4 minutes ago, Purdey said:

If I remember correctly, the Spanish Flu killed 50 million and no one punished the Spanish. No consequences at all.

 

 

 

United States: A widely accepted theory is that the Spanish flu originated in the United States, specifically in Haskell County, Kansas. The first known cases were reported in early 1918 at a military base, Fort Riley, where soldiers became ill. These soldiers were then deployed to Spain, potentially spreading the virus.

The Kansas Flu Pandemic....  😝

 

Sometimes, popular history isn't kind to the actual, established facts....

 

Let's for once try to stay on topic ...   Covid-19  .......    not the war, not US ....   COVID-19 

 

43 minutes ago, steven100 said:

well all the conspiracy believers can think what they like,  but the fact remains Covid-19 killed millions around the globe, so it wasn't the flu or a severe cold as some conspiracies would like to believe.

 

Covid-19 is real.

It does kill people.

 

anyone who thinks otherwise is very naive or a dreamer.   

Agreed but the OVER reaction world wide was astoundingly stupid when you consider that the people most at risk of severe reaction to Covid are known and WERE known to be a small group.

They made up most of the millions.

Most healthy people who got Covid (myself included) just recovered and carried on.

 

When you look at that, you can (almost) start to believe some of the conspiracies!

 

The current repercussions of lockdowns etc are more severe  than what letting nature take its course would have been.

 

I await the flames and mock horror at my lack of concern for human life!

On 8/11/2024 at 6:46 AM, steven100 said:

 

I decided to raise this topic following another gold shop robbery due to the loss of work from Covid-19.

 

Covid-19 destroyed millions of ordinary people's lives,  through loss of their job,  market depreciation on investments,  bank foreclosures,  loss of business,  car repossession,  house loan foreclosure,  life savings lost,  and many other tragic effects.

 

We see on the news where many people have resorted to crime following their loss of income because of Covid-19.

A few weeks ago I was reading where a well dressed chap almost in tears in the US was talking on the news after being arrested and saying ' I've lost everything because of Covid ' 

Thousands if not millions of folks lost their houses because they could not pay the mortgage.   

Thousands has their transport taken back or repossessed by finance companies.

and the list goes on ....

 

Now,  the point I really want to make and get across is what consequence's or punitive measures or punishment has been placed on

China since Covid-19 first broke out from Wuhan China back in 2019   ??

What repercussions have been forced onto China as a result of their horrendous lack of safety and virus containment that caused Covid-19    ??

Have they been punished    ??

Should someone be punished   ??

or should we all forget and just move on ....

 

 

It's an interesting subject  ... what's your opinion   ?

 

 

 

Excellent post Steven. Nice to see someone had the courage to post on such a subject. This has to be the topic of the year.

1 minute ago, steven100 said:

Let's for once try to stay on topic ...   Covid-19  .......    not the war, not US ....   COVID-19 

 

You started this. And you didn't start a thread just about Covid 19. You asked: "What repercussions have been forced onto China as a result of their horrendous lack of safety and virus containment that caused Covid-19    ??"

 

That made it about politics and not just Covid 19.

 

A pair of posts with unsourced and unsubstantiated claims have been removed, along with several widely off-topic posts.

 

 

1 hour ago, Will B Good said:

 

 

United States: A widely accepted theory is that the Spanish flu originated in the United States, specifically in Haskell County, Kansas. The first known cases were reported in early 1918 at a military base, Fort Riley, where soldiers became ill. These soldiers were then deployed to Spain, potentially spreading the virus.

OMG! Shock! Horror!

No compensation there either, I suspect.

1 hour ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

 

And of course, contrary to the historic common name given to that pandemic, it wasn't actually the "Spanish" one in terms of its origins.

 

"The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus.

 

The earliest documented case was March 1918 in the state of Kansas in the United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April.

...

The pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when wartime censors in the belligerent countries suppressed bad news to maintain morale, but newspapers freely reported the outbreak in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as the epicenter and leading to the "Spanish flu" misnomer.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

 

 

 

Again... shock,,,horror! No compensation there, but thanks for the info.

43 minutes ago, Purdey said:

OMG! Shock! Horror!

No compensation there either, I suspect.

?

9 hours ago, VBF said:

Agreed but the OVER reaction world wide was astoundingly stupid when you consider that the people most at risk of severe reaction to Covid are known and WERE known to be a small group.

They made up most of the millions.

Most healthy people who got Covid (myself included) just recovered and carried on.

 

When you look at that, you can (almost) start to believe some of the conspiracies!

 

The current repercussions of lockdowns etc are more severe  than what letting nature take its course would have been.

 

I await the flames and mock horror at my lack of concern for human life!

 

You have no idea of what the damage is or was. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that manifests as an inflammatory disease. Its initial symptoms can pass with little perceived impact, but its underlying  effect is still not fully identified. It is known to be responsible for long covid which is an auto immune related condition. However, what is still being studied is the impact that covid has for the long term cardio vascular and neurological impact. Smokers do not have heart attack and strokes over night. People who worked  in chemical plants and with asbestos did not become ill until decades later.   It takes years for the genetic impact of a disease to manifest itself as the damaged cells can no longer be managed by the human body. We see this with shingles, which is related to a previous infection of chicken pox. It is also seen with other viruses, like polio.  We most likely will not have the full impact of Covid infections for at least another 10-20 years.

 

Covid is a nasty virus and the  damage it does is deep and impacts every critical organ in the human body. Do not under estimate its impact.

On 8/11/2024 at 2:34 AM, impulse said:

 

Many fell on hard times as a result of the Orwellian reaction to Covid.

 

 

This. Whatever role China played in the Covid-19 saga, once the virus emerged in our borders it was up to OUR politicians how we respond.

 

And Boris Johnson and his government were the first European government to introduce draconian lockdowns, based on the flawed mathematical guesswork of one Neil Ferguson.

 

According to Lord Sumption, a retired Supreme Court Judge, the infamous "Report 9" by Neil Ferguson was the cause of  "one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times". As you may recall this report by Ferguson dealt not only with the UK but also the US, and Neil Ferguson and his fellow academic geniuses got it spectacularly wrong but nevertheless both the UK and US adopted it as gospel. This report changed UK government policy, causing ever harder, and longer, lockdowns, based on the flawed predictions of Neil Ferguson and other academics from the UK.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)

 

And it is not as if Covid-19 was Ferguson's first blunder, there was a long history of Ferguson making Cassandra like hysteric predictions that did not come to pass. He had a history of being wrong long before Covid 19. As we later found out.

 

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal-is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/

 

Britain's draconian lockdowns, caused by Ferguson's false predictions, were copied all over the world, by almost all governments. Thereby causing trillions of dollars of economic damage and bringing people to economic ruin.

 

Ferguson had to resign in shame and disgrace from the government advisory body, but not because of his incompetent work, but because he ignored his own lockdown advice and went about banging some broad during a lockdown.

 

It is an absolute scandal, that the incompetent Boris Johnson government and this complete failure of an academic, Neil Ferguson, were never brought to justice to account for all the damage they caused all over the world with their criminal recklessness and incompetence.

A post implying unsourced and unsubstantiated claims re the origins of the COVID virus has been removed, along with an ensuing reply.

 

8 hours ago, Cameroni said:

According to Lord Sumption, a retired Supreme Court Judge, the infamous "Report 9" by Neil Ferguson was the cause of  "one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times". As you may recall this report by Ferguson dealt not only with the UK but also the US, and Neil Ferguson and his fellow academic geniuses got it spectacularly wrong

 

I realize Neil Ferguson is a favorite whipping boy of the anti COVID lockdown folks in the UK.... But did he get it "spectacularly wrong" as claimed above? History and the facts would say NO.

 

Specifically, as the above-cited Wikipedia report recounts:

 

"He said that the new coronavirus could affect up to 60% of the UK's population, in the worst-case scenario,^[53] and "suggest(ed) that the impact of the unfolding epidemic may be comparable to the major influenza pandemics of the twentieth century."^{[45][54][55]"}

 

^{As it turned out, COVID in fact became one of the world's worst, deadliest pandemics of the past 100 years dating back to the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920.}

 

^{Then further from Wikipedia on Ferguson:}

 

"His team's publication in mid-March [2020] of the projections that the UK could face hundreds of thousands of deaths [emphasis added] from COVID-19 without strict social distancing measures, gained widespread media attention.^[56]"

 

^{And as the BBC later reported looking back:}

 

^"Prof Ferguson's modelling of the virus's transmission suggested 250,000 people [emphasis added] could die without drastic action.

 

This led Prime Minister Boris Johnson to announce on 23 March that he was imposing widespread curbs on daily life aimed at stopping the spread of the virus."

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52553229

 

Another report at the time in the journal Nature said Ferguson's estimate of COVID deaths if NOTHING were done reached 500,000.

 

"updated data in the Imperial team’s model¹ indicated that the United Kingdom’s health service would soon be overwhelmed with severe cases of COVID-19, and might face more than 500,000 deaths if the government took no action..." -- which, of course, was a scenario that did NOT occur as the UK government did act at the time.

 

https://archive.ph/t8zOh#selection-1175.64-1181.182

 

^{And just to note, those Ferguson forecasts were made in spring 2020 BEFORE any COVID vaccines had been created or deployed.}

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Ferguson_(epidemiologist)#COVID-19_–_2020

 

So where did the UK end up in terms of COVID deaths even AFTER the country finally, after some delays due to political dithering, made a series of on-again, off-again lockdowns? And after the impact of mass deployment of COVID vaccines that began in late 2020?

 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

 

And how much worse would COVID deaths have been in the UK in the absence of COVID vaccines, which didn't exist at the time Ferguson made his original forecast? Add several hundred thousand more deaths on top of those the actually occurred.

 

"According to World Health Organization data, 400,000 lives in England are estimated to have been saved up to March 2023 due to the COVID-19 vaccine programme."

 

https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2024/04/16/whos-eligible-for-the-2024-covid-19-vaccine-or-spring-booster/

 

All of the above pretty much shows that Ferguson was certainly in the right realm with his early 2020 forecast about what could have occurred in the absence of actions.

 

And as the cited Wikipedia entry above further notes:

 

"The COVID-19 computer model which Ferguson authored (see CovidSim) was initially criticised as "unreliable" and "a buggy mess,"^[61][62] but subsequent efforts to reproduce the results were successful.^[63]"

 

^{Also, FWIW, the above cited assessment by Lord Sumption mainly faults the UK government for not adequately considering the follow-on economic and other impacts of the lockdowns. But he doesn't seem to say much at all about how close the COVID death numbers forecast by Ferguson ended up being to what actually occurred in the UK, after including the impacts of lives saved by the COVID vaccines that weren't and couldn't have been part of Ferguson's early 2020 forecast.}

 

https://www.thetimes.com/article/7bd50604-2559-11ed-a44e-83ef2a2167ff

 

There also have been other, differing opinion assessments of the effects of the COVID lockdowns in various countries at least in terms of limiting infections, such as from the UK Royal Society of top scientists:

 

Lockdowns and face masks ‘unequivocally’ cut spread of Covid, report finds

 

Royal Society review looks at non-pharmaceutical interventions when applied in packages of several measures

 

Measures taken during the Covid pandemic such as social distancing and wearing face masks “unequivocally” reduced the spread of infections, a report has found.

 

Experts looked at the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – not drugs or vaccines – when applied in packages that combine a number of measures that complement one another.

 

The Royal Society report, called Covid-19: examining the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions, reviewed the evidence gathered during the pandemic for six groups of NPIs and their effectiveness in reducing transmission.

 

(more)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/24/lockdowns-face-masks-unequivocally-cut-spread-covid-study-finds

 

And from the Royal Society report itself, which looked at the experiences of various countries they studied, on COVID lockdowns:

 

"Social distancing and ‘lockdowns’
Most effective of all the NPIs were the social
distancing measures. Stay-at-home orders,
physical distancing, and restrictions on
gathering size were repeatedly found to be
associated with significant reduction in SARS-
CoV-2 transmission, with more stringent
measures having greater effects.

...

Social distancing measures aimed specifically at
protecting the elderly, such as restrictions on
visitors and ‘cohorting’ staff with residents
in care homes (separating residents into
groups, each cared for by a specific group
of staff), were frequently associated with
reduced transmission and reduced outbreaks
within care homes.

...

The effective application of NPIs ‘buys time’ to allow the
development, evaluation and manufacturing of
such therapies and vaccines at scale. So there
is every reason to think that the application of
combinations of NPIs will be important in future
pandemics, particularly at early stages with
novel pathogens when there are knowledge
gaps and when therapeutics and vaccines are
not yet available."

 

https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/impact-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-on-covid-19-transmission/covid-19-examining-the-effectiveness-of-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-executive-summary.pdf

 

15 minutes ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

Lockdowns and face masks ‘unequivocally’ cut spread of Covid, report finds

 

absolutely correct .....  

3 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

 

I realize Neil Ferguson is a favorite whipping boy of the anti COVID lockdown folks in the UK.... But did he get it "spectacularly wrong" as claimed above? History and the facts would say NO.

 

 

It is quite shocking and unbelievable that some people even now are claiming Ferguson's modelling was accurate. I find that both amusing and terrifying. The UK's own Covid-19 inquiry, constituted by none other than Boris Johnson, has been widely criticised for determining the result before the inquiry had even finished its work. Forme Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption went so far as to call it a farce.

 

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/covid-19-inquiry-farce-jonathan-sumption-7vgtxp037

 

Not just Lord Sumption, but also the director of the University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Carl Heneghan, has criticised the inquiry, for "for refusing to engage in the core issues of the pandemic and "silencing science"". Why did Heneghan say this? Because the inquiry refused to investigate " the accuracy and use of epidemiological modelling in decision making". In other words the very reason why politicians in the UK adopted draconian lockdown measures, the various papers Neil Ferguson provided to government, were not evaluated in any way.

 

As a result Michael Simmons in the Spectator wrote "that the Inquiry was asking the wrong questions and had learned nothing about the problems of the use of modelling which he thought had led to inaccuracies in decision making." Simmons  says that the models failed to consider the effects of behaviour change, citing historic work by Neil Ferguson, and evidence given Ben Warner, the data scientist.

 

Carl Heneghan said that rather than assessing whether lockdowns were an effective policy the inquiry assumed that the correct policy was to impose more severe lockdown restrictions earlier.

 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-needed-a-covid-inquiry-but-this-isnt-it/

 

Anyway, so much for the UK government's post pandemic inquiry which is failing to look at the evidence of whether modelling was accurate. Let's see. shall we?

 

"Epidemiological models will always have monstrous error margins: there are too many variables, as we knew long before Covid. The botched reactions to BSE and foot-and-mouth were both driven by overly pessimistic models. Professor Neil Ferguson, who led Imperial’s Covid work, said that ‘up to 200 million people could be killed’ by bird flu. The government started stockpiling antivirals at a substantial cost after being told that the ‘best-case’ scenario would involve 3,100 deaths in the UK. The actual death toll across the world was 457. Was the Covid modelling any more accurate? If not, why not?"

 

So we already knew way before Covid-19 that the mathematical modelling work of Professor Ferguson was wildly inaccurate. Was Ferguson's Covid-19 modelling accurate?

 

Ferguson was called to account and gave evidence. 

 

"The KC wanted to know if modelling had factored in how different population groups were affected by pandemic measures. How effective would stay at home orders be among different ethnic groups, for example. ‘None of the models looked at the indirect consequences of interventions’, came the reply."

 

Interestingly Ferguson predicted that Sweden would have 85000 deaths. Despite refusing to lockdown in the same way as the UK Sweden had less than a third of that.

 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-inquiry-asked-the-wrong-questions-of-neil-ferguson/

 

Did Neil Ferguson's models take into account that the population would make behaviour changes of their own accord? No, even though Ferguson himself was aware of this issue with his modelling in 2006:

 

" It was hardly considered that Brits might regulate themselves in such a way that a legally enforced lockdown – a lockdown that is still chasing people through the courts – might not have been needed. There are no such ‘validated’ models to do that, said Ferguson. Indeed he himself pointed this problem out in an article in Nature in 2006.

 

We do not assume any spontaneous change in the behaviour of uninfected individuals as the pandemic progresses but note that behavioural changes that increased social distance together with some school and workplace closure occurred in past pandemics and might be likely to occur in a future pandemic even if not part of official policy.

 

So nearly 15 years before Covid struck Ferguson knew how crucial self-governed behaviour change might be and how unprepared modelling was to take account of it."

 

‘Was that [first] lockdown necessary?’ ‘This is not a question we can definitively answer, the professor replied. Would voluntary measures have been enough? ‘We’ll never know.’

 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-inquiry-asked-the-wrong-questions-of-neil-ferguson/

 

But more importantly, was the modelling done by Ferguson anywhere near correct? There are actually several scientific studies that have been menioned in UK parliament which show how Ferguson's modelling was deeply flawed:

 

"That work is now being challenged. Because of time, I will quote only a small selection. In a paper entitled, “The effect of interventions on COVID-19”, 13 Swedish academics—Ferguson ain’t popular in Sweden, I can tell Members that much—said that the conclusions of the Imperial study were not justified and went beyond the data. Regensburg and Leibniz university academics directly refuted Imperial College in a paper entitled “The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe”, which said that the authors of the Imperial study

“allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”

 

Former chief epidemiologist Johan Giesecke said Ferguson’s model was “almost hysterical”. In the House of Lords, Viscount Ridley talked of a huge discrepancy and flaws in the model and the modelling. John Ioannidis from Stanford University said that the “assumptions and estimates” seemed “substantially inflated”.

 

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2022-01-18/debates/AB251DCA-8088-485C-BF49-3999C4EE9AC5/Covid-19ForecastingAndModelling

 

So what about the countries that ignored Feguson's modelling or saw it as flawed and did not implement draconian lockdowns?

 

".. numerous studies have shown Sweden’s excess death rate to be among the lowest in Europe. Figures by the World Health Organisation, for example, show that in 2020 and 2021, the country had an average excess death rate of 56 per 100,000 — compared to 109 in the UK, 111 in Spain, 116 in Germany and 133 in Italy."

 

https://unherd.com/newsroom/norways-top-epidemiologist-sweden-handled-covid-well/

 

Regarding the effectiveness of masks:

 

"It is even harder to pin down the evidence for compulsory wearing of face masks in public. At the beginning of the pandemic, most experts seemed to agree that masks were a waste of time. Yet within a year, mask-wearing had become compulsory. What happened to change policy? 

The most important new study was from Copenhagen University Hospital, and it seemed to support the original policy of discouraging masks, showing no significant effect for mask-wearers. The government’s own ‘evidence summary’ for the use of face coverings in schools found a difference in Covid absences of just 0.6 per cent between schools where masks had been worn and those where they had not, which the authors of the report had to admit was statistically insignificant. The abandonment of scientific debate and the failure to conduct new studies left the field wide open for radical views to influence government policy."

 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-needed-a-covid-inquiry-but-this-isnt-it/

And yet 230,000+ UK folks directly died from COVID during the pandemic, according to the UK government, and that was AFTER the lockdowns occurred and vaccines were widely deployed....

 

Which makes Ferguson's original prediction of hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths in the UK if NO action was taken pretty much in the ballpark -- all the political bloviating aside.

 

All the posted comments above talk about all kinds of things, EXCEPT how many UK people in fact did from COVID in the UK, which seems to be a topic the anti-lockdown, Ferguson-focused folks attempt to avoid.

 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

 

PS - You really don't want to be quoting Stanford's John Ioannidis, a popular anti-lockdown academic, on this subject, considering that he forecast early in the pandemic in 2020 that the U.S. might have 10,000 COVID deaths... and the U.S. officially is now at about 1.2 million and rising.

 

"Despite warning about the hazards of forecasting with incomplete data, Ioannidis ventured a prediction of his own. Based on mortality figures from the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak, he wrote that the virus might claim only 10,000 lives in the United States. (Later he would seek to portray this figure as his “lower bound” estimate.)

...

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, recalled his bafflement at Ioannidis’s essay and said it was already clear that strict social distancing measures were necessary to avoid overflowing hospitals.

 

“We had enough evidence to see that uncontrolled spread was very dangerous,” Lipsitch said. “The idea that we should just sort of sit by and gather data calmly struck me as incredibly naive.”

 

https://archive.ph/QscVJ#selection-1653.0-1653.341

 

Talk about REALLY getting one's predictions wrong!

 

15 hours ago, Patong2021 said:

 

You have no idea of what the damage is or was. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that manifests as an inflammatory disease. Its initial symptoms can pass with little perceived impact, but its underlying  effect is still not fully identified. It is known to be responsible for long covid which is an auto immune related condition. However, what is still being studied is the impact that covid has for the long term cardio vascular and neurological impact. Smokers do not have heart attack and strokes over night. People who worked  in chemical plants and with asbestos did not become ill until decades later.   It takes years for the genetic impact of a disease to manifest itself as the damaged cells can no longer be managed by the human body. We see this with shingles, which is related to a previous infection of chicken pox. It is also seen with other viruses, like polio.  We most likely will not have the full impact of Covid infections for at least another 10-20 years.

 

Covid is a nasty virus and the  damage it does is deep and impacts every critical organ in the human body. Do not under estimate its impact.

But still to impose restrictions with such long-lasting consequences on the whole world by all the politicians involved was, IMO, basically an over-reaction.

Accepting that you're correct, it STILL  would have been better to have let the world carry on with the consequent increased death rate.

 

I do not have figures, but I still maintain that for every person who caught Covid, the majority survived unscathed. 

Just a "straw poll", I personally know about 20 people (including myself) who have had Covid since 2020.

Of those, only 1 has died and she was 82 and in poor health. All the others are fit and well.

 

I respectfully refer you to Charles Darwin.

6 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

and "suggest(ed) that the impact of the unfolding epidemic may be comparable to the major influenza pandemics of the twentieth century."^{[45][54][55]"}

 

^{As it turned out, COVID in fact became one of the world's worst, deadliest pandemics of the past 100 years dating back to the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920.}

 

Just to refute John's points one by one, in fact the Influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 has death figures in the 17 million to 100 million range. The total death toll from Covid 19 is around 7 million, and those figures include millions of old people who happened to get Covid, then died and were caught in the statistics as "deaths from covid".

 

So actually, we have had pandemics before that were FAR, FAR worse than the Covid pandemic, and there were no crippling lockdowns imposed and yet humanity survived. This fact of course supports the conclusion that the lockdowns were excessive and unnecessary.

 

6 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

Another report at the time in the journal Nature said Ferguson's estimate of COVID deaths if NOTHING were done reached 500,000.

 

Yes, first Ferguson predicted 250,000 deaths, then he conceded his original model was flawed and instead doubled the prediction to 500,000 deaths.

 

6 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

So where did the UK end up in terms of COVID deaths

 

The actual figure of 232,000 deaths of course includes a substantial number of old people who contracted Covid-19, subsequently died and were automatically counted as "deaths from covid". 

6 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

"According to World Health Organization data, 400,000 lives in England are estimated to have been saved up to March 2023 due to the COVID-19 vaccine programme."

 

Some more mathematical modelling. On what basis and what data was the figure calculated? If we have learnt one thing from the pandemic it is that the supposed leading insttutions, like Imperial College, get things spectacularly wrong.

6 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

"The COVID-19 computer model which Ferguson authored (see CovidSim) was initially criticised as "unreliable" and "a buggy mess,"^[61][62] but subsequent efforts to reproduce the results were successful.

 

You need to read and actually understand what you are quoting. The Nature article where this quote says "efforts to reproduce results  were successful" refers not to Fergusons death predictions, but rather to the technical software code that was used in the model, ie not the data that was fed to the model, or the data it produced. A bunch of coders examined the code because reports of bugs had been made and found that the code worked fine. This in no way can be understood as a vindication of Ferguson's death figures.

 

6 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

Measures taken during the Covid pandemic such as social distancing and wearing face masks “unequivocally” reduced the spread of infections, a report has found.

Not in Sweden, were neither enforced social distancing nor enforced mask wearing was used the way it was in the UK, and yet Sweden's excess death figures were far better than in countries which used hardcore enforced social distancing and enforced mask wearing, like Italy, Spain or UK.

 

So how can one possibly argue that enforced lockdowns and face masks had any significant effect? Sweden proves the exact opposite.

 

 

1 hour ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

And yet 230,000+ UK folks directly died from COVID during the pandemic, according to the UK government, and that was AFTER the lockdowns occurred and vaccines were widely deployed....

 

Very doubtful. No proper autopsies to determine the actual cause of death was done in the case of  almos all very old peole who contracted Covid and subsequently died. They were automatically counted as "death by Covid". Most likely the true death toll from Covid-19 in the UK is far lower.

 

1 hour ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

All the posted comments above talk about all kinds of things, EXCEPT how many UK people in fact did from COVID in the UK, which seems to be a topic the anti-lockdown, Ferguson-focused folks attempt to avoid.

 

Not avoiding it at all. Let's talk about it.

 

You can see here the whole mess the UK government made with the death figures from Covid. The government itself recognised that it made an error in that  they at the beginning counted deaths "with" covid in the actual death figures, ie where someone died within 28 days of contracting Covid they were automatically counted as having died due to Covid. However, the government saw the folly of this approach and later changed that approach, saying now you should only count a Covid death where it says on the death registration certificate "Covid 19". Even then there was no requirement for an autopsy to really determine that Covid 19 was the cause of death, a doctor putting Covid 19 on the death certificate sufficed to include that death in the Covid 19 death tally.

 

You can read that from the horse's mouth, ie the UK gov, here:

 

https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2023/01/27/changes-to-the-way-we-report-on-covid-19-deaths/

 

If proper autopsies had been done in each case, it is virtually 100% certain that the death from Covid 19 figures in the UK would be substantially lower, alas, the expense and risk at the time ensured it was not done.

5 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

 

Very doubtful. No proper autopsies to determine the actual cause of death was done in the case of  almos all very old peole who contracted Covid and subsequently died. They were automatically counted as "death by Covid". Most likely the true death toll from Covid-19 in the UK is far lower.

 

 

Not avoiding it at all. Let's talk about it.

 

You can see here the whole mess the UK government made with the death figures from Covid. The government itself recognised that it made an error in that  they at the beginning counted deaths "with" covid in the actual death figures, ie where someone died within 28 days of contracting Covid they were automatically counted as having died due to Covid. However, the government saw the folly of this approach and later changed that approach, saying now you should only count a Covid death where it says on the death registration certificate "Covid 19". Even then there was no requirement for an autopsy to really determine that Covid 19 was the cause of death, a doctor putting Covid 19 on the death certificate sufficed to include that death in the Covid 19 death tally.

 

You can read that from the horse's mouth, ie the UK gov, here:

 

https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2023/01/27/changes-to-the-way-we-report-on-covid-19-deaths/

 

If proper autopsies had been done in each case, it is virtually 100% certain that the death from Covid 19 figures in the UK would be substantially lower, alas, the expense and risk at the time ensured it was not done.

 

 

 

Why not just consider excess deaths as a good indicator?......No one is going to sanction 250,000 autopsies..

29 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

The actual figure of 232,000 deaths of course includes a substantial number of old people who contracted Covid-19, subsequently died and were automatically counted as "deaths from covid". 

 

We're just replaying arguments that have been raised and countered here many times before:

No, death totals from COVID-19 in England have not been overstated

...

"So, if a person did have COVID-19 but there was no reason to think that was at least part of the reason they died, the doctor or coroner would not write it on the death certificate. In other words, if COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, it is always part of the cause of death, either on its own or in combination with other health conditions," he [the ONS spokesman] said.

...

"Claims that COVID-19 deaths are lower than reported have been common throughout the pandemic from critics who argue the virus is not as serious as we are being led to believe. In fact, however, researchers have found evidence that overall deaths from COVID-19 have been undercounted, not overcounted, since the start of the pandemic."

 

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/24/youtube-videos/no-death-totals-covid-19-england-have-not-been-ove/

 

Then as for Sweden, it  did fare better than some larger European countries like the UK, but also fared WORSE than its neighboring, more similar Nordic countries that did have and impose restrictions. So hardly the poster child for successful COVID control policies that many right-wing folks would attempt to paint it as.

A year and a half after Sweden decided not to lock down, its COVID-19 death rate is up to 10 times higher than its neighbors

...

• Sweden decided not to implement a full-scale lockdown during the pandemic.
• It now has up to 10 times as many COVID-19 deaths per capita as its Nordic neighbors.
• Sweden also didn't fare much better economically, suggesting its gamble didn't pay off.

...

Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway."

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-strategy-failed-higher-death-rate-2021-8

 

Scathing evaluation of Sweden's COVID response reveals 'failures' to control the virus

Authorities misled the public about the benefit of masks, the report says.

 

March 25, 2022

...

"As a result, Sweden had a higher COVID death rate than the surrounding Nordic nations.

 

"The Swedish response to this pandemic was unique and characterised by a morally, ethically, and scientifically questionable laissez-faire approach, a consequence of structural problems in the society," the team wrote. "There was more emphasis on the protection of the 'Swedish image' than on saving and protecting lives or on an evidence-based approach."

 

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scathing-evaluation-swedens-covid-response-reveals-failures-control/story?id=83644832

 

 

21 minutes ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

So, if a person did have COVID-19 but there was no reason to think that was at least part of the reason they died, the doctor or coroner would not write it on the death certificate

 

That is really not convincing because if you think back the hysterical fear that existed around Covid was in part caused by medical practitioners NOT KNOWING what effects Covid-19 would have, since it was a new disease.

 

So without knowing this, how could doctors possibly attribute a death, in whole or in part, to Covid-19, accurately? Without doing autopsies it was just guesswork. Only much later were the real effects of Covid documented, when sufficent people contracted the disease.

 

The government itself realised its Covid death figures were flawed, since they initially counted someone who died "with Covid" in the Covid 19 death figures, if they died with Covid 28 days after contracting the disease.

 

"This review found that there remains a divergence between the 28 day measure and the number of deaths where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate as explained below.

 

COVID-19 death registrations should continue to be used as the primary figure for measuring COVID-19 deaths. The number of deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test is no longer recommended.

 

https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2023/01/27/changes-to-the-way-we-report-on-covid-19-deaths/

 

21 minutes ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

but also fared WORSE than its neighboring, more similar Nordic countries that did have and impose restrictions.

 

Yes, but the point surely is that going through the pandemic substantially WITHOUT hardcore lockdowns was MORE successful than imposing the hardcore lockdowns Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK imposed.

 

There was no need for these lockdowns, as we saw Sweden, who bravely resisted the pressure to impose them, did perfectly fine without them.

 

Now, that the dust has settled Norway's leading epidemiologist complimented Sweden's performance.

 

https://unherd.com/newsroom/norways-top-epidemiologist-sweden-handled-covid-well/

And then there's the bogus, false argument that all the older people in the UK who died from COVID were already on the verge of death anyway or had little time left to live.

 

Average Covid-19 victim dies years before they otherwise would

20 July 2021

 

People dying from Covid-19 lose about a decade of life on average.

 

https://fullfact.org/news/boris-johnson-whatsapp-covid-life-expectancy-cummings/

 

"However, we need to be clear that the Covid deaths we’ve seen so far have been despite the UK’s lockdowns. As we have said before, the evidence suggests that without lockdowns the death toll would have been higher.

...

And while it is true that the pandemic has disproportionately affected older people, unlike previous large crises, such as the Second World War or the Spanish Flu, people dying of Covid have still lost about a decade of life, on average.

 

https://fullfact.org/health/covid19-behind-the-death-toll/#:~:text=people dying of covid have still lost about a decade of life%2C on average.

 

 

 

12 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

Now, that the dust has settled Norway's leading epidemiologist complimented Sweden's performance.

 

https://unherd.com/newsroom/norways-top-epidemiologist-sweden-handled-covid-well/

 

 

Sweden's king says 'we have failed' over COVID-19, as deaths mount

December 18, 2020

 

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's king said his country had failed in its handling of COVID-19, in a sharp criticism of a pandemic policy partly blamed for a high death toll among the elderly.

 

Carl XVI Gustaf, whose son and daughter-in-law tested positive last month, used an annual royal Christmas TV special to highlight the growing impact of the virus, in a rare intervention from a monarch whose duties are largely ceremonial.

...

An official commission said on Tuesday systemic shortcomings in elderly care coupled with inadequate measures from the government and agencies contributed to Sweden's particularly high death toll in nursing homes.

 

(more)

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN28S0BQ/

 

27 minutes ago, Will B Good said:

 

 

Why not just consider excess deaths as a good indicator?......No one is going to sanction 250,000 autopsies..

 

It is helpful, but one has to use it with care because the excess death figures do not establish if a death was caused by Covid 19 directly, during the pandemic if you recall resources were diverted to Covid 19 and people could not have operations due them being cancelled due to lack of staff and resources. So a death counted in the excess death figures could be, medically, caused by something else rather than Covid 19, for example a cancer patient not getting a vital examination or operation.

 

Even now we continue to see higher excess death figures. This can be due to the effects of Covid or the acute pressures on NHS acute services resulting in poorer outcomes from episodes of acute illness and disruption to chronic disease detection and management. 

 

Nobody really knows for sure.

Just now, Cameroni said:

 

It is helpful, but one has to use it with care because the excess death figures do not establish if a death was caused by Covid 19 directly, during the pandemic if you recall resources were diverted to Covid 19 and people could not have operations due them being cancelled due to lack of staff and resources. So a death counted in the excess death figures could be, medically, caused by something else rather than Covid 19, for example a cancer patient not getting a vital examination or operation.

 

Even now we continue to see higher excess death figures. This can be due to the effects of Covid or the acute pressures on NHS acute services resulting in poorer outcomes from episodes of acute illness and disruption to chronic disease detection and management. 

 

Nobody really knows for sure.

 

 

Got it.....Cheers

On 8/13/2024 at 8:50 AM, Captain Monday said:

The cure of "border closures" accomplished little or nothing

 

Australia and New Zealand did better than most.

 

I don't think anyone realized how adaptable COVID was, with its variants.

 

It's easy to point the finger at China as the source, and say they should be paying for the damage caused. Based on that logic, Australians should be suing the Brits for bringing in foxes and rabbits, and the South Americans for giving us fire ants.

29 minutes ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

 

 

Sweden's king says 'we have failed' over COVID-19, as deaths mount

December 18, 2020

 

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's king said his country had failed in its handling of COVID-19, in a sharp criticism of a pandemic policy partly blamed for a high death toll among the elderly.

 

Carl XVI Gustaf, whose son and daughter-in-law tested positive last month, used an annual royal Christmas TV special to highlight the growing impact of the virus, in a rare intervention from a monarch whose duties are largely ceremonial.

...

An official commission said on Tuesday systemic shortcomings in elderly care coupled with inadequate measures from the government and agencies contributed to Sweden's particularly high death toll in nursing homes.

 

(more)

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN28S0BQ/

 

 

 

Whilst Sweden's response was not perfect, in hindsight, it was the right approach.

 

Sweden had one of Europe’s lowest Covid-19 death rates despite shunning most lockdown restrictions, data released in May by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested.

 

But according to the WHO figures, Sweden had an excess death rate of 56 per 100,000 – well below the global average of 96. By comparison, between 2020 and 2021, the UK’s excess death rate was 109, Spain’s was 111, and Germany’s was 116.

 

 

“The incidence of severe acute Covid in children has been low” and a study showed that Swedish children “didn’t suffer the learning loss seen in many other countries”, she said.

 

At the end of the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that Sweden’s economy would shrink by 7%. This proved to be a pessimistic forecast, with the country’s economy shrinking by just 2.8%, “significantly lower” than the EU average of 6% and the UK’s “staggering” 9.8%, said The Telegraph.

 

https://theweek.com/news/science-health/956673/did-sweden-covid-experiment-pay-off

 

 

Your post above is just repeating the same Sweden vs larger European country comparisons made above, while ignoring the more comparable Sweden vs. other Nordic country comparisons made in the same article, that you decided not to quote. From the above cited article, re Sweden:

 

"Experts have suggested that socio-demographic factors could have played a huge part in keeping down excess deaths, meaning that the policy of shunning formal lockdowns may not have worked equally well in other countries.

 

These factors include “having a high rate of single-person households”, therefore reducing opportunities for transmission, as well as a “low population density compared to countries such as the UK and Italy”, said the Daily Mail."

 

AND

Neighbourhood comparison

"While Sweden’s death figures are lower than many European nations, comparing its figures to other Nordic countries shows you “cannot call Sweden a success”, Professor Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia, told the Daily Mail.

...

Sweden’s neighbours fared significantly better in keeping excess death rates down, with Denmark logging just 32 excess deaths per 100,000, while Norway logged “one fewer death per 100,000 than expected”, said the paper."

 

https://theweek.com/news/science-health/956673/did-sweden-covid-experiment-pay-off

 

As the above article points out, Sweden faring better than larger European countries  re COVID mortality could have had as much or more to do with their very different socio-demographic characteristics among those countries than it had to do with their differing lockdown policies.