The biggest class action lawsuit in history?

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 terragait 25 Oct 2020

Very little criticism in the media of what could be the biggest class action lawsuit in history. Opinions welcome?
https://www.corona-schadensersatzklage.de/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o98UoxP53T0&feature=youtu.be

2
 The New NickB 25 Oct 2020
In reply to terragait:

This has certainly got me wondering about the UKC data breach.

 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to terragait:

Looks like the vampire legal class are joining the dumpster fire of stupidity and deliberate ignorance.

I dare say plenty of people will crowd fund him to make a lot of noise, lend some credibility to the highly politically motivated movement and contribute to the growing direct and indirect body counts.

1
 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to The New NickB:

> This has certainly got me wondering about the UKC data breach.

There was a very familiar looking anti-lockdown post (familiar in terms of writing style and messaging) from a decade old and largely inactive account that was deleted within 15 minutes a few weeks ago. My reply to it is still on file.  I didn’t think if was genuine then and I’m far from sure this one is now.

Edit:  here it is - https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/who_wants_a_circuit_breaker-726...  - my bad; it wasn’t a decade old account but well established for 3 years and clearly legitimate.

Or I’m just turning into the paranoid nutter muttering in the corner.

Post edited at 12:52
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OP terragait 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

It just seems that this is such a big news story that nobody is talking about, pro or con.

Removed User 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

I watched the first two minutes of the YouTube vid and gathered that this bloke intends to sue the Chinese for starting it all which is the other US right wing hobby horse i.e. it was all the fault of the Chinese.

I suppose it could be genuine but more likely to be politically motivated.

I wonder what "go phuq yourself" is in Mandarin? I imagine he'll find out quite soon.

 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to terragait:

Such a big news story that the only links you’ve got are a YouTube video and an article written in German on what I presume to be their own webpage.  

Are you really surprised nobody is taking about something that isn’t a news story in any recognised news outlet?  

You seem confused.

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 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to Removed User:

You lasted 30 seconds longer than me, I was getting bored on 2x playback.  I was detecting hints it was heading towards suing on the grounds of overreaction and state control in the west.

> I wonder what "go phuq yourself" is in Mandarin? I imagine he'll find out quite soon.

Perhaps he’ll take a trip over there to file the deposition and we can find out.

In reply to Removed User:

> I wonder what "go phuq yourself" is in Mandarin? I imagine he'll find out quite soon.

If I was their broker their life insurance premium would be getting substantially increased.

Post edited at 14:21
 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to terragait:

Faulty PCR testing which seems to be part of the argument which he wants to use is in itself a controversial testing method from what I have read.  For example the CEBM at Oxford University has asserted that they are not really useful in identifying infected patients because they are so sensitive that they may pick up dead virus and therefore the tests may well be over reporting "live" infections.

My friends 55 year old mother was killed by the NHS bureaucracy because of this.  She had covid in March recovered but needed a cancer operation in April/May for a statistically survivable cancer assuming a timely operation.  She could not get a negative PCR covid test subsequently despite clearly having recovered and the NHS trust refused to allow her in for her operation as a result and she subsequently died.  Meanwhile the NHS was no where near collapse when she needed her operation.  

This is not an isolated case as it is widely reported in the press that the NHS cancelled so many operations needlessly as evidenced by the home based non covid excess deaths for example.  I would not be surprised to see some negligence cases launched against the NHS and I am sure some of those will be entirely justified as it has let a lot of people down. 

Post edited at 16:02
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OP terragait 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

I agree, that should have read 'potentially big news story' i believe the original 'YouTube' posting had 2.4 millions views and a heck of a load of comments before it was taken down by YT & Facebook. This guy does not appear to be some small time chancer, he has a history of going for the big guys VW and Deutsche Bank. What is his social legal political angle, the far left, the far right, the middle, good or bad, i'd like to know where he's coming from thats all.

 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

> For example the CEBM at Oxford University has asserted that they are not really useful in identifying infected patients because they are so sensitive that they may pick up dead virus and therefore the tests may well be over reporting "live" infections.

They did indeed claim this, but that was some time ago and it's now blatantly obvious that - right or wrong - what CEBM claimed is no longer of any relevance.

Let's look at the number of tests taken, cases detected, hospital admissions and deaths since 1st September.  These are quick estimates from the data here - https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

  • Tests taken per day - increased ~2x, linear increase with time
  • Cases detected per day - increased ~20x, exponential increase with time
  • Hospital admissions per day - increased ~20x, exponential increase with time
  • Deaths per day - increased ~ 16x, exponential increase with time.

CEBM have put forwards no argument for why the false positive rate would be increasing exponentially with time as would be needed to produce these results.  They aren't exactly coming out of this covered in glory in my view having first released a rather questionable piece on false positive rates and then having completely failed to distance themselves from the embracing of this piece by the misinformation brigade as it becomes painfully obvious how irrelevant their contribution (right or wrong in itself) is to the present situation.

Edit: My latest plots from today's dashboard data.  False positives my arse.  Worryingly it looks like detected cases are picking up again.

Post edited at 16:26

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 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to terragait:

>  This guy does not appear to be some small time chancer, he has a history of going for the big guys VW and Deutsche Bank. 

So he says.  I see nothing to corroborate that on the publicly accessible internet.  Perhaps his name is buried somewhere in some case files but I don't see it.

He walks and quacks like part of the right wing backstory to the anti-lockdown misinformation brigade.

 The New NickB 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

A quick google certainly takes you to some interesting places. 

 Rob Exile Ward 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

'I would not be surprised to see some negligence cases launched against the NHS and I am sure some of those will be entirely justified as it has let a lot of people down. '

F*ck me, we're in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic, the likes of which the NHS has never  had to deal with before; and it would have been hard enough at the best of times, let alone after 10 years of near criminal, corrupt mismanagement by Tory sc*m ministers. (When Jeremy Hunt, he of the junior doctors disputes and the pathetic, ideological advocacy of a '7 day service', looks good compared to his predecessors and successor you get some measure of just how rubbish they have been.)

And here we are,  still right in the middle, people like you are advocating getting lawyers involved to skim off yet more of the public purse. WTF is that all about?

I'll tell you what - I don't mind paying for ANYONE'S treatment under the NHS, but I really object to paying for it and then having to pay out more, mostly in legal fees, when errors occur, as they inevitably will.

Post edited at 16:20
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 Dax H 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

I managed about 15 minute's, his main thrust at that point seems to be because swine flu didn't kill us all then there is no need to worry about covid 19 and certainly no need to remove our human rights by forcing us to lock down, wear masks etc. 

Had the governments of the world done nothing and people were dying in droves he would be stood there trying to get a law suit going because the governments didn't do enough to protect us. 

 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to Dax H:

Thanks for the summary.  Noting left field then...

> Had the governments of the world done nothing and people were dying in droves he would be stood there trying to get a law suit going because the governments didn't do enough to protect us.

If I don't make it in my new venture I'm going to retrain as a solicitor.  You literally can't loose.  More and more people are retraining into law in their 40s and 50s...

 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

I'm sure your opinions are valid and this is not my area of expertise so I'll leave it to academics to fight it out but I can say having observed a case of a person showing no symptoms and then constantly failing to get a negative test over 3 months (I very much doubt this is an isolated case) and then dying thanks to the NHS bureaucracy withdrawing commitment to surgery, it would appear that the CEBM's assertion should warrant consideration and a thorough investigation should be undertaken.

The NHS has killed people (person I am aware of but as I say I doubt this is an isolated case) based on their rigid rules regarding these PCR tests by refusing to treat people who are either clear of the virus with the PCR testing failing or asymptomatically infected for 3 months (time spread in the case I am aware of).  I doubt these peoples families will be clapping the NHS going forward.

Post edited at 16:27
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 Rob Exile Ward 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

'The NHS has killed people' - Have you any possible idea how ignorant and offensive that comment is? Do you know anyone who works for the NHS and you would say that to?

Do things go wrong? Yes the do. Do people dies as a result? Sadly, sometimes yes. Does 'the NHS'  do it in purpose? Do you really think so?

 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

The NHS weren't exactly having an easy time of it, and the PCR tests are the best diagnostic they have to go on.   Given the clear evidence of symptom-free infectious states in this disease as well it would seem highly prudent to err on the side of caution, and at the time they didn't have the CEBM outputs (I say "outputs" as so far as I am aware it's blogs etc rater than a peer reviewed medical study).  

I regard the CEBM output with a high degree of skepticism as it conveniently aligns with Heneghan's openly stated political leanings on this, and it immediately became fuel for the misinformation fire, which Heneghan has made no effort to clarify.   

Why do you blame the NHS bureaucracy?  I would blame the coronavirus situation for forcing the healthcare system to make very difficult choices with only bad outcomes.  Imagine the opposite - patient A is receiving hopefully life saving care in hospital when patient B is admitted in a symptom free infectious state after receiving multiple positive test results.  Patient B infects patient A, who dies as a result.  There is far clearer grounds for legal liability in this situation than the one you outline, and it doesn't need an expert to spell out how badly it would go down.

Ultimately nobody knows if the person who sadly died was infectious or not, but you have to play the balance of probabilities, and they can't come down in favour of everyone living.  That really sucks, but this is a really sucky situation.

 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

You don't have to go far through the medical community to find doctors who were saying during the lock down that services shouldn't be withdrawn and lists cancelled based on covid risk parameters because of the knock on effect.  I know a number myself who were saying this as their hospitals lay empty with their patients dying at home needlessly.  As I said there has clearly been issues around the PCR testing.  

The NHS may well have made some major mistakes.  Holding to account a public service that allegedly has failed a person/people whether it is an isolated case or collection of cases is moral as it provides a check and balance to ensure high quality practice going forward.  I don't think the fact it is a pandemic makes any difference. 

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 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

I blame the NHS bureaucracy in this case because the hospital in question was no where near capacity (which was the case all over the country), the surgeon was even calling for the operation to go ahead but the infection control rules prohibited it.  That is a bureaucratic decision that has directly led to that persons death because the NHS refused to treat the patient because of the possibility of covid transmission.

Why should the NHS select to kill a cancer patient just because that patient might transmit covid within the hospital (no symptoms after multiple PCR tests over 3 months)?  On that basis they should also refuse to admit covid patients to general hospitals as they might spread the disease in the hospital as well.  It does not make sense.   

During the lock down it seems that if you were dying of covid you could be admitted to hospital obviously regardless of the risk of onward covid transmission risk whereas if you had covid (based on the PCR test) but were dying of something else you were denied life saving treatment in some cases.  That is defining who lives or dies based on a bureaucratic selection.   

  

Post edited at 17:06
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 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

Yes I do know people working for it and I have said it to them yes.  

To be clear I am not blaming individuals in the NHS who are delivering care but clearly at a policy level when mistakes are made it should be held to account as it regularly is and quite rightly so.  The fact that there is a pandemic on makes no difference to that principle being correct.    

Post edited at 17:11
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 Rob Exile Ward 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

You're a lawyer, aren't you? 

1
 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

No

 Rob Exile Ward 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

' That is defining who lives or dies based on a bureaucratic selection.'

That's meaningless - there is often an element of 'bureaucratic selection' when treatment is provided or withheld. 

Back in March the hospitals in northern Italy and Spain were close to being overwhelmed by Covid patients, with wards full, staff burnt out and insufficient equipment and supplies. They were even running out of mortuary space. There was every reason to anticipate that the UK could be as bad, if not worse. And it would not be unreasonable to anticipate that a collapse of that type could have exponential effects - patients not being looked after in hospitals, ambulances having nowhere to deliver patients to and so having to return them to their homes, staff becoming infected so that they could not only not work, but they could not be treated either ... it would not be unreasonable to imagine the entire system imploding. At that point, we didn't know.

Faced with that, if you were a hospital administrator, what would you have done?

Post edited at 17:28
 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

In May and June it was clear the NHS was not overrun and many doctors were calling for life saving surgeries to be rescheduled.  I know one myself who runs the largest department of its kind in the UK who was one of those saying that the decision to cancel operations and treatments of severely ill patients was a huge miscalculation of the relative risk by the policy makers at the NHS.  The system did not respond, people died, including someone I know who could have been saved who was in their 50's and there will be many others.  These people have been failed by the NHS.  

As I said above if you had covid you were treated in hospital but if you were in imminent danger of death from something else and had covid it seems that people were being rejected, which makes no sense.   Essentially those people were failed by the NHS and many doctors will agree with this view, nt leat because at the time the NHS was no where near short capacity.    

No doubt it will be one of the issues looked at in depth in a public inquiry.  There are legitimate questions over decsions that should be answered.   

Post edited at 18:32
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 DancingOnRock 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Someone always has to be to blame. 

We are seeing human nature at it worst. It’s the governments fault, it’s people not wearing masks fault, it’s a conspiracy, it’s 5G, anything but a natural occurrence that we can’t do anything about, something that happens every one or two hundred years. 
 

To admit that would be to admit that there are things we don’t know and don’t understand. Things that we are scared of and have no control over. 
 

People don’t like that. It’s scary. 
 

So they make stuff up to make themselves feel safe. 

 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

> because at the time the NHS was no where near short capacity.    

In no small part because every effort was made to keep covid positive patients away from non covid wards, because it’s practically impossible to stop it spreading once it gets in - even with 4 months more learning and time to resolve PPE supply issues, hospitals are still suffering covid outbreaks on non covid wards, with outcomes including death of other patients.

I’m sure this will all be gone in to but right now I draw the line way short of accusing the NHS of “killing” people.  

It can’t be repeated enough that it’s highly probably the reason we haven’t had a total healthcare meltdown is because of the ongoing risk control measures.  

Ask yourself - if this person has been covid free and died because a patient who repeated tested covid positive was admitted to their ward, what would you be saying now?

 Rob Exile Ward 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

'No doubt it will be one of the issues looked at in depth in a public inquiry.  There are legitimate questions over decsions that should be answered.  '

Yes of course - though how much use it will be is anybody's guess. A pandemic like this hadn't happened before, and - in this exact form - will never happen again. 

 GWA 25 Oct 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Questions need to be asked as to whether with a greater willingness by decision makers to work at isolating covid patients they could have safely run the service far harder than they did.  

The entire system of government and health care was so obsessed with covid deaths and narrowly focused on that I think that policy makers lost their grasp of relative risk.  Many medics thought the same which is why they were calling for operational restarts during the lock down to no avail.    

Obviously no one has tried to fail within the NHS and I am not trying to apportion blame on individuals but there needs to be questions asked because it is an important institution which seems to have lost grasp of sound risk management policy.    

Post edited at 20:10
 wintertree 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

> Questions need to be asked as to whether with a greater willingness by decision makers to work at isolating covid patients they could have safely run the service far harder than they did.  

With symptom free transmission and an - at best - 30% false negative rate in PCR testing, I think “better isolation” is a fantasy.  If you look at the recent PHE surveillance reports, care homes are failing at that with the benefit of four more months from the period you refer to.  The news stories on hospital outbreaks paint a similar picture for hospitals.

>  but there needs to be questions asked because it is an important institution which seems to have lost grasp of sound risk management policy.    

I’m not convinced.  The risk from covid is exceptional in that it has the ability to explode exponentially to a catastrophic level in the space of a month or so.  The choices are basically to hold the level so low that it appears to be a non-issue or to end up careening downhill without any brakes on an exponential growth curve.  This makes the risk control measures seem totally disproportionate when they’re working, but the comparison case that matters is the one where there are no such measures.   

There were no good choices.  

Edit: fundamentally I agree it’s a massive problem that routine business has suffered so much during the pandemic and its one that’s looming large in our near future with the rising cases.  Better testing with a much lower false negative rate is critical it seems to me to improve the ability to segregate covid positive patients.  You could I expect improve this with current qPCR and PCR tests by changing the analysis thresholds used but this would also give a higher false positive rate if CEBM’s take on post-infectious viral fragments is true, so it would not help the assumed corner case you raise.

Post edited at 20:27
 Dax H 25 Oct 2020
In reply to GWA:

> I blame the NHS bureaucracy in this case because the hospital in question was no where near capacity (which was the case all over the country), the surgeon was even calling for the operation to go ahead but the infection control rules prohibited it.  That is a bureaucratic decision that has directly led to that persons death because the NHS refused to treat the patient because of the possibility of covid transmission.

I'm sure on a personal basis the surgeon was willing to take the risk and that is exactly why there is a line drawn in the sand and a procedure in place. 

Had the surgeon and the rest of the OR staff been infected how many other people would be on the table in front of them being infected before they start showing symptoms. 

Another point to consider is surgeons don't grow on trees, without doing everything possible to protect them how many more people will die if infection runs riot through the none covid parts of the hospital.

Final point, we are only 10 months in to a global pandemic, in June we were only 6 months in. The entire world is trying to work out how to deal with it, mistakes have been and will continue to be made. The thing with mistakes in health care is they hurt people, you could have 999,999 successful outcomes but everyone focuses on the 1 bad one. 


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