Thursday 23 December 2021

Time To End The Pingdemic

It is isn't even Christmas yet, but its already clear that the dire predictions about the effects of the Omicron variant are proving false. The latest information we have suggests that Omicron is much milder than the Delta variant, which itself was milder that its predecessors. As a consequence, even just of that, the proportion of people infected who require hospital treatment, let alone those who die, is somewhere between a half and just a third that of those infected with previous variants. On top of that, we have the effects on reducing serious illness, hospitalisations and deaths arising from the additional factors of widespread natural immunity, and vaccination. Nearly all those being hospitalised or dying, now, are people who have refused to get vaccinated.

The latest ONS data shows that whilst infections are rising – the number of Omicron infections is rising at a far faster rate than for all Covid infections – the number of hospitalisations remained flatlined, and is even declining, and the same applies to deaths. Nearly all those hospitalised or dying are people who were not vaccinated, many not vaccinated at all, and continues to show that the vast majority of deaths are amongst the elderly.

Again, this data, it has to be remembered, is deaths of people WITH Covid19, not FROM Covid 19. In other words, it is simply a measure of the people who have died from all causes, including being hit by a bus, but who also, in the last 28 days, received a positive Covid test. The ONS data I have provided previously indicates that only about 10% of those dying WITH Covid, actually die FROM Covid, as opposed to dying from some other cause, such as Alzheimer's, dementia, stroke, heart disease and so on.

So, taking that into consideration, and the fact that the large majority of those being hospitalised or dying even WITH Covid, are people who have the previous variants of it, rather than Omicron, its no wonder that the numbers for hospitalisations and deaths are pretty much flatlining. Firstly, they have little to do with deaths FROM Covid, and everything to do with the normal increase in deaths from all these other causes that always happens during the Winter, and secondly, because Omicron is milder than these previous variants, as it becomes more dominant, its effect is going to be to reduce the number of hospitalisations and deaths, not increase them, especially when the growing number of people that have immunity increases.

The media and opportunist politicians continue to try to skew this data, and make it say what it clearly does not show. One example is the focus on the data for London. But, London is a special case, because, for a range of reasons, London has very low rates of vaccination. On some accounts, only about 30% of people in London are fully vaccinated, and again many of them not vaccinated at all. So, its no wonder that London has suffered higher rates of hospitalisation, serious illness and death than other parts of the country. This is not a measure of the increased danger from Omicron, but of the failure of the London Mayor and others to persuade Londoners to get vaccinated, probably because they have been too busy engaging in other irrelevant courses of action, and tittle tattle about Christmas parties and so on.

It must be quite clear by now, looking at the actual data, that all of the scare stories about the effects of Omicron, used to argue for further lock downs and so on, were baseless. But, there is one further consequence of them that does pose a real immediate danger. All of the calls for further restrictions play into the continuation of the measures requiring people who have been “pinged” to self isolate. Even setting aside the question of the millions of people wrongly pinged, the whole process of “pinging”, and requiring a period of self-isolation is completely pointless, and damaging. To my count, Starmer himself must have self-isolated about four or five times, not because of being ill, but simply because of being pinged. That was probably at least one benefit to the rest of us, but, in general, it indicates the lunacy of such an approach.

Having known carriers of the virus be isolated, in a period when it was not widespread, and before there was vaccination, had some point, though, across the world its been seen that it would not be contained in that way. But, when millions of people have already been infected, when there is now widespread natural immunity from previous infection, and when about 90% of the adult population have been vaccinated, it is not just pointless, but counter-productive.

The way to proceed is on the basis of ensuring that everyone is fully vaccinated, so that even if they come into contact with some other infected person it poses no risk to them. Its why things like masks and passports are a useless diversion. Moreover, why should the 90% of the population that has got itself vaccinated be further penalised just for the benefit of a small, irrational minority that refuses to get jabbed? In some places, those that refuse to get jabbed are being charged for the hospital care, if they contract Covid, and there is rationality in such an approach, as against authoritarian measures to force people to be vaccinated.

But, the obvious area in which the pingdemic is again having immediate serious consequences is in the NHS. The media, daily, says that tens of thousands of NHS staff are off sick with Covid, and that the number could reach 50,000-100,000. But, of course, the vast majority of these staff are not off sick with Covid at all. They are off work, because they have simply been pinged, after having come into contact with the infection – which you would think must happen on a daily basis to staff in the front line!  At worst, some of these workers will have been infected, but as the data shows, infection does not at all mean illness, let alone serious illness.

It is sheer madness to have tens of thousands of health workers forced to stay away from work – indeed for tens of thousands of others workers too – simply because of being pinged. The rational way to deal with the virus, now, is not by trying to isolate those that have it, or even just come in contact with it, but is by vaccinating everyone so that they are not made ill by it. The government has reduced the period of self-isolation from 10 days to 7 days, provided those pinged get two successive negative tests, but the rational response is to scrap the requirement altogether, along with the testing. The actual test of whether someone should be off work should be simply whether or not they are ill.

By forcing people to stay off work even when they are not ill, but simply because they have been pinged is to ensure that the normal Winter crisis that affects the dysfunctional NHS will be worse than normal. But, that has nothing to do with Covid. It has everything to do with the irrational measures that are being adopted in response to it, not to mention the fact that the NHS itself is not fit for purpose.

6 comments:

George Carty said...

I read here that there's been an outbreak of the omicron variant in a research station in Antarctica, in spite of the staff members involved all being fully vaccinated, undergoing multiple PCR tests, and quarantining for 10 days in South Africa. My first thought on reading that is "if the new variant is this slippery, surely even the Chinese Communist Party won't be able to wipe it out".

What do you this will mean for China, given that (since the delta variant caused Australia and New Zealand to throw in the towel) it is now the only country still committed to a Zero Covid strategy, and that the "Zero Covid" has arguably replaced "fast economic growth" as the way in which the CCP legitimizes its rule?

Perhaps we can expect all hell to break loose in China in the coming months?

Boffy said...

I can only repeat that outbreaks of infection are meaningless. The constant harping on about infection rates, and numbers of infections really irritates me, because it shows that the media's propaganda war, in which they continually harp on about this ridiculous metric is swallowed by gullible populations who who don't understand the basic science.

Let's be clear, having immunity, whether natural immunity or artificial immunity via vaccination, does not at all meant that you cannot be infected by any particular pathogen. Lots of people after decades of having colds have immunity from various cold viruses, including coronavirus, rhinovirus etc. It does not at all mean that you cannot be infected by these viruses, and the likelihood is that each year, you will be. It simply means that your immune system is ready to respond to any such infection, and to prevent those viruses from multiplying inside your body, and causing you to be ill. The same is true in relation to the flu jab that people get each year. It does not stop you being infected. It stops you being seriously ill.

The same thing with all the stuff about the decline in antibodies after several months. Take the first ever vaccine - that produced by Edward Jenner to deal with Smallpox. The vaccine itself was produced by infected people with Cowpox, after Jenner realised that milkmaids who got Cowpox developed immunity to Smallpox (the origin of the term vaccine from the Latin Vacca for cow). But, no one vaccinated with Cowpox virus had Smallpox antibodies - they hadn't been infected with Smallpox virus. What they did have was an immune system that was now able to respond to Smallpox infection, by quickly producing Smallpox antibodies, because the virus was close enough to that of Cowpox, and to produce other immune responses such as production of white blood cells and so on, to prevent the smallpox from multiplying, and subsequently to kill it off.

Incidentally, the best way of sustaining such immunity amongst people who have it either naturally or from vaccination is by frequent exposure to the virus, so that the body continues to respond to it, and to boost the immune response to it, which is all that booster jabs do anyway. Again measures to restrict exposure and so spread of the virus are in contradiction to such a requirement.

With the vast majority of population - particularly those at serious risk - vaccinated against COVID, the focus on infections and infection rates is a total diversion, and I feel a deliberate diversion by sections that want to keep those restrictions in place whatever happens, each for their own narrow reasons. We have widespread, and multiple testing of populations. People are told to be tested several times a week - each one being as useless as another - whereas initially only handfuls of people were being tested. So, it is obvious that the number of infections recorded now is going to be multiple times what it has been in the past. But, the only people becoming ill are those at risk who have not been vaccinated!

Imagine what would happen each year, if, despite widespread vaccination, people were told they had to be tested for flu infections. Each year, tens of millions of people in Britain would show up as being infected and potential spreaders of the virus to others, some of whom might suffer serious illness or even die. But, of course, we do not do that, and for good reason, and the same should be true with Covid.

That China is using COVID to assert control over its population, as it faces multiple social challenges is not surprising, given the totalitarian nature of the state. What is so appalling is that so many who claim to be on the Left, and even defenders of workers liberty, should throw themselves so heartily into the development of similar measures in Britain!

George Carty said...

Immunity that stops infection altogether is known by epidemiologists as "sterilizing immunity": it exists for some diseases (including smallpox and measles, which is why those diseases can be eliminated by vaccination) but not for others. It doesn't seem to exist for respiratory viruses like colds, flu or covid: maybe that's because a virus reproducing in the upper respiratory threat isn't regarded by the immune system as a serious enough threat?

Your point about infection rates being meaningless in and of themselves is of course correct: that's probably why the zero covid zealots have resorted to making fantastical claims on "long covid", like that if you get even a mild case of covid in childhood you'll be permanently brain-damaged to the point that you end up dying of dementia in your 40s. Of course the beauty of such a claim (for them) is that it would take decades to prove it false.

Boffy said...

Quite right. Long Covid itself is largely a sham. No one can define it, and it came along conveniently at a time when it was clear that all of the claims about COVID being an existential threat to entire populations as against simply the 20% (mostly the elderly over 75) were completely bogus.

The supposed symptoms of long covid are so divergent as to be meaningless, and there is no scientific evidence of a connection between infection and any of these later developed symptoms that could be caused by any number of other factors nothing to do with COVID, including psychosomatic conditions, especially in conditions of mass hysteria. But, in any case, there is nothing new in people who had had a virus of all kinds later suffering other conditions, including all those supposedly caused by long covid. People suffering with ME, for example, are usually found to have had some illness caused by a virus, such as a bad dose of flu and so on.

Again though there is nothing new, everything that can possibly be thrown into the mix to be attributed to COVID is being, and that in itself should beg the question of why that is being done. But, we have a collective madness, and societies where the ability for individual critical thinking has disappeared, and no one is prepared to engage in thinking for themselves for fear of being vilified or cancelled.

George Carty said...

Propaganda that has zero basis in fact isn't usually effective, but the "long covid" propaganda is based on fact in two respects:

1. A significant fraction of people who get Covid do suffer longer-term chronic symptoms in the next few months: this is indeed basically ME, but is more common because Covid is a new virus. To get ME as a result of a long-endemic virus you'd have to somehow dodge it throughout your childhood so that you first encountered that virus as an adult.
2. A very few people have indeed suffered permanent brain damage from Covid: mostly they are those who had severe Covid as a result of being immunocompromised).

On the subject of the immunocompromised, I can't imagine it's a coincidence that one of the best-known zero covid activists in the UK (Deepti Gurdasani) is immunocompromised herself. Was she a patsy made an offer she couldn't refuse by dark and sinister forces?

I'm reminded of geneticist Hermann Muller, who was paid by the Rockefeller Foundation to scaremonger about ionizing radiation (and thus undermine the development of nuclear energy, which threatened to compete with the oil on which the Rockefeller fortune was built). He was in no position to refuse the offer because he was in financial dire straits due to his age (56 in 1945), lack of savings or pension (due to frequent job changes forced on him, often as a result of his socialist beliefs), and a 2-year-old daughter with a serious health condition. He was even awarded a Nobel Prize that he didn't really deserve on the strength of his research, which was likely another opportunity for blackmail designed to ensure his loyalty...

Boffy said...

It depends on what you mean by zero basis in fact. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was not based upon facts. They were used effectively by Tsarist pogromists, and later even more effectively by the Nazis, who were the ones who really popularised the document and printed copies in the tens of thousands. If by fact you mean that its only necessary to take some fact, however peripheral, and tangential to the claim you are making then, yes, that is often more effective.

So, yes, I accept that some people who have suffered COVID also suffer some long-term conditions, which may themselves be a consequence of having done so. My point, however, about it being largely a sham is precisely that

a) these cases are not different than the cases of people who have had other viruses, and also then subsequently suffered similar conditions, such as ME and so on, so it should really be termed post-viral syndrome, not long Covid

b) There will be a large proportion of people who suffer conditions after having been tested positive for COVID, or even been ill with COVID, but whose conditions, unlike in a) have nothing to do with having been infected. Correlation is not causation.

c) The fact that any and every subsequent condition is being termed long Covid makes the term meaningless, and adds to the impression that it is being used as a catch-all term used to hype up the effects of the virus, given that the vast majority of people infected with it are asymptomatic - even amongst the vulnerable 20% its only a small minority who actually do become seriously ill, let alone die - and so to be able to maintain the narrative that it represents some existential threat to everyone.

On this last point see my ONS link in the recent post setting out that the age adjusted mortality rate (all deaths) was greater in each year between 1990-2008, than it was in 2020, and in 1990 was 40% higher!

I tend to be very wary of anything that could be seen as conspiracy theory in relation to the motivation of individuals. As a materialist I prefer to see the working through of collective rather than individual interest. So, I can see why a sensationalist media hypes of stories, and I can see why, having done so, and created conditions, in which governments are led to act to assuage a moral panic, a government seeking to divert attention from other failings would do so. I see why, central banks that have been trying, and increasingly failing to inflate asset prices, see an opportunity, to print money and reduce bank rates, to divert money into asset prices again, and why that benefits the ruling class whose wealth and power is based upon the ownership of those paper assets.