Published On: Wed, Mar 25th, 2020

New “refined” Covid-19 death estimates, not lockdown measures, appear to be behind avoidance of supposed critical care bed crisis

The man chiefly responsible for the UK Government’s highly controversial (and unlawful) suppression reaction to so-called Covid-19 has today appeared at the Commons Science and Technology Committee, and he had some surprising news.

Neil Ferguson, the leader of the [Imperial College London (ICL)] team that concocted a doom and gloom model of “illness with coronavirus” that prompted (or provided a pretext for) draconian measures for societal control said,

If, and it’s an if, we’re moderately confident as I’ve said but can’t be completely sure, if the current measures work as we would expect them to then we will see intensive care unit demand peak in approximately two and half to three weeks’ time and then decline thereafter.

However, Ferguson was surely, and for understandable self-motivated reasons, placing too much importance on the measures, given that so-called Covid-19 deaths have been occurring for three weeks already towards an evidently revised estimate for their total by the NHS, and all without any mitigating measures deployed in that period to stop the spread of so-called SARS-COV-2.

Ferguson declared that deaths could be “substantially lower” than 20,000, which is the figure modelled as being a result of suppression of the disease (in essence, the measures that have been enacted in Britain the week commencing 23rd March), but he also said that “Since we did that initial analysis which came out on 16th March NHS have refined estimates and that means the gap would be less.” [Apologies to the reader; the quote is from the Telegraph’s fragmented live updates, and it is not know exactly what ‘the gap’ refers to. The point is to show that NHS reporting is a contributory factor].

A peak date of the Easter weekend (11th and 12th of March) is approximately two weeks earlier than the ICL model predicted as being the time when the most number of critical care beds would be occupied with Covid-19 patients (5 per 100,000). Indeed, according to the model, at Easter weekend the ICL team had been expecting bed occupation to be lower than 1 per 100,000.

While the author does not have access to the NHS’ revised estimates for Covid-19 deaths, the comparison made in the above paragraph suggests that they could be considerable, and that actually there is a case to be made for the UK Government to scale down its response. Arguably, a change of strategy to deploy a halfway measure of mitigation of the (so-called) disease by specific isolation of the vulnerable would now avoid projected overburdening of the NHS, and also lessen the extent of a second wave of infection that the ICL imagines will happen in the autumn of 2020.

Of course, outside of the simulation modelled by the ICL, there is a sophistication that is not considered in it, and that is the fact that so-called Covid-19 deaths almost always occur in a scenario where the patient has severe pre-existing illness. Moreover, even if the NHS has started to account for this in its estimates, and this is the factor that has forced what is essentially a monumental backtracking by the ICL lead modeller, a reduced number of expected death by so-called Covid-19 may still be wildly overrated because of the fact that the PCR test used to detect SARS-COV-2 cannot detect if it has infected the host (with Covid-19).

Consequently, it now looks increasingly likely that the team of modellers at ICL, along with Members of Parliament and members of the corporate-media, are responsible for the installation of an intrusive and economically catastrophic control grid without having had cause to do so. (Ferguson himself seemed not to be following his own advice as he revealed that he was appearing at the Commons committee in a state of recovery from Covid-19, ironically describing it as being like a “bad flu”. Corporate-media reportage did not specify that he was appearing via a video link†). Being already directly culpable for an as yet unknown scale of economic damage in Britain, it seems incredible that these same people will have the power to inflict a second bout of madness later in the year. Moreover, (assuming the veracity of the ICL model), if they claim a catastrophe at that time having refused to take action now that would lessen the effect (in order to maintain a bluff about the effectiveness of suppression) then they will compound their criminality, and FBEL will certainly be campaigning for them to face justice and imprisonment.

 

Update; 26th March 2020:

More information from here; Ferguson was indeed appearing via videolink. This doesn’t alter any ironic significance of his finding “Covid-19” to feel to him as if it was a flu.

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