Read on Twitter
Tweeps, as you may know I've been in an awkward spot on this platform regarding COVID. I want to share some stats & offer my views THREAD
1/ I supported a prudential approach to COVID, with mask wearing indoors, mass testing & confinement of positive cases along the "Lazaretti" model employed in Malta
2/ I still think that is the right approach when you don't know much about the virus. I still wear a mask in the supermarket & I have registered for the App
3/ Most of my followers on this platform are anti-mask, anti-test & many are suspicious of the vaccine (which I will take when offered)
4/ Thankfully, I have great mutual followers on this platform & we never fell out. In particular I learned a lot from thoughtful discussions with @PlainVa86760081 & @paulrey99
5/ To be clear though, I have never been a supporter of lockdown, nor has @nntaleb whose work informed my views. The other measures mentioned before are sufficient
6/ As time went on, it was clear that, apart from the elderly , overweight & a small number with underlying conditions, very few people were dying of COVID. This, in my opinion, conclusively undermines the case for lockdown
7/ As @paulrey99 said early on, the focus should have been on protecting the vulnerable. The rest should be allowed to get on with their lives
8/ The Swedish experience was also conclusive. Much is made in the media of criticism of Sweden's approach, but it is still outperforming the UK & France, among others, in terms of fatality rate, but without the damage of lockdown
9/ I conceded a while ago that I had been wrong in a Tweet to @paulrey99 & @PlainVa86760081, the latter in particular had been quick to spot the risk of lockdown being a pretext for what is now called the great reset
10/ Anyway, now hospitals are apparently "at breaking point" & the mood on Twitter seems to be that the hawks, like I was at the beginning of the pandemic, were right. So lets look at some stats
11/ What bugs me about the BBC's reporting of this is it talks about hospitals being full or fuller than during the previous peak, this is misleading. We are now in winter, so you would expect both of those things
12/ We also know that a lot of COVID deaths are not caused by COVID, many are people who die for different reasons & had COVID before they died. It's not reliable
13/ What is reliable, with some qualifications, is excess deaths. These are easy to download from the ons in excel form and plot https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales
14/ Here is the graph. While there is a total of 22,132 excess deaths since 11/9/20, this is well below the last peak & not an egregious number
15/ Of course, you could say that the deaths would have been higher without the lockdown, but still, we had lockdown during the last peak too
16/ And, as I said, Sweden didn't lock down & their performance is better. So bottom line, excess deaths do not support the current mood in the media
17/ Finally, I recommend the @spectator's datahub. You can see that the current levels of utilisation in hospital are comparable to historical averages
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/nhs
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/nhs
18/ Coda: the excess deaths should obviously be adjusted for excess heart attack, cancer & suicide deaths. Suicide deaths are reported with a long lag & hard to attribute reliably to particular time periods ...
19/ ... cancer can last a long time & so if someone tragically dies of cancer because of reduced treatment due to COVID, it will only show up in the figures with a lag. And I can't find weakly heart attack data
20/ So there it is, hope the data's helpful. Sorry to anyone who's unfollowed me END
