BECAUSE THEY ARE PURE REACTIONARIES:

This time last year, we had three times as many people in hospital with Covid-19 and five times as many people dying with Covid-19. The number of people being infected was falling, as was the number of people being hospitalised and dying. Today, the numbers of people being infected, hospitalised and dying are all on the rise. There is no seasonal pattern here. There is no pattern at all.

Seasonality is not completely irrelevant. Warmer weather allows people to mix outdoors where the risk of infection is lower. Scientists still can't fully explain why influenza is so seasonal, but this is probably the main reason. However, influenza has quite a low reproduction rate, with an R0 of 1.3. The original SARS-CoV-2 had an R0 of 3. The UK variant has an R0 of 4 and the Indian variant has an R0 of 5. Warmer weather can be enough to tip the balance in our favour if other social distancing measures are in place, but there is nothing magic about the changing seasons that makes Covid-19 disappear. 

It's not flu, it's SARS. Plenty of countries have seen the virus surge in spring, summer, autumn and winter. The UK is now one of them. 

The reason why Covid deaths started falling in April 2020 and January 2021 should be obvious. In both cases, lockdowns had begun a few weeks earlier. Lockdown sceptics naturally claim that this is just a coincidence and have put forward alternative explanations. Last year, their theory was that Britain had reached herd immunity, but when that crashed and burned so spectacularly they resorted to claiming that seasonality was pushing the infection rate down in early February. 

Seasonality is now supposedly suppressing the virus once more, even though the infection rate has been actually been rising quite sharply (to plug this hole in the theory, they have resurrected their tired and discredited theories about PCR tests, spin cycles and false positives). 

This is all nonsense and easy to disprove. The more interesting question is why they want to believe the vaccines are useless. Why are people who were insistent that there would be no second wave last winter because of herd immunity so sure that there will be a massive wave this winter despite 87% of adults already having antibodies? Why has there been such a shift towards anti-vaxxing among lockdown sceptics, including some of the most prominent figures, such as Piers Corbyn, Michael Yeadon and Naomi Wolf (all of whom have been kicked off Twitter)?

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