Some thoughts

Via Instapundit, behold the poor sods; still traumatized by covid:  Meet the Americans STILL isolating 4 years into Covid pandemic... including NJ woman who's been in lockdown for 1,620 days While I do I feel a bit sorry for people (especially the elderly) who were terrified into thinking catching it was a death sentence, after 4 years they need to get over it. The people featured in the article definitely have other mental health issues, this line stood out:  Hill, who uses they/them pronouns' Yep, a well-adjusted individual here! It does seem that there are more and more people (and women in particular) who are too fragile to cope with everyday life. Social media has made people more willing to divulge personal issues that they would have kept to themselves in the past. I recently reconnected on FB with a woman I knew at school and she is constantly posting about her anxiety and other issues.  This post on Mental health and Leftism is also telling, and given women (esp...

Today's must-read article:  Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown 'Lockdowns proved a disaster for young people at every stage of their development. With all the attention on the elderly, the young were left to cope on their own. It was assumed they’d be resilient. Far from it.' Working in schools I've seen this firsthand, teenage girls especially seem to be very fragile (though how much is due to other factors such as the encouragement of victimhood and lack of resilience is hard to tell) What is even more depressing is polling out from Unherd today showing the majority still don't think it was a mistake, as further examined here:  Why doesn't Britain regret lockdown? Very depressing

Pretty much my position:  Vaccinating the elderly saved lives The evidence was clear from early on that only the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions were vulnerable so they it was worth jabbing them. The rest of us, less so and compulsory vaccination, and the rhetoric against those who didn't want the jab was totally unjustified,. Lots of charts and data, key takeaway: The evidence suggests that vaccinating the elderly saved lives. Unlike lockdowns and mask mandates – which had little discernible impact while imposing huge costs on society – elderly vaccination appears to have made a tangible difference. (There is no correlation between lockdowns and excess mortality across European countries or U.S. states.) Focussed protection culminating in voluntary vaccination of high-risk groups was the right strategy all along – just as the Great Barrington authors argued. Indeed. RTWT

 While at work today I can across this piece of Research on the DfE website:  The impact of COVID-19 on 2020 to 2021 assessment arrangements . This paragraph stood out: 'however good the remote provision, it did not measure up to face-to-face learning. Students missed the interactions with their teachers and the ability to ask for clarification about topics in real time. They also missed interactions with their peers, citing group work, debates and projects as features that could not be captured as well online – even when the lessons were live – as in the classroom.'  Indeed. My experience working in an online school was that while better than nothing it is not a good substitute for being in a school. The socialization role of schooling is of equal importance to the skills and knowledge acquired. It is becoming more and more apparent that the lockdowns had a hugely damaging effect on children, (who the data is clear were not at risk of covid), and were a massive overreact...

 ..hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the madness. It's truly depressing how many people are still cowering in fear and want to carry on with this forever. Today's Lotus Eaters podcast had a good segment on this: Anyway, Happy Freedom Day!

From this Telegraph story:  Fear over freedom: Here's what the doom-laden government graphs didn't show us The doom-mongering and public hysteria would be a lot lower if data were presented honestly. 

It's never going to end is it? Was too annoyed yesterday, this article sums up my thoughts pretty well:  Petrified government is wasting the vaccine dividend . Madness Updated 17/06: A good piece on Unherd-   We are hostages to Government fear The trouble is, we haven’t done nearly enough rational assessment of the harms and benefits of anti-Covid strategies. Invoking the idea of existential risk to push us all into complying with behavioural rules got the Government a free pass for policies that, in normal times, would have been unthinkable. Critics of specific measures were easily lumped in with conspiracy theorists who said the whole thing was a hoax, or “just the flu”. Suggesting that baton-charging sunbathers in parks was counter-productive provoked cries of “How many people do you want to die!?”

'We will not eradicate COVID-19 from the UK. There will not be a time when we can say that there will never be another case of COVID-19 in this country.  Secondly, variants will keep on coming. There will be new variants every year. If the Government’s position is that we cannot open up until there are no new variants elsewhere in the world, we will never be able to travel abroad ever again. The third: sadly people will die from COVID here in the UK in the future, as 10,000 to 20,000 people do every year from flu.' ( source ) I'm shocked, shocked, to find myself agreeing with Mrs. May, makes me wonder how she'd have dealt with the pandemic

 I can't find anything to disagree with in this article:  The Prime Minister must not abandon Freedom Day!   The Lotus Eaters made a similar point in this video the other day-   Looking at the (updated) data they linked to, we can see in the last 7 days the following: People tested positive- 45, 895 Virus tests conducted- 6,088,413. That works out as only 0.75% of those tested were positive! Furthermore: Patients admitted to hospital- 975. That's only 2.12% of positive cases, and 0.016% of those tested. Finally, we see that there were only 61 deaths. (within 28 days of a test, so the previous concerns for how many died from/died with apply). It's clear to me that we need to open up fully and get on with our lives, from this data there is no justification for further delay.

  Well, he certainly didn't pull his punches ! I've long been an admirer of Cummings insights into the problems in government, particularly with the dysfunctionality of the civil service (such as his Hollow   Men  posts) and his comments on this topic today show nothing much has changed. It also shows the flaw in the leftist's arguments that their side would have done better, as they would still have to deal with these issues.  I also find it frustrating how he still seems to be pushing the line that lockdowns were essential, being such a data-driven guy he can't be unaware of the problems with the modeling, and the actual death rates (that I've posted about ) among the under 60s and patients with no prior conditions. He is right that shutting the border earlier and screening arrivals would have been a good idea, and I suspect his comments on Hancock are on the mark.  For me, the real tragedy with Cummings is that while he is good at diagnosing problems he seems...

I'm currently working my way through an anthology collection I picked up cheap somewhere called  The Mammoth Book of the End of the World . This evening I got to a story called Pallbearer by Robert Reed , which really struck a nerve. The story gradually reveals that a deadly virus emerged in China, in response to which the world rapidly develops and deploys a new vaccine. Canada, Europe, and Japan quickly innoculate the majority of their populations, but the USA falls behind due to the number of poor, isolated communities and resistance by religious groups.  The big twist is that the vaccine turns out to be slowly lethal, leading to mass death and civilizational collapse. The narrator was a young boy at the time and survived due to his religious mother's refusal to get vaccinated. In the end, it is revealed that the virus and vaccine were deliberately engineered and release to 'weed' the human race to prevent environmental collapse, and a second 'weeding' is bei...

I had my first dose of the (Oxford-Astrazeneca) vaccine on Monday at 7:15pm. The set up at the local civic centre was very efficient, I was in and out in less than 15 minutes. I felt fine when I got home, however, I woke up in the middle of the night shivering uncontrollably. The rest of the night alternated between feeling freezing cold and boiling hot. I ended up taking the day off work (which being an agency worker meant I didn't get paid), sleeping through most of it. Weirdly I found taking paracetamol warmed me up and when they wore off the shivers returned. Luckily today I felt fine, although my injected arm still feels a bit stiff.  This experience seems to tally with family members and neighbours, I'd say roughly half felt no effects while those who had effects similar to mine had them for up to two days. I had heard that people who've had covid previously had worse side effects, which makes me wonder if I didn't actually have it while in Taiwan. Before it all b...

From this Spectator column:  The ‘Covid deaths’ that are not caused by Covid This shows that there were two clear spikes in deaths around April 2020 and February 2021. However, as the article says when defining what is a 'Covid death': Of the 260 people whose death certificates mentioned Covid-19 in the week up to 23 April, only 176 (67.7 per cent) mentioned the disease as an underlying cause. In other words, in a third of ‘Covid deaths’, the real cause was something else; Covid was at most a contributory factor.  My own analysis would suggest that this was the case for as many as 95% of deaths.  BTW, I had my vaccination letter come today, as they've reached my age bracket.

 As we are now officially no longer in a pandemic, and the increases each month are getting so small, this will be the final post in this series. I though may do a final addendum once NHS England stops publishing data. Previous posts in the series can be found here: 1 2 3 4 5 . So for one last time,  here is this month's update of NHS England's weekly covid stats and update my charts. As before, all raw data can be found here , using data up to April 28th. To start, here is the breakdown of all deaths by age and pre-existing condition: Following the usual format, here is my updated monthly summary data. Top left is total deaths with or without a pre-existing condition. The bottom left is broken down into age, I have simplified it into under or over 60. To the right in orange are percentage totals. Next, here is my graph showing total deaths by a pre-existing condition. Again the curve seems to have plateaued. And here is the breakdown by over and under the age of 60: Movin...

 A fascinating interview with Swedish Epidemologist Johan Giesecke-  Did Sweden get Covid wrong? . Key points he makes:  Look at the good things with the Swedish system…. One is the schools: we are not destroying the future for classes of children. Another is that Sweden kept to its international agreements — for example in the EU you are not supposed to close your borders with other countries, but that has happened in several countries in Europe. We have made it possible for small businesses like cafes or bicycle shops to survive the pandemic. We have kept democracy. We have trusted people. I think there are a number of benefits from not having a severe lockdown and more of them will come as we do research on this in the future.” RTWT

I forgot to do this last week, so here are this month's update of NHS England's weekly covid stats and update my charts. As before, all raw data can be found  here , using data up to March 25th. Following the usual format, first here is here is my updated monthly summary data. Top left is total deaths with or without a pre-existing condition. The bottom left is broken down into age, I have simplified it into under or over 60. To the right in orange are percentage totals. Next, here is my graph showing total deaths by a pre-existing condition The graph appears to be leveling off, hopefully, the peak will appear next month.  And here is the graph showing the percentage of deaths by age group and gender. We still see more male deaths in every age group. New for this month, I spotted an ethnic breakdown in the weekly spreadsheets. I simplified it down to 4 groups, white, mixed, BAME, and unknown/unstated. Here is the data: Note that the %  pretty closely mirrors the ethnic de...

As we near the end of the month, it's time to revisit NHS England's weekly covid stats and update my charts. As before, all raw data can be found here . Following the usual format, first here is my % calculations for the totals to date: And here is my updated monthly summary data. Top left is total deaths with or without a pre-existing condition. The bottom left is broken down into age, I have simplified it into under or over 60. To the right in orange are percentage totals. Next, here is my graph showing total deaths by a pre-existing condition.  And here is the graph showing the percentage of deaths by age group. This pie chart shows all deaths by age,  And finally, here is the to date total deaths by gender. The trends are consistent with those seen in the previous posts  in this series.

 As it's nearly the end of the month, here are the updated Covid-19 deaths by age and pre-existing condition table from NHS England with my percentage calculations.  And here is my monthly table with data to the end of Jan: I have been busy today writing an essay so I haven't had time to crunch more numbers (I was going to look for UK-wide figures) but it is clear there is no major change to the trend, so this will be the last update on the subject until the end of February. 

 After my previous speculative post, let's look ahead at an actual catastrophe going on right now, and the long term implications of current events. First off, it is clear that lockdowns have disproportionately hit some sectors harder than others, and large firms have had a better time than small, individual, and family-owned ones (as this  Babylon Bee article satirically points out). I would therefore expect to see even more consolidation as small firms fail to reopen and larger firms either merge or are taken over. Also longer term I would expect there to be less start-up and business creation, with individuals becoming more risk-averse and there being fewer opportunities to attract investment, lower consumer confidence, and higher barriers to raising capital. It would still be possible to have sole trader/self-employed trade like plumbing or decorating, and selling online via platforms like eBay will still be viable, but overall I expect a future where large PLC's and multi...

 Last week I posted my analysis of covid death stats for England. O was going to wait for the end of the month to do an update, but given the reporting this week thought why not. First up, here's the updated table with my % calculations ( source ) Instead of reposting the updated charts from last week, instead, hers's a new chart for this week: Also this week I had a look at the deaths by gender table (not the numbers don't add up to the totals by 2 as I removed 2 deaths which were in unknown and indeterminate columns): Finally, here's a chart comparing deaths by age for males and females: