RickBradford

27 minutes ago, Haveasay said:

Bangkok province needs to go into a seven day lockdown, similar to what Australian cities have done, with no in or out except through airport,

I think the lack of fresh food produce reaching Bangkok for 7 days would cause far worse problems than Covid, with its current total death toll in Thailand of 67 over the last year.

Perhaps I see mRNA vaccines as new technology because that is the way that CDC describes them:

"mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine to protect against infectious diseases. To trigger an immune response, many vaccines put a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies. Not mRNA vaccines. Instead, they teach our cells how to make a protein—or even just a piece of a protein—that triggers an immune response inside our bodies."

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html

3 minutes ago, partington said:

This article is not referring to approved and licensed vaccines but ones that are being investigated. It is rather vaguely written to be honest and not up to scratch. 

 

There are very many mRNA vaccines being "used" against cancer and other diseases that are at the same stage, that is under clinical investigation.

 

If you can come up with a licensed and approved one I'd be happy to admit I'm wrong!

Scientists have been testing adenovirus-based vaccines for decades, but it wasn’t until July of this year that the first one was licensed, when Johnson & Johnson got approval from European regulators for an Ebola vaccine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/health/astrazeneca-covid-vaccine.html

8 minutes ago, partington said:

As far as I know there  are no AstraZeneca type (adenovirus vector vaccines) that have been approved for human use, so I am not sure why you consider them "tried and true"?

"Currently, adenovirus-based vaccines are used against a wide variety of pathogens, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and Plasmodium falciparum."

https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-are-Adenovirus-Based-Vaccines.aspx

I suspect that anyone who regularly crosses international  borders is going to have to show a vaccination certificate, so deeply ingrained has the Covid panic become.

If vaccination becomes necessary, I'm going for the Astra Zeneca one, which is based on tried and true viral vector technology; the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not just new vaccines, but a new technology of vaccine known as messenger RNA (mRNA). This is why they are much more expensive and need much colder storage conditions.

Look, even the WHO admits that the PCR test is very far from perfect. In a guidance note issued in December, they wrote:

The design principle of RT-PCR means that for patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low. Conversely, when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain.

In other words, there is a significant risk of false positive results from the test, WHO admits.

https://www.who.int/news/item/14-12-2020-who-information-notice-for-ivd-users

Frankly, not a very good idea when the count of "cases" is used as an instant excuse to start locking everything down.

Plenty of perfectly healthy people will now be languishing in some State quarantine facility - in many countries - for no reason.

In fact, I will go further; it's a rotten idea to rely on PCR tests.

And note that the figures for Sundays tend to show a jump from earlier days in the week for reasons I don't know, but which probably aren't very complex.

5 hours ago, webfact said:

Taweesin Visanuyothin, CCSA spokesman, said Thailand’s 68th death from Covid-19 was a British man, 71, who suffered from diabetes, thyrotoxicosis and lung cancer.

So, it is rather ridiculous to badge it as a "Covid death", you would think.

The US's CDC has estimated that  94% of Covid-badged deaths had underlying medical conditions, with an average of 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-94percent-of-covid-19-deaths-had-underlying-medical-conditions/ar-BB18wrA7

Rather puts the pandemic in perspective .....

3 minutes ago, robblok said:

But mortality RATE has NOTHING to do with lockdown. (unless hospitals overflow)

 

So obviously you don't understand the difference.

 

The mortality rate is counted AFTER someone catches the disease. So it gives a percentage of people who die after infection. That is of course dependent on if someone is obese and how good the quality of healthcare is.

 

But if you put in more infections that actual number of people dying will be higher while the rate stays the same (until hospitals are flooded and can't care for its patients anymore).

 

A lockdown will only affect mortality rates if hospitals are overflooding something that is close to happening in the UK if they had not locked down you would have seen mortality rates go up because they could not care for everyone.

 

 

Nope, sorry.

They were talking about "deaths per million people" of a population, not the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is the proportion of infected people who die.

1 minute ago, robblok said:

It says that it could stem the spread it of Covid. Seems logical that death rate depends on other things. I guess you don't get the difference between catching the disease and dying from it. 

I understand that extremely well.

And The Lancet specifically states that full lockdowns did not affect mortality ratios, which was the question I was asking.

8 minutes ago, robblok said:

I would call them delusional. A lockdown is the only way to slow down (not prevent) the spread of covid. If no lockdown the UK would not be doing triage and far more would be denied medical help more would die. This widely accepted. 

Then perhaps you should contact the editors of The Lancet, perhaps the world's most prestigious medical journal. Because they ran a detailed statistical study of 50 countries, and concluded, inter alia:

Quote

 

Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.

 

According to their study, the biggest factor in mortality is obesity, then a country's GDP.

8 minutes ago, James105 said:

His modelling is improving though as he did predict that 150 million would die from bird flu in 2005, and it turned out that he was out by a bit as a mere 282 died from this.   Not really sure how he still has a job to be honest.

Because he can be relied on to do what the Government wants, which is to produce catastrophic predictions which gives the Government the excuse to take drastic actions, which they love.

It's not about facts and accuracy, it's about being on the 'right' side.

I see. Very interesting.

And what about the people who agree that Covid is serious, but believe that lockdowns do not prevent Covid mortality?

Are they also "Covid deniers" or is there another term for them?

Excuse me, what do you mean by a "Covid denier"?

9 minutes ago, KhaoYai said:

It is possible to quote different figures, extract different time scales in order to distort the figures but I think that most rational people will understand and accept the figures produced by the ONS.

I would argue that, given the very broad definition of a "Covid death" in the UK, the only figure which is reliable is the ONS's "all-cause mortality" figure.

As has been pointed out, Public Health England's definition of a Covid death as: "death in a person with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test and died within (equal to or less than) 28 days of the first positive specimen date" makes any reporting of "Covid deaths" statistical nonsense.

All-cause mortality is the way to go, and the UK will see a significant rise this year of around 10%, as has been pointed out before.

8 hours ago, robblok said:

But those deaths are directly covid related because of the strain it puts on the health system.

By that reasoning, someone who dies of a heart attack in hospital would also be "directly covid related" since they are served by the same strained health system.

12 hours ago, KhaoYai said:

If I and all those who believe in the seriousness of the Covid situation are wrong, what harm will we have done?

How about the harm of throwing 125 million people worldwide back into extreme poverty, according to the IMF and World Bank?

Note that the damage has been caused not by Covid itself, but the economic recession caused by the global response to Covid.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/10/21/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-global-extreme-poverty/

The effects of this economic shock will be felt for decades.

48 minutes ago, 2530Ubon said:

...  it could also mutate to become more deadly.

That would be very unusual for a virus, in historical terms.

Generally, they evolve to become less deadly over time, although perhaps more transmissible.

Full discussion at : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/will-coronavirus-evolve-be-less-deadly-180976288/

But, of course, nobody knows for sure.

2 hours ago, tinca tinca said:

SO WHAT documentation IS required??

Last I saw is:

1) Mor Chana app installed

2) Written reason to travel

3) Written approval from a local official of your travel plans

On top of that, you will be subject to temperature tests on the way out of the province.

15 hours ago, Sundown said:

Do you have the numbers?

There are very comprehensive data at https://www.mortality.org

Some countries, such as Spain, are going to see about a 10% rise in mortality, others, such as Australia are going to show reduced mortality this year, the light toll of Covid-badged deaths more than offset by lowered deaths from other causes.

What those "other causes" may be is speculation, but one intriguing possibility is seen in the almost complete vanishing of deaths from influenza, down 98% by some estimates. The WHO has said that flu has "almost vanished from the southern hemisphere."

WHO video at Has Covid killed off the flu? | Daily Mail Online

I've seen three explanations suggested, none of which is without its problems.

One, flu deaths have been wrongly attributed to Covid, which doesn't really explain the huge mortality spikes seen globally in April/May.

Two, the coronavirus has out-competed influenza, like gray squirrels out-compete red. But with only a small percentage of people in the world infected with Covid, I'm not sure how that works.

Three, (which appears to be the favored establishment narrative) is that lockdowns also prevented flu infections from spreading. This doesn't really square with the Australian situation, with no flu infections at all since July, at a time when Australians were relatively free to move around after the end of the first Covid wave.

So, flu has all but vanished for the moment, but it's not clear why.

44 minutes ago, Happyman567 said:

What about all the stray dogs that have Rabbis that try and bite me every morning when I walk

Oy vey!