This is exactly what this man said.. and he emphasised how we are still not ready if it happened again tomorrow...
So these eminent scientists have figured out that if you calculate the R rate based on the two most concentrated environments of illness and mortality , hospitals and care homes - you might just get an artificially high figure !!!! Im neither pro or against all the arguments but I remember at the time for a long period through it nobody I knew had met anyone with covid and we all had a good circulation of contacts and relatives . But late on the pandemic it had swing the other way and most people we knew who had been hospitalised were asthmatics , smokers and the obese with other health problems . Might be different for you lot but that was my experience of it .
Who knows what is right or wrong regarding the R numbers, data can be twisted to suit any viewpoint - more interesting to me how so many are willing to do the government's bidding and shut down any dissent, block opinions or questioning. Solzhenitsyn wrote something about how similar happened in the Soviet Union where the middle classes shut down and controlled the free opinions of the proletariat, because it meant having to question the validity and conviction of their own beliefs. Disagree with Boris Johnson, the data from pharmaceutical company giants and civil servants and it's a conspiracy theory...
I’m at the stage …do I blame the politicians….or do I blame the scientists? or did them both make the biggest cluster **** of a century?? we will probably never know
It wasn't helped by 95% of the people who contested the model and interpretation of the data being absolute ****ing idiots, making up total bollocks. They mostly drowned out anyone else with the ability to put together a sensible response.
The ‘making up of total bollocks’ was clearly by politicians, modellers, etc. But anyway each to their own, I have my beliefs and you have yours, and that’s fine by me, we’ll highly likely never agree so let’s just leave it there. I don’t have either the time or inclination to get drawn into a long drawn out debate.
Who are these dastardly people who are doing the government's bidding? I'm going to take a couple of wild guesses here: 1) you're someone who believes in free speech and how no-one should stop you from saying something; and 2) you think that someone disagreeing with you is the same as doing the government's bidding and shutting down any dissent. I'm always amazed how many people think that someone disagreeing with them strongly is the same as blocking their opinions. Just because someone says a certain view is conspiracy laden bollocks doesn't mean they are shutting down the debate, people can post as much conspiracy laden bollocks as they want (for example, see lots of this thread), and other people can laugh at them. Free country innit?
This is the fundamentally weird thing about the conspiracy theorists. I think it's quite obvious that the government made huge mistakes around covid. In fact, mistakes probably isn't a strong enough word, I think there was willful negligence going on. What plans we did have weren't acted upon, and the knowledge we did have was at times deliberately ignored. Many, many lives were sacrificed in favour of the economy and of populism. Ridiculous conspiracy theories actually help the government to get away with all of that. It distracts from the stuff they really did do, most of which is the polar opposite of what the conspiracy theories accuse them of. I hate these Tory governments we've had over recent years, and the Johnson-led one was the worst of the lot. I'd be the last person to want to cut them any slack, and I don't think that having absolutely no time for daft theories is doing that, it's simply being a reasonable, media-literate person who knows to ignore the absurd claims of the think tanks and libertarian newspaper editors. Johnson and his friends should be seriously taken to task for their covid failings, and the enquiry probably will do that. People going on about Bill Gates wanting to control your brain with vaccines or about economy-sapping lockdowns somehow being the preference of the ultra-rich people who actually benefit more than anyone from that economy, is a big part of how they've got away with it so far.
