Steve Baker calls on Boris to publish Freedom Plan

From Lockdown Sceptic Website

by by Will Jones / 15 January 2021

Steve Baker, the Deputy Chair of the anti-lockdown Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative MPs, has issued a rallying cry to the group’s members. The Sun has the story.

In an explosive rallying call to fellow members of the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group, the ex-minister blasted: “People are telling me they are losing faith in our Conservative Party leadership.”

The group represents dozens of Tory backbenchers who are worried about the side effects of long lockdowns.

Mr Baker urged those colleagues to make their concerns directly to Mr Johnson’s Commons enforcer, Chief Whip Mark Spencer.

In a bombshell note to MPs seen by the Sun, Mr Baker writes: “I am sorry to have to say this again and as bluntly as this: it is imperative you equip the Chief Whip today with your opinion that debate will become about the PM’s leadership if the Government does not set out a clear plan for when our full freedoms will be restored.”

He told them to demand “a guarantee that this strategy will not be used again next winter”.

The major intervention reads: “Government has adopted a strategy devoid of any commitment to liberty without any clarification about when our most basic freedoms will be restored and with no guarantee that they will never be taken away again.”

The action appears to have been triggered by key Government advisers going public with their view that lockdowns must continue well into 2021.

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Avon Lady Calling With The Virus by Les May

EARLIER this evening someone dropped an ‘Avon Catalogue’ enclosed in a plastic bag through my door. I could see the information that it would be collected on Sunday. If whoever did this is infected with the virus which causes Covid 19 then potentially they are putting in danger the lives of everyone in the houses to which they distributed the catalogue.

No doubt this action not specifically excluded by the lockdown regulations. But that does not mean it is a sensible thing to do. If by chance whoever did this is prosecuted I shall not waste any crocodile tears on them.

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Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown

Editorial Comment: THE Spectator ran an article on the 6th, January by Alistair Haimes, who had until then been a enthusiastic lockdown sceptic, which called on others to support the current government Lockdown. As a consequence of this both Will Jones on the LOCKDOWN SCEPTIC WEBSITE and Les May on the NV Blog have responded with their views on posts displayed below on the NV Blog.

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Scepticism is supposed to be the bedrock of science. But where scepticism shades into cynicism it can be as blind to changing events as the unexamined credence it claims to displace. Scientific belief should be based on informed supposition which is then rigorously tested against the evidence — that is the basis of the scientific method. There should be no shame in changing opinions and assumptions when facts change. We start with assumptions, test them against the evidence (which itself changes) and then use that conclusion to repeat the process, ad infinitum. So if conclusions don’t change when facts change, something might have gone awry.

As an example: your view on the merits of the current winter lockdown versus the Halloween lockdown. First: do you think a lockdown is prima facie defensible? To some people, ‘no!’; to far more people, ‘normally no, but it depends’. Whatever initial view you put into your decision hopper, now try to bend that assumption around the first input of information: the healthcare system either (a) clearly has capacity left, apparently running at below average levels for the time of year, as it was in October; or (b) might credibly need to triage fairly basic healthcare within, say, three weeks as seems to be the case now, or so we are told. Whether we are in (a) or (b) should change your opinion; if it doesn’t, you might be doing this wrong.

Now, add in the game-changer of approved, effective vaccines. Your opinion should be different before and after the approval of the vaccines (2 December for Pfizer, 30 December for Oxford). Put simply, it is perfectly justifiable to be against open-ended restrictions in a world with no vaccine, but to think a brief period of restriction while vaccines are rolled out is sensible, and personally I know many lockdown sceptics whose views pivoted on the day the first vaccine was approved.

Finally, consider the pace of the epidemic. Have cases apparently stabilised, as at end of October, or has there been an out-of-leftfield development like the Kentish variant, which experts believe might be at least 50 per cent more transmissible with no obvious sign of deceleration? Whatever the state of your opinion on lockdown so far, this development should alter it at least somewhat.

You might be stridently, philosophically, against lockdowns whatever the consequences, or you might be a dour socialist zealot who instinctively thinks that the cilice should always be tightened in a crisis; but for everyone in-between, allowing opinion to change with evidence like this is likely an excellent idea. Where opinion becomes rigid it can also become brittle, and often doesn’t age well.

Personally (not that it matters given I’m just a punter rather than in government) I have unashamedly been sceptical of the government’s use of interventions throughout the epidemic, though I’m closer to the moderate than the fundamentalist wing. I thought that the March 2020 lockdown was sensible and inevitable while disease parameters and treatment protocols were clarified and healthcare capacity was built, but believe it dragged on far too long, inflicting incredible social, economic and collateral health damage when the first wave of Covid was obviously waning with the seasons. It appeared the government was allowing opinion-polls to lead it down a path of ever more severe restriction rather than examining realistic targeted alternatives that could tide us over sustainably until a vaccine arrived (which I admit came miles faster than I’d imagined possible), and hadn’t stopped to gauge the damage done along the way.

You can of course understand the bind. There is a crisis, the government needs to do something, lockdown is something it can do, so it does lockdown. It might well be the only lever to pull initially, but that doesn’t mean the lever should stay pulled. Who knows, it may even be the best answer in the medium-term, but it is hard to believe that scrutinising every cost and alternative along the way wasn’t a very worthwhile exercise even so.

For lockdown two, like many others, I thought that the case in November was not well argued, was farcically presented with scary out-of-date death charts and poorly administered (creating the boom Halloween weekend by leaking plans on the Friday night was absolutely unforgiveable).

Every intervention, after all, has a beginning and an end, and the degree of social mixing from the ‘one last shindig’ at the beginning to the ‘thank God that’s over’ effect at the end may conceivably outweigh the temporary reduction in R — such ‘forcing events’ cause discrete social circles to overlap which otherwise wouldn’t intersect.

But in the event, the key moment in autumn (possibly during lockdown) wasn’t underground kids parties or news presenters’ knees-ups, it was the emergence of the Kentish variant. Some have hypothesised that the variant emerged from the way we treat Covid sufferers. Hospitals with chronically ill patients create living petri dishes for mutation (it is worth remembering that a quarter of all infections are still presumed hospital acquired). Add in treatments like convalescent plasma (blood extract containing antibodies­) and there are then all the pressures needed to evolve a mutant strain. We will, like good scientists, have to await more data.

Lockdown three, I’m sorry to say (and I can hear the howls from sceptics as I write this), is justifiable, practically and ethically. Given the rollout of the vaccine, the emergence of the new variant and the plausible risk of the healthcare system falling over, there is probably now no realistic alternative. Whatever one’s objections to the first two lockdowns, on both cost-benefit and libertarian grounds, it is at least a defensible position to acknowledge the merit of a brief lockdown during a maximum-speed vaccination campaign to minimise morbidity and mortality along the way.

The calculation is entirely different now from that of the previous two lockdowns. Given the vaccine, the variant and the healthcare situation, the current restriction can be supported (regretfully) without cognitive dissonance by those who opposed the previous lockdowns vehemently and vocally. It is either bad logic, bad faith or fundamentalism to argue otherwise.

This is a position that will make no friends. The zero-Covid Sanhedrin (whose ship sailed long ago in a connected Europe) and the libertarian sceptics (very few of whom are actually anti-vaxx by the way) will both find reasons why this nuanced view is outrageous.

The big, big difference this time is this: an opening in a rock without an exit is a cave — but if you can see an exit, it’s a tunnel. The previous two lockdowns were caves. It was dark and nasty, possibly involving bats, and we had no idea how we were going to get out except back into the same world we’d entered from. But this time really is different: we’re going not into a cave but into a tunnel, there is a credible exit strategy that we can see and believe in, and we’re scheduled to emerge in about 100 days (give-or-take) into a country where almost all the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated and where lockdown is not just lifted but dismantled, hopefully never to be seen again, and good riddance.

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A Defence of Lockdown Sceptics

FROM the LOCKDOWN SCEPTIC's WEBSITE - By Will Jones / 8 January 2021

I was disappointed to read the Spectator article by Lockdown Sceptics contributor Alistair Haimes about his departure from our ranks. The brilliant data analyst has been a valuable ally and I hope he will return to the fold in due course.

His argument boils down to this: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” But what facts have changed? He cites three. First, the health service is under severe stress and unless we can reduce virus transmission over the next few weeks it’s at serious risk of being overwhelmed. That wasn’t true when the second national lockdown was imposed in November, he says, but it is today. Second, we now have two approved Covid vaccines, with more to follow, so any new restrictions will be short-lived. Third, there is a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 which is around 50% more transmissible than the pre-existing variants.

I’ll take each of these in turn – although I may digress a bit.

First, I’m sceptical of the claim that we have X number of days to save the NHS – a familiar trope that I thought the Labour Party had flogged to death. Let’s not forget that a winter bed crisis in the NHS is an annual event, as you can see from this collection of Guardian headlines. According to PHE, there was no statistically significant excess all-cause mortality in England in the final week of 2020 and while excess winter deaths this season are above the five-year average, they are currently below the peaks reached in 2016/17 and 2017/18. We published a piece on Wednesday in Lockdown Sceptics by Dr Clare Craig on Emergency Department Syndromic Indicators that looked at various indexes of ill-health, such as hospital admissions for Acute Respiratory Infection, Influenza-like illness and Pneumonia, and those are all below the baseline for an English winter – or were until a week ago. These data suggest that some of the people currently in English hospitals with COVID-19 have either been misdiagnosed or would have been hospitalised with something else if they hadn’t been laid low with Covid. In some NHS regions, Critical care bed occupancy numbers are currently above what they were in December 2019 – an unusually mild flu season – but there was still some headroom on December 27th, as you can see from this bar chart.

But let’s allow that things have got worse by an order of magnitude in the past week or so and some NHS trusts really are on the cusp of being overwhelmed, which they may well be. (See today’s report from the senior doctor.) Will the lockdown Boris announced on Monday do anything to avert this catastrophe, as Alistair seems to think? The only difference between the new national lockdown and the Tier 4 restrictions that were already in place in 80% of England on January 1st is that restaurants and pubs can no longer serve alcohol to take away and schools will be closed. But schools had already closed when London went into Tier 4 on December 20th and there isn’t much evidence that those restrictions reduced the R number in the capital. As SAGE member Professor Andrew Hayward pointed out on Tuesday, nearly 10 million key workers are still travelling to and from work. In addition, people are still going to supermarkets, chemists and corner shops. The statistician William M. Briggs, co-author of The Price of Panic, argues that it’s misleading to think of lockdowns as quarantines. Rather, they just create a number of ‘concentration points’, herding people into a limited number of spaces, and in that way increase the rate of transmission. If masks worked this mobility might not matter, but the recent mask study in Denmark suggests they don’t.

Some lockdown enthusiasts pick out a handful of examples where lockdowns have coincided with a fall in Covid deaths but that’s not a scientific approach. Numerous research studies, published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals, have concluded that there’s no association between Covid mortality and the standard suite of non-pharmacuetical interventions, such as mandating masks in indoor settings, closing schools and universities, shutting non-essential shops, imposing curfews and banning domestic travel. You can adjust the lockdown variables all you like – timing, severity, etc. – but there’s no signal in the noise. The American Institute for Economic Research has collected some of the best of these studies here and we’ve created a compendium of the evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions don’t work at Lockdown Sceptics. The epidemiological models that SAGE uses to persuade the Government to ratchet up the restrictions rely on counterfactuals – if you don’t do y, x number of people will die – that cannot be falsified because the Government always end up doing SAGE’s bidding, as Alistair Haimes has pointed out.

On the other hand, it is incontestable that lockdowns cause harm. Lockdown sceptics are sometimes accused of putting profit before people, but I’m not just talking about economic harm – increased borrowing, businesses going bankrupt, growing unemployment. The negative impact of school closures on children has been flagged up by numerous educational organisations, including Ofsted, with the most disadvantaged paying the highest price. The Centre for Mental Health estimated in October that that up to 10 million people will need either new or additional mental health support, thanks to the trauma of enforced isolation, and reports of domestic abuse to the Metropolitan Police increased by 11% during the first lockdown compared to the same period last year. Drug overdoses in San Francisco killed more than three times the number of people last year than COVID-19.

It’s also nonsense to imagine the economic damage caused by the lockdowns won’t have ruinous public health consequences – anything that hurts profits, hurts people. Professor Sunetra Gupta estimates that the global economic recession caused by the lockdowns will result in 130 million people starving to death and the United Nations predicts it will plunge as many as 420 million residents of the developing world into extreme poverty, with low-income countries seeing average incomes falling for the first time in 60 years.

Even in the absence of the detailed cost-benefit analysis the Covid Recovery Group of MPs has repeatedly asked for, it seems overwhelmingly likely that the harms caused by lockdowns in the UK alone are greater than the harms they prevent. According to one study out of Bristol University, the ongoing restrictions will cause 560,000 deaths, 310,000 more than Professor Neil Ferguson and his team predicted would die absent a lockdown but with voluntary ‘mitigation’ measures in place. As the now disgraced President of the United States said, the cure is worse than the disease. That essential point hasn’t changed, so I see no reason why sceptics should change their minds about lockdowns now. Yes, the NHS may be in genuine peril, but that doesn’t mean we should set aside our well-founded doubts about the effectiveness of heavy-handed interventions. On the contrary, trying to quarantine people for a third time, given that the policy clearly hasn’t worked, seems like Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

What about the vaccines? True, some sceptics did argue that shutting people in their homes until a vaccine became available was impractical because it might take years to develop one. But that was never the central plank of our case (see above). On the contrary, our preferred alternative to locking down is ‘focused protection’, as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration, and vaccines make that strategy more attractive, not less.

Our starting point is that the number of people who died from COVID-19 in English hospitals in 2020 who were under 60 with no underlying health conditions was 388 and the virus is less deadly than seasonal flu for healthy people under 70. Note, we’re not claiming that SARS-CoV-2 is less deadly than the average bout of seasonal flu for the entire population – although that’s true of some flu seasons – only that it’s likely to kill fewer healthy people under-70, including children. Whenever we cite that 388 statistic, critics accuse us of being callous, as though we’re saying older people and those with chronic conditions don’t matter. Far from it. We think the Government should pull out all the stops to protect those who are vulnerable to this disease, including care home residents, who made up about 40% of those who died from COVID-19 in the first wave (and 50% of those who died in Scotland). Shielding for people in these groups should not be compulsory – we believe in trusting people to make their own risk assessments and adjust their behaviour accordingly. But it should be a viable option, with all the necessary support. Meanwhile, the rest of us should be permitted to go about our lives, taking the same precautions we would in a normal flu season.

The arguments for and against ‘focused protection’ have been well-rehearsed, but the vaccines deal with one of the best objections – that it would be inhumane to expect the vulnerable to shut themselves away until the rest of the population develops natural herd immunity. That would create a two-tier society. But now that we have a vaccine, those groups only need shield until they’ve been immunised, at which point they can re-enter society (something they can’t do at present, even after they’ve had the jab, because there’s no ‘society’ to re-enter). The Government is planning to vaccinate 13.9 million people by mid-February – although that number includes everyone who works in health and social care settings – and there are about 16 million who fall into the above vulnerable categories.

So, yes, the vaccines do make a difference – they strengthen the sceptics’ case by making ‘focused protection’ more palatable.

What about the new variant? I’m reserving judgment on whether it’s more transmissible. As Mike Hearn pointed out yesterday, ONS infection survey data released on December 23rd show that the percentage of the UK population testing positive for the new variant began to fall in November before taking off again, and in some areas it has already started to dip, as was clear from the plot presented by Chris Whitty on Tuesday. If it’s 50% more transmissible than pre-existing variants, why isn’t the percentage just constantly rising in all parts of England?

But suppose the new variant is more infectious. What evidence is there that the new lockdown measures will interrupt transmission? If the first two lockdowns didn’t stop the original virus in its tracks, why will a third stop a turbo-charged version?

I sympathise with Alistair Haimes. He believes the NHS is at risk of falling over and wants us to do something – anything – to protect it. Lockdown sceptics also don’t want to see the NHS fall over, but where I part company with Alistair is in believing that a third national lockdown is the right mitigation strategy. Wouldn’t it be better to offer robust protection to the vulnerable and make vaccinating them an absolute priority? Not only would that be more likely to ‘save the NHS’, it would save the rest of us from the harms caused by yet another lockdown. ‘Focused protection’ is sometimes dismissed as not scientifically credible, but the 700,000+ signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration include over 13,000 medical and public health scientists and nearly 40,000 medical practitioners.

Alistair thinks this lockdown is more palatable than the others because there’s light at the end of the tunnel, thanks to the vaccine. Within 100 days, he estimates, it can be dismantled, hopefully never to be seen again. I wish I shared his optimism. At Tuesday’s Downing Street briefing, Chris Whitty said restrictions might well be back next winter and some people have called for masks to remain mandatory indefinitely.

The problem with allowing the state to suspend your civil liberties is that you may never get them back. I treat the Government’s claims that it will relinquish the powers it has arrogated to itself when the crisis is over with extreme scepticism, just as I do every official announcement about the virus.

One final point. Over the past week or so, some of the most prominent lockdown sceptics have been vilified in the media, accused of encouraging members of the public to ignore social distancing guidelines and thereby causing people to die. These attacks may ratchet up over the next few days as the NHS comes under more and more pressure, although it’s hard to imagine them becoming even more hysterical. Paul Mason wrote a column in the New Statesman on Wednesday saying that Allison Pearson, Laurence Fox, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens and me should be consigned to the seventh circle of hell. But the assumption underlying these criticisms is that lockdowns work, which is precisely the point under dispute. Is it reasonable to expect us to just take that on faith and keep any doubts we have to ourselves? After all, we don’t ask the Paul Masons of this world to take it on faith that lockdowns cause more harm than good and accuse them of killing people by advocating for tougher restrictions. We think history will prove us right, but we’re not so full of righteous certitude that we want to silence our opponents.

One of the most unpleasant aspects of this crisis is that it has brought out an ugly, authoritarian streak in so many people, particularly those in positions of authority. Before March of last year, I believed that totalitarianism could never take root in British soil because we are such a Rabelaisian, freedom-loving people, fiercely proud of our independence. Now, I’m not so sure.

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Toby Young's slip-up on Twitter

SOME weeks ago Toby Young, editor of the Lockdown Sceptics website, tweeted: 'New study suggests more than five million Britons have had the coronavirus. Given that -50,000 people have died from it, that means an IFR [infection fatality rate] of 0.1%.'

Tim Harford, the UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST in the Financial Times [19th, DECEMBER 2020] wrote 'There was just one small problem with that tweet: the arithmatic.' Young duly clarified: 'That last tweet was wrong... had a brain fart. If 5 million Brits have been infected and -50,000 have died, that equals an IFR of 1%.'

Tbat suggests that Young's second tweet admits that the virus is 10 times more deadly than he had thought. Meaning that rather that anticipating one death per thousand infections, his updated calculation suggests we should expect 10.

Tim Harford admits that it is easy to slip-up with decimal points, and thus to make false statements about Covid-19. He argues that the 'strongest arguements in favour of lockdowns is the kind of information peddled by some lockdown sceptics.' He writes: 'When you see demonstratably false claims that most people who died with Covid-19 did not die of it, that we are seeing a "casedemic" founded on false postives or most infections are asymptomatic throughout - that's the point you think: gosh, maybe we really can't be trusted after all.'

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Government to Close Schools

THE Government has announced targeted school closures for England in an attempt to control the spread of the virus (though it’s unlikely to help much, as Toby explained yesterday). The Telegraph has the details.

One million primary school pupils will not return to classrooms as planned next term as Boris Johnson unveiled sweeping school closures and warned more could follow.

The Prime Minister said that in order to combat the spread of the new coronavirus variant, the majority of secondary school pupils will now stay at home until “at least” January 18th, two weeks after term was supposed to start. Those in exam years 11 and 13 will return on January 11th.

Only the children of key workers and vulnerable children will go back on January 4th, the scheduled start date. It means the staggered start to term which had previously been announced will be moved back by a week.

Primary schools in “high infection areas”, estimated to affect one million pupils, will also close for the first time since the spring for at least two weeks as Mr Johnson said “even tougher action” was needed because of the “sheer pace” of the rising infections.

The Prime Minister said there was no guarantee that the January 18th return date would not slip further, as the latest data on infection rates would be reviewed at that point.

He added: “I want to stress that, depending on the spread of the disease, it may be necessary to take further action in their cases as well.”

The announcement came as three quarters of the population of England were quarantined in Tier 4 as of this morning, with the rest of the country left in the scarcely less restrictive Tier 3, creating a new national lockdown in all but name.

LOCKDOWN SCEPTICS' Stop Press: In Sarah Vine’s column in yesterday’s Daily Mail she opposed school closures, saying “it’s madness to treat our schools like nail bars or nightclubs“. Yet her husband Michael Gove is reported to have sided with Matt Hancock and opposed Gavin Williamson’s efforts to keep schools open. Trouble in paradise?

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LOCKDOWN SCEPTICS & a new strain of virus!

TODAY TIM JONES on the Lockdown Sceptics website asks: 'If the new strain has a biological advantage that makes it more transmissible why isn’t it taking over in every region?'

He continues: 'However it is a real question that needs answering, and one that’s also being asked by Professor Francois Balloux on Twitter:

'The new 'UK #SARSCoV2 variant' (lineage B 1.1.7) which has recently gone up in frequency in the UK has been identified in numerous countries including in Denmark, where its frequency remained at ~1% in mid-December.

1/ https://t.co/ElOC2zqTAW

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 29, 2020 'A number of media outlets have reported on the new technical briefing from Public Health England that shows considerably more being infected by carriers of the new variant than carriers of other variants. Here’s the report in the Times. 'Contacts of people with the new coronavirus variant are 54% more likely to develop the disease, according to new analysis from Public Health England. 'They found, however, that it did not appear likely to cause more severe disease or higher death rates.

'Researchers found the “secondary attack rate”, or proportion of contacts of confirmed cases that develop the disease themselves, was 15.1% for people with a confirmed case of the new variant and 9.8% for people confirmed to have another variant.'

The figures were published yesterday in a technical report on the variant, now named VOC (variant of concern) 202012/01.

Ministers pointed to the variant’s increased infectiousness when announcing higher Tier 4 restrictions for much of England earlier this month.

However, according to Tim Jones, 'the PHE briefing does not draw any conclusions about transmissibility from the data it presents (it doesn’t mention transmissibility at all). Is this because the authors are aware that this may be just coincidence? In other words, that it appears to be more transmissible just because most of the infections with it happen to be in the areas that are currently surging? This by itself would explain why the secondary attack rate (the proportion of contacts who become infected) for the new variant in England is higher in recent weeks – because it happens to be the variant most prevalent in the areas of the country where more people are currently being infected. To know whether it is the new variant itself that is responsible for the higher secondary attack rate, or something else, we would need to see it higher in other regions, not just the one currently surging. And as Loftus and Prof Balloux observe, there is not currently evidence of that.'

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Pushing Public Health Messages by Les May

ROCHDALE THE 'WORST AFFECTED' BY VIRUS!

I LIVE in Rochdale, one of the metropolitan boroughs that make up Greater Manchester. Last Saturday lunchtime I was treated to the sight of our local council leader speaking on a BBC news programme about the negotiations with the government about the financial support which would be available if ‘Tier Three’ restrictions come into force. He also raised doubts about whether the additional restrictions were necessary, citing the fact that the negotiators had been presented with ‘old data’ about infection levels.

Last Wednesday I watched the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van Tam, present graphics showing how in the past few weeks rising Covid 19 infections, which were substantially affecting young adults have spread initially, are now moving into the older parts of the population in my town and others like it. These of course are the people whose illness places greatest strain on the NHS and who are most likely to die.

The next day Sky News ran a piece which made the claim that my town, Rochdale, is the borough worst affected by the virus.

Now I don’t wish to suggest that Allen Brett, or Bretty as he likes to style himself, was being deliberately misleading in his comments about the infection levels in Rochdale, but I will say that I find it a little surprising that our council leader seemingly had not taken the trouble to be briefed by Rochdale’s Director of Public Health, Andrea Fallon, about the situation in the town. She’s the expert in these matters, not him. Or perhaps it’s not really so surprising.

Since March when the initial ‘lockdown’ was imposed it can hardly be said RMBC has been proactive in its approach to handling the pandemic. Residents have received precisely two communications about Covid 19, one A5 leaflet came in late March and the second a couple of months ago. No doubt the response would be that there is comprehensive information about the ‘rules’ we are supposed to adhere to on the RMBC website.

Indeed there is, but in the jargon of the computer world, this is a ‘pull strategy’. In other words if you want to get the information, which is liable to change at any moment, you have to be sufficiently motivated to go and find it. If you are a MS Windows user are you sufficiently motivated to access the Microsoft website every time you switch your computer on to make sure that your machine has the latest security patches? Knowing that you are not, MS adopts a ‘push strategy’. Each time you switch on the new patches are sent to your machine automatically; you don’t have to do anything to keep your machine safe.

Some of the money being given to local councils in the Greater Manchester area should be spent on implementing such a ‘push strategy’ to disseminate the latest information about the status of Covid 19 infections in our towns as assessed by the Director of Public Health. This could be done by running an Internet based service dedicated to doing just that. Residents would initially register an e-mail address with the service, and would receive regular updates, encouragement to continue self isolating if asked to do so and advice about infection control in their daily routine. Why should it have taken a query to a local councillor to supply evidence to support a statement she had made to unearth the fact that there was an interactive map* showing the rolling seven day number of new infections in the area I live in? How many councillors are themselves aware of this?

This virus is not going to go away quickly and we have to learn to live with it. The optimistic view of how the future is going to unfold is that at some time not too far ahead, an effective vaccine will be discovered. If we are lucky this may happen. But even if it does the first recipients will be those in involved in health care who are daily putting their own lives at risk treating Covid 19 patients and those who are particularly vulnerable due to existing conditions. The rest of us, and that includes old people like me, will have a lower priority. It may take two or more years before everyone who wants it has been given the vaccine.

The pessimistic view is that we will never have an effective vaccine or effective therapeutic drugs. This is at least a possibility which should not be discounted. Many colds are caused by coronaviruses and in the past one or two million years we humans have never evolved immunity to ‘the common cold’. So in the absence of medical methods of removing the threat to human life presented by this virus, be it for another couple of years or stretching into the future, we are left with public health interventions to mitigate its danger. This should be part of any ‘roadmap’ for the future.

In the fight against this virus it is not enough for us to be passive entities obeying rules we did no make and perhaps do not understand the logic of. Our first priority should not be to acquaint ourselves with the ever changing ‘rules’; it has to be doing whatever is necessary to keep ourselves and our families safe from infection. It is no use local politicians complaining that hospitality venues should not be closed because community transmission is highest where households mix, unless they also have a strategy for discouraging household mixing. To do this we need to have all the information available about where the infection rate is highest, where it is increasing at the fastest rate in our local area and regular reminders about why this is happening and the part our behaviour is playing in this.

Getting this information and advice on a regular basis to residents in the boroughs around Greater Manchester and similarly affected conurbations, isn’t ‘rocket science’. It simply needs a bit of imagination and effort on the part of local councils. If they cannot even manage this what makes anyone think they could run a less shambolic ‘Track and Trace’ system than the present government?

* Initially this map could be found at;

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=47574f7a6e454dc6a42c5f6912ed7076

If you go to this site you will be redirected to;

https://coronavirus-staging.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map

This is more detailed and more informative, but the text is not so easy to read.

If the links above are not ‘live’ then copy and paste the link into your browser.

“We’re all in it together!” by Christopher Draper

ASDA was packed today – the woman on the till reckons it’s because we’re about to get the full lockdown treatment in Wales – “but at least we’re all in it together”. I beg to differ…

1) April 2020, Dominic Cummings visited Barnard Castle despite lockdown regulations

2) September, Tony Blair photographed leaving Mayfair restaurant in breach of compulsory 14-day quarantine on return from trip to USA

3) September, SNP Rutherglen MP Margaret Ferrier travelled from Scotland and back on public transport to speak in Parliament despite having covid. She also preached in St Mungo’s Church, Glasgow

4) March, Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon journeyed to father’s birthday party despite ban on all but essential travel

5) September, Jeremy Corbyn MP defied “rule of six” to attend larger dinner party

6) July, The Prime Minister’s father (and former MEP) Stanley Johnson defied travel ban to visit his holiday home in Greece. On return to England photographed entering shops without wearing mask

7) October 5th Parliamentary authorities confirm that MP’s (allegedly including Matt Hancock) continued drinking alcohol in Parliament bar after the 10pm deadline imposed on the rest of us. Parliament refuses to identify the guilty individuals.

8) April, Government Housing Minister, Robert Jenrick MP, defied lockdown and travelled 150 miles to his parents’ Herefordshire home

9) April, Dr Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, ignored lockdown regulations and on two weekends travelled from Edinburgh to her Earlsferry holiday home

10) August 19th, EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan, defied ban on group meetings by attending a golf dinner in County Galway, along with other politicians and an Irish Supreme Court judge

None of the above individuals were prosecuted although tens of thousands of ordinary folk have been fined and on October 4th five Doncaster welders authorised to work on the Isle of Man Electric Railway were imprisoned for two weeks because they unwittingly breached regulations by visiting Tesco on their brief journey from the ferry to their hotel. Ironically they were singled out because they wore masks which aren’t required on the IOM.

As far as our political class are concerned, “Laws are evidently for the Little People!”

Christopher Draper, Llandudno

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ALL ABOUT EID?

HEALTH Secretary Matt Hancock has wished the country a 'Happy Eid' the day after regional lockdown measures were brought in across the north of England.
The measures prevent anyone from mixing with people from another household in gardens, houses and hospitality venues in a bid to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Taking to Twitter this morning Mr Hancock said: "I want to wish all my Muslim friends in the UK & around the world a very happy Eid al-Adha.
"This will be a challenging Eid for many, and I am grateful for your continued efforts tackling #coronavirus."

Eid al-Adha runs from July 30 to August 3 this year and is widely celebrated across the world - marking Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience.


Saima Afzal, a community inclusion activist and Blackburn councillor, said the Government “left it too late” to impose the restrictions.
She said people in the Lancashire town had already been warned against visiting households when it became clear to the council that infection rates were on the rise.
Speaking to PA news agency, she said: “Why did the Government leave it so late? Two hours before Eid, giving them little time to reconfigure.”
She said she understood why the restrictions had to be introduced, stating the virus affected every community.
“The issue for me is the timing, it’s really unfortunate,” she said.

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Vital medical equipment is being shipped abroad despite NHS shortages!

Medical Equipment Being Exported Abroad Despite NHS Shortages

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to wonder if that Bunteresque Johnson, and his sidekick, Dom Cummings, aren't exploiting this national emergency to kill off the elderly and the baby-boomer generation in order to cut the social security/pension bill. It may be a kind of “Shock Therapy”, disaster capitalism, approach to cutting public expenditure.


Dominic Cummings is on record as saying  it's "too bad" if the elderly die of the virus, – he later denied saying this - and how else can you explain, the cack-handed way the Government have gone about dealing with this crises?


Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, told us on 23^rd January, that Professor Christopher John MacRae Whitty, the Chief Public Health Officer for England, had revised the risk of the UK population getting the coronavirus from "low to very low" and said that the country was well prepared and well equipped to deal with it.


Since then, tens of thousands of people have died of the virus (a thousand in one day), and NHS staff are complaining of a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and their difficulty in getting tested. There is also a shortage of respiratory equipment.


A week ago, Bill Gardner, of the DailyTelegraph, wrote that millions of pieces of PPE were being shipped from Britain to Europe despite the NHS shortages. He wrote:


“Last week five million surgical masks and more than a million respirators were packed onto EU-registered Lorries by one UK wholesaler …and shipped from British warehouses to Germany, Spain, and Italy, despite severe shortages in the UK.”


According to Gardner, UK firms had told him that they had “no choice” but to keep selling lifesaving gear abroad because their efforts of help had been repeatedly ignored by the British government.


Milton Pena, who was an orthopaedic surgeon at Tameside Hospital, for 17-years, told me recently that the failure to do widespread testing and not to count coronavirus deaths in the community was 'premeditated', i.e. deliberate government policy. According to MailOnline, No 10 abandoned widespread testing more than a month ago, so the true scale of Britain's outbreak is a mystery. And why is this country still exporting PPE to other countries, when NHS staff, are complaining of a shortage of it, which is putting their lives at risk?


What's also curious is why 15,000 air passengers a day, are still flying into British airports even from high-risk countries, and aren't being screened or quarantined or even observing rules on social-distancing. They just walk onto the streets of Britain, after being given a leaflet, advising them to self-isolate for two weeks, if they feel I'll after landing.


Public Health England have said that screening  is ineffective and the Foreign Office, maintains that there is no evidence that closing borders or travel bans, would have any effect on the spread of infection. Yet, many other countries have done the very opposite. Professor Gabriel Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine, told the Financial Times:

"The UK is an outlier. It is very hard to understand why it (the British government), persists in having the open border policy. It is most peculiar."


And while this is going on, we're being told to stay at home, keep three metres apart, and risk fines and prosecution, if we infringe lock-down restrictions, much of which is of dubious legality. You couldn't make it up; it's like something out of a comic opera.

Flights from coronavirus hotspots continue to land in Britain!

Arrivals at Heathrow - Not being screened or checked for temperature

By Derek Pattison

Brian Bamford (Bammy), has cast doubt ("April Fool's Day comment on airports), on the validity of comments that I posted from Nicola Grundy, on Northern Voices, regarding the situation at Heathrow Airport. He seems to think that her comment is somewhat misleading and doesn't reflect the true situation at Heathrow Airport. While I cannot see that that in her comment, Ms Grundy claims that it's " business as usual' at Heathrow, since posting her comment, I have also checked further. 

Screening for coronavirus began in January in other airports around the world, but in the UK, it was simply ruled out as being ineffective. Public Health England said, "airports have been provided with leaflets and posters." Surely, this is like applying a sticking plaster to a gaping wound?

On the 30th and 31st March 2020, the Sun newspaper gave the following report about the situation at Heathrow Airport.

"Flights from coronavirus hot spots were still landing in Britain on Monday with thousands of passengers not being checked for symptoms. Planes from Italy, America, and Spain, all touched down at Heathrow yesterday morning with passengers simply walking through arrivals and onto public transport. Although many had masks, there were queues at arrivals and departures and there appeared to be barely any social distancing between travellers. One traveller posted an alarming video on Twitter showing dozens of passengers queuing up at check-in with no social distancing. He wrote:

'Unfortunately the penny has not dropped. While millions of people are in lockdown to help our brave NHS, this is what is going on at London Heathrow. Someone needs to get a grip.'

Around 12,000 passengers passed through Heathrow yesterday and although this was way down on the usual 213,000 a day and landings and takes off were down to one every fifteen minutes - as opposed to one every 45 seconds it still meant regular traffic all day."

If passenger arrivals at Heathrow Airport, can still at this late hour, walk straight onto the streets of Britain without any screening, even temperature screening, when they may have come from a high-risk country, then what is the point of police roadblocks, police drones, and telling people to stop at home, when people are still flying into the UK who may be contagious and possibly spreading the virus to other members of the public? This is tantamount to pissing in the wind.

Is Britain becoming a police state under Boris Johnson?

Police drone footage of Peak National Park

THE outbreak of Coronavirus in Britain is a serious matter, and I fully understand the need to introduce measures to contain and control the spread of the virus. Other countries in Europe and elsewhere, have introduced similar measures including the United States and Australia. But if social distancing is be enforced throughout Britain, then it must be done with proportion and common sense, and it is not clear that the British police can be trusted to do this.

Last week, I was stopped by two police officers in a van while I was walking home. They wanted to know where I had been and where I was going. I told them that I had been out shopping and had called to see a friend and that I was now making my way home. I was told that I shouldn't visit anyone at their home and that I faced imminent arrest if I didn't have a reasonable excuse for being out and about. The police officers said that this had all been ordered by the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. I was also told that I wasn't permitted time out of doors to undertake exercise. I told them that I knew nothing about these measures and that it sounded to me like we were now living in some kind of police state, in Britain. I told them that I shopped and looked after a vulnerable adult, and I was then allowed to complete my journey. A friend also told me that he'd been stopped one morning by the police while he was on his way to do shopping, while also on foot.

As I write, in the area where I live, Greater Manchester, care workers are still visiting homes, taxi drivers and bus drivers are still carrying passengers about and staff are working in the supermarkets. The dustbins are also being emptied and the post is being delivered. Currently local parks and takeaways are still open for business. Pubs, clubs and restaurants are closed but many shops and banks remain open. And yet, the police are driving about stopping people in the street to see if they've got a reasonable excuse to be out and about and are threatening to arrest people and could fine them, if they haven't. 

When the Prime Minister announced the lockdown on 23 March, he said people would only be able to leave their homes for shopping, one form of exercise a day, any medical need, or to provide care or help for a vulnerable person, or to go to work. Johnson also banned  gatherings of more than two people under the emergency measures.

So when a party of 20 people, gathered for a barbecue in Foleshill, a suburb of Coventry, after the imposition of the lockdown, they were shocked when local police - who'd smelled food being cooked outside - raided the house and tipped over the grill, bringing the party, to a sudden and abrupt conclusion.  The police tweeted:

"Unbelievably, we've just had to deal with 20+ people having a BBQ!! Please listen to government advice else this will get worse and will last longer!! They finished the message, '#RIPBBQ', before attaching a photo of a tipped over grill, with abandoned sausage rolls laying on the ground.

While the actions of the Coventry police may appear to have been justified in this particular case, under the current situation, the police nevertheless, appear to be also cracking down on what is deemed 'non-essential' - and by implication illegal - activity, by the authorities. In less than a week, Britain has become something of a police state, with millions of people effectively under house arrest, and the police being given blanket powers to enforce largely arbitrary rules.

It has been reported that Derbyshire police are using drones to spy on people going on 'non-essential walks' in the Peak District National Park, during the coronavirus lockdown. A video that has been made public, shows police drone footage of unsuspecting members of the public hiking, walking their dogs and watching the sunset. All totally harmless behaviour which is now deemed 'non-essential'. Although the Peak District could hardly be more sparsely populated, and there is little danger of spreading the virus to anyone, Derbyshire Police are warning the public to stay away from the Peak District.

In other parts of the country it is being reported that police are setting up checkpoints on Britain's roads demanding to know where motorists are going. In Cornwall, police threatened to search car boots to check whether drivers were off to the seaside.  In Cumbria, the police have warned members of the public, that they risk being fined if they visit the area, warning: "The Lake District is Closed."

Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said: "These are chilling powers that create a serious risk of arbitrary policing. Authorities are right to take robust measures to protect public health, but in truth the only way we can control the spead is through well-informed community co-operation, not just criminalisation. Basic safeguards are missing from these extraordinary powers and I'm afraid more draconian powers still are to come from the Coronavirus Act."

Under Boris Johnson, Britain's is creeping towards becoming a police state. Not many weeks ago, Johnson was telling us that there was nothing to worry about because everything was under control and there were contingency plans in place. It was all bollocks  as usual. They hadn't a clue. While football matches were cancelled along with other events, the Cheltenham horse-racing festival went ahead.

What Boris Johnson's Conservative government have managed to do is to panic and spook people and that's why they're panic buying in the shops and supermarkets. They should have also taken effective measures much earlier. Instead, Johnson preferred to toy with the idea of "herd immunity" -  that is letting the virus take it course to a large degree.

As for medical assistance, most of us have been thrown under a bus, because you ain't going to get any or it's going to take forever for you to get to see a doctor. The reason there are fewer deaths in Germany is because they've got a much better health care system than Britain - which has suffered from years of Tory austerity policies since 2010 - and they treat people. But you can bet your bottom dollar, that Prince Charles and Boris Johnson are getting first class medical treatment. Both of them managed to get immediately tested for the virus  when thousands including doctors are denied it. When asked why Prince Charles was able to get tested when others could not - including NHS front-line staff - Health Minister, Edward Argar, told Sky News, that the heir to the British throne's symptoms and conditions, "met the criteria."

How long this lock-down is likely to last is a moot point. Some health professionals have suggested that it might take as long as six months for Britain to get back to normal, Let's hope is doesn't take too long to get back to normal life and not too many lives are lost to the virus.