Doom and gloom over Covid yet death rates and hospital admissions are low

‘NI doctors warn of long winter ahead’

On an inside page the article was advanced with the headline ‘More than 80% of doctors in NI fear second wave in six months’.

Reading the statistics presented it transpires that 47% of “nearly 500” doctors who responded to a BMA survey said their greatest fear for the NHS was a second wave of the virus.

With 1,700+ GPs registered in Northern Ireland this equates to about 14% of all GPs expressing this fear!

This is hardly comforting reporting, even accurate reporting, when many in the Province, especially in the ‘vulnerable’ age group, which I have now entered, are really feeling the stress of the restrictions already in place.

Daily new positive test results are running at around 120, this equates to one in around 16,000 of the population (reckoned at 1.9 million in 2020) and hardly represents an epidemic, never mind a pandemic.

Yet we are told “we are living on the brink”.

But deaths have been ‘flatlining’ for around eight weeks, and hospital admissions are virtually non-existent even with these higher infection rates.

We also recognise that the higher rate of infections is due to the high number of tests being carried out, compared to very low rates of testing when the virus was really virulent.

It appears that positive cases are either asymptomatic or are recovering at home. But still the message is one of doom and gloom.

The health minister Robn Swann was given scientific estimates around March which led him to declare there could be up to 15,000 deaths with this pandemic.

To date we have reached 4-5% of that total, and all of them regrettable.

Absolutely, we recognise there are a vulnerable sector of our population who are more likely to catch the virus, but the vast majority (quoted at 98%) recover with little adverse effects.

Credible information available on the internet shows that this virus is following very similar graph profiles to other viruses such as Sars, Hen Flu, etc.

Some contributors say that wearing masks and keeping our distance are counterproductive. When we come into contact with others, we pick up viruses regularly, and subsequently build up immunity to them. But protecting ourselves by distancing and masking is preventing this.

Does anyone remember the government’s suggestion that building no up ‘herd immunity’to the virus was mooted in the earliest days? But then the ‘science’ came along and said no!

Sweden opted for herd immunity, and by some measures has fared best of all European nations.

Where are we being led? Does anyone know? Alene Foster declared last week that she was ill, but with “only the flu”.

So. It is already in the air, and will this boost the panic even further, and every case of flu be labelled as ‘Covid related’, to raise the fear factor again?

One wonders where this is all leading.

Gordon McNeill, Portadown

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