New coronavirus in/from China

[Little John]

Everyone who reads this forum knows you don't get it , but why do you feel the need to continuously prove that either interpreting data is not your strongest point or you are just looking to argue with random people on the internet.

We see exactly the same modus operandi with climate change denial. It's a phenomena of our times, we live in the so-called information age. It's never been easier for lay people to find stuff out, educate themselves. However not only do many not take advantage of this amazing time (fair enough), but they actually publicly promote their intentional ignorance. Why? Promoting one's ignorance used to be something folk avoided.

Here's a first hand account from a big London hospital today:

So, my news for today. The hospital is full. Covid patients are sitting in ambulances all day queued up outside. At least they have some oxygen and someone to look after them, which is why they are not being stacked in hospital corridors where there's no oxygen or nurses to look after them. Yesterday, two covid patients died outside in ambulances while waiting for bed space.

Don't have a need for an ambulance because you'll have a 6-10 hour wait because they are all queued up outside the local hospital full of covid patients.

Look after yourselves and take care of your loved ones, even if that means staying away from them.

And so you are reduced to anecdotes and appeals to emotion. No surprise there

[Little John]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/0 ... 4va0zTEKgs

How the left learned to love the Tory police state
Fraser Myers
7th January 2021

Lockdown has devastated civil liberties, punished the poor and boosted the rich, but the left wants more of it.

Lockdown No3 is here. Less than a year ago such a draconian and repressive policy had never been considered in a liberal democracy – even its most prominent advocates have acknowledged this. But now it has become depressingly normal. So normal in fact that it is hard to find much opposition to it, despite the colossal damage it has caused.

Voices from across the political spectrum have been (rightly) critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic. But the criticism has overwhelmingly been that the government did not lock down fast enough or hard enough. This has been a particularly depressing refrain of the left. The very people who present themselves as radical opponents of the Tory government have been cheerleaders for its extraordinary accumulation of state power, its rescinding of the right to free association and protest, its sidelining of parliamentary democracy, and its shutdown of civil society. And that’s just the basics of the policy – never mind its disastrous unintended consequences.

When the first full lockdown was announced in March, the Guardian’s Owen Jones was relieved to have been placed ‘under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right-wing Tory government’. This may have been expressed in jest, but it was literally what had happened.

The police had suddenly been given extraordinary powers to prevent members of the public from going about their business (and even then, officers often went beyond the law, arresting people for crimes which did not exist). Aside from some crocodile tears over the fact that ethnic-minority Britons were being disproportionately arrested and fined for lockdown breaches, the left learned to love the police state pretty quickly.

Every time restrictions were eased, reducing the scope of everyday activities that could get you arrested, the left cried murder. Now the left argues that restrictions on social mixing are not enough – we need restrictions on thought and speech, too. Take Paul Mason, whose latest book is How To Stop Fascism and who, last year, warned that a right-wing prime minister was plotting a coup against democracy. He has continually blasted the government for allowing too much freedom. His latest crusade is against lockdown sceptics whose ‘disinformation’ (aka disagreements with the government) he says needs to be ‘suppressed’. Mason wants opponents of the police state to be silenced either by the goverment or by the megacorporations of Silicon Valley. That would represent true ‘leadership’, he says. How To Stop Fascism indeed.

Many self-styled socialists have made it their mission to shut down society, regardless of the cost. And there has been a tremendous cost. One area where this has been most catastrophic is in schools. School closures have been devastating for children, particularly from the poorest backgrounds. While the government has argued that the new strain of the virus makes the most recent round of school closures necessary, the left has been arguing for schools to stay shut since last spring.

Teaching unions and left-wing outlets like Novara Media said that schools were unsafe to open even in June, at the trough of Britain’s epidemic. Novara Media accused ministers of weaponising concerns about disadvantaged students to pursue ‘harmful policies’. The life-ruining harms of denying children a proper education barely raised a squeak.

The costs of lockdown fall overwhelmingly on the working class – the very people the left is supposed to champion. The bank balances of the poorest have been reduced by £170 per month compared with before the lockdown – an astonishing 14 per cent drop. This is despite the unprecedented state support that has been made available to keep jobs afloat. In contrast, those on higher incomes have, on average, saved an extra £400 per month.

The left is simply in denial about this. It presents our state-enforced atomisation as solidarity in action. It does this by decrying any tentative re-opening as sacrificing workers to the cruel whims of billionaires. But in reality, the super-rich are the real beneficiaries of lockdown. The wealth of Britain’s billionaires has grown by 20 per cent – faster than at any time since the Great Depression. The shutdown of society – and its replacement by state and central-bank support – has led to what is arguably the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history. One that has been supported wholeheartedly by the left.

Instead of recognising that nearly 10 months in and out of lockdown has not succeeded in taking pressure off our clapped-out health service, many on the left engage in the fantasy of ‘Zero Covid’. This strategy has the backing of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and Independent SAGE (which one commentator memorably described as ‘SAGE… if you hate the Tories’.

If you thought that Zero Covid sounded like a more reasonable proposition with the arrival of the vaccines, think again. Independent SAGE’s Christine Pagel is calling for lockdown to continue even after the vaccine has been administered to the most vulnerable (by which point the death rate will have collapsed).

Before she was charged with harassment and lost the Labour whip, Claudia Webbe MP was in the Socialist Campaign Group. She now claims that ‘the UK has never properly locked down’. She makes explicit what other leftists try to imply when they cry ‘full lockdown now!’ and rage at the Covid death figures whenever the public is given the most minor reprieve from house arrest. (Many of the left’s most shrill demands for lockdown came last week when most of England was already under the Tier 4 ‘stay at home’ rules – lockdown in all but name.) In doing so, the harms of the lockdown are brushed aside and the fact that thousands have died of Covid regardless of the restrictions is ignored. The scene is set for forever lockdown.

Many might have thought the lowest point of the sorry excuse for what remains of the British left would have been its rejection of the Brexit vote – when it called for millions of working-class votes to be thrown into the shredder to defend the neoliberal EU oligarchy. But it has now spent the whole year demanding that an authoritarian police state enforce policies that have devastated the poor and blighted the lives of disadvantaged children. Surely, it can never recover from this.

[Catweazle]

So, the Right, Left and Centre parties, after studying the evidence from actual experts, are supporting the lockdown measures.

Perhaps there's something to be learned here.

[RevdTess]

LJ complains about anecdotes and appeals to emotion, then immediately posts a massive polemic from Spiked which is, yes, anecdotes and appeals to emotion.

[kenneal - lagger]

You took the words from my mouth, Tess, but you should know that LJ considers anything from Spiked as "DATA" and infallible. LJ has gone so far to the left that he has turned up on the right!! Just look at his support for Trump.

[PS_RalphW]

Over 1300 dead in one day, passing April peak. 68,000 positive tests also new peak. No sign yet of the new lockdown slowing the spread. Probably have some of the Christmas New Year surge still to go. Care homes are reporting 50% fatalities in the space of 3 weeks.

We are losing the race to vaccinate

[adam2]

The number of positive tests is IMHO of relatively little importance since it may be due to more tests.
The death toll is of much greater importance as it should be reasonably accurate, and has now reached over 1,000 a day for several consecutive days.

The death toll is unlikely to be totally accurate since it will include some patients who die of unrelated causes within 28 days of a positive test.
Some covid cases may be wrongly diagnosed and therefore wrongly recorded as being due to other conditions, when in fact the victim died of covid.

I do however believe that believe that the reported death toll is APPROXIMATLY correct.

[clv101]

The number of positive tests is IMHO of relatively little importance since it may be due to more tests.

It's not a case of 'may'. The data are published. The current 7 day average test rate is ~480k per day, up from 308k a month ago. But that only partly explains the rise. Over the same month the positivity rate has increased from 4.7% to over 12% (England).

The death toll is of much greater importance as it should be reasonably accurate, and has now reached over 1,000 a day for several consecutive days.

Yes, but it's a lagging indicator. Death itself takes around 4 weeks from infection and around 3 weeks from case identification. Registration and reporting can add a significant lag. Some of today's deaths will likely have occurred over Christmas for example. The lag's also been getting a little longer as treatments have improved. Fewer are dying but those that too tend to stay in ITU longer. This might reverse in London in the coming weeks as treatment becomes limited.

The hospital admission rate is a good metric as it doesn't lag as much as deaths, is a good measure of those who are very sick (discounts asymptomatic and minor symptoms) and has very really public heath implications.

The other thing to note is that both the hospitalisation rate and following death rate most likely have at least a couple more weeks of increase as daily cases haven't yet peaked.

[Little John]

Meanwhile:

[PS_RalphW]

The key metric is the supply of intensive care beds. This number has been sharply increased to try to match covid demand, many operating theatres have been shut down and converted into icu wards. Vast amounts of elective surgery has been cancelled, which will have reduced demand for general ward beds. It is not the number beds that is critical but the number of critical care nursing staff, who are overworked and overwhelmed, with 3 or more times normal workload, and many themselves sick or isolating with covid.

My Indian ex girlfriend's brother died in London today, he would have been in his sixties. I do not know the cause

[Little John]

The key metric is the supply of intensive care beds. This number has been sharply increased to try to match covid demand....

No it has not been increased. You are making shit up. In hospitals it has been decreased to provide more space between beds in Covid wards to limit contamination. Secondly, the Nightingale hospitals that were touted as the extra capacity that was going to be required have barely been used. Not least because demand on capacity in hospitals is and has been consistently lower than even last year.

My Indian ex girlfriend's brother died in London today, he would have been in his sixties. I do not know the cause

And?....

[kenneal - lagger]

Why don't you go down to your local hospital and tell that that they're not overworked, to stop whining and get on with the job so that the lockdown can be lifted, LJ. See what sort of response you get. I bet you haven't got the guts to do that.

[Little John]

How it's done

https://www.bitchute.com/video/Hmxo720ccw4V/

So, are you going to issue some more personal slurs whilst continually deleting my response. Or, are you just going to delete this post as well.

[adam2]

I have recently deleted two posts that consisted primarily of insults or name calling. More than two if looking back longer. Other posts have been edited to remove insults or name calling.
Please refrain from insults.

[PS_RalphW]

The Guardian is reporting that winter rates off common colds is down by 75%, influenza by 95%, and other respiratory and hand hygine linked infections are also lower than normal. So a small silver lining from the lockdowns.

Hospital in Surrey bringing in emergency storage after their morgue is full.