British Prime Minister Boris Johnson no longer trusts the forecasts of Covid experts and has asked GCHQ to provide him with the true data of the epidemic. The Government Communications Headquarters is the best agency to turn to: since 1919 it has been involved in espionage and counter-espionage in communications, and during the Second World War it gave excellent proof of itself by decoding the Nazis’ Enigma code.
Johnson also has the same problem as many of his colleagues in other countries: too many experts have their say every day and it is difficult to distinguish trustworthy voices from deafening background noise. Even trusted government virologists often make alarmist predictions to avoid being accused of underestimating the problem. But important decisions are made on their forecasts, which change the lives of millions of people and cost a mountain of money in state budgets.
The Daily Mail wanted to see clearly the situation in Britain and compared the predictions that had been made, and on which the government made its decisions, with the current situation. The experts do not come out well, which would justify resorting to spy agencies to get a more reliable picture. In July, for example, a report by Downing Street science adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said virologists estimated the death toll of 119,000 if a second peak of the outbreak coincided with the peak of the winter cold. The victims were many, more than 54,000, but half of what was expected.
In a more recent press conference, Sir Patrick and Professor Chris Whitty, the government’s Chief Medical Officer, had announced that the deaths in December would be at least 4,000 per day, but fortunately it only reached 15% of that figure, with a downward trend. And the hospitals? The same experts had said that it was now close to full capacity, while at least half of the hospitals had no patients hospitalized for Covid. Currently, only 13% of the beds are occupied by people infected with the virus and the total beds occupied are even 1,293 fewer than the November average of last year. Intensive care is 31% occupied by Covid patients and the number of places used today for treatments of that type was even lower than the average for the years between 2015 and 2019 on 8 November.
Even the way of counting the victims could be questioned by the counter-intelligence agency: of the victims counted as of November 18, 53.7 per cent were over 80 years old. Only 275, 0.7%, were under the age of 40 and only 4.5% of the overall deaths did not suffer from severe pre-existing diseases.
To the interpretative chaos are then added the messes caused by the bureaucracy, which, for example, indicated their home and not the school where they study as the place of infection of the positive students, causing undue closures in the wrong areas. The government has suggested isolating the people most at risk such as the elderly, but in Great Britain only 0.4 of the seventy-year-olds today contract Covid, compared to 2% of secondary school children.
The espionage experts will now get to work to make sense of a thousand voices at odds with each other and apparently devoid of logic. If they have made it through Hitler’s Riddle, they can make it again against an equally ferocious and insidious enemy.
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