Thread by @_johnbye

Carl Heneghan's latest article for the @spectator shows the professor of Evidence Based Medicine is either misreading or misrepresenting the evidence.

At least 90% of the deaths he lists in an article called the "hidden death toll of lockdown" are actually covid deaths!

He says it's "hard to imagine, let alone measure, the side effects of lockdowns", and kind of proves that by listing lots of deaths that mostly have nothing to do with lockdown.

The data he's using seems to be from here:

app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjo…

So what does it actually say?

Claim 1) "28,200 more deaths among diabetics than we'd normally expect".

This is true, but very misleading. Because 23,667 of those "diabetes" deaths actually listed covid as the underlying cause of death!

So most of them definitely aren't lockdown deaths. They're covid deaths!

Also, almost all the excess diabetes deaths that *weren't* listed as being directly caused by covid happened around the first wave peak.

It seems highly unlikely that the first lockdown somehow killed about 500 diabetics a week almost instantly .. but later ones didn't kill any.

Claim 2) "For people with heart disease, it’s 17,100".

Again, technically this is true, but what he's not telling you is that 16,200 of those were people with heart disease who died from covid.

So again, almost all of these are categorically NOT lockdown deaths.

Claim 3) "For dementia and Alzheimer’s, it’s 22,800."

This one's a bit more complex. But the short answer is that there were 27,000 deaths involving dementia and Alzheimer’s where covid was the underlying cause of death.

So non-covid dementia deaths are actually BELOW average!

The long answer is there were some excess dementia deaths in the first wave that weren't attributed to covid.

But since then non-covid dementia deaths have been at or below average, despite months of continuing restrictions on care home visits, which Heneghan cites as a concern.

Also, it's now thought that many of those first wave dementia deaths were actually undiagnosed covid.

There was little or no testing in care homes at the time, and we now know covid symptoms in elderly people can look a lot like dementia.

manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/…

So far then Carl Heneghan has listed 68,000 excess deaths, but a quick look at the data shows almost 63,000 of those (92%!) listed covid as the underlying cause of death.

As sceptics would put it, they died "with" heart disease, diabetes or dementia, but they died "from" covid.

Given that the article is titled "the hidden death toll of lockdown", you would be forgiven for thinking that the excess deaths he lists are in some way related to lockdown.

But almost all of them were directly caused by covid!

They're NOT lockdown deaths, hidden or otherwise.

Either he doesn't understand the data he's using or he's deliberately misleading readers. Neither is a good look for a professor of Evidence Based Medicine.

He's implying lockdown killed tens of thousands of people. But there's no evidence to support it.

The only area that's not so clear cut is his claim that there's been a "big rise in at-home deaths".

This is true. But it's continued all year largely regardless of the level of lockdown restrictions, and is fairly closely mirrored by below average non-covid deaths in hospital.

It seems likely that due to changes in palliative care and people being unable or unwilling to go to hospital, at least some excess home deaths are people who would otherwise have died in hospital or hospice.

But Heneghan tries to link them to his phony lockdown deaths.

The whole article seems more like random rambling than a coherent argument about how many deaths may have been caused by lockdown measures.

After listing the misleading excess death figures, he has nothing more to say about lockdown, but instead has a jab at Neil Ferguson. 🙄

Casual readers are likely to go away thinking that lockdown has killed tens of thousands of people.

It certainly seems to be the narrative Heneghan and The Spectator are pushing.

But it simply isn't true, and the deaths the article lists are almost all directly caused by covid!

Update: It looks like even Heneghan and the Spectator have realised how wildly misleading the article was, and quietly reworded it today to admit that "most were categorised as Covid deaths". Which somehow still implies maybe they weren't.

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