Cod Almighty | Diary

Waiting for the zombie apocalypse

1 May 2020

Hooray, hooray, the 1st of May, Covid lockdown continues today.

Bottom-of-the-barrel Diary has been thinking recently about democracy and what a terrible idea it is. (If you’re wondering where the footy bit comes in, hold on, it’s on its way.) In theory it’s a great idea. In reality, it’s suitability as a political system depends entirely on the information being disseminated to the voter. This was bad enough when this was controlled by the media. Now it’s semi-controlled by the media and semi-controlled by Darren in Weymouth who makes graphs on his computer that prove ginger-haired people are serial killers, and shares it on Facebook.

Two weeks and a day ago, when I was last allowed to vent on the CA diary page, I had to point out that I was no Mystic Meg. This time I would like to point out that I’m no Rachel Riley. So, if I can see the hideously misleading way information is being fed to us, I’m sure anyone vaguely numerate must be banging their heads against the wall in frustration.

Take the tragic daily Covid death toll. Every one of these deaths is awful and I in no way intend to downplay their horror. But they are presented to us, by the BBC, in the form of a graph. Now, this grotesque daily figure does not represent the number of people who have died that day. It represents the number of deaths registered on that day. Often less than 25 per cent of the deaths actually occurred on the day in question.

Yet – as mentioned earlier – they are put on a graph. What does this graph tell us, exactly? How fast the messenger boys are? Does nobody look at it and think "what the hell is the point of this graph except to obscure any actual trends, which is what we are interested in?" No. They just carry on printing it every bleedin’ day, then in the evening someone stands in front of it on the news and looks serious.

And I’d like to point out that if you test 20,000 people one day and find that 4,000 are infected, and 40,000 people the next day and find that 5,000 are infected, the number infected has gone down and not up. Oh my sweet lord. Hey, BBC, why don't you put the number of positive tests on a useless and misleading graph without any context? Oh, you have. Of course you have.

Someone said to me they should introduce a stricter lockdown because deaths are "still going up." In which circumstances would deaths go down, I wondered, except in a zombie apocalypse? Is the dreaded ZA the only way we can ever leave our homes again? We'd only have to rush back in again, and barricade the doors. It's a lose-lose situation.

There are people – even MPs - on Twitter still claiming that as soon as Germany lifted lockdown their infection rate surged and they had to go back into lockdown. It didn't. They haven't. But that was the way the media presented it, and...

I could write pages of this but, lucky for you, I'm not going to. Democracy is a terrible political system but, hey, I'm still alive so I'm going to count my blessings, have a sit-down and read a magazine for old people. Footy bit approaching.

Scunthorpe United's central defenders seemed to be practising social distancing a week earlier than everybody else.

There you go. Deviant Diary gave me that one. Blame him.