cas14655

You took your time thinking about your excuses. The fact is that you weren't the slightest bit aware of the magnitude or direction of NHS funding. You just assumed it must be down because that's the only reason the godlike public services could fail.

> The numbers you cite represent a real-terms fall after inflation despite the population growing about 8% in that time

Who made the population grow like that? Isn't it usually the same people who tend to champion mass immigration and socialized health care? Have you ever spoken up about the tension between these two issues?

Who made the inflation? Isn't it usually the same people who champion centralized fractional reserve banking with easy money who want socialized health care? Or are you in the inflation threads arguing for limiting inflation to "Save the NHS".

> AND a reduction as a proportion of GDP.

Is that even true? Can you show some math? And who says health care costs have to keep up with GDP? Are we just supposed run faster in place like we are in a hamster wheel where every bit of increased production is just eaten up by rising costs?

> Meaningless.

Sorry, there is nothing else to say here but that if you are fine with frivolous spending in a funding crisis, as you see it, then you are just an idiot.

> No. You have invented that line of thinking

Completely dodging my point.

By March 2020 we had the Diamond Princess Data which established an upper bound of 1% case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID. We already knew then that it's definitely not the Spanish Flu (2.5 - 10% CFR), not Cholera (3%), not Smallpox (3%), not SARS (11%), not even Measles (1%-3%).

Not only did we never do anything like COVID measures for any of the diseases you mentioned but the WHO described the individual NPIs that would later make up the COVID "lockdowns" as "never recommended under any circumstances" in their 2019 flu pandemic recommendations.

What happened with COVID was an unprecedented overreaction by historical standards where we threw overboard everything we knew to try authoritarian gobbledygook on the back of the carefully cultivated FUD around COVID coming out of China.

Please describe the strawman.

Well, you are right in a way. Contact tracing, masks and social distancing make even less sense for corona viruses which we full well knew in 2020.

> If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking

You are not considering how positivism works. If you say lockdowns work you have to prove that in all instances. I just need one (1) counter example to disprove your theory completely.

> Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest.

Cherry-picking. Yeah, that's what focusing on Australia and NZ while ignoring Peru and Sweden is, exactly.

Finding two patients who got better after blood-letting is not enough to prove blood-letting works. Your theory has to fit all the available quality data (so no China or model "data" allowed).

> I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.

Yeah that was the extend of lockdowns. Go tell that to the people that where locked up without visitors in nursing homes for months on end.

In itself your statement is accurate: we did not have data that is impossible to have.

In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible.

This is the WHOs evaluation of NPIs in 2019 (PDF Warning): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...

It says Contact tracing, Quarantine of exposed individuals, Entry and exit screening and Border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances".

The experts thought about and decided it was not worth it.

Sweden Age Adjusted Mortality 3rd January 2020 through 18th June 2021: -2.3%

Source: ONS

Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.

Liberals: "We will fix X with policy Y"

Conservatives (-2, flagged): "All you'll do is cause Z"

Reality: X is now worse and Y had unintended consequence Z

Liberals: "Z isn't happening and anyone who says otherwise is a conspiracy theorists anti-vax COVID denier fascist "

Liberal Fact Checkers: Headline: No, Z isn't real. Text: actually Z is real

Liberal Media: Here is why Z is a good thing

Liberals: Well, of course, there was always going to be Z dum-dum anyways we have to fix X+1 with Y+1

> pro-spending / pro-austerity

NHS spending 2009/2010: £124.1 billion

NHS spending 2019/2020: £148.9 billion

> What exactly is the point you are trying to make?

You don't have a clue about what's actually going on in reality. That was the point. Thanks for proving it.

> Pouring money into "diversity" is certainly nothing to do with it

It must be nice to be able to spend the same money twice. Please let us know how exactly to accomplish this feat.

> Overall resilience of the NHS

People dying right now waiting for ambulances. People dying in spates of cancer and heart disease due to delayed screening or missed treatments[1]. "the NHS is so resilient".

> It's not difficult to draw a straight line from one to the other.

So your plan is to put all your eggs into one basket (i.e. state-run health care) and then cross your fingers that no bad politicians (ehm conservatives) ever get into power. That sounds like a very well thought out and forward looking plan.

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-re-at-pandemic-levels...

Are you getting at potentially unknown long term effects of COVID infection?

People keep saying this so there is probably something to it. I mean, not even the most optimistic mask studies show a long-term complete protection from all pathogens that can cause colds but okay, let's take it at face value: your wife is protected from colds because she wears N95s.

What this means is that your wife's immune system isn't getting challenged and isn't learning about the ever changing pathogens around it. It's not building immunity to the various strains every winter and it therefore can't get any cross-immunity ie against SARS-COV-2 [1].

All we know about the immune system suggests this is not good in the long term.

If true and I kind of hope it's not for this reason, your wife might be setting herself up for a very serious disease down the line. I hope this is not the case and wish both of you the best of luck.

[1] https://www.mpg.de/17434954/0907-moge-prior-exposure-to-comm...

If conversations about COVID seem impossible it might be because a substantial portions of the population overestimates the danger from COVID by as much as 50x.

Source: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...

> This, does. Because it has nothing to do with the submission but all with covid minmizing thrown in after a legitimate question.

Question: how low does the IFR have to be so we can call a disease "not so bad" without "minimizing" it?

My girlfriend sells self-made clothes online. In 2015 I made her a a small Tapestry 5 webapp to manage her orders and, this was the crucial feature, to determine payment status from her copy'n'paste online banking's transactions list.

Today, it has integrations for Paypal, Etsy, Shopify, DHL and HBCI (no more copy and paste, finally) and basically covers the whole order cycle with minimal fuss and gives her a quick way to publish new products which she does a lot as fabrics come in / get sold out.

I guess that's not that useless but of course it simply can not be worth the time I spent on it.

Yet, I don't regret doing it in the least because for me it literally is a labor of love. Plus, I learned a lot doing it and I can go down crazy paths like this one time I made an android app to cut out the background of her product photos. Didn't turn out to be useful in the end but eventually I did use OpenCV via JavaCV for something else in the software.

Currently I am in the process of rewriting it in Kotlin / Multiplatform (JVM+JS) and again, I'm learning a lot and making the software a lot sleeker and more functional. That's not going to be worth it either, I am sure.

Anyway, I wish I had day job were I was in constant contact with users to built them something of tangible utility and value.

I am talking about this table:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/download/table?format=xlsx&uri=/peopl...

(warning excel)

It shows that of the 32 European countries 17 didn't even exceed an excess of 5% in the whole period from 2020-01 to 2021-06.

These are two examples of how measures specifically meant to fight the disease caused a lot of deaths. Care homes also had deaths from loneliness and despair due to banning family visits, another pandemic measure that is still going on today.

https://appgpandemic.org/news/hospital-and-care-home-visitin...

“There are still obstacles in place when trying to visit a loved one in a care home and the impact has been and continues to be devastating. The safeguarding issues I am seeing and hearing about are atrocious. Residents left for hours in dirty, wet incontinence pads leading to dangerous pressure ulcers. Malnutrition. Dehydration. End of life medication given to patients without their or their family’s consent. Psychological trauma, post traumatic stress and suicides have resulted because of this. Multiple systems are failing, including Local Authorities and the CQC. It is a complex situation that needs a bold approach by both empowering families and galvanising government action to hold public bodies to account and stop private equity firms placing profit over people.”

The single largest group of people, between 40% and 60% depending on country, to die from coronavirus were from care homes [1],[2] so it stands to reason that measures applying to care homes had an outsized effect on corona virus mortality.

And indeed, Sweden, after admitting it did wrong by the care home residence in Spring 2020 and taking steps to rectify the situation, got their deaths under control which allowed them to end 2020 at (minus) -2.3% age-adjusted relative mortality.

> There are studies for this such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099995/

This study uses unadjusted mortality which does not account for an aging population. In particular it doesn't account for Sweden's 2019 negative excess mortality. I look at this report by the UKs Office of National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Table "Table 2: Relative cumulative excess mortality ..." is the most interesting. It shows that more than half of these European countries had absolutely nothing exceptional going on mortality wise between 2020 and June 2021. I'm not sure how the Corona narrative (100000k death / month without lockdowns!!) can account for this data. If it's really only the virus we should've seen mass mortality everywhere especially the places with a more "hands off" approach like Sweden. That's just not what happened.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/half-of-corona...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...

> I agree that communication was awful all over the board

I appreciate the peace offering but you have to understand that, for me, this topic is deeply personal. I am not willing to let it go on "oh let's call it awful and move on". Maybe in the beginning there was an earnest motivation to avoid suffering but the rest of the time, the public was simply deceived if not down right gaslit.

As a general answer: Corona is seasonal depending on latitude and on northern latitude spring is the end of it's season. So no matter what you do, you get a decrease in cases anyway. But if you mean something else, please show me in detail.

The excuse for lack of evidence seems to so often boil down to "that wasn't true lockdown". However, the measures in 2022 followed the same logic as the early lockdowns and were justified with the same grab bag of reasons. For instance, in winter 2021/2022, in Germany, I wasn't allowed to do anything except shopping for essentials because I am not vaccinated. For me, it absolutely was exactly like lockdown: same restrictions, same reasons, same dire predictions what would happen without these measures.

So I want an explanation for why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022, a full one and a half month ahead of Germany and why are cases now dropping like a rock in Germany three weeks after repealing most measures.

Well except that a lot of countries didn't have any unusual excess mortality in 2020. And anyway how do you separate the deaths caused by the measures from the deaths caused by COVID?

Such as

Discharging hospital patients into care homes:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/28/the-covid-care-home...

"The practice of discharging untested patients from hospitals to care homes remained in force until 15 April 2020."

Killing people with ventilators:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

"Bergmann’s case illustrates a shift on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, as doctors rethink when and how to use mechanical ventilators to treat severe sufferers of the disease - and in some cases whether to use them at all. While initially doctors packed intensive care units with intubated patients, now many are exploring other options.

I am not doing that at all. Switzerland for example has similar vax rates to Germany and I'd bet that Flordia is similar to Cali. You can even compare before any vaccinations and it's the same picture.

The reasons given for lockdown were ever shifting. Just very recently German Health Minister Karl Lauterach said we have to keep measures because 200 people a day die of Coronavirus and that's just too many.

> Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions.

Where, when, how? Even the very first lockdown in Germany happened when R was already <1. That used to be on the RKIs (our CDC) website.

What I don't understand is that I have to keep coming with facts (and still get censored) and you (the pro-lockdowners) can just keep doing argument by false assertions without showing any data whatsoever.

You really think you are in the right here? Wow!

A:

"Ten professional singers performed a passage of the Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode of Joy” in two experimental setups—each with and without surgical masks. First, they sang with previously inhaled vapor of e-cigarettes. The emitted cloud was recorded by three cameras to measure its dispersion dynamics. Secondly, the naturally expelled larger droplets were illuminated by a laser light sheet and recorded by a high-speed camera."

Are you serious?

B:

Have you even read through your own link?

CRCT: "No difference was found between hand hygiene or hand hygiene plus face mask in household contacts of influenza patients"

Case-control study: "No marked reduction in infection"

Cohort-Study: "The use of masks does not seem warranted if other infection control procedures such as handwashing are used"

It was well known before 03/2020 that masks don't do anything. That's why every public health expert and official was adamant that they don't do anything. That's why nobody had any. Didn't you ever wonder why no one had PPE on hand if it's so important?

Here is the 2018 review of this topic by the WHO:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329439/WHO-...

On page 25 you can find a table of RCTs that show exactly how useless masking is vs Influenza.

People who "follow the science" seem to be particularly unclear about positivism and the scientific method. Whoever is making huge claims about masks, lockdowns and vaccines needs to understand that burden of proof is on them. THEY need to present a theory that is consistent with ALL of the quality data that exists, not just some cherry picked retrospective garbage from China.

Depends on what you mean by efficacy. It's recently taken on the meaning of "Protection against death and hospitalization" which is not necessarily related to infections. But yeah, UK data going back into last fall consistently shows that vaccinated people over 18 even have a higher case rate (cases / 100000), sometimes as much as 100% more, than unvaccinated.

yes, spike protein is the culprit I think.

When the vaccine came out it was believed that the spike is harmless but later it was shown that the spike protein is enough to cause symptoms similar to the disease COVID. [1]

For a long time people thought that the mRNA, and therefore the spike from the vax, would stay in the muscle tissue and be broken down in a matter of days. This study [2] in Cell found that, actually, the mRNA can get to the lymph nodes and cause spike production for as long as 60 days. Spike protein is also found in the blood of 96% of vaccinees and the concentration is comparable to that of an acute infection.

[1] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/spike-protein-of-sars-cov...

[2] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00076-9

There is literally no reason or evidence that think that the restrictions had any effect at all let alone a significant one worth the trade offs. If for some reason you are allergic to Sweden you can compare England Winter 2022 with Germany, or Scotland or Wales. Or Germany to Switzerland after Feb, 16th 2022 when they dropped their measures. Or Florida with Cali. It didn't do anything. I am sorry but it's time to learn the truth.

Hundreds of thousands died with a positive PCR test, yes. But then everyone who died had one taken. Certainly, a number of those died because because of this particular infection but the average COVID death was a very old person who had two or more preexisting conditions.

So the real question is: how many have died who would not have died of the flu or RSV or Andenovirus or Beta-coronavirus or any of the other innumerable causes of respiratory infections?

Not to mention, this has nothing to do with people younger than 40 or even younger than 60.

Masks seem silly no matter what if you understand how corona spreads or if you know how after 2 years, in diagrams, you can't see a difference between unmasked/cloth masked/ffp2,N95 masked countries or even counties.

slowly we are progressing from "it can't be the vaccine". I can already see this is going to be a long couple of decades.

The vax doesn't prevent infection.

Except for two things:

a) that corona spreads through aerosols which we have known since mid 2020 b) Mask don't even work against Influenza which actually is transmitted via droplets.

TFA specifically answers this question.

> [..] increased CA incidence was not observed among the 16–39 age group in 2020