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Sunday, 5 April 2020

Trending towards cock-up



As we all know, squeezing good information from the coronavirus debacle is not easy. The pandemic is ferociously complex and reporting standards are both variable and complex. Uncertainty is the big problem as it always is in the natural world. As ever the mainstream media make a considerable addition to the uncertainty.

Yet as we have two radically different strategies for containing the pandemic in Europe, it is worth comparing the current UK strategy with the far more relaxed Swedish approach – as many have done already. Here we have a situation where COVID-19 deaths should eventually show a significant difference between Sweden and the UK. Otherwise the huge economic, social and political damage caused by the UK approach will have been a disastrous decision.

Ignoring a number of caveats connected with COVID-19 death rates in the UK and Sweden, we could compare deaths per million people within each population. We may as well add Germany to illustrate the uncertainty headache when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of containment policies.

The situation yesterday was –

UK          64 deaths per million people
Sweden   37 deaths per million people
Germany 17 deaths per million people

As a further comparison there are about 9000 deaths per million people each year in the UK. So far the virus is virtually insignificant in terms of overall UK mortality although that may change significantly. We hope not of course, but it may.

As we know the situation develops day by day and tomorrow both the UK and the Sweden numbers will be significantly higher. However, at some point the UK number must turn out to be significantly lower than the Sweden number or UK containment policy will be seen by many of us as a disastrous failure.

At the moment we can’t say that, but UK containment policy is currently trending towards failure in the restricted sense that it now seems unlikely that it will be unambiguously successful and worth the enormous cost. The trend may change and it may change radically, but at the moment it is what it is. A major UK government cock-up is certainly on the cards.

If so it will be denied – vigorously.

6 comments:

Sam Vega said...

I suspect that one way of deflecting blame will be to point out those differences in recording what counts as a Coronavirus death. Either that, or our statistics will be revised so as to only include those who died of, rather than with. But that will be a difficult one to sell to the public.

Scrobs. said...

I refer The Right Honourable Gentleman to a post I made earlier...

http://scroblene-webley-bullock.blogspot.com/2020/03/truths-damn-truths-and-statistics.html

Is there a 'correlation', or is that when someone bangs a crown down onto someone's head and they all cheer and go for a piss-up somewhere...?

James Higham said...

Trouble is - I just don’t buy the touted figures. We just don’t know.

wiggiatlarge said...

The problem as always is the government with advice has taken a position, as with all civil servants actually admitting to a mistake is not on the agenda.
What we or the government don't know is the final outcome and they are not going to change much as they are damned if they do damned if they don't.
One thing is for sure, as pandemics go even with adjusted or false figures this is pretty low in the mortality stakes compared with previous ones, again I point to the '68 HK flu that killed 80,000 here and 1 million world wide, nothing was shut down and I have no recollection of any restrictions, we all carried on as normal, did I know anyone who caught it or died from it ? no.

Nessimmersion said...

Latest from Hector Drummond below:
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/04/06/latest-euromomo-stats-covid-19-visible-in-some-countries-but-no-disaster-sweden-fine/

A K Haart said...

Sam - I'm sure you are right and it won't be difficult to do. It is complicated so using the complications to build a narrative which sells the correctness of the policy - well it has probably been drafted already.

Scrobs - yes, as ever it is a question of which correlations we choose.

James - deaths numbers are problematic but probably good enough for the big picture.

Wiggia - Mrs H was talking about the 68 HK flu this morning because we both remember a high level of school absences. People forget these things though, or don't look them up.

Nessimmersion - thanks I'll bookmark that. It's an interesting approach, similar to one or two others where we look at the wider mortality picture and see how relatively benign this pandemic really is.