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August 24, 2020 - 3:00pm
On 19th August, England passed a significant milestone, which since today we can report with some confidence: there were zero reported deaths following a positive Covid-19 test in hospitals or other settings, for the first time since 7th March.
This is a remarkable event, but check the homepage of the BBC or any other mainstream publication and there is no mention of it at all. For months, the country was battered by daily headlines about Covid deaths, but with this good news comes no commensurate coverage.
This is especially surprising given that the daily hospital deaths report has been the single most reliable indicator of progress throughout the coronavirus crisis. From early April, I started tweeting daily updates on English hospital deaths by the actual date of death, as provided by NHS England. As deaths can take some time to be reported, this number does not usually reach something close to its final total until five days later.
This method meant that as early as the 10th April, we could identify that deaths had probably already peaked two days earlier. On 15th April, the Chief Medical Officer told the daily press conference that deaths were still increasing despite the fact that the date-of-death data told us unambiguously that we had passed the peak of deaths a week earlier.
The date-of-death numbers have been in single figures more often than not since the end of July, a period when the now-discredited Public Health England deaths measure was still reporting over 50 deaths per day and giving the false impression that easing restrictions had stopped deaths decreasing.
So the first day of zero reported deaths is a truly significant event. Lockdown was originally introduced in the middle of a crisis to stop the NHS being overwhelmed, but we are now in a very different situation: Weekly deaths involving flu and pneumonia are now over 6 times the number involving coronavirus, and Covid-19 hospitalisations have come down dramatically from a peak of more than 3,000 on the 1 April to an average of 50 per day now.
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SubscribeGiven the main point of having a public sector news organisation is to report objectively, its really annoying that the BBC continually refuse to report any news that might reflect positiviely on the nations government and institutions.
The lack of meaningful context in data reporting is equally abysmal …
Not click-bait sadly. I guess their raison d’etre is to get an audience. I gather viewing numbers were up with death nos. Maybe our media are simply a mirror of the majority desire for mass death and destruction.
The BBC have a long history of ignoring any fact, stat or story that runs counter to the narrative they wish to promote.
Covid is the deadliest threat to life this side of the zombie apocalypse. Any stat that might undermine such an idea should remain unacknowledged. Any unsubstantiated rumour or “fear” should lead the bulletin. That has long been their modus operandi.
Not only the BBC, it’s the same in almost every country, except Sweden I guess…
The Swedish media is every bit as deceitful as the BBC. But, luckily, for Sweden they do have one or two smart scientists/epidemiologists.
The devil is in the details then (or in this case the angel).
Yes, It is time to start believing in conspiracy theories. What is currently happening makes no sense: quarantine, face masks, track and trace but, the crisis peaked at the beginning of April! Why do we have to associate within 1-2 metre distancing at this late stage? Why do we have to wear stupid cloth face masks which protect no one? Why do we have to associate in ‘bubbles’. Why are millions of tax payer monies being spent on useless distancing measures? We were told to lock down to, ‘Save the NHS’ but, the NHS WAS saved! It was not overwhelmed. The Nightingale Hospitals have stood empty so, why are we not being given accurate statistics as to the number of deaths and the actual infection rate? Hospital admissions and deaths have been falling steadily since the peak at the beginning of April. They are supposed to be following the science. Whose science??? Why are they only listening to Prof Neil Fergusson who has been called out for his countless alarmisms with other Coronaviris infections? The BBC, that sacred cow, is selective in its reporting. Why? So many obvious, unanswered questions. Yes, I DO believe in conspiracy theories.
Excellent comment Christine!
And by the way , there is nothing exceptional about conspiracies, they happen all the time and every day. You only need 2 or more people who do something in secrecy to damage another person or to get richer or…..it actually doesn’t matter what cause is served by it… I’m bewildered when people do not believe in conspiracies because it’s what history is made of.
No, there is nothing special about conspiracies. In life good people and bad people plan. We are dealing with people who have pretty well made a place for themselves outside the law, or even the remotest liability for their actions, and surprise surprise they take advantage. In any normal human dispensation this would be a recipe for disaster, and it is in this one. We ought to look at J K Galbraith’s concept of “innocent fraud” of which what we are seeing is the most grandiose and devilish example.
But most conspiracy theories don’t consist of two or so people, they involve ‘Them’, The Powers That Be, The Pentagon, The Deep State, Global Capital, The Jews controlling the the world. Actual conspiracies are more bungling and banal.
“Bungling and banal” – nicely put! I incline more to the c**k-up theory of history than the conspiracy theory myself…
Why is it either/or? Government conspiracies have been openly admitted to by the very organizations that did them years later – MKUltra, Mockingbird, Gulf of Tonkin, Strategy of Tension, NSA, Tuskegee syphilis etc. They published actual documents proving that their organization, in the past, committed willful conspiracies. And yet people still don’t believe them! It’s hilarious.
The global conspiracies you refer to are of the kind they use to make the followers look silly and sometimes justly so. But my point is ofcourse that a huge amount of conspiracies that fit the definition is overlooked (and quite often there are big ones among them).
Exactly. And when a good 10% of criminal convictions are called ‘conspiracy to…’. Are the courts engaged in conspiracy theorising?
It might make more sense to believe in incompetence theory. Now with added wokery.
I totally agree witheverything you say. Due to the huge success by the Government to frighten the life out of the sheeple, they are poised to introduce measures of state control never possible before.Watch this space !
We are told that “the end game”- our only hope of normality- is the vaccine. With 3 of the 6 front runners from China and 2 of the remaining 3 backed by the Bill Gates Foundation.
Is it a coincidence that these 2 controllers and backers of WHO stand
to make tens of billions from their rushed vaccines?
Meanwhile, credible treatments such as Hydroxicloroquine, Pulmicort and Ivermectin are banned in the United States and Australia and Doctors who publically promote these treatments are threatened with lose of license and their job.
Yet WHO tells us that Covid survival rate is 99.4% and 95% of deaths are in the 65yrs+ with 2 comorbidities. So for those under 65 yrs and infected, the mortality rate is 0.03% (0.6×5.0). Seasonal flu mortality is 1% and kills a much broader range of the population.
A conspiracy on a global scale is the only explanation that makes any sense.
Interesting article particularly if read in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (OCEBM) article “Estimating the infection fatality ratio in England” dated August 21, 2020. The Oxford study suggests an Infection Fatality Ratio of 0.30% based on the Medical Research Council model and 0.40% for the Office for National Statistics model. This is vastly different to the 1% suggested by Neil Ferguson which led to the imposition of draconian lockdown measures in March.
I also recommend another look at Freddie Sayers interview on 05 May 2020 where it was revealed then (more than 3 months ago), in a study conducted by Professor Hendrik Streeck of the University of Bonn, that the Infection Fatality Rate may well be in the region of 0.36%. Prof Streeck also placed great emphasis on the viral load, & a recent article by two professors at OCEBM (The Spectator on 21 August) points to the relatively high number of ‘weak positive’ tests, where most are not infectious,and states “the number of cases should not be the main driver of future lockdowns”.
It really is time politicians and MSM stop the alarmist headlines because, as David Paton says, “it is essential we reset our attitude towards coronavirus” to one that is based a little more on the evidence.
“Those scenes on the TV news of Hazmat suit clad workers in Italy and Korea hosing down walls and streets with anti-viral chemicals”. Yep, it’s all about the authorities needing to be seen to be doing something even if it is totally ineffective. Reminds me of Foot & Mouth Disease in the UK, where vast amounts of disinfectant was poured onto straw pads at entry & exit points to villages. Completely pointless. Modelling by Prof Neil Ferguson also led to the policy of “contiguous culling”.resulting in the slaughter of 6.5 million cattle, sheep and pigs. As the BBC subsequently reported, many vets and farmers felt at the time,and still do, that the policy was far too drastic, Still, when watching thousands of animals burning on open air pyres, we could be comforted that the authorities were doing something.
The local council in my little village in Tenerife resorted to washing the streets almost every day. Now they can’t afford to empty the bins!
Just to consolidate your point. I believe that those infection rates are for the entire population. We now know which groups are especially vulnerable. Strip them out and the fatality rate for healthy people below retirement age is much lower.
Yes, the overall rate of 0.36% or whatever is pointless: the risk is far higher in the old and frail and far lower in the young and healthy: so like all such averages, it’s almost meaningless.
I suppose the rate that we need to compare it with is the normal annual mortality rate of 1.2% or so, but of course, not everyone is going to get infected anyway, so a 1/300 death rate would be a worst case scenario in which no precautions are taken at all, and everyone gets it: which seems highly improbable as many of us appear to carry some immunity.
Probably the simple answer to David Patons question (why is the BBC not reporting the good news of death rates diminishing?) is that good news isn’t news. It never was and never will be (except for little panda bears born in captivity). Furthermore the preference these days for bad news is extra strong since cognitive dissonance has reached epic levels worldwide. It’s unprecedented. To me it feels like a new religion is born.
But also given the (economic) consequences of measures taken, how is any government or any news organization in the world ever going to get out of the apocalyptic frenzy? That’s exactly why Sweden has been the favorite international target of criticism, not Kim Jong Un but Anders Tegnell is the most dangerous person alive. So my point is that having to admit that one has been exaggerating (and not just a little bit) is psychologically not an option, it’s suicide.
Nevertheless, forced by economic disaster, news organizations and governments must at some point change course, but this must be done very carefully and very gradually, for instance by repeating all the time that measures were succesful and ofcourse by inventing new measures. So preferably they want to come out the lockdown step by step, if ever, because the hopes are still that the vaccination will come soon enough.
Soon enough to prevent evidence based science to annihilate the lockdown-measures (this science is already there btw but has no platform yet to reach the millions). It’s a fascinating rat race.
No, the end of a war is news (even the end of a war 75 years ago as we have just seen) but it is not part of WHO/Gates/Hancock agenda and the mainstream media cannot tell the truth to save their lives. The BBC news is full of unreadable wokish good news stories every day. That’s not the problem.
They could probably work out how they were going to retell this story if they were forced to very quickly but they are still addicted to the global narrative, these men and women of straw.
Fair enough, good news exists, ofcourse, as long as it fits the narrative, that’s more or less what I mean with the panda bear born in captivity. So the vaccine will be the so called good news we are all waiting for since it fits the narrative.
“Good news” is news too.
I can live with commercial organisations selling partial truths to excite the masses, but the BBC need to remember they are supposed to serve intelligent audiences as well ….
Maybe I can get an exemption from the License Fee as my IQ is somewhere above 100 🤔
I think they know they can’t serve intelligent people anymore and perhaps they don’t care. A must read is Tim Schwab, Columbia Journalism Review ‘ Journalism’s Gates keepers’.
An interesting link – thank you.
The BBC wouldn’t have the first idea of how to serve an intelligent audience. It is staffed entirely by morons. I threw out the TV 20 years ago because it was obvious even then that there was no more reprehensible organisation on the planet.
Spot on-virtually all political regimes have put themselves in a cul de sac-any review of the latest data would imply a fairly rapid relaxing of the lock down restrictions which would beg the question why we did it in the first place-so they will ignore “the science” and continue to turn the screw until some suitable reason /excuse can be found-I suspect they are all pinning their hopes on a vaccine or effective treatment of symptom-this will give them the excuse not to examine the policies implemented..However as this is likely to be some time off we will continue to have totally erratic and illogical policy decisions imposed on us-Zugzwang I think!!!
I’m not waiting. The semi closed NHS isn’t an illusion, it’s real and is a DELIBERATE, conscious decision, so that it can “handle the 2nd wave”.
So my 15 page analysis & recommendation document is going to the top of the NHS & SAGE by the end of the week. If they d**k about or bury it, I’ll get it into the papers & online. I may be wrong, but no where near as wrong as Ferguson & his religious hangers on.
The inadequacy if they NHS at the moment is responsible for hundreds of avoidable non Covid deaths.
Really? I can imagine “100% effective cure for cancer found” as being headline news in every country in the world.
The constant harrying and sceptical media from DAY ONE of this pandemic had/has one objective…to bring this govt down.
Enter Starmer and we get Brexit cancelled.
Simple.
An utter disgrace that will not be forgotten.
The swamp is still full.
And Nanny Doris (the politician formerly known as Boris) still insists on stupid, pointless restrictions on our behaviour and forces us to wear absurd masks when we go shopping. Is it any surprise that what little confidence we had in our political leaders has all but vanished?
Damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t. He probably has “advisors” climbing over each others backs to justify their existance, while the legal sharks lurk in the background!
.. meanwhile the guardian decides to sign off todays ‘live blog’ with the news that someone in Hong Kong may have got it twice, raising doubts about immunity. The plummeting death rates and hospitalisations aren’t reported – they’re on a mission to ramp it up and they won’t rest until every one of us has lost our jobs, our kids have gone mad and we’re all back in our houses living life virtually. Stay safe guys.
someone in Hong Kong may have got it twice
and if they bothered to report the whole piece it actually states that the 2nd infection was a mutated version and in both cases the man was asymptomatic and it wasn’t a big issue
wow! Thank you! I just groaned to hear more horrible probably inaccurate news and moved on without reading.
Long ago the BBC along with so many other journalists abandoned their mission of informing opinion in favour of trying to control it.
Like so many lawyers they have become “activists”.
The 24/7 tv news cycle has corrupted news reporting beyond redemption. I watched the morning news today and, in the absence of any catastrophe, it was listless garbage.
They thrive on bad news.
It’s the lack of independent funding which has destroyed news.
Thank you.
Great article – I have followed David Patons daily updates on twitter from early in the crisis and his analysis has been spot on and devoid of the hysteria that much of the mainstream media has pedalled
We seem to be inhabiting the narrative of one of those Chris Morris Brass Eye interviews in which the interviewee has invested so much emotional capital, driven so far down a narrow one way street, that it has become impossible to reverse, to cut the losses and reevaluate, no matter how absurd the narrative becomes.
Where is Chris Morris when we need him?!
He would upset far too many people for any woke broadcaster to give him airtime. The snowflakes would go into fit.
Is it time to start believing in conspiracies?
All cockup. They’re too stupid to conspire to find their own arses.
This is my letter in BMJ on-line this morning. BMJ ought to be getting it given that they are partners with Oxford CEBM:
‘Less haste, more safety, certainly, but we could do with an end to the vaccine rescue narrative as well’
Re: Covid-19: Less haste, more safety Fiona Godlee.10.1136/bmj.m3258
Dear Editor
Who could argue with ‘less haste, more safety’ as a proposition [1], particularly with children who as a target population are not generally at risk from the COVID-19. But even a little less haste might not solve the problem and a licensing schedule of two or three years for a vaccine of novel design would still be unprecedented.
The fact that we are also now rather optimistically talking about 50% efficacy from any of these new COVID-19 products is also a cause for bewilderement. If the purpose is the resumption of normal civil life then 50% surely cannot do it, and we might do better to look for hope in the sharp decline in hospitilisations and deaths (even though we may be able to generate an idenfinite number of new cases as an artefact of testing) [2-4]. To limp along like this in the hope that we will all be rescued by a vaccine (supposing we any longer need rescuing) is not realistic, and not the basis on which policy should be directed – quite apart from the harm that it is doing to every other aspect of civil life and of health policy itself.
[1] Fiona Godlee, ‘Covid-19: Less haste, more safety’, BMJ 2020; 370… (Published 20 August 2020)
[2] Tom Jefferson, Carl Heneghan, Elizabeth Spencer, Jon Brassey, ‘Are you infectious if you have a positive PCR test result for COVID-19?’, CEBM 5 August 2020,..
[3] Carl Heneghan, Jason Oke, ‘Why Oldham sshouldn’t be going into lockdown’, CEBM 19 August 2020, …
[4] Daniel Howdon, Carl Heneghan, ‘The Declining Case Fatality Ratio in England’, CEBM 19 August 2020,…
There are demos planned across Europe this weekend, including one in London: Unite for Freedom, Saturday 29th August 2020, 12:00, Trafalgar Square.
Thanks for that. Didn’t know about this until reading your post. I’m going and I’d encourage everyone on these pages who is sceptical about this debacle to do the same. We need the numbers so the media can’t paint it as a crackpot far right ‘incident’ …
I thought the XR loons + BLM were having a demo this weekend. Are Unite for Freedom joining this mob or just doing their own thing? Either way, good news for police overtime, placard makers and shares in Rentacrowd but otherwise completely futile, as such events always are.
Flyer for the demo on Saturday:
https://williambowles.info/…
Answering to some previous comments, I don’t think it is a conspiracy at all. More like a sleepwalk into goodness knows what.
There is no grand design, just lack of leadership, and, most of all, mob rule.
Everybody has their little agenda and lobbies the government about it and in the end they get their way. The problem with this approach is that the messages it sends are very mixed and end up upsetting more people than it satisfies.
Nobody (the government and the public alike) really cares about “the Science” (whatever that might be) or “the Numbers”. Everything is being ruled by personal perception and that ultimately, and inevitably, leads to paralysis.
This is the Brexit “debate” all over again!
Then, as now, there are SO many different opinions that it’s not surprising that decision-making is haphazard. Conspiracy theories and fear-gendering media have all contributed to a very nervous public. The initial panic has passed now as we have better knowledge of the virus (and treatment), more PPE and facilities. But I don’t blame the Govt. for panicking back in March as they had no idea what they were facing then. Now it’s different. We need to open up slowly and get back to some degree of normality. The big problem is that the economic hit has yet to be felt. If you take the Covid effect, plus a likely no-deal Brexit trade deal, and a China waiting to give a kick in the teeth, then things could get pretty desperate.
There is an obvious explanation: journalists don’t understand the difference between cases and deaths. OK, they’re not that stupid. Journalists are simply passing on the figures that they’re given. The questions they should be asking is why they are given some figures and not others and who is making these decisions. The problem is that they are too lazy to do the investigating and prefer to boost their career by going on Twitter.
Medical/science journalists have jolly award ceremonies twice a year where they get awarded prizes by the industry – the profession no longer attracts those who want to report it as it is. The MSM are all funded by Gates (see Columbia Journalism Review), and they are penned in like sheep by Science Media Centre (operating out of the Wellcome Trust) and Sense About Science. The modern journalist is no longer an investigator but an extension of industry/government public relations. Anyone not happy with this has probably long ago found something else to do.
I was writing about non-specialist journalists working for the national papers and the main TV channels. However, the points you make are valid and explain why the front page journalist is not being helped by the science specialist on the paper or channel. While at university, I was offered a job writing for a scientific magazine. When I said that my knowledge of biology was poor, I was told that this would not hold me back. I suspect that specialist journalists are not even writing articles but are being supplied them by the industry. The pay offered was poor and the magazines took who they could.
The fear porn media are exclusively onto ‘cases’. Do keep up.
That’s quite a BIG footnote/correction at the bottom of the article! You might want to think about changing your headline, introduction, and general attack on the BBC.
No, the bbc needs to be attacked with vigour. Its anti- gov`t, anti-uk agenda is extremely damaging to this country.
I expect the news reporting to be impartial and objective. With COVID and alas with too many other subjects now, the BBC has failed miserably. Regrettably it is now an agenda driven institution no longer properly informing the public. I say this as a former strong supporter of the BBC.
Not sure what the point is. One of the difficulties that Covid has revealed is that people’s understanding of statistics is inadequate in particular how statistics of large populations cannot always be applied to small ones. So deaths may be down to 1 per day but that is not incompatible with there being 3 on one day and none for the next two. When there have been no deaths for 3 weeks be can get a modest amount of bunting out
It is quite clear what the point of it is when viewed in the light of informantion on the Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service. The insanity must end – you cannot run government policy on the basis of a single indicator and now that even that is clear the policy rumbles on destroying everything.
Something that kills so few people ought by rights to be such an irrelevance that no one even bothers mentioning it. Instead the government has destroyed the economy and millions of people’s lives over it. We can never abolish all deaths, and it is counter-productive to try.
The original lockdown in March was justifiable because the disease was very new and there were so many uncertainties. I could see the risk of hospitals being over-run and the disaster that would have been. But it is frustrating that politicians and the media have been so slow to respond to what has happened since, including applying restrictions long after their usefulness has passed and being patently wrong in the metric they are using – new infection numbers – supposedly to deal with local ‘flare ups’.
I agree that we now know even more about it why it was wrong to lock down, but as it happens, lock-down was unjustified from the very beginning: https://thoughts-about-stuf…
To me, the most important point on that list is the first: that there is no precedent in all of recorded human history for a lock-down like this. The precautionary principle ought to preclude doing something so untested, especially when all the evidence we had (i.e., most of the remaining points) suggested that this was not an epochal health crisis that could require such a response.
In a recent survey most people thought Covid had killed 7% of the population- 4.5million people!!Most people are numerically illiterate.
That survey result is so absurd that you have to wonder whether something went wrong, but I fear it didn’t.
Yes, when people can’t make a guess to within 100x, with the minimally required info on TV most days, one wonders what the point of school was.
This seems to me to be a serious problem with even educated readers and science. Often, they might have literacy and numeracy skills to read critically scientific papers (particularly medical papers) but they lack the time, the will or the nerve – if they are scientists they may even defer to people in a neighbouring field even though something may be seriously wrong. The present episode has been very instructive for many about how data can be routinely faked up to suit a commercial/political purpose. But mostly they have been allergic to looking for themselves. Meanwhile, of course, many will have been mesmerised by the atmosphere of fear drummed up by the likes of the BBC – the imagined numbers reflect the scale of the rhetoric, not what the have been factually told, although of course that has been hyped as well.
“most people would rather die than think, and most do”. BR.
No, it’s very clear that we’re around 99.5% of the way through reaching a natural equilibrium between a novel (but related to some endemic) virus & its human host. All heavily infected countries in Europe are headed to about 0.05% of population dying with of from the virus. It slows then stops as a result of emerging herd immunity, which process has been hard at work on us in U.K. since just before lockdown.
This seems to be a very poor article given that the premise (no deaths on August 19th) is actually false. it strikes me that the author shot his load so he could peddle some of his personal bile as opposed to making a striking and effective point. What also strikes me is that the statistics that he lauds over PHE stats (in his eagerness to deride PHE counting measures) are the ones that render this article nothing more than another tired BBC bash article rather than something cerebral or genuinely rational. Zero deaths on 19th August .. erm nope – so what was your point again, David ?
The article has a valid point in that the massive decline in daily deaths is no longer discussed on any MSM including BBC. All they are interested is cases which are not following on to be hospitalizations or deaths. So in short the whole Government and MSM are carrying on this whole fear mongering over a disease which is now at worst a mild flu.