Covid: What they don’t tell you

[FreedomIS]

Not a fan of the DM but thankfully and finally reliable data and facts are being reported.
People should be angry about how misleading the government has been.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8971669/What-DONT-tell-Covid-facts-twisted-strike-fear-hearts.html

@FreedomIS

Deaths from influenza/pneumonia: Yes I know it isn’t COVID! But ...

1976 - 62,357
1999 - 60,018
1997 - 57,271
1982 - 57,220
2000 - 56,623
1983 - 56,192
1995 - 55,828
2017 - 50,100

Has the government handled this the right way?

Yes.

The above figures are for years without any type of lockdown or restrictions on group sizes and mask wearing etc. Without lockdown in March, and all of the various restrictions since then, our current covid death rates would be way worse than they are now. So a ridiculous comparison.

They could stop this now though, improvements have been made with treatments, many people have obviously had it..they could say take all the info into account and gently begin an easing of restrictions etc etc. They seem completely unwilling to listen to anyone else or to entertain a different point of view, plus they’re still continuing with the fear propaganda, it’s bizarre.

But of course the government got it wrong. They assumed it was a virus that would wipe out 5-10% of the population. It became apparent it wasn’t, but rather than admit they got it wrong and sunk the economy for nothing, they will drag out this ‘war’ for the foreseeable to save face.
All governments? All co-operating? All at once? And the drs, scientists, healthcare workers, nurses? All of them? All on the same page? How remarkable. What an astonishing conspiracy. I take my hat off to them, they've acheived something never before done in the whole of human history. In order to save face. Ok.

[quote FreedomIS]@conkersarebonkers

“The number of winter deaths last year the hit highest level in more than 40 years after the failure of last year's flu jab. There were an estimated 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2017/18 - the highest recorded since winter 1975/76, figures from the Office for National Statistics show. 30 Nov 2018”[/quote]
Not sure why you're quoting that at me? That's excess winter deaths - i.e. the fact that more people die in winter than in the rest of the year -
not just flu/pneumonia deaths. Dementia and Alzheimer's accounted for 54.1% of the excess deaths, for example.

Here is a link to the actual ONS page if you (or anyone else) is interested in seeing the actual breakdown: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/excesswintermortalityinenglandandwales/2017to2018provisionaland2016to2017final

OP you’ve cherry-picked the worst years.
Here’s year by year

@GreyishDays

And? We didn’t have lockdowns then either. If you extrapolate the numbers to match today’s population, those years are even worse.

The daily mail article is very poorly written and some of the figures are wrong- for eg the number of icu beds that are usually available in Scotland. And one of the problems is that it’s not just the number of patients in ICU - it’s the fact that patients with COVID tend to stay there for much longer so beds are not freed up. And the NHS usually runs generally with high bed occupancy levels so having to treat all these extra patients will quickly overwhelm the service. www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/bed-occupancy-in-the-nhs
Staff also get sick and you can’t run the beds without staff.
Yes there are flu deaths every years but we can vaccinate for flu, it’s not so contagious and it doesn’t show the same exponential increase in cases . www.healthline.com/health-news/why-covid-19-isnt-the-flu

Tbh if it's all a government conspiracy one wonders how the government benefits from people wearing face masks and having a tanked economy.

[quote FreedomIS]@GreyishDays

And? We didn’t have lockdowns then either. If you extrapolate the numbers to match today’s population, those years are even worse.[/quote]
You’re trying to say there are as many deaths from flu and COVID though? But there wasn’t lockdown etc and most years it’s much lower.

I don’t know. What are you trying to say?

I’m not being stroppy about that, just not understanding.

This thread shows exactly why an objective discussion about Covid will never be possible on MN.

mobile.twitter.com/john_actuary/status/1330073548245901314

mobile.twitter.com/ADMBriggs/status/1328999957270040580

@BoulangerieBabs

Dear god if people have so little critical thinking ability that they can't work out what's wrong with this article then I truly despair.

Yes indeed. The irony of an article supposedly about reliable data and facts that is full of errors and incorrect data!

Given the source of this, I only did a quick skim and didn't fact check it. That said I read enough to know that there are NO new facts here, and yes, many of them are verifiable. At one level or another they have been reported in myriads of places - including, in the UK, the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC - for many months now. So the only "finally" about it is "finally the DM has noticed what loads of other scientists, media and other observers have noticed".

But given that Mumsnet is full of curtain twitchers and the other kind of "reporters", you are wasting your breath trying to discuss facts here. Never let facts get in the way of mass hysteria.

Personally I dont believe a lot of what is in DM. They seem to push that only the vunerable get Covid. I know lots of people who have had it all ages. I know people who have had it twice and people who have died. The people who died not all underlying illnesses covid killed them. I think people need to use their common sense.

Important new paper in Nature. No evidence that asymptomatic “cases” can transmit the virus. Sample size of ten million! Definitive, but don’t post it on Facebook as they’ll mark it as “misleading”! LOL!

www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

We already knew asymptomatic (rather than presymptomatic) cases were low risk for transmission, but okay, LOL I suppose.

OP can you just come out with it and say what your theory is for what’s really going on? Clearly you’ve got one, if you’re talking about how ‘they’ are hiding things from us and only a few people ‘get it’. Why not say what ‘it’ is and who ‘they’ are?

It would be quite frustrating if this thread turned into yet another 300-post ramble that never made any arguments other than dark mutterings about ‘them’ and links to someone else’s YouTube videos.

Not definitive as a study of asymptomatic transmission! 10m people in study but only ~160 definitely positive asymptomatic cases within that group.

Here is another Nature link for you, discussing evidence about asymptomatic transmission:
www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03141-3

"Although there is a lower risk of transmission from asymptomatic people, they might still present a significant public-health risk because they are more likely to be out in the community than isolated at home, says Andrew Azman, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who is based in Switzerland and was a co-author on the study. "

@raviolidreaming

The issue with 'underlying health conditions' is that it doesn't account for life expectancy had that person not contracted covid. Is a 35 year old with diabetes an acceptable death because they had an underlying health condition? A 45 year old with asthma? A 70 year old with stable angina who was otherwise fit and active? Underlying health conditions doesn't mean that death was imminent. People aren't expendable because they aren't in perfect health.

Agreed. I'm running out of ways to explain that to people. It's frustrating.

@FreedomIS

There is a particular group of people who will not believe 2 + 2 = 4 if you tell them it was printed in the Mail. And it’s not a small group either.

There's a particular group of people who will believe 1+1=1 if it's printed in the Mail and it's not a small group either

Or a very bright one

[quote FreedomIS]Important new paper in Nature. No evidence that asymptomatic “cases” can transmit the virus. Sample size of ten million! Definitive, but don’t post it on Facebook as they’ll mark it as “misleading”! LOL!

www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w[/quote]
Why are you copying and pasting text from Toby Young's tweets as your posts? Or are you Toby Young (and if so why are you unable to calculate 1% of a number?)

@Igglepiggle78

They could stop this now though, improvements have been made with treatments, many people have obviously had it..they could say take all the info into account and gently begin an easing of restrictions etc etc. They seem completely unwilling to listen to anyone else or to entertain a different point of view, plus they’re still continuing with the fear propaganda, it’s bizarre.

They eased restrictions over summer and with the schools going back, and now we have a second wave so restrictions have had to be tightened again in the form of another lockdown. So how do you conclude that now would be a good time to loosen them up again?

That flu/pneumonia quoting is such misleading nonsense as a comparator...

The stats don't separate out influenza from pneumonia. People at the very end of their lives often die from or with bacterial pneumonia because their lungs are so weak they develop it easily and die from it. If influenza was being reported alone, it would be a much smaller figure (mainly thanks to the vaccine, of course).

@FreedomIS

There is a particular group of people who will not believe 2 + 2 = 4 if you tell them it was printed in the Mail. And it’s not a small group either.

Ain't that the truth! ONS figures: fine. ONS figures reported by the Daily Mail: total lies and rubbish.

I don't generally read the Mail and keep an open mind about what I read in any paper, but nor do I dismiss what any paper reports just because it's that one.