Analysing the latest figures from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the United Kingdom has the 7th highest death rate per 1million population globally. If you filter out territories & principalities – so look at countries only – it is the 5th highest. One can make two deductions from this ranking:
Firstly, it is 11.3x higher than the worldwide average death rate of 21 per 1million population.
Secondly, it equates to 0.0237% which is still 4.2x lower than the average death rate for seasonal or winter flu.
The other countries making up the top 5 highest death rates are Belgium, Spain, Italy and France. Can you spot a pattern? All are developed economies in middle/southern Europe and all are implementing strict confinement of their citizens.
Ignoring the European aspect, something we have been highlighting for a while and is set out in previous commentaries – the most recent here – the staggeringly high death rate in these countries shows that ‘lockdown’ has not worked and is not working.
Just why is the UK’s death rate over 11x the worldwide average?
We maintain our view that the congregation of those with high viral dosage and high viral load – the sick and those caring for them – in the same confined spaces – hospitals and to a lesser extent care homes – for prolonged periods of time is a key contributor.
Next, the pointless confinement of the general public has been in force now for almost 4 weeks, compared with SARS-CoV-2’s infection cycle of a maximum of 2 weeks. Individuals are not getting sick at home but instead the sick get sicker if they find themselves in hospital.
An observation about ‘lockdown’ is either everyone stays at home or no-one stays at home. You cannot tell one swathe of the population that they should stay at home because they will kill everyone else on sight if they don’t, when another swathe of the population is allowed to go outside and move around freely. Are each and every single one of these key workers immune from SARS-CoV-2? No, of course not.
So why are all the key workers permitted to go about their daily activities when everyone else must stay indoors? They are just as likely to catch – and recover – from SARS-CoV-2 as everyone else.
It is either everyone is free or nobody is free. Not somewhere in between based upon how the enforced notion of heroism implies invincibility. All that ‘lockdown’ has done is create a social apartheid, a misdirection from the government and its talking propagandists that does not stand up under scrutiny.
The principle of ‘lockdown’ is based upon the immediate & ephemeral response to a localised terrorist attack: it is implemented in order to reduce casualties during an attack and to provide clear backgrounds & unobstructed arcs of fire for automatic weaponry in the armed response.
The basis of telling a population to stay inside is the correct plan for a storm or similar event, where you instruct people to batten down the hatches and remain indoors until the storm has past, whereupon they emerge.
Instructing people to stay indoors to try and hide from a virus is ineffective, even more so when the research suggests the majority of the population have by now already had SARS-CoV-2, either without knowing or with mild symptoms of the disease and have recovered. This is in line with just about the only sensible and rationale thing to come out of the WHO so far:
“Most people will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment.”
Yet the government still persists with its fearfest, ramping up the panic-inducing rhetoric and speculative hyperbole at every possible opportunity. UK health secretary Had Mancock managed a stupefying piece of untruth earlier this week when he said on live television that the virus was so bad because it was the most serious the world had ever seen. More serious than ebola, smallpox or even seasonal flu, which kills in the region of 290,000 – 650,000 people annually (source: WHO)? A buffoon so beguiled by his own propaganda & lies that he clearly doesn’t realise that there are 22 other coronaviruses and believed to be approximately 320,000 viruses on the planet and that’s just the total that can affect mammals.
Not only is the government’s response causing the unnecesary and avoidable deaths of many of those with COVID-19 but the ‘lockdown’ & government propaganda has meant non-COVID-19 deaths outnumber COVID-19 ones. The Office for National Statistics most recent figures record 16,387 total deaths in the week to 3rd April of which 3,475 – that’s 21% – mention COVID-19. The emphasis is ours as this includes suspected COVID-19 deaths, deaths with and not from and instances where a doctor can use the Coronavirus Act 2020 to avoid having to bother about fully completing a death certificate and even have a best guess at the cause of death. Somewhat worrying but it all helps increase the death toll if you are the government and need your bogeyman to be as bad as it possibly can.
Except it isn’t going the way of the bogeyman as analysing the ONS figures, adjusting for the expected number of deaths which would occur naturally, COVID-19 isn’t the biggest cause of excess deaths (even allowing for the misleading over-reporting as above): it is everything else.
People are dying of existing medical conditions where their scheduled treatment has been postponed or cancelled because of the absolute priority given to COVID-19 at the expense of every other illness. People who have suffered medical episodes, such as heart attack or stroke, are unable – or more likely unwilling – to seek medical attention, either through a desire not to want to be a burden to the system or because they are shit-scared of going into hospital. These individuals would mostly survive under normal conditions but in this current nightmare they are dying and in greater numbers than the killer virus of death that is the worst in the history of Had Mancock’s delusional imagination.
A number of those who have died from medical episodes, such as heart attacks or strokes, are likely to have done so because of the effects of fear: older people confined at home, terrified by the government propaganda, alone & afraid, petrified to go out, unwilling to seek medical attention, convinced they will be next…they have been unable to process this insanity and have been overwhelmed by it. Often it will not be the fear for their own welfare that overcomes them but fear for the welfare of others; their siblings, children and grandchildren, who are all just fine.
Responsibility for the unnecessary & avoidable deaths of each and every single one of these individuals plus the unnecessary & avoidable deaths of each and every single one of the individuals exposed to excessive viral dosage & load lies at the feet of the unholy trinity of Had Mancock, Professor Chris Shifty and Emperor Wannabe-Winston Johnson.