Here's a nice little case study in what used to be called 'fake news'. It may be worth reading if you've seen that '200,000 lockdown deaths' number.

This is a short thread on how the tweet below is wrong, and how the Telegraph headline it misquotes was wrong.

Here's how the editor of the Telegraph article summarises it.

The article uncovered predictions from an official report put together back in April.

Here's how The Metro summarised The Telegraph's article.

Various other articles also summarised it in a similar way.

Pretty clear from those, right? "Coronavirus lockdown could cause '200,000' extra deaths'.

Here is the actual Telegraph headline itself:

"Lockdown may cost 200,000 lives, government report shows".

But below is how the Telegraph summarised it on Twitter. Note the difference: "Lockdown *and* protecting the NHS"

And here's the actual figure in the article of the predicted impact in the first 6 months. Note that the figure is 'up to 25,000', not 200,000.

Below that it says 'a further 185,000' in the medium to long term'...

So that's 200,000 from lockdown, right?

Not really: Read what it actually says. "25,000 could die from delays to treatment".

Does 'lockdown' mean the same as 'delays to treatment'?

No: delays to treatment happened at the same time as lockdown, but they are not the same thing.

Delays to treatment were a policy designed to prioritise covid cases and, if you think about it, lockdown slowed covid cases.

And the same for the 200,000 number: It's a prediction on what would happen if '75% of elective care' was cancelled for the 'medium to long term'.

And why would elective care be cancelled? Through prioritising covid cases. And covid cases were *reduced* through lockdown.

So nowhere here does the article fairly attribute any deaths to 'lockdown' so far.

Here we get on to where the Telegraph summarise the numbers in a table.

The line here is the 'up to 25,000' figure - ie, they've taken the maximum amount.

If you work through that table, there *are* some actual death predictions 'within one year', which could be attributable to lockdown. Let's count them:

Recession: 600 to 12,000
Suicide: 500
Domestic violence: 20
Accidents at home: low tens

So absolute maximum estimate: 12,550.

Let's see if there are any other numbers in the article.

Here's the very last paragraph, which says:

'The report points out that nearly 500,000 people would have died from coronavirus if the virus had been allowed to run through the population unchecked'...

It ends by saying that there would have been 'more than a million non-Covid deaths resulting from missed treatment if the health service had been overwhelmed'.

In other words: The report implies lockdown could save hundreds of thousands of lives - the opposite of the headline.