How Do Pandemics Usually End?

Ever since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, people around the world have been asking the same questions, how and when will the pandemic come to an end?

If only there was a clear cut answer.

Different efforts have been taken across the world to mitigate the impact of the virus.

On 23 March, a national lockdown was executed across the United Kingdom, resulting in businesses closing their doors and members of the public being urged to remain at home as much as possible.

And while the national lockdown has since eased, local lockdowns have been put in position in specific areas across England – this later morphed into the government’s three-tier coronavirus restriction system, introduced in October, in a bid to categorise different postcodes according to virus risk.

Despite the public tolerating these periods of lockdown, the evidence has demonstrated that the outcome was not a long term fix but a short term one, and once society returned to greater levels of socialisation, and schools and universities started again, the number of people hospitalised with COVID 19 returned to levels higher than when Britain first locked down in March.

As a result, it’s reasonable to wonder whether we will stay stuck on this carousel of sporadic lockdowns until a vaccine is available. A scenario which experts, including chief medical officer Chris Witty and Kate Bingham, head of the vaccine task force, estimate could be another 12 months away, and can we look to the past and other pandemics to give us an alternative answer?

The most lethal pandemic in recent history was the H1N1 Spanish flu of 1918, which was calculated to have eradicated at least 50 million people worldwide over two years till 1920.

In 1957, the H2N2 influenza pandemic began, killing about one million people – the 1968 H3N2 flu pandemic came just over a decade later, resulting in a comparable number of casualties, and 2009 marked the appearance of another flu pandemic, this time swine flu, which was calculated to have caused 284,000 deaths.

And while lessons can be taken from past pandemics, it’s crucial to mention the majority were caused by strains of influenza, while COVID 19, a coronavirus, behaves completely differently from flu, and Dr Nathalie MacDermott, NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) academic clinical lecturer at King’s College London, underlines the extraordinary personality of COVID 19.

Dr MacDermott said that this pandemic is unusual, in the sense that we have a pathogen that’s extremely capable of spreading.

It’s highly contagious and highly transferable, and it’s infectious in asymptomatic individuals, and that all these factors make it much harder to control than a lot of other epidemics that we might have encountered more recently.

And it appears to have had a tremendous upswing of support for the Conservative Party, hoorah, and God save the Queen, but with all this sarcasm that’s so thick, you could use it for tile grout, but you can’t beat a good old pandemic to show just how caring the Conservative Party are.

This virus will, of course, work its way through the population, just like all other pandemics – some will die, most will recover completely and life will go on, but what we should do, is refuse to live in fear, but if you are fearful, mask up and stay at home.

And allegedly studies are going on by agencies who are industriously looking for the best ways to coerce the general public into adhering with the COVID mainstream narrative, and if we were in an actual pandemic, would such gimmicks need to be applied?

Furlough Fraudsters Robbed As Much As £3 Billion

According to calculations used by parliament’s spending watchdog in a report into the government’s flagship jobs protection scheme, more than £3 billion might have been robbed in furlough money by criminal gangs and fraudulent employers.

The National Audit Office said there was evidence of substantial levels of furlough fraud from both organised gangs hijacking claims and employers taking money collected on behalf of the staff and NAO said that more money will be lost through staff working hours that they were claiming for.

Meg Hillier, who chairs the public accounts committee said that HMRC has paid out billions of pounds to fraudsters and that most of this has probably gone for good.

HMRC managed to stop tens of thousands of fraudulent claims against the self-employment scheme, but it doesn’t know how many managed to slip through the net.

It also missed chances to find out which companies were robbing cash meant for their staff or forcing them to work while furloughed and evidence of significant furlough fraud will add to concerns over the risks taken by the Government in its economic response to the pandemic.

The NAO said earlier this month that taxpayers face losses of up to £26 billion because of criminal activity and company defaults on its bounce back guaranteed loan scheme for small businesses.

The warning from the NAO over the cost of furlough fraud comes after the Government announced plans to expand and improve its job support scheme for businesses forced into tier 3 lockdown or struggling under tier 2 constraints.

According to data, the furlough scheme has cost the taxpayer more than £41 billion to support the wages of approximately 9.6 million people. While more than £13 billion has been spent on helping cover the earnings of self-employed workers.

NAO found the schemes have been most successful in protecting jobs up to October, but the report said the schemes missed as many as 2.9 million people given a combination of policy decisions and constraints in the tax system that meant they were ineligible.

Of this, about 1.1 million people were robbed of money because of limited data to validate claims or determine eligibility, while approximately 1.6 million were ruled out because most of their income didn’t come from being self-employed or they had trading returns above £50,000 and a further 200,000 were estimated to be ineligible because they were newly self-employed.

The NAO said there were several ways that the scheme was open to misuse. Pointing to initial HMRC calculates that between 5 and 10 per cent would have been lost in fraud and error and if accurate, this would correlate to £2 billion to £3.9 billion founded on payments made by mid-September.

However, societies problems are well summarised by this story – lie, cheat and rob whenever the Government gives out money to people, but when all said and done, we know who the actual thieves are, they’re called the Conservative Party, and criminals and politicians are the same.

Nevertheless, our Government has wasted even more money – all you have to do is look at the track and trace fiasco and this is just all smoke and mirrors to deflect from the underlying root of the problem.

And what’s £3 billion of other people’s money anyway?

If you were to lose £50,000 in a private company you’d get fired, but lose billions as a public servant and nothing happens.

A Crackdown In Ann Arbor

The University of Michigan’s reopening hasn’t gone well, compelling the local government to step in and on Tuesday, local health officials instructed students at the University of Michigan to stay in their quarters, effective immediately, to control an escalating campus outbreak.

Cases and positivity test rates have recently spiked in Ann Arbor, which had essentially sidestepped the worst of the pandemic.

According to Jimena Loveluck, the health officer for Washtenaw Country, which encompasses Ann Arbor and the university said that since October 12, cases associated with the university have comprised 61 per cent of more than 600 confirmed and likely local infections.

University administration said in an emailed statement to students and staff members that most of the cases on the campus could be traced back to small and medium-size groups without proper face coverings and social distancing.

The stay in place order, which applies to all undergraduate students through November 3, has quite a few exceptions.

Students not displaying manifestations of COVID 19 can still attend in-person class, play varsity sports and get medical care. They can also access university dining service and exercise in pairs outdoors.

Health officials say those activities haven’t been problematic and that it was socialising without safeguards that’s fueled the outbreak and Emma Stein, 21, a senior news editor for The Michigan Daily, the student paper, said that during the day, on campus, everyone’s okay and following the rules, but at night and on weekends, they don’t.

Ms Loveluck said that even though the regulations don’t constitute a quarantine, the health department may start using fines for breaches and that was particularly significant in advance of October 31, which was shaping up to be a big party weekend to mark the season’s first home football game against rival Michigan State.

One student told The Detroit Free Press that they’ve needed this for a long time and that right now, they were the university who chose football over the safety and well being of not only the students but every single person who came into contact with them.

In Ann Arbor, students and faculty have criticised the university for its reopening plan, which didn’t include across-the-board testing for asymptomatic students and that other colleges have relied on extensive, compulsory testing to keep cases down, since asymptomatic people are often infectious.

And a few weeks ago, Ms Stein, the senior, drove to an urgent care centre in another town to get a routine test – she and her friends didn’t even think to go through the university health system, and she said that they wouldn’t have qualified so they just drove.

The amusing thing is, our children go to college and universities so that they can learn from other people’s experiences so that they don’t make the same mistakes that someone has already made, but what we learn is that our children are a complete afterthought in all of this, and it just demonstrates that the priority isn’t students, it’s bucks.

And the case demographic rages on. Mass testing to find new cases, but don’t worry about imparting harm to this children and the poor, and this is what happens when you follow Trump virus guidelines.

To Be Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak Must Dare To Be Disliked

Being the frontrunner in the Conservative leadership stakes seldom ends well, yet this is the position that the chancellor Rishi Sunak, dispenser, for now, of vast sums of other people’s money, find himself in.

He’s the favourite to take over at some point as Boris Johnson’s leadership deflates like a soufflé and the Tory tribe starts to consider what to order next from a limited menu.

The chancellor will know that in every leadership contest since MPs plumped for the outsider choice of Margaret Thatcher in 1975, the eventual winner has not been the favourite at the start of the contest, bar one. Boris Johnson was the exception last year, as a favourite who won.

However, it seems that Rishi Sunak will be the next Prime Minister inside a year. That’s unless Priti Patel doesn’t get him and send him to ascension island, but I think Rishi Sunak would have to do some serious damage to become as unpopular as Boris Johnson.

Thirteen Districts Impacted By COVID-19

With the eruption of the Minuwangoda Brandix COVID 19 cluster that has already extended into 13 districts, there’s a heightened chance of the virus circulating into the remaining districts as well, Chief Epidemiologist Dr Sudath Samaraweera said.

He said COVID 19 patients had been reported from Kurunegala, Puttalam, Kegalle, Kandy, Galle, Hambantota, Jaffna, Vavuniya, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Badulla, Mongaragala and especially Gampaha.

He said following the detection of the 49 COVID 19 patients including fish vendors from the Peliyagoda Fish Market, there’s another chance of spreading the virus around the country via fish sellers.

Dr Samaraweera said the fish harvest obtained at the Peliyagoda Fish Market had circulated the country and that there might be individuals who contracted the virus from fish sellers and transporting fish across the country.

Thus, Dr Samaraweera asked the sellers who got the fish from the Peliyagoda Fish Market to be warned about the symptoms.

The Epidemiology Unit has taken measures to perform PCR tests in all districts to trace contacts of COVID 19 patients and more than 425,000 PCR tests had been done in the country and samples had been collected to conduct more than 8,000 PCR tests.

Allegedly it’s already spread to Colombo and they should be telling people the truth so that they can take precautions so that they can be safe, and whatever is unfolding there, they’re supposedly being lied to and they’re being destroyed as a nation, although the blame game won’t help, they need to face this as a nation to overcome this, and what steps will be taken to contain it – I suppose the ball will be tossed into the coats of the public.

Pope Francis Approves Same-Sex Civil Unions

Pope Francis has endorsed same-sex civil unions for the first time since taking the papal position.

The approval came halfway through a feature-length documentary, titled Francesco, which had its premiere at the Rome Film Festival.

The film delves into topics Francis cares about most, including the environment, poverty, migration, racial and income inequality, and the people most affected by prejudice.

Francis said in one of his sit down interviews for the film that homosexual people have the right to be in a family and that they were the children of God, and he continued that what we have to have is a civil union law, that way they are legally protected.

Francis’s predecessors, including Benedict XVI and John Paul II, denounced same-sex marriage during their papal tenure.

While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis supported civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriage. However, he had never come out publicly in acceptance of civil unions as pope until now.

Director Evgeny Afineevsky had remarkable access to cardinals, the Vatican television archives and the pope himself and he said he negotiated his way in through perseverance, and deliveries of Argentine mate tea and Alfajores cookies that he got to the pope via some well connected Argentines in Rome.

The premiere comes after the Pope applauded a breastfeeding mother as he reverted to going without a coronavirus face mask during the Vatican general audience.

Francis mentioned Switzerland’s Valentina Frey at the beginning of the audience in the Paul VI hall while she breastfed her daughter Charlotte Katharina.

He said the act was an illustration of affection and beauty before continuing his address.

The Pope said that something grabbed his attention while the readers were reciting the Biblical passages and there was the baby over there that was crying.

He said that he was looking at the mother who was nursing the baby and consoling her and he said he was thinking about how God is like this was us. How he often endeavours to console us and nurse us and that it was a beautiful vision when this is happening in the church and we hear the baby crying and we see the mother’s tenderness.

And he thanked her for her witness and said that the tenderness of a mother is a sign of God’s tenderness with us and that we should never silence a baby in the church because this is the voice that attracts God’s tenderness.

There are numerous people out there that will say that God or Jesus doesn’t exist, but then I guess in 2,000 years our predecessors will say that we didn’t exist either, but at least Jesus and God was written about.

However, there have been stories about Harry Potter, princesses locked in towers with long hair and walking bears that sit and eat porridge, but many prominent stories lack the whole validity element.

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man. Living in the sky and watches everything you do, every minute of every day.

This invisible man has a unique list of ten things he doesn’t want you to do, and if you do any of those ten things, he has a special place, full of fire, smoke, burning, suffering and despair.

And he will send you to live in that special place to suffer, burn, choke, scream and cry forever and ever till the end of time – but he loves you! And he needs money, he always needs money.

We Have Seen Boris Johnson At His Most Incompetent Numerous Times. Here He Was At His Most Malignant

On live television, Andy Burnham had just finished making an impassioned plea for the tiny amount of money that will be needed to spare the poorest and most vulnerable people of Manchester from ruination in the wake of new coronavirus constraints being thrust upon them.

Reporters had asked a few questions, and then, still, on live television, a colleague positioned a smartphone in front of him, containing breaking news.

Not only is help not coming, through pure vindictiveness, the previous, already too low, offer had been withdrawn.

Andy Burnham puffed out his cheeks in horror, and after a short pause to take in what was happening, alighted on the following words and said that this was no way to run a country, is it?

Coronavirus has not left history short on vignettes to encapsulate this Government’s quite shocking ineptitude. But this wasn’t ineptitude, it was sheer nastiness.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, had just been saying that there would be a better possibility of beating the virus if we worked together and that we couldn’t move through the pandemic by grinding communities down – we need to carry the public with us, not destroy their spirit.

They were stirring words. It’s also, of course, a significant testament to Boris Johnson that he’s turned the likes of Andy Burnham, a man who was arguably the least outstanding contender in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, which we may recall was defeated by an obscure backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn, into a great leader.

Crises make some, not all, but some aspects of the job of politicians much easier and it isn’t all that difficult to find the right words for sober times, though it’s certainly beyond the Prime Minister, as is every other aspect bar none.

Andy Burham had explained in stern and clear detail how he was asking only for £65 million, which equates to approximately £23 per person in the Greater Manchester region.

This he said, was the bare minimum and that without it, people would be made homeless.

He’d been offered £60 million, and the negotiations appeared to have broken down over the almost laughably tiny sum of £5 million and then, on live TV, he would learn that Manchester’s MPs were on a video conference call with Matt Hancock, the offer had been unilaterally lowered to £22 million, and tier 3 restrictions were being unilaterally imposed too.

And this grievous handling of these matters by our Government endangers the very unity desperately needed in these times across the country, with everyone now liable to becoming rebels, with most people saying that they can stick their tier 3 and that they’re going with their instincts, just like puppet master Dominic Cummings.

And how much more poop are the people going to take?

The Conservatives have nothing but contempt for having to help the working classes and we should remember their actions when we next visit the ballot box and we should also remember this is the Prime Minister who said he’s finding it difficult living on £150,000 a year but still expects people to live merrily on a minimum wage.

And we have seen Boris Johnson at his most dangerous, and he doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing, although I’m sure nobody else could have done better. Still, they seem to have become extremely vengeful of the people with their imposing settlement figures based on what they need in the middle of a pandemic, but what they’re really doing is bringing about pandemic austerity.

World’s First COVID Human Challenge Trials To Start

Volunteers in London are to be infected with coronavirus early next year, in the world’s first COVID 19 human challenge trials.

The project, first announced in a media outlet last month, was disclosed publicly on Tuesday morning with an initial £33.6 million of government funding.

The aim is to speed up vaccine development by contaminating participants with coronavirus in a secure clinic, a month or so after vaccination, rather than waiting for them to be exposed as they go about their normal lives in the community, as occurs in conventional clinical trials.

Before that, healthy recruits aged 18 to 30 years old will take part in a virus characterisation study at the Royal Free Hospital’s special biocontainment suite to learn how people react to infection.

Starting with a tiny dose of the virus, the scientists will gradually increase the amount given to the volunteers until they reach a level that reliably infects the upper respiratory tract.

Up to 90 people will be involved at this stage, which is expected to last approximately three months.

Andrew Catchpole, scientific director of hVivo, a company specialising in human challenge studies, which will be running the project in partnership with academic partners led by the Imperial College London said that they want to find the lowest dose of the virus that will reproducibly deliver an infection.

hVivo is a spinout from the Queen Mary University of London that was bought earlier this year by Open Orphan, a Dublin based pharmaceutical research company.

Dr Catchpole said the virus used would be a strain circulating in the United Kingdom, to be manufactured at Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Zayed Centre for Research.

When the scientists have determined the most suitable doses to use, they will start to test COVID 19 vaccine candidates selected by the UK vaccines task force, probably beginning in late spring if the characterisation studies go well – the Government has reserved the first three trial slots and will determine which vaccines to test.

Chris Chiu of Imperial, the study’s lead researcher said that human challenge studies can increase their knowledge of COVID 19 in extraordinary ways and accelerate the development of the many possible new COVID 19 treatments and vaccines.

He added that their number one priority is the safety of the volunteers and that his team has been safely conducting human challenge studies with other respiratory viruses for over 10 years and that no study is entirely risk-free but the human challenge programme partners will be working hard to guarantee that they make the risks as low as they conceivably can.

How Failures Of The Obama-Era Stimulus Could Navigate A Biden Administration

The person taking the oath of office on Jan 20 will encounter economic disarray and this will be true whether it’s Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and true whether or not the off and on negotiations over a new round of pandemic relief yield anything.

Given mass failures of small businesses and continuing astronomical numbers of people filing for jobless benefits, the President will encounter a situation uncannily comparable to the situation Joe Biden and President Obama encountered a dozen years before.

If it is Joe Biden who comes to power, along with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he will have something rare, the opportunity to look at the lessons of recent yore and have a do-over.

Barack Obama’s first legislative focus, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, demonstrates what can go awry when the Government spends money on a mass scale to resolve an economic situation.

Mainstream economists believe that the legislation helped stabilise financial markets and start an economic expansion that would last a decade, but it also proved underpowered and politically toxic, with lasting consequences for Barack Obama’s presidency.

It offered fuel for the president’s adversaries to depict him as an extravagant debt spendthrift. Yet it was also insufficient to forge a robust recovery and the unemployment rate the month of the 2010 midterm elections was 9.8 per cent, almost as high as it had been a year earlier.

That combination of a fragile recovery with the perception of profligate spending helped Republicans retake the House of Representatives.

Most voters never agreed with the opinion of economists that the recession would have been more alarming if not for the stimulus bill.

In 2010, for instance, only 35 per cent of Americans in a Pew survey thought that the legislation had helped keep unemployment from getting worse and by distinction, 80 per cent of economists surveyed in 2012 said the legislation had resulted in a lower jobless rate that year.

The lesson, if you’re going to shoot your shot at improving the economy, you’d best go big enough to not just stop it from crumpling, but also to get a boom underway.

The same economic challenges will apply if Donald Trump is re-elected, though the likely policy path would be different.

In negotiations over pandemic relief spending, the administration has embraced help for businesses, including protecting them from virus related legal liability and many Republican senators have fought a new large scale stimulus, despite occasional tweets from the President endorsing it and his allies have argued that the administration’s strategy of deregulation and low taxes will create a robust recovery as public health concerns ebb.

Joe Biden is just a human being like all of us and it’s not fair to expect any more than the best that he can do.

He’s going to have to do a lot just to fix the damage that Donald Trump has done, plus there are tons of laws that need to be strengthened or replaced and the people of America can’t now count on some sort of old boy sense of propriety as a normal.

They have to ground their Government on something more solid now, so someone like Donald Trump can never happen again, at least for the sake of coming generations. So, just remember Donald Trump’s herd mentality, because the more he talks the more people start to believe it.

Wales To Go Into National Two-Week Firebreak COVID Lockdown

The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has declared that a temporary national lockdown will be imposed in Wales.

The Welsh Government believes a two-week firebreak, from Friday at 6 pm until Monday 9 November is essential to help bring the virus under control.

Approximately 2.3 million people in Wales are already living under local lockdown rules, that’s fifteen of Wales’s 22 counties plus Bangor and Llanelli.

The Labour-led Welsh Government has also prohibited people from crossing into Wales from tier 2 and tier 3 areas in other parts of the United Kingdom, but the Government believes it needs to go further and it asserts that a sharp lockdown now will give it and the NHS in Wales breathing space ahead of a difficult winter.

Everyone in Wales will be required to remain at home and work from home wherever possible and workers in critical jobs and those for whom working from home isn’t feasible are allowed out.

Non-essential shops, tourism and hospitality industries will have to close, except for takeaways, along with community centres, libraries and places of worship, other than for funerals and weddings.

Drakeford said children were the Welsh Government’s top focus and he said childcare would remain open and primary and special schools would reopen as expected after the half term.

He said that secondary schools will reopen after the half term for children in years 7 and 8 and those taking exams, but that other pupils will continue their education from home for an additional week.

All gathering indoors and outdoors will be prohibited with people from other households – there will be an exception for people who live alone, who will be able to continue to join one other household.

Drakeford said the virus was spreading rapidly in every part of Wales and if action was not taken it would continue to accelerate, risking overwhelmingly to the NHS.

He said the firebreak is the shortest that they could make it, but that meant it would have to be intense and deep to have the maximum impact on the virus.

College students will study from home in the week starting 9 November and universities will continue to provide a blend of in-person and online learning.

Drakeford added that in the same way, they were asking everyone to remain at home and that if students have reading weeks or half term they will also need to remain at home in their university accommodation.

But will this not allow students to catch the train home, spend a fortnight carrying on as normal, then bring it back?

Hmm, a fortnight locked in a 12ft by 10ft room with zoom lessons or escape back to mum and dad, zoom lessons and home comforts, I know which I would prefer.

Oh dear, circuit breakers, almost as ridiculous as flattening the curve and masks don’t work from earlier.

Sure take a break, but it won’t stop the virus from spreading and all they’re doing is kicking the can down the road and if masks work, why have cases continued to rise exponentially in both Wales and England since their introduction?

That’s because masks are not 100 per cent effective, although nobody ever claimed they were – they only just mask the virus, pardon the pun.

Masks just reduce the probabilities of you getting coronavirus and that’s only by about 5 per cent, but unfortunately, delaying the spread of COVID into the winter will then overlap with other respiratory emergencies and create another predictable peak in excess winter deaths and this strategy is opposite of flattening the curve.

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