Scientists on SAGE will answer the question that they have been asked. The key therefore is to choose the question carefully.
So far as I can gather the question that the Government is asking is ‘how best can we supress the spread of the virus until a vaccine becomes available?’
Given that the virus spreads through social contact, we can hardly be surprised when the scientists come back with a recommendation to halt social contact by imposing lock-downs, preferably as restrictive and fierce as can be enforced.

It is a bit rich however, when you hear some of those scientists who break cover to complain that they recommended a full lock-down a fortnight ago, but that they were ignored.
They were not ignored, on the contrary, their advice was considered but rejected, which is very different indeed from being ignored.

In any event, when the advice is presented it comes with a caveat  -boldly articulated up-front, namely that the measures proposed are designed to curb the spread of the virus, and that they all come with associated costs and impacts that may be damaging to the economy, to our health, and to our mental health.
It is not for the scientists to weigh-up those costs, their expertise is confined to the question that they were asked -how to stop the spread.
Rather, it is for the Government to make the assessment as to whether the cost and damage is worth the candle.
So, those politicians who are now insisting that we should just do what the scientists are telling us, including the Leader of the Opposition, have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the advice and their own proper role in weighing it up.
Furthermore, they equally fail to appreciate that there is a growing body of scientists and clinicians who believe that the strategy is the wrong one. The great Barrington Declaration, which gives voice to this growing dissent, has -as I write- been signed by 26,000 clinicians and 10,000 medical and public health scientists.
The resistance is growing in Parliament too: 88 MPs voted against the 10 o’clock hospitality curfew this week.
Most dissent comes however, from within the governing party itself. This is because the coronavirus strategy has been particularly difficult for Conservatives like myself, for whom the belief that individuals make better decisions for themselves, their families and their communities than the state can make for them, is a core value.
As Winston Churchill summed it up ‘trust the people’.

To-day, scientists from Edinburgh University, having re-worked the notorious Imperial College modelling of the pandemic, discover that the lock-down measures were a terrible mistake and will lead to more Covid-19 deaths than would have occurred if we had allowed ourselves to acquire herd immunity.

Yet when reservations are expressed about the Government’s Coronavirus strategy ministers respond by stating that there is no alternative other than ‘letting the virus rip’.
The growing chorus of scientists and clinicians are however, advocating just such an alternative strategy.
It is not fair for Government to refuse to engage and insist that there is no alternative. Plainly, there is, and we should evaluate it before we write it off as being less effective than the existing strategy which, after all, does not appear to be working well at all.

The Government restated its strategy this week with absolute clarity: to suppress the disease through local and national restrictions on liberty and the economy until such time as a vaccine is developed.
Here is the difficulty: first, there are areas of the country that have now been in restrictive local lock-down for many weeks and infection rates, far from decreasing as a result of the measures have, on the contrary, increased sharply -in some areas as much as tenfold.
Second, vaccines may take a very long time to develop, there is no guarantee that one will prove effective, or it may prove only partially effective and take a further prolonged period to be sufficiently available to have an impact. After all, We possess anti-flu vaccines but it still kills 20,000 of us annually ( and incidentally it is currently  killing a lot more of us than Covid-19).
The Government’s strategy requires that lock-down restrictions with increasing severity, with all their disastrous economic, social and health consequences be repeatedly imposed and re-imposed with every local outbreak indefinitely until an effective vaccine developed.

The unease with this prospect of indefinite misery is growing. Very significantly family doctors are now demanding to be represented on the body of scientists advising the Government. They point out that currently the scientists are too focussed on the disease and the measures to combat it, without weighing up the damage that those measures are doing to the health and mental health of the nation and which the family doctors are seeing daily.

The alternative strategy can be summarised thus: Concentrate resources on isolating the infected, and on protecting people who are particularly vulnerable. The rest of us should be allowed to get back to normal social and economic life, judging and managing for ourselves the risk we are prepared to take, and through social interaction over time, acquire a measure of ‘herd immunity’.
This must include the NHS getting back to normal too, where Covid-19 measures have vastly reduced its capacity to treat other conditions.

The basis of this strategy is that we may have to live with Covid-19 for a long time, even forever, so we need to adapt to living normally with it; best we get on with it without wasting more time, as we it appears now that we wasted the summer, and consequently have made the coming winter worse.

On Tuesday evening 6^th Oct we debated the rule of six.
The minister at the despatch box conceded, when asked for the scientific basis for choosing six, that the number was chosen for its simplicity rather than science.
I couldn’t resist pointing out that if simplicity was the yardstick, then ten would be preferable as we could count them up on our fingers.
Furthermore, without sacrificing simplicity, was not possible to exclude children from the six, as they have done in Scotland, or is that too complicated for the English to grapple with?

The limit of six applies both indoors and out of doors (save only for households and bubbles of more than six). Thankfully however, it emerged during the debate that the police have no power of entry to a dwelling to enforce the measure. So they will have to wait outside to count you as you emerge -assuming sufficient fingers are available.

I tabled the following written question

Question: Desmond Swayne
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will secure additional facilities to enable Nightingale hospitals to accommodate patients that are not intubated. (92665)

Tabled on: 21 September 2020

Answer:
Edward Argar

The Nightingale hospitals are available to support the National Health Service when needed. Local clinical leaders are working to determine how this is done whilst considering the needs of all patients requiring NHS care.

The answer was submitted on 07 Oct 2020 at 13:41.

Now the answer was due several days earlier, so the department clearly needed longer to think about it. Nevertheless, the discerning reader will observe that the answer is pretty opaque, It might mean nothing at all.

My purpose in asking the question was this: I want to see the NHS getting back to normal by treating all the other routine and life-threating conditions that are killing us off other than Covid-19 (which, after all, is only killing less than 2% of those of who are dying).
One way to achieve this would be to resume normal service in those wards, operating theatres, and hospitals that were converted for exclusive Covid-19 use and to put the Covid-19 patients, as far as possible, in separate units, with the Nightingale hospitals being obvious candidates.
Now, one of the reasons why the Nightingales were so underused is that they could only accommodate ‘intubated patients’ i.e. patients who are sufficiently unwell to have to have had a tube inserted down their airway and sedated. They would also, as a consequence, be catheterised.
The hospitals couldn’t take patients that were not entirely bed-bound because they didn’t have enough lavatories.

Given that we’ve had all summer to address the issue I thought I’d ask if we’d taken the opportunity to remedy the matter. With all those events companies unable to do normal business, surely we could have rustled-up deluxe facilities supervised with military precision.
Alas, the answer suggests not.

The effort to overcome Covid-19 has often been characterised by ministers as a ‘war’.
The first principle of war is the selection and maintenance of the aim. You have to know exactly what it is that you are seeking to achieve and design all your policy towards obtaining that aim.
Back in March the aim was defined as ‘flattening the curve to protect the NHS’
Last week I asked the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove, if this had remained the same.
He replied “our aim is to flatten the curve, to protect the NHS and to save lives” and significantly he added “protect the economy”
Neither the aim expressed in March, nor the restatement by Mr Gove last week gives us much by which we can judge the direction or effectiveness of policy. We do not know what the end state is supposed to be. We do not know for sure if the aim is to contain, delay the spread, suppress, or eradicate the disease. ‘Flattening the curve’ seems to suggest merely delaying the spread which was certainly understandable back in March: by delaying we would reach the warmer summer weather; The NHS would have less flu, norovirus, and other winter pressures to deal with; and the virulence of coronaviruses tend to abate in summer months.
‘Flattening the  curve’ is much less understandable as a statement of the aim in the autumn.

I am often at a loss as to what the Government’s policies are supposed to achieve.
A typical example is the nationwide 10pm curfew on the hospitality industry, particularly given Mr Gove’s additional stated aim to ‘protect the economy’.
The virus certainly can’t tell the time, and the impact on the industry is devastating: To comply with regulations premises have reduced their capacity and introduced expensive new staff-intensive procedures. Consequently, sufficient opening ours are vital to secure sufficient revenues, especially where restaurants need to secure a second dinner sitting.
This policy, applied across the country despite widely different infection rates, makes nonsense of the stated aim.
It would have been better to devolve powers to the local levels where any curfew could have been applied to individual establishments, giving proprietors a powerful incentive to influence the social-distancing behaviour of their patrons.

The frontiers of knowledge are ever expanding. Professor Hugo Zeberg and his team at the Max Plank Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology have discovered the genes that make some individuals particularly susceptible to severe  symptoms if they catch Covid-19.
Furthermore, those unfortunate enough to carry the gene do so because our ancestors acquired them by breeding with the Neanderthals some sixty thousand years ago. So, we can safely blame the Neanderthals because they died out forty thousand years ago.
Of course, a slightly different slant to put on it, would be to blame those over-sexed ancestors of ours for their congress with the Neanderthals.
Which reminds me of my schoolmaster’s advice: “boys, it is a lot safer to take up a musical instrument than either to join the Christian Union or to spend your time daydreaming about sexual exploits”
I’ve recently taken up the Piano

 As Covid-19 cases in New Forest District continue to decline (5 per 100,000) I am dismayed by to-day’s announcement of new and economically damaging restrictions on our liberties.

Think back to February. The initial phase in our strategy to deal with Covid-19 was ‘Confine’: to confine it by identifying it through testing, and then quarantining cases and contacts. It was understood however, that this would be temporary and that inevitably it would get out and start spreading in the community. So, the next phase was ‘Delay’: The purpose of delaying the spread was to ease the strain on the NHS by reducing the infection rate until we got to the summer when there would be fewer other winter pressures like flu for hospitals to deal with. We also hoped Covid-19, a coronavirus like flu, would be equally seasonal in its behaviour and abate in the summer.
There was no expectation that we would implement extreme measures, rather the advice was to wash your hands frequently and be sensible about social distancing. We anticipated acquiring a herd immunity through the manageable spread of the disease.

We witnessed hospitals in Italy being overwhelmed and other countries bringing in draconian lock-downs. Then, modelling by the team from Imperial College London suggested that, if we carried on as we were, 500,000 would die (they have form in vastly over-estimating deaths from other diseases), the Government was spooked, it changed course and ordered the lock-down with all its devastating consequences.

Flu kills all year round – In the last weeks of July it killed 1000 of us (where Covid-19 killed only 200)- but it is seasonal: it certainly kills a lot more of us in the winter. Equally, we should stop talking about another wave of Covid-19 and instead, like flu, start expecting its annual season.
Having peaked in April Covid-19 abated over the summer. Inevitably it will get worse in winter. It may also be worse this winter than might otherwise have been the case. This is because we carried on with a number of restrictions on normal social life during the summer, reducing our ability to acquire and share herd immunity and wasting the opportunity provided by the weakest period for the virus.

My contention remains, as I have said many times over the last months, that our over-reaction to the disease has done much more lasting economic damage, and, counter-intuitively, even more damage to our health  than the disease itself.
The current strategy merely kicks the can down the road. If the measures work and reduce the spread, the virus will simply reappear later.
Of course, we could be lucky and get a vaccine or a cure, or even ‘moon-shot’ daily tests to enable us to return to normality, but none of these are certain.
One day there may be a virus that threatens our whole way of life – but this isn’t it, even if we are behaving as if it were.

16/09/2020 By Desmond Swayne

On Tuesday the following exchange took place in the Commons:

Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con) To what extent is there a possibility that it is the exponential increase in testing itself, in identifying genuine new cases, and the very significant possibility of false positives, that is giving a distorted impression of the trajectory of the disease?

The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock) I like my right hon. Friend very much and wish that that were true. The reason why the Office for National Statistics does the surveillance testing is to ensure that we are constantly looking, on a national representative sample, at what the case rate is, as well as, of course, using the tests, and as we increase the testing numbers, we will inevitably find more of the cases that are there. The ONS survey published on Friday shows a rise in the numbers commensurate with the rise in the numbers of tests that have come back positive, and that does take into account the point about false positives, which is an important one.

The reason I put the question is that I have received a number of representations from clinicians across the country (presumably prompted by the stand that I’ve taken) who believe that Covid-19 testing is giving a misleading impression about a second wave. They argue that of course we will detect more genuine cases of the disease as we do more testing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the disease is increasing: we may simply finding more of it because we are looking for more of it.

More worrying is the belief that the a false impression is being created by the test which is unable to distinguish between active cases of the disease, and those who may have recovered from it some time ago but have remaining non-infective traces of it.

I’m not sure that the Secretary Of State’s answer provides sufficient reassurance. He is stating that the Office of National Statistics conducts a survey by testing a representative population sample and then applying a statistical calculation to estimate the number of cases in the whole population.
If the ONS test suffers from the same inability to distinguish false positives it doesn’t escape the possibility of exaggerating the incidence of the disease.

The ONS does publish the following caveats:
“we do not know the true sensitivity and specificity of the test, as COVID-19 is a new virus….
The estimates presented in this bulletin contain uncertainty. There are many sources of uncertainty, including uncertainty in the test”

The Government  website -when I last looked- stated the daily number of tests processed in the UK  was 227,075. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/testing and the daily number of people tested positive is  3,105. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/cases
Which means that 1.37% of those tested had a positive result. Clearly it doesn’t take a mathematician to tell you that a relatively small percentage of false positives will have a significant impact on our estimate of how many people are infected. In fact a report by the ONS in June put false positives at 2.4%: which even higher than the actual proportion of positives!

We are threatened with more restrictions to our liberty which will lay waste to even more of our employment opportunities, and will be more damaging to the health of anyone suffering from a medical condition other than Covid-19, all driven by policy reliant on what may be very misleading data
At some stage we will have to have a reality check and remind ourselves that whilst Covid-19 is a horrid and dangerous disease, it is only 24^th in the league of UK killers at only 1.4% of deaths (the top scorer being dementia at 11%).

If we want to live normally we will have conquer our fear

A number of constituents have written to demand that I vote against the provisions of the UK internal Markets bill because it breaks International law -even the minister admitted that in the Commons.

The bill is about a great deal more than our treaty obligations in respect of the Northern Ireland protocol under the EU withdrawal agreement, with which only a few of its clauses are concerned.

The bill cannot break UK law because Parliament makes the law!
Furthermore, the Withdrawal Agreement only has the force of law because Parliament passed it into law. In the Act with which we did so, we included a clause making it clear that we could change it we needed to. Therefore, the Markets Bill no more breaks the Withdrawal Agreement than the Withdrawal Act itself did.

The provisions affecting Northern Ireland in the bill are a response to threat by EU negotiators that they would use the Joint Committee set up under the protocol to effectively exclude UK produce from Northern Ireland if we did not concede vital ground in our negotiations with them on a free trade deal.
So, the provisions of the bill are precautionary: they give ministers power to act in certain circumstances. The objective remains to avoid those circumstances and therefore, not to have to implement the provisions of the bill. The bill of itself does not breach any international obligation.

The Northern Ireland protocol is predicated on the existence of a free trade deal between the EU and the UK. Without one the provisions become unworkable.
The Government made a manifesto commitment to UK voters to ensure that there was unfettered market access between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Let us assume that the worst case comes about,  that there is no EU trade deal and that the Government has to use the provisions set out in this bill to make the arrangements workable.
In that circumstance would we have breached our international treaty obligations in respect of the Withdrawal Agreement?
I think not.
In that respect I believe that the minister was wrong in what he said in the Commons when he agreed that it would compromise the obligation even if in a very minor technical way. I say it wouldn’t.

Article 184 binds the EU and the UK in good faith and using their best endeavours negotiate expeditiously to implement the future relationship set out in the Political Declaration.
Both sides have effectively accused the other of already beaching that binding obligation.
Failure to agree would be the proof of this. It follows that, the parties having breached the fundamental obligation underpinning the Agreement, then the Agreement is void: the Treaty is abrogated. We would have no further binding international obligation.

Would this adversely affect our international reputation?
Would other countries trust us in making future binding agreements?
Our trading partners are not blind. They can see that is a unique circumstance. They have had their own dealings with EU negotiators, and they know what is going on.

To compare the provisions of this bill with China’s abrogation of the Sino-British agreement over Hong Kong, as some parliamentarians have done, is ridiculous and grotesque. It reveals the bankruptcy of their argument. 

 I have opposed intrusion into our civil liberties by Coronavirus regulations whereby we are told whom we may meet, where we may meet them, and now even what we must wear. So,  I was tempted to join the protest march last weekend in London against the Coronavirus regulations and for which I had received a couple of email invitations.
I certainly wasn’t put off by the prospect  fine because it struck me as entirely possible to attend such events and yet abide by the required social distance set out in guidelines. Furthermore, so many other protest marches have been allowed to proceed largely unmolested by the authorities including the Black Lives Matter protests, and just in the last week Extinction Rebellion.
As for the liability of an on-the-spot fine of a whopping £1000 for the organisers, I certainly wasn’t one of them, and anyway, even if one were, the organisers of the other protest marches were not pursued.
In the event I didn’t go simply because I have so many other demands on my time on a Saturday.

Piers Corbyn, Jeremy’s elder brother, has always struck me as a rather odd fellow, with some pretty wacky views. Nevertheless, I was pretty horrified that he was fingered for the £1000 on-the-spot fine for the march that I had at least contemplated attending. This is very unfair given that the other more fashionable marches did not receive this heavy-handed approach. I am glad that there is a campaign to fight his corner and challenge the fine, to which I’ve made a very modest contribution.

The regulations under which our right to lawful protest has been removed -undebated and without a vote in Parliament- gives the power to any police officer, including police support officers, to levy the on-the spot-fine on you for being involved in a gathering of more that 30 people. Well, in that case I’m very glad I didn’t go. The original official description of the regulations was that the £1000 was just for the organisers, actually the wording of the regulations however, state that it’s anyone involved.
When I received the emails advertising the March, I did contemplate forwarding them to those constituents who have been most vociferous in their criticism of Coronavirus regulations. I didn’t, but had I done so, would I have ‘involved’ myself, and might I be liable to be fined?
I am informed that this is indeed the case. In fact, anyone present, carrying banners, shouting slogans, is ‘involved’ and could be liable.
Another chilling aspect of all this is how police photographers take long lens photographs of entirely peaceful participants: they can come for you later.
As the barrister Matthew Scott has put it
“One should shudder at a law that gives such vast powers to the most junior officials; that was introduced by an emergency procedure, and after the publication of grossly misleading official guidance as to its intended effect”

We should never be careless with our liberty and freedom of expression