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. … 

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 … 

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. … 

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 … 

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 … 

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 …