Shout out for the Covid counters
RI’M GENUINELY surprised I haven’t been served with a noise abatement order by now – I must be driving the neighbours crackers. For months, at around quarter past six most evenings, anyone passing our house will have heard a great, bellowing, stentorian racket, regular as clockwork and noisier than Big Ben.
“Noooooo! Not ‘from’ Covid, you idiots! With Covid! They died WITH it!”
Let me explain.
This has been my visceral response to BBC TV News nightly flash-carding the day’s governmentissued Covid death statistics.
Anyone who’s shuffled off this mortal coil who coincidentally tested positive for the virus is recorded as dying from it. Hence my lung-busting shouts. Because people already on their last gasps with cancer, organ failure, advanced dementia... you name it, are recorded as victims of coronavirus if they are identified as having it within 28 days of death.Yet cause of death in such cases is clearly little, if anything to do with the virus.
It’s sheer, unadulterated madness. You might as well say they died of a cold if they happened to have one on top of whatever was actually killing them. Even road accident casualties who subsequently died of terrible injuries were recorded as coronavirus deaths if Covid blood tests proved positive.
Never mind the catastrophic brain damage caused by being hit by a truck. Got the virus too? Sorry,
that’s what put paid to you. Official. I’ve been banging on about this nonsense for months, on these pages and on the news-based radio shows I occasionally guest-present when the regular host is away. I’ve taken a lot of flak for it on social media, including the odd death threat. (So if some bonkers troll topped me but I happened to have Covid at the time, would that give him or her a defence against charges of murder? Don’t bet against it).
Anyway, I knew I was right, so I pressed on regardless.And lo and behold, this week the Office for National Statistics came through arguing my corner too.
The ONS revealed that almost a quarter of registered Covid deaths were of people who actually DIDN’T die of the disease. Latest analysis shows that 23 per cent of registered “coronavirus deaths” were in fact people who died “with”
the infection rather than “from” it. Other re-evaluated statistics show that daily death figures for April are being wildly exaggerated.
Britain had no more than 28 deaths per day since the beginning of this month, even though the Government put the figure as high as 60.That’s because their daily update is based on the number of deaths reported in the last 24 hours – that often includes cases from days or even weeks previously.
Meanwhile, why have we only ever been given daily figures for hospital admissions and deaths? Why not figures for people who’ve recovered from Covid and been discharged? An absurdly one-sided presentation.
It’s because the Government – with the connivance of the BBC in particular – wanted to scare us into lockdown compliance. It worked too.A plague on both their houses.