So I’ve followed the weekly Indy sage broadcast now for a few months. They are worth listening to for a weekly sitrep regarding the situation on the ground in the UK.
This is an emergency meeting they held today with a focus on the current situation in the UK. Of course they don’t talk about Ivermectin or other such treatments etc, but they do give a very good roundup of what the current situation is in the UK right now.
We can talk for ages on this site about PCR, whether there is a real pandemic or a casedemic, whether people are fiddling the stats etc. but it’s very hard to argue with doctor after doctor coming on saying that they are swamped, that hospitals are full and the number of patients coming through the door is growing every day, that this is a situation that none of them have seen the like of, that their colleagues are “dropping like flies” etc. etc. etc.
Covid is really happening. It’s very, very bad and accelerating. The current approaches by the government are not working. It’s finally arriving in my own part of the country, and I expect that my local hospital will be full in a matter of days.
Thanks it’s good to get video ‘reports’. I watched the first quarter. It’s useful to get such factual reminders eg that there are more Covid cases reaching hospital. There is useful information there. Probably every serious source or analysis provides something useful.
But I still find it very troubling. How many elephants can be ignored before it is accepted that we are not in a normal living room? They’re presenting us with a problem - the scary bit - but with the proposed solution already decided. However earnestly presented, to me that’s selling.
Given it’s so terrible, and going to get worse, why has none of them suggested doing something that evidence suggests might make people less vulnerable to the disease (vitamin boosts for immune systems?).
Health experts that have forgotten that diseases can be treated (HCQ? Invermectin? High dose C? VItamin D?).
They are placing ultimate, absolute reliance on a rushed vaccine - the ultimate corporate product, which has been heralded as long as there has been Covid-19 - while showing ignorance or lack of interest in any problems that route might lead to.
The info is being cherry picked. For days they have been reporting cases - supposedly the key issue - without giving the number of tests! Can there be a good reason for that number to stall? The Sage group don’t seem to have it either.
It’s admittedly sobering that the number of hospital patients is now passing April levels. This could however be due to the greatly increased amount of testing - if people are ill and know they have Covid, they are more likely to call for help.
Death rates per case are not nearly matching April levels. Someone should say loud and clear that even if the numbers are scary, the virus itself appears to be objectively less dangerous now (cases and deaths are slowing down every continent except Africa, where levels are still much lower). Keeping people in a state of fear (leading to obedience) seems the order of the day for the govt and media, and medical establishment.
It’s important to know the effects of the lockdowns. To call for total lockdown without this consideration is not science. It would be useful of one of those personnel would show an interest in this. An accountant that can not see both sides of the balance sheet is no use.
A graph is presented showing cases zooming up in Tier 4 regions, and points out that the ‘cases’ graphs are also increasing in other tiers. This looked moderate to me, and I wondered if there was a good reason to jump from hospitalizations to cases. .The BBC has quite a useful page with graphs of hospitalizations by region.(scroll down)
From this the immediate problem seems to be in London and East regions.
The speaker then says this spread of cases in other regions too has to be stopped - but this would be a good point to consider how levels of immunity will be building up in regions where cases are increasing more slowly, and health services are not stretched. This after all was supposed to be the point of the first lockdown.
So this seems a good example of fitting information round an intended policy.
I could be being unfair - of course I should really watch the rest to see if this group does anything more alternative!
Having just had a minor op in the main city hospital for our region, I’ve got to say I’m still more inclined to believe the “film your hospital” brigade. I also have had the misfortune to visit A & E around 8pm midweek before Coroni and it was busy. Not nearly as busy as daytime recently.
And as for “doctor after doctor …” well its interesting that they all come forward when their jobs depend on it. Where were they all when PPI was stripping money from the NHS? Where were they when nurses pay was so poor they had to rob third world countries of their nurses? Where were they when NHS Trusts put numbers men in charge? Where were they when the Nightingale 4,000 bed emergency Coroni hospital was almost empty? Where have they been while surgery for cancer and other serious illnesses has been almost ended?
I don’t know anyone apart from you (in another post), even knows anyone who has been really ill with the “virus”. I’m sorry PP, but from the evidence of my own eyes, I’ll stick with the “film your hospital” brigade.
And in the video, they’re still talking about “cases” FFS. That’s not the elephant in the room. Its a herd of flipping ellie’s!
No-one dropping dead in the streets here. Or, putting it a bit more prosaically, there’s no sign of lots of ill people where I live; none at all, according to the local grapevine. When that starts, I’ll tend to give the panic-porn a bit more attention. Till then… still on the prophylactic-dose C and D, and still living as normal; as usual not cowering in self-imposed house-arrest, before this entirely-usual hectic action in the chronically ill-treated NHS during the Winter flu season.
Bugger the tiers! I don’t even know which one applies here - today - because it’s so chaotic that I quit listening long ago. (Not that I would have complied anyway!) Lately, every ‘news’ bulletin piped into my place has been accompanied by a lot of derisive swearing, featuring many invitations to go away sexually. The solitary - consolidated, all-channels (?) - AM bulletin that beeb radio allows now on 3, at 08.00, was solid panic porn today as usual, garnished thinly with New Year’s ‘honours’ bollocks about some racing-car driver, and with just one lonely actual news item tucked in low-key towards the end, about Tesco defying minimum-wage laws. Not that we’re being rail-roaded, of course…
Hospitals get loaded and very busy at this time of year, normally. It gets bad because, just as we never prepare adequately for snow on the roads, preferring instead ‘news’-shrieking about weather that’s never been this bad since - er - last Winter, so I expect every year to hear about hospitals under severe pressure. Well, yeah! Considering what we’ve let the shysters do to the NHS, they would be, wouldn’t they? Meanwhile, no empty Nightingales yet this Winter. Fingers burned with that duff piece of performance-art last Spring. Yeah, true enough: they might have been a prudent precaution when we were still unsure what was happening; but in the event…
I’ll wait for the all-causes deaths figures to be decontaminated from the current tsunami of shystery - which couldn’t be more obvious - and see what hindsight will show - eventually - about the actual year-picture this year.
Thanks for the comments. Lots here to think on, and several things to reply to. Vamonos!
Absolutely right, ED, and this is my primary criticism of all approaches proposed by basically everyone in a position of authority these days, including the indy sage team. I have been meaning to try and get onto one of their weekly broadcasts, and ask this exact question, but have been stopped by my own laziness. I will absolutely try and ask them in the new year. They do invite questions from the public, so it should be possible.
Yes, it might seem that way from this particular video. I have to say that over the last few months (and even later on in this very video) they come back to their central set of recommendations - local efforts to identify ill and infected people, and then targeted quarantines to slow the progress of the virus. They even included the same idea that I put forward a few days ago - hotel rooms for those who want to isolate away from vulnerable family members. Overall, the vaccine is only a small part of what the propose. They do say this explicitly later on in the video above. In particular Prof Anthony Costello is the guy who says this.
Again, they do often do cover the number of tests as well as cases. I didn’t notice that they missed the number of tests this time. Just for reference, we have had the largest number of cases ever recorded, and the number of tests has actually fallen by 150K, so it’s definitely not an artifact of more testing. Interestingly, the numbers of cases that the health app ZOE records, seems to match very closely the “officially” reported number of cases. The ZOE app gets it’s 5 million UK users to fill in a symptom survey every day and they use that data to determine the likely number of covid cases in the UK. A completely different data source to the tests being run by the NHS. My feeling is that the cases are significant and do correlate with hospitalisations, and the problems of false positives etc. are overstated. That means that the recent rise in cases is worrying to me.
There’s a lot that could be said about this. Firstly, this is already changing - yesterday we recorded daily deaths that were right up there among the highest we have seen since April. That will get most likely worse over the next few weeks, meaning I suspect that we will very soon be back at the death rates we saw in April if not worse. I don’t think that the virus is less dangerous now. Another point to keep in mind is that the initial wave of covid in the UK seems to have been highly clustered, and was very, very bad in only a few places. The hospital overwhelm seems to be what made the initial death toll so bad (coupled with the care home fiasco). The situation today is more widespread, and so it’s taking longer to get to the same level of hospital overwhelm that we saw in April. That longer run up explains (in my opinion, again) the reason why deaths have ramped up more slowly this time. That looks set to change over the next few days/weeks.
Again, I would suggest that the indy Sage team are not, in general, in support of lockdows per se. What they really want to do is set up a locally organised, functioning track, trace and isolate system. They make this point several times. Lockdowns are the only tool the govt is considering, however, so in the absence of anything else that’s the only lever to pull in a situation like today when things are so bad. If the IS group’s advice had been followed back in March when they started, we would have avoided all national lockdowns.
Hi @PatB. So, yes I can easily believe that certain regions are hard hit, and others hardly at all. That was true for Cambridgeshire, where I live, for this whole year. The virus seemed to bypass us, even though we’re only an hour from London. The question is, how do we keep your area clear of covid cases? If we do nothing, then it will eventually get to your area, and unless there is a special genetic strain there, you will see the same overwhelm in the hospitals that we have seen everywhere else. Lockdown’s are arguably not effective, which leaves the indy sage’s advice of identifying people who are ill and spreading the virus, and then paying them to stay in quarantine for 2 weeks, the most sensible advice to my mind.
Well, there are two points here. Firstly just because their jobs depend on it (how is that exactly?) doesn’t mean it’s not true. I do believe it when I see multiple doctors from right across the political and social spectrum coming out saying that they have never seen this before, and that their hospital is totally overwhelmed and staff are dropping left and right. Secondly, I do remember NHS staff coming out on various types of strikes and protests over the last decade. I remember their fight with Jeremy Hunt over the years.
Actually, I have to say that I’m glad you don’t know anyone who has been ill with covid. I hope that continues! I can tell you, that up close it’s no fun at all.
Cases lead to illness which lead to deaths. It’s important to keep an eye on it. As I mentioned to @Evvy_dense above, there are confirmations about the case numbers from different sources, and the correlation to hospitalisations and now deaths is pretty clear.
That’s great news @RhisiartGwilym. I’m glad to hear it. That was the case here too, but sadly no longer. I can understand how, from a personal point of view, you prefer to live life as normal until you see evidence to change that. From a policy point of view, however, that is a very dangerous road to take. By the time you start seeing people dropping in the streets, you’ve lost. It’s exactly the same as the climate change argument. By the time we hit observable milestones, the future is too hard to change and we’re screwed.
One of the people I read recently put it like this: Some problems are best solved whilst in the egg stage. By the time it hatches you have a much bigger problem to try and solve.
Yes, and we are far, far, far beyond that this year. Euromomo is recording excess deaths of 300-1000% higher than the last few years. The doctors in the hospitals you are referring to are telling you that they’ve never seen anything like this.
This is nothing like normal, RG.
yes, or deadly viruses. We could have followed the indy sage group’s advice in March and we would be much better prepared to deal with a pandemic coronavirus, but we chose to do nothing.
Last winter was not this bad. Nor the one before that. Or before that, or before that … etc. You get the point. According to the doctors in the hospitals dealing with this situation, it’s the worst they have seen.
Thanks for all the thoughts, everyone. I respect the fact that we all have our different understanding of what’s going on. Personally, I still find on-the-ground sitreps from frontline staff the best way to try and understand where we are. To dismiss out of hand the direct testimony of doctors, nurses etc is to just bury our heads in the sand.
I’m gonna try and get into one of the upcoming indy sage meetings, and ask a question. If I get in, I’ll come back here and see if anyone here has a question they would like to ask!
Cheers all, and (depending how dangerous it is where you are!) do try and keep safe…
Perhaps I’ll add a bit to my personal experience above. I spoke to a neighbour who is a carer in a local OAP home and has worked there for years. No one, not one has had “the virus”.
And PP, [quote=“PontiusPrimate, post:5, topic:815”]
Cases lead to illness which lead to deaths.
[/quote]
Really? Can you quote an untainted source(s) for this? And what is the ratio? Does 1 case equal 1 illness and 1 death? And of course, as I have said again and again ad nauseum, while the amplification cycles are not published (even if we ignore the other well established facts that PCR is not fit for purpose) it is easy to boost or reduce the number of cases. And that is without the simple issue as @Evvy_dense has said, how many tests have been done.
Having had what I take with increasing confidence to be a bout of the disease, I concur with P that it’s not to be taken lightly. I didn’t suffer much, despite being in the supposedly most at-risk age group, but I did notice that it seemed a good deal more tenacious than the standard Winter respiratory infection, which tries it on with me most years, and which always gets blasted by an already-robust immune system, heavily ammo-ed up with lots of C, in a single 24-hour period. Whereas this particular encounter of mine this year lasted three days (of only slight discomfort), with plenty of pampering rest and ease taken. Not the normal pattern; covid certainly seems to be worse than usual (having been engineered to be so maybe…?). Just bad enough, in fact to lay on it the huge worldwide rail-roading scam which the compromised WHO and it’s ‘stakeholders’ have very clearly been trying on.
I expect this whole episode to die down again to something resembling the previous normal (though with all the gics’ current WealthPowerStatus gains securely reserved in their hands, of course) after the BPh gangsters decide they’ve milked this particular panic of a satisfactory profit-gouge; it being, as Wolfgang Wodarg points out, only the latest iteration of a scam that’s already been run several times previously, this century: ‘Aaaaargh! New DEADLY virus! Sure to kill MILLIONS! Quick! Vaccinate the world! Sign here and pay upfront, please! Oh, and do notice the no-liabilty clause!’. This one will prove to have been the most WPS-profitable run of the scam so far, I imagine.
P, I think that we can unify your take and mine on this episode something like this:
Yes indeed, there’s an unusually nasty new respiratory pathogen about this time, not much question of that . It’s a somewhat worse killer than average - though not yet proven to be a genuine new monster (that’s looking ever less likely now). Following the ancient pattern, it’s right now busily easing its way out of pandemic status and into endemic status, by the usual natural-inoculation population-immunity process, as collectively we encounter it and grow our immune responses, as ever (what with the survival rate remaining in the high 90s percentile). And we can reasonably expect more and worse outbreaks of novel pathogens in the future, as the current, always-pandemic-inviting human population-overshoot episode worsens - till it too begins spontaneously to retreat, some time in the middle of this century. And quite possibly this natural Gaian mechanism will be given a gratuitous extra push by mega-criminals in bio-warfare labs in various places. That possibility can’t be excluded, if we’re being rational. There are in fact plenty of rational responses to these diseases, involving both effective prophylaxis, and effective cures. But these common-sense responses will continue to be sidelined by the gics and their servants in pocket-politics and mediawhoring, in favour of the hugely profitable vaccine rackets. We seem more or less to agree these points already, on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, P, don’t we?
Your experience is interesting. It adds weight to my theory that this virus doesn’t spread like the flu - it is much more clustered, with some areas being hit hard and others not being touched at all. This is yet more reason why nationwide lockdowns probably don’t make sense in dealing with this virus.
In terms of cases --> hospitalisations --> deaths, there are two questions and I’m not sure what you’re asking exactly?
1- do some viruses cause illnesses? If this is what you’re asking then I’m not sure what to respond. At the moment I just take this as a given… But perhaps you’re not asking that, which moves us to
2 - does Sars-Cov-2 in particular lead to illness (covid) and ultimately deaths? In this case I would suggest that we find an example of someone who died of something that looks like covid (ground glass opacity in the lungs, thousands of micro-clots, coughing etc.) but didn’t test positive for Sars-Cov-2. Until then I’m happy to go with the opinion of doctors around the globe and believe that SC2 is the cause of Covid.
To your second point, i’ve seen several references about ratios. From memory it seems to be something like 5-10% of people who get the SC2 virus go on to be hospitalised, and of those something like 20% go on to die from it. Crunching those numbers gives something like a 1-2% case fatality rate, which I think is the accepted consensus.
Finally, as I said to ED above, In the UK we have experiences our highest number of new cases, whilst the number of tests dropped from approx 500,000 per day to 350,000 per day. So the testing fell, and yet cases went up. This was corroborated by the ZOE health tracker app which uses a totally different methodology and yet comes up with similar numbers.
Hi PP. Its easy. You said “Cases lead to illness which lead to deaths”.
What I’m asking is, disregarding the elephant in the room of PCR tests, how many “cases” lead to how many illnesses, and how many illnesses then lead to deaths?
Yes, I think I agree with just about everything you said there. The only thing I would add is that our government has systematically destroyed our health service which has made this whole thing way way worse than it ever needed to be. That and the stubborn refusal on the govt part to do the basic things it knows will work - locally mediated solutions, immune boosting recommendations and ivermectin. Together these two points guaranteed a living hell in hospitals up and down the country.
It’s not just a question of whether the number of cases is an artefact of the number of tests. PCR will find genuine cases that are there and the correlation will be there, but I think it is probably quite weak, because in my view it doesn’t make statistical sense to base calculations on a variable that is badly defined.
Cases are mentioned in every announcement but you need to hunt to find the number of tests to relate to. Given also that a ‘case’ lacks clinical meaning, it is clear that we are getting cherry-picked information chosen for effect. This is one reason I dislike listening to people talking to cameras! We are being rushed and bamboozled.
There is a need to examine the whole process of selection. Just as the sensationalist something or other (level of cases/deaths somewhere) will usually be chosen as a lead/basis, there’s a consistent preference for the plaintive cries of those medics in places that are worst hit. We won’t see any footage of doctors in Scotland playing three-card brag . The last clean weeks’ figures for Scotland’s deaths showed deaths were 24% fewer than the week before. Cases were up, and that dominated the headlines. I’ll admit tests were fewer (though this only became evident a few days ago). No figures today in the official place but verbal announcements about cases and deaths, not mentioning tests. When there were only 45 or so deaths after four days of non-reporting, that wasn’t announced.
The bombardment from a favoured viewpoint keeps counter points from even appearing. Eg, because of the way pcr works, the more people get covid, the more faux pcr cases (viral fragments from past covid exposures) will be created in the future. There’s also likely to be a level of acquired immunity holding the numbers back from April levels. Without contextualizing ‘cases’ in terms of tests and deaths the public is left listening to the siren, with little choice but to obey it. I think the complete absence of the issues raised in our own discussion from the mainstream narratives shows that a march has been stolen on the public and on dissenting doctors.
Certainly, Evvy! You have to be blinded by TDS not to notice that we’re being conned, big time. True, it’s riding on the back of a real, unusually-nasty seasonal new ‘flu’, to give it credibility cover (just about, if all the figures are comprehensively bent), but it remains self-evident to any AAPA person (awake and paying attention; opposite of TDS) that there’s a huge con going on.
The inescapable conclusion has to be that it’s being run by gics and their servants to claw in lots more WealthPowerStatus - especially the first two of the trinity. That’s been crassly obvious during the whole of 2020: huge increases in billionaireparasite wealth, and in blatantly-illegal power grabbing and wielding by the powers-that-shouldn’t-be (Oz!?). The illness, genuine though it is (to some extent) is being used for that purpose. That - and running the vaccine-profit rackets right through to payoff - is why the effective non-vaccine prophylactics/cures for covid are being suppressed and/or trashed by the gic-serving whores.
If I had any use for vaccination, I’d be looking at the Russian ones, as the only examples that just might be s&e. Even then, I’d be heavily sceptical, since I don’t personally believe that the new vaccines are either necessary or likely to work effectively, after all the rush-work. And as for safety - well, we shall see, as the upshots of the present human-guinea-pig field tests continue to manifest…
OK. On that basis, let’s assume the PCR cycles used was 40. Now test all those people who resulted in 1,000 “cases” again using 30 cycles. A considerable number of those “cases” would no longer be “cases”. However, if there was a real relationship between “cases” and illness, there should now be a lot less than 50-100 people going to hospital. A magical cure!
Then test all those people again using 45 cycles, and there would be a lot more than 1,000 “cases”, and suddenly, a lot more than 50-100 people going to hospital. Whereas in reality, there were only 50-100 people who should be going to hospital. in the entire group of people measured. A magical infection!
I may not have explained that very well, but my point is “cases” is a meaningless figure. Its a great figure to use to up the fear porn. Its also great (by reducing the cycles used) to show how well the “virus” is being contained.
Just to emphasise this, “cases” is meaningless. Unless used in a carefully controlled fixed environment, and it is NOT a measure of people who are sick, will become sick, or are infectious. It is a tool to heighten TDS (h/t Rhis) and up the fear porn.
Oh no question about the wilful destruction of the NHS, P! Being the age I am, I’ve actually watched the unrelenting, venomous hatred that certain segments of the gangster English-raj class, and their political and media servitors, have always maintained for the very idea of socialised medicine. Medicine, after all, has always been a universally-desired good, and racketeers in the snake-oil scams have always found it a guaranteed cash-cow: everyone wants a magic bullet against all the ills that flesh is heir to. It’s a perennial desire, inherently profitable for those who want it permanently commercialised.
These enemies of social justice - the real, class/power/economics thing, not the attention-diverter ‘social-marxism’ IDpol-rubbish - have been gunning to destroy the NHS since its very inception. I’ve watched them at it, since I was eight years old: cursing it as a crazy idea even before 'Neurin o’r cwmoedd got it started.
Good comments again. I have no problem agreeing that there are good reasons to be suspicious of PCR in theory. @PatB, your example there is clear and compelling. In practice I’m not sure how much the effects we’re worrying about here make a big difference.
One reason I say that is the ZOE health tracker app seems to match the number of reported cases using a different methodology.
This suggests that the cases that are being reported are actually a measure of something real and not simply artefacts. What artefacts exist, through the cycle threshold being too high, or picking up folk who are actually recovered and have only “dead” virus particles (how can something that was never alive be dead?) etc. it’s likely not as big a deal at it seems in theory. In the same way that false positive results seem, in real life, to not be as big a deal as they are in theory.
A second reason I say that is that in the areas where cases were rising, we now see actually overwhelmed hospitals. Those hospital patients started as cases - i.e. SC2 positive. Again, the link between high cases and hospitalisations (after the appropriate 1-2 weeks) indicates to me that the rise in cases was measuring something real, and that the effect of false readings for whatever reason, was small.
@Evvy_dense, you make a good point about what data gets selected to be presented. There is a natural tendency to focus our view on areas that are hardest hit. You’re right that this leads to bias in our understanding, and does a good job of promoting the fear campaign. As Pat, and Rhis have pointed out, there are still places (maybe lots of places) that remain untouched by the virus. This clustering seems to be to how this virus spreads. We should be talking about that a lot more. The question should be how do we protect places that have not had the virus yet, from getting it?
The question of immunity is complex. Surely it is building up in the population, and there is a good chance that some had pre-existing immunity to begin with. Prof Karl Friston was the first person I heard who made that argument (calling it “dark matter” that protects some of the population) way back in April. KF is the head of the modelling effort for Indy SAGE as it happens.
However. I’m back to comparing theory with actual facts on the ground. Given how badly London was hit, and how public transport kept going and people were moving around, I would have expected some level of herd immunity to develop in London. As an aside, authorities in Sweden had the same feeling about Stockholm. It looks like that was just not true in either of those cases.
Why? Is it because immunity wears off after a few months? Is it because, despite the surge in the spring, too few people got it? Are there other reasons? I have no idea, but I feel like it’s an important question.
Immunity is a complex story and not something that we can rely on yet, seemingly.
As I said in my first post, we can discuss the theoretical failings of PCR, the idea of herd immunity etc. But the truth does seem to be that this virus is still rampant, devastating many people’s lives and it remains very dangerous problem facing us.
And in the absence of a coherent strategy for dealing with the virus, it will just keep finding its way into areas that had been missed the first time round, and the ball keeps on rolling. The current situation is undoubtedly made worse by a government that refuses to act in the interests of its citizens and waits until it’s overwhelmed before deciding to act at all.
Timely piece of wisdom PP - compare theory vs facts on the ground. The virus is running rampant in places for sure. Maybe it seems pedantic to point to flaws, omissions and outrages in the information released and the incessant narrative. These problems don’t mean there is no virus, do they?
Yet I still disagree (with myself ). One of the key problems is that the (tightly controlled) narrative obstructs fundamental truths from being arrived at. The disease isn’t rampant in most countries whose politicians didn’t take control of medical thinking. Of the continents, only Africa has an overall cases gradient (like R number) higher than 1 (1.07).
One shouldn’t underrate the value of the issue of trust - when only one solution to the virus threat is acceptable to TPTB, it is to be expected that information released will be manipulative. A savvy salesman can walk off with someone’s savings without telling any actual lies. One of these key techniques is to pull out something subjective and new that appears to override the sound objective ‘knowns’ - long enough for the commitment to be made, after which it’s too late. Other techniques in evidence (covidence? ) include bamboozlement and distraction.
So…the narrative has long dropped the idea of the health system actually treating the dangerous illness which has turned the country upside down. As long as ‘cases’ is used and accepted to mean clinical infection (a lie, basically), and is used as the daily headline, the need for proper discussions is suppressed.
Imagine even if the number of cycles (Ct) were reported. Swathes of people told “You have the VIRUS!” on a Ct of 40 plus would be able to live normally, go to work etc. And the people who matter, who test positive with (say, for ‘argument’) Ct less than 30, who are likely to become ill or transmit the disease, would know it is they who have to take great care - they would know they are likely to spread the virus. There would likely be a huge benefit in limiting spread; planners could plan and research could develop on further limiting the spread.
Another key but abused issue is immunity. The number of cases means something but many of these positives in the number being shouted will have immunity from the very exposure that is making them positive.
In fact the issue of immunity is critical - it is what will see off the virus, or the population if not achieved, or somewhere in between. It needs to be studied! And quantified, and put into joined up policy. Instead, it has only been used as a propaganda concept, a selling point for the policies (the do-nothing policy, then vaccination).
How shocking is it that immunologists are not represented in the public ‘science’ which has been handed to people who always answer ‘exponential’ and give large estimates when they are really only thinking of ‘infinity’.
But to put flesh in these bones I think the siren needs to be shut off so discussions can take place. It’s good that we can do that here…what a good idea PP, to try to connect with the Independent SAGE group!
. The last clean weeks’ figures for Scotland’s deaths showed deaths were 24% fewer than the week before. Cases were up, and that dominated the headlines. I’ll admit tests were fewer (though this only became evident a few days ago). No figures today in the official place but verbal announcements about cases and deaths, not mentioning tests. When there were only 45 or so deaths after four days of non-reporting, that wasn’t announced.