Covid

[InTheBigBank]

Excellent article on this by the very left wing Professor Sunetra Gupta in the Torygraph today.

You will cause heads to explode when people try to come to grips with someone being lockdown-skeptic but also aligning themselves with the left side of politics.

 

[InTheBigBank]

Its a long piece and to try to paraphrase it is difficult but here goes.

It is titled "Mass testing is preventing us from getting back to normal"

1. Mass testing has created a mess.

2. At an individual level knowing your infection status is very helpful. e.g. If you are planning to visit vulnerable family and friends, but positive tests can have significant negative impacts: loss of income and opportunity that hits the poorer hardest. She quotes a study that up to 1/3 of positive tests were for people who were non infectious.

3. We are permanently crawling with germs. Expecting the individual to bear responsibility for an infection he or she passes on creates a state of permanent guilt.

4. We should be very careful during a pandemic to protect the vulnerable but once a disease becomes endemic "there is little else we can do other than not visit granny if we have a fulminant cold."

5. Self isolation and being told we may have been in contact with someone who has tested positive has done little to stop the spread of infection over the past few months but it has impacted delivery of healthcare and education. Sanctioning the use of tests that suggest people are contagious when they are not magnifies the problems.

6. Even with perfect tests we would still have vast numbers of key workers unable to function and children denied education and the intellectual and emotional stimulation that our education system seeks to provide. We would still endure our lives being endlessly disrupted, all this having scant impact on the prevalence of an infection in its endemic state.

7. Accurate testing would have been useful at the start of the pandemic to assess the the progression of the pandemic and the effects of the restrictions. It was unforgivable to use a faulty testing system which transferred societal responsibilities to the individual sentencing many to loss of livelihood, education, social contact and hope. And we are still doing this.

Then the conclusion and in full:

"Continuing with a mass testing, mass isolation strategy in response to a disease that has become endemic is merely piling up the misery. The government must change course ."

With apologies to the lady if I have got anything wrong.

Lots of common sense stuff here which has been forgotten about over the course of the pandemic.

Really you can sum the whole thing up by saying government have no control over a natural phenomenon.

The politicalisation of a virus, the tiresome obsession with 'safety' and subsequent nannying of the population in order to be seen doing something was futile and incredibly damaging in all sorts of ways.

 

[elginCity]

Gupta, like Professor Minford the economist, is an outlier. There’s always one or two ‘experts’ who buck the general trend, and are seized upon by those who support an ideology or agenda to reinforce their views.

 

[Devon Red]

Gupta, like Professor Minford the economist, is an outlier. There’s always one or two ‘experts’ who buck the general trend, and are seized upon by those who support an ideology or agenda to reinforce their views.

I do agree with this, as much as I agree with Gupta.

 

[InTheBigBank]

Gupta, like Professor Minford the economist, is an outlier. There’s always one or two ‘experts’ who buck the general trend, and are seized upon by those who support an ideology or agenda to reinforce their views.

Is she an outlier though, really? Since BBC, Sky, ITV tend to give the majority of airtime to those with the 'correct' views, perhaps she isn't as much of an outlier as perceived?

Besides, if she does hold a minority view, does that mean she's wrong? It was once the view of outliers that slavery is wrong, that washing hands was important & the earth orbits the sun.

 

[Spanks]

Is she an outlier though, really? Since BBC, Sky, ITV tend to give the majority of airtime to those with the 'correct' views, perhaps she isn't as much of an outlier as perceived?

Besides, if she does hold a minority view, does that mean she's wrong? It was once the view of outliers that slavery is wrong, that washing hands was important & the earth orbits the sun.

And we live in an era where it has become fairly open practice to dismiss experts that disagree with the ruling party, for political expediency. So you're going to cling to an outlier if it suits your agenda.

 

[Egg]

Besides, if she does hold a minority view, does that mean she's wrong?

Well, here's a piece penned by Gupta herself in which she addresses some of the stuff which, by her own admission, she was wrong about:

Sunetra Gupta: have my Covid hypotheses held up?

It’s fair to say that my contact with the world of public media over the past eighteen months hasn’t been without incident. When I look back at the first interviews I gave on Covid-19, including to UnHerd in May 2020, it is plainly evident that I still had no idea how politicised and nasty this...

unherd.com

 

[InTheBigBank]

And we live in an era where it has become fairly open practice to dismiss experts that disagree with the ruling party, for political expediency. So you're going to cling to an outlier if it suits your agenda.

Everyone regardless of viewpoint will cling to someone or something which suits their agenda. Human nature.

Well, here's a piece penned by Gupta herself in which she addresses some of the stuff which, by her own admission, she was wrong about:

Sunetra Gupta: have my Covid hypotheses held up?

It’s fair to say that my contact with the world of public media over the past eighteen months hasn’t been without incident. When I look back at the first interviews I gave on Covid-19, including to UnHerd in May 2020, it is plainly evident that I still had no idea how politicised and nasty this...

unherd.com

Kudos to her for having the proverbial balls for admitting to mistakes. None of us are infallible.

 

[Alistair20000]

You will cause heads to explode when people try to come to grips with someone being lockdown-skeptic but also aligning themselves with the left side of politics.

Indeed.

 

[Alistair20000]

Gupta, like Professor Minford the economist, is an outlier. There’s always one or two ‘experts’ who buck the general trend, and are seized upon by those who support an ideology or agenda to reinforce their views.

Is the useless Prof Neil Ferguson mainstream Elgy ?