New York went from 6,300 COVID-19 deaths to 10,000 by adding 3,700 “presumed”, but untested, cases. No doubt someone thought 10,000 was a more impressive number for the tabloids. And they are all tabloids, now, aren’t they?
Nationally, we went from 30,000–which presumably included the higher New York number–to 40,000, through the same magic of assumptions.
Neil Ferguson, in his latest–as of what, three weeks ago now?–said that 10,000 of the 20,000 Brits he expected to die were going to die of something anyway in the next year. Should those numbers really be added? No, I would argue they should not. We should not be counting straws, but hay bales.
And the biggest hay bale, right now, is the one being loaded by our sundry governments onto the backs of the already poor, the already miserable, the already marginal.