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Originally Posted by Damien
They didn't die yesterday - not all of them anyway.
The numbers now include people who died several days earlier but have only just been reported. The Daily Stats are deaths registered and not occurred. This means the deaths for the day before are largely unknown with the majority not in. So we won't know what day was 'the peak' until about a week later.
To see why look at how the stats are reported. Here are today's numbers from NHS England: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistic...pril-2020.xlsx
You can see that yesterday 'only' had 115 deaths. So where did the other 802 come from? They've been added to the totals of previous days. The same will happen in the coming days for yesterday's 115 deaths.
This isn't your fault though because it's seems every journalist in the country is running with 'deadliest day yet' headlines. The only ones who are not appear to some of the BBC who (but not always!) use the word 'reported deaths', Sky and the FT. Reporters writing 'xxx died yesterday' is flat out untrue.
Drives me crazy. These organisations need to balance out the profile of their journalists to get a few with a background that isn't an arts degree. It's not a surprise some of the best reporting in this has come from places with decent economics reporting (Not including Preston - he has been rubbish).
The only tier below them are the newspaper columnists who are completely out of their depth with epidemiology, statistics and pandemics (and can't crib something they half-understood from a BBC documentary about global warming) who nevertheless bestow us with what they reckon. There should be more people who know statistics and public health policy and not someone who can bang out a few hundred words on why COVID-19 is the fault of capitalism to a reliable schedule. Morons. |
And ... breathe. There now, feel better?
Good point, well made though. A part of journalist training is in rapidly assimilating facts and explaining them in a way the chosen readership can understand. There are however limits to this process. Sometimes you just need someone with relevant expertise. It’s not surprising some of the best commentary has come from reporters with an actual grounding in economics.
Peston is the notable exception because he is making the basic error, as are many of the Arts-educated set, of treating this as a political crisis and trying to report in terms of whether one minister or another is competent, what decisions Raab is allowed to take while Boris is sick, whether the correct decisions have been taken around testing and so on - even to the extent of treating the scientists recommendations as political statements to be challenged on the basis of five minutes’ reading of something on Wikipedia, or a phone call with a favourite contact (there is footage doing the rounds of Robert Peston being handed his ar53 live on air by one of the gov’s senior advisers having tried, unsuccessfully, to lecture him on his chosen specialist field).
The reality is, only scientific expertise is going to identify solutions, and only resources whose availability is predicated on years of health, industrial and economic policy can implement those solutions. All the politicians can do is act on advice. The big political stories are a year down the road yet, when we begin to look in to how prepared we were, how prepared we could have been, and which industries we designate as strategic, to ensure domestic control and production in the future.