Reality seems no bar to Tory denialism
Unite’s Howard Beckett took Matt Hancock to task yesterday, after Hancock was forced to admit the Leicester coronavirus surge was linked to schools – and Beckett reminded the woeful Health Secretary that unions had warned him of the consequences of his haste to force children back into the classroom:
Tory MP Neil O’Brien felt he had to interject – and tried a condescending tone denying the hapless Hancock’s admission:
But O’Brien was on wafer-thin ice, as noted journalist Ian Betteridge
The evidence is overwhelming, as Hancock – the Tory jointly responsible for tens of thousands of avoidable coronavirus deaths – was forced on national TV to confirm that school pupils had been infected in such significant numbers that the re-closure of schools had to form part of the renewed lock-down of Leicester after its coronavirus resurgence:
There was no shortage of respondents ready to point out O’Brien’s error:
Howard Beckett is right – the link is obvious, with school transmission studies in France and Germany showing clearly how fast the virus can spread within and from schools – and Hancock was warned, as was his boss. Now he is exposed – yet again – as arrogant, useless and lethal.
Neil O’Brien, on the other hand, got ‘owned’ for his ill-advised intervention. Wonder whether he ran off to remonstrate with whoever briefed him to deny the obvious.
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Try reading O’Brien’s tweet aloud, but in Helen Lovejoy’s voice (Simpsons, “Won’t somebody please think of the children” lady).
“Literally not true” reads like a txt from a 13-year-old.
“You are a senior person, please behave as such, this is serious” – is a bit whiney – a bit saccharine – a bit Women’s Institute.
Another Oxford PPE potatohead.
Neil O’Brien’s acronym…
N.O.B.
The twitter version of a ‘michael fallon moment’…
https://youtu.be/-iRVHvLGDk4?t=11
Other cities/areas are affected too as well as Labour-oriented Leicester. Are these other places too blue to lockdown? Never mind, think of all the lovely fines money they’ll make from schoolkid’s parents in September!
1. There is no ‘second peak’ – which is wild hyperbole – just an increase in testing for the presence of an RNA sequence by a test that doesn’t diagnose illness.(and that not very accurately)
2. There is no causality established with the opening of schools.
Nationally, deaths related to Covid-19 have declined dramatically since April, and hospital admissions are stable at normal rates. All reliable indicators remain below the level defined as ‘epidemic’, and recent calculations from the more reliable sources (i.e those who have been shown to be accurate over the emerging data from the last three months and have nothing to gain from ramping up hysteria) are suggesting that the population may now have close to population immunity, the threshold of which may be much lower than originally thought for this generally mild virus).
Obviously, government, the not-very balanced SAGE group and the catastrophically wrong modelers like Ferguson all have an interest in keeping up the doom and disaster stories as their narrative goes down the pan.
Knicker-wetting on the basis of panic isn’t science – it’s just wet knickers.
“The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference.”
William Farr (1807 – 1883)
“You say that like it’s a bad thing, dickhead.”
David McNiven (b. 1950)
For sane citizens, this analysis of the Leicester flurry of nonsense is well researched, and not based on a naive belief in the veracity or basic understanding of Matt Hancock :
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/leicester_2jul.html
5) Median age of Covid-19 deaths per country
Half of all deaths were below, half were above the median age.
Country Median age
Source
Austria 80+ years EMS
Canada ~86 years HCSC
England 80+ years NHS
France 84 years SPF
Germany 82 years RKI
Italy 81 years ISS
Spain ~82 years MDS
Sweden 86 years FOHM
Switzerland 84 years BAG
USA ~80 years CDC
https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
0 – 19 yrs 15 3 0 18
20 – 39 158 32 0 190
40 – 59 1,873 255 0 2,128
60 – 79 9,778 551 0 10,329
80+ 13,903 477 0 14,380
Date 2.06.2020 NHS graph.
Notice the first graph median age 80-86, notice the second graph students fatalities 18. Approximately there are 8,740 ,000 students in England which is approximately 0.000002%. Notice the second graph adult fatalities between the ages of 20-59 2,128. There are approximately 420,000 teachers in England( the majority retire by 60) no one knows the fatalities amongst teachers but if all the fatalities were of those amongst the unfortunate deaths in the 20-59 age group it would amount to about 0.005%.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-3-June-2020-weekly-tables.xlsx
… and meanwhile as this misdirection of attention goes on, rabbits of Lock-Up redundancy are emerging from the hat in increasing numbers.
That’s why it matters.