OK, fair enough

‘reasonable worst-case scenario’: oh how I love a contradiction in terms.

‘a one in four chance that a “catastrophic” pandemic will hit the UK in the next five years’: why so? We haven’t had a “catastrophic” pandemic in the last five years.

What we did have was a “catastrophic” response by the Establishment: the government, the opposition, the media, the schoolteachers’ unions, the NHS and the medical trades, the pharma companies, the Public Health officials, the Science, the police, the local authorities, …

We were saved by the people who manned the tills, stacked the shelves, drove the lorries, kept the water and sewage flowing, and the electricity and gas, ploughed and herded, …

Given we are still arguing about where the last one came from, how could we possibly come up with these odds? It’s “pull a scary number from our arse” time.

“If however it’s little kids dying then most people would want quarantine and lockdown.”

*of* the little kids, *not* the people who are not ill. We should never be locking up the healthy to save the ill.

Why suddenly the ‘catastrophe pandemics’ after 500 years? These join the list of crises: obesity, alcohol, climate, poverty/inequality, air-quality, etc.

Could it be there is a catastrophe/crisis factory somewhere?

And what happened in 2020 was not a pandemic, but it was a catastrophe of Government globalist policy.

Arthur the cat.

First important thing to understand… symptoms are caused by the immune response to an invading pathogen, not the pathogen itself. That immune response and the symptoms it produces is called “disease”. You cannot have a disease without signs & symptoms. Asymptomatic disease is an oxymoron.

Typhoid is caused by Salmonella typhi, which is a bacterium not a virus. It is a bacterium of the gut spread in fæces and by poor hygiene.

A bacterium can replicate itself very rapidly in almost any medium inside or outside the body.

A respiratory virus must enter a cell in order to use the cellular chemistry to reproduce copies of itself, and this causes a change at the cell surface which incorporates foreign protein which the immune system recognises as alien and kills off to produces the symptoms (aka disease) – nasal discharge, sneezing, coughing by which the virus is spread into the air as an aerosol and by which is has become adapted as its means of transmission.

If you do not have the disease caused by a respiratory virus infection, it means the virus has been deactivated/destroyed and is not reproducing so you cannot spread it. The nonsense about asymptomatic transmission of SARS CoV 2 was not based in medical knowledge but political manipulation.

Typhoid Mary had a colony of the bacterium living in her gut to which her immune system was desensitised and did not attack, so she had no symptoms, no disease but could pass on active bacteria.

About 80% of the population have staph and strep colonies in their upper respiratory tract to which their immune system is desensitised. These are disease causing bacteria and if, for example, they are transferred to an open wound of another person, or an immune compromised person, or someone to which the particular strain is novel, they can cause disease. Perhaps we should therefore all go into perpetual quarantine.

(The transfer of said bacteria from the nasal passages operating theatre staff, in exhaled water droplets into open wounds is the basis of hospital masks. They were never intended to stop viruses or protect the wearer. )

840,000 dead? A strangely precise prediction. 25% chance in the next five years. I get the five year bit; that’s the time horizon of politicians. But 25% is pulled straight out of an arse. The expectation is a pandemic every twenty years when historically they have been rare. The last one (1918-19) was very unevenly spread. The privations of war and an idiotic policy of cramming victims into crappy hospital wards exacerbated a fairly normal flu.

To avoid the next “pandemic” we just have to say “No!”. Refuse to go to hospital, do not take any of the miracle cures (patent pending) they come up with. Open the bloody window, fresh air is the best disinfectant.

There are lessons to be learnt from covid, but they are not the ones They think you should learn.

Oh noes, the Astrologer Royal (aka Prof Pantsdown) has been at the spreadsheets again.

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!! (eventually)

“The transfer of said bacteria from the nasal passages operating theatre staff, in exhaled water droplets into open wounds is the basis of hospital masks. They were never intended to stop viruses or protect the wearer.”

And yet they don’t work for the patients’ wounds either. As has been known for decades.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf

From Baron Jackfield’s list I would conclude that it’s impossible to have a pandemic in the 21st century. People are simply too well-fed and healthy now. As was confirmed as early as the Diamond Princess, the people who die of a newly named virus are the same ones whose age and poor health leave them vulnerable to any virus.

That’s not to say you can’t raise the death count by putting patients on ventilators, or by banning fresh air and exercise and administering untested pharmaceuticals. But that’s a different matter.

Even going back a century, I’m not convinced the flu epidemic wasn’t really an aspirin epidemic (the drug had just come off patent, and doctors’ advice if it didn’t alleviate symptoms was to keep increasing the dose).

@jgh – “*of* the little kids, *not* the people who are not ill. We should never be locking up the healthy to save the ill.”

That’s a pretty stupid idea. Quarantine only works when applied to those who are infectious, and for practical implementations, it must also be applied to those who are thought to be infectious pending confirmation. If we had a disease that only made children ill, then locking them up would achieve nothing if the adults could spread the disease, since children almost universally come in frequent contact with adults.

“ What to do should depend on who is getting ill and dying. If like Covid it’s old folk with just a few years left we need to ignore it and get on with life. If however it’s little kids dying then most people would want quarantine and lockdown. Especially the vast majority with children and grand children.”

We know people were quarantining and self isolating at the start of Covid because the travel, pub/restaurant/cafe usage and other stats said so and also because cases were already falling before Boris told us it would be 3 weeks to flatten the curve.

If it had affected children, or the next one does, parents and grand parents won’t need the government to tell them what to do, and if they do need the government to tell them what to do a bit of Darwinian thinning out of the population might be a good thing.

50 per cent of the population falling ill and some 840,000 people in Britain dying

It’s the 50% falling ill that is puzzling – how come 50% don’t fall ill? What prevents them getting this disease and although the new plague is not nearly as infectious as SARS-CoV-2 it appears to have a higher infection fatality rate of 2.4% assuming a population of 70m.

This model has obviously got more orchids than Nero Wolf but they are not even trying to dress it up as something faintly plausible.

Tries again: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf

You fools. Surely you know there’s another variant sweeping Britain?! Yet you carry on as if nothing is happening.

Of course, there’s no actual need to create a surreal hospital show nowadays. Though they’ve replaced comedy with freakish clowns.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12370811/NHS-managers-told-not-offer-sympathy-female-colleagues-worried-sharing-toilets-biological-men-woke-handbook.html

Bloody bastards.

JG @ 9.35, that is precisely the point.

I just discovered ‘The Kissinger Report’ into population control, published in 1975 and implemented into US law by Gerald Ford. It decided that actions were needed to keep the world population below 6 billion by 2050 and no more than 8 billion total:
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/population-control-and-official-usg

It isn’t paranoia when they really are out to get you.

@Arthur the Cat

None of which is relevant to my question.

It was entirely relevant, and he answered the question – albeit rhetorically – with his point about strep.

[BTW, my first wife was a biologist who worked in pathology and I’ve currently got two medics, a surgeon, a research pharmacologist and a neurobiologist in the family. I don’t need Bio 101 lectures.]

Are you saying you know it all via genetics, or osmosis? I have two judges in my family, but it doesn’t mean I know a great deal about the law.