THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times which has won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
LOTS of things have surprised me in this pandemic, but nothing has shocked me more so than the recent scandal surrounding Public Health England and how our fatality figures are reported.
Essentially PHE has a central computerised list of who has tested positive for the virus.
That list inevitably gets longer and longer as nobody is ever taken off it. They then compare that list to an NHS database of people who have died, if anyone on the first list is on the second, it’s called a coronavirus-related fatality.
It’s an extreme example, but if someone tested positive for the virus in March and was hit by a bus last week – that would be included. It sounds too ludicrous to be true, but it is. It’s a disgraceful way to deal with data. It means the virus deaths can never end.
For a long time I’ve criticised the Government for how the data is collected and presented. But the fault lies with PHE here. It was clear to anyone following the data that this is not the best way to record what was happening. As the list of those who tested positive grows, the effect it has on the numbers will be greater. During the peak this would have had little impact, but now as the numbers are falling these extra deaths will be artificially inflating the numbers fairly significantly.
When so much is decided based on that data, it really frustrates me that it isn’t collected in an absolutely meticulous fashion.
The NHS is operating at only around 50 per cent capacity for serious diseases such as cancer and mental health problems. It will cost far more lives if we don’t get it kick started again.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock is absolutely right to launch an urgent review into this. Some countries have been accused of being creative to suppress their figures, but to have it this way round is truly ridiculous.
Accuracy matters. So much depends on those numbers but to be frank the way they have been handled is an utter embarrassment.