I outlined at the weekend how the Government will now lie about Covid 19 in a most brazen fashion and will make appalling policy decisions which only compound previous blunders, simply to cover up those initial blunders. The media and oposition almost all went along with the GroupThink response to Coronavirus so find it hard to offer questions now, other than on minor issues of implementation. But some in the media go further spinning outright lies on behalf of the Government in its hour of need. Today’s Daily Telegraph serves up a real shocker as you can see below.
If you defend the GroupThink you must attack Sweden which ignored siren calls saying that its non lockdown policy would see mass deaths. So you read the headline below and the sub head that follows and can only conclude that the Swedes were wrong and the Group Thinkers correct.
Only if you read down do you get the real truth:
“Sweden has now overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to have thehighest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world, throwing its decision to avoid a strict lockdown into further doubt.
According to figures collated by the Our World in Data website, Sweden had 6.08 deaths per million inhabitants per day on a rolling seven-day average between May 13 and May 20.
This is the highest in the world, above the UK, Belgium and the US, which have 5.57, 4.28 and 4.11 respectively.
However, Sweden has only had the highest death rate over the past week, with Belgium, Spain, Italy, the UK and France, still ahead over the entire course of the pandemic.”
Ends
So in fact the headline and sub head only refer to the deaths of the last week – a small portion of overall deaths. During the last week Sweden, with a population of just over 10 million, has seen around 470 deaths out of a total of 3,831 deaths since the epidemic began. So this is a truly small snapshot. The number of deaths in Sweden is falling rapidly although only just not quite as rapidly as in the UK. Both are trending rapidly towards being at a very low rate indeed. If trends continue, despite only one country having lockdown, the number of daily deaths will be almost zero by August in BOTH countries.
The overall Swedish death rate works out at c379 people per million. The UK rate is 532 per million. In Belgium it is 798!. At the current rate of decline in the UK and in Sweden there is not a cat in hell’s chance of the Swedish death rate overtaking that of the UK, or France, Italy, Spain and Belgium. It will not even come close!
There may be minor demographic differences but that is not the point and they are minor anyway as I pointed out some time ago.
What matters here is that we Brits were told that Sweden’s refusal to lockdown would see traffic jams of death carts in Malmo and Stockholm and that there was therefore no alternative to our policy which has destroyed our economy and is causing vast numbers of other deaths as cancer patients go undiagnosed and untreated and as suicides mount. Sweden shows there was an alternative but to cover up the greatest ever policy blunder in British history, one supported by almost the entire political and media class, it is now necessary to smear Sweden with utterly misleading headlines such as this one.
My late uncle Christopher Booker wrote for the Sunday Telegraph until his death but stopped ordering the Daily Telegraph a good while back noting what an awful rag it had become. I am sorry he is not here to see this new low point of fake news for the publication.