The facts behind the angry confrontation over Covid restrictions 

23 Apr 2021 | Facts, News and Updates
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FACT CHECK
Pub landlord vs Keir Starmer: what you need to know about lockdowns

On a campaigning visit to Bath on Monday, Sir Keir Starmer was confronted by an irate pub landlord. The Labour leader was dramatically thrown out of the pub after a heated exchange—apparently over his support of the government’s Covid-19 restrictions.

Footage taken at the scene shows Rod Humphris, landlord of the Raven, citing two different pieces of Covid data in justification of his anti-lockdown stance.

First, he argued that the average age of a person who died from Covid is 82 years and 3 months, whereas the average age of death from other causes is 81 years.

Data ([link removed]) from the Office for National Statistics ([link removed]) largely supports this. But this doesn’t mean that people dying of Covid in their early 80s were necessarily going to die soon of something else.

Data shows that if you reach the age of 82 ([link removed]) in the UK, you’re actually expected to live for several more years. Analysis published by Full Fact last month showed that the average person who dies of Covid in the UK has actually lost about a decade of their life. ([link removed])

His second argument was that the UK experienced a similar rate of death as recently as 2008 (when lockdowns were not imposed).

It’s true that the last time the death rate was this high was in 2008. ([link removed])

But this largely reflects the fact that we’ve made progress in healthcare and encouraging healthy behaviour over the last 13 years. For example, we smoke less as a country now than we did 13 years ago.

It could be argued then that the pandemic has seen these improvements to the mortality rate reversed. And this was despite national restrictions, without which the death toll would have been higher.

Political decisions like these—which require us to weigh up the life-saving benefits of lockdowns against the harmful impacts on the economy—are hugely important, and people have a right to disagree. But people deserve all the facts, in their proper context, so that they can make up their own minds.
Lockdowns do work ([link removed])
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FACT CHECK
European Super League: fake stories debunked ([link removed])

Following the announcement of the European Super League, a number of fake quotes attributed to notable figures in football have gone viral on social media.

Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp was the victim of falsely-attributed quotes. According to claims on social media, he reportedly condemned the project as being motivated by “greed”. It was also claimed he had “demanded a meeting” with his club’s ownership.

Elsewhere, it was claimed that Sir Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester United, was supposed to have called the European Super League “a piece of nonsense”, which “sells [supporters] right down the river”.

We also spotted a viral story which claimed that José Mourinho was sacked by one of the breakaway clubs, Tottenham Hotspur, because he “refused to take players onto training ground over the club’s proposed Super League admission.”

All three stories were false. But they are a timely reminder of how we can all fall for fake stories during fast-moving, high-profile and emotive news events.
Where do fake quotes come from? ([link removed])
FACT CHECK
We don’t know if the ‘Nigerian variant’ is more deadly ([link removed])

Several news outlets and social media users have raised concerns about a Covid-19 variant which has been dubbed the “Nigerian variant” (although evidence now suggests that the variant was first detected in the UK).

Kent Live reported it kills “twice as many people” as other variants, claiming that it has “so far” killed 4.3% of the people it has infected. This is compared with 2.3% of infected people being killed by the so-called “Kent variant”, which is now the most common strain in the UK.

This is misleading, because we simply don’t know the true number of people so far infected by either variant.

Instead, these death rates are based on the number of deaths occurring among detected cases—and only 328 cases of the “Nigerian variant” have been found so far, which makes it hard to be confident about how deadly it is.

In February, Public Health England said there was no evidence that this variant causes more severe illness or increased transmissibility.
How common is this variant? ([link removed])
MORE FACT CHECKS
Also this week...
* Godfrey Bloom video makes false claims about vaccines ([link removed])
* Results of Covid-19 vaccine trials have been published and peer-reviewed ([link removed])
* Ivermectin for Covid-19 remains controversial ([link removed])
* Viral street fight wasn’t actually filmed in England post-lockdown ([link removed])

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