© Unknown
Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
Few would disagree that the UK's handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been a shambles. We are now in the 14th week of a three-week lockdown and excess deaths are among the highest in Europe. But while the received wisdom is that lives could only have been saved by locking down harder, earlier and for longer,
the benefits of lockdown remain unproven, while the costs of lockdown are starting to mount. Dr Malcolm Kendrick is a GP and author of
Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense.
spiked caught up with him to get his take from the frontline.
spiked: Do you think the Covid statistics are accurate?
Malcolm Kendrick: It is very difficult to tell.
It is clear that different countries are recording deaths differently. Death certification is not a precise science. Normally, when someone dies, you have got a reasonably good idea what they died from. But if a person who is 85 drops dead, what do you put on the certificate? I do this, so I know it is not very accurate. GPs were advised to put Covid-19 on the certificate if they suspected somebody had it, even if there was no test done.
We are in a strange situation where we are probably both over-recording Covid-19 and simultaneously under-recording it. Will we ever know what the real statistics were?
We are over-recording it because elderly people die quite often, and we may say they have died of Covid-19 but not know that was the case. Therefore there will have been a number of people who died of other things who have been recorded as dying of Covid-19. Equally, there will be people who died of Covid-19
but the GP did not know, so did not put it on the certificate. It really depends on how people decide to record the death.
Comment: This woman was understandably frustrated at the absurdity of not being able to get a cup of coffee without having to follow a rule that she has a medical exemption for. If anything, the people shaming this woman are being a bunch of Karens.