Confidence in government reporting of coronavirus is collapsing. The Telegraph has a headline this morning that says:
The FT's version is:
And Chris Giles in the FT evidences that claim with this chart:
To put it bluntly, the evidence on announced Covid-19 deaths is fabricated. Deaths are being deliberately under-reported. There is growing evidence that some are engineering this. And the result is a loss of faith in the government.
And this matters. A lot. Only government can get us through this crisis. I think that is apparent now to everyone, including the financial capitalists who are seeking to capture the process for their own gain, again. But if faith in the government is lost because it consistently lies (and I use the word advisedly on this occasion) about the true scale of deaths to the extent that it is not just people like me saying so, but the Telegraph and FT do so as well, then we are in deep trouble.
But the likes of Raab, Hancock and Gove don't get that.
And Johnson is sitting this one out, I am quite sure entirely happy to let those he thinks dispensible take the blame when on his return he can reshuffle them out of the way and announce his new government Mk2, which will not work for him again.
This government needs to be credible.
It's not.
And how that helps anyone is very hard to work out right now.
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Starmer is Govt. MkII, hence his desire not to make waves.
Be advised that I am very angry with the Labour party and have no intention as yet of voting at all.
But let’s give him a chance, eh? This made me think this morning:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/18/britain-one-party-state-tories-coronavirus-power
Starmer’s response to the leaked document was enough for me to believe that he is aware of his boundaries. He will not step out of line, because he is expecting to take over when the time is right.
He offers no hope, for the future.
I am sure you think there is some sense in your riddles
I am not sure as yet that I can see or agree with it
Medical spokeswoman for the govt, just listen to her. She mentioned an important point in the video she just admitted the UK has endless amount of cash. Which it does, the bank of england can create any amount of money out of thin air and taxes are not needed to fund govt services. There is no economic reason why nhs has no cash. Also look at the hubris of the govenremnt in dealing with the covid 19 crisis. https://twitter.com/i/status/1251911232807895040
I must have missed that…
Clap everyone.
It doesn’t help anyone but if the majority of people can’t see it / won’t see it what can be done and how can it be changed/stopped? All the people you mention were never credible to a lot but more thought they were or liked Boris. Don’t think that has/will change in the near future so we are stuck aren’t we?
What has been happening in our Care Homes is a national disgrace.
Added to by the issues with PPE – the news doing the rounds is that we are running out – not able to protect those who are meant to protect and care for us.
What did Keynes say about it being best if a country owns its own means of production?
Inward investment? Neo-liberalism? De-industrialism? My arse.
But we said this in 2008 didn’t we – capitalism doesn’t work anymore. And here we are nearly 12 very long years later.
May this be the final nail in the coffin. The pain and suffering can only be worth it if it is.
Maybe – just maybe, Johnson – having had a torrid time with his own Covid-19 experience – is just shitting his pants right now, figuring out what he has to do next.
Apologies for bringing up Rachel Maddow’s name again in response to one of your blogs, Richard, but she’s been on to the care home issue in the US on her programme for more than a week.
And by way of strange coincidence, this clip (one of three on the subject from Friday night’s show – all available via the MSNBC link to The Rachel Maddow show) also features the figure of 7000 ‘unrecognised/unrecorded’ deaths, only not in the UK but US.
Worth listening to her anger on this subject as it applies equally in the UK, except we don’t have anyone in our media who speaks as courageously on the subject (Alex Thomson on C4 News being a possible exception) here: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show
Thanks Ivan
I welcome this
I share your view of Alex – who I know – and like, a lot.
He’s nit alone in the C4 team
Victoria MacDonald is very good
So too Siobhan Kennedy right now
There are still some decent journalists around – and Alex Thompson is still, as he has long been, one of the very best. There are also some good pieces to be found in unlikely corners, including this excellent example of the unvarnished shining through from The Herald’s wise woman in French exile, Fidelma Cook. It is at https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18388666.fidelma-cook-will-come-reckoning-british-politicians-coronavirus/
Thanks for that pointer Nigel – good piece. Fidelma now followed
Channel 4 my preferred source of news for a while now – a good team all round, all proper journalists who get out into the field rather than just talking head presenters. Supplemented by a selection of newspapers, social media and of course this blog! There’s plenty out there though sturdy filters are needed…
The irony of the Telegraph’s readership being predominantly older, solid Tory voters.
Telegraph maybe getting worried about its already shrinking readership, now dying off faster as well
What is most startling about the Telegraph and FT is that they are “breaking ranks”. Most of the press headlines this morning are Government propaganda: basically following exactly the same line as presented in the Daily Mail: ‘Vaccine hope for Britain’; subtitled with ‘breakthrough’ and 1m jabs by Autumn: uncanny, only it isn’t. It is what the press media in Britain has become: gophers. Notice also, that this is the day after the same press failed to report the $20m wasted on domestic antibody tests by the Government. We may fairly ask, what produced this remarkable unanimity of headline when the Government has catastrophically failed on testing, PPE and care home support?
The answer is not hard to find, but it is worth remembering that this is a longstanding problem. It is not just caused by COVID-19. The press are not principally doing ‘journalism’ at all; that is long dead. Rather the purpose of print journalism in Britain is political PR, particularly directed to produce highly politicised pro-Conservative propaganda and columns, not of journalism (investigation is long, long gone) but endless hack-opinion pieces written by politically motivated, unoriginal, careerist, sycophantic writers who are indifferent to ‘evidence’; unless they can quote a neo-liberal, Government-lobbying, so-called ‘think-tank’. I only wish to be fair.
The problem is that the daily and now redundant, obsolete, print press is dead as a viable commercial industry. It is kept alive by its required service to government by neo-liberal financial and business interests, to keep the Conservatives in power at any price at all. It is, in effect an arm of Government and Party.
This print media is nevertheless still allowed to set the daily ‘political agenda’ used by the current, major – and still politically and socially important – licensed British terrestrial electronic media, to establish for Britain the key news priorities for the whole country, that they are entitled to cover (and crucially what is not covered), and legitimise through long established habituation. The terrestrial licensed media measure the appropriate daily agenda principally, and perhaps often only against the opinions that flood the market with the eastablished and well-rehearsed neo-liberal opinions and purposes of billionaires and oligarchs, that are offered as the only evidence of independent British licensed electronic media news impartiality. The politics we possess, I submit is the consequence of this media messaging and quite calculated processing.
Much to agree with their
Chris Giles is no fan of mine, or vice versa to be honest, but what is notable is that he is doing journalism
That is rare
Agree with all of that. Begs the question as to why they have started to break ranks. Might they be wondering whether they are backing the wrong horse? Or whether even their loyal readership might suddenly realise whats going on. And like a piece of elastic, snap back….
I don’t know the answer, and the opinion surveys have not been encouraging so far.
Maybe for all its unwelcome horrors, Covid-19 is democratising suffering – being a social leveller – who hasn’t got an elderly relative in some form of care these days, and these places have proven to be vulnerable blind spots even to an intentionally blind Government. Maybe it is this that is making people stop and think?
God, I hope so.
Thanks the external links BTW.
I think this is relevant.
From the Good Law Project’s campaign:
Leaked guidance from an NHS hospital trust reveals that doctors are not being required to report COVID-19 as the cause of death for patients. Here’s what the guidance says: ‘Doctors are asked to use the standard MCCD (Medical Certificate of Cause of Death) form to certify death. ‘Pneumonia ‘or ‘community acquired pneumonia’ are acceptable at 1(a) on the MCCD. There is no requirement to write COVID 19 as part of the MCCD. It may be mentioned at 1(b) on the form, should the doctor wish.’ The guidance can be seen here. The Good Law Project has instructed a legal team to write a letter to the hospital trust to ask them to withdraw this guidance urgently. You can read the letter here. The government’s daily figures for the number of deaths from COVID-19 are based on what is reported on death certificates. If doctors are not required to write COVID-19 anywhere on the death certificate, then we have no way of knowing if those figures are correct.
https://goodlawproject.org/covid-19-deaths/
I think this is fine
But without a test a doctor cannot say Covid 19
And PM testing is not proven as yet
So we come back to testing being the issue
Only a cynic would suggest that the lack of testing might suit a government agenda of understating both the fatalities and the extent of infection…
This from David Edgerton is worth a read, linking the fantasies behind both COVID and Brexit
https://twitter.com/DEHEdgerton/status/1251529873073602561?s=20
Excellent….
Recommended
Particularly concerning as some in Whitehall are rubbing their hands in glee thinking they have got away with numbers well below what some modellers forecast https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-lockdown-three-stage-exit-plan?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&ref=mobile_share&fbclid=IwAR2i-8sgLlDlYzHTYpLzvi1q8yuRogYjRRIWQhm-_F_C_A6w7mmC8Kxi63E
warmish winter – which allows comparison with previous winters & death rates. Easy to see the temp’ corrected “run rate”.
Simple to extract from the “death run rate” the spike due to the virus.
The government has nowhere to hide. The data will come out – sooner – or later. Death is a death.
& thus above average can be “allocated” to events – in this case the virus.
Fatberg & co can wave their arms all they want, & will, doubtless, revert to type – by lying.
& doubtless the mainstream media will lap it up.
But it still looks like probably 22k – 25k deaths now – probably more in the future. 40k? 50K? UK the “leper colony” of Europe?
Vote tory – vote death. Probably not what the fatberg imagined back in those halcyon days of August 2019.
Keep cracking the jokes Boris, it’s all so “funny” – everybodies laughing..
I still expect six figure deaths
This has a long time to run
Nothing has much yet changed my estimates which remain on the pessimistic end of most scales
Assuming they don’t find a way to “fix” the ONS, we should get another week’s worth of death registration data shortly, and I expect it is going to be very grim indeed. The “success” so far appears to be plateauing the daily toll at approaching 1,000 deaths per day (with diagnosis, in hospital). Fortunately we don’t appear to have run out of intensive care capacity yet, if the low usage of the Nightingale Hospitals is any indication.
If you double the rate for excess deaths attributed to other causes or elsewhere (perhaps more) that is a death rate more than twice the usual daily average. Probably for several weeks, edging towards a month or two. This is success? Jesus.
As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, ten or twenty thousand is a statistic.
You are right
Three things. First, the Nightingale is all a show: it basically can’t treat people. All it can do us palliative care
Second, ITUs are full, they’ve just built overflows. But care is at much less than normal levels.That is a measure of capacity.
Third, deaths will be over 20,000 now.
Hopefully, six figures of death will only be entered into throughout the piece – this is, assuming that we have one or two smaller waves later in the year and a vaccine does become available in the next 12 or so months.
After this initial major wave of infection, I would hope that we will be able to keep it bubbling along slowly as they have in some of the Asian countries so the ongoing number of infections and deaths remains relatively low.
However, this requires the government to be competent and I’m not sure they have it in them. Yesterday, we discovered that the initial PHE contact tracing as infections began in the UK used ‘up to 290’ workers at any given time. In comparison, South Korea, which has a considerably smaller population, had approximately 1,000 people contact tracing at the peak. China reportedly put 90,000 contact tracers into Hubei province (population, 60-odd million) after the initial localised cover up.
We’ve already heard that the thousands of public health officers in our local councils weren’t called upon to contribute to the initial contact tracing program so I only hope that somebody in government has half a brain and is planning this differently. Logistically, it might be tough, but employing thousands of people to contact trace over the next year could save tens of thousands of lives, not to mention many tens (or hundreds) of billions of government payment/loans should further lockdowns be required.
It would be great to think that this wave will only be followed by smaller ones
However, there are no signs of lessons being learned as yet
I fear that will be very costly in terms of deaths.
What is being exposed to public scrutiny, if we look behind the narrow framework of COVID-19 itself, is the state’s executive capacity to command and control. It has effectively disappeared. Downing Street no longer possesses the ready access to well-oiled levers to pull, or the buttons to press, and be confident of decisive executive response out there in the country, because they no longer exist; but the government knew that, because they removed them.
What all the failures on testing, PPE, Pandemic crisis management, instant access to university and science laboratories, public health services in local government, and no doubt many levers that used to attach Whitehall to the country’s critical local institutions, have all been dismantled and discarded as unnecessary nanny-state interventions over ten years at least; in the name of small government, liberty and neo-liberalism. This government created this latent catastrophe-waiting-to-happen, over years and years of planned, systematic austerity and the thorough and ruthless application of neo-liberal ideology. We are left with a command and control system in government that is a hollow shell. This demolition of government executive responsibility, because that – in the final analysis – is what this has been, is also the only planning the Conservatives have ever willingly undertaken outside wartime.
Counting the number of people dying from/with COVID19 is difficult. I don’t object to the current method of counting/releasing the data as long as it is used correctly – as an indicator that things are getting worse/better in hospitals, what the regional spread of the virus is etc.
What I DO object to is that the number released is claimed to be an estimate of how many have died. It is not. We have a much better one (albeit with a 2 week lag) from the ONS. Your article of a few days ago highlighted that the excess death rate (for which COVID19 is the only explanation) is running at least double the “official” count.
An honest government would point out these data…. but we don’t have one.
We need to make the weekly ONS release “front page news” everywhere. It should be the lead story on the BBC on 21st April…. and if not, why not?
I have been thinking that the last occasion a British state body faced the sort of crisis – in terms of instant overload – the NHS now has is that which British Army faced in 1914 (when monthly recruit figures went up something like 100 fold from July to August).
That was followed by the shell crisis of 1915: maybe the predicament our Prime Minister is in is that of H H Asquith, not that of his hero Churchill (who had a different crisis, from which he ended up in the trenches)