Here is a free-range chicken in a layer flock at a site somewhere in Northamptonshire in the English Midlands. It roams free, it does not risk an unlimited fine for leaving its home without just cause, it can associate with chickens other than its flock, or any feathered or non-feathered friend. It does not have to queue to get into shops to buy basics, (nor did it ever), nor justify itself if it wishes to stroll around more than once a day. Although its parents were cooped up because of bird ‘flu a few years back, it knows only liberty. Mind you it doesn’t have the right to bear/bare arms, nor any right to free speech, nor protection against unreasonable searches or seizures. No one is going to ask it to self-incriminate, well, perhaps next week.
It is not required to keep itself 6 feet, 6 and three-quarter inches (or 2 metres) from other chickens not from its yard. It is not under sentence of death as it is not raised for meat. Welcome to the UK, where the chickens run free and there once was liberty. Do you think the concept might catch on?
Mind you, at least we are safer from the virus now, aren’t we.
If its being raised for eggs in a business setting it has three years max before its euthanized. Egg production drops by about 80% every year so most layers are culled after 2-3 years. Not even for meat as they’re too specialized (not enough meat) and too old (tough meat) to compete with the 8-12 week old meat birds.
Anarchy, State and Utopia – the Chicken Edition, by Robert Nozick.
Northamptonshire is not far from East Anglia. Home of the “usual suspects” with Avian Flu, predicted to cause mega-deaths. Ah, the good old days. With the same theoretical modelling techniques by (guess who) Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson. Only a few days ago he was estimating 500,000 deaths in the UK. Now “unlikely to exceed 20,000”.
“Although its parents were cooped up because of bird ‘flu a few years back”
Hmmm.
“Only a few days ago he was estimating 500,000 deaths in the UK.”
[sigh] No, he wasn’t.
Mr Ed,
You might want to check out your headline for this post…
I live near Hull and our local plod has made an announcement that they will not be stopping people at random and asking them if their journey is necessary.
Regarding chickens. We keep them and ours have a pretty happy life and we don’t bump them off when they stop laying. We have in the past bought rescue hens that have been retired from the egg industry but we found that they are a bit of a waste of money as they eat but produce very few eggs.
Must be dispiriting to be a free ranger surrounded by so many Chicken Littles. (Henny Pennys, I think, to y’all over there.)
This situation exists only because the government is neither threatened by the chicken’s freedom, nor is it of value to the government by being constrained. Change either of those parameters and that chicken would be caged post haste. Plus a Chicken Police bureaucracy would spring up to aggressively monitor the status of chickens with drones and fines.
I was down on Key West a few years ago, and the place is FULL of wild chickens. Apparently they were brought there in the 19th and early 20th for cockfighting. When that was outlawed, they set their chickens free (or, I suspect, ate them). They reverted to the wild, and as wild birds, are protected by law.
He was talking crap NiV. As with his prev bollock-useless predictions.
And as for the chicken–we could all walk out the door now.
It is the cowardice of the masses that facilitates evil as always.
A few more days and thousands more jobs /businesses gone the time for people to start to ignore the crap will arrive.
Ellen,
I’ve seen ’em on KW. I guess you also saw the poldactyl cats that also date from the pirate era.
You still don’t know.
“Herd Immunity” is bullshit.
Where is the fabled unicorn of Herd Immunity in Italy?
The virus is known to reinfect people. There is no immunity.
Gary,
Do you have a source for that? All I’ve seen are claims that once you’ve caught the thing and survived, you’ve acquired immunity. But I have seen that said only by Joe Six-Pack, and I’m not sure he’s a trained pathologist specializing in virology.
Does anybody know one way or the other for sure?
If we didn’t develop immunity to this and all the other bugs we would all be dead already. Herd immunity is the point when enough people have acquired resistance to the bug that it is unable to propagate itself through the population. If this wasn’t happening then cases of the virus wouldn’t spread and then gradually decline but would spread through the population indefinitely. Even the worse plagues throughout history died out eventually.
“Does anybody know one way or the other for sure?”
Nobody knows for sure, but it is considered likely based on the behaviour of other coronaviruses and limited animal testing.
The virus does not appear to be mutating, and with only one strain loose there is little opportunity for ‘crossbreeds’ as happens with Influenza. (If two different Influenza viruses infect a cell at the same time, the viruses assembled by the cell can be made up of bits from either strain mixed together.) That helps enormously with forming immunity.
They did experiments on macaque monkeys in which survivors were re-infected. They got a slight fever, but otherwise were not ill, suggesting that the immunity allowed them to fight off the new infection.
There have been a number of widely reported cases where survivors have recovered, and then have been subsequently tested and found positive for coronavirus. Researchers think this may be because the virus from the original infection sometimes remains for a month or more at a low level, because of the test being unreliable and sometimes giving false positives, and possibly, as suggested by the monkeys, re-infection is possible but results only in mild or no symptoms.
If people were going into hospital, complaining that they had already had it before and recovered, I think the doctors would find that very significant and report it widely. I haven’t heard anything of the sort.
However, given that by the leading models’ current estimates the fraction of the population infected is still very small, even in places like Italy, re-infections should be small squared. So we might not have heard of it because there hasn’t yet been enough opportunity for it to happen.
It is also possible that infection and recovery give short-term immunity, for a year, say, but longer term the immunity decays. That might result in recurring epidemics every few years.
In short – we don’t know, there is insufficient evidence. But previous experience suggests it should work.
@NiV
If you are taking issue with either estimating or a few days ago, then I would agree.
However, the team certainly mentioned the 500,000 figure, didn’t dispute it when it was quoted and have form for being wildly pessimistic.
They tend to take estimates of transmission rates etc. rather uncritically. They certainly didn’t take the data from the Diamond Princess seriously enough. That’s the gold standard for this whole epidemic. You could not have designed a better test bed for extreme contagion.
I guess we should really thank the Japanese.
Gary; “Where is the fabled unicorn of Herd Immunity in Italy?”
The death rate in Italy is probably a consequence of a skewed age demographic, and associated co-morbidity.
Everyone can catch the damn thing, but in order to live through it you initially need good health and constitutional resilience. These things tend to be not so freely distributed in the old and infirm as your average teenager.
So, I’m sorry for the elderly of Italy, but as far as I can see, there is no indication that a significant number of under 55s are succumbing to Covid-19.
Gary; ““Herd Immunity” is bullshit.”
How many people do you know who have been tested once ( there only recently being tests for COVID-19 ) recovered, and contracted the same strain again. Can you cite one documented instance?
Yea, growing old, sucks!
“However, the team certainly mentioned the 500,000 figure”
Yes, the claim was that if you took no precautions whatsoever, the predicted deaths would be over 500,000, if you took the precautions then being proposed by the government, the predicted deaths would be 250,000, in both cases ignoring the impact on the mortality rate of the NHS being overloaded. Since the predicted peak demand for beds was, at the time, eight times the number available, then pretty obviously if you left things as they were then most of those people couldn’t be treated and a lot more even than the 500,000 would die, although they made no attempt to estimate how many. Roughly 15% of identified cases require hospital treatment, but if you’re reasonably young and healthy only 1% die. All the projections of low death rate are therefore dependent on the health system being able to cope – overload it, and the death rate might go up as high as 15%! And far more of the younger people would die.
So they recommended that more severe measures be taken now, to keep the demand for beds below the limit. They modelled the effect of that, and that is where the 20,000 figure comes from. With total lockdown, combined with the number of beds available being doubled by the NHS since the first report, they think they can keep it down to less than 20,000 deaths, and not run out of beds. However, they admit that everything is uncertain, based on their current best estimates, and they could very easily be wrong.
The 500,000 figure was a hypothetical case presented for comparison that only applied in circumstances they didn’t expect would actually happen. On the one hand assuming no measures were taken, which even then wasn’t the case, and ignoring the overload effect. The change to 20,000 was on the basis of the lock-down. Change the policy, and you change the prediction.
—
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
He covered all his bases NiV.
But his lockdown crap was the safest medical try-to-cover-his-own-arse bet he could get–save for the small matter of destroying the UK and World economy–already adrift on a sea of debt.
The UK has been a police state for a very long time, at least since the beginning of WW II. The recent lockdown is merely another click of the ratchet.
You’ve lost:
(1) freedom of speech (ask Tommy Robinson);
(2) freedom of the press (never had it–prior censorship);
(3) the right to bear arms (even pocket knives);
(4) freedom of religion (black minister arrested in London for reading KJ Bible [!!!!]);
(4) facial recognition and personal tracking cameras;
(5) freedom from violent personal attack, Paki/Muslim sex-grooming gangs still run amok, with the full cooperation of your pathetic and utterly corrupt police…
I thank God my grandparents had the sense to leave in 1910.
Well, I don’t know anyone who has been tested because the government hasn’t bothered to test anyone other than rich celebrities.
Where is the testing and tracing that South Korea used so successfully?
Where is the PPE equipment?
Why did the government arrogantly refuse offers by British companies and the EU to supply ventilators?
https://thenantwichnews.co.uk/2020/03/24/nantwich-firm-blasts-government-over-delay-after-offering-5000-ventilators/
Astounding incompetence.
South Korea has less than a hundred deaths. They acted decisively and quickly, whereas the lazy workshy Bungle sat on his arse doing sod all for six weeks.
Why is South Korea so competent, whereas the useless marzipan dildo that is the British government has been criminally, comically incompetent?
That is the important question.
@NiV
Tell me something I don’t know.
You might try responding instead of launching a rant.
“Why did the government arrogantly refuse offers by British companies and the EU to supply ventilators?”
Because they’re sourced via dodgy middlemen in the Middle East adding vast mark-ups, often for ventilators that don’t actually exist.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52074862
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
If you agree that it wasn’t true that “Only a few days ago he was estimating 500,000 deaths in the UK”, then why criticise me for saying it? The 500,000 was a hypothetical base for comparison, conditional on no action being taken to stop the epidemic, which even then was on nobody’s agenda, and ignoring the impact of the NHS overload, which was the major point of the paper, and which means it is quite probably a drastic underestimate of what would actually happen if that policy was used. You can’t compare that to the subsequent estimates based on a drastically different policy.
But I’ve had to explain the same point three or four times now, and it was getting irritating. My apologies if it came across as short.
“You might try responding instead of launching a rant.”
What point did you want me to respond to?
Interestingly, there is another Gary on Twitter who trolls for the ChiComs.
I assume that it is another Gary, because the one on Twitter is, or pretends to be, American. But of course, trolls who use the same talking points can also use the same name.
@NiV
Not to pile on with everyone else, well ok, maybe a bit, but this “…leading models’ current estimates the fraction of the population infected is still very small…”
How can a model accurately estimate any ratio where the denominator is # of people who have it? I’m a physical scientist, so where measurement of a thing is possible yet you rely on only a model, your method is suspect. Maybe even your motives (I’m addressing governments who don’t test, not NiV)
No one is testing even now that test kits are widely available. Until we start doing widespread, random testing, we won’t know the denominator, so please don’t use ratios in your statistics. Numerators are fine: lots of people have died and more will. Probably no more than regular flu kills each year–but I don’t know that because…we are not testing!
And if officials or media are going to scare people with death plots rising exponentially, please plot regular flu deaths alongside for comparison.
If the death rate were so high and the doubling time just 6 days (perhaps stretched now by social distancing), we should be approaching one million deaths world wide (based on 555 deaths as of 1/21/2020 and a 6 day doubling time).
When the dust settles, one question I want put to governments everywhere is “why didn’t you test once kits became available?”
NiV:
Actually, to me it seemed too long, but i have a taste for brevity.
Also, i had already read a related comment of yours.
Seen on Sargon’s channel on YT
“How can a model accurately estimate any ratio where the denominator is # of people who have it? I’m a physical scientist, so where measurement of a thing is possible yet you rely on only a model, your method is suspect.”
*All* physical measurements are reliant on models. Some of these models are so well-tested that we routinely assume them to be true (physical ‘laws’ are all models of reality), but the principle still applies. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
In this case, statisticians estimate the number infected from the bits they can see, but everybody agrees that they cannot do so accurately. The virus is too new, the data too scanty and incomplete for that. However, you can make a start.
For example, the UK death toll is about 1000 people now. Based on other data, the overall mortality rate is about 1%, give or take. So four weeks ago when the people now dead got infected, there should have been about 100 times as many people infected who didn’t die. 100,000 people infected, 1% = 1,000 of them die 4 weeks later.
At the same time, the number of deaths is ramping up 10-fold per week, so the number of infections 4 weeks ago was presumably doing the same. If it continued to do so over the intervening four weeks, that adds another factor of 10,000, already in the pipeline right now. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Obviously, that’s a lot of fuzzy numbers going in, and the difference in outcome is massive. Exponential growth is hugely sensitive to initial conditions. I don’t know what’s going to happen. They don’t know either, although they’ve got a lot better access to data than I have, and more experience with the statistics. By all means be sceptical about the accuracy. But the proper response is “We don’t know”. We don’t jump to whatever conclusion we *want* to be true. We look at the data, taking into account the uncertainty.
“When the dust settles, one question I want put to governments everywhere is “why didn’t you test once kits became available?””
Because until a large enough fraction of the population has had the virus, it doesn’t tell you anything.
You know how opinion polling works – you have to sample more than a thousand people to get a figure accurate to a few percent. To measure a fraction considerably smaller than 1%, you’d need a far bigger sample than that. And because the tests up to now only told you if you were infected now, not if you had already had it and recovered, it would mean you would have to keep re-testing every week. (If the epidemic spreads 10-fold a week, then 90% of cases will have only picked it up in the past week, and any test older than a few days is out of date.) They didn’t have the money or laboratory capacity to do so.
Now that the antibody tests are available, they’re ramping up testing. However, they want to be sure the tests are accurate, because if a false test result leads someone to think they’re clear when they’re not, the consequences could be severe. So they’ll test accuracy first, then expand testing capacity over the coming months.
Done!
The test isn’t that accurate anyway–so awaiting salvation by test is another myth.
So is it: Make a wild, scary Golgafrincham Mutant Star Goat story, of 500,000 deaths (based not on science, but ‘models’ which are by definition, not what they are intended to represent) let it be reported as if possible, scale back the scare whilst ramping up the State, and then come up with a figure of 20,000 (12 days deaths in the UK) or +3.25% that can be declared as ‘victory’ whilst engaging in Statist Agitprop for the organisation that gave us mass-killing at Mid-Staffs and yet which is held up as our saviour, whilst giving us Venezuela-style shortages, political pork on an epic scale and showing how feeble liberty is in the UK?
Or is there more at play?
After all, an unsanitised telephone did for the remaining Golgafrinchams.
Mr Ed; “mass-killing at Mid-Staffs ”
Don’t forget the ‘Liverpool pathway’.
In fact, I wonder how many aged folk have gone that route over the years. But, oh! oh! Somebody might notice if the NHS drives them all along the Liverpool pathway at the same time.
‘Our’ gary-troll’s wild anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-Jewish and etc. assertions have of late had a sometimes obvious, sometimes indirect pro-ChiCom flavour, but if my not-infallible memory serves, that particular aspect was not in evidence before the virus became a major topic of conversation, so I’d say its having been a specifically ChiCom troll from the start is possible but far from proved; western-hating fruitcake, so periodically backing any topical anti-western fad – yes; specifically a member of the 50-Yuan army – hmmm.
Of course, I also think you and I and Julie near Chicago (I think everyone else has already worked it out 🙂 ) should follow the rule hammered into me by Natalie two decades ago at the start of this weblog thingy: don’t feed the troll – not even to the extent your and my comments do. 🙂 It’s a bit like washing hands, disinfecting and etc. – you have to touch things to do it – taps and disinfectant sprays and so on – and then strictly you should disinfect them, and then …. 🙂
Of course, I was trained in the 26-stage procedure for urination in an NBC battlefield environment (42-stage procedure if solids are involved) so it is easy to think of something much more tedious than all this hand-washing one is faffing around doing at the moment. 🙂
If true, then a lock-down is pointless. As soon as it is stopped, the disease will spread as before, because re-infection means it won’t burn out.
But in order for a person to recover from C-19, we know that the body must have figured out how to stop it. Otherwise people wouldn’t recover (given that they are cured without antibiotics or outside assistance). And immunity is merely a quicker reactivation of a previous antibody.
The uptick in suicide from the government approved Corona panic is gonna be bigger than Corona virus deaths.
The models have been wrong for every pandemic for the last 25 years.
All that matters to Doctors is preserving the cash cow NHS. The bigger harder question of choosing a path that minimises death is trickier stuff.
Also why did that chicken cross the road?
Chester Draws: “If true, then a lock-down is pointless. As soon as it is stopped, the disease will spread as before because re-infection means it won’t burn out.”
From the point of view of eradicating the virus, the lock-down is pointless.
Niall: I have no recollection of having seen comments by ‘our’ Gary before the coronapanic. Nor of ever having replied to them, before or after.
Snorri Godhi (March 29, 2020 at 10:06 am), the gary-troll has been a very occasional visitor (briefly noticeable for a bit and then gone for quite a while) for almost a decade: everything from wild raving against Haliburton to assuring us that ISIS was a Mossad-run false-flag operation. (Also some web evidence – I’m never quick or eager to call troll so did a data check.)
However I think we’re probably feeding the troll overmuch merely by discussing, so I will cease my discussion now. You raised the possibility so I responded. Ordinarily, I avoid that and leave people to draw their own conclusions from content alone – and I saw it was being almost universally ignored in this latest irruption. I’m done – and I advise the same to others. Don’t feed the troll.
Itellyou–Preserving the cash cow NHS won’t be possible in the collapsed economy we are heading for.
You would think medicals should have the nouse to realise that.
it doesn’t have the right to bear/bare arms, nor any right to free speech, nor protection against unreasonable searches or seizures.
I don’t have any of that either.
The only difference between me and the chicken is that it has a owner who can kill it with impunity.
Lord T,
So we are, for now, above Red China with their organ harvesting.
I don’t know if you are in England. Have you opted-out of being an organ donor yet? Be awfully tricky if you were on marginal life support after an accident and there was a transplant target for the NHS to meet. For England the deadline is 20th May 2020.
Meanwhile in Wales, a herd of goats is slowly taking over Llandudno…
Well that’s less grim than a plague of Flesh-eating Zombies.
Tune in next week….