My comment：anyone can do a projection like that. Two seconds on Excel. But is it likely? Answer: not remotely. NOT REMOTELY. I say this because we know we are some weeks to a month or so behind Italy, Spain and France and we know what they are doing (see below). They are not suffering anything remotely approaching Vallance’s irresponsible projection above.
I am so sure the UK won’t hit 50,000 new case per day that I’ll give any reader odds of ten to one. I’ll bet you one of your dollars to ten of mine that the UK will not be at 50,0000 daily new cases by October 13. (Email me).
I know this, I believe this, because I have access, as we all do - even Pat Vallance - to the figures at Worldometer. They are based on official government statistics, more up-to-the-minute than those at WHO.
I say this is malpractice because it leads to unnecessary panic. And unneeded lockdowns. Which, we know lead to more deaths in non-Covid areas, more deaths from untreated or undiagnosed cancer (50,000 by some estimates), more suicides, more bankrupticies, more of everything that’s horrible, because of lockdowns.
Meantime NHS hospitals are running at half capacity as they keep wards empty for this hypothetical surge, this purely fantastical torrent, based on a few clicks in an excel spreadsheet. Insanity. Irresponsible. Vallance and Whitty ought be censured. Or sacked. Or both. Instead the likes of the BBC is running with this nonsense with zero scrutiny. Keep Vallance away from the keyboard! Block his access to Excel!
Here are some charts that I’ve taken from Worldometer, with my notations:
In my view this is a serious dereliction of duty by the chief scientist and the chief medical officer. They ought to be impeached. They ought to be sacked. They ought, at least, to be mocked. They ought, at the very least, be ignored.
ADDED: I’ve looked at the figures for UK daily cases and the only week in which they doubled was 5 to 11 September. In no other week did they double. So, Vallance has cherry-picked the very worst figures and projected them out a month. That is duplicitous, to say the least. Surely it is not worthy of the chief Scientist.
Related:
PS: it’s been really weird to watch British Ministers talking about the Covid measures as if there weren’t any experience in other countries to draw on. We can all go to Worldometer and see the real time new cases and daily new deaths, all around the world, and in Britain.
So when they talk as if we don’t know this, and it’s all super dangerous, it’s kind of crazy and not real. Though it does seem to me, watching some of the Ministers, that they really don’t know. That’s even more worrying. That it’s ignorance and incompetence, not duplicity.
