CITY GRUMP
I think the time has come to add a new word to the Oxford English Dictionary and that is Whittycism: The art of bamboozling the public with misleading statistics. The most recent example is the notorious solo graph that Whitty and Valance put up to suggest that by the middle of October we could be running at 50,000 new Covid cases a day. Of course they said that this was not a forecast but considering that no other graph or visual aid was used during the TV broadcast to the nation it is absolutely realistic to say that this is what they wanted to encourage us all to believe. A perfect Whittycism.
Well here we are past the middle of October and reported cases are running at circa 26,000 a day thus nowhere near Whitty and Valance’s infamous graph. But dig a little deeper and up pops something SAGE and the government don’t want you to know. Back on September 29th the Lancet published “False- positive in Covid-19 results: hidden problems and costs”. In the article the authors refer to the view that between 1% and 4% of PCR tests return a false-positive and they cite government research to back up their argument. Accordingly, as right now circa 300,000 PCR tests a day are being carried out, that would mean between 3,000 and 12,000 are giving a false-positive. Given that positive PCR tests are currently recording circa 26,000 new cases a day, this is a very significant number. And yet the whole government policy on where to whack the next mole with lockdowns is based on the number of reported new Covid positives. This is madness on steroids. Actually it is worse than that. The Government and SAGE are living a lie. And where is our national broadcaster that we pay for in all this? Well the retired former BBC investigative reporter, Sue Cook, blew the gaff on this a few days ago when she pointed out that Ofcom had issued guidance that the BBC must avoid undermining the Government’s approach to Covid. Cook remarks that “this is little short of censorship”. Sue, you are being too generous, it is censorship of the kind last seen in WW2.
There are, of course, other salient statistics and aspects of the SAGE dominated Covid policy that those in power don’t like to point out. For example Downing Street, in its frantic efforts to counteract growing rebellion in Manchester and surrounding areas, shout out Manchester University Foundation NHS trust is already at 70% ICU occupancy and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust is at 91% occupancy. What they don’t tell you is at the same time last year the figures were 87% and 96% respectively. The ONS reported this week that in England 100 extra people a day are dying in their own homes as people have been reluctant to go to hospitals or have been discouraged from going, or have encountered disrupted services. Might just explain why ICU bed occupancy is in fact lower in Andy Burnham’s domain. Yet again the government is lying to us by deploying misleading statistics.
Also reported this week is that Covid survives on your skin for 9 hours. This means all those who have the virus and reuse their face masks during that period will of course be virus spreaders as they interact between their skin, their mask and the surfaces they touch. Again not something SAGE , etc likes to tell us.
To coin a phrase we are being unValanced by Whittycisms. The very fabric of our society is being torn apart by out of control and unexamined vandals at the heart of Government and by a pathetically irresponsible parliamentary opposition, aided and abetted by a blindfolded BBC. This has got to stop right now, otherwise the establishment does not merit survival in its current form.
The City Grump has spent some 40 years in the City of London. He started as a stockbroker’s analyst but after some years he decided he was too grumpy to continue with the sell side of things so he moved to the buy side and became a fund manager for the next 20 years, selling his own business in the 1990s. Post the millennium, he found himself in turn chairing a stockbroker, a financial PR company, and an Exchange. He still keeps his hand in, chairing a brace of VCTs and investing personally in start-ups. The City Grump’s publications are available here.