Almost a year ago to the day, I noted that the reasons given for closing down Christmas celebrations in the U.K. last year had owed more to a basic mathematical error than the supposed increased transmissibility and virulence of the new alpha (Medway) variant.
This year, a similar threat from omicron appears to be scaring the politicos, but this again seems more a figment of the scare-mongers' hysteria than scientifically-grounded evidence.
The willful damage that certain so-called scientists have serially inflicted on the economy needs to be queried. However, the propaganda machine likens any healthy skepticism to flat-earth advocacy.
Consequently, this note takes a leaf out of Steven Koonin's excellent book on the climate debate Unsettled, and only interprets the Government's own official data.
However, as you will see below, this interpretation comes out quite differently to the Government propaganda/BBC party line. Covid, as is the way with new viruses, is mutating into both a significantly less transmissible and substantially less virulent variant.
You are only about one third as likely to catch Covid this Christmas as last and, even if you do, you are now 80% less likely to die from it. So, why isn't this the new narrative?
Same Government data, different headlines.
The UK is currently in the throes of its fifth Covid variant wave: Wuhan (Mar 2020), Spanish (Sep 2020), alpha (Nov 2020), delta (Jun 2021) and now omicron (Dec 2021). Cases are at a record high, despite one of the most comprehensive vaccine programmes in the world and a series of extensive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), like lockdowns and forced self-isolation. Yet behind the media hysteria, an extremely salient fact seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Whilst the number of positive tests has hit new highs, the number of deaths which used to follow just 14 days behind such 'cases' have fallen away, especially since omicron....<<<Read More>>>...