The government seems to have published a shelved PHE study today just to defend Matt Hancock against accusations by Dominic Cummings about discharging patients from hospitals to care homes without testing them for covid.
And the study is flawed, due to that very lack of testing!
It's been widely assumed that many deaths in care homes in the first wave were caused by patients being discharged from hospital without being tested. A policy that continued until April 15th.
This issue was raised by Cummings in his testimony yesterday.
So data for the first wave, which is when most seeding from hospitals took place, is very incomplete, and will underestimate cases.
Which would be fine, except they've defined the first wave as everything up to October 12th! Well into the second wave for the North and Midlands.
This means they're mixing data from when seeding from hospitals was most likely to have taken place but there was almost no testing in care homes, and data from when there should have been very little seeding but care homes were being routinely tested.
Which will skew the data.
To give an idea of the possible scale of the problem, the study identifies 5,882 lab confirmed outbreaks up to October 12th.
But the last PHE care home outbreak report (which also includes suspected outbreaks) already showed 6,811 by July 19th.
So both the number of care home outbreaks and the number of cases and deaths associated with each one is significantly undercounted for the period when most seeding took place.
But not in later data when patients were being tested before discharge, reducing seeding.
As the study averages things out over the entire pandemic, up to the point when it was really written in October, the proportion of care home deaths and outbreaks caused by hospital discharges in the ACTUAL first wave will be FAR higher than the 2% it quotes for the "first wave".
It's hard to interpret this as anything other than dusting off an old report that's been sitting on a shelf for the last seven months and publishing it purely to provide dubious cover for Matt Hancock in today's press conference. 🙄
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Assuming any of this is true (it is Dominic Cummings, after all), it paints a pretty damning picture of a government hopelessly unprepared and woefully unsuited to dealing with a serious emergency.
For starters, apparently the Prime Minister and others were convinced the whole thing was overblown, and that the economic damage from acting would be worse than the death toll from doing nothing.
They saw it as another Swine Flu.
They were wrong.
Once they got past that, herd immunity WAS the initial policy, because they didn't see any alternative. Either 260,000 people die in the spring (the "optimal" strategy!) or even more die in the winter.
He claims there was even talk of asking people to intentionally get infected!
Update on the situation in Bolton, courtesy of the covid dashboard.
First up, cases are still rising rapidly. Daily case numbers are almost back to the peak they reached during the second wave that hit the North West hard in the autumn.
It says a lot that so many politicians and their friends saw the pandemic as a get rich quick scheme.
In this case a disgraced former MP working with an organic dog food company owner (!) to broker a deal with a Hong Kong company, which itself seems to be a middleman. 🙄
Meanwhile in Canterbury, disgraced former scientist Michael Yeadon (who thinks proposed covid booster shots may be a plot to depopulate the Earth) is addressing people in a park with a PA system.
Having recently complained that he wasn't able to do this.