Kit Yates Profile picture
Mar 12 23 tweets 5 min read
With the #GaryLineker row the focus has been drawn away from the government's illegal migration bill and even, ironically, their rhetoric around it.

To return to the original story, Suella Braverman's numbers on asylum seekers don't add up.

Here's why:
🧵
1/21
Last week upon unveiling new plans to allegedly deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats, Suella Braverman claimed that *100 million* people could already be on their way to seek asylum in the UK.
2/21
In her speech to the commons, the home secretary claimed: “There are 100 million people around the world who could qualify for protection under our current laws. Let’s be clear. They are coming here.”
3/21
An article she wrote the following day repeated the claim and went further suggesting that there were “likely billions more” eager to come to the UK if possible.
4/21
In reality, just 85,000 people have arrived in the UK in small boats across the Channel since 2018 – just 17,000 a year on average.
5/21
Even the relatively high 45K people who arrived in the UK last year to seek asylum by crossing the channel on small boats pales into comparison – at just 0.045 per cent of Braverman’s touted 100 million figure.
In total, around 90K people applied for asylum in the UK in 2022.
6/
To set the record straight on the numbers, of the 100 million people that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates are displaced around the world, only around a quarter have actually left their home country.
7/21
unhcr.org/refugee-statis…
Around three-quarters of displaced people who do leave their own country remain in a neighbouring country.
Surveys consistently demonstrate that the majority of refugees would like to return to their homes as soon as it is safe for them to do so.
8/21
unrefugees.org.uk/wp-content/upl…
Historically, we have relatively fewer asylum seekers applying to the UK, compared to our population size, than many of the EU nations. In 2021, there were around nine asylum applications per 10,000 people in the UK.
9/21
researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01…
Across the rest of the EU, this figure was 14 applications per 10,000 residents, placing the UK below the average in 16th place. In 2022 the UK received 75,000 asylum applications. Germany received almost 250,000.
10/21
fullfact.org/immigration/su…
The home secretary sees it to her advantage to overinflate the potential scale of the number of people arriving in the UK. She believes that the potential threat posed by this hypothetical deluge justifies legislation which, many believe, is in contravention of international law.
The huge numbers being bandied about are hard for us to get a handle on. Many people struggle to visualise the difference between thousands, millions and billions.
12/21
Even if they know that a billion is a thousand times more than a million and a million is a thousand times more than a thousand, when numbers get really large they can go beyond the scale of things we are able to relate to. Everything just seems big.
13/21
One way to comprehend the difference is to think about time – a phenomenon which we experience both on very short and very long scales. A hundred thousand seconds is just under a day. You can go 24 hours without eating no problem.
14/21
A million seconds is about 11.5 days. Not eating for that long would push most people to their limits.
A billion seconds is about 35 years. Fasting for half a lifetime is patently impossible. The scale of the problem changes significantly as the numbers ramp up.
15/21
Here’s another way of thinking about it. If I give you £1,000 a day it will take just 100 days for you to amass £100,000. In three years you’ll become a millionaire. To become a billionaire, however, will take 2740 years.
16/21
When we compare the 100 million displaced people in the world to the fewer than 100,000 people who claimed asylum in the UK last year, at less than 0.1 per cent the number of asylum seekers doesn’t seem so large.
17/21
Even the 45,000 people who came to Britain to claim asylum via boats across the channel represent only around 0.07 per cent of the current population of the UK.
18/21
Even when placed in context though, we must be careful not to focus too heavily on the numbers which have grabbed the headlines. We must remember, at its heart, that this story is not about numbers. It is about people.
19/21
Often desperate people fleeing the traumas of their past and hoping to build a better life for themselves.

By denying them the protections afforded under international law...

20/21
... by breaking the European convention on human rights, the UN convention on refugees and the universal declaration of human rights – all of which the UK was a founding member of – we are betraying the legacy that our country fought so hard to secure.
\ENDS
This should have said just *over* a day.
100,000 seconds is about 27 hours 47 minutes.

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More from @Kit_Yates_Maths

Mar 7
Seems like a good time to remind people why the herd immunity strategy wouldn't have worked.

We found critical flaws which meant shielding strategies, like the GBDs "focussed protection", would have failed in practice.
🧵
journals.plos.org/globalpubliche…
The unprecedented scale of the public health crisis posed by the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments around the world to impose restrictions on social contact to suppress transmission of the coronavirus.

2/16
An alternative strategy would have been to temporarily shield those who were most vulnerable to COVID-19 (the elderly and those with certain pre-existing conditions), with the aim of achieving herd immunity by allowing a largely unmitigated epidemic in the rest of the population.
Read 16 tweets
Mar 3
Buried in WhatsApp conversations between then-prime minister Boris Johnson, his scientific advisers and Dominic Cummings, is an exchange which is arguably even more worrying than this headline-grabbing stories.

Johnson's fundamental maths mistake...
🧵1/22
On 26 August 2020, Johnson asked the group:

“What is the mortality rate of Covid? I have just read somewhere that it has fallen to 0.04 per cent from 0.1 per cent.”
2/22 Image
He goes on to calculate that with this “mortality rate” if everyone in the UK were to be infected this would lead to only 33K deaths
He suggests that since the UK had already suffered 41K deaths at that point, this might mean “Covid is starting to run out of potential victims” Image
Read 24 tweets
Feb 17
A quick update 🧵on the covid situation in the UK at the moment.

TL;DR After rising for the last couple of weeks things seems to be slowing down and covid incidence rate may even have peaked.

1/9
The ONS infection survey is just catching up with the latest rises

All nations (except NI) have seen rises

Remember it is around two weeks out of date (these data are for the week ending 7th Feb).

So we will expect to see these numbers rise for another couple of weeks yet.
2/9
The latest week saw rises in all regions of England...

3/9
Read 10 tweets
Feb 17
Apparently the government are planning to tell doctor's to "sign fewer patients off sick" to reinvigorate the economy.

Unfortunately, just telling people they are not sick, doesn't make them not sick, so I think this plan will probably fail.
Lets have a look at the data.
🧵
1/12
Firstly, we saw a sharp rise in the UK sickness absence rate from 2020 to 2021*.

This is the highest level since 2009.

*2022 data is not out until April.

2/12
The pandemic has had a number of different and potentially conflicting impacts on these data.

It's possible that measures such as furloughing, social distancing, shielding and increased homeworking may to have helped reduce other causes of absence in 2020...
3/12
Read 13 tweets
Feb 10
ONS infection survey picking up the flattening-off of COVID cases that we saw a couple of weeks ago.

Remember you might see reports (based on these data) today suggesting covid cases are flattening.

In reality we know they've been rising for almost two weeks now.
Zoe infection survey picked up the rise much earlier.

They've recently recalibrated their numbers to better match the historical numbers from the ONS to give a more accurate picture of the absolute levels.
In greater detail you can see rises in prevalence in England and Scotland and falls small falls in Wales and NI, although, of course, all these estimates are subject to some uncertainty.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 10
Covid Hospital admissions continue to rise in England as another wave of covid spreads across the country.

Not hearing much reporting on this in the media.
Seems like we have just come to accept that this is what happens now.
1/3 Image
Hospital admission rates have increased in every region of England, with particularly steep rises in the East of England - although the South East. North East and the Midlands are flatter.
2/3 Image
Admissions rising in all age groups, but as always the biggest increases tend to be seen in the older age groups.
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets

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