FACT CHECK Daily Mirror front page article overstates impact of inflation
“Families to be left £2,000 a year worse off as cost of living continues to soar” — Daily Mirror, 2 February 2022
To come up with this figure, the Mirror estimated various price rises — such as energy (£648), housing (£252), groceries (£180), petrol (£70) and car cover (£25)— before adding £600 due to the rise in National Insurance and the effect of freezing income tax thresholds.
There’s nothing wrong with simply presenting these additional costs to illustrate how the cost of living is changing. But the Mirror did something different. To get to its £2,035 a year total, it added together the various price increases and tax changes with the estimated fall in ‘real wages’, which it estimated to be £260.
But the measure of ‘real wages’ already takes price rises into account - so adding that figure to the rising prices of the goods and services mentioned essentially counts the inflation of these items twice, making it look like the cost of living is rising faster than it probably is.
Various organisations including the Resolution Foundation, the Financial Times and the House of Commons Library, as well as the Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility, have made their own calculations.
Posts all over social media falsely claim police in West Yorkshire are investigating the vaccine roll-out. They cite a “crime reference number” as evidence for this.
Indeed, reference numbers have been created by the police - but this is done to make a record of the complaints filed by vaccine protesters. This is common practice. West Yorkshire Police told us:
“No crimes have been recorded however and no criminal enquiries are ongoing by West Yorkshire Police in respect of the vaccination programme.
“We can state categorically that West Yorkshire Police have no investigations relating to this report or any other alleged criminality relating to the vaccine programme.”
They told us they’re aware of similar reports made to the Metropolitan Police and will not be recording any additional reports in relation to this matter. The Metropolitan Police has also repeatedly stated that it is not carrying out any criminal investigation into the Covid-19 vaccination programme.
“One in a hundred children will actually get sick enough [with Covid] to be admitted to hospital.” - Dr Binita Kane, 3 February 2022
A video shared by NHS England on its Twitter and Facebook accounts contained claims about children and Covid that were not accurate. The video was widely shared before being deleted, but NHS England has not yet published a correction to explain why the video was deleted.
NHS England told us the hospitalisation statistic was taken from the website of campaign group Long Covid Kids. A chart on that website shows that the number of Covid hospitalisations in under 18s was often around 1% of the number of reported cases until the second half of 2021. More recently, it has been roughly 0.5%, which Dr Kane told us she thinks is a more up-to-date estimate.
But both these figures still overstate the proportion of children who get ill enough with Covid to be admitted to hospital.
This is for a number of reasons. The first is that a number of these admissions would be due to ‘incidental Covid.’ That means that the children in question were in hospital for other reasons, but tested positive for Covid at the same time.
The number of reported Covid cases also does not reflect the total number of infections actually happening, because many people do not get tested, or their results are not reported.
The ONS estimated that between December and January the number of infections in all age groups was about two and a half times higher than the number of positive tests being reported.
As a result, the true risk is hard to estimate precisely. However, if you took Dr Kane’s updated estimate of 0.5% and applied these adjustments—assuming they apply to children as much as everyone else—you’d end up with an estimate of roughly 0.1%.
In short, the claim in the NHS video that one in 100 children with Covid get ill enough to need to go to hospital may have overstated the real risk significantly.
