Kelly’s Eye

CARL Heneghan, the professor of evidencebased medicine at Oxford University, was absolutely right to observe at the weekend that “people have become overly frightened and throughout this pandemic the fear instilled in people has been a real problem”.

The professor is at the forefront of those seeking to instil a greater sense of proportion. Last week he highlighted how hospitals in Oldham (which is facing tighter lockdown restrictions again), Rochdale and North Manchester had 1,252 occupied beds. How many were Covid cases? Nine.

Even at the peak of the virus, that figure was only 290.Yet opinion polls have shown that many are under the impression that anything between 10 to 100 times more fatalities have been caused by Covid than the actual figure, which is 0.1 per cent of the population.

Instead others are branded “irresponsible” for gatherings that never lead to all the apocalyptic prophecies of spikes in the virus, while the ever more cases uncovered by testing are treated as if evidence of plague ripping through the populace, when the vast majority of them weren’t even aware they’d had the virus.

Hospital admissions, let alone deaths, have plunged to negligible figures. It becomes ever clearer too that both those sets of statistics were inflated by cases wrongly counted as Covid-related.

Yet we are still in thrall to the “concept of telling a nation to protect its health service by trying not to use it”, as leading consultant Dr Waqar Rashid recently referred to the government campaign at the start of the outbreak.

That concept was bolstered by the pious wail of “lives are more important than money” – a wilfully false distinction, as if maintaining a healthy economy and saving people’s lives and livelihoods were not inextricably linked.

We’re about to find out just how much.