What Do You Think Today?

[I'm Murrin]

Take a look at the graphs of total cases over the last few months, peter. Look at how the number dipped downward last month... then shot back up right after the 1 month lockdown ended. Do you really think lockdowns don't work? They just keep trying to hard to please the people who want to not be in lockdown, and ending it too early.

[peter]

Listen to the lady Murrin. She explains how the testing process is flawed, how the data we are being presented with is simply not stacking up, how the correlations we would need to see if this were a simple case of a transmissible disease leading to infection, hospitalisation and subsequent death are simply not there.

I don't know, maybe she will have changed her mind since this interview took place, but I'd doubt it. The numbers won't have changed and this is a very numbers focused lady. She is no Covid denier and neither am I, this disease can kill you: but if this was the plague of biblical proportions that we are being told it is, where is the evidence? I don't know anyone who has died of Covid: I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has died of Covid. I know a few people who have tested positive - but every year I know a number of people who have virus of this or that type and very occasionally someone who has been hospitalised or died. With my eyes I see nothing this year to make it any different. In respect of the hospital beds situation - every year for the last ten years we have had reports of trollys in hospital corridors. Everything about this pandemic is on bits of paper or on our screens, selectively chosen to drive the intended message home.

Take the 'new variant'; infection numbers were purportedly rising despite all of the measures we were adopting in order to prevent transmission (preventing autumn by sticking the leaves back on the trees), Johnson was saying that to cancel the Christmas relaxation would be inhuman - nailing his colours to the tree of sticking with his plan despite the anguished pleas of his opposition leader Kier Stamer for him to change course. When he buckles to the pressure of the data (that he accepts blindly - that others question mightily) and has to do a spectacular U-turn, then suddenly the new variant is running rife, it's seventy percent more infectious (but doesn't make you more sick...... but not less either, mark you....... and it won't impact on the vaccine rollout {that was designed for the original strain}) and is running rife. Forgive me, but this all seems a bit too of pat for me. It's like the announcements are following the PM's needs and not his actions following the data. Something doesn't feel right.

And couldn't you just feel the wave of despondency and anguish sweep over the country as he made his announcement? This will have consequences. I hate to think about what the suicide statistics will be for next year. Home deaths are up by twelve times at the present - twelve times! Over a hundred people a day dying in their own homes with no medical attendance. The collateral deaths as a result of this policy of lockdown, fear mongering, all the things I've mentioned above will dwarf the Covid death numbers, or more significantly, the numbers actually saved from death by the measures imposed.

And why is this emphasis on "people who have died (for any reason) within twenty eight days of a positive Covid test." Tell us the number of people who have died in a hospital ICU unit with verifiable Covid-19. How hard can it be. Forgive me (again), but isn't the significant bit of what is in that weekly death total the bit that is contained within the parentheses?

At any time, in any given year, and especially at winter time, if you were to fix upon the numbers of people with a virus, start hammering away at the infection rates, the numbers in hospital, the numbers of available beds and yes, the numbers dying, you could have just such a pandemic. And yes weeping nurses would be found to tell you that everything was falling apart at the seams. This pandemic is any other year, statistically hyped, data driven, media steered, fear mongered, granularly focused to the nth degree. It is a Frankenstein of our own making, a monster run out of control, and the price we are all going to pay is horrendous.

[I'm Murrin]

I have no idea who that person is and if you're only going to point to a single dissenting opinion I'm going to continue to pay attention to the majority on this.

I get your point about hospital places not being adequate to deal with the pandemic. But what the fuck does that have to do with dealing with the pandemic? We can't time travel back ten or twenty years to make the country more prepared for 2020, we have to deal with it in the situation we are already in.

You're right that the PM's announcements are convenient for him... he's a fucking Tory prime minister and he's Boris fucking Johnson. Why would you ever take his word asbout why he's doing something? All they care about is the political outcomes and what's good for their donors, not what's actually good for the country. They lifted the restrictions at the beginning to December because they wanted us to go out and spend money before Christmas. They put the restrictions back because that was a fucking stupid thing to do in the first place.

[peter]

I watched both the Sophie Ridge show yesterday and the Andrew Marr. It's difficult to maintain the position I have espoused in the face of the absolutely uniformity of the message put out in both programs, but it is only when you step back and actually perceive just how one sided that narrative is that you get some perspective.

A leading doctor from the BMA told us in grave tones that last week 44 people had been diverted to different hospitals because the ones that they had attended had not been able to cope with them. 44? My own local hospital diverts that many a week! Two hospitals in London had (we were told) issued emergency notification that they were unable to cope with any incoming emergency or acute admissions. Again, the hospital where my wife works is on the verge of such conditions on an almost weekly basis. This is, despite what this man was saying, not an unusual state of affairs, although from the presentation it could easily be assumed that it was.

In respect of the "single dissenting opinion" - have you heard of the Great Barrington Declaration? Go to gbdeclaration.org and have a look.

I don't know if you have any experience of how Government works in situations like this Murrin, but I do. The same epidemiological modeling was used in the case of the UK foot and mouth outbreak of the (what) early century, and it wreaked havoc on the agricultural sector before they managed to wrestle it back into it's box. This is the same situation writ large. Science is flying high on borrowed wings and it has the Governments of the world running scared.

Alas, to a man with a sledgehammer every problem is a rock and this is what we are seeing here. To Chris Whitty and his colleagues this is all about data and charts. They never look up from the screens in front of them for long enough to check out the real world in front of their faces. The hospitals are overwhelmed, yes - they're always overwhelmed; They're never not! This is no different excepting as a matter of presentation.

Matt Hancock sat on Sophie Ridge raising his eyebrows and speaking disparagingly about the people who had defied Chris Whitty's instructions to "unpack your suitcase" and stay in London instead of returning to their families for Christmas. "They were told not to travel unless they absolutely need to," he said. What doesn't he get? They did absolutely need to. They were desperate to get to the places they need to be in crises such as these, as they experience the certainties of the world they know crumbling about them. They were scared and frightened by Boris Johnson's hyperbolic statement about the "new variant strain", hyped up as a tool to disguise the failure of the existing measures to control the infection rate (a policy the consequences of which we are seeing this morning) and they did what Jacob Rees Mogg would have said was the "common sense thing to do" - they got the fuck out of Dodge!

And I am absolutely with Sophie Ridge, when she skewered that little shit Hancock on her program with the question "Why did you, a month ago, promise the people that they could have their Christmas, when it was entirely predictable - entirely predictable - that this would happen." Of course there was nothing he could say.

The problem with all of this situation is that it makes it very difficult to keep yourself grounded. I am acutely aware of the risk of spinning off I into the realms of fantasy in a thing like this: how could it be other - our lives have been delivered a disorientating blow in which the certainties we have enjoyed to date are suddenly put into question. This is of course increasingly likely if you are not fully buying into the main stream narrative - but it is also a potential problem even if you are...... and I believe that the hyperbolic and damaging policies we are following in our response to this nasty, but not out of the realms of our normal experience, virus are an example of this on a large scale.

(But allowing myself a bit of ungrounded slack for a minute, for whatever reason what we have seen is our societal norms dismantled before our very eyes. First with the mass gatherings of events such as Glastonbury and football matches, then down to mixing in pubs and restaurants and onto family gatherings and the like and finally into the ultimate separation of masking us so that we do not even look each other in the face anymore. Almost overnight we have moved from a society which assumes the right to do pretty much as we please into a collection of individuals who we ask "what are we allowed to do?"; from a society based around interaction with our fellow human beings to a collection of separate units, moving around like pollen grains in a petre dish, repelled from each other as if by some electrostatic force and I ask where do we go from here. This thing having been done, who will step into the void, who will determine what is to be done with this 'tabula rasa' and what will their goals be (in an odd way, this is not dissimilar to what happened in Russia after the fall of communism and the break up of the USSR - and that didn't end particularly well). The world we knew is gone: what will be rebuilt from the debris that remains to replace it? There will be great opportunity for the movers and shakers behind the scenes in all of this and it would be naive to think that there are not those who will be looking on with "greedy eyes" in order to see what can be made of it.)

But I'm guessing that we are not going to agree on these things Murrin and that's okay. I'll do what I'm told anyways, my position of doubt not withstanding - because I accept the possibility that I might be wrong as well (so best to not take any chances and go with the flow). No matter how it goes, here's to wishing you and yours a good Christmas and a safe New Year.

[Avatar]

What is the "mainstream narrative" though?

Certainly I would think that some things are simply incontrovertible regardless of anybodies narrative?

There is certainly a pandemic. (A world-wide epidemic.)

Around 4% of people who contract it die, and long-term effects of surviving it, while insufficiently known yet, in at least some cases appear quite debilitating.

Mask wearing and social distancing hamper its transmission. (As they do the transmission of a great many other communicable illnesses.)

There are a finite number of hospital beds and staff available for treatment of patients.

I think all those are things that nobody can disagree on.

So what is the basis for disagreement then? The fact that we are altering our social norms in the face of it? That government is imposing regulations in order to do so? That unless these norms are altered, society will not be able to treat those affected? That the numbers are different than what we assume / are told?

Not seeing exactly what the basis for opposition is here...

--A

[peter]

The mainstream narrative is that the presentation is 1) that the data is accurate to a degree beyond the point where it can be questioned 2) that even accepting the accuracy of the data that it cannot be interpreted in any other way 3) that the policies of lockdown and social separation are the only responses that can be considered 4) that the attention must be absolutely focused in the direction of what this is doing to the people who contract the illness and the attempts of Governments to control the disease and that the immense collateral damage is given not so much as a thought 5) that to buy into this narrative has taken on an almost quasi-religious aspect and to question it even in the slightest is to be frowned upon, to be out on a limb in some way.

There are pandemics every year.

A brief glance at the John Hopkins data on mortality on a country by country basis shows that the mortality is nowhere near four percent. And even if it were, what would this be four percent of? The general population? All people who get infected? The ones who develop symptoms? The ones who are hospitalised? There is evidence that there is significant innate immunity within the population to this virus, such that a high proportion will be resistant to it before they ever even contact the virus, and that a high proportion of those who do will shake off the virus as they would any other mild viral infection. So it is not four percent of the population that are going to die; it is a tiny tiny proportion - and for this the collateral damage that will destroy millions of lives, cause innumerable deaths by suicide, incalculable lost life-years by other medical diagnoses failing to be made, by the early deaths resulting from missed appointments, missed treatments, money failed to be available for future health care as a result of economic damage leading to further lost life-years in the future....... The list goes on.

Mask wearing and social distancing might hamper transmission in a perfect world. But have you seen how people wear masks? How people practice social distancing? And say you enforced these measures to the point where any efficacy they could have in this perfect world was achievable - to what end? They hamper transmission. Hamper. Not stop. So we wait, while this hampering is occurring for what - for everybody in the world to be given this vaccine - that doesn't stop you getting the virus, that doesn't stop you transmitting the virus, whose efficacy in terms of how long it will provide protection for, how often it will need to be repeated (monthly, yearly?) - and while you wait the stuff I'm talking about above goes on - and on - and on .......


And the hospital beds. In the UK we put up nightingale hospitals in cities all over the country during the first wave so that the hospital's would not be overwhelmed. Where are they now. Did they evaporate overnight? The first time round they lay empty while the regular hospitals were emptied out (resulting in god knows how many lost life-years in consequence), and while the science predicted onslaught of patients never happened and the staff lay around in the sun outside with nothing to do (I know - I saw them!). The overwhelmed hospitals argument simply does not stack up - or at least any more this year than it would in any other when the health service has been bowed under the strain of successive years of cuts and economies that have impaired it's proper functioning. When the question of where these nightingale hospitals are now was put to a spokesperson on the radio the other day, the excuse given was that it is a staffing problem. Well why were they built in the first place then? Was no thought given to that when they were being put up? And it's crap anyway; the nursing agencies in the UK are awash with nurses whole took early retirement in order to pull huge salaries working as agency staff when it suited them. The private hospitals and cosmetics clinics are full of doctors trained at the public expense who could be justifiably seconded back into the NHS to work under more experienced doctors in the field within these hospitals. It simply doesn't stack up.

Sorry Av, the basis for disagreement is there - it's very much there and simply using my eyes I see nothing, nothing, that remotely justifies what has been done to our lives, our societies, our futures on the pretext of this statistical pandemic. The price we are going to pay for this is unknowable - unknowable. What level of death would justify this? We soak up the deaths caused by smoking, by drinking, by obesity in their hundreds of thousands every year without so much as a thought (and I'll bet more than four percent of the people who get lung-cancer die), and yet for this we destroy our economies, our lives, our societies? No basis for disagreement?

Sorry - not buying it. If four percent of the entire world population were wiped out by this disease I would still question the appropriateness of the measures we are putting in place to control the virus: at the actual percentage (whatever that may be) I think them disproportionate to an eye-watering degree.

I'm interested in your take on this Av, because you have always struck me as a very fatalistic type of person. Your take has always been (correct me if I'm wrong) that life is a pretty pointless exercise at best and that the best response is simply to make the best of it and take the punches when they come as stoically as possible. Yet your take on this seems much at odds with the 'chips in the air, landing where they will' approach that I would have (perhaps wrongly) expected. Now I'm entirely comfortable with taking my chances with the virus (and taking the consequences on the chin if it goes wrong on me) in order to continue with the life I know, but more importantly because I consider that the landing zone from this is infinitely more questionable following the course that our Governments have decided upon. The consequences I know will occur from this (in terms of the collateral damage etc I outline above), seem to me multiple times less desirable than the speculative consequences that might or might not occur if we adopt a simple medical response to the problem, without going down the (probably doomed to failure anyway) control route that we are currently following. The longer term aspects of how it effects our future freedoms etc, I'm not even thinking about here, but they still lie in back of all of this. Where will we land and who will make the running when we do - the questions are simply too big. But you on the other hand, seem to be more stoic in your acceptance of the official line. Strangely, I'd have expected us to both be taking the opposite positions to where we are.

Nowt so queer as folk eh?

[I'm Murrin]

So what are you proposing, peter? That pretty much every government in the world is collaborating to take this out of proportion and impose controls on people? That the Tories in the UK conveniently discovered this new variant so they could impose more restrictions and therefore chose for the entire EU - and more - to close their borders to us?

[peter]

It doesn't do to underestimate the power of simple human stupidity Murrin. Governments around the world have bought into the inflated value placed on science as a sort of 'Wizard of Oz' whose pronouncements must never be questioned. This phenomenon has a name - 'Scientism' - and I was taught about it forty years ago. In respect of the new variant, the WHO have been tracking new variants of the virus since day one; the problem here in the UK was not that there was a new variant, but that Boris Johnson used it politically to hyperinflate its significance in order to facilitate his U-turn on the Christmas relaxation. Why did he do this - because (as I've said above) when you use fear as a tool of social manipulation and the toothpaste tube runs dry you either have to resort to coercement - or up the ante on your fear arsenal. The closing of the boarders is a simple example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Johnson simply didn't predict the international response that resulted from a speech he intended for domestic consumption purposes only (yet another example of his unfitness for the position he finds himself in) and here we are. This is what happens when the science follows the politics and not the politics following the science.

But okay - I'm going to ask a few simple questions and I'd like you all to give them some thought, more perhaps because I think it important that you do than because I want you to provide answers.

Firstly, how do we get the freedoms that have been taken away from us back.

We are told that this or these vaccines that are soon to be widely rolled out are at least good enough to stop one from actually dying from this (or is it these) virus (viruses) and so, one might assume, that when the vulnerable have been vaccinated and provided cover against them, we might resume our mask free and non-distanced futures without further let or hindrance. But no. Already Chris Whitty and Professor Johnathan Van Tam have said/implied that the restrictions we labour under are with us for quite possibly years to come. The Whitty's and Van Tam's of this world are never going to stop so I ask again; what is our exit strategy here.

What is the route back to our normal lives?

It is now apparent how easy it is for our liberties to be taken away from us, but it remains to be seen how easy it will be to get them back. The evidence to date is not encouraging. (This, incidentally is exactly what Hashi, Don and I were arguing twelve months ago, before the risk became reality; it was as plain as the nose on your face where this was going even back then.)

Secondly, we are continuously hearing this chilling phrase 'the new normal'. Question: who defines what this new normal is? Supplementary question; what are our options if we don't like it?

These are really important questions to me - and I hope they are to any of you who might be reading as well. I thank the guys over at Talk Radio (especially Julia Hartley Brewer, who I would normally be a million miles away from on just about everything) who have provided a continuous outlet for 'the alternative view' and have shone a never wavering spotlight on exactly what is being done to us here. They/she are/is responsible for the message in this post.

[Avatar]

Well, one thing I think this has brought home to people is the simple fact that the "freedoms" you think you have are merely the whim of the state.

Anyway, technically, you are still free to do anything you want, as long as you accept the consequences.

Now, in theory, you would get them back when everybody is immunised, has immunity, or when the virus is eradicated.

"Normal" though is pretty nebulous. What you really mean by "normal" is "what I am accustomed to" and that is always subject to change as circumstances etc. change.

normal
/ˈnɔːm(ə)l/

adjective

1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.

There's always a "new" "normal," it's just that usually it happens either so gradually that we don't notice it changing, or so fast that we have no choice but to adapt to it.

This particular case has been a strange mixture perhaps, perhaps also due to shifting the goalposts so often.

Maybe, since I don't feel particularly inconvenienced by the restrictions, I am less concerned about getting back to "normal."

Indeed, I see considerable benefits to this...less traffic, less fatalities, less pollution, less crime, and indeed, less illness. Dunno about you all, but we haven't had a flu season this year, and I personally haven't had so much as a cold since lockdown etc. started.

I do grant that the economic impact is far greater, especially on industries and services built around travel and social gathering, but the automobile destroyed the livery stable and horse-drawn carriage industries...

What has really stood out to me here, (and which I've mentioned before), is how all the "essential" workers are the ones we tend to pay the least.

Maybe if they're so essential we should re-look that...

--A

[sgt.null]

I will gladly accept a raise.

[peter]

I've worked through this on minimum wage from day one. There is no work from home in my line, and no respite from it until they come up with a machine to do my job (at which point presumably I go onto the scrapheap) or I die in the traces.

I wake up today more depressed both for my personal future and that of my country than I have been for a long time. Michael Gove in today's Times tells us that he looks forward to a bright new future of opportunity in which we can put the rancour and ugliness of British politics since the referendum behind us, and the Express tells us that we are of into a golden future having at last broken free from the injustices that have shackled us for the past fifty years.

I look out and see a country ripped in half, the one divided from the other by visceral difference that will now never dissapear until we are all dead. I see the personal freedom and liberty that I have enjoyed in terms of movement, of where I go and when a distant memory. Even if I could get on a plane and go to see the far-flung places of the world that I have so loved in the past, I could no longer afford to do so and the quarantine restrictions incumbent upon reentry into the country cannot be accommodated in workplaces such as mine. The restaurants I have patronised are no longer places I want to be in. I have no desire to sit behind screens, served by bemasked waiters and waitresses, socially distanced in venues stripped to the bone of the small paraphilia that made them distinct and individual. I'd rather be at home.

The 'new normal' is not alas, a place that has anywhere in it for the likes of me. There is no yellow brick road that leads to the sunlit uplands of Boris Johnson's fantasies - not in my world.

(Edit; Peter gives himself a swift kick up the arse. "Pull yourself together you sniveling little pup!" The benefits of having a shallow little mind incapable of maintaining any depths of strong emotion over a sustained period of time. )

[Avatar]

At least you don't live in the US Pete. (Talking about a country torn in half.)

Politicians fantasies aside though, it's rarely quite as bad as we fear it will be, even if it is worse than we hoped. In the long run, things will reach equilibrium, because that is the nature of nature.

And hey...at least your country has vaccines...

Rich Countries Hoard Vaccines

Rich countries' success in buying up most of the vaccine supply have left the rest of the world "scrambling for supplies" as they try to protect their populations, campaigners say.

The world's wealthiest countries have reserved enough vaccines to allow them to inject their populations multiple times over, and have started administering shots...

...Meanwhile, poorer countries are firmly at the back of the line, and may have to wait years for mass vaccination.

Researchers and campaigners say the difference will be stark: One estimate from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says that 51% of vaccine doses have been reserved by countries representing less than 15% of the world's population.

Emphasis mine.

--A

[peter]

Reports today that the army are drafted into Dover in order to "help clear the backlog" of lorries stuck in and around the port, following Boris Johnson's declaration of the new variant strain of Covid 'ravaging' the country.

Yeah right. Anybody with half a brain knows exactly why those soldiers are there; to keep a lid on the growing anger of the thousands of drivers who have been detained in their cabs over the Christmas holiday, with precious little in the way of amenities and support while they endure their wait to be tested and then hopefully allowed to return home. But they will get their revenge - because when they eventually get home, they won't come back for love nor money until the looming post-transition ports fiasco is absolutely nailed down, which will take months! So Britain will pay for their lack of hospitality to those poor men, deprived of the ability to be with their families through no fault of their own, but rather as a result of the rash overstatement for political purposes of a shiftless PM who was simply too stupid to foresee the consequences of his own words. It will serve us right if no continental driver (upon which our supply of fresh produce and vegetables is wholly dependant) decides to come back here for six months. We should hang our heads in shame at the way that these drivers have been treated; we don't deserve the service they provide us.

-------------------0----------------

Dawn French and the BBC are facing a storm of criticism about the inclusion in the recent Christmas Special of The Vicar of Dibley of a reference to the Black Lives Matter organisation and the killing of George Floyd. They proclaim that the reference was entirely in keeping with the sentiment and character of the fictional vicar, and I guess it was included in order to sustain the increase the 'real world' illusion that the makers hope to present.

But hang on, this is not the real world. This was a special being made to air on Christmas Day. Would it not have been okay, just for one day, to leave the problems of the real world just there - in the real world? Could the viewers not have been afforded just one hour without having the nasty brutish realities of the real world thrust down their throats? Would it have been too much?

[Avatar]

Well, the special was only 30 mins.

Eh, I mean I noticed it, but it seemed perfectly natural to include, if a bit awkward. Didn't bother me or drag me from escapism. In fact, I prefer it when things like this acknowledge the reality of the world around us.

Art is a mirror after all...The lie which helps us recognise the truth...

--A

[peter]

The top man of The Royal College of Psychiatrists warns today that upwards of ten million people will require long term treatment and counselling in the wake of the Covid crisis as a result of the disruptive shock, which he puts on a par with that suffered in following the second world war.

The toll of lost and ruined life-years from this is alone is incalculable.

It is entirely possible to respect the threat and danger associated with Covid, but but to simultaneously question the policies that have been adopted to deal with it. Like Professor Sunetra Gupta (professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University) I consider the social and economic costs of lockdown to be simply too high for the policy to be justified and I point also to her observation that they may be actually counterproductive as in the limiting, but not halting of the spread of infection, they are effectively preventing the build up of the herd immunity that ordinarily occurs (and upon which the shielding of the vulnerable in our society as they progress into immune senescence is dependent).

I maintain like her, that a policy of shielding of the vulnerable, while the rest of society continues to function in as normal as possible a manner would be far more effective (not to mention proportionate to the risk) in the long term dealing with this situation while simultaneously limiting the worst of these costs.

I also fundamentally object to the 'mission creep' aspects of the dealing with this pandemic, where it is now being spoken of almost openly, as a point from which measures designed to effect completely different ends, unrelated to the pandemic (but which can be introduced under the umbrella of measures attempting to deal with it) can be brought forward. There is to me a sinister aspect to behaviour of this kind which I want no part of.

If holding these views puts me into the 'swivel eyed loon' end of the social spectrum then so be it. Would, from my point of view, that more of us were similarly mentally challenged.

[I'm Murrin]

Herd immunity isn't really something that "ordinarily occurs" in these kinds of things. Most herd immunity comes from deliberate vaccination efforts, or things like chicken pox where exposure to a minor illness provides protection from a more serious one.

[peter]

In fairness Professor Gupta used a different term which I can't remember, but the essential idea being the same, that the various "arms of the immune system" (as she termed it) form a collective response amongst large numbers of people that have essentially provided us the means to survive viral challenge down through the ages, and certainly from time long before anything like vaccination was available. This evolved system is why as a species we are still here. I don't know - maybe she's wrong but given her position her opinion must surely be pertinent. Sorry I can't describe it better but her interviews are easily accessed on YouTube via a short search.

(Edit; Just thought I'd check it out though, and the Wikipedia definition of herd immunity says "Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to infections, whether through vaccinations or previous infection........" {my italics}. I know Wikipedia isn't the best place for taking info as gospel, but in this case I'm pretty sure they have it right. In the case of the chicken pox example, are you mixing it up with the fact that people who had had cow-pox were discovered to be immune to smallpox? This was the advent of the work by Jenner that led to the use of vaccines as we see them today. But interestingly, there has been suggestion that our familiarity with other coronavirus types that cause the common cold may be partly instrumental in conferring a degree of innate immunity to Covid in the general population that has not been hitherto given sufficient consideration.)

[Avatar]

Tightened restrictions here as cases surge, including banning alcohol sales for the next 15 days (over New Years) so many people are going to be upset, except the black marketeers.

Also increased curfew, no gatherings, etc. Might be lucky and get a quiet new years for a change, (my area is very high-density) but doubtless there will be people ignoring the regs as well.

(I feel like we have multiple covid threads now... but I guess many of are thinking of it, so entirely on topic. )

--A

[peter]

Tonight on BBC news we have the main story being that hospitals are reporting that they are near breaking point dealing with this...... while on the front page of the Telegraph today they report that the nightingale hospitals (put up in record time during the spring in response to the first wave) are being dismantled.

The reason that the hospital capacity is nearing its limits - there are no beds left....but there are ten percent less beds available due to the need to socially distance them. The need to socially distance them, to stop transmission of the disease between the beds - the reason people are in the beds, because they already have the virus. The reason that the nightingale hospitals are being dismantled, there is no staff to man them - the reason there is no staff, because they are all at home watching Netflix - sorry quarantining following testing positive (at what point do you send your front line soldiers go home just when there's a battle to fight?) for the virus whether they actually have the disease or not.

This is all making my head spin and the truth of it is that the Government have gotten themselves into a real tangle with this and it is they (as much as us) that have no exit strategy. I don't know what the answer is, but I know a fuck-up when I see one.

[peter]

Worrying little snippets out there for any with eyes to see and ears to hear.

The lockdowns are not, it appears, being accepted with quite the equanimity that BBC reports of late would have us believe. A day or so ago, reporting on the introduction of a full lockdown across the whole of Northern Ireland, the roving reporter spoke to four different people, members of the public out on the street enjoying their last day of freedom before settling in for the duration, all of whom to a man referred to the necessity of what was being done as being "for the best".

Where, I wondered, were the people (of whom I come across daily in numbers at least equaling those in support) who were critical of the policy? Surely not everyone in the whole of the province was happy at having their freedom curtailed, their job put at risk, their life upended and thrown into disarray? Well it appears that they are indeed out there, it is simply that we are not being told about them. While odd snippets of news appears in the local media of protests here, and gatherings there, of people coming out onto the streets to demonstrate their opposition to what is being done, by and large it is not being reported in the national media and certainly not on the BBC.

More disturbing even is the by all accounts heavy handed approach that the police have been taking in putting these protests down - masked officers in numbers (and riot gear) quickly moving in to disperse and/or detain the offending gathered, using non too light a touch in doing so. It appears that our once respected (if not loved) police force has rapidly morphed from neutral law enforcers into a quasi Government militia, willing to follow the order of the day with little question as to the rightness or otherwise (in respect of our civil liberties) of what they are doing. That news of such overzealousness has to dribble out, circumventing the normal channels should of itself be a scource of concern to any person of a libertarian bent. (As an aside, one could comment upon the almost imposibility of finding an officer to come out in the event of a home burglary or shoplifting offence, but the sudden availability of scores in the case of putting down people choosing to exercise their hard won rights in respect of protest....but this is another thing altogether.)

And it does not end here. Postings on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook that do not follow the mainstream narrative have been removed or, if not so, arbitrarily tagged as "unreliable" or "unverified", while statistics put out by politicians and the like which run in the direction of flow that the Government of the day deem appropriate, are allowed to pass without question. Further than this, in a creepy form of behind the scenes censorship, evidence that runs contrary to the state sanctioned narrative (the Danish study that demonstrated the virtual nonexistent effect of mask wearing on protection from infection being a case in point), previously easily available, is suddenly becoming much harder to access, buried much deeper in the thousands of results that most searches elicit.

Whether you buy into the mainstream narrative on lockdowns or not, these things should concern you. Whether you or someone who takes a different position on all of this is correct, we are all liable to be living with these things for a long time to come.