The Government admits its ‘facts’ are wrong, yet continues on its dangerous path
We are just two days into this crackpot lockdown, and already the doom-mongering projections which got us here in the first place have been proven wrong — by the Government itself!
We are just two days into this crackpot lockdown, and already the doom-mongering projections which got us here in the first place have been proven wrong — by the Government itself!
During its press conference on Saturday, the Government presented graphs which indicated England would see up to 1,500 deaths a day by the beginning of December. This figure has since been reduced by a third, at 1,000 a day.
The same is the case for projected hospitalisations. Up to 9,000 a day, the Government said to scare us into lockdown. Yet a recent update has cut this, again, by a third, to 6,000.
These figures paint ‘a very grim picture’, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on Saturday. Might this statement now be revised to ‘a very false picture’?
Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson, both from the University of Oxford, put it right:
‘The growing number of errors seem to occur in only one direction (the worst case scenario) which underpins the point. Undeclared changes in projections based on undeclared assumptions clearly mislead.
‘Key decisions can only occur when the underlying data has been made available and checked independently, when methods and key assumptions underlying any models have been published. And only when these have been communicated clearly and coherently can effective and equitable policy decisions be made.’
At the same time, we have learned that, thanks largely to the Government’s lockdown policies, one in six over-fifties had their hospital treatments cancelled between February and May. One in four who wanted (or, rather, needed) to speak to a GP were unable to do so.
The impact of this is devastating. Yet we know that the Government isn’t paying much attention to this. In a revealing statement during a press conference yesterday, Sir Simon Stevens, the Chief Executive of the NHS, said (whilst standing next to the Prime Minister):
‘In the here and now, we can't stop cancer developing; […] we can't immediately prevent heart attacks or strokes; […] but we can prevent the spread of coronavirus in the community, and that is what we need to do to care for everybody who needs it.’
The Government’s decision to pause all ways of life — along with many forms of essential treatment — is highly damaging, and must be reversed.
