I've forgotten how long we have been in this state. We lost Christmas, it got cancelled with about 5 days notice by the government. We have been in lockdown since January with a tortuously slow roadmap out that was supposed to end in Freedom Day today.
Not so.
Boris went on air last Monday, 19th June, to say that because the indian variant cases were growing, we had to delay until 19th July. There have been many Lockdown Sceptics pieces written about how the data were presented in such as way as to make it look worse than it is. For example, the following graph shows how a higher percentage of young people are being admitted to hospital now than during previous waves (because the elderly and vulnerable have been vaccinated). It makes it look like we have a crisis. What it does not mention is that young people recover faster and that admissions are balanced by people leaving hospital having recovered.
However, if you use the actual number of covid inpatients, rather than the percentage, the graph looks like this:
They are giving the impression that the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed. In fact, there are many hospitals with not a single COVID inpatient. The following pi chart illustrates that there 99.2% of hospital beds do NOT contain COVID patients.
I have just listened, over lunch, to the BBC 1 O'clock news. That was a mistake. The spent a good 5 minutes interviewing Margaret Keenan, the 90 year old who was the first woman outside of a trial to receive a vaccine, and the nurse who gave it to her. Surely there must be some actual news to cover? This was clearly a propaganda exercise, but why now. What are the nudge unit trying to achieve? Next there was a piece on long covid, with two people who had been working to recover over the past year, and lots of shots of them in hospital, heart rending stories of their struggles to breath etc. Shortly afterwards, there was a screen full of pictures of young children and yet another 5 minute piece on children who are suffering with long covid. There is plenty of news out there that could be featured, but instead we are fed a diet of gloom and doom, presumably softening us up for some new announcement of delay to the restoration of our human rights. The recently released book "A State of Fear" by Laura Dodson is insightful about the abusive methods used by our own government on us. The techniques are so obvious - yet they still seem to work with the vast majority of the population. My opinion of the intellectual ability of vast majority of the population has, I'm afraid, plummeted.
