Robert Stevens
COVID-19 deaths in Britain are surging as the result of every restriction being ended by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government.
In the last week, almost 2,000 people have died in Britain from COVID-19, as fatalities reach levels not seen since the height of the pandemic in January and February 2021. The 2021 deaths were during a period before vaccines were widely available to the population.
On Wednesday, 651 people were reported dead, the highest number since February 17, 2021. The 1,984 lives lost Thursday represent an increase of 665 deaths over the previous week, or 50.4 percent.
The Daily Mail declared the 651 figure “artificially high because it includes some who should have been counted yesterday”. But the previous day saw 288 deaths recorded, making it 939 fatalities over both days no matter how the data was sliced up. Hundreds more deaths followed, with 350 announced Thursday.
Rising COVID deaths in Britain are part of a persistent death toll across Europe as the inevitable consequence of restrictions being lifted everywhere, including on travel between countries. Over 10,000 deaths have been recorded throughout the continent in each of the last two weeks. Taken over a year this would add more than half a million more deaths in Europe, assuming the fatalities rate stays as it is, and bring the official death tally to around 2.3 million.
On the day the UK recorded 651 deaths, Germany recorded 307; Russia 267; Italy 155 and France 152. In Spain, where the population has already suffered over 103,000 deaths, the authorities did not even provide a figure for that day.
The media has either not even reported the shocking increase in UK deaths, or relegated it to a minor report.
On Thursday, Dr. Dan Goyal, a National Health Service consultant and academic, tweeted, “FFS, 350 more gone today! 2,000 lives lost this week! That’s X 5 more than any other infectious disease. That keeps Covid the 3rd biggest killer of all adults in the U.K. Vaccine rates plummeting. Mask wearing and self-isolation gone. Where the feck is the media uproar?”
A “Doctor in Emergency Medicine” posted, “Yesterday there were 651 deaths in the UK from covid. 651!!!! Nothing on the news. This isn’t living with covid. It’s living with zero restrictions.”
Yesterday, Kit Yates, a mathematical Biologist at the University of Bath and member of the Independent Sage group, tweeted, “It's important to remember that falling covid doesn't mean low covid. Latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) survey suggests prevalence is around where it was at the January peak, which is still extremely high. One in 14 people currently infected in England.”
This was in response to official figures showing that COVID cases overall are falling. It is claimed there were 217,308 cases up to Thursday, compared to 328,471 over the previous seven days.
However, case figure reports must be viewed with extreme caution given that universal free testing was done away with in Britain at the start of April. Under conditions in which the working population of over 30 million are not only back in the workplace, but actively encouraged to work even if they have the virus, the spread of COVID is likely to be far higher.
The Guardian reported that although there had been small decline in the number of cases reported nationally, “experts analysing the data say it is too soon to say whether infections have passed their peak… Declines have been recorded in England across most age groups; however, the trend in the week ending 9 April was unclear for those in school years 7 to 11 and those aged 70 and over, with 7.2% of the latter thought to have had Covid in the most recent week, the highest level yet for that age group.”
A central plank of the government’s homicidal agenda of “living with COVID” is to end all reporting of the spread of the disease. Therefore, at this stage, the only reliable indication of the prevalence of COVID is the number of hospital admissions and deaths.
While hospitalisations are below the numbers recorded during the second wave in early 2021, this is mainly due to the impact of the mass vaccination of the population. That given, while there was a fall in admissions in the week to April 4 compared to the week to March 28, per 100,000 population, on Thursday there were still 19,770 patients in hospital with COVID in Britain.
According to the government’s measure, which tallies people who passed away within 28 days of a position COVID test, 171,046 are dead. The more accurate figure recorded by the ONS, based on COVID-19 being mentioned as a cause of death on a death certificate, finds that 191,164 people have perished. The i news noted, “About nine in 10 deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate since the start of the pandemic have coronavirus as the primary cause of death, with a minority listing the virus as a contributory factor.”
For more than two years, COVID has ravaged the world’s population as the ruling class everywhere, except for China and a few other countries, following a herd immunity policy. According to official figures over half a billion people have been infected globally, with over 186 million cases recorded in Europe. France, Germany and Britain have all recorded well over 20 million cases among their populations, with France approaching a staggering 30 million.
Millions are now suffering from Long COVID, a series of debilitating conditions that can afflict people for months or years even if their infection was only “mild.” It is feared that some cases could last for a lifetime. COVID is proven in numerous studies to be a devastating disease, which if it does not immediately kill can attack and damage the heart, the brain and other vital organs.
According to research published in November, an estimated 100 million were suffering from Long COVID. However, this was based on a World Health Organization estimate of 237 million worldwide COVID infections. Infections have more than doubled globally in just the four months since.
In a piece headlined, “Long Covid: the invisible public health crisis fueling labour shortages”, the Financial Times noted that “UK labour market data show a rise of some 200,000 since the start of the pandemic in the number of people who are not working or job-seeking because of long-term ill health; and a quarter of UK companies say long Covid is one of the main causes of long-term staff absence.”
“The UK also publishes an official monthly count of self-reported cases, in which an estimated 1.2mn people said in March they had persistent long Covid symptoms lasting at least 12 weeks, with women, people aged between 35 and 49, health workers and teachers most affected. A total of 784,000 said they had been suffering for at least a year, and 322,000 said it limited their day to day activities ‘a lot’”.
ONS data reported by the newspaper the previous week found that an “estimated 1.7mn people, or 2.7 percent of the UK population, reported experiencing symptoms lasting for more than four weeks after they had, or suspected they had, the disease as of March 5. This represents a slight rise from 2.4 percent about a month earlier.”
Allowing COVID to rip and to keep profits flowing at all costs can only lead to further more deadly COVID variants. One such could be the Omicron XE variant, of which hundreds of cases have been detected in Britain. Analysis shows that this arose as the result of the unrestricted Omicron BA.2 sub-variant, which has fueled recent cases and deaths. XE is a known as a “recombinant” as it combines genetic characteristic of other variants, in this case BA.1 and BA.2. XE was first detected in the UK on January 19 and by March 22, 637 cases were present in England.
The World Health Organisation has warned that XE could be more transmissible than the BA.1 and BA.2 variants. This assessment was backed up by the UK Health Security Agency, with the most recent data showing a growth rate for XE 9.8 percent higher than BA.2.
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