MORE UPDATES ON OUR MISGOVERNMENT - THEY ARE STILL LYING TO US

SKWAWKBOX is a lifeline to the truth in these COVID times. We have to be so smart, so alert if we are to see through what is going on. Here are some aids to that end:

Another Tory lie - and one that will needlessly wreck local economies and leave people in danger

The Tories are attempting to justify their plans to close pubs and restaurants by claiming that almost a third of infections in the second wave of the pandemic are contracted in hospitality settings:

Nadhim Zahari is telling porky-pies.

Public Health England's own data expose the blatant - and massive - lie. Just 4% of infections outside the

home trace back to pubs and restaurants.

But by contrast, 38% of infections are caught in schools, by far the biggest means of transmission:

Public Health England - sometimes its voice is muffled and distorted but these statistics could not be clearer in their significance.

You are nine times more likely to catch COVID in a school as in a pub or restaurant and more than six times more likely to catch it in a workplace. Yet the Tories are ignoring the biggest sources of infection and closing hospitality to look like they are doing something.

But any plan to suppress the second wave that does not involve re-closing schools and workplaces, where almost two thirds of total transmission take place, and re-instituting furlough or a better scheme is a sham.

AND SO WE MOVE TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF THIS MISGOVERNMENT:

NHS near 'implosion' - and figures show second wave is now hitting more vulnerable patients

The second wave has hit us. 

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has issued a public warning that the NHS is near 'implosion' and almost 100% full - and that the mushrooming of coronavirus infections in the 'second wave' of the pandemic is pushing the health service beyond its limit.

The RCEM notes that while the number of patients hospitalised by COVID is four times higher than a month ago, five times as many patients are on ventilators. This is a clear indication that the virus is now spreading rapidly among more vulnerable groups after initially hitting the younger and less vulnerable - pulling down the COVID-denier claim that the virus has somehow become less virulent because numbers of deaths and ICU admissions were low at the beginning of the second wave.

The RCEM also warned that the situation is so dire that yet more patients suffering other conditions are likely to be kept waiting for treatment.

The Tories' measures so far to counteract the growth of the second wave have been utterly inadequate - and dishonestly applied. This has to change and re-closing schools must be a first measure, not a last (or never) resort - and the provisions for online learning that the government should have been building throughout the pandemic must be put in place urgently now with no further, inexcusable delays.

ONE MORE MOMENT OF TRUTH. YOU WON'T HAVE HEARD THIS IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.

 

'School is safe' myth blown apart by new PHE data - but no acknowledgment or admission from Tories or Labour front bench

Why are we not being told these truths? 

New data from Public Health England (PHE) have blown apart the myth - stubbornly clung to by both the Tories and Labour's leadership - that 'school is safe'.

The figures show that of new infections last week, the biggest group affected was girls aged 10-19 - and boys of the same age were the fourth-largest group. Younger children were reported at low levels - but with young children likely to be asymptomatic in a vast majority of cases and testing only being done on symptomatic children - and in a huge number of cases not even then - the real numbers of younger children affected is likely to rival the high rate among their older siblings.

The numbers show beyond reasonable doubt that schools and universities are the main driver of the second wave - as even the government's own scientists warned. Yet the Tories continue to pursue the hospitality industry as if that was the engine room of the pandemic and are obstinately refusing to even consider calls for schools to be closed again.

As long as they continue to do so, no efforts to get on top of the second wave have a hope of success.

MY CONTRIBUTION TO OUR COLLECTIVE EDUCATION - THANKS FOR READING.