It's the End of the World as we know it

(and I feel fine)

Roughly two and a half years ago the world was waking up to the existence of a new virus. What happened next is one of the most bizarre and baffling episodes in the history of mankind. It’s bizarre not because mankind isn’t capable of doing really dumb and really terrible things; it’s bizarre because in an age of ‘enlightenment’, where we can control and do experiments on single atoms in a laboratory, almost the entire world seemed to capitulate to the kind of hysteria that would not have been out of place during the Salem witch trials.

Various theories to explain the events have been posited. They range from the “everything we did was scientific and the right thing to do” all the way to “it was all a hoax designed by Darth Schwab to control the world”.

I’m going to talk predominately about events in the UK, but things were little different elsewhere. Everyone it seemed, with the notable exception of places like Sweden, seemed to go doolally. Many were convinced the fear and astonishing measures taken were appropriate and necessary. Many, including yours truly, had a reaction that unfolded with time along the lines of

eh?
surely not?
you have to be kidding me?
have we gone insane?
WTF?
WT holy F?
WT holy effing F with extra side helpings of F?
What in the name of Batman’s soiled underpants is going on?

The ‘Official’ Impact

The official UK charts and figures are published on the government’s corona virus dashboard, although you can get a more detailed breakdown of stats from the Office of National Statistics. Here are 4 charts taken directly from the dashboard in which I’ve added a few notations.

According to the dashboard there have been very nearly 178,000 deaths within 28 days of a positive test and just over 200,000 deaths where covid has been mentioned on the death certificate.

The current population of the UK is estimated to be about 68 million so as a rough and ready 1st approximation we’ve had 0.29% of the population succumb to covid (using the death certificate figure). In plain terms that’s about 3 people dying of covid for every 1,000 people in the UK, or 1 covid death for every 333 people.

What Happened?

Whilst there are some who question the existence of viruses, or that viruses cause disease outbreaks, my own view is that the “standard” explanation is by far and away the most plausible explanation of events. Nasty little bugger gets breathed in, body reacts, some people die.

Just as viruses have lineages that we can trace, there is also a ‘lineage’ for antibodies too - and these immune response lineages are correlated with the viral lineages. That’s a little hard to explain without there being some external causative agent like a virus. This, and other pieces of evidence, lead me to accept the “standard” model as being overwhelmingly the most plausible explanation - although we definitely don’t understand everything about important things like the mechanism of transmission and things like seasonality.

Something clearly happened. People died. That there was excess death cannot be denied. The initial outbreak followed a typical “Gompertz curve” that is seen in temperate regions for other outbreaks of respiratory viruses (yet another piece of evidence to broadly support the standard interpretation)

It was serious enough to be very noticeable in the statistics. But there’s a whole spectrum, as we like to say these days, between serious and emergency.

And here’s where things went sideways, right from the outset.

Insanity ripped through the nation like last night’s dodgy vindaloo rips through a digestive system.

28 Days Later

I didn’t watch too much BBC during the ‘pandemic’. It was too dangerous. TV’s are expensive items and few survive having bowls of coco pops thrown at them in anger. But even the BBC can be accurate at times (I know, who’d have thought it, right?). Their reporting on all things corona, especially when talking about the death figures, had a banner explaining that a covid death was “a death, for any reason, within 28 days of a positive test”.

Yes, the words “for any reason” were there in all their goofy glory. The Figures of Doom and the Charts of Terror were examined in sonorous tones by serious ‘experts’ - and all the while this little banner was sat there just taking the piss.

Why did everyone play along with this charade?

I have no answers, but from any scientific perspective collecting shitty data, and knowing from the outset that it is shitty data, is inexcusable. This is not ‘science’ - it’s pretend science. It’s the drag queen version of science. In a drag act you have some hairy-arsed bloke dressing up in some nightmarish costume that most women wouldn’t be seen dead wearing, and pretending to be a woman. What we had with covid was governments and official health bodies pretending to do science.

Drag shows, for adults, are fun and meant not to be taken seriously. They’re deliberately over the top for the purposes of entertainment. Drag science, however, is another matter entirely.

The UK government, for reasons only fully known to itself, wanted you to be much more scared than you needed to be.

This was a deliberate strategy. All of the messaging, along with the emotional blackmail campaigns, was purposely constructed to instil a climate of fear and to keep everyone terrified.

Of course, if you want people to wet their shreddies (obscure UK slang for underwear), then it’s important you make it look worse than it is by collecting flawed data.

The strategy is self-contradictory. You’re faced with a virus which has a moderately serious impact, much like a severe flu, and in order to get people to think of it like it’s really deadly you inflate the numbers so that people behave as if this virus is really deadly because if they didn’t, most people would not be dying from this not all that deadly virus.

Why did they do this? Why did they want us so terrified?

A typical explanation might run along the lines of “oh, they needed to big it up so that people took extra precautions to save lives”. OK, so why not ‘big up’ flu then? Why not make flu seem more deadly than it is?

It’s because most people are not terrified of flu. If they tried to pretend there was a super deadly flu going around a lot of people would essentially shrug their shoulders and say we’ll just get through it like we have for the many previous outbreaks of a severe flu - where we have, essentially, done nothing. Except take the usual sensible precautions like staying at home if you’re sick.

But we didn’t do the ‘nothing’ we do for flu. We inflated the figures so that things looked to be much worse than a severe flu and pretended we were facing some serious existential threat that necessitated shutting down the entire planet. We indulged in some performative nonsense that involved all manner of masks, screens, hand sanitizers, one way systems, taping off park benches, and retreated to our covid bunkers.

It was almost all showmanship, performative and over the top like a good drag show should be.

This is what the worldwide covid response has looked like to me. It hasn’t been science, it’s been a fucking drag act.

Why the 9th April 2021?

You may have noticed that I’ve highlighted the date of 29th April 2021 in the above charts. There’s nothing particularly special about this date, except that the ‘pandemic’ had largely fizzled out according to the ‘official’ charts and it was the end date for the data I downloaded from the ONS at the time.

At the time, I wanted to get some feel for the variation in infection fatality rate (IFR) with age. To do this I assumed that the overall IFR was either 0.2% or 0.4% which was higher than some detailed estimates based on seroprevalence studies. I also assumed a uniform infection rate across the ages (which may not be the case), but I wanted to see for myself from the official data just how the different ages might be impacted.

I came up with the following estimates. Assuming an overall 0.2% IFR is not consistent with the ‘official’ data, but more consistent with estimates from some seroprevalence studies at the time.

The data is for England & Wales only, so not for the UK as a whole. I should stress that these figures are over estimates of risk. They’re based on the ‘official’ figures, for one thing.

And here’s a simple indicative chart for age-stratified excess death during this period. It’s only a first approximation because there’s no age-standardization, or population adjustments, but it is sufficient to see the trends

I’ll leave you to peruse the figures at your leisure - enough has already been spoken about charts and tables like these and I’ve nothing new to add.

The big humps seem scary but in context they’re nothing particularly out of the ordinary for a disease outbreak. During the bad winter flu of 2017/2018 there were 50,100 excess winter deaths recorded by the ONS (not sure whether this is a UK figure, or just England & Wales). If we factor in that flu testing had not reached quite the peak of absurdity that covid ‘testing’ has, and also factor in the deliberate over inflation of the death figures during covid, we can see that for a country the size of the UK the covid deaths are really not all that much more significant than those expected during an outbreak of a severe flu.

What did we do during the bad winter flu of 2017/2018?

We whined about lack of hospital beds (as we do every winter in the UK) and carried on as normal.

What did we do for covid?

We broke the fucking country.

Batman’s Soiled Underpants

Just what the hell has been going on? I have never subscribed to the ‘incompetence’ theory - at least not for the UK government. Their propaganda, their messaging, has been terrifyingly competent. I think they knew exactly what they were doing.

Why they did what they did is a matter of speculation at this point, but the self-contradictions implicit in the “we need to terrify people that this not-so-deadly virus is deadly so that they follow the health guidelines to save people from this virus which most don’t need saving from” lead me to suppose that the agenda has been about anything but health.

What is certain, however, is that we’ve burlesqued our way through this pandemic in the flounciest of dresses whilst the great balls of destiny have sweated away our well-being, our economy and our future.

It is, I fear, the end of the world as we know it. I don’t think we’ll have a sane response to the outbreak of disease ever again.

And just to make you feel worse - here’s one of my favourite ‘Dad jokes’

---