Wow this is crazy ignorant from @richardm56 Let’s take it apart. /thread https://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/richard-and-judy/1323175/coronavirus-lockdown-figures-covid-19-death-toll

So in the opening sentence @richardm56 finds a criminal offence! Falsifying death certificate causes is illegal. I expect he reported it directly to the police so no worries.

Mmm a 'blood test' - the plot thickens. Blood tests are only for antibodies, which aren't great at acute illness. Swabs are for current illness. If COVID was on the death cert it would make sense to be the latter. Great case though - can't wait to see more details....

Um...no this is not what the PHE did. They create two streams for classifying death due to COVID, 28 days from positive test and 60 days post. Many patients in ICU because of COVID will stay there far longer than 28 days, so the utility of this in that situation is hard to guage.

Additionally we have TWO other ways of tracking COVID deaths - ONS death certificates (legal ones obviously Richard) and excess death, which both closely tally ABOVE the PHE death count. Excess deaths we are amongst the worst in the world.

Here’s a great graph, remember we are at the very worst end of excess deaths per million. We’ll come back here I’m sure.

The 'absurd' calculations in Richard's esteemed TV personality opinion from an epidemiology professor reflect the infection-fatality rate ( https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/estimating-mortality-from-covid-19) currently estimated to be 0.5-1%.
If we infect 80% of population (immunity) that's 52m people, 1% is 528,000 dead.

So actually a lot of the excess deaths we have seen were estimated to be due to LATE lockdown, not the lockdown itself.
And ECONOMICALLY the trashing and the recession is ALSO because of a lack of virus control.

Remember this graph? We are ALSO on target for the worst economic hit, because of our poor virus control.

Returning to normal economy is only possible by controlling the virus. We went in too late and came out too early. Countries that did better, like the left side, flourished.

Ah Sweden again where...nope, they closed schools for older adults, banned mass gatherings, worked from home (travel dropped by 40% in Stockholm and spending by 25%) and they lost around 6% of GDP, with similar deaths/million to the UK (572 vs 624).

Can we leave Sweden alone?

And while cases are limited by testing capacity, hospitalisations continued to peak well into lockdown, which was the whole point.

This dangerous rhetoric around what is essentially a scientific and public health debate can only do harm. So please desist.

If you’d like to know more about the pandemic and what it was actually like to experience the effect of lockdown I’d suggest you check out @whsmith Non-Fiction Book of the Month: