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Following up with Michael Gove Our headline piece today comes from the senior doctor and regular Lockdown Sceptics contributor. He has done a fact check on Michael Gove's infamous piece in the Times, now that the hospital data for the week it was published are available. On November 28th, Michael Gove wrote an article in the Times claiming that the NHS could soon be entirely overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients occupying every hospital bed including the overflow Nightingale Hospitals. When writing this piece, he would have been aware of the up-to-date bed occupancy figures which are sent out to all hospital CEOs on a daily basis. These figures were not available outside of NHS executive and Government circles. Yesterday (December 3rd) the weekly NHS statistics regarding bed occupancy were published up to December 1st, so the public can now see the data which Gove was privy to when writing his article. I have summarised the highlights below. First, the headline figure of COVID-19 positive patients in English hospitals (Graph 1). Readers can clearly see the downward trends in the North West, North East and the Midlands in the w/e November 28th and flatlining everywhere else. Graph 1 Next, ICU patients (Graph 2). Regular readers will know I favour this metric as it is harder to manipulate than most of the other ...
