New Zealand have spent the majority of the last two years under less restrictions than the UK currently has in place (yes including freedom day!).
And here is Japan (for those arguing size, density, travel hub, etc…)
And here is somewhere closer to home….
And finally here is Singapore, who actually base their Covid guidelines on the British Pneumonia guideline…
And yet they have had less Covid deaths…
A lot less, > 10 times less
No or even less excess all-cause deaths
And the UK’s economy didn’t fair any better than our freedoms
And all our freedoms and all the deaths didn’t manage to save our economy….
Time to admit:
This Government took our money, our freedoms, and still let Covid ravage our country…killing >100k, disabling many more, buckling our health service and shafting our economy.
No doubt Covid did the direct damage, but it neither had to nor did it have to cause the mounting indirect damage.
It was Johnson’s Government backed by a party simply not up to the task of governing when the nation needed it most.
And it’s not over yet!
Time to own it:
This Government took our money, our freedoms, and still let Covid ravage our country…killing >100k, disabling many more, buckling our health service and shafting our economy.
No doubt Covid did the direct damage, but it neither had to nor did it have to cause the mounting indirect damage.
It was Johnson’s Government backed by a party simply not up to the task of governing when the nation needed it most.
And it’s not over yet!
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@profnfenton
I recently watched your explanatory video about Covid and the various problems with the data.
I think I followed your logic, but my concern relates to a few “big leaps” and the attempt to understand an illness I presume you have not seen very much of…
..if I can…
I appreciate the vulnerabilities in the data you have identified are genuine, but
1. Asymptomatic and non-infected are very different. The students were non-infected. Therefore the pick up rate of 36 false positives in the many thousands of samplings were well within <0.1%
2. The more likely reason for the initial spike in the data at the start of the vaccination roll-out is (IMV) more likely related to the genuine increased mortality associated with the overwhelmed hospitals. Excess home deaths have remained high throughout. And we see a…
But It is a pattern that seems to be emerging from economists and statisticians, that somehow the resistance of the PM to further mitigations was in some way a success.
While the economic argument seems absent, focus on healthcare numbers seems popular and problematic.
Oh my, Johnson must be getting desperate. His tactic for holding onto power now seems to be “talking up” his success in managing the pandemic.
Some things to bear in mind as the battle for the narrative continues…
While we can get distracted by the ‘with’ or ‘from’ Covid argument, here is the excess death data…one of the good overall measures for how a nation responded to the pandemic.
Ireland, Germany and France had about half as many excess deaths as the UK.
We averaged between 500 to 1000 extra deaths at home per week, throughout the pandemic.