita, last time I looked.

However NZ is self sufficent in food -we would starve quickly if internationally isolated. It has a tiny tourist trade compared to us. No finance industry I know of with international exchanges. No educational trade in students. It was so much better placed to literally end people crossing borders, whereas we could never do that and stay alive. .........

Danny - seriously, why don't you simply check your facts before you type!! Seriously? A "tiny tourist trade"!? Just take as a reference www.tourismnewzealand.com/insights/industry-insights/ - good enough for you? And from that:

"Before COVID-19, tourism was New Zealand's largest export industry and delivered $40.9 billion to the country. Tourism made a significant positive impact on regional economies supporting employment by directly employing 8.4 percent (229,566 people) of the New Zealand workforce."

For heaven's sake Danny, tourism is NZs largest export industry, and related to the UK that NZ$40.9 billion equates on a per capita basis to about £300 billion for the UK! Yet you dismiss it as tiny!!? It's one of the main reasons why Jacinda Ardern's failure to open up after vaccination was seen as such a catastrophic mistake. Hit the economy badly, but only delayed the Covid inevitable.

And I think you'll find that "self sufficient in food" is only a fraction of the story. Ever heard of New Zealand lamb? Import/export continued to a large extent - it was *people* who were largely blocked from travelling to/from the country, or fully quarantined when such could not be avoided. (eg Ships crews.)

But anyway you're missing the point. (Again) The whole reason for bringing New Zealand up was *not* to suggest we should have done as they did, even if we could have in time. But rather that it acts as the best we've got to a scientific control to the academic question of what would have likely happened in the UK if we had hypothetically fully isolated and kept Covid out until a vaccine was ready? Reasoning being that they DID do just that, and racially the population is broadly similar to that of Britain - well, much closer than nearly everywhere else in SE Asia anyway.

And frankly Danny, I'm really not going to waste any more time on you over the whole "Hastings had Covid early" nonsense. If that had happened on a widespread basis amongst 100,000 people, it would have been noticed. Just forget about surveys and the like. If the main hospital only has less than 500 beds for EVERYTHING, then any large scale outbreak BEFORE the height of the pandemic could not have been missed. Your mathematical error is to use national figures (low because large areas of low incidence get averaged in) for an area where you are saying there was a very high concentration of cases. If you have to use the low figures, it's equivalent to saying it only affected a few districts of Hastings.

And - just maybe it did!? But then bang goes any theory that Hastings got widespread immunity from it - not enough people would have been infected! You can't have your cake and eat it.

[Danny]

Nov 26, 2023 0:21:56 GMT lens said:

"Before COVID-19, tourism was New Zealand's largest export industry and delivered $40.9 billion to the country. Tourism made a significant positive impact on regional economies supporting employment by directly employing 8.4 percent (229,566 people) of the New Zealand workforce."

Ok, so that is £20bn for a population approx 1/10 that of the UK. UK tourist income might be £250 bn depending what number I believe from google. So actually fairly comparable. I stand corrected. However, something being a countries largest export doesnt necessarily make it per se economically important if the country in question doesnt much rely on trade.

It's one of the main reasons why Jacinda Ardern's failure to open up after vaccination was seen as such a catastrophic mistake. Hit the economy badly, but only delayed the Covid inevitable.

Dont know the details, but any country delaying relaxing restrictions, including the UK, after vaccinations had reached the top 1/3 of the age range didnt really make sense. It might at the time have been justified by hopes to create herd immunity and eradicate the disease, which we know now didnt work at all.

And I think you'll find that "self sufficient in food" is only a fraction of the story. Ever heard of New Zealand lamb? Import/export continued to a large extent - it was *people* who were largely blocked from travelling to/from the country, or fully quarantined when such could not be avoided. (eg Ships crews.)

In Britain, border restrictions totally failed to prevent new waves entering the country. So if NZ trade continued as you say, once again we come back to the problem how they succeeded and we failed. Each new strain entering the UK is starting from scratch with the epidemic. It was argued that first time round such as NZ of S Korea were very quick to react and had systems in place, so that is how they managed to stop it entering. Yet this was true for the Uk and Europe for the new strains when they arrived, and they all totally failed to prevent it passing their borders. Yet NZ and Aus etc still succeeded. Thats pretty remarkable. One explantion might have been much lower border crossing rate, but you are saying it really wasnt? Again this is pushing towards the real reason being pacific nations had pre existing immunity to covid from past corona virus outbreaks. Even Alec now seems to be arguing Chinese success in containing covid wasnt due to lockdowns because they didnt really have one despite the hype.

But anyway you're missing the point. (Again) The whole reason for bringing New Zealand up was *not* to suggest we should have done as they did, even if we could have in time. But rather that it acts as the best we've got to a scientific control to the academic question of what would have likely happened in the UK if we had hypothetically fully isolated and kept Covid out until a vaccine was ready? Reasoning being that they DID do just that, and racially the population is broadly similar to that of Britain - well, much closer than nearly everywhere else in SE Asia anyway.

I dont have a problem agreeing that had the world been vaccinated before covid disease arrived, fewer people would have died. In that sense the example of any country which excluded the disease isnt terrible helpful. Almost everyone agrees almost the definition of a decently effective vaccine is that it will protect you from serious illness. The important question is what might have been the outcome in the UK comparing what we did do, with instead eg a Swedish approach with no lockdown and much less personal restriction. Or a third route where we did nothing at all. We did try to exclude the disease, it didnt work and whether you believe it arrived in 2019 when no one was trying to stop it, or 2020 when we were, either way it did arrive and so we had to manage it already here.

And frankly Danny, I'm really not going to waste any more time on you over the whole "Hastings had Covid early" nonsense. If that had happened on a widespread basis amongst 100,000 people, it would have been noticed

I'm sorry, but it just would not. Alec above went into numbers of hospital admissions accompanying such an outbreak being obvious and noticeable, but they simply were not. On that scale taking the actual numbers from the national outbreak, they very well could have been passed off as a bit of a winter surge, which happen every year. It would only have been noticed if it happened on a much bigger scale, such as the worst credible case estimates from SAGE. But those never came true anywhere, ever. On the other hand, if it had been milder than our national outbreak more like Sweden, or maybe even milder than that because even in Sweden certain interventions were counter productive in the manner explained by Henegan amongst others (ie restrictions most reduced cases amongst the young and safe, not amongst the old, Therefore before it ended there would be more not less cases amongst the old, and therefore more death and illness!). Saying it could not have happened is sticking your head in the sand. Without evidence to the contrary it still remains entirely possible the interventions made matters worse, not better, because they made the young fearful and isolationist and delayed the onset of herd immunity. (and yes, Hastings plainly achieved herd immunity to the original wuhan strain, which Mclean averred and still averrs to be impossible)

Just forget about surveys and the like. If the main hospital only has less than 500 beds for EVERYTHING, then any large scale outbreak BEFORE the height of the pandemic could not have been missed. Your mathematical error is to use national figures (low because large areas of low incidence get averaged in) for an area where you are saying there was a very high concentration of cases.

I'm not saying Hastings had a high concentration of cases. Actually, I am saying it had a lower concentration of cases than places with full interventions in place. Or postulating that, and I dont see the evidence to disprove it. I agree with you the figures I used do not describe individual trust's situations in terms of percentage of resources used at peak. Do you have any such figures?

However...this is still arguing back to front, I was addressing Alec's contention there would have been 1000 admissions in Hastings, and pointing out there never were admissions on that scale anywhere. In fct, total admissions seems to have been something like half total deaths ascribed to covid, which is pretty curious in itself. So how did he justify that number? You also have not produced relevant numbers showing such a thing happened anywhere, never mind that even if it did, it was impossible the lockdown interventions actually INCREASED deaths rather than reducing them.

This is all very much like Heneghan was arguing with Mclean. She argued it was obvious there could be a million deaths. He was arguing there was no evidence deaths would be anything like that under any circumstances. Show me some evidence rather than assertions there would be this scale of hospital overload. (it didnt happen in April 2020, certainly never happened after that. All those nightingale hospitals were never used.)

[alec]

lens - One very interesting observation regarding China and New Zealand though; both effectively eliminated covid through strong and targeted control measures, with both countries benefiting from very short, limited periods of controls in most areas, while the rest of the world suffered long periods of disruption.

Neither country could contain covid indefinitely, but this wasn't because of what happened inside their own borders, where effective elimination was achieved. Both suffered from externally seeded infection once the inevitable reopening of borders happened.

Perhaps the lesson of this is that if the world had acted quickly and targeted local elimination, then we would now be in an effective zero covid scenario, and we'd all be much better off.

[Danny]

Nov 15, 2023 16:43:34 GMT lens said:

@danny - re the Alpine resorts, then forget about anti-body testing. Just look at this from 10th FEBRUARY 2020 (!) - www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/10/super-spreader-brought-coronavirus-from-singapore-to-sussex-via-france Look at the already KNOWN cases on the graphic, and their geographical distribution. The main text makes it clear that even by then there were a huge number of cases in Italy, and the risk to spread from ski resorts was known. There was certainly a delay between initial cases and spread - but it only took a few weeks for it to become clear.

I dont quite see what you are trying to demonstrate. It says 25,000 cases in Italy whereas maybe there had been 50,0000 cases in Hastings by then, all unrecorded. Why do you consider 25,000 cases is huge?

The text also says covid has a 2 week incubation peiod, but come on, we know thats bollox. By two weeks someone should be gasping in hospital or recovering, or recovered. Although they say this to explain why someone wouldnt notice they were ill, the actual dates they quote suggest the key action took place over one week or just a bit longer and doesn not say the person had no symptoms.

Your original point re "they didn't notice they had it" may have been true for a few weeks (at most) but it was very soon obvious.

How? How was it obvious the guy in the article had covid? Did someone do a covid test? That would be tests which did not exist before Jan 2020, and then in very small numbers.  If no one had done a test, and no one had even heard of covid, then he just had a funny fly sort of thing, and I read 10,000 people have always died each year from pneumonia (ie that would be covid lung disease) where the actual causal agent was never identified.

Let's try out some very rough numbers. From google, the population of Hastings is somewhat under 100,000, yes? Wherever Covid struck in Europe, a ball park figure for deaths seems to have been about 0.1% of the population, so firstly yes - about 100 deaths, mostly amongst the elderly, seems roughly right.

Assuming interventions didnt make the outbreak worse not better, but yes....

But I believe for every death there were about 10 *hospitalisations* at this time?

No. Where does this come from? The UK covid hospitalisations data from the NHS said 25,000 covid admissions in a period to july 2020 during which 50,000 people were deemed to have died from covid. So actually only half as many admissions as deaths. It would seem most people died from covid at home, and most people severely ill with covid (ie they actually died) never were admitted to hospital. Do you consider these figures to be wrong?

Many of them needing ventilators.

There was a huge call for ventilators, but then this was quietly shelved. It was discovered most sick people did better on oxygen than placed on a ventilator. If anything then, a shortage of ventilators might have saved lives! Or put another way, its possible someone who just had access to oxygen maybe in a care home might have done better than had they been admitted to hospital and placed on a ventilator.  Oxygen became the preferred tretment rather than ventilators, but I dont recall a comparison of ventilators to just bed rest without oxygen. The issue was that when blood oxygen fell below a certain levels, doctors acting on protocol placed patients on ventilators. But such people were much healthier in other respects, ie still responsive and able to discuss options than you might have typically expected based on those numbers. Doctors made a bad call, covid was better not treated by ventilators unless it got much worse.  Its certain some people died because they were placed on ventilators, Im not sure how many.  Not using ventilators was touted as an improvement in treatment saving lives.

So an expectation of about 1,000 extra hospitalisations in Hastings at such a time.

No...on the basis of the national figures from the main outbreak, only half as many admissions as deaths! And over a period, not all at once.

- many needing ventilators/ICU.

I cannot say what was happening in hospitals in general, but I know one case of suspected covid, someone in hospital late 2019 very ill with the right sort of symptoms, who was not placed on a ventilator. This person was also admitted to hospital again in 2020 when the hospitals were full of covid and all the patients were being tested daily, who however never caught it that time. Well probably wouldnt, if they had it really bad in 2019.

(And likely 10x as many CASES again, with patients being ill at home for a week or two.)

So what? I'm suggesting maybe 50,000 people who caught it and never told a doctor. But no, if they were kids they would quite likely just keep attending school.

Would you like to tell us how many hospital beds there were in 2020 to serve the Hastings area? Because I believe it was (is) under 1,000 in total.

ample for the expected 50 admissions over 3 months.

A thousand extra hospitalisations, and a hundred extra deaths WOULD_HAVE_BEEN_ NOTICED.

You keep saying that, but keep claiming 1000 admissons does not make them appear. What evidence do you have to justify this number? It certainly does not come from UK admissions data.

As to deaths, 100 deaths would be only 10% of all annual deaths. From ONS, "An estimated 28,300 excess winter deaths occurred in England and Wales in winter 2019 to 2020, which was 19.6% higher than winter 2018 to 2019." They define winter as 4 months December to March. The actual recorded figures for England certainly have scope for including some extra from covid that winter. But looking at the average, thats about half the deaths we got from covid in the first wave, so actually the covid death rate of 0.1% or about 100 deaths in Hastings isnt much above what is NORMAL in winter.  And that is before we get onto the question whether some interventions actually made matters worse. We KNOW the UK with lockdown did worse than Sweden without lockdown. Heneghan (amongst others) explained why extending the epidemic with interventions would be expected to cause a higher proportion of older people to catch it.

[Danny]

Nov 16, 2023 7:36:10 GMT alec said:

Danny - Jesus H Christ!

You cannot be serious, as they say. 100 extra deaths in a tiny town like Hastings....

From ONS, "It shows that there are 91 large towns with a population above 75,000, 347 medium-sized towns with a population between 20,000 and 75,000, and 748 small towns with a population between 5,000 and 20,000." Hastings is not at all a small town. Wikipedia lists Hastings and Bexhill as the 59th largest urban area in the UK.

And 100 deaths is worst case, if we had followed the path of Sweden with fewer interventions, then you would expect fewer deaths.

... from a mystery virus

But it wasnt a mystery virus, it looked just like normal cold/flu killing only the same people as normal cold/flu and in numbers not much greater than happens every year from mystery viruses. I would not be in the least surprised if staff in the hospital noticed they had a bit of a surge of such cases, but so what? What would they actually have done about? The answer seems to be nothing. There was no agency which would have reacted to this. The flu agency specifically ignored cases which were proven not to be flu. Even Whitty giving evidence talked about this, he explained there are always suspect illnesses but in assessing whether the nation needed to take special action about covid, he had to wait for sufficient evidence to become certain it would be dangerous enough to bother with. He was being asked why he didnt insist on action earlier, and thats why, just not enough evidence to take any action.

it would have been a very big global story,

No, it would not. Because it was hardly above NORMAL! All the fuss about covid was because it was predicted to kill x10 as many people as it did! It has never anywhwere achieved the death rates, the fear of which caused all this fuss. You only have to listen to the covid enquiry experts to understand how much worse they believed it would be than it really was.

[Danny]

Nov 26, 2023 9:58:24 GMT alec said:

Perhaps the lesson of this is that if the world had acted quickly and targeted local elimination, then we would now be in an effective zero covid scenario, and we'd all be much better off.

But the only way to do that would be to have permanent bans on international travel. Or two week quarantine on every international travel.

How else would you stop transmission of a new unknown disease?

[Danny]

To summarise the problems lens and Alec have, to prove covid could not have happened in Hastings winter 19/20:

1)Prove expected number of hospital admissions. Stats suggest admissions total =half deaths total in general epidemic so 100 deaths and 50 admission ballpark.

2)Prove eg had UK acted more like sweden with fewer interventions, this would not have made outcomes better, not worse, in the same way Sweden had a better outcome than did the UK. Further, prove that even in Sweden intervention did not make matters worse not better by forcing a larger proportion of cases to occur in the older population before herd immunity occurred.

3) Prove Hastings had not achieved herd immunity to original strain covid before the UK general outbreak. ( the case and deaths evidence for the rest of that year shows it had)

[alec]

Danny - no, lens and myself don't have any problems with the Hastings theory, because it's patent nonsense.

The problem is entirely yours - you just spout nonsense and are impervious to fact and logic.

Hasting really is a small town, 91,000 according to census data by 2020. So according to the official deaths data - www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/quarterlymortalityreports/octobertodecember2019 Hastings should expect something like 920 deaths/100,000 in a year, so Hastings would expect to see ~ 840 deaths per year from all causes. So lets say you had an extra 100 deaths from covid, that would be a 12% increase in annual mortality - huge!

It's actually far worse than that, because deaths from respiratory illnesses are much lower - 2019 it was 30.2/100,000 in England - www.statista.com/statistics/985735/avoidable-mortality-from-respiratory-disease-in-the-uk-since-2014/ so 27.5 for Hastings. So you're claiming an increase by a factor of 5 would be a small increase that wouldn't be noticed?

Can you not see just how daft your theory is?

You have the problem - not lens or me.

[Danny]

Nov 27, 2023 8:39:03 GMT alec said:

You have the problem - not lens or me.

I really dont. Hastings acheived herd immunity to covid before the spring 2020 general outbreak. Thats unsurprising because I can demonstrate a widespread disease with covid symptoms over winter, with an identified origin in Wuhan.

You problem is to explain why the general national outbreak was rather worse than what happened in Hastings when no one used special interventions. (obviously people would have implemented their normal intereventions, like not visiting granny while they were themselves ill)

[leftieliberal]

Long Covid linked to MCAS ( mast cell activation syndrome)
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-66998448

I (the reporter) approached NHS England to ask whether it recognised MCAS, or had plans to request a NICE review of the condition, but after incorrectly signposting me to NHS information about mastocytosis, the press office declined to answer any questions about MCAS.

[alec]

@danntinexile - "You problem is to explain why the general national outbreak was rather worse than what happened in Hastings when no one used special interventions."

That's the problem. This has been dealt with already, but you keep forgetting/ignoring.

Hastings wasn't unique or special. I've shown you this already, with multiple local authority areas showing the same kind of pattern as Hastings. That's completely normal evidence of the expected statistical variation of infection patterns in a pandemic outbreak. So your starting point is completely wrong; Hastings was part of a totally normal pattern of variation, and doesn't need any special explanations to explain. I've also shown you the details about the factors behind why Hastings initially experienced fewer infections, which have again been dealt with on here several times before.

The Hastings infection spread was part of normal distribution, the reasons for this have been explained, and there is no evidence that Hastings had an early outbreak of Covid, which - by your own admission - there would have been (100 deaths), and had there been, by my detailing of mortality facts above, would have seen a massive amount of medical attention had it happened, as the mortality levels would have been off the charts for what is considered normal.

So - a completely normal pattern of infection, with Hastings being one of many statistical outliers, as is expected, clear reasons why Hastings was an outlier, and concrete evidence that there was no early outbreak in Hastings. That's why you have the problem, and everyone else just laughs at you.

[alec]

leftieliberal - I think it's really worrying now what we are seeing regarding covid and immune system damage. When this was first proposed as a threat back in mid 2020, largely based on the knowledge of SARS viruses we had already gleaned from SARS1 and MERS, it was really attacked pretty viciously by many established virologists and medics. In part I suspect that was because twitter got hold of the debate and people started calling Covid 'airborne AIDS', and at that time the comparison to HIV/AIDS was running well ahead of the actual evidence. There was a completely wrong heading insistence that we had to treat Covid like a standard respiratory illness, when there was nothing remotely standard about SARS-Cov-2.

But now, not so much. While HIV pretty much completely destroys the immune system if left untreated, Covid damages parts of it, so we can't say yet that we have another AIDS epidemic coming down the tracks, but equally, you only contract HIV once; no one knows what a dozen Covid infections are going to do to our immune systems, but so far the evidence isn't encouraging.

I think the other factor here is the reaction of the doctors in your report. I've heard so many stories of medical professionals getting angry with patients who are presenting them with actual evidence of what Covid does. In one case I am aware of a nurse who left without taking a routine blood sample in a disabled persons home because she (the nurse) refused to wear an FFP3 mask given to her by the vulnerable patient and the patient said she wouldn't allow her in the house without the mask. The patient was following NHS and UKHSA advice, but the nurse got very angry, telling her that 'we don't need to wear masks now'. It's a similar story with doctors who are asked to read papers about covid effects, who instead lecture the patient that covid can't do the things it's now proven it does do and who refuse to learn anything new.

There's a real battle going on between patients and many NHS doctors, and that is adding hugely to the distress these patients feel just from being sick.

[Danny]

Nov 27, 2023 11:00:49 GMT alec said:

there is no evidence that Hastings had an early outbreak of Covid, which - by your own admission - there would have been (100 deaths),

I said that by analogy with the national waves we have seen, something abou 0.1% might be expected. However, that begs the question whether what was done in interventions might have made matters worse, not better. Simply looking at Sweden's outcomes, we would cut that to 3/4 or 2/3 by not having a lockdown.

The point is, there is credible evidence Hatsings had covid winter 19/20. Its not that there was no one in the town infected with covid during the spring epidemic, the point is there were but nonetheless there was no general outbreak of cases and deaths. This goes far beyond random stastical variation. Prof Mclean government advisor would assure you such is totally impossible and Hastings should have been overrun with covid just like eveywhere else. At the time then, the question being asked in Hastings was how come it uniquely in the SE had such low cases. Featured regularly in TV news broadcasts as bottom of the league table. Others rose and fell, Hastings stayed dead low. The local council commissioned a university study just how this had happened, but the results never seem to have been published. As the national league tables of cases one by one shot up for different places, Hastings stayed near the bottom. I have several times mentioned that the very bottom was Torridge in Devon, and yes I would not be surprised if they too had early covid.

and had there been, by my detailing of mortality facts above, would have seen a massive amount of medical attention had it happened, as the mortality levels would have been off the charts for what is considered normal.

Off the charts? Normal rise in winter mortality would be about 100. This estimate of covid deaths, about 100. Thats not off the charts. You contend it is, but winter surges of death amongst the elderly from flu type disease are very normal.  And I said to you, just who would local doctors have reported this to? The answer is no one.

clear reasons why Hastings was an outlier

Er no...you havnt suggested even one! Its also relevant to what you might suggest, that once the new kent strain appeared, Hastings became infected exactly the same as other local towns. It was not protected from that one at all. So whatever you might suggest depressed Hastings cases against the Wuhan strain, you contend from the arrival of covid in the UK until the arrival of the kent strain, whatever you think might have protected it totally stopped working against the new strain. So what fits that description?  Why... post infection immunity does...there's a name for it, herd immunity.

[alec]

Danny - "The point is, there is credible evidence Hastings had covid winter 19/20."

No Danny, there isn't. There is zero evidence that Hastings had covid in winter 19/20. Completely zero. As I've explained to you, what you have done is take a pattern of case distribution which is completely explainable within the normal statistical distribution of pandemic waves, and then invented a possible reason for which there is no supporting evidence.

"Off the charts? Normal rise in winter mortality would be about 100. This estimate of covid deaths, about 100. Thats not off the charts. You contend it is, but winter surges of death amongst the elderly from flu type disease are very normal. And I said to you, just who would local doctors have reported this to? The answer is no one."

I've just shown you the evidence that Hastings would normally expect around 27.5 deaths in total from all respiratory illnesses IN A FULL YEAR. So yes, a surge of 100 deaths in a short space pf time in winter would be an epic scale wave for a little town like Hastings. Can you not read the evidence that others present you with?

And yes, we really do have some very well organised reporting systems for unexplained deaths from new and undiagnosed illness. The UKHSA would have to be informed, and back then in 2019 it would have been PHE. They weren't informed, because Hastings didn't have an early covid wave and there was no surge in deaths.

"So whatever you might suggest depressed Hastings cases against the Wuhan strain, you contend from the arrival of covid in the UK until the arrival of the kent strain, whatever you think might have protected it totally stopped working against the new strain."

Random statistical chance, along with the fact that even you must be able to appreciate that Hastings is closer to Kent than Wuhan? With the Kent variant originating in, er, Kent, it's a near certainty that Hastings was seeded with the new variant far more quickly.

You need to be ore open minded about evidence.

[Danny]

Interesting evidence at the enquiry from Khan, Mayor of London. He had wanted to attend cobra meetings to find out what was happening which might affect his ten million or so citizens. Government responded that either they invited all metro mayors or none. Khan responded that not at that time but now he knows government was aware that the epidemic in London was ahead of that in the rest of the UK, so it affected him more. Which of course fits nicely with it being fed by infected people from Hastings.

The big problem is that the younger half of the poulation transmitted most cases, but didnt become unwell enough to seek medical attentions. So before March 2020, no one was counting real cases of covid. There could have been millions in London which went completely undetected. I know for a fact of one school in London which had its worst ever attendance rate, kids with a respiratory virus, in that period before schools closed. Khan alluded to some schools closing after half term in february because of kids who had attended skiing holidays in Italy, but government advice was for no schools to close. 14 closed, which seem to have been dotted all over the country because of skiing trips in Feb. Theres info about schools in this daily mail article from 26 feb 2020. www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8045831/Coronavirus-chaos-seven-UK-schools-shut-18-send-pupils-staff-home.html

Its interesting one of their images has the caption, "Worldwide, more than 80,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 2,700 have died". Which implies a case fatality rate of about 3%. Which is x30 the estimate we are using at the moment of 0.1% Thats a HUGE difference between what was planned for and used to justify interventions compared to what could ever really have happened. And that 0.1% is almost entirely amongst the old, so even if 100% of under 50s had been infected, very few cases would have come to medical attention.

Old people were automatically protected by virtue of not working and not socialising nearly as much. The same of course applies to anyone younger who was already ill, which might have caused them to be a serious case.


The expected start of any covid epidemic would be very few serious cases.

[Danny]

Nov 27, 2023 11:17:05 GMT alec said:

But now, not so much. While HIV pretty much completely destroys the immune system if left untreated, Covid damages parts of it, so we can't say yet that we have another AIDS epidemic coming down the tracks, but equally, you only contract HIV once; no one knows what a dozen Covid infections are going to do to our immune systems, but so far the evidence isn't encouraging.

First, there is no evidence covid is more dangerous in any respects of lasting damage than other respiratory diseases. The plain truth is that this is novel research never done before. As to HIV, it is a virus which also mutates as does covid to new forms. The difference is that people with HIV are infected for years and so those mutation occur internally. So people with HIV are exposed to different strains. This particularly applied when certain anti HIV drugs appeared, and it was found the virus would mutate internally to evade them. Which has also been seen in unlucky individuals whose own covid infections have persisted for months.

I think the other factor here is the reaction of the doctors in your report. I've heard so many stories of medical professionals getting angry with patients who are presenting them with actual evidence of what Covid does. In one case I am aware of a nurse who left without taking a routine blood sample in a disabled persons home because she (the nurse) refused to wear an FFP3 mask given to her by the vulnerable patient and the patient said she wouldn't allow her in the house without the mask.

All governments lied to their people exaggerating the dangers from covid. So now people are still scared. You also seem to be. Now when medics come along and say any risk is minimal, they arent being believed. As you dont believe them either.

[alec]

Danny - "First, theer is no movidence covid is more dangerous in any respects of lasting damage than other respiratory diseases."

It would be good if you could stop talking bollocks. There is a veritable mass of evidence that covid has far more impacts. You're just talking complete shite. No other respiratory virus directly infects the immune system, just for one. SARS-CoV-2 actually hijacks some types of immune cells. Flu doesn't lead to excess deaths two years after infection.

[account_disabled]

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[lens]

Nov 26, 2023 9:58:24 GMT alec said:

lens - One very interesting observation regarding China and New Zealand though; both effectively eliminated covid through strong and targeted control measures, with both countries benefiting from very short, limited periods of controls in most areas, while the rest of the world suffered long periods of disruption.

Neither country could contain covid indefinitely, but this wasn't because of what happened inside their own borders, where effective elimination was achieved. Both suffered from externally seeded infection once the inevitable reopening of borders happened.

Perhaps the lesson of this is that if the world had acted quickly and targeted local elimination, then we would now be in an effective zero covid scenario, and we'd all be much better off.

Sorry, but I think China and New Zealand are very different cases. New Zealand was lucky with it's geography to be able to virtually keep it out until the global situation was pretty clear, and with then closing borders had few enough cases to be able to tackle the few it did have via testing and isolation.

And Danny, the population of the UK is about 68 million, that of NZ about 4.9 million. The UK has about 14x - not 10x - as big a population. It makes tourism - per capita - an even bigger economy than the UK, and very largely dependent on foreign tourists.

China was very different, largely down to being where Covid originated, with a huge number of cases developed before it was remotely close to under control, even acknowledged. And alec, China didn't even come close to "effective elimination" - more a case of whack-a-mole with draconian lockdowns brought in where outbreaks flared up. But that's not to say the rest of the country didn't have a lot of measures during the whole period. I know several friends who went there to work for the Winter Olympics, and the picture they came back with was pretty bleak in terms of controls - it was radically different from New Zealand. Heck, the Olympics even had to take place with no public, and only a few special invited guests. The Chinese lockdowns certainly kept the case numbers (and hospitalisations, deaths) down whilst the controls lasted, but they didn't even come close to "effective elimination".

I have heard that the eventual end of the Chinese lockdowns was eventually brought about by the Football World Cup of all things. They couldn't not show matches - and it was looking at the foreign TV pictures with full stadia, with not even a mask to be seen, that came as the "Emperors got no clothes on moment". The lockdowns and controls were becoming increasingly unpopular, let alone the economic harm, but apparently seeing how the rest of the world had effectively returned to normal was the final straw. Certainly the timings of the World Cup and the sudden end to restrictions give strong weight to that theory.

It's also the case that internal restrictions were removed BEFORE any widespread lifting of international borders, and the resulting rise in cases came from within. It's just not true to say the surge of cases was the result of travellers from abroad (as was the case in NZ). Think about it - the periodic severe lockdowns all through 2022 couldn't have come from outside  - the borders were closed! All through 2021-22 there were a continuing number of infections within the country which occasionally flared up into big outbreaks. The measures did keep overall figures relatively low whilst they lasted - but they couldn't last for ever, and that's what China does have in common with NZ. Such measures have justification in delaying cases to save a health service being overwhelmed or to get the population vaccinated, but otherwise they just delay the inevitable at the expense of severe economic harm.

[Danny]

Interesting listening to the two of you with diametrically opposed interpretations of what went on in China. Lens view is Chinese lockdown really did exist and failed to stop covid. Alecs view was it didnt exist, and failed to stop other diseases so no reason to think it stopped covid either. You seem to agree Covid ceased to be a serious threat to China and lockdown had nothing to do with it. That is, if it ever was a serious threat rather than millions of hidden cases with just the froth on the top of the wave visible because it caused severe cases ending up in hospital.

I remember that when this maybe effective/maybe not Chinese lockdown was released there was a surge of cases, but nothing much happened otherwise. The UK has a hundred thousand new cases every day, so if the same rate is true of China they will currently be having millions a day. But as lens pointed out over international football, they will be all back to work just ignoring whether or not they happen to catch covid or flu or whatever. A teacher recently noted to me how we are back to coughing and spluttering in class as per pre covid.

I am reminded of what happened in the UK post the spring 2020 wave as restrictions were released one by one. The epidemic did NOT behave in the manner Whitty said recently in evidence it must behave. He said approx 'an epidemic is either doubling or halving'. Depending if R is above or below 1. But as each measure was relaxed, there was a burst of new cases. Only it didnt then go into exponential growth (actually it never, ever did for more than a few weeks and never at scale as feared). Instead it behaved as if a new block of people had been added to the population which included some extra ones susceptible. Some of these got infected and added to case stats, but then this surge pretty quickly started to decline. It behaved exactly as if the Uk already had herd immunity.

Precisely the same happened when schools resumed that september. Pactically nothing happened in Hastings, and there was a gradient of severity as you went north. But everywhere the initial surge burned itself out without causing a mass resumption of the disease. This only happened that winter as the new kent strain arrived, and we went into round 2.

All this suggested the UK achieved herd immunity to the original strain, and had we just let it run that spring, we would simply have achieved herd immunity faster. The fact the early outbreak in Hastings wasnt even officialy noticed suggests the consequence of not intervening could have been a better result than with interventions.

Just as a reminder since people seem to have forgotten, the reasons why Hastings must have had covid in 2019 are:

1) I had a disease with what we now know to be the correct symptoms for covid in November 2019, loss of taste and smell which zoe later determined to be 95% certain of identifying covid. At the time I described this as the worst flu I ever had.

2) This was worse the older you are, mild for youngsters. A couple of associated cases in older relatives of people of working age ended up in hospital. One died, in neither case was the hospital able to identify the causal disease. Not a known disease, then.

3) The outbreak began in a workplace of about 300 people when someone young arrived back from Wuhan with a cold and went straight back to work. I got it from my partner who works there.

4) I had a mild cough for the rest of the winter, so I guess that means I had long covid.

5) Later in the year I spoke to others who said they had had a similar disease in winter, including loss of taste and smell, and I spoke to someone who works for a hospice who said they had a wave of deaths.

6) Come the spring when the UK had its big wave, Hastings had negligible covid. The hospital wards set aside for covid stayed empty.

7) Hastings failed to get a resumption of covid as measures were relaxed or when schools returned. Its essentially imnpossible Hastings could simply not have had covid at some time when it was all around. Its not as if there was no covid in Hastings and a big fence, it just did not take off. The only real explanation of how this could happen is if the town was already immune. Looking for a place with very low case count is an accademically recognised method of finding the start point of an epidemic, because the cases happen before anyone starts counting.

8) When the kent wave arrived, Hastings caught it as readily as anywhere else. Very strange how it could keep out the first wuhan strain but never later strains, if thats what did happen. Statistically impossible I would have thought. Unless...hastings was immune to the first strain because it got it early.

9) Hastings is well placed to have been feeding cases into London via infected travelers, and the timing would be about right to explain the surge in London cases 'discovered' by SAGE when they finally started looking in the general public. When SAGE panicked because they saw more and more cases the more they tested, what they really discovered was an already growing background of cases which had been emerging for months. If it started Hastings November, then maybe peak Jan-feb leading to London cases feb-march, as happened.

10) In 2021 I had a covid antibody test which scored 0.03 on the usual scale. 1 means fully immune, 0.1 is defined by the testing company as meaning a probability you had covid. Minimum is about 0.001. The manufacturers do not assign a meaning to low scores below 1, though this is the benchmark standard for antibody testing. A score of 0.03 seems about reasonable for someone who had covid 18 months before. Government would count this as not testing positive for having had covid, but that is frankly absurd. It does however explain why the official antibody results for people who have had covid are so low, because researchers and authorities ignore most of the positive results. Similarly they only count cases with a positive test result, so have always missed most of them.

11) in 2022 I had covid, testign positive. It was nothing, bit of a sore throat and snuffle. That makes perfect sense if I had it seriously in 2019. if I didnt, then I cannot understand what the fuss is, because its a trivial disease!

12) The government dashboard gave cumulative counts of covid cases from April 2020, and I watched the totals climb. What became clear was that while different towns caught the disease sooner or later, Hastings stayed at the bottom of the list. Only it wasnt the very bottom. Torridge in Devon was. When schools rsumed, there seemed to be low cases centignin the SE, but also from the SW. Seems likely there was also an early infection in Torridge, Devon. Obviously there were early infections in Europe, from which the UK outbreak was officially deemed to have arrived. But that early wave infecting Europe could just as well have delivered some cases to Britain too. Covid started spreading world wide in 2019.

13) Sweden didnt use lockdown and got better outcomes than the UK. Its clear now some interventions could have made the epidemic worse. The rationale is essentially that measures introduced to slow spread were most effective amongst young people, whereas its old people who die.This pushed a larger proportion of cases into the older population before herd immunity was achieved, pushing up deaths. There is indeed a rationale why intervening might have made the epidemic worse.

Prof Angela Mclean gave evidence to the covid enquiry where she stated even if the UK had allowed the 2020 epidemic to run for a year at the maximum rate the NHS could handle cases, it would not have achieved any significant percentage of immunity to the disease. Whats plain is she was utterly wrong. Even with suppression in place the UK achieved enough immunity to prevent wider resumption of the epidemic when schools resumed. Had we allowed it to, the first wave would have passed through without more deaths than did occur, obviously without the financial cost of lockdown. It seems likely without interventions in fact the deaths would have been fewer. (though obviously I cannot check that because pre covid local deaths figures were never published in detail, so we dont actually know how mnay died in Hastings winter 19/20)

[lens]

Nov 28, 2023 8:00:50 GMT Danny said:

Interesting listening to the two of you with diametrically opposed interpretations of what went on in China. Lens view is Chinese lockdown really did exist and failed to stop covid. Alecs view was it didnt exist, and failed to stop other diseases so no reason to think it stopped covid either. You seem to agree Covid ceased to be a serious threat to China and lockdown had nothing to do with it. That is, if it ever was a serious threat rather than millions of hidden cases with just the froth on the top of the wave visible because it caused severe cases ending up in hospital.

I remember that when this maybe effective/maybe not Chinese lockdown was released there was a surge of cases, but nothing much happened otherwise. ...........

Apart from that the bit highlighted above is not really "Lens view". At best it's an oversimplification. In 2021-2 the measures China was implementing may be said to have "stopped" Covid in that widespread outbreaks and draconian lockdowns were sporadic, and (as far as Chinese figures can be believed) death and severe illness rates were quite low. Where I disagree with alec is when he says that during thi period the virus was "effectively eliminated" within China, and the surge in cases at the end of 2022 was due to opening international borders.

The Chinese measures *suppressed* Covid during those two years, they nowhere near eradicated it. Lockdown *does* work as a delaying measure - but it can't be kept up indefinately. Even China had to accept that.

And I think your memory of that period may be a little faulty, Danny . From the time, remind yourself from www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/china-zero-covid-policy-what-is-it-and-why-lockdowns-quarantine-protests
and
www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/29/chinese-cost-covid-xi-lockdowns-china

From the latter (January 2023): "Over the last two months, the virus has rapidly spread through the country. Up to 10,000 critical cases were registered in hospitals every day. Morgues were overwhelmed, pharmacies reported shortages of basic medications, and supply of antiviral drugs was held up by protracted negotiations with foreign suppliers. Online and in the streets, people spoke of almost everyone they knew having caught Covid, and of elderly relatives dying."

Hardly "nothing much happened otherwise"?

And I suggest alec takes a look at the former if he thinks that apart from closed borders and the occasional severe localised lockdown, Chinese society had more or less gone back to normal internally (as in New Zealand) in 2021-2 - the graph ties in closely with what my friends experienced in early 2022.

As for " You seem to agree Covid ceased to be a serious threat to China and lockdown had nothing to do with it." - well no, just no. I certainly don't agree with that statement, but I'll leave it up to alec if he wants to take it further!

The Chinese lockdown and other measures *could* have been beneficial if they had taken the time to implement a thourough vaccination policy, preferably with foreign vaccines, when the efficacy of the Chinese ones was found to be not very good. (As happened in New Zealand.) They didn't. Which meant that the years of hardship and economic harm they endured were largely squandered.