Covid death stats just don’t add up
JUST HOW accurate are the Covid death statistics? In December, I related a story on this page about a care home worker who told me of a resident who had Covid put on her death certificate after she fell, suffered a bleed from the brain, was taken to hospital and died. All the care home’s efforts to get an explanation failed. In that piece I said that when the pandemic was over we needed a serious inquiry into the figures.
Now Bel Mooney, the distinguished author and advice columnist, tells a similar story about her father. The legend below the graphs of government death statistics clearly states, “deaths for any reason within 28 days of testing positive” but the BBC always, always avoids reading out “for any reason”.
There is an immense difference between those who die directly of Covid and those who die with Covid or indeed who have tested positive, recover and die of something else within 28 days and I cannot be the only one who has noticed that nobody seems to die of pneumonia or winter flu at the moment.
UNLIKE the figures published by the Government each day, the Office of National Statistics does distinguish between Covid as an underlying cause and Covid mentioned anywhere on death certificates whether as an underlying cause or not.
In the eight weeks from November 6 to December 25, there were 18,771 deaths from Covid as underlying cause and 21,629 where Covid was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate whether as underlying cause or not.
If, as I suspect, the raw figures which are intoned night after night are inflated through lack of these distinctions, then the Government has scored a spectacular own goal as we now have one of the highest published death rates in the world. None of that is to deny the horrible death toll that Covid has caused but if government is so insistent on being led by data then at least the nation has a right to expect the data to be accurate.
ANOTHER cheer for Brexit!
We no longer have to implement the ridiculous EU ruling that lawnmowers and golf buggies have to have motor insurance when driven on private land. It would have cost an estimated £2bn in insurance and is just one of the many instances of EU nonsense which we can now escape.
THE Government proposal to appoint something called a “free speech champion” to tackle what has become known as the “cancel culture” of shutting down debate in our universities, shows how far we’ve already travelled from the principle this latest development will supposedly defend.
Predictably, student unions and higher education authorities insist that there is no evidence of censorship, or that an official watchdog would be a bigger threat to academic freedom.The briefest research into the cases of speakers banned for the wrong opinions exposes how laughable is that first assertion.The second point, however, carries some merit.
Our places of learning should no more require such a clunking solution to the suppression of opinion than social media should be subject to state monitoring for the same thing.And that does mean allowing the expression of views that the vast majority of us might recoil from, and tolerating that even those whose only recourse is to taunt and abuse have the right to do so.
We defeat these people with satire and ridicule, by exposing their pitiful limitations to the light of debate. Otherwise we are admitting not just that such views frighten us, but that we are so weak-willed and easily led we don’t even trust ourselves not to be taken in by them.