After this is all over there should be a national enquiry into why our entire political and media class is swamped by liberal arts graduates with no concept of how to analyse data and the collective intelligence of a bumble bee. It should be let by my cats who have greater predictive skills than Professor Neil Pantsdown, our, until recently, expert in chief whose always wrong computer models drove the groupthink of our leaders. Let me be clear I have no time for Boris et al on this matter as I noted earlier today HERE. However…
Some on the left, seeking to make political capital from every death, make clowns like Neil Ferguson seem like masters of the data universe. This morning the ONS published a report saying that some occupations were more likely to see Covid deaths than others. A stand-out seized upon by the left was that bus drivers were 2.5 times more likely to die of Covid than the population at large. At once Boris was accused of “literally” sending certain people to their death. The lefty mob piled on.
I am not surprised by this stat at all. And I am not sure that had bus drivers been wearing full PPE while at work it would have made any difference at all.
Firstly, driving a bus is, like my job, a sedentary profession. Therefore, there are almost certainly more fat bus drivers than folks in the population as a whole. And the evidence is clear: we fatties are far more likely to die from Covid-19 than those who are not fat.
Secondly, it will shock you to hear that there has been almost no campaigning by woke pressure groups, the Oxford University Students Union and the dreadful Guardian to address the appalling gender imbalance among bus drivers. It is far more important that they secure bumper pay rises for BBC presenters already earning six figure sums. The ONS stated, admittedly in 2015, that there were 95,000 full time male bus drivers in the UK and just 8,000 female drivers. Two thirds of Covid deaths are male with one third female and the other 108 genders escaping with no damage at all. What a miracle. If that was not a sign from God that we really all need to turn transgender to escape the plague I don’t know what is.
Thirdly most bus drivers live in towns and especially cities and guess where the Covid hot spots are? Hence if one adjusts for the gender and geographical imbalance among bus drivers and also for their propensity to be fat both because obesity is more of an issue among the working classes than among the middle classes and because their job is a sedentary one the data will, inevitably look very different.
But who cares about doing real research lets just stick with the narrative of wicked old Etonian Tories sending bus drivers out to die. Once again, its lions led by Donkeys and evil bastard donkeys to boot.