Donate

Age-Standardised Mortality Rate Falls To Lowest Level on Record, Again

The ONS announced today that there were 35,401 deaths registered in England in May, which is 9% less than in March, and 10.7% less than the five-year average. As I keep mentioning, however, the best overall measure of mortality isn’t the number of deaths, but rather the age-standardised mortality rate.

In May, the age-standardised mortality rate was 12% lower than in April, and a remarkable 16.7% lower than the five-year average. Like April’s figure, it was the lowest on record for that month. In fact, it was the second-lowest figure on record for any month. (The only lower figure was last August’s age-standardised mortality rate.)

This means that the last two months have both seen recorded-breakingly low levels of mortality. (The ONS’s dataset goes back as far as 2001, and given that mortality has been decreasing more-or-less continuously for the past few decades, April and May’s figures were probably the lowest ever.)

This chart from the ONS shows the age-standardised mortality rate for the first five months of the year, each year, going back to 2001:

Although 2021’s figure was higher than the figure for 2019, it was 2.2% lower than the figure for 2015 and 2.5% lower than the figure for 2018. This means that – despite higher-than-expected mortality in January and February – the overall level of mortality in the first five months of 2021 was actually lower than three years before.

The past three months have “cancelled out” more than 70% of the age-adjusted excess mortality observed in January and February. If June’s age-standardised mortality rate comes in as low as May’s, the overall level of mortality in the first five months of 2021 will be below the five-year average.

Stop Press: MailOnline reports that COVID-19 was the 24th leading cause of death in England in May, and made up fewer than 1% of all fatalities.

By Noah Carl  /  18 June 2021 • 10.42
     
140 comments

Government to Exempt 2,500 Football Officials from Travel Quarantine Rules so Euro Finals Can Take Place at Wembley

Thousands of Brits had their holiday plans ruined when Portugal was demoted to the travel “Amber List” earlier this month. But now the Government is considering making 2,500 football officials exempt from quarantine rules so that the Euro 2020 semi-finals and final can take place in England. The Guardian has the story.

The proposal would exempt about 2,500 UEFA and FIFA officials, politicians, sponsors and broadcasters from the quarantine restrictions faced by ordinary travellers, according to the Times.

On Monday, the Government announced a four-week delay to the final easing of lockdown restrictions in England in order to allow more people to be vaccinated to combat the Delta coronavirus variant.

The only teams playing in the tournament on England’s “Green List” of countries that do not require isolation on arrival are Wales and Scotland.

All others are on the “Amber List” bar Turkey, which is on the “Red List”. Travellers arriving from Red List countries must stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days while those from amber list countries must self-isolate at home for 10 days, although they can get released from quarantine early if they pay for a private test, at least five days after arrival, and it comes back negative.

Asked how it would be fair for VIPs to have a different set of rules from the general public, the Policing and Crime Minister, Kit Malthouse, said: “I haven’t seen the detail of that particular proposal. One of the things we are trying to do though is obviously accommodate the Euros as much as we possibly can.

“And while much of the concern around coronavirus regulations has been about whether one situation is fair compared with another situation what we’re generally trying to do is make difficult decisions about the path of a virus, at the same time as trying to enable the ordinary operation of very special events like the Euros and, no doubt, health professionals and the immigration professionals at the Home Office and then the senior ministers who make a decision will take all of that into account as we proceed.

“And look, it’s a great competition, we’re very lucky to have it, we’re trying to make it happen with as much kind of satisfaction all round as we possibly can and that will be taken into account in the decision over the next few days.”

So what about everyone else, Boris?

Worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  18 June 2021 • 10.13
       
66 comments

No Mandatory Vaccination for Care Home Staff in Wales

Wales will not be copying England in making Covid vaccination mandatory for care home staff. First Minister Mark Drakeford says that staff in positions of care should take the vaccine, but “there is a very big step taken when you move into compulsion”. This decision is likely to have been swayed by the fact that such a high proportion of care workers have already been vaccinated anyway. WalesOnline has the story.

In Wales the take-up of the vaccine has been extremely high, resulting in as many as 98% of care home residents and 92.3% of care home workers having had their first dose. The percentage when it comes to both doses is equally encouraging – 93.7% for care home residents and 85.7% for care home staff.

However, there are still 2,960 care home employees and 295 care home residents who are yet to receive their first dose – despite being in the top priority groups when the roll-out was announced last December.

A spokeswoman for the Welsh Government confirmed there were no plans to make Covid jabs mandatory for care home staff at this point. She said: “Protecting our most vulnerable people in care homes is at the heart of our response to the pandemic and vaccine strategy. 

“While Covid vaccination rates are at such high levels in this group – and in other priority groups and age groups – in Wales we do not see the need at this time to introduce compulsory measures.

“We will continue to work with the sector to promote the importance of vaccination and support any care workers who have not yet been vaccinated to get a vaccine.”

The country has, however, followed England’s lead in delaying the easing of lockdown restrictions by four weeks because “the Delta variant has entered Wales and quickly spread throughout the country”. The First Minister is quoted in Sky News.

There is sustained and accelerating transmission, not just in north and southeast Wales but in all parts of Wales.

It is now the most dominant variant in new cases in Wales. We are once again facing a serious public health situation.

The WalesOnline report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  18 June 2021 • 09.06
       
55 comments

Covid Vaccination Open to All over-18s in England

All English adults are now able to book a Covid vaccination as the number of over-18s who have been vaccinated nears 45 million (over 80%) – yet still we wait. Reuters has the story.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday pushed back the full re-opening of England from lockdown until July 19th because of a rise in cases, but also accelerated his vaccination plans, pledging to give every adult a first dose by the same date. 

“Offering all adults a jab less than 200 days after the programme launched is one of our country’s greatest collective achievements, saving over 14,000 lives so far,” he said, referring to Public Health England estimates of the impact of the vaccine roll-out.

Britain has given a first dose of a Covid vaccine to more than 42 million people, almost 80% of adults, while well over a half have received both shots.

Health authorities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each run their own vaccination campaigns. Wales and Northern Ireland have already made vaccines available to any adult, while Scotland is offering them to anyone over 30.

In Monday’s briefing, the Prime Minister said that current vaccination levels were not enough to justify unlocking the country and that two-thirds of the adult population must be fully vaccinated (a milestone that is expected to be reached by July 19th) if there is to be an effective “wall of immunity”. Even then, he warned that “a proportion of the elderly and vulnerable may still succumb [to the virus] even if they have had two jabs”.

The Reuters report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  18 June 2021 • 08.19
       
83 comments

News Round-Up

By Jonathan Barr  /  18 June 2021 • 02.49
 
41 comments

Chris Whitty Warns of Summer AND Winter Waves as Neil Ferguson Raises Prospect of New Lockdowns – But Data Show the Third Ripple is Already Peaking

The doom-mongers of SAGE were out in force again yesterday, building on their recent victory in Downing Street to keep stoking the fear. The Independent brings us the latest wisdom from Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson.

The third wave of COVID-19 cases in the UK has already began, according to Government advisers – who said it was possible strict lockdown curbs would have to reintroduced at some point this year.

It comes as a new study commissioned by the Government found Covid infections have increased 50% since the start of May – as the country struggles to combat the rise of the highly-transmissible Delta variant first detected in India.

“We’re at the beginning of [the third wave] now,” said Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial epidemiologist dubbed “Professor Lockdown” by the tabloid press.

Ferguson told a media briefing that his latest modelling predicts between 100 and 1,200 deaths a day at the peak of the summer “third wave”, before raising the possibility that restrictions may need to be introduced.

I’m very much hoping we won’t need to reverse course [on the easing of restrictions] – and I suspect we won’t. We will inevitably see cases and hospitalisations rise. But the key is [how] manageable the level is.

Chris Whitty Warns of Summer AND Winter Waves as Neil Ferguson Raises Prospect of New Lockdowns – But Data Show the Third Ripple is Already PeakingRead More

By Will Jones  /  18 June 2021 • 01.19
         
115 comments

Government Considering Making Working from Home “Default” Option

Workspace provider IWG (formerly Regus) said in March that, after lockdown, “hybrid working”, where staff work from home some of the time, will become “the norm”. With the Government confirming on Thursday that it is considering making working from home (WFH) the “default” position by giving employees the right to request it, we are a step closer to this. The Guardian has the story.

Responding to reports that ministers could change the law, Boris Johnson’s official spokesperson said a flexible working taskforce was examining how best to proceed.

“What we’re consulting on is making flexible working a default option unless there are good reasons not to,” they said. That would mirror the approach to other forms of flexible working, such as part-time hours.

However, they emphasised there would be no legal right to work from home, adding that the Prime Minister still believed there were benefits to being in the office, including collaboration with colleagues.

Business lobby groups have said many of their members are considering keeping flexible and hybrid approaches adopted during the pandemic. Sixty-three per cent of members of the Institute of Directors said they intended to shift to working from home for office-based workers for between one and four days a week.

However, the Confederation of British Industry, another lobby group, said it opposed giving workers an automatic right to work from home. “The default must remain that businesses control where work is done. While they will need to talk with workers about this, accommodate flexibility where they can and explain these decisions, it can’t be unduly onerous to do so,” said Matthew Percival, the CBI’s Director of People and Skills. “That’s why a ‘right to request’ approach is the right one.”

The pandemic [that is, lockdown] has ushered in drastically different working arrangements for many office workers, but the plan to legislate to support working from home had already been mooted in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto…

Ministers have been advised that removal of all restrictions on workplaces could be risky, according to a document first reported by Politico. Instead, the Government is thought to be considering advice for a hybrid approach, blending continued home working with some time in the office when necessary.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Downing Street has denied the story, saying there are “no plans” to make working from home the default after the pandemic or to legislate for a legal right to work from home. But many things the Government has said it has “no plans” for have subsequently turned out to be very much in the pipeline, so we shall see.

By Michael Curzon  /  17 June 2021 • 18.41
   
48 comments

Why is Davos Man So Keen on Lockdowns?

In my column in this week’s Spectator I have tried to answer the question of why the global elite became such enthusiastic supporters of the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis — stay-at home orders, business closures, face masks — and passionate opponents of less draconian alternatives, such as those set out by the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. First, I summarise the explanation that my friend James Delingpole favours:

It’s because these 21st-century robber barons are making money out of the pandemic. According to Robert Watts, who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List, more people have become billionaires in the past year than at any other time in Britain’s history. The combined fortune of these Masters of the Universe has grown by more than a fifth, and the rest of the 1 per cent haven’t done too badly either, thanks to massive government expenditure. Across the developed world, central banks have pumped money into the economy, boosting asset prices and further enriching the plutocratic elite. What’s not to like?

But while I think that’s a factor, I don’t think it’s the whole of the story. I think it’s also because being in favour of non-pharmaceutical interventions is a high-status indicator, a way of advertising that you’re in the same club as tech titans like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and eminent public health scientists like Anthony Fauci and Neil Ferguson.

That’s a term coined by a doctoral student at Cambridge called Robert Henderson. In an article for the New York Post, he defines ‘luxury beliefs’ as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class”. The example he gives is the belief, prevalent in the 1960s, that monogamy is outdated and marriage a source of patriarchal oppression. That doesn’t cost the rich anything because most of them are brought up in bourgeois two-parent households and enter into stable, monogamous marriages. But as the credo of sexual liberation trickled down to the working class it has wreaked havoc, leading to illegitimacy, crime and poverty.

This is where Delingpole goes wrong, I think. The reason Davos Man has outsourced his opinions on the pandemic to the World Health Organisation is not because the policies recommended by Tedros Adhanom enrich him. Rather, it’s because they cost him nothing. He can just as easily work in the shepherd’s hut at the bottom of his garden as he can from his corner office. His children are provided with a full timetable of lessons via Zoom, courtesy of their private school, and if he feels like a holiday abroad he can charter a private jet. Becoming a cheerleader for lockdowns is a way of signalling that he is among the tiny elite of successful people for whom there is zero cost associated with them.

Worth reading in full.

By Toby Young  /  17 June 2021 • 15.20
     
74 comments

Even in Ferguson’s Worst Case Scenario, the Cost of Saving One Life From Covid is a Million Pounds

We’re publishing an original piece today by Glen Bishop, the second year maths student at Nottingham University who often writes for Lockdown Sceptics about the shortcomings of the models that SAGE has relied on throughout this crisis. In this piece, he does a back-of-the-envelope calculation to work out how much it has cost the Government to save one life from Covid. Not surprisingly, it is considerably more than the £30,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year that is the upper limit in the guidance the NHS relies upon when deciding how to allocate resources. Here is an extract:

Financially, the test for rationality of a response to public health is the one used, until the Covid hysteria, by the NHS and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). NICE is the body that decides whether treatments, technologies and medicines are beneficial enough to warrant their cost. The upper limit the NHS and NICE are willing to pay for a treatment yielding one extra quality adjusted life year (QALY) is £30,000. If £30,000 is the accepted limit that can sustainably be spent by society on giving an individual one extra quality year of life, then have lockdowns met this test? Even with Ferguson’s projections, they aren’t even close.

As mentioned, using the 500,000 deaths projection would lead to 372,000 lives having been saved. Conveniently the National Audit Office puts the cost of measures announced by the government by the end of March at £372bn. That would be, as readers will notice, £1 million per life saved. But again, taking QALYs lost per Covid death of seven years gives £143,000.

This is a cost per year of life nearly five times more than the £30,000 the Government previously deemed an upper limit for what was reasonable and sustainable to spend on treatments such as that for children’s cancer medication. Is it the Government’s or Professor Ferguson’s position that protecting somebody from Covid is worth spending five times more than protecting someone from cancer or do they not understand the realities of the policies they are implementing?

Worth reading in full.

By Toby Young  /  17 June 2021 • 15.08
     
38 comments

The 60 MPs Who Deserve Our Praise

These are the 60 MPs who voted against the extension of lockdown restrictions on Wednesday evening, plus two tellers.

Conservative

Adam Afriyie (Windsor)

Siobhan Baillie (Stroud)

Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire)

Bob Blackman (Harrow East)

Crispin Blunt (Reigate)

Peter Bone (Wellingborough)

Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands)

Sir Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale West)

Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire)

Steve Brine (Winchester)

Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge)

Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch)

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds)

Elliot Colburn (Carshalton and Wallington)

Philip Davies (Shipley)

David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden)

Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon)

Richard Drax (South Dorset)

Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green)

Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford)

Marcus Fysh (Yeovil)

Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell)

Chris Green (Bolton West)

Mark Harper (Forest of Dean)

Philip Hollobone (Kettering)

David Jones (Clwyd West)

Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire)

Andrew Lewer (Northampton South)

Chris Loder (West Dorset)

Jonathan Lord (Woking)

Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham)

Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet)

Karl McCartney (Lincoln)

Stephen McPartland (Stevenage)

Esther McVey (Tatton)

Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle)

Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot)

Mark Pawsey (Rugby)

John Redwood (Wokingham)

Andrew Rosindell (Romford)

Greg Smith (Buckingham)

Henry Smith (Crawley)

Julian Sturdy (York Outer)

Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West)

Sir Robert Syms (Poole)

Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire)

Sir Charles Walker (Broxbourne)

David Warburton (Somerton and Frome)

William Wragg (Hazel Grove)

Labour

Ben Bradshaw (Exeter)

Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish)

Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields)

John Spellar (Warley)

Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton)

Derek Twigg (Halton)

Democratic Unionist Party

Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry)

Paul Girvan (South Antrim)

Carla Lockhart (Upper Bann)

Ian Paisley (North Antrim)

Sammy Wilson (East Antrim)

Tellers

Steve Baker (Conservative, Wycombe)

Jackie Doyle-Price (Conservative, Thurrock)

You can use the WriteToThem website to easily contact these MPs and thank them for their vote.

By Michael Curzon  /  17 June 2021 • 11.26
     
84 comments