One problem with it, the selfishnes of people in this country, you saw it with panic buying as a country we are twats, you saw the bellends in Benidorm out drinking on lockdown, give them an inch etc. Other european countries seem to have more self discipline than us, if we had been allowed to carry on in the hope people wouldve adhered to the rules as long as this youd be sadly mistaken, I can take you to parts of Oldham where they are quite blatanly not bothering, this would be mirrored all over this country. Also the size and the way we live here doesnt exactly endear itself to seperation, lots of urban areas, I guess places like Sweden arent as densley populated as us. weve had nearly 30000 deaths id expect that to be at least trebeld in Covid deaths if we hadnt done lockdown plus add to that all the add on deaths from RTCs etc and you can see it wouldve been carnage. Our way out of this is by creating an "isolation nation" pubs, bars reataurants can now work out how to function within these "rules", suprmarkets have achieved it and workplaces have to a degree.
As humans we ahve overcome far worse than this, with a little bit of planning and thought most but not all of us could come out soon but it has to be done right and for those not conforming have to brought to account.
Death toll trebled? Who knows? I do know we’ve put all our eggs in the Ferguson basket and he’s been wrong before. In fact, he said that, with the measures the government now had in place, deaths would be ’substantially below 20000’. He’s wrong about that.
A few other predictions from Professor Ferguson, who has single handedly done more damage to the economy than the bankers did.
In 2005, he said that 200 million could be killed from bird flu. Actual deaths were 282.
In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent. His most likely estimate was that the mortality rate was 0.4 per cent. A government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths. Actual deaths were 457, with a case fatality rate of 0.026%.
In 2001 the Imperial team produced modelling on foot and mouth disease that suggested that animals in neighbouring farms should be culled, even if there was no evidence of infection. This influenced government policy and led to the total culling of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs – with a cost to the UK economy estimated at £10 billion.
It has been claimed by experts such as Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was ‘severely flawed’ and made a ‘serious error’ by ‘ignoring the species composition of farms,’ and the fact that the disease spread faster between different species.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. He also predicted that number could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic as well. In the UK, there have only been 177 deaths from BSE.
Ferguson’s disease modelling for Covid-19 has been criticised by experts such as John Ioannidis, professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, who has said that: ‘The Imperial College study has been done by a highly competent team of modellers. However, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated.’
Now, it might come to pass that he was correct, but his modelling didn’t allow for anything other than; not enough critical care beds, not enough kit, no immunity, and, worst of all, no allowance for deaths related to the lockdown but not actually caused by C-19. It’s got to be worth questioning rather than blind faith and obedience, I’d have thought?
