FILE PHOTO: British Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage speaks during a visit at Dover harbour, in Dover
Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday announced that a second national lockdown would start on Thursday 5th November in England, as the UK passed one million Covid-19 cases. Nigel Farage announced that he was rebranding his Brexit party as Reform UK, saying that the country is in urgent need of fundamental reform. In a joint statement with Brexit party chairman Richard Tice he said: “The single most pressing issue is the government’s woeful response to coronavirus,” He said “Ministers have lost touch with a nation divided between the terrified and the furious. The debate over how to respond to COVID is becoming even more toxic than that over Brexit.”
The bit about a divided nation certainly rings true.Even scientists disagree with one another – we guess science isn’t a given source for something as new and unproven as this pandemic – science works best when things have been proven.
Sadly in terms of Covid-19 we’re near the bottom of the pyramid of evidence.
See the full article on the Logic of Science website.
The inetresting point is that we are prone to confirmation bias – we buy into things that support our own view.
It’s not just the UK that’s struggling to get things right – countries are approaching things differently. A part of Spain banned smokers smoking outside as their exhalation would spread the disease – how did they think non-smokers breathed?
Sweden’s approach has not involved locking down and is widely regarded as being successful, but Dr Simon Clarke in the Spectator who is an associate professor in cellular microbiology at Reading University suggested that speculation about the success of Sweden’s policy was ‘rose-tinted’.
Yet a YouDriver currently living in Sweden pointed out that Sweden have no masks, no lockdown and had fewer deaths in September than in any previous year, despite having a higher life expectancy than the UK (therefore more older people).
