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

I cannot be alone in detecting the enormous drop in productivity when dealing with large commercial organisations.
My office does a great deal of telephoning in pursuit of issues raised with us by constituents, and I do quite a bit myself for my own purposes. It’s always been a bit of a bugbear, but the agony of very long waits on the telephone has multiplied exponentially.
You are warned when you reach the first hurdle: the recorded message telling you that because of Covid19 there will be extended delays in answering.
It is not uncommon to wait in a queue for half an hour only for the line to go dead and you have to just give up or start all over again.

Last week I did a short interview on Times Radio. I followed a yet another professor (they must cloning them) who had produced the results of his latest study showing how, on the contrary, there had been a massive increase in productivity consequent on so many people working from home.
How did he discover this?
As far as I could make out he asked the sampled home-workers, who told him gladly that they were more productive.
Is he a professor of gullibility or what?
Asking individuals to measure their own productivity is hardly an objective assessment.
As a consumer of the services of banks, building societies, insurance companies, law firms, government departments, I can safely say they are kidding themselves if they think they are more productive. 

The ‘second wave’ that we are threatened with is really a second wave of mass hysteria. 

In the last fortnight of July five times more people died of seasonal flu (some 1000) than died of Covid19 (some 200 souls).
Are we in a panic about flu deaths?
Why not?
For the last 5 years flu has carried off almost 20,000 of us annually.
In the flu season of 1968-69, 80,000 flu deaths occurred in the UK, but we didn’t lock down our economy doing untold damage; we didn’t close our schools, we didn’t pass draconian new laws with fines for making normal social contact. We maintained a proper sense of proportion.

The damage we are doing to ourselves with our current over-reaction is enormous: one in three of our 18 to 25 year-olds have lost their jobs, they are just the first: a tsunami of job losses is now coming our way.
We were told that the objective was to protect the NHS, and we did, but 26,000 people have now died as a result of not getting treatments for other conditions, and a further 16,000 will follow them by next March. Millions are now on the waiting list for treatment, 300,000 of them waiting in great pain for joint replacements alone. 2000 clinical trials for new drugs and treatments have been paused or abandoned.

 We will be paying for our gross overreaction in in so many ways for years to come.
It is little excuse to acknowledge that much of the rest of the world has shared our madness. It is just bonkers.

Last week I received a call from Solent Radio asking me to comment on a report that I had been prevented from entering a village shop because I wasn’t wearing a mask. I told them to send their investigative journalists to the village and interrogate the staff in every shop and they would discover that it was nonsense.
In Parliament I called the requirement to wear a face covering a ‘monstrous imposition’ and I believe that the wearing of masks feeds into our national mass hysteria which is doing such damage to our economic and community life.
Nevertheless, it is the law and I wouldn’t break it, if only to avoid giving satisfaction to the dreadful sorts who email me to report their neighbours for minor infringements of the regulations. Don’t tell me, just download the Gestapo App. 

I receive a very large correspondence, principally by email: it is not unusual to receive 200 emails in a single day.
Over recent years email correspondence has grown exponentially, so much so, that increasingly I have to ration my responses. Some constituents complain that I am rude. I dispute this. Certainly, I dispense with salutations and answer the question asked without preamble. I accept that I am brief -I have to be.

Whilst, I read all the email I receive, I will make a judgement as to whether an automated acknowledgement is a sufficient response.
I confess however, that I do not read any messages sent to me via social media. So when I receive an email from Facebook telling me that someone has commented on my ‘post’; ‘written on my timeline’ (whatever that may mean); or has sent me a message, I am afraid that I take no action. 

I do have a pang of guilt because I have a Facebook page and a Twitter account which I use solely for the purpose of broadcasting.
When I was Regimental Signals Officer I used to lecture fellow officers about the need to resist the temptation to have their thumbs constantly on the Clansman pressel switch (on permanent ‘send’) and instead, to listen out on the radio net. Alas, in that respect I no longer obey my own instruction: I just broadcast and don’t receive.
The reasons for this are twofold: First there are only so many hours in a day and I have a great deal else to be doing. I receive literally thousands of ‘notifications’ on Twitter, where one earth would one even begin?
 Second, whilst email can be bad enough, the unpleasantness of some of the commentary on social media is of such a pitch that it would drive you to a state of depression were you to read it. I know colleagues who have been quite unnerved by what is said to them on social media.  

So, if you wish to express an opinion to me stick to email swayned@parliament.uk and even though it is an email, nevertheless give your full postal address, or write to me at the House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA. 

Just as fewer people are dying at this time of year than would normally be expected to -according to the long term average, and of those who are dying, more are doing so from flu than Covid19, nevertheless we are wrecking holidays with new quarantine impositions and increasing the ferocity of punishments for non-compliance with our new face-wear requirements (which only weeks ago we were being told were unnecessary, or even counter-productive)
Is there no end to this mass hysteria?
It has so many unfortunate consequences

Usually we are treated to scenes of delight as pupils receive their exam results at this time of year, but instead my email inbox has exploded with the furore surrounding their estimated grades.
It is easy to say that I wouldn’t have started from here, but I wouldn’t have: we should never have closed our schools and cancelled our public examinations. Other jurisdictions did not do so and yet have had better Covid19 outcomes.
But having closed them, we had to find a substitute for the exams.

The statistics show that when it comes to predicting exam outcomes, individual teachers consistently overestimate the performance of their pupils. It is natural for teachers to predict on the basis of what they believe their pupils to be capable of, but exams measure actual performance.

Clearly, to have relied on teacher-predicted grades as a once-off this year would have involved a measure of unfairness: There would have been no consistency across schools and it would have put pupils with teachers inclined to make more realistic assessments, at a disadvantage.
The mechanism to moderate predicted results using the historical performance of schools might have seemed reasonable in theory, but has given rise to many anomalies, not least having a quite unfair impact on exceptional pupils at historically less well performing schools.
Reliance on unmoderated teacher predictions, though unfair and imperfect, is preferable to the moderating effect of an algorithm

There is no ‘good’ way of addressing the problem but why didn’t we see it coming from a mile off?
One way of dealing with it might have been to have done everything somewhat earlier (after all, we didn’t have to wait for the exams to be over and marked because there weren’t any), then schools could have had confidential access to the results well ahead of publication, giving them time to remonstrate effectively in a clearly defined and agreed appeals process (and even as I write, that process in yet to be defined).

The surrender by Scotland puts pressure on ministers to do likewise and accept a year of grade inflation. It certainly wouldn’t address the unfairness caused by a lack of consistent assessment across schools and individual teachers, but I think it would be the lesser of two evils.

Of course. We’ll all blame the Government, but the cock-up is largely the work of professionals and  an independent quango. What we can blame the Government for is allowing itself to be persuaded to close the schools and cancel exams in the first place -so we are back where I began: mass hysteria.