Dr Malcolm Kendrick’s blog has attracted a lot of positive reviews from the anti mask, anti vax, covid denial lobby. I thought I would have a detailed look at what he has written.

Dr Kendrick commences quite sensibly by pointing out the difference between cases (symptomatic and fitting a case definition) and infections (true positive tests).

Later on he correctly says that the mortality in the early stages of an epidemic is artificially high because only severe cases are identified and studied.

He then continues, reasonably, to say that case fatality rates and infection fatality rates are different. This is where his reasoning gets muddy. He looks at cases and links that to mortality 2 weeks later. This is nonsense.

The average time from diagnosis to death is 17-18 days. Deaths on day 14 will not overlap completely with diagnoses on day 1.

He then falsely states that in Sweden the case fatality rate is 0.5% and the world wide CFR is 3%. But the Swedish figure is from diagnoses in the first 2 weeks of august but the world wide figures are for the entirety of the pandemic so far. Of course the figures are different.