A dodgy dossier?

“Next slide please”.  There were a number of very scary graphs painted in angry colours with illegible axis scales put up by Sir PatrickVallance FRS FMedSci FRCP is Government Chief Scientific Adviser  and Head of the Government Science and Engineering, on Saturday night.    (Actually, you can read them on the web site, just.  The words show these are not forecasts or projections.   Just scenarios!.)   

At face value they show that things are getting worse in a very scary way. Extrapolating the curve we can see that everyone will have died at least twice by end of the tax year.   So, at last, we really can spend a year dead for tax reasons!!!     

What I find quite remarkable is that the official Opposition are suggesting they will back the government.  If they do, they will be equally culpable for the disaster ahead. They should join the Conservative MPs that are threatening to vote against the legislation unless the Government comes up with something that is a whole lot better than what they have so far fed us in what can, not unreasonably, be described as a dodgy dossier.    

It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test.  On Saturday, Public Health England reported 278 new Covid deaths in England.   The average number of deaths for the past seven days is 214, up 50 per cent on the week before.  

If deaths kept on rising at that rate then, yes, you would get to 4,000 deaths a day in December.     

However, a better guide to future deaths is the figures for new infections, which, of course, tend to lead the death figures.  Over the past seven days PHE has recorded an average of 22,521 new cases a day – which was a six per cent increase on the week before.     If deaths follow the trajectory of new infections – as surely they must, unless Covid-19 suddenly mutates into a vastly more deadly form – they will be nowhere near 1,000 a day by Christmas, let alone 4,000.   

The figures stink.    

I just hope there is not another David Kelly “suicide” when someone blows the whistle.