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More Guardian Lies

22 July 2022 - 9:13 pm

Today the Guardian published yet another colossal, outright lie. Of course they do this all the time, but this really is a corker. This article titled “Why do the minority who haven’t had Covid account for most new infections?” makes the following claim…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/22/why-do-the-minority-who-havent-had-covid-account-for-most-new-infections

Yes, they claim just 15% of the people in England “have somehow never had Covid”. Let’s set aside the follow-up claim that “55% of new cases are from this group” for a moment. The article cites the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) as the source for this figure, but naturally doesn’t link to any data to back up the claim.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the population of England was 56,489,800 in England on 21st March 2021. There is no reason to believe that number is significantly lower now, the 22nd July 2022.

According to Statista, a website that specialises in collecting and presenting statistics using cited sources, the total number of COVID cases in England as of the 19th July 2022 is 18,229,008, and they are using the UK Government as source data. Looking directly at that UK Government website data for COVID “cases” in England, as of the 20th July 2022, they list:

19,560,297 total cases
18,393,023 first episodes
1,167,274 reinfections

Those figures are produced one day apart, and are close enough for us to take the figure for what is being called a “COVID case” as being the official figures from the UK Government.

According to the Guardian, 15% of people in England have somehow “dodged” the COVIDS, which would be approximately 8,473,470 people.

According to the UK Government, who the Guardian state is the source for that claim (but don’t link to), 38,096,777 out of the (at least) 56,489,800 of the population have NOT become a COVID “case”, which is 67.44%.

Now obviously what constitutes a COVID “case” bears no resemblance to the number of people who were/are actually ill with anything, but the point here is that the claim that only 15% of people in England at this point have “somehow” managed to not catch this allegedly super-infectious virus after two and a half years is a demonstrable lie, even if you take the official figures the UK Government produce at face value.

It’s not even remotely close, or could be attributed to a rounding error or some other statistical artefact. It’s a difference of almost thirty million, which is over half the population of England.

The only bit of actual truth in that entire article is this line…

“There are, as ever with Covid, multiple forces at work.”

Indeed there are, and most of them are in the fiction department. If the ironically named author, Ian Sample, tires of his role as “Science Editor” for the Guardian, I am sure either Neil Ferguson’s department at Imperial College London, or any Climate Change™ synagogue will welcome him with open arms.