By Gabriel Princewill-
Professor Ashton has blamed breaches of the government lockdown on lack of honesty about the true number of deaths arising from Covid-19. The former adviser of the Department Of Health said that a lack of extensive testing has made it difficult for public health officials to know where COVID-19 was spreading fastest.
Prof Ashton, who formerly served as Cumbria’s regional director of public health, said people were not being treated like adults and that this was why they were acting as delinquents. After accusing the government of being paternalistic, he said:
“The lockdown will now have to continue for quite a long time,” Prof Ashton said. “I think it’s really important for the government to be completely honest about the numbers.
“There’s a lot of worry now on social media that we’re not being given the full picture. People need to be treated like adults.”
He said: “If you treat people as adults they’re more likely to behave as adults rather than as delinquents. We’re seeing the delinquency play out in house parties in Manchester and other kinds of things because people aren’t really trusting what’s going on”.
Professor Ashton’s explanation of lockdown breaches is not supported by the facts at all. Lockdown breaches are more attributed to lack of discipline than an absent of trust by the public in the stay at home rules mandated by the government. Those unscrupulous individuals throwing house parties are clearly irresponsible people with no consideration for the numbers of people dying. Accusing the British government of a lack of transparency regarding Covid-19 deaths implies substantive knowledge to the contrary, which in any event will need to be corroborated.
Professor Ashton’s warning came as Downing Street gave an update on Boris Johnson’s progress from hospital who has been doing short walks between periods of rest” since he was moved back from intensive care and into a hospital ward.
Accuracy
Th e accuracy of the government’s figures about the precise numbers of those who have died from Covid-19 has been under scrutiny in many quarters, understandably so, since the extent and the degree of the pandemic is important to know. Lots of important decisions hinge on those numbers, making it of paramount importance that figures are not underrepresented or over represented. let alone to suggest they are being pretentious about them, as suggested by Professor Ashton.
Evidence that some Covid 19 related deaths have been discovered after the victims passed away, is cause for some concern. Those deaths are however believed to have been separately recorded and reported. How and why some Covid 19 deaths were discovered subsequent to the respective fatalities is a matter still being examined by many of the authorities. Any anomalies in the figures presented hardly justifies breaches of lockdown rules, especially if the deaths are believed to be actually higher than has been reported.
Some findings have concluded that hospitals have been so saturated with patients that a number of Covid-19 patients have had to be turned down to manage the overwhelming pressure faced by these hospitals. Hundreds of residents of the UK’s largest charitable provider of care homes are thought to have died from the virus in the last three weeks, while another network of care homes is reported to have recorded 88 deaths.
Care industry leaders believe the virus is more prevalent in care settings than the estimate given by the UK government’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, who said on Tuesday that just over 9% of care homes had cases of Covid-19. The question is whether professor Whitty is intentionally underestimating the figures, or whether he has not been privy to accurate information about the true figures of Covid-19 related deaths.