Bijou Drains
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Except that dentists have long been allowed to charge and make a profit out of actually providing health care, which NHS doctors are not.
There are very many NHS specialists and consultants who have their own private clinics, etc. usually in the afternoon off that they get from the NHS as part of their deal. They then have private beds in NHS hospitals, which they pay a fee to the hospital for, so that they can do their private operations etc. meaning you can effectively jump the queue if you are willing to pay.
Strange thing was that when I worked for Local Government we were always told that as salaried staff we were not able to work for any other organisation outside of our contracted hours, because unlike hourly paid staff, our labour was deemed to be the exclusive property of the employer. Funny how the same rules don’t seem to apply to senior doctors, MPs, Senior Civil Servants, etc.
Article in the Independent which is pretty depressing, in terms of human intelligence:
These same people who are worried that Bill Gates will be able to track where they are are probably the same people who regularly and without coercion update their facebook and twitter pages with details of where they are, what they are doing, who they are doing it with, what they are having to eat (complete with picture), who they are shagging, who they would like to shag, when they are having a dump (sometimes, unfortunately, complete with picture) along with details and pictures of all of the members of their family and their friends (and usually a whole lot of people who they are pretending to be friends with for the sake of facebook).
Quite why Bill Gates would go to all of this trouble to find out information which they are happy to give away freely, is beyond my comprehension.
It’s a bit like all of this worry about the coronavirus tracking app. If you are worried that someone is going to find out you are shagging your boss’s wife, leave your phone at home when you are shagging her (or get her to leave her’s at home if you’re doing it at your house). But don’t worry too much because one of you is bound to have put it on facebook or twitter anyway!
On the Marxist Animalist debate, judging by this survey, if we are the smartest, most advanced, cleverest animal on the planet, the rest of the animals must be absolutely as thick as pig shit. No wonder the aliens don’t come, I bet they are steering a wide course around this place.
Interesting article by George Monbiot, no great fan of his, but interesting numbers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/19/uk-government-pandemic?CMP=share_btn_link
Macau
You cite Macau as an example of an absence of lockdown. Again this does not seem to support your hypothesis that Covid 19 has a very high transmission rate and that it is not influenced by measures such as lock down or social distancing.
Macau had a small number of cases and they reacted immediately by enacting stringent measures, to quote from the wikipedia article you cite “Stringent government measures have included the 15-day closure of all 81 casinos in the territory in February; in addition, effective 25 March, the territory disallowed connecting flights at it’s airport as well as entry by all non-residents (excepting residents of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), and from 6 April, the Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau Bridge was closed to public transport and most other traffic.”
In Macau they reacted very strongly very early on. If your hypothesis that this disease spreads much more quickly than the current estimates, the disease would have spread, dispite the measures taken, however there is no evidence of widespread spread. You can’t be correct about high spread in Sweden and low spread in Macau, I suspect you are wrong about both.
Again from the wikepedia article you cite:
“On 3 February, the government of Macau announced that starting at noon, all bus and taxi passengers were required to wear masks; otherwise the driver would have the right to refuse boarding. Starting at 13:00, all light rail passengers were required to wear a mask; otherwise the driver would have the right to refuse boarding.
On 4 February 2020, all casinos in Macau were ordered to shut down for 15 days. The following facilities were also required to close: cinemas, theatres, indoor amusement parks, arcades, internet cafes, pool halls, bowling alleys, steam baths, massage parlours, beauty salons, gyms, health clubs, bars, karaoke bars, nightclubs, discos, and dance clubs.
On 7 February, the government of Macau announced that government workers were to stay home from the 8th to the 16th, except for emergency services”
Hardly a laissez- attitude faire.
Similarly in Japan they reacted very quickly, however the government there have come under criticism for stoppiing these measures too early.
In either case the comparison with the progress of the disease cannot really be made with the UK situation. In both of these cases the government acted quickly to try and stop community transmission (in which it seems they were fairly effective). In the UK the government let the Cheltenham festival go ahead, let the Liverpool v Atletico Madrid match go ahead and only cancelled sporting events after pressure from the sports themselves. By the time this had all gone ahead and community transmission was well established, they held the white flag up and the head cases started talking about herd immunity, only to change tack again and lock the stable door when the horse was half way to Ascot. Hardly comparable situations.
Dave
You then go on to cite a case where staff at a Candian nursing home deserted their jobs and left the residents to die. I agree with you that this was a dreadful situation and that the over reaction of staff to the threat of coronavirus was a causative factor in the deaths of these poor people. However again it provides no evidence that the high level of deaths in “care homes” in the UK has any connection to this kind of behaviour. I have seen no reports of this kind of behaviour at any “carehome” in the UK and certainly no evidence the care provided in UK homes has been a massive factor in the great surge of deaths in care homes.
about 20 percent of the employees have antibodies,
There are many indications that one in five employees at Danderyds hospital have had COVID-19. Further analyzes will show how many of these have shown symptoms or been ill. Photo: Cecilia Larsson Lantz
It shows a first reconciliation in the COMMUNITY study that started at Danderyd’s hospital just over a week ago.
– After 527 tests, we can see that about 20 percent of the employees have antibodies, says the doctor and researcher Charlotte Thålin, who runs the study together with professors Sophia Hober, KTH and Peter Nilsson, SciLifeLab.
The study is the first in the world that can provide such safe results.– The idea of the study is not only to determine how many of the employees who have had COVID-19, we also want to be able to determine how long an individual has antibodies and is most likely immune to COVID-19, says Charlotte Thålin.
– It will be exciting to see if antibody formation is related to possible symptoms, and whether there has been more infection in the departments that care for COVID-19 patients.In just over a week, the research groups around the COMMUNITY study have been able to test 527 of Danderyd Hospital’s employees. These have not yet been able to get their individual answers, but the research team is doing everything to make it happen in the near future. At present, only employees at Danderyd’s hospital are tested in the study. But in the future it is entirely possible to test everyone in the population, only there are resources for it.
– We still don’t know for sure whether antibodies mean immunity, but there is much to be said. In that case, people who are told that antibodies have been formed could work without the risk of becoming infected, or of infecting others, which is of great importance not only for health care and other socially beneficial functions, but also for society as a whole, says Charlotte Thålin .
High validation
According to the analyzes made regarding the validation of the test results, the results are almost 100 percent reliable.
– In the validation conducted so far, more than 400 samples with known answers have been analyzed, of which just over 100 have been positive and 300 negative. In all these cases, this method of analysis has given the correct answer, ie 100 percent correct. Since it is important to know more about this, we will continue to analyze known samples and thus further validate the method, says Professor Sophia Hober.The study runs for at least one year
Now the study continues at Danderyds hospital and the hope is that within a few weeks all the staff who want to be included in the study will have tested. Employees fill out a questionnaire where they indicate whether they have had symptoms and where they are at the hospital. After three months there will be a follow-up where you test the same individuals again, whether you have had antibodies or not. Thereafter, several follow-ups continue; after six months, one year and probably even after two and five years.
The study also creates a biobank with plasma samples from inpatient patients with COVID-19. The purpose is, together with other research groups, to investigate possible prognostic markers. These blood tests can also provide important information about possible treatment options.
Brief facts about the study
• Employees go into an app and book times for testing, where the answer is also stated after about 2 weeks. Complete confidentiality is ensured, for example, by the employee signing with his BankID.
• After the first test, follow-up is done after 3, 6 and 12 months, probably even after 2 and 5 years respectively. This is because the study wants to know how long an individual has antibodies. The follow-up is done regardless of whether the individual had initially formed antibodies or not.
• The test method has been developed at SciLifeLab and KTH.
• The research group from Danderyds Hospital includes specialist physician Charlotte Thålin, ST physician Ann-Sofie Rudberg and specialist physician Sebastian Havervall.
• The research group from KTH includes professors Sophia Hober, Peter Nilsson and My Hedhammar.
• The study is funded by the Stockholm Region, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Erling-Persson Family Foundation, the Christian Family and Jennifer Dahlberg and Atlas Copco.For more information, contact Charlotte Thålin (charlotte.thalin@sll.se) or call Danderyds Hospital press call 08-123 562 77.
Danderyds Hospital is one of the country’s largest emergency hospitals. The most important thing for us is that our patients feel safe and secure and receive the best possible care and treatment. We work towards that goal every day – together.
Again you use a study in which it found that 20% of staff in a hospital (and a hospital is place where contact and transmission are likely to be higher because of factors such as carrying out personal care, contact with contaminated material, a likelihood of higher number of people carrying out the virus in the hospital) as evidence to support your 50% conjecture. I have never stated that there is wider infection than the official figures show, most of the estimates I have read agree with a possible spread of 5-20%, but I have seen non that state that it is anywhere near 50%
on Sweden
After the first survey measured the spread of coronavirus in Stockholm in April, a second survey will determine how many more were infected one month later.
Published May 05, 2020By the first weeks of April, 10 percent of Stockholm’s population had been infected with the coronavirus and developed antibodies, according to sampling collected via post from 1,000 of the city’s residents. KTH researchers now will follow up with a second mailing of 1,000 sample collection kits in order to determine the spread over the last four weeks.
The results provide a snapshot of the spread of infection Stockholm had accumulated by Easter. Of 1,000 anonymous home sampling kits sent, 550 were returned. Of these, 446 test responses were approved.
The incubation period for COVID-19 ranges from 2 to 14 days following exposure, with most cases showing symptoms approximately 4 to 5 days after exposure. The average sampling day was April 11, says Niclas Roxhed, associate professor at KTH.
<figure class=”block figure” lang=”en-UK” data-cid=”1.981041″>
<figcaption class=”figure-caption”>Lab engineers Matilda Dale and Annika Bendes work with the sample analysis.</figcaption></figure>The mailings were evenly distributed to men and women, chosen at random, and ranging in age between 20 and 74, from a population of 1.22 million people in 717,850 households.
“We really need the public’s help now,” Roxhed says. “Only with as many contributions as possible can we get a true picture of the spread of infection.
“And this allows us to put into practice a way for everyone who needs to be tested to be able to test themselves.”
Roxhed (KTH) and Olof Beck (Karolinska Institutet) are responsible for sampling and mailing. Analysis of antibodies and proteins is led by Jochen Schwenk and Claudia Fredolini (both from KTH / SciLifeLab). Production of viral proteins is handled by Gerald McInerney, Leo Hanke and Benjamin Murrell (all three from Karolinska Institutet).
it is a bit speculative but going from Swedish death curve as a descriptive model they might be at about 20% now
there was another Swedish serological on heath workers only that had about 20%
I will have to look for it later.
the highest were I think about 70% by PCR in an American prison population ?
So you cite in evidence of your claim unsupported claim that “it is inconceivable that less than 50% of the UK population have not had the virus” a study, which is not complete, but which you you say might show that the infection rate is about 20%. I would be very intersted to know just how this supports your contention, or indeed how a 70% infection rate can be used to correlate to the UK population?
Picture taken on the tube in London this morning. The commuters seem more worried about dying from putting on their trousers than from COVID-19 – and the risk may actually be greater, given that London is almost virus-free and eight people died while trying to put on their trousers last year.
Here you actually contradict yourself, the attempting to put on trousers did not kill them, it was whatever happened as a result of them trying to put on their trousers, so by your logic, you cannot really link the trousers to the risk,
Sweden (Population 10.1 Millions)
Covid 19 Fatalities 3674
Belarus (Population 9.5 Millions)
Covid 19 Fatalities 160
The Swedish figures are probably far more important that the Belarussian ones, it has a very strange, neo Stalinist regime.
If you compare the figures for Sweden to the UK
Working on a UK population figure of about 68 million, that would give Sweden a death toll of about 25,000, admittedly better than the UK, but considering the population density of Sweden, a lot worse than could be expected. Stockholm metropolitan area has a population of about 2 and 1/2 millioin, so roughly a 1/4 of the population, and the other cities are much smaller by comparison, so it is possibly not the best comparison with the UK. Another factor to take into account is that generally speaking residential and nursing homes in Scandinavia are much smaller and better equiped than the ones in the UK. I don’t know a lot about Swedish Social Services provision, but I will try and find out.
There is a regular commenter on the BBC news site feedback section who uses the same name as you, I thought you might be one and the same. My post should read Have your say (HYS)
Dave
I won’t go through all of what you have written, but a few examples will suffice to make my point.
To reiterate I do not believe that all those dying with covid have died from it.
Nice that you have a belief, the Christians and Muslims and other religious nutcases base their views on belief, what would be nice is some proof.
An example of a factual case would be that the Italians reviewed or sampled a set of died with covid cases/ death certificates and decided that in fact only 13% of them could be reliably diagnosed of dying from Covid.
Where is this study? I have looked on line and cannot find it.
This was supposed to be about Lockdown and the amount of people that could be killing, will kill over the next year or so and the general misery for the working class around the world that is now too late to stop.
Data is already suggesting that about 30% of excess deaths in the UK are non covid deaths.
Again where is the report, also how does that link to lockdown in terms of causality
Many of those people have died for lack of proper medical supervision and stress in old peoples home.
Again massive assumptions. What kind of old people’s homes are you talking about? Are you talking about residential care homes which provide social care or nursing homes that provide both social and nursing care, or did you not know there is a difference?
EG
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/05/14/625355/UK-care-home-residents-fading-away
please do not use extraneous material in that as another opportunity to go off on another tangent. It is just something I just read.
If you don’t want people to comment on it, why put it in? So despite your plea not to analyse the evidence you are using to support your case, I will analyse it. the report states that:
“The virus won’t be the killer of these people, it’s the distress and fear of not seeing family that is doing it,” said one carer who asked to remain anonymous
So your entire case that care home residents are not dying of coronavirus is based on one report by one carer, as reported on the highly pro Iranian presstv.
As a demonstration of the accuracy of that report I quote the following statistic from it:
The homes have tried to keep residents in contact with their loved ones through the telephone or online. However, 80% of care home residents have dementia, preventing many from using technology.
Anyone who has any bacground or knowledge in this aea will know that that statistic is absolute nonsense. I could write at length about the “care” arrangements for older peope in this country and the inadequacy of that, but that is an altogether different topic, however the term Care Home is a catch all term which the press have used very inexactly to describe several different settings. These include:
- Sheltered accomodation, which is accomodation open generally to those over the age of 55 that have commununal spaces and gernerally have a trained warden ont he premises,
- Residential care- this is care provided to meet social care needs, funded by local authorities, if you have less than a certain amount of assets, but not ususally provided by local authorities. IN these settings staff are trained to meet social care needs not nursing or medical care needs
- Nursing homes – where people with medical needs are cared for, although many of the residents of these homes have dementia many do not and have other physical and nursing needs. These are usually funded through the health service as continuing health care needs.
- Physical disabilies residential homes – homes for adults, usually under 65 who have physical disabilites which require them to have full time support and care (there are a very small number of registered nursing homes that deal with physical disabilites for younger people)
- Learning disabilites residential homes – where people who have learning disabilies and require full time support and car.
- Mental Health residential homes – where people with enduring mental health conditions, who require full time support and care are cared for.
- Hospices – where people who are reaching end of life for various reasons are nursed to their deaths.
So as you can see the situation is a lot more complex than just “care homes” no where near 80% of residents of “care homes” have dementia and to state without any evidence to support it that “Many of those people have died for lack of proper medical supervision and stress in old peoples home.” really about sums up what you are saying, it is ill informed and based on supposition. But let’s plough on any way.
Given what is known to have happened on those two aircraft carriers as well documented examples it is inconceivable that that the majority of people in the UK has not already had it.
Making Lockdown a waste of time.
Even the statistics that you provide for the USS Theodore Roosevelt show this to be unlikely to be the case, the statistics for the aircraft carrier infections were as follows:
As of 20 April, 4,069 sailors had been moved off the ship, out of the total crew of 4,500. Some 94% of the crew had been tested or the virus, yielding 678 positive and 3,904 negative results.
So if a majority on the USS Theodore Roosevelt were not infected, how can it be in your words be “inconceivable to think that the majority of people in the UK have not already had it”?
People are assuming that lockdown is a tried and trusted method with a proven track record for this kind of thing; it hasn’t .
Again more supposition, which people and which assumption, my anecdotal evidence is that most of the people I know do not believe this is a tried and trusted method, just the best we have at the moment. However the general principle of quarantine for infectious diseases is, I would argue, a tried and tested method which has some degree of success stretching back millenia.
there is good cleaned up data an analysis on the UK at this site.
Yes, I agree it is a very good clean up of the stats, although I cannot see how any of the cleaned up stats they provide support any of the arguments you have made.
My viewpoint at the moment is that people are probably not dying of covid at all but probably from something else maybe an influenza or another cold type virus.
So we are back to the old chestnut that it is all caused by the flu, but this time it is a mysterious one known only to you.
People mistakenly think when you have a respiratory illnesses you have one infection from one virus, [fungi, bacteria or yeast ].
This may be the case for “people” who ever that refers to, but it is not the view taken by those who work in medicine, so the fact that the general public, may have a mistaken view of the nature of infection is neither here nor there.
In the real world you get an infection which degrades the respiratory pathways and that is followed by a host of other microbes.
If covid 19 is a secondary opportunistic infection testing for it as an affect is going to miss the cause and more importantly, if applied on a mass scale, is to generate some bizarre data if the hypothesis is that covid 19 is a primary causative infection .
So you are saying, if the virus is a secondary cause. However there is no evidence to suppport this whatsoever, most people who die of cancer don’t actually “die” of the cancer but from infections that come in the end stages of cancers, that doesn’t mean that getting cancer is fine and we shouldn’t worry. The overwhelming evidence is that there are a very high number of deaths over and above the expected deaths for this time of year in many different countries and a great number of these have been infected with Covid 19 and additionally these deaths have shown a unique set of symptoms, suggests extrememly strongly that Covid 19 is the primary infection which allows other infections to get a hold. In the absence of your mystery cold and flu (a disease so far unknown and undetected by medical science), can you provide any other explanation for these events and statistics.
[Covid 19 as contributing factor is relevant as in deceases you can synergistic effects.]
I hve no idea what this is supposed to mean so I cannot comment.
In pandemics you do not usually have per million capita death rates varying from 600 to below 10.
Actually yes you do. I studied epidemiology and statistics at degree level, and studied in depth the global pandemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague and for instance in Great Britain, the plague was very area specific, with some places, for instance at one time London, massively infected, whilst at the same time Ireland and Scotland were practically untouched by it. Similarly it was only when pheumonic plague overtook the original bubonic plague (Yersinia Pestis) did large scale infection in Scandinavia take place.
It doesn’t flare up in one city and then die out without affecting the billions in the rest of the country and then move to the other side of the world and create alleged havoc there.
But actually that is what did happen in previous pandemics, look at the history of the Spanish flu infection for one instance and going back to what I said about bubonic plague, Venice was ravaged by it, whereas nearby Corcula was hardly touched during the height of the Venice plague. The issue here is transmission. In previous pandemics transmission was generally quite slow and location specific being transported by road and sea travel. In the epoch of air travel, it appears that the greater amount of tranmission has been through air travel and the pattern of infection which has emerged is one which fits in very neatly with such a transmission process.
There are other issues evolving now about whether some treatment regimes eg hydroxyquinoline are actually killing people and sub groups, a proportion of whom can react badly to it.
Johns Hopkins University reports that there have been global deaths in the region of 320,000 people, the proportion of those who died as a result of a bad reaction to a drug that hasn’t been used in any great numbers is likely to be miniscule. However if they HAVE been giving patients hydroxyquinoline which I believe can be used as a pesticide, I would be very surprised as the drug that is being tested out is hydrochlorquinine
Eg BAME people who appear to be dying in higher numbers than others.
EG AGAIN
The you go on and with this link you appear to contradict all that has been said before, i.e. that Covid 19 is not really that harmful and that the response is overblown, by quoting a link that states that there is a very serious risk for BAME people.
I could be very unkind and say that your viewpoint is that it only effects the elderly and the BAME population, so as I am neither why should I be bothered. I am sure that is not your position, however it is difficult to say what that viewpoint is.
It is no more practical to quarantine older people or people in care homes than it is to segregate people from BAME backgrounds
.
As well as unnecessary intubation of patients which is a desperate high risk strategy.
As I know only too well.
Again I know from previous postings that you have expereinced being supported by a ventilator, I had personal experience of this myself when my mother was twice placed on a ventilator and also had to use other types of positive pressure devices. It is a horrendous experience and I am deeply sympathetic to you, however from my experience, entubation is not something which is done without consideration and it is a high risk strategy. Surely the fact that you are here to tell the tale and that my mother lived on for another 8 years is a demonstration that that high risk strategy often pays off.
“Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged.”
The implication being that we need market forces plus something else, and the market, plus something else.
It boils my piss when these fuckwits pontificate about the way forward, yet they haven’t got the imagination to see beyond trying to pleasantly rearraging the prison we all live in, so we can have a nice humane prison.
