Trump was right - Covid escaped from a lab

[Will!]

5 hours ago, Goat said:

13 March, according to Wikipedia, border closures from 14 March, although Danish citizens were exempt, the UK introduced similar measures on 16 March, at the time the UK was reporting similar case numbers as Denmark but from 10x the population, possibly this was partly down to testing.

There were earlier restrictions related to specific regions, (China, S. Korea, N. Italy), I think the UK implemented broadly similar measures at about the same time.

The important point, that I was responding to, is that by 13 March, or even by 1 March, the die was already cast, we already had a significant number of cases imported from Italy etc, and many hundreds of thousands of tourists overseas who needed to come back, there was no way we could avoid a significant Covid outbreak in March 2020.

To repeat, AFAIK no country introduced measures that, if replicated in the UK at the same time, would've had a material effect on the UK's outcome.

Personally I wonder whether border controls might have made a difference to the Kent / Alpha variant outbreak later in 2020.  There were several arguments against closing the borders to non-UK residents. All were wrong.

The first was the economic cost. Compared to the subsequent cost closing the borders would have been cheap at twice the price.

The second was that people coming from countries with a lower prevalence of Covid would not worsen the problem. This ignored the fact that plenty of other countries' surveillance systems were less effective than the UK's and we had no idea what the true prevalence of Covid in those countries was.

The third was that Track & Trace would work. I think that speaks for itself.

[Goat]

1 hour ago, Will! said:

Personally I wonder whether border controls might have made a difference to the Kent / Alpha variant outbreak later in 2020.  There were several arguments against closing the borders to non-UK residents. All were wrong.

 

I thought Alpha evolved in Kent anyway, closing borders wouldn't have helped that.

Most of the cases that did come into the country came in with UK nationals, unless you're willing to lock them out, or stop them leaving in the first place, closing the border to non-UK nationals is not going to help.

Even if we were prepared to enforce rigorous borders controls, i.e stop most people leaving the country, I doubt it would've achieved much, too much of our everyday essentials (food, medicine etc) comes in from Europe, it'd only be a matter of time before a trucker brought in the next variant.

[Will!]

3 minutes ago, Goat said:

I thought Alpha evolved in Kent anyway, closing borders wouldn't have helped that.

Most of the cases that did come into the country came in with UK nationals, unless you're willing to lock them out, or stop them leaving in the first place, closing the border to non-UK nationals is not going to help.

Even if we were prepared to enforce rigorous borders controls, i.e stop most people leaving the country, I doubt it would've achieved much, too much of our everyday essentials (food, medicine etc) comes in from Europe, it'd only be a matter of time before a trucker brought in the next variant.

The Kent / Alpha variant was first detected in Kent.  Some people live in Kent, but it also contains a major entry point to the UK.  If it evolved here then it's true that border controls would have made no difference.  If it did not evolve here then they would have made a very big difference.

Your second point is supposition, unless you have data to back it up.

For your third point, the "too difficult" argument, my reply is that what we went through instead was considerably more difficult.

[MARTINX9]

7 minutes ago, Will! said:

The Kent / Alpha variant was first detected in Kent.  Some people live in Kent, but it also contains a major entry point to the UK.  If it evolved here then it's true that border controls would have made no difference.  If it did not evolve here then they would have made a very big difference.

Your second point is supposition, unless you have data to back it up.

For your third point, the "too difficult" argument, my reply is that what we went through instead was considerably more difficult.

For a century we called the 1918 influenza pandemic the Spanish flu. Spain - as a nation with a free press at the time and not at war - was the first to report cases officially but it didn't originate there at all.

We should - on the basis of the evidence - have called it the Kansas flu.

No one knows how the Kent variant originated - but as you say it is a key entry point to the UK and even back in 2020 there were also large numbers of illegal crossings over the Channel.

Edited March 6, 2023 by MARTINX9

[Goat]

28 minutes ago, Will! said:

The Kent / Alpha variant was first detected in Kent.  Some people live in Kent, but it also contains a major entry point to the UK.  If it evolved here then it's true that border controls would have made no difference.  If it did not evolve here then they would have made a very big difference.

For your third point, the "too difficult" argument, my reply is that what we went through instead was considerably more difficult.

40% of cases were Alpha on 21 December 2020, the next nearest that I can find is 4.4% in Italy, I think that's fairly strong evidence that it really did evolve over here.

Also, you missed something there, Kent contains a major entry point (two actually) for road haulage, which is exactly the sort of thing that would've been exempt from border restrictions anyway.

 

39 minutes ago, Will! said:

Your second point is supposition, unless you have data to back it up.

We know that the virus was imported approximately 1,500 times from Italy, Spain and France in Feb/Mar 2020, mostly from the first two, we know that those are popular tourist destinations with millions of people visiting each from the UK each year.

We don't generally get much tourism back from them, especially in February/March.

I doubt that business travel would've been anything more than a tiny fraction of the number of tourist coming back from those countries, and the business travellers were also at least as likely to be UK nationals, if not more.

I think the supposition is reasonable and unlikely to be wrong.

[Will!]

22 minutes ago, Goat said:

40% of cases were Alpha on 21 December 2020, the next nearest that I can find is 4.4% in Italy, I think that's fairly strong evidence that it really did evolve over here.

Nice chart.

Take it back to October 2020 though.  With hindsight there was a greater percentage of Alpha analysed sequences in Italy than the UK in that month.  That's circumstantial evidence that Alpha evolved outside the UK.

22 minutes ago, Goat said:

Also, you missed something there, Kent contains a major entry point (two actually) for road haulage, which is exactly the sort of thing that would've been exempt from border restrictions anyway.

I see no reason to exempt road haulage from restrictions.

22 minutes ago, Goat said:

We know that the virus was imported approximately 1,500 times from Italy, Spain and France in Feb/Mar 2020, mostly from the first two, we know that those are popular tourist destinations with millions of people visiting each from the UK each year.

We don't generally get much tourism back from them, especially in February/March.

I doubt that business travel would've been anything more than a tiny fraction of the number of tourist coming back from those countries, and the business travellers were also at least as likely to be UK nationals, if not more.

I'm talking about later in 2020, not February / March.

Edited March 6, 2023 by Will!

[Quiet Guy]

Leading Biodefense Expert Says A Science "Cabal" Is Misdirecting America About A Wuhan Lab Accident: "It's like denial and deception."

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/cp/139957921

[Social Justice League]

Yes indeed, it came from the lab.

Human scum at it again.