An interesting article in the Telegraph, written by Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University and Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, and Tom Jefferson, Honorary Research Fellow at the centre.
They are very critical of the ‘Rule of Six’. There is, they say, absolutely no scientific basis for it – it is clearly a purely arbitrary number plucked from the air – it’s nice to find such highly qualified people echoing my own view on the ‘rule’. They claim that government is panicking, relying on modelling which has already proved unreliable and statistics which are exaggerating the numbers.
I’ve just had a look at the reported deaths for the week 11/9/20 – 17/9/20. A total of 81 deaths were reported, of which 66 had tested positive at time of death and 15 had not, but covid-19 was mentioned in the death certificate. Assuming for the moment that those numbers are accurate, and do not contain any exaggerations, that equates to 11.5 deaths per day taking the 81 figure, 9.4 for the 66.
To put those numbers in perspective, in 2019 the average number of suicides – from another Telegraph comment – was 12.1. It is a truism that we all die of something, and on an average day nearly 1,700 people die of something. Being generous with the numbers that means that at the moment covid-19 deaths represent around 0.68% of deaths – and for that number the country is being destroyed socially and economically.
Nobody in their right mind would try to claim that covid-19 isn’t dangerous – of course it is, and there is no doubt that the deaths will increase over the winter in common with all other respiratory killers, but the ‘cure’ exemplified by the government’s actions seems like doing more damage than the disease itself. One last statistic – the government is looking to take action wherever the rate of positive tests exceeds 50/100,000. For all other acute respiratory infections, the figure is 400/100,000.
I cannot help but think that we are seeing a government which really is panicking, thrashing around in the hope of finding the least damaging – in terms of health care – course of action. But even that hope is ill-founded. Whilst attention has been focused on covid-19, other health problems have effectively been ignored. Cancer care, routine operations, GP consultations, have all suffered, not to mention the mental health problems being stored up. When the figures become available, I wonder how many suicides there will have been in 2020?
Mike