There were some reports of this in Italy as well.

I've no real evidence to support it but my suspicion is that COVID-19 really is is attacking organs besides the lungs. The enzyme it binds to is present in the heat and arteries, so it is possible for COVID-19 to cause strokes and cardiac issues. The research on this hasn't come down one way or there other, but it could explain many of the excess deaths.

Yes.

So many errors in the article from the canary you quote and your understanding of the situation.

1) The government has not ordered any ventilators from Dyson.
2) There was an open tendering to manufacture ventilators to a set standard which I previously linked to. Dyson tendered as did several other engineering organisations.
3) Dyson is partnered with medical engineering companies who have been designing the ventilator with Dyson working on the production.
https://www.ttp.com/news/cambridge-c...ator-challenge
4) The MEC company quoted is not a ventilator manufacturer. They make oxygen pipes and taps. They do not have the resources or expertise to mass manufacture ventilators unlike the TTP / Dyson partnership.
5) The other company quoted is just a middleman who offered to sell thousands of ventilators and millions of self test kits for covid-19 to the government. Dubious?
6) The donation quoted was
So from the charity, not the person, nor the company, so subject to charity rules and to support a festival of engineering not the conservative party or an individual politician.

Your case again seems to be that Dyson is a member of the conservative party. Is your policy that no one who is a member of a party you disagree with should be entitled to bid for government contracts?

Could you reference the millions that James Dyson has given to the conservative party?

You appear to be strong on opinion and lacking in facts to support the opinion. Some of your beliefs are clearly false e.g. that a contract has already been given and that there is not an open tendering process. The source you quoted is full of errors, and only references a donation not from Dyson not to the conservative party.

You are entitled to your opinion but on this site you are expected to provide factual support for opinions.

One fact that you could address is the 'millions donated to the conservative party by James Dyson'. This is your claim and your responsibility to evidence. If this is not true would this change your mind, or would Dyson's party membership still make him an unsuitable person to manufacture ventilators?

The stay at home message, repeatedly chanted by the government and police, is too simplistic;

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...tals-bm73s2tw3

"England and Wales have experienced a record number of deaths in a single week, with 6,000 more than average for this time of year.

Only half of those extra numbers were attributed to the coronavirus. Experts said they were shocked by the rise, particularly in non-Covid-19 deaths, and expressed concern that the lockdown might be having unintended consequences for people’s health.

There are fears that patients are not seeking help for life-threatening conditions, including heart attacks, because they are worried about catching coronavirus in hospital."

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1250354070487007232

The government has given formal approval for construction work on the HS2 rail project to begin despite lockdown measures.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52293055

Making a 150 mile journey a few minutes faster is not going to "level up the country"

Oh dear :(

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/worl...ost_type=share

Have to keep the number of fatalities under the government's own 20,000 forecast otherwise it'll be clear that the response has been bungled.

Deliberately failing to count a significant proportion of cases would certainly be one way to achieve that :rolleyes:

I'm 100% sure that all construction workers will ensure they're 6ft away from each other at all times, and there will be nothing that requires them to be any closer at any point.

I'm also convinced that after the years that HS2 has been a thing for a delay of 6 months would be far too long.

Must get HS2 past the point of no return before anyone gets a chance to kill it off.

I have previously talked about 'excess attributable deaths' with flu. The largest proportion of which are the increased number of strokes and heart attacks occurring shortly after an episode of flu particularly in the elderly. This is not unique to flu but occurs more generally following pneumonia of many causes. It is not unexpected that we would see a rise in deaths from other causes following within a few weeks of a covid infection. We may see a continued excess of deaths even as actual infections fall due to a lag effect. My guess when more details emerge is there will be a rise in deaths certified as due to heart disease, strokes and other thrombotic disorders.

We had something similar here. A university published that it had an app which could detect whether you had coronavirus from a selfie. Er, it didn't.

https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech...hrough-selfies

a) Some common corona viruses induce less than a year of immunity. If COVID-19 behaves this way then it's effectively impossible to achieve herd immunity via infection

b)With it's observed rate of mortality and critical cases it's likely impossible to achieve high rates of immunity without overloading health services.

Well now HS2 and Crossrail can complete at the same time! .......

You are really hang up on "Dyson is a member of the conservative party and this is why you criticize Dyson making ventilators" narrative. Newsflash: your lack of reading comprehension is not my problem.

Political allegiances of Dyson is side show. I didn't even knew about them when I started criticizing your government making business with Dyson at expense of actual medical companies.

I will say it for the THIRD (and last) time: I criticize idea of Dyson making ventilators on grounds that government should contact existing medical companies first, and producers of vacuum cleaners last.

If you are going to still insist nonsense about my motivations, there is nothing more to discuss. Have fun cleaning up 16 hour a day mess made by your incompetent politicians. You like them, so it shouldn't be problem, right?

Oh dear, it seems the ventilators in question are not going to be much use other than for a few hours use per patient:
https://www.ft.com/content/365529f8-...8yZbTqlH0IYWwE

I don't understand this comment the government specification is

You made comments about bribery and corruption and Dyson giving £ millions to the conservative party. A claim that you seem unwilling to back up.

The government had already sought to purchase as many ventilators as possible both from UK and other manufacturers. They were unable to commit to delivering sufficient ventilators within the timescale needed. You seem unable to accept that you are wrong when you say that the UK government had not sought to purchase from pre-existing manufacturers prior to putting out a bid for new manufacturing options. The government did not contact Dyson, when the bid went out Dyson responded.

You seem to think that the government should have just sat back and said 'Oh dear! We did our best but there are no more ventilators available, you will just have to make do with the limited number that the current manufacturers can provide'. The reality is since everyone else is seeking the same thing, new manufacturing capability has to be brought on line. To get the predicted number of ventilators needed a new rapidly manufactured ventilator design was sought. Most modern ventilators can monitor a large number of physiological variables, have a large range of modes and are compatible with e.g. NO therapy. A simpler design is possible that delivers the type of ventilatory support needed for most patients, for the minority of patients who you might want to run on NO or try HFOV you can swap to a more sophisticated vent.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/r...on-ventilators

Sounds like baloney to me.

What Do Countries With The Best Coronavirus Responses Have In Common?

Not surprised.

Has Cyril had a sex-change yet?

I've seen that meme a few places and I think there's some merit in it, because I'm sure women have more and deeper empathy than men.

Just thank christ that evil Thatcher bitch is still rotting in her grave.

Plus Greece (with a male PM), whose response was exemplary.

Not sure what a coroner has to do with anything since deaths due to covid-19 do not have to be reported to coroner. Not sure what counties have to do with it.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/...arch_2020-.pdf
No evidence in current instructions that there should be any difficulty in signing a death certificate with covid-19 as a cause of death.

I suspect your source is fake news.

On this site, it is interesting how many people will jump to report a twitter feed or other dubious source as fact because it addresses their preconceived notions.

A good example is the fake Dyson narrative;

Fake narrative.
True Narrative

What a stupid article. Here are the deaths per million numbers for the nations she listed:

Denmark	53
Iceland	23
Finland	13
Germany	43
New Zealand	2
Norway	28
Taiwan	0.3

Looks impressive ... but! Here's a partial list of other countries with death rates less than 53 per million:

• Antigua and Barbuda
• Austria
• Bahamas
• Barbados
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Canada
• Cayman Islands
• Cyprus
• Czechia
• Dominican Republic
• Ecuador
• Estonia
• Greece
• Guadeloupe
• Hungary
• Isle of Man
• Israel
• Liechtenstein
• Lithuania
• Martinique
• Mayotte
• Moldova
• North Macedonia
• Panama
• Romania
• Saint Martin
• Serbia
• Slovenia
• Turkey
• Turks and Caicos

And last I checked, Justin was Prime Minister of Canada, not Sophie.

This is a textbook case of cherry-picking data.

From another article on this, we have:
https://www.newsweek.com/ventilator-...expert-1497950

I'm no expert in this, but it looks like the spec was for a ventilator for short term use. It might be that these companies (Dyson, Mclaren Rolls Royce etc) would struggle to make ventilators to be sufficient for a patient beyond a few hours, as the spec to see a patient through for longer maybe harder to achieve.

Hancock praised 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore for raising £7m for the NHS by walking round his garden. That £7m is roughly what the Conservative government has taken out of the NHS daily for10 years.

Nice match.

The high lite is correct, but totally irrelevant to the article, which does not name Justin, Sophie, or Canada.

Agreed.

Purpose of flattening the curve has very little to do with achieving immunity, it is mostly about not overwhelming the health care system. An overwhelmed system results in many more deaths - both from COVID-19 and from other illnesses that can't attain treatment.

Flattening the curve with social distancing actually slows down herd immunity by reducing transmission over a much longer time-line. And as lomiller mentioned, that's all contingent on whether or not immunity to COVID-19 is conferred for any reasonable period of time, or whether it behaves more like our normal coronaviruses for which we don't retain immunity.

The article's headline was "What Do Countries With The Best Coronavirus Responses Have In Common?" and the answer was clearly "They have a female as head of government." Except that's definitely not the case. I quickly found 30 other countries that have a death rate less than that of Denmark (which the author points out as having the "best" coronavirus response,) and I'm certain not all of them have a woman leader. I know Canada doesn't.

Now some of those countries may be early on the infection curve and eventually end up with more than 53 deaths per million, but not all of them. The article started with the conclusion and cherry picked data to support it.

Remarkable that Sweden had all the time to analyse the Wuhan solution and proceeded with "herd immunity" and permanent organ damage for hapless citizens. Netherlands ditto.

Yep, it's pretty noticeable how much worse countries that didn't act immediately look against countries that did.

UK - 12,800 dead from 80,000 infections.
Germany - 3,800 dead from 130,000 infections.

You'd almost think there's a strong case to make for early action. I tell ya, Jacinda will be able to apply for president of the planet if she manages to keep a lid on it here.

I must say, Jacinda's signal today is a masterclass of common sense and helping the economy.

Workers will return to most employers, but only contactless business can be done, so expect an explosion of Uber eats immediately.

Most important of all, sentinel testing has begun, so pretty well all the bases are covered.

If this all works - and there's no reason it shouldn't - NZ's response will form the blueprint of how to handle a pandemic in the future.

Full details here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...kdown-will-end

Got it. I was not following your though process too well. My bad.

Maybe it counts for something in Canada that our top medical officer, who is Trudeau’s primary source of COVID-19 info, is a woman, as are 4 provincial MO’s.

Since there has been a year on year increase in NHS funding, your statement as put is untrue. I suspect you may mean something more nuanced such as over the past 10 years accounting for inflation the NHS budget is £25 billion less than it would have been if it had increased inline with inflation (you may wish to specify which measure of inflation you used).
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/project...ell/nhs-budget

Although the Kings fund says that there was real growth of 1.4% taking into account inflation.

Without more information on your assumptions this would seem to be false.

ETA also looked here for the basis of your figures
https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publi...%20summary.pdf

I have tried quite hard to verify this as it would be a nice thing to quote, but in good faith I cannot.

I can see this approach with careful restrictions on travel could work for islands with a co-operative population (e.g. it might be problematic in Papua). I am not certain that it would work for the UK as I am not sure disenfranchised populations will buy in, and the UK population may be high enough to support prolonged background circulation. I am also not certain how this fits with EU free movement legislation, thinking about Ireland, Malta, Cyprus etc. I think it may be very difficult for continental countries with extensive and porous land borders. I can see that this is a good plan for NZ / Australia and many other islands.

As of today, the US has reported more deaths from COVID-19 (28,529) than Canada has reported infections (28,379.) Some of this is due to the high population density in New York City. Some of it is due to different responses by the government in each country and, possibly, differences in how much the population trusts its leadership. It will take a fair amount of study after the pandemic dies down, perhaps even after the expected second and third waves, to determine all the factors that played a role in these numbers.

Yeah, it wouldn't work with porous borders. Good point on Papua!

I just hope it works for the Pacific Islands, who are all on pretty much the same path, but don't have hospitals to anything like the standard of NZ/Oz.