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Government Slammed By Experts For Repeated Failings on Data Used For Lockdown Professor Carl Heneghan from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine have penned a searing piece in the Telegraph excoriating the Government's abysmal failures in presenting clear, honest, reliable data to justify its decisions. The data failures in this pandemic have been considerable: continually they have overestimated the numbers going to die, mis-categorised COVID-19 deaths, exaggerated the impact on hospitals, and missed some 16,000 cases because of an Excel blunder. Perhaps even worse, these failings do not come to light because of Government transparency – but rather when painstaking analysis, eagle eyes, and sometimes even the simplest of questions are enough to expose major faults. Tellingly, the errors and misrepresentations only ever skew in one direction. This week has seen death estimates invalidated; statements on case numbers from the chief medical officer to the Science Technology committee requiring “clarification to avoid any misinterpretation”; and significant errors in medium term projections that seemingly do not affect interpretations. To understand and interpret the current Covid-19 data is proving nigh on impossible. The publication and presentation of data is confusing, and at times it is unsound.The methods and data underlying the models used to generate “scenarios based on assumptions” are inscrutable and decisions ...
