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Official data ‘exaggerates’ the risk of Covid-19 and talking about a second wave is ‘misleading’, nearly 500 academics told Boris Johnson in an open letter attacking the blockade.
Doctors and scientists said the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has become ‘disproportionate’ and that massive testing has distorted the risk of the virus.
They said the tests are likely to produce a large number of “false positives” and that the government needs to do more to place infection and death rates in the context of normal seasonal rates.
The letter criticized the government’s handling of the coronavirus for “causing more harm than good.”
Official data is ‘exaggerating’ the risk of Covid-19 and talking about a second wave is ‘misleading’, nearly 500 academics told Boris Johnson (pictured Friday) in an open letter attacking the lockdown
It comes after the UK confirmed an additional 24,957 positive Covid tests yesterday, just 13.9 percent more than last week’s total.
Leading scientists suggested that the second wave of coronavirus in the UK has already peaked.
Professor Tim Spector, who runs the Covid Symptom Study app with the aim of tracking the spread of Covid-19 in the UK, confirmed there were “positive signs” that the country “passed the peak of the second wave.”
The open letter to the Prime Minister was signed by 469 doctors and is titled Do No Harm First: The Medical Principle that a cure should never be worse than the disease itself.
The UK confirmed a further 24,957 positive Covid tests yesterday, just 13.9 per cent more than last week’s total, as leading scientists suggest that the second wave of coronavirus in the UK has already peaked. .
Another 413 people have died after testing positive for the virus, official figures released today revealed, bringing the total death toll in the UK during the pandemic to 48,888.
It is signed by immunologist Dr. Charlotte R. Bell, pediatrician Dr. Rosamond Jones, consulting surgeon, and Keith Willison, professor of Chemical Biology at Imperial College.
The letter says: “The management of the crisis has become disproportionate and is now doing more harm than good.
“We urge policy makers to remember that this pandemic, like all pandemics, will eventually pass, but the social and psychological damage it is causing runs the risk of becoming permanent.
‘After the initial justifiable response to Covid-19, the evidence base now shows a different picture.
‘The problem of functional false positive rates has not yet been addressed and, in particular, in the context of a low prevalence of the disease, in which false positives are likely to substantially outnumber true positives and furthermore are poorly correlated with the person who is infectious.
“Along with this, we have the problem that it is normal to see an increase in illnesses and deaths during the winter months.
‘It is remarkable that [the] The UK death rate is currently around average for this time of year. Therefore, the use of the term “second wave” is misleading.
“We have the knowledge to allow a policy that protects the elderly and vulnerable without increasing all other economic and health damages and that is not at the expense of our entire way of life and particularly that of the nation’s children.”
The open letter was organized by parent campaign UsForThem and Recovery, a new group opposing heavy coronavirus restrictions.
It comes amid warnings that the country needed ‘dramatic action’ to reduce Covid-19 transmission, despite the government’s ‘gruesome’ presentation of data to justify the latest lockdown.
Today’s number of cases registered an increase of just 3,045 over the total of 21,915 last Saturday.
Another 413 people have died after testing positive for the virus, official figures released today revealed, bringing the total death toll during the pandemic in the UK to 48,888.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter told the BBC that it would not be sustainable for the health service to deal with the levels of coronavirus cases without stricter measures.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter said it would not be sustainable for the health service to deal with the levels of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations without measures tougher than those imposed by the three-tier system.
The statistician and chairman of the Winton Center for Risk Communication and Evidence at the University of Cambridge told BBC Radio 4’s Today show: “ If this is going to go down, it will go down very slowly unless dramatic action is taken, which It has been taken.’
Meanwhile, hundreds of people have been tested as part of a massive coronavirus testing pilot program in Liverpool, with queues outside the new testing centers.
The military has been brought into the city to help implement the scheme, which uses lateral flow tests to deliver results in less than an hour for people who show no symptoms of the virus.
Johnson has said that the rapid test driver could be a “royal road through the crisis.”
The R rate of the coronavirus fell in five regions of England this week except London and the South East, where it did not change, and remained stable between 1.1 and 1.3 in England and the United Kingdom as a whole. Last week marked a drop from 1.2 to 1.4 the week before
But health experts said plans to screen Liverpool’s population were not adequate.
Sir David said: ‘The point is that we are getting around 20-25,000 positive tests a day, which translates to around 1,500 hospitalizations a day, around 250-300 deaths a day and these are generally stable but increasing a little: deaths in hospitals and hospitalizations are slowly increasing, and we are approaching winter.
‘Those kinds of levels, even if they are very stable and below the first peak of the virus, unless they start to fall, we get stuck with them for months and it seems to me and others that that is not going to be sustainable in terms of what the health service can do.
A group of academics said the potential for ‘damaging diversion of public money and resources is enormous’ and warned that the £ 500 million project could be a ‘costly failure’.
The new data shows that the rate of infections in England and Wales appears to be declining.
The slides now contain a note that says: ‘The graphics on slides four and five have been modified after an error was found’
The revised figures now suggest that the second peak is likely to be on par with the first, with the worst case being 1,010 daily deaths in December.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that approximately 618,700 people in England, one in 90, had Covid-19 between October 25 and 31, up from 568,100 the week before.
The government and its scientific advisers were criticized on Thursday for using ‘dubious data’ to justify a devastating second lockdown, and Tory MPs warned that SAGE’s doomsday predictions had echoes of the controversial dossier that sent Britain to war with Iraq.
A graph wielded at a press conference by Professors Doom and Gloom emerged stating that England could see up to 1,500 deaths per day by December and that it had been secretly toned down “after an error was found” with the data.
The prediction sparked widespread alarm because, if true, it would dwarf the 1,000 daily deaths recorded during the peak of the first wave in April.
SAGE’s forecast for hospital admissions was also discreetly revised from 9,000 in early December to 6,190.
The government faced a severe reprimand from the UK Statistics Authority this week for its use of data.
