COVID loves superspreader events

The above post-Jubilee COVID-19 figures were published a few hours ago. How predictable…

We tested far more people a year ago.

A large proportion tests positive. Many are rushed to hospitals and some die.

Patients admitted to hospital, first week of June:

2022

07-06-2022 577
06-06-2022 606
05-06-2022 531
04-06-2022 443
03-06-2022 404
02-06-2022 412
01-06-2022 480

2021

07-06-2021 131
06-06-2021 121
05-06-2021 96
04-06-2021 96
03-06-2021 93
02-06-2021 101
01-06-2021 115

2020

07-06-2020 323
06-06-2020 306
05-06-2020 380
04-06-2020 458
03-06-2020 491
02-06-2020 553
01-06-2020 522

So this summer we’re worse off than the same period in 2020.

or a while now I’ve noticed something that’s really not good. Heck, it’s very backwards, even disturbing. Years ago my wife sent a parcel and it ended up inside the recipient’s bin. It took days to get to the bottom of what had happened. It turned out, after many hours wasted, that the courier placed the parcel inside the bin. Not kidding! It was just sitting there for several days, deep inside a large garbage can!

This is part of a rather bad trend here, albeit I suspect the same has happened in other countries as well. The courier does not knock on doors, instead putting through the door a slip that says the parcel is “INSIDE THE BIN!” (Even the handwriting isn’t so legible, and not every person here can read English!)

What are the consequences of this practice? You can easily have it thrown away into a landfill. Incidentally, news reports said that Amazon had been sending returned items right into the landfills. This was seen as more “efficient” than properly handling “unwanted” but perfectly functional products, likely produced in hard-hitting sweatshops by hard-working people, maybe even kids (child labour is rampant in Indonesia for instance).

Lazy approaches of nihilists, pushed through with “cost-cutting” mindsets, are ruining the planet. And yet worse, they ruin the service! This harms both senders and recipients (I witnessed this firsthand one hour ago).

These UK couriers, who merely follow instructions from their managers, ought to understand that people’s BIN is NOT a mail box. It doesn’t specify this, either. It’s not designated a postbox. Don’t put any parcels inside bins. It’s not secure and periodically it gets emptied into garbage trucks.

People pay shipping fees for a service, not for you to dump objects of value into BINS. Worse yet, this practice will encourage petty thieves to go through your trash, making a mess in pursuit of treasures. This is the new “key under the doormat” lunacy.

Now, some cynic might say they try to knock on the door first, or try to ship to one’s neighbours. But no! They did not bother this time; all they had to do was knock on the door as both my wife and I had our headphones off for the entire day (9AM to 4PM) just in case they deliver and we need to hear knocking. These couriers love to underestimate the importance of the job. All for the sake of profit. They externalise the risk and the toll.

Today, fortunately, I only knew they came because I heard the mouth of the door opening for the slip to fall in. What if I hadn’t heard that?

With all the supposed “technological advancement” (wherein asking the client to become a till operator is considered “progress”) we only got worse. We’re worse off when Bezos et al (or in this case Royal Mail, the national courier) are playing ‘treasure hunt’ with things you already paid for.

This causes a lot of angst and anxiety. But what do they care? To them, it’s the “cost of doing business” and in case of a lost parcel you may have to spend hours chasing them before some sort of compensation gets issue at all. They’ve passed the burden and risk to the clients at both ends, the sender and the recipient.

Another rather important aspect is, bins are naturally dirty. That’s what they’re typically there for. In this case, today, Royal Mail left the parcel next to cat’s poo. And that says a lot about the quality of service. How was the delivery? Poo!

The page says it was last updated today, but watch how old the latest data is:

Who needs testing anyway, right? It only makes the regime look bad. Come on, Jubilee!

t’s 7PM already. By the time I’m done writing this it might be 8PM. It’s Thursday. Every Thursday the British government publishes a report here, but it failed to release its weekly mortality report. Nothing on time. And no, it’s just a public holiday! So what is going on? Are they gaslighting us. Are they “taking the piss” as we say here?

If you go to https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/, the official portal for data, it says (under cases): “Latest data provided on 27 May 2022″

That’s six days ago. Months ago updates were daily, even during weekends!

Is it a holiday now?

Sort of.

At the top it states: “In line with weekday only reporting, the dashboard will not be updated over the bank holiday weekend. Following the update on Wednesday 1 June, the next update will be on Monday 6 June.”

Seriously???

Recently they started redirecting to a sub-portal of England figures only. It makes the number seem a lot smaller than they actually are. Nice propaganda you got there… anything to encourage people to compare apples to oranges? It’s a long tradition in this portal, as I noted here over the past year or so.

So the UK’s COVID-19 policy in summer of 2022) can be summed up in two words: “HIDE STUFF.” More people die with COVID-19 this summer (or late spring) than the same period a year ago.

It is worth noting that, based on the government’s own official figures, the UK is now at around 197,000 deaths with “COVID-19″ named in the death certificate.

So is COVID-19 at new lows in UK? No! The TESTING (i.e. visibility of the virus) has reached new lows.

This is not the way to solve the issue. It is the banality of fatality. We’re meant to think this is perfectly fine. America (US) lost a lot more than a million citizens to this virus already. Did I say a million? In America they commemorate the 9/11 attacks, which killed less than 3,000, but this thing is like 350 times worse. Will they commemorate and remember the lives of COVID-19 victims 20 years from now (like they did 9/11 victims last year)?

Sad to put it quite so crudely, but at this stage COVID-19 is a virus helped by another virus (or Earth lice) called homo sapiens, who are eager to spread it in the name of man-made activity called “shopping” and “the economy” and “back to normal”. Those slogans and sound bytes have justified a lot of suffering and deaths.

Based on latest available figures, about 100 people per day die in the UK with COVID-19 in their death certificate. That’s a pace of 36,500 per year. And that’s during summer. We can be rather certain that deaths will rise in autumn too, not to mention wintertime. We’ve quit trying to contain the virus. It is inhumane to go “back to normal” like this; we put at risk people who just simply do not wish to get infect at all.

As the World Socialist Web Site put it some days ago, “Officials, media spread complacency as US enters third summer of COVID infections and death” (still many deaths, even in summertime).

The article focuses on the US but it’s like this in the UK also. Many people outdoors and indoors refuse to wear masks.

The state of the UK COVID-19 portal is disturbing. It’s hardly being updated and each day I’m checking “WHAT’S LEFT” of remaining data. It feels like they plan to phase it out completely some time soon. Recently they published updates only on Mondays and Thursdays. Today there’s a missing report for Thursday. I pointed out clear anomalies and inconsistencies in previous reports.

ROUND AUTUMN of 2002, when work at the Office (MCC) was relatively quiet and I had spare time, I set myself up with a scholarly-type Web page. The page has since then morphed into this thing and it was moved to its own domain more than a year later. The blog was set up in 2004 along with many other MySQL-powered pieces of software.

This site is not my first site because I also had a webspace in Geocities (since around 1996 or 1997), but it was the first “proper” personal site. Later came Techrights, which isn’t about myself but about issues. Moreover, TuxMachines turns 18 in a number of days, but it was inherited, not founded.

Video download link | md5sum 65b5259906d3697479213d2e2c9f09d6
COVIDiots in Public Office
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

HE above video sums up some of my more recent thoughts on the lack of data coming out of the NHS regarding COVID-19. It’s delayed, it’s incomplete, and nowadays it compares apples to oranges. But death figures are a lot harder to manipulate. Here are the latest figures:

Week ending date : Weekly registered deaths

13-05-2022	795
06-05-2022	838
29-04-2022	1,248
22-04-2022	1,185
15-04-2022	1,152
08-04-2022	1,134
01-04-2022	1,063

Compared to the same period last year (with some restrictions remaining):

14-05-2021	164
07-05-2021	139
30-04-2021	232
23-04-2021	290
16-04-2021	402
09-04-2021	422
02-04-2021	450

As I explain in the video above, our government seems to have concluded that the enemy is information or pertinent data, not the virus. As such, restricting access to information (or media distraction) seems to have been adopted as the strategy for the sake of “business as usual”. At what expense and at whose expense?