As each day passes, I think it can’t possibly get worse, the cretins in charge can’t make any more of a hash of our lives and every day, I am proved wrong.
Britain faces a ‘human disaster’ unless ministers impose ‘stricter’ rules, one of the Government’s scientific advisers has warned amid the looming threat of a full New Year lockdown in England and warnings that the mutant strain of Covid has spread across the entire country.
So, lock-downs don’t work. They have been proven comprehensively not to work, yet what is the solution?
Yup, more lock-downs.
Professor West, a psychologist at University College London, added: ‘It sounds expensive but the alternative could well be a catastrophic collapse in confidence in the country’s ability to control the virus and the economic, human and social disaster that would follow.’
What pat of the trashed economy, the destroyed businesses and livelihoods, the late cancer and heart diagnoses, the mental illness and the suicides caused by this idiotic response does this behavioural psychologist not understand?
As for confidence, I have none in either the government nor the charlatans in SAGE.
The politicians and ‘experts’ keep repeating their script, knowing that it is garbage, with no concern about how their decrees are ruining the lives of so many people, especially the young. They will never be made to take responsibility, or be removed from their cushy public sector sinecures with gold-plated pensions and they consider themselves above the directives they impose on the rest of us. I have nothing but contempt for the lot of them.
If this -cough- ‘new’ strain is so infectious, why has it taken from September(UK) to now to spread?
Now appears this variant surfaced 8 Months ago in Brazil and is in Germany, Italy, France. Seems to me it’s spread slower than the original Wuhan virus which spread around world in “80 days”
Boris et al make themselves look more incompetent and dishonest every time they speak. Where’s the 4,000 C-19 deaths per day? Oh, NHS is working hard to deliver that
NHS England: 9,400 fewer beds than last December – whut?
Why? NHS “Due to Corona virus” – pardon, you what?
For safety? NHS “Yes, our patients’ safety… Only 25% of in-patients catch C-19, although in Hampshire they’ve achieved 40%, and we’re working on that”
Anyone have phone number for a Witch Doctor?
That’s a psychologist talking about keeping the public’s confidence, not an epidemiologist trying (however disastrously) to save lives.
It would be sinister, but they actually released it to a newspaper. Can you have ‘openly sinister’?
We have 1.9 beds per thousand patients. Germany has 13 per thousand. The NHS needs an upgrade and far more hospitals and staff than it currently has.
” The NHS needs an upgrade and far more hospitals and staff than it currently has.”
And the only way that can be achieved is to stop pretending a healthcare system designed in the 1940s and which has not been copied by one country around the world (apart from Singapore who promptly binned it when its manifest shortcomings became apparent) is suitable for the 21st century.
Until the fetishizing of the NHS stops, and we have a mature debate about how other countries provide socialised healthcare, nothing will improve. Merely pouring more resources into the maw of the NHS will achieve nothing apart from buying a short period of respite. Once it has wasted all of that the collapse will continue. The NHS is after all the USSR in miniature, which lasted about 70 year before collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The NHS was formed in 1947, so its 70 years are up………
Tear it down, salt the earth, start again.
I don’t think it’s ever had more money (world’s 5th biggest employer I think) yet still isn’t fit for purpose.
Saved my life ( Massive trauma & loss of blood ) 40 years back …
Save my wife’s life – emergency appendectomy at 01.15 hrs – after scans showed she was 1:600 with appendix in “wrong” place.
ONLY get rid of it IF you can find something better – OK?
The French have a better system. So, yes, tear it down. The bloody thing made my wife’s final months a misery.
The NHS killed my Mum with a wrong prescription which was given even after familial carers,who knew more about her medical history than the NHS, told the hospital that this prescription would be ineffective and dangerous. I absolutely despise the NHS.
What’s all this talk of ‘disaster’ from the high and mighty? A few weeks ago Boris Johnson was threatening us all with a ‘moral disaster’ – remember? The ‘moral disaster’ for us all is that Johnson and Ferguson and Hancock and all their cronies are still in power … but how dare Johnson talk of anything ‘moral’?
This next bit won’t be to everyone’s taste, but what’s wrong with uttering unpalatable truths or asking hard questions?
Since 1967 this country has been involved in a continuous ‘moral disaster’ with the relaxation of the old anti-abortion laws … anyone who claims that their ultimate goal, that which INSPIRES them, is the preservation of human life, will have to consider how they stand with regard to that matter … as Johnson appears to have contrived the actual slaughter of at least one of his children, the poor little unfortunate he fathered on Petronella Wyatt, we may judge what mercy the rest of us may expect from him and his cronies – and we may also question how thw NHS defines ‘healty’ as pregnancy has been defined by it as a mere pathological condition that can be ‘cured’ by drugs or surgery …
I don’t agree with you, but I commend you for speaking your mind and fully defend your right to do so. Well done Sir.
These two quotations keep coming back to me.
There is nothing so bad that government cannot make worse – Ronald Reagan
‘ . . . the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary’ – H L Mencken
I’ve just read a “History of Cholera” – very depressing, because it’s all too clear that people, including, I’m sorry to say, “Longrider” have not learnt.
Yes, the restrictions are bad, really bad … but, BUT.
Doing without them is even worse, when there is a serious pandemic on the loose.
Hi Greg,
I invite you to take a quick look at the UK government’s own published data below and play a little game I like to call ‘spot the pandemic’.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/945420/Weekly_report_mortality__w51.pdf
Cholera is a waterborne disease. That’s a significant difference. To say that I have not learned is false. I am well aware of the history and well aware that lock-downs and restrictions do not inhibit an airborne disease. Also this is an RNA virus and no amount of panicky reactions will stop it. Only allowing it to fizzle out on its own will do that.
And / Or an effective vaccine, of course.
And if lockdowns are ineffective, how come other countries, that don’t have BoZo & his lying clowns in charge have done better than we have?
Corona viruses are RNA. There is no such thing as an effective vaccine as they constantly mutate. The flu vaccine has about 40% efficacy. This will be similar.
Lock-downs only slow the spread, they don’t stop it. What do you think will happen in New Zealand when they open up properly again? Given that the population has no herd immunity? That our government has been worse than others doesn’t excuse the behaviour.
Conflating the current politically caused crisis with Cholera is a bit of a reach. If you’d ever seen a Cholera case you’d know what I mean. Cholera is a bacterial infection, rarely asymptomatic and caused by a clearly identifiable sink of infection (A contaminated water supply). Controlling Cholera is easy. All you have to do is clean up the water supply and anaerobically clean up your sewage.
SARS/COV-2 by contrast is a mostly airborne, droplet-carried coronavirus which is not stopped by masks or lockdowns. Indeed there is a body of medical opinion that says masks in non-surgical use can provide a reservoir of infection, catching small amounts of viral load from the original sources (Clothes, contaminated surfaces etc), allowing inhalation (Masks can’t stop something as small as a virus) and providing a lovely environment (For a virus) up close and personal to your sinuses and throat mucosa. Great for a respiratory illness.
How on earth can you compare a disease spread by the ingestion of infected water which, if left untreated, has a fatality rate of 50 to 60 percent over all age groups with something that has fatality rate of around 0.1 to 9,4 with the average fatalities age of 81
I think that Boris has discovered the childhood Game of “Simon Says” and is trying to think up more and more ridiculous things to make people jump through hoops.
How much further can he take it? Judging by the Karens’ reaction, quite a bit further by the looks of things before his bluff is called.
THERE I tend to agree with you!
BoZo is like Empiminodas the Cretan – he’s a consistent liar!
Greg T is so consistently wrong that he could have a career as a government adviser.
@Greg T
Whut? Cholera was an early example of state & ‘science’ being wrong and fighting against the man (John Snow) who was correct
There is No “serious pandemic on the loose”
– In UK fewer than 400 people under 65 with no diagnosed co-morbidity have died from C-19 in last 11 months
Quarantine of healthy and sick has never before been used before and is inhumane
Greg, Don’t forget to wear your mask in bed, the 0.125 micron virus might sneak into your bedroom under cover of darkness
@Stonyground
Spot on
There was much more than J Snow to Cholera – I was thinking of how, even after the true causes were widely known, the medics were ignored – the classic case was in Hamburg, as late as 1892 (!)
@Greg T
Lockdowns, masks etc don’t work:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-22-contrast-between-new-york-and-florida
“The virus does its own thing, despite our dictators’ desperate need to show that they are “doing something,” however damaging or meaningless the “something” may be.”
Meaningless: Have a look at London Nightingale Hospital, cost £220 million of taxpayers money and never used. It’s now gone, all 4,000 beds and equipment have vanished
Merry Christmas to all
Hope Christmas day and Boxing day is great for you
I’ll be with three other ‘households’ inc mum (80)
God bless
Happy Christmas to everyone, and may 2021 be healthy and successful.
Here in Mackay, COVID-19 is something we watch on the news. Sadly, it has impacted our Christmas, our son had lunch at a pub that a woman from NSW who tested positive was at. Despite testing negative, he has been forced to self-isolate at home for 14 days with our daughter-in-law and granddaughter instead of flying up to us. The levels of risk aversion displayed by our clown of a premier and her chief health officer is farcical, somebody sneezes in another state and the borders are closed.