Deaths, then cases, now GUESSES?

The number of people in the UK infected with the plague is falling, says the Office for National Statistics (ONS). They tell us that about 4.4 million people had a certain virus in their body in the week up to 9th April, which is down from nearly 4.9 million the week before. If you believe those figures, that's equivalent to about one in 15 people testing positive for the virus.

Since free testing ended in England, the numbers of recorded cases have very predictably fallen off a cliff. Realistically, what percentage of people are going to pay £2 a time to stick a cotton bud up their nostrils when they are more concerned about whether or not they can afford to turn the heating or the tumble dryer on?

So, the ONS have come up with a new system to perpetuate the story to perpetuate the pandemic. It now says it tests thousands of people at random - whether or not they have symptoms - to estimate how much virus there is in the country. From those thousands, it translates that into an estimate of how many millions that would show on a national scale.

One wonders whether they have travelled out into remote villages in the West Country to test people, or if they concentrated their testing in London or other cities where people are crammed closer together and far more likely to keep passing infections round? I wonder!

Mercifully, the new variants of the virus are akin to a mild cold for most people, if they get symptoms at all, but, as ever, it is still putting the beatified NHS under “intense pressure”. Much of that pressure has to be the way that free testing remains for the workers and that isolation periods still contribute to staff shortages.

In actual figures, not guessed ones, a record 6.2 million people are now waiting for routine NHS treatment. A&E departments are heaving, with face-to-face doctor’s appointment being as rare as hens’ teeth. With only 71% of patients seen, treated, admitted or discharged in under four hours, compared with 87% in March 2019 - before the madness began, how many more are suffering at home?

Isn’t it time the ONS and the NHS concentrated on real figures instead of making them up?

Martin Day – Party Secretary