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14 May, 9 tweets, 5 min read
SAGE have rushed out minutes of yesterday's meeting, warning of the danger posed by India's B.1.617.2 variant.

As it usually takes several days for minutes to appear online, this looks like an effort to speak out before Monday's lifting of restrictions.

gov.uk/government/pub…
The modelling group's assessment is that B.1.617.2 seems to be 50% more transmissible than the B.1.1.7 Kent variant.

There's a stark warning that without measures to slow its spread this could cause an "unsustainable" surge in hospitalisations.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
They predict hospitalisations could again reach the kind of levels seen last April and this January, if nothing is done to stop it.

And DOUBLE that if the next step is taken and remaining restrictions are lifted on June 21st!

This is what they mean by "unsustainable pressure".
Their recommendation was to keep local restrictions in place where the B.1.617.2 variant has taken hold to buy time, and ramp up vaccination in and around those areas "as soon as possible".
But the PM doesn't believe "present evidence" shows any need to delay Monday's reopening.

There's no local measures, just a suggestion for people in those areas to "think twice".

And instead of surge vaccination, accelerating second doses for over 50s.

It looks like yet more dither and delay.

We're in this mess (again) partly because the government delayed restrictions on travel from India, despite rapidly rising cases there.

And now the variant is here, they're doing nothing to stop it spreading.

google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.…
Meanwhile public health officials in areas where cases are doubling every week as B.1.617.2 spreads are said to be "furious" over the lack of support for local action to stem the rising tide.

google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.…
Meanwhile in Bolton, currently the epicentre of the B.1.617.2 variant, cases are continuing to rise rapidly.

The only good news is that so far it's spreading much slower in the over 60s. Is this just the usual lag (see September), or will vaccines keep cases low in the elderly?
Thanks to @statsgeekclare for pointing out that I didn't include a link to the excellent coronavirus dashboard as the source of the graphs above.

You can track cases in Bolton here:
coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?…

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
16 May
It says a lot that so many politicians and their friends saw the pandemic as a get rich quick scheme.

In this case a disgraced former MP working with an organic dog food company owner (!) to broker a deal with a Hong Kong company, which itself seems to be a middleman. 🙄
Former Tory MP Brooks Newmark emailed Hancock to ask for his help to "make this happen".

Newmark had quit in 2014 after sending explicit photos to an undercover journalist who he thought was a young activist.

Not his first sext, it later emerged.

google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.…
He was lobbying on behalf of Zoe Ley, a former investment banker turned dog food company owner.

She setup a new company in May 2020 which helped broker two PPE deals, worth a total of £258m.

The BBC thinks she personally made over £1m from this.

google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.…
Read 9 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
15 May
"Decent hard working folk who aren't covid deniers", at the anti-lockdown protest in London today.

There's someone with a giant Q sign right in the middle of this shot. 🙄
More here, marching alongside covid crank Professor Fenton (who thinks the second wave was mostly false positives).

Pretty much an A to Z of conspiracy theories - QAnon, world government, eugenics, depopulation, child sex rings, microchipping people...

ImageImageImageImage
Meanwhile in Canterbury, disgraced former scientist Michael Yeadon (who thinks proposed covid booster shots may be a plot to depopulate the Earth) is addressing people in a park with a PA system.

Having recently complained that he wasn't able to do this.

ImageImage
Read 4 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
11 Apr
Covid sceptics' latest cause is the banning of Denis Rancourt from @ResearchGate.

Everyone from @toadmeister to @ClareCraigPath and @profnfenton have tweeted support for him.

The problem is he's a racist crank with no expertise in viruses and a long history of writing nonsense.
His recent output on ResearchGate (which he was repeatedly warned about before the ban) includes articles claiming "vaccines are inherently dangerous" and that the surge in deaths last spring wasn't caused by covid but was "mass homicide by government response".
Before covid he was also a climate change denier.

A 2007 article claimed global warming was a "useful myth" that "deflects attention away from real world issues" such as "power-driven financiers, corporations and their cartels backed by military might".

activistteacher.blogspot.com/2007/02/global…
Read 12 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
10 Apr
We now have data from mass testing in schools for the first 4 weeks after they fully reopened on March 8th, up to the end of the spring term.

The results suggest that transmission of the virus *has* increased since schools went back .. but mostly amongst staff.
Starting with nurseries and primary schools, the data initially looks rather alarming, with a huge jump in positivity rates the week after schools reopened.

However...
The data is also broken down by role within the school, and we can see that the government started rolling out free lateral flow tests for support and household bubbles to use at home when schools fully reopened.

These are included in the main school test figures!
Read 19 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
9 Apr
Carl Heneghan's latest article for the @spectator shows the professor of Evidence Based Medicine is either misreading or misrepresenting the evidence.

At least 90% of the deaths he lists in an article called the "hidden death toll of lockdown" are actually covid deaths!
He says it's "hard to imagine, let alone measure, the side effects of lockdowns", and kind of proves that by listing lots of deaths that mostly have nothing to do with lockdown.

The data he's using seems to be from here:

app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjo…

So what does it actually say?
Claim 1) "28,200 more deaths among diabetics than we'd normally expect".

This is true, but very misleading. Because 23,667 of those "diabetes" deaths actually listed covid as the underlying cause of death!

So most of them definitely aren't lockdown deaths. They're covid deaths!
Read 16 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
27 Feb
The latest graph and interview from @RealJoelSmalley starts by claiming that the response to covid killed more people than covid itself, and ends with a wild theory that vaccination drove the surge in deaths in January!

Needless to say, there's no real evidence to support this.
First he claims that there have been almost 40,000 deaths over the last year due to denial of healthcare.

Many of them over the summer, when there were no excess deaths!

As he says in his podcast interview, "any analysis is worthless if the data that goes in is not good".
And his data is not good.

Instead of using the five year average, he generates a baseline curve that he believes deaths would have followed in 2020 without covid and lockdown.

But this is based purely on deaths in late January / early February, extended out to the whole year!
Read 26 tweets

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