Virus Stats - Is Government Being Honest?

One way in which suspicion has fallen upon countries like China, and indeed Russia, over reporting infections and deaths due to the Coronavirus, is the way in which they have been open and honest about the numbers - or perhaps not. Our free and fearless press has found this most useful, as in the absence of Scary Muslims™, Rotten Lefties™ and anyone who is not white, they always need someone to blame, because, er, they do.

So it ill behoves our own Government to be less than totally open and honest themselves, and that is the distinct impression given during the past 24 hours. On Tuesday afternoon, the infection and death figures were issued via the Department of Health and Social Care Twitter account at 1551 hours. These told that 8,077 people had tested positive for Covid-19, while, overall, 422 had died. But yesterday, everything changed.

At 1416 hours yesterday, the DHSC Twitter feed told “Today's figures will be published later this afternoon. We are working hard to provide you with the latest information and will tweet this out as soon as possible”. But the figures did not appear until after 2300 hours, well after media sources had them. The number of those testing positive had leapt to 9,529, but cumulative deaths had increased to just 463.

However, the lockdown strategy should take at least two weeks to work through - maybe a little longer. Then the waters became yet more muddied, as Sienna Rogers of LabourList observed “Well, this is very interesting from [Nick Watt] – the government is changing the way it is releasing death figures, which ‘may not actually be the deaths that have taken place over the last 24 hrs’ as family consent is now required”. Eh?

LSE researcher Luke Cooper was sceptical. “It’s not true that consent is required if the data is anonymised. I’m sorry to say that this sounds an awful lot like govt is fiddling the figures”. And as we are given just the overall numbers of deaths, the date is indeed anonymised. Then came Rowena Mason at the Guardian. “No 10 says mortality rates were lower yesterday because it is a ‘crossover day’ as the way we report coronavirus deaths is changing - no clarity on why or how yet”.

They could be arguing in their spare time. Chris Smyth of the Times then chipped in “Death figures update: last night only 28 new fatalities [England] recorded. Alas this is not good news, it is because there are now so many deaths NHS using a 7.30am cut off instead of 1pm. So govt looking at changing how they are reported”. Oh? Do go on.

“We may not get any death figures today, as they are looking at moving to publishing first thing in the morning. Aim is to give more time to collate NHS data and inform families before ages and locations made public”. Well, well. While hundreds of new deaths from both Italy and Spain are freely reported and picked up by media sources, the information that should be most relevant to those media sources has mysteriously dried up.

We are told that there is bad news coming down the track; a new NHS facility is being built at the ExCeL centre in London’s Docklands; that facility, NHS Nightingale, has provision for thousands of beds and two morgues; individual reports of deaths are everywhere; TfL staff report scores of their colleagues falling ill from the virus; and the numbers dry up.

This is the stuff from which conspiracy theories spring. Government must come clean.

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