COVID Craziness: How Likely is a Second wave?

Written by Professor Paul Kirkham, Dr Mike Yeadon, Barry Thomas on September 15, 2020. Posted in Current News

Daily deaths from and with COVID-19 have almost ceased, having fallen over 99% from peak. All the numbers monitored carefully fall like this, too: the numbers being hospitalised, numbers in hospital, number in intensive care – all are falling in synchrony from the April peak.

[PSI editor: The original is a long article, only select extracts posted here. Read the full document at lockdownsceptics.org]

Viral evidence historically tells us that you don’t generally get infected by the exact same virus twice, certainly not within a short period of time. It’d be a poor immune system which lets that happen and we’d probably not have made it as a species into the 21st century if that’s how it worked. So there’s an expectation of some duration of immunity.

It needs studying, but our experience and evidence for coronaviruses (Le Bert et al, 2020) suggests that if you have memory T-cells, durability can be very long lasting. This study showed that people still had robust T-cell responses in 2020, 17 years after the first SARS outbreak back in 2003. The concerns people have expressed about falling antibody levels underscores a lack of knowledge about acquired immunity.

It is not efficient nor required for immunity to maintain high levels of antibodies to everything to which you are immune. Instead, cellular memory enables very rapid re-generation of antibodies upon re-encounter with the antigen, if that is required to defend the host. Alternatively, innate and cellular memory responses can be sufficient.

The NHS currently remains ‘COVID-19 ready’ in preparation for an expected second wave, a highly unlikely scenario based upon an initial model with highly sensitive input variables that we already know to be inaccurate.

The evidence we’ve presented leads us to believe there is unlikely to be a second wave and that while there have been apparent multi-‘wave’ respiratory viruses in the past, notably 1918-20, in many cases it became clear that this was either different populations being infected at different times or in some cases multiple different organisms involved.

There is no biological principle that leads us to expect a second wave based on the accumulation of data over the past six months. Instead, it is likely there will be local, small and self-limiting mini-outbreaks as areas previously unexposed come into contact with the virus.

Executive Summary

Evidence presented in this paper indicates that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic as an event in the UK is essentially complete, with ongoing and anticipated challenges well within the capacity of a normalised NHS to cope.

The virus infection has passed through the bulk of the population as a result of wholly natural processes and evidence indicates that in the UK and other heavily infected European countries the spread of the virus has been all but halted by a substantial reduction in the susceptible population.

This has occurred because the level of infection required to introduce enough immunity into the population to reduce the reproduction number (R) permanently below 1 occurred at markedly lower infection rates and loss of life than had been initially anticipated.

The evidence presented in this paper indicates that there should be no expectation of a large scale ‘second wave’ with smaller localised outbreaks when the virus contacts pockets of previously uninfected populations.

Current mass testing using the PCR test is inappropriate in its current form. If it is to continue, then results and reporting should be refined to meet the gold standard of testing methodology to give clinicians improved information so that they are able to make appropriate clinical decisions.

Positive tests should be confirmed by testing a second sample and all positive tests should be reported along with the Cycle Threshold (Ct) obtained during the test to aid assessment of a patient’s viral load.

It is recommended that a greater focus be placed on evidence-based medicine rather than highly sensitive theoretical modelling based on assumptions and unknowns. Current evidence allows for a greatly improved understanding of positive infectious patients and using the evidence to improve measurements and understanding can lead to sensitive measurements of active cases to give a more accurate warning of escalating cases and potential issues and outbreaks.

Contents

Executive Summary
Background
Mortality and critical care
A complete event of the pandemic
Epidemic outbreaks
Population susceptibility
Immunity threshold
The PCR Test
Expectations of a second wave
Spain and France
References

About the authors: Paul Kirkham, Professor of cell Biology and Head of Respiratory Disease Research Group at Wolverhampton University; Dr Mike Yeadon, former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco Pharma Ltd; Barry Thomas, Epidemiologist

Read the full document at lockdownsceptics.org

Also, watch this excellent short ten-minute video on the ‘second wave’ from Tony Heller:

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