Politics

Boris Johnson crashed the car and killed 50,000. Who can rely on his roadmap?


“They’re saying now there’s 25,000 dead,” my news editor told me in awestruck tones down a crackly, single-bar phone line.

I looked around me at an area many miles wide, flattened by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, in what was once a bustling slum and was now a patchwork of thousands of concrete floors which was all that remained of the houses that once stood here. “Where?” I asked.

“That’s the total for the whole Indian Ocean,” he replied. I saw the arms sticking out of the piles of sopping wood, smelled the corpses I couldn’t see, in a city that had once been filled with people the government never cared for.

“Bollocks,” I said. “There must be 25,000 dead in this place alone. The total is nearer 250,000.”

That was Banda Aceh in Indonesia, the third country in three weeks where I’d interviewed survivors, medics and refugees. And it was a solid lesson in why official death tolls aren’t worth the arse they’re covering.

1. They’re written mid-disaster, when no-one knows which way is up

2. They don’t count people who don’t count

3. Your best guess is a sniff test

Stick your head out of the window.Can you smell bulls***?

Of what, exactly?

Every day the government announces the terrible death toll of coronavirus. Those are the hundreds who were in hospital, who got a test, and who tested positive.

They’ve recently been added to by those who had Covid-19 mentioned on their death certificates, and those who died after testing positive in care homes.

The figures do not include those who died with symptoms but didn’t get tested, or where the doctor didn’t feel happy putting Covid on the death certificate. They may also be counting those who died with the bug, but of something else. The worldwide figures are even patchier.

To you, me, and statisticians these figures are worthless. But yesterday, they were reason for Boris Johnson to nevertheless announce in sombre tones that we have “passed the peak”. How the hell would he know?

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Fleet Street Fox

The government says there are about 28,000 dead. FactCheck has added a bunch of stats together and says it’s at least 30,000. The FT has analysed excess deaths data from the Office of National Statistics and reckons it’s 48,000 or so. And the rest, sunshine – those who died with symptoms but no test, those whose infection allowed existing conditions to claim their lives, those killed by partners, alcoholism, or despair during lockdown.

What little of the numbers we can rely on seems to show we have not passed the peak in care homes. Our frailest people are still dying in uncontrollable numbers. But they do not count, and so are not counted.

Today we can expect Matt Halfcocked to announce, with some relief, that he is within shouting distance of his target 100,000 coronavirus tests (why not remind yourself that the government knows it has not tested enough people, then go back and re-read that paragraph on how it is only counting deaths of people it’s tested).

These tests are barely worth it – not only do people report repeatedly testing negative, with symptoms, before finally testing positive, they’re of very little use if not coupled with a tracing programme that shuts down the disease before its victims show signs of it. But yay or boo, depending how you feel the boy’s PR exercise has gone, and while we’re looking at his target let’s not look at the fact we probably busted through the 20,000 “good” deaths target weeks ago.

“I did not revise for any of this”

The Nightingale hospitals cannot be used by covid patients with other problems. Care homes cannot decant their patients into them as so many have dementia and co-morbidities. To staff six Nightingale beds requires one doctor and six nurses, each plucked from the bedside of someone dying in more complicated fashion in hospital.

That was known when they were constructed; their success, therefore, lies only in making those who ordered them look like they can magic up a hospital.

Which brings us to the exit strategy. For the frail and elderly, it involves dying in unacceptably large numbers as a result of someone else’s daft idea about herd immunity, which is looking increasingly like the same plan they had for foot-and-mouth back in 2001 and boiled down to disposing of the bodies as cheaply as possible.

For Johnson, the exit involves meeting 5 key tests. Which is funny, because the World Health Organisation has 6, and all of them considerably tougher than his.

Not only does Johnson say we’ve passed a peak we haven’t passed, and is abiding by random, easier-to-meet rules of his own devising, he’s also bending the laws of space and time to suit himself.

Yesterday he said: “I think it was completely right to make our period of lockdown coincide as far as we possibly could with the peak of the epidemic.”

But here’s the thing. Had we locked down sooner, the peak would have been sooner, and killed fewer. The peak was not inevitable in size or date – whenever it was or will be, is because Johnson allowed football matches to go ahead, and Cheltenham race course to open, and did not order borders closed.

New Zealand, which locked down 19 days after its first case, is now reopening. The UK, which waited 53 days, is nowhere near doing the same. Had he locked down sooner, we wouldn’t be debating what his “road map” would look like – we’d be motoring already.

London Mayor Boris Johnson takes one of the first rides on the Emirates Air Line cable car across the River Thames
“Look, the wheels have come off!”

As it is, we’re living in a forced isolation that a quick look out of the window will tell you people are becoming impatient with. Some are snitching on their neighbours, others are fighting in supermarkets, and at least one has turned cannibal.

There is a nation, here, that has just coughed up millions extra for the NHS even though every party has found it impossible to persuade us to pay higher taxes for the same. There is a populace oohing and ahing at a pollution-free sky, and we are ripe for a leader with the vision to seize the moment to truly protect the NHS by getting us to pay for it, and to save lives by at the very least persuading us to turn our engines off when queueing for a Burger King.

Yet the leader, and the government, we have seem to be stuck in the old ways of distraction, lies and shifting blame. To claim a victory they haven’t had, by not counting any of the things that never counted enough before.

It smells as bad as Banda Aceh did 14 years ago, where the Red Cross first reported 5,700 deaths, the Indonesian government predicted 25,000, and even today it is probably still undercounted at 175,000.

When they talk about targets, note the fact their aim is off. When they produce a road-map, ask how we got here. And when they say we’re all in this together, remember that is a terrible thing to hear from the driver during a car crash.

What we need is a government that doesn’t talk bollocks. What we’ve got is one that knows nothing else.





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