Here’s a challenge for the highly numerate among you. Last week, I confessed that I was bad at maths as a child and always felt a hot blend of alarm and shame whenever any calculation was called for. All that changed during the pandemic. Suddenly, I was hearing official statistics about Covid, and looking at graphs apparently charting hospital admissions and waves of infection, that I mistrusted.
With the help of a brilliant trio – Liam Halligan, my Planet Normal co-host; Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford; and “George”, a senior source in NHS England – I gradually acquired the confidence to start delving into those fearful data.
Why were sums which the Government and its scientific advisers should have done as a matter of course never attempted? In an excellent recent column on the catastrophic legacy of lockdown, my colleague Fraser Nelson highlighted the dud Sage “scenarios” which prolonged restrictions into the spring of 2021 without any cost-benefit analysis. As he points out, the standard “way of judging public health questions is a ‘quality of life years lost’ study: factoring in age and health impacts of the problem and the solution”.
Why were sums which the Government and its scientific advisers should have done as a matter of course never attempted? In an excellent recent column on the catastrophic legacy of lockdown, my colleague Fraser Nelson highlighted the dud Sage “scenarios” which prolonged restrictions into the spring of 2021 without any cost-benefit analysis. As he points out, the standard “way of judging public health questions is a ‘quality of life years lost’ study: factoring in age and health impacts of the problem and the solution”.
Continue reading @ The Telegraph.
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