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 that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.

TURNING on the news these days you would be forgiven for thinking we were still approaching the worst of the pandemic.

Emotive words such as “soars” or “rockets” are used to describe our death toll, even when the raw data suggests that we are moving further from the peak every day.

Using cumulative totals has not helped, either. Even if just one fatality was recorded today, many of our newspapers would refer to this as our growing “record death toll”.

An Oxford University statistician, Dr Jason Oke, has estimated that deaths are dropping by about 30 a day.

Indeed the total daily mortality is now below the average for May.

This is really good news however you think the crisis has been handled by the Government.

Every day at 2pm the Department of Health releases the daily figures, though virtually always a few hours late.

Beautiful

We see reported fatalities, new infections, tests carried out. There’s one crucial figure missed – the recovery numbers.

The UK and the Netherlands are the only countries that so far have not released these key statistics.

Even the beautiful pacific island of Fiji has 15 recovered – which is more than the United Kingdom as we have no details!

I’ve been pushing for these numbers to be published for a while now, so I was delighted to hear Boris commit to doing this at a press conference a couple of weeks ago.

Reports yesterday confirmed that the department will indeed release these statistics soon.

It will give us all a welcome morale boost to see the recoveries grow, showing everyone that the vast majority of victims will recover.

We can’t stay hidden in lockdown for ever. The country needs to creep back to normal. We need to give people as much confidence as possible that this can be done safely.

Seeing a tangible number of people recovered will go a small way to reducing the current culture of fear.