LIES, DAMNED LIES AND MATT HANCOCK’S STATISTICS : HEALTH SUPREMO MATT “THE APP” HANCOCK is under the pump to lower the UK’s cumulative Covid-19 death tally.
“It’s world leading at the moment,” an aide to the fresh faced Health Tsar told LCD Views, “but in the wrong direction. We need them to be facing the other direction. So we’re doing something about it.”
And the something appears to be adding used by dates to diagnoses.
“The 28 day shelf life of a Coronavirus diagnosis will stop people dying in ICU from Covid-19, when actually they’ve died of old age, or middle age, or a compromised immune system, or whatever you like really. It’s a pretty open field. Death. We’re becoming specialists in the causes of it. It’s all rather subjective too, when you think about it. Death is intensely personal. Thus death is subjective and it follows so is the cause of death. We really should be asking people how they died, after the event. But the dead are notoriously shy. So it’s best we change the way we record deaths and guess.”
And the UK isn’t alone in attempting a revision of statistical methods, in order to help the current government’s re-election chances.
“Narnia is at it too,” the aide said, “The Queen there, she has seen a shocking mortality rate amongst loyal fauns. Really quite something. So she’s put a temperature ceiling on diagnoses. If you contract Covid-19 outside of her frozen forest then you’ve actually died of sunstroke. It’s genius.”
But sceptics, wary of attempts by Downing Street to bring the kind of numberwang statistical flair to Covid-19 deaths that they’ve brought to employment statistics, have sneered.
“Why 28 days? What happens it you die from Covid-19 a moment after the expiry date of your diagnosis? It’s nonsense. All it really shows of course is that Matt Hancock, and the entire Johnson government, are already long passed their own used by date.”