Masks continue to prove ineffective, COVID tests are unreliable, second waves are coinciding with very low death rates and the UK government has chosen a disastrous “model country” (Belgium) to justify its latest restrictions. An interesting study shows how misleading countries’ death statistics (already questionable) can be.
In a previous post in July I pointed out that those countries which had the longest enforcement of mask wearing had no better COVID infection records than others.
Given what we also know about the manufacture and specification of the standard masks used by 95% of the population the case for compulsory mask wearing is even more suspect. The masks are made unhygienically in third world sweatshops and even bear the message that they cannot protect the wearer from the COVID19 virus!
Let us look again at the 12 countries which most strictly enforced mask wearing from an early stage of this pandemic and see how they have fared in recent weeks.
Venezuela: daily cases rising throughout July have more than doubled since then – although deaths have risen they still remain very low at between 6 and 12 deaths per day.
Israel: a big second wave started in early June and has continued rising to new heights with daily cases doubling since mid July to 4,000. Deaths rose but remain low.
El Salvador: cases rose rapidly throughout July reaching a new peak in early August but deaths although rising remain low at between 5 and 15 a day.
Cameroon: cases still rising in July but fell back in August and September with low deaths
Argentina: cases still rising in July to circa 6,000 per day rose to over 12,000 by September with deaths rising from 100 to 300 a day.
Turkey: started in mid March, rose from under 1,000 cases a day in mid July to nearly 2,000 in September.
Cuba: strong rise second wave from mid July to September.
Colombia: very steep rise in cases from mid July to September now reached 7,500 a day.
Czech Rep: second wave began late June and very big rise since end August.
Slovakia, second rise in cases from end of June rising steeply from mid August. Second wave twice as high as the first.
Austria: after big fall to the end of April cases rose strongly from July yo September. Now reaching same peak as first wave.
Poland: daily cases have never declined since March and are now twice the April level.
So with the exception of Cameroon, all those countries which forced mask wearing from an early stage of COVID19 have had big second waves of infections, some even higher than the first wave.
A study of why Sweden fared worse than its Scandinavian neighbours Denmark and Norway concluded that the lack of masks was not significant. The difference was due to the size of Stockholm, the number of immigrants and their distribution among old age homes where deaths were high. The lack of Mask enforcement hardly featured as a cause.
A study of mask wearing in the UK looked at 10 weeks of pub opening totalling 500m visits without masks. It did not stop UK deaths and hospital admissions falling lower and lower!
NEW LOCKDOWN INSPIRED BY FAILED BELGIUM
As Sweden, which had no complete lockdown or enforced mask wearing, is judged safe enough for the British to travel to without quarantining, the country held up as an example for Johnson’s new drastic “rule of 6” measures (Belgium) is still on the quarantine list. Government scientists had praised Belgium for its actions to prevent a second wave. But Belgium infections have now risen from 91 on July 16th to 969 on September 12th a 10 fold increase while in the same period the UK figure has risen 5.4 times.
HEALTH PRE COVID DETERMINED COVID “CASES RISE”
An interesting study of the mortality rates prior to COVID in Spain, the UK, Netherlands and Sweden showed that their high COVID death figures were due to lower deaths (below the average for the period) before COVID set in.
With countries like Germany and Portugal their lower COVID deaths were due to higher deaths than usual in the previous months.
NEW COVID CASES IN HEALTHIER YOUNG
In the UK two thirds of covid cases are now under 40. This mirrors what is happening in France. In the UK in the spring 75% of cases were in the over 50s. Now that is down to 20%. COVID cases in the over 80s is now down to 3% from 28%.
In other words one of the reasons for both much lower hospital admissions and deaths is that the infections are in age groups where resistance is greatest.
VANISHINGLY LOW DEATH NUMBERS
In the UK these were the very low official death figures between 6th and 12th September.
September 12th – 9 deaths
September 11th – 6
September 10th – 14
September 9th – 8
September 8th – 32
September 7th – 3
September 6th – 2
An average of 9 deaths a day – and that on a doubtful definition of a COVID death* – is not a crisis. It is six weeks since COVID “cases” (I think this now includes “infections” determined by increased testing which is not the original definition of “cases”) began to rise.
Allowing for the period of infection to death and death registration of about 3-4 weeks we can see that deaths have not risen in response to infections. Indeed given that hospital admissions remain low (falling consistently to about 140 a day- that is 9 patients per hospital in the UK!) the increased infections have not lead to widespread serious illness.
In a recent interview on French television Prof. Jean-François Toussaint of the Université Paris-Descartes said that hysteria over a “second wave” in France is based on the widespread misinterpretation of data – ie counting infections nearly all of young people not exhibiting symptoms and not deaths – which are, as in the UK, vanishingly small in number. Toussaint also reflects decades of scientific research on the usefulness of masks by saying:
There is not, at this time, any scientific argument that attests to the usefulness of masks”
TOTALLY MISLEADING COVID TESTS
The British (and other governments) are making drastic social and economic decisions based on tests for COVID19. But are they at all reliable? The experience of a friend in another country is interesting:
I had a test for COVID 19 and the first result was positive. I was upset, then i was invited for the second test and third tests. The second one showed that it is not COVID19 but one of the other types of coronavirus.Then I had a third one for antibodies and three blood tests – they showed that I had no COVID 19, but I have all other coronavirus types.
The Doctor who was managing the test and laboratory said to me that 99% of tested patients have all varieties of coronaviruses and antibodies. And they all show on the first test as COVID infected (but it is not COVID 19). So it is widely assumed that the first test in many countries diagnoses as COVID19 when it is not.
The website New Scientist wrote in August:
Two 90-minute tests for the coronavirus will be rolled out by the UK government in the coming weeks ………… neither has publicly available data to support its use……“I’d never heard of these two tests,” says Jon Deeks at the University of Birmingham, UK, who has been comparing the evidence behind a range of rapid tests to diagnose covid-19.
So not only can we not trust the definition of COVID deaths we cannot trust the definition of COVID 19 infection itself when people are specifically tested.
*
I have pointed out before on this website that very few of so called COVID deaths are directly from COVID. In the USA the CDC’s website of the Government’s Centre for Disease Control” clearly and definitively states:
For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.
