At long last, Dr No has found a way of estimating official covid death inflation. By official covid death inflation, he means the extent to which the authorities have deliberately inflated the number of covid deaths to increase, in SPI-B’s infamous words, “the perceived level of personal threat…among those who are complacent”. Let us be absolutely clear: this is the government, and its agencies, deliberately massaging official statistics, to scare the population witless, into submission and compliance. In SPI-B’s own words, this needs “hard-hitting emotional messaging” to be effective, and what could be more hard-hitting and emotional than official accounts of tens of thousands of deaths from the novel coronavirus? It is classical propaganda, “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view”, a shocking and lamentable abuse of power that has no place in a modern democracy. Yet, for the last eighteen months, this tissue of partial truths, lies and deceits has been relentlessly streamed day after day by the government, via a complicit mainstream media, to the British public. The vast majority of other countries have also fared no better.

Dr No’s last post showed there were substantial humps in non-covid–19 mortality in care homes and private homes in the first wave of the pandemic, and that these humps cannot by fully explained by a displacement of what would have been hospital deaths to care and private home deaths. Something else must be at work, which Dr No rather  loosely suggested might be ‘neglect, or worse’, in the absence of other obvious explanations. The ‘or worse’ is to cover the ‘midazolam thing’ — the excess use of midazolam last year, and by implication, excessive, and inappropriate, use of end-of-life care to ‘help the old folk on their way’. Dr No used ‘or worse’ because he is not fully persuaded this did (or for that matter did not) happen. There was a rise in aggregate midazolam prescribing — for example, see the striking April 2020 spike here — but there was also a rise in the numbers of deaths, so it becomes a chicken and the egg problem: did more deaths cause more midazolam prescriptions, or did more midazolam prescriptions cause more deaths? We don’t know. Perhaps it was a bit of both.

For a while, Dr No has bumbled on about having to wait a while to get data on non-covid–19 deaths caused by the panicdemic, that is, the collateral damage done not by the virus, but by our response to the virus. It now turns out that the data has been hiding in plain sight all along, in one of ONS’s cryptically named data files. The trail starts with referencetable10052021114704.xlsx, which was recently uncovered and dissected by the excellent John Dee, and which can still be downloaded from ONS’s own website here. But referencetable­10052021114704.xlsx only covers part of the picture, specifically deaths in care homes, and furthermore, it has, as John Dee points out, been deliberately obfuckstrated by ONS, who have chosen to report cumulative totals rather than weekly numbers of deaths, which has the effect of disguising what John Dee rightly calls a “shocker of a hump” for non-covid deaths in the spring of 2020. Dr No’s chart for the de-obfuckstrated version of the data is shown above. The “shocker of a hump” is clearly visible in the red line representing non-covid care home deaths in April and May 2020.

Bad News Item of the Week was an Economist/Ipsos Mori poll revealing that around two thirds of Britons want a number of covid restrictions to remain in place until covid is ‘under control worldwide’, an uncertain end game with an elastic definition. Over a third want the restrictions, including masks in shops and on public transport, travel controls, compulsory check-ins for pubs and restaurants, and social distancing in theatres, pubs and sports grounds to remain in place for ever. Assuming the polling is accurate and representative, that means two thirds of fun loving Britons want Freedom Day postponed indefinitely, and a shocking one third want it postponed for ever. What on earth persuaded a once proud people, who stood ready only seventy years ago to fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets and hills, against the odious menace of tyranny, to become a nation of curtain twitching traffic wardens who want the suffocating embrace of authoritarianism?

Another breakfast, another Today programme, more Diddledum and Diddledee. The latter, Martha “I’ve got a beehive in my bra, more on that story later” Kearney, has refined her primary distraction technique of singing rather than speaking her questions so well that at least one listener half expects the answers to come back from the chorus in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. They never do though; instead yesterday morning we had the drone of Nick Gibbs, the schools minister, warbling on about keeping children safe, and ramping up the tedious testing charade, now rendered even more farcical by the discovery that a drop of Ribena can put the kybosh on a school. Earlier this week, the Telegraph compiled a dossier of the devastation triggered by over-reaction to the covid threat in schools, a litany of intellectual and social larceny that has seen schools and facilities closed, play time like prison camp, and, most bizarrely of all, escorts on trips to the loo, to make sure kids “don’t go off and meet other children and cross-contaminate bubbles”. Rosa Klebb, it turns out, is alive and well in British schools.

A clip, heard on Radio Four’s The Film Programme yesterday, reminded Dr No of a vaguely remembered article by Milos Forman, director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which posed The Czech Question: Do You Want to Live in a Zoo or a Jungle? On the one hand, Forman suggests, “Life in the zoo is somehow comfortable. You don’t have to try hard and you still get your food. True, you don’t have any choices: you eat what they give you, but you do eat. And you are protected: No tiger will attack you, no snake will bite you. True, you are in a cage, but so are the tiger and the snake”; on the other, he suggests “the jungle is alluring, beautiful. You can see it in the eyes of East Germans when they cross the wall. They are fascinated by the variety of colo[u]rs that life in the jungle can offer. And you are free! You can go wherever, whenever and however you wish. But you can get lost, or attacked by the tiger, bitten by the snake, stung by parasites or leeches. It will not be easy for people who have lived for decades in the zoo to adapt”.