Covid Restrictions Ending in Europe as Rollback of Rules Begins
England, France, and Ireland start their journey back to normalcy.
As the surge of the Omicron variant is ending, the new reality that the airborne coronavirus that causes covid is here to stay is being embraced by European leaders.
In the United Kingdom, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced the end of COVID-19 measures including mandatory face masks in England.
“Our scientists believe it is likely that the Omicron wave has now peaked nationally… because of the extraordinary booster campaign, together with the way the public have responded to the Plan B measures, we can return to Plan A.”
Johnson said none of the so-called Plan B measures would remain in England when they lapse on Jan. 26, as face masks would not be legally enforced anywhere and COVID passes would not be mandatory.
The government said it would also no longer ask people to work from home, effective immediately.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced Thursday that the government will lift most of its COVID-19 restrictions in February.
Starting February 2, stadiums, arenas and other large-capacity venues will be allowed to operate at full capacity again. Homeworking obligations will be lifted, though it will still be encouraged, and masks will no longer be required outdoors, as is currently the case in many cities.
On February 16, people will be allowed to eat and drink in stadiums, cinemas and on transport, as well as being allowed to drink while standing in bars. Nightclubs will be allowed to reopen, though the government was unable to specify whether masks would be required.
Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland says the nation will scrap almost all its COVID-19 restrictions on Saturday.
Ireland had the second highest incidence rate of COVID-19 in Europe just last week but also one of the continent’s highest uptake of booster vaccines, which has helped keep the number of seriously ill people well below the previous peak. read more
“We have weathered the Omicron storm,” Martin said in Friday’s televised address, in which he said booster vaccines had “utterly transformed” the situation in the country.
“I have stood here and spoken to you on some very dark days. But today is a good day,” he said.
I am glad to see that other countries are at least heading back to normalcy. I suspect many of the rules that remain will disappear as the covid cases get milder and the benefits of natural immunity are better appreciated.
Natural immunity was six times stronger during the delta wave than vaccination, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, published Jan. 19, analyzed COVID outcome data from New York and California, which make up about one in six of the nation’s total COVID deaths.
The study has limits — namely, it was done before the omicron wave and doesn’t factor in any information about boosters. It does, however, broadly agree with studies from other countries.
I would like to give a hat-tip to Sweden, which clearly adopted the most sensible model at the start.
For more than a year, Germany has reported more new COVID deaths per million than Sweden each day, despite endless media praise for N95’s, medical grade masking and strict vaccine passports for most businesses
I wonder why Sweden doesn’t get praised for having better results pic.twitter.com/USgVDVj7vr
— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) January 21, 2022
Finally, as a Californian, I share this sentiment:
"I feel like a person sitting in the Soviet Union watching the Berlin Wall fall. The UK has ended its COVID regime. The movement will spread worldwide. I hope someday it comes to California."https://t.co/T5DEJ2pDbx
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) January 21, 2022
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Until China strikes again
I’m afraid with the woke left there will not be a major change until the next election and only if the Democrats are destroyed
Which with cheating will be quite the feat
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this point.
TY Leslie.
https://twitter.com/amwick2/status/1484143514556510209?s=20
The viruses and other pathogens are out there, evolving, past, present and a progressive threat to viability. Don’t forget your masks, goggles, and 3 m social distancing rule. 6 feet was a politically congruent (e.g. tolerable) compromise of the actual science behind unforced particulate distribution (according to the Wuhan military institute).
Here’s the rest of that story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIGT-3vlycQ
BoJo got caught partying with elites on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral. That wasn’t the only time. His own party is incensed with his tone deaf stupidity and has joined the chorus of calls for his resignation. It looks like BoJo’s days as PM are numbered. Calling an end to the mandates is his last desperate Hail Mary pass in hopes of turning the tide. Good luck!
On the other hand, here is British Dr. John Campbell presenting some very interesting points about pandemic deaths revealed by data just released via the UK’s FOI Act.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UHvwWWcjYw
Really, the deaths from Covid are over-stated by over 80% and the average age of death in 81.5 which is right about the expected lifespan in the UK. So…. what is so special about the WuFlu?
It’s very much in line with what was revealed in Italy and consistent to what you would expect with our own FOI data released a couple of weeks ago regarding Pfizer’s vaccine research. Conclusion: WuFlu has been one of the biggest hoax’s ever perpetrated. Of course, no one dares say that.
Not only is WuFlu over, it never really was.
Except to those who China murdered, some families lost 10-12 relatives, not 81. Yeah I don’t understand it but it is deadly in the right people
I have it right now, unvaccinated, I’m allergic to the flu vaccine amd even the CDC said don’t take it if your allergic to the flu vaccine, I believe it’s the PEG they use in both.
Anyway, got it last Monday, 6 days in, I believe and pray the worst past. Have been taking ivermectin, my monoclonal appointment was canceled, they ran out with the rationing. Absolutely this government is trying to kill us
Is that one of the treatments you could have gotten if you hadn’t been white? I bet the Professor could use some complainants to sign onto his lawsuit.
We’ll all have been infected before long. I’ve probably been infected but I don’t know for sure. I always get the sniffles when the weather turns cold and this year was no different. I’ve gone this long without the poison poke and am determined to avoid it at all costs. The numbers tell us that it is almost exclusively about being frail and elderly, or being obese. If you aren’t frail nor obese, you are almost certainly safe (according to the studies). We’ll be over this soon (except in CA). I’ll be in AZ soon.
China practices “demand-side economics”. Instead of facing shortages and unruly peasants, they address the problem by reducing demand.
re: “BoJo got caught partying with elites on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral.”
No. Members of the ‘Number 10’ staff were found to have engaged in what’s been described as a party.
Johnson wasn’t even in London that day, so no, he didn’t attend.
Does this whole thing feel eerily like an experiment to anyone else?
Like the social engineering experiments Stalin. Mao, and Pol Pot performed. Using the peasants as guinea pigs. For the greater good, of course.
Yes. That’s why I tell anyone who has the gall to ask that I’m “in the control group.”
Gee, it’s almost like all that crap never worked in the first place.
Hello, is this thing on?
People all over need to take hard looks at the “emergency” powers politicians and bureaucrats laid claim to and begin reigning them in. In the US, this needs to be done at all levels from city up through county and state right up to the federal level. “States of emergency” simply cannot be allowed to endure unquestioned for years at a time.
These people are doing it.
Such “emergency powers” don’t actually exist, either on the federal or the state levels, according to their respective constitutions. Neither does “martial law” — martial law, if it ever arrives, will be entirely extra-constitutional.
The fed itself has no such emergency power at all; in our state, the power exists only “in time of war” and only insofar as “ensuring the continuity of government.” Not a word in either about exceptional power over the citizens themselves.
In Democrat controlled polities, the restrictions and “emergency powers” are now laws of nature.
Subotai Bahadur
The only reason BJ has made these shifts this week is to save his skin now that he and his coterie got exposed for having had Friday parties, er, “business get-togethers” in the garden at Downing last year while the rest of the country was locked down, having to watch enfermed loved-ones die through plexi-glass, and the like.
Since Brexit, all he seems to have been preoccupied with is his kook-wife’s cause, net-zero green shit. He is just like so many pols from here that start off conservative and then lose their way. He is a weak man.
The only reason BJ has made these shifts this week is to save his skin now that he and his coterie got exposed for having had Friday parties, er, “business get-togethers” in the garden at Downing last year while the rest of the country was locked down, having to watch enfermed loved-ones die through plexi-glass, and the like.
Since Brexit, all he seems to be preoccupied with is his kook-wife’s cause, net-zero green shit.
He is a weak man, just like so many pols from here that start off conservative and then lose their way.
I don’t want to start another fight here but there are things to both sides of this argument that make sense….just make sure you fight with real ammo.
Yes, COVID killed a good number of people and it’s stupid to pretend otherwise. Pretending that it’s a hoax is ridiculous and only makes anyone in the middle convinced that you have no idea what you are talking about. I’d prefer to try and convince those people that the truth is not well-written with all of this polarization, even from historically reliable sources, and that press communication is doing what it always does: hyperbole, which is feeding right into politician panic porn for the masses.
Data are DEFINITELY “cooked” somewhere (that means handled improperly/falsely somewhere, either intentionally or unintentionally if you hadn’t heard it before).
I’ll give you an example from one of the datasets that should be reliable. Even if you believe COVID is misattributed for lots of deaths (which I also believe), a number like excess mortality rate (regardless of cause) should make sense and be somewhat immune to misattribution of the cause.
Our world in data, which has shown no bias that I’ve ever been able to see, estimates that the U.S. excess death rate is ~0.34% for the past two years. They report 339 excess deaths per 100,000 people. (source here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?tab=chart&country=~USA)
Given the 329.5 million people in the US, that stat claims excess death in the past 2 years to be ~1.12 million people. In two years, the same dataset says that 2.5% of US population has died of COVID. So, why is the excess death rate so much lower than the COVID death rate? At the same time, why does the excess death rate predict 1.12 million excess deaths but the reported COVID cumulative death rate for the US is only 856,000 deaths?
These datasets abound with gross inconsistencies on multiple fronts and no one is really questioning it with an actual numerical argument. “It’s fake” doesn’t really pass muster to a skeptic unless you point out numbers.
To make matters even worse, look at these CDC numbers…
CDC reports a total death rate of 869.7 per 100k in 2019 and a total death rate of 1027 per 100k in 2020. That’s a difference of 157 excess deaths per 100k in 2020. The CDC is always way behind in updating their numbers for the year prior so 2021 isn’t available yet. However, if we take the 2 year rate from our world of 339 and subtract away the 157, we can estimate that the number of this “so much better under Biden” 2021 even with vaccines and numbers on decline was actually higher at 182 excess death per 100k in 2021. Even if its a little off because of different data sets, we can expect those CDC numbers to not be very different between 2020 under Trump and 2021 under Biden.
The truth won’t be found in the CDC numbers. Click on the link I provided above. Those findings were found in Italy too where they slashed their official deaths due to Covid by 95%. In the UK study, Dr Campbell calculates right before your eyes using official statistics that the UK deaths were overstated by 80-85%. And that the average age of the dead was 82.5%.
Covid was not the Black Death that it was treated as and didn’t even come close to warranting engaging in a global genetic experiment. Sure people died just like do every year of the flu. The flu itself wasn’t a hoax but the fear porn and the globally coordinated shutdown clearly was.
So get off of your high-horse and get familiar with the real data. Your statistics completely ignore what more and more studies are revealing. Not that I want to “start another fight here” but do you work for the CDC or something? There data is garbage and has been from the beginning.
Would I be accurately paraphrasing everything you said above as follows?
COVID was definitely a dangerous disease to (mostly) a limited profile of the population, and did a lot of damage; and the “Fauci science” unconstitutionally imposed on us all by our governments did pretty much fuck-all to affect it one way or the other? (Except, perhaps when people like Cuomo abused his “powers” to kill even more people than otherwise would have died?)
You know that, quite conveniently, the calculation for expected deaths was changed shortly before it was used to calculate excess deaths – and that change lowered the expected deaths despite the fact that they had been consistently rising for quite some time? So what effect could that have had on that ‘excess deaths’ figure?
Healthy guy, I know you explained your post, but I’m still trying to completely wrap my head around it.
Sundance hits it out of the park.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/01/22/professional-leftists-begin-trying-to-retreat-from-the-consequences-of-their-covid-nonsense/
“I feel like a person sitting in the Soviet Union watching the Berlin Wall fall. The UK has ended its COVID regime.”
You wish. Rather, you are a person sitting in East Berlin, watching the authorities remove the top-cap on the wall, in preparation for adding more courses in the near future.
Insurance adjusters know you can’t estimate a risk by looking at one person, or a hundred people, but when you start getting into groups of a thousand, the risk numbers start to stabilize, and when you’re talking a hundred-million…
Eventually, we’re going to have a good idea of:
How many people died *of* Covid.
How many people died *with* Covid
How many more people died from suicide due to the lockdowns/trauma.
How many people died from lack of medical care because of lockdowns.
You just explained 99% of the problem. When you separate those who died “of” Covid with no co-morbidities, the number falls within the normal flu season range and within the usual “at risk” groups, mostly elderly and obese. I find it alarming how many people with cancer died because of missing treatments and/or fear of going to the hospital. It looks to me like the Fauci/Cuomo/Newsom effect probably killed more people than Covid. It’s like Trump warned Fauci when Team Fauci was aggressively pushing their pogrom plan early on, “the cure cannot be worse than the disease!”. It sure looks like it was worse.
They’ve gotten most of the first world vaccinated, with whatever long-term side effects pertain. I’d say this is in fact “mission accomplished”. Disease abatement, which didn’t actually happen, was the pretext. We will see in a few years, assuming honest health statistics (they aren’t now), what those effects are. I believe that long-term side effects will be, as much as possible, be made politically impossible to associate with the vaccines. The “safe” narrative must be maintained. Given that the covid vaccines are well known for causing spontaneous abortion and miscarriage I fear birth rates may plummet. Doesn’t WEF implicitly support population reduction in the first world?
The mandatory covid vaccination for health-care workers is still in place, company vax mandates are still in place and encouraged, and vax passports are not actually illegal. What about school vax requirements? I’d say the stuff of real significance doesn’t change at all.
Can I as an unvaxed person even enter Britain? Can I legally travel internationally anywhere without mandatory nasal drilling and quarantine? Yeah, I’m not seeing much improvement there.
Austria and Australia are still doubling down, and the emergency powers Europe’s governments gave themselves aren’t going away even if their immediate effects are.