The test and trace data from government is highly misleading. How many people are estimated to have the virus? We dont know. How many were missed by the tests? Don't know.
And why are PHE and local authority public health doing almost EIGHT times as much contact tracing as SERCO? 25,000 call handlers tracked only 10,000 contacts in 2 weeks. That's why they are twiddling their thumbs. At our expense.
The positive lab test results graph shows 300-400 positives per day for June 4-10. That adds up to about 2500 cases. Yet they say they received 5900 cases reported to test and trace. Where did the other 3400 cases come from?
One can estimate crudely ~10,000 symptomatic cases per week in England early June (based on ONS data and allowing for up to half being asymptomatic). So how many cases do they believe are in the community, and why do they receive cases for follow-up not reported by the labs?
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A Trump Presidency raises scary issues for all of us about how far he will go with an authoritarian or Fascist agenda. Here are NINE questions about what might happen in 2025? (THREAD)
1. As Trump orders the removal of 2 million ‘illegals’ in the largest ethnic cleansing in American history since the genocide of American Indians: how many innocents will die or be killed? How will Mexico respond? Will these expulsions increase US labour costs and inflation?
2. Will he destabilise the global economy through punitive tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Will tariffs + fiscal incontinence cause inflation? If foreign states become poorer will they invest less in the US stock market + treasuries, leading to a stock market shock?
Today's Lancet climate and health report presents 56 indicators of health and climate change across FIVE domains. (Download the report for free from the Lancet website). Here is a thread of some of the key findings. #Lancetclimate24 (1)
Heat-related deaths among over 65s are at their highest ever level (2)
Almost half the global land area is being affected by extreme drought for at least one month each year. (3)
Whitty's excuse about upscaling testing is wrong. He should have set up an advisory group to get this moving from day one. The excuses about lack of infrastructure compared with S Korea is a retrospective excuse and misleading. (1) THREAD
S Korea and the UK developed a test on the same day in January. S Korea had managed to get up to 6-18,000 tests per day during February 2020...see below. (2)
We can see from Adam Kucharski's figure that their R fell below 1 by early March and they stopped the epidemic in two hotspot areas. They have since had five times fewer deaths and no lockdowns. We are not talking about 'mass testing'. (3)
On the Today programme this morning Sir John Bell echoed the official story that in the first six months of the pandemic we faced a new virus with little evidence to guide us. Nothing could be further from the truth. THREAD (1)
We can’t compare death rates between countries say statisticians. Sir Patrick Vallance wrote to the Inquiry that “a 'zero Covid' strategy could have been pursued, but required a national lockdown and border closures by the end of February.. (2)
to be continued indefinitely.” These statements are wrong. As early as January 28 2020 the UK Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) unanimously decided on a pandemic strategy based on the wrong virus, influenza, simply to limit the spread. (3)
One reason why climate change doesnt energise politicians and the public is because we describe heating in terms of temperature. Saying the world has warmed by 1.2 degrees seems like a nice pleasant weekend. Here are some other ways to describe it... (1)
We pump 1,337 tonnes of CO2 into our thin and fragile atmosphere every second... (2)
How much energy was required to heat the world by 1.2 degrees. In terms of 'Hiroshima bomb equivalents' how many bomb loads of energy have been added? Sixty, 600, 6 million or 6 billion? (3)
How does poor family purchasing power in 1734 compare with Universal credit in 2023?
Jacob Vanderlint in Money Answer’s All Things in 1734 gave a budget for a laborer, wife+4 children in London of 16shillings per week to cover meat, bread,milk, salt, sugar, butter, cheese and beer (to avoid perils of water), coal, soap, candles, thread and rent for two rooms.
We might add on another two shillings for crisis expenses, transport, clothes and medicines. In 1750 £1 was equivalent to £284 purchasing power in 2023. That’s £256 per week or £1109 per month for the family costs in 2023 prices