16 Oct: Daily Mail: Truth about the claims scaring us all to death: Soaring infections, teeming hospital wards, and terrifying death rates... but do the numbers justifying crippling new lockdowns REALLY stand up to scrutiny?
By Ross Clark
Claim: ICU beds in Liverpool are already 95 per cent full
Reality: Fewer ICU beds are occupied than last year
On paper the 95 per cent statistic, revealed earlier this week by Liverpool city councillor Paul Brant, conjures up a disturbing image of overflowing hospitals and inadequate care.
So rest assured that it bears no relation to reality. Indeed on Thursday, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust dismissed Mr Brant’s claim, insisting that its units were only 80 per cent full with just 47 of its 61 critical care beds occupied.
That may still seem high, but it is actually perfectly normal for ICU beds to be full at this time of year...
Claim: The Covid-19 death rate is actually high
Reality: It really isn’t
Such fears date all the way back to March, when the World Health Organisation morosely announced at a press conference that the virus had a mortality rate of 3.2 per cent.
But that figure was based on a crude calculation that divides the number of deaths by the number of confirmed cases of infection.
As we know from antibody tests, which show that many people have had Covid-19 without knowing it and without being tested, most cases have actually gone unrecorded.
To accurately work out the death rate, we must focus on something called the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) – which is the number of deaths divided by the number of actual cases.
Scientists at Imperial College London originally estimated the IFR for Covid at 0.9 per cent, and an updated estimate has put it at 0.66 per cent.
And many even believe the figure to be far lower.
One paper published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation this week by John Ioannidis, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, reviewed 61 studies from around the world that have calculated the IFR.
His analysis shows that their median – the middle figure – value for the IFR is 0.27 – suggesting that only four in every thousand people who have been infected with Covid-19 have died from it...
Claim: A second spike could cause twice as many deaths
Reality: Far fewer people are dying now
Claim: The current wave of infection will tear through the elderly
Reality: We are far better prepared this time around ETC
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8845533/Coronavirus-Soaring-infections-death-rates-claims-justify-lockdowns.html
meant to say more claims are debunked at the DM link, including:
Claim: Infections are running higher now than when Britain went into lockdown in March
Reality: There is an increase in cases — but only because we are testing more