The Latest from Cafe Hayek

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 07:11 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

D__ isn’t the only person to write to me with this concern.

Hi D__:

Thanks for your e-mail about my new essay on what Christopher Snowdon calls “public health paternalists.”

You’re correct that taxpayer-subsidized health care transforms many private choices into ‘public’ ones. And so, for example, when Jones’s penchant for eating poorly and not exercising lands him in the hospital, taxpayer Smith is understandably angry at having to help pay for the ill-consequences of Jones’s choices.

Yet I do not believe that this reality justifies public-health authorities proscribing and prescribing actions that would be private in the absence of government’s policy of collectivizing the provision of health care. With collectivized health care – as with collectivized anything – the problem is real of Jones and Smith free riding on each other and, hence, behaving in ways that are collectively harmful. Real too is the resulting pressure for government to reduce this harm by micromanaging personal choices.

But to ask a now-popular question: What’s the limiting principle? Where does the assault on individuals’ freedom to choose end? The problem exists only because government collectivized an activity – the provision of health care – that can and should remain privately supplied and demanded. With health care forcibly collectivized, rather than call for – or even to tolerate – government restrictions on personal behavior, the better course is to demand an end to the forced collective provision of health care. Otherwise, additional government intervention is summoned to ‘solve’ a problem that exists only because of earlier government intervention. And these additional interventions will themselves create spillover effects that are sure to fuel calls for yet further control by the state over private choices.

If you discover that your house is structurally unsound because its design is faulty, you don’t summon the same incompetent architect to use his same flawed design principles to patch up the evident problems. You change the design.

Sincerely,
Don

Some Covid Links

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 03:15 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley ably defends the decision by government officials in Florida to recommend against vaccinating healthy children against Covid. Three slices:

The Sunshine State is bucking the public-health consensus again. “The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced March 7.

Cue the outrage. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the recommendation “irresponsible.” The Infectious Diseases Society of America accused Dr. Ladapo of putting “politics over the health and safety of children.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki jabbed: “It’s deeply disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out there and casting doubt on vaccinations.”

Dr. Ladapo is doing no such thing. He is merely acknowledging the abundant scientific evidence that Covid-19 poses a negligible risk to healthy children, which makes it impossible to know if the benefit of vaccination outweighs the risk.

…..

But this makes vaccinating children even more senseless. The vast majority have already been infected. The CDC estimates that 58% of children under 18 had infection-induced antibodies as of January, based on commercial laboratory blood samples.

This is almost certainly an underestimate. Antibodies have probably faded in those who were infected earlier in the pandemic, and a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found 63% of children under 18 who tested positive for the virus on PCR tests didn’t generate antibodies in their blood. Unlike the current crop of vaccines, prior infection stimulates mucosal immunity—including antibodies in the saliva and nasal passages—that can provide a strong barrier to infection.

…..

The public-health consensus has been wrong time and again during the pandemic. When it comes to vaccinating children, especially the youngest, Dr. Ladapo is right.

Here’s an excellent letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Each of us must decide which principled stands to take in life, and mask-querade mandates sometimes force us to choose between convenience and conviction. Even before mandates were lifted last month in California, I entered many retail establishments without harassment from staff or management, and only slight frowns from other customers. But other venues tested my principles: barefaced, I could not enter restaurants, theaters, libraries or museums. I am still barred from airports, public transit and doctors’ offices.

This virus era will be over when we, as a people, stand up and determine that it’s over. Ms. Sugar is correct that those who do not act on their principles are the reason that mask mandates still exist, since it’s now clear that “the science” offers no valid justification for these questionable, confusing edicts.

Jane Johnson
Ventura, Calif.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is correct: Beijing’s deranged pursuit of zero Covid hurts not only the Chinese economy – it hurts all the global economy. A slice:

China’s domestic growth will take a hit. The Communist Party regime recently announced a GDP growth target of 5.5% for the year, but that will be impossible to achieve if major commercial centers are locked down. Another risk is consumer confidence, which already was under threat from the property-market slowdown President Xi Jinping has orchestrated over the past year. Beijing claims it’s pursuing a “shared prosperity” agenda in which ordinary households will earn—and then spend—a greater share of the country’s income. But first they need to be let out of their apartments.

Mr. Xi appears to be waking to the economic and political dangers. He instructed officials on Thursday to reduce the cost households bear for Covid controls. Vice Premier Liu He this week promised measures “that are favorable to the market” to stabilize equity prices roiled by Covid fears and worries that Beijing’s long-running regulatory crackdown on tech companies could stifle growth.

Even as the lockdowns become more contentious with the public, Beijing shows little sign of abandoning its zero-Covid fixation. That policy stubbornness, combined with Beijing’s apparent failure to devise an alternative in the two years since the pandemic began, is a danger to the health of Chinese citizens and the prosperity of China and the rest of the world.

Writing at City Journal, Nicholas Wade decries the credulity of many science reporters. A slice:

Why are science writers so little able to report objectively on the origin of the virus? Innocent of most journalists’ skepticism about human motives, science writers regard scientists, their authoritative sources, as too Olympian ever to be moved by trivial matters of self-interest. Their daily job is to relay claims of impressive new discoveries, such as advances toward curing cancer or making paralyzed rats walk. Most of these claims come to nothing—research is not an efficient process—but science writers and scientists alike benefit from creating a stream of pleasant illusions. The journalists get their stories, while media coverage helps researchers attract government grants.

K. Lloyd Billingsley wonders if Fauci will get the downsizing that he deserves. A slice:

Senator Rand Paul will introduce an amendment to eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and establish three new institutes headed by presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, and serving a term of five years.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator in chief,’” Paul wrote in a Fox News commentary. “No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”

Paul, a physician for more than 33 years, says he “never encountered someone with the gall to proclaim himself ‘the science’ and portray anyone opposing him as ‘attacking science.’ That is until Dr. Fauci became the COVID dictator-in-chief.” Paul mourns “those we lost to the crushing and overbearing lockdowns and mandates that were based on junk science.”

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but if he ever practiced medicine it was only for a short time. In 1968, Dr. Fauci was hired on with the National Institutes of Health and he has headed NIAID since 1984. Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry.

The government of New South Wales, Australia, admits that it lied in order to do Covid health theater. A slice:

By far the more disturbing insight offered by [New South Wales premier Dominic] Perrottet was the abuse of the state’s children to make the Education sector ‘feel better’.

‘When we announced schools going back, the media would rush to find the scariest epidemiologist who was out there saying “every child across New South Wales would die”. And that was a problem, because we had to instil confidence. So what did we do? Together we agreed we would go and get all these Rapid Antigen Tests – which was a massive fee,’ said the Premier.

Instead of standing his ground and defending the much-lauded ‘science’ of NSW Health – something that citizens were told that they could not question when it was destroying their businesses and holding them hostage in their homes – Perrottet implemented measures to keep the media quiet.

Here’s a report from last week’s gathering, at Hillsdale College’s DC campus, of some of the relatively few scientists, academics, and journalists who wisely counseled caution against Covid hysteria and warned of Covidocratic tyranny. (HT Jay Bhattacharya, who was among the participants in this event) Three slices:

Johns Hopkins medical professor Marty Makary, a National Academy of Medicine member, said the New York Times functionally blacklisted him after he went on Fox News, and his department “started to squash” critics like him early in the pandemic. He compared Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and former NIH Director Francis Collins to “African presidents” who rule for decades.

Epidemiologist Sheila Weiss said her company, which has close Stanford ties, wouldn’t let her publish a commentary on “booster mandate madness” because it was “too much of a political or corporate risk.” An investigative journalist declined her offer to run with the story because “Fauci’s goons” already targeted him, Weiss said.

Cal Poly microbiologist Pat Fidopiastis, who leads its COVID wastewater testing lab, explained how he became the campus villain for refusing to wear masks “unless required,” challenging mask efficacy and referring to COVID’s origin in Wuhan, which drew student accusations of racism. He voted for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton, but “they made me” a Trump supporter.

…..

Bioethicist Aaron Kheriaty, fired by UC for refusing COVID vaccination, said public health has morphed into seeking “behavioral outcomes” through moralistic framing and frowns on objective data that could give “false reassurance.” To Kheriaty, “that’s the definition of propaganda.”

…..

Former NYT science columnist John Tierney blamed the “crisis crisis” on Fauci, who first rose to prominence in the AIDS crisis. The media have perverse incentives to indulge alarmism on scientific issues, from overpopulation to energy shortages and now COVID, because it increases readership.

“You have to do counter-scares” such as the Great Barrington Declaration, which emphasized collateral damage from lockdowns, he said.

“Add 12 months or so” to right-wing COVID coverage and Leonhardt’s daily NYT newsletter will validate it, giving liberals permission to acknowledge reality, according to Maxwell Meyer, former editor of The Stanford Review. He pointed to a “series of very conspicuous coincidences” in which the CDC revised guidance following a Leonhardt column.

Quotation of the Day…

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 01:30 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 268 of Herbert Spencer’s insightful July 1853 Westminster Review essay, “Over-Legislation,” as this essay is reprinted in Liberty Fund’s 1981 collection of some of Spencer’s writings, The Man Versus the State, with Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom:

Ever since society existed Disappointment has been preaching, “Put not your trust in legislation”; and yet the trust in legislation seems scarcely diminished.

Beware Public-Health Paternalists

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 08:31 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

My latest column for AIER is inspired by IEA’s Christopher Snowdon. In it, I – as does Snowdon – warn against the mix of faulty understanding and hubris that motivates what Snowdon calls “public health paternalists.” A slice:

In the minds of public-health paternalists, the body politic becomes almost a literal body. The aggregate (as described by statistics) is treated akin to a sentient entity that suffers health problems, many of which can be cured by this entity’s team of physicians – namely, public-health paternalists. And in a country with a population as large as that of the United States, the number of different health problems suffered by absolutely large numbers of individuals will be enormous, thus ensuring no end of opportunities for public-health paternalists to use the power of the state to proscribe and prescribe individuals’ behaviors.

But as Snowdon notes, public-health paternalists sense that, to justify their interventions, they need more than to point to scary statistics drawn from a large population. At least in societies with a liberal tradition – in societies that historically accord some deference to individuals to freely make their own choices – public-health paternalists must bolster the case for their officiousness by convincing the public that seemingly private decisions are not really private. Public-health paternalists thus insist, for example, that obese people are innocent victims of predatory marketing by companies such as McDonald’s, while smokers have been trapped by the vile tactics of Big Tobacco as well as by the peer pressure of simply being surrounded by friends who smoke.

According to public-health paternalists, therefore, almost no decisions that affect individuals’ health are truly ‘individual.’ Nearly all such decisions are either heavily determined by the actions of third parties, or themselves affect the choices of unsuspecting third parties.

Nothing is personal and private; everything is political and public. Because, according to public-health paternalists, a vast array of seemingly ‘private’ decisions are both the results of “externalities” and themselves the causes of “externalities,” the work of public-health paternalists is plentiful, while the power these ‘experts’ require to protect the health of the body politic is vast.

This perversion of classic public health into public-health paternalism is alarming. As public-health paternalism comes to dominate the field, persons attracted to study and practice public health will be, in contrast to traditional public-health scholars and officials, far more insistent on expanding public-health’s domain. Public-health paternalists will excel at the dark art of portraying as ‘public’ – and, hence, as appropriate targets of government regulation – many activities that traditionally and correctly are understood as private and, hence, as not appropriate targets of government regulation.

How much of the overreaction to COVID-19 is explained by the rise of public-health paternalism? I suspect an enormous amount. Public-health paternalists are not only already primed to misinterpret private choices as ones that impose ‘negative externalities’ on third parties, they are also especially skilled at peddling their misinterpretations to the general public. And so although the quite real contagiousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus renders it a valid concern of classic public-health scholars and officials, the contagiousness and ‘publicness’ of other aspects of COVID were exaggerated in attempts to justify excessive government control over everyday affairs.

The most obvious example of an activity traditionally regarded as private and, thus, not properly subject to government control is speech and writing. Of course, no one has ever denied that speech and writing have effects on others; indeed, changing other people’s minds and hearts is the very purpose of much speech and writing. But in liberal civilization the strong presumption has been that individuals are to be trusted to judge for themselves the merit or demerit of whatever expressed thoughts they encounter. We’ve long recognized, and rightly feared, the danger of allowing government officials to superintend and suppress peaceful expression.

Yet with COVID, this presumption was significantly weakened, if not (yet) reversed. The US Congress held a hearing to investigate “the harm caused by the spread and monetisation of coronavirus misinformation online to try and identify the steps needed to stop the spread and promote accurate public health information,” while high-ranking US government public-health officials tried to orchestrate an effort to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration. A Cornell Medical School official, writing in the New York Times, openly called for suppressing the speech of physicians who dissent from the prevailing ‘expert’ consensus.

Peaceful expression and the exchange of ideas are now regarded by many elites as sources of potentially dangerous ‘externalities.’ And in the minds of public-health paternalists, the only way to protect the body politic from becoming lethally infected with what public-health paternalists themselves deem to be misinformation is for government to suppress the spread of viral ideas no less than it suppresses the spread of viral molecular structures. This ominous development during COVID surely was encouraged by the rise over the past few years of public-health paternalists.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 08:30 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 228 of Lionel Shriver’s great 2016 novel, The Mandibles:

All governments rob their people. It’s what they do.

Some Non-Covid Links

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 04:43 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

Arnold Kling is thoughtful and wise. A slice:

Another concern that I have is the need for turnover. When agencies perpetuate themselves, there is little chance for new thinking to emerge. In government, we need to find a way to balance the advantage of institutional knowledge with the adverse consequences of thinking that becomes stale and rigid.

But most of all, we need an overall political culture that does not suffer from excessive faith in central government. Too many well-educated people believe that credentialed experts have all the answers. And too many anti-elitists believe that popular opinion provides all the answers. Skepticism, epistemic humility, and appreciation of my four propositions are all too rare.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Adam White warns against the further politicization of the the U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

It is remarkable to see how little the court’s loudest critics even attempt to anchor their attacks to our basic constitutional principles. They attempt to delegitimize the court for failing to act like a legislature. They accuse it of being insufficiently representative and promoting the wrong policies.

In all of it, these critics ignore the fundamental requirements of their own role as citizens. Judicial legitimacy isn’t simply a matter of hecklers’ vetoes. It requires the critics themselves to grapple seriously with the court’s explanations. And it requires all of us to recognize that disagreements are a part of constitutional government.

Tim Padgett reviews, in the New York Times, William Neuman’s new book, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela. A slice:

Neuman skillfully explains just how insane. “Chávez’s socialism was all means and no production,” he writes. “It was showcialismo,” an endless bacchanal of multibillion-dollar projects — like a national electricity monopoly, Corpoelec — that were essentially left to rot after the ribbon-cuttings. As Venezuela gorged on imports and prices ballooned, Chávez and his handpicked successor, the witless ideologue Nicolás Maduro, kept forcing price controls that further discouraged domestic industry, spawning huge shortages and extortionate black markets.

“It was a Yogi Berra economy,” Neuman wryly observes. “Stuff was so cheap that nobody could afford to buy it anymore.”

Epic graft schemes proved even more crippling, especially after oil prices went south again. Using fraudulent contracts and invoices, Chavista mandarins and their business cronies gamed the chasm between the official and black-market bolívar-to-dollar exchange rates. They reaped Mafia-grade profits; they also bled the state-run oil monopoly, PDVSA, of cash and robbed Venezuelans of urgent necessities like food, housing and energy infrastructure.

And here’s an excerpt from Neuman’s book.

Here’s a short course from David Henderson in oil economics.

Robert Bork, Jr., busts some of today’s myths about the alleged monopolization of the American economy. Here’s his conclusion:

Perhaps the administration is right about one thing. There is excessive concentration of power – in Washington, D.C.

Stephanie Slade asks if libertarians must care about more than state power. A slice:

As good libertarians, we know better than to ask the state to solve these sorts of problems, but we don’t have to pretend they aren’t real. To say that a good society just is a free society and a good life just is a free life is to miss all of that. Greater freedom from force and fraud is always a positive thing. Greater freedom from cultural constraints may not be.

Smoke does not get into George Will’s eyes. As slice:

Today, many corporations slather their business calculations with a syrup of fashionable blather. By the time this geyser of corporate-gush concludes, no progressive trope has been unused: Ending “exclusionary policies” will ameliorate “climate change” and “institutionalized inequity.” PMI wants to achieve “a smoke-free future” by selling noncombustible tobacco products — e-cigarettes. PMI and Altria rightly resent those who insist that only zero-risk products are virtuous alternatives to the known high risks of cigarettes.

The behavior of many millions of Americans is generating an ocean of data that can be acquired no other way — data about harm-reduction from smoke-free, non-combustion products. Do they, over time, wean smokers off cigarettes? Or do they, particularly with flavors that delight the young, become a gateway to cigarettes? We will find out, unless government regulations truncate the experiment.

Robby Soave reports on the New York Times‘s admission of the dangers of cancel culture. A slice:

The New York Times published a terrific editorial on Friday that takes note of “America’s free speech problem” and points to both right-wing legislation and cancel culture—enforced by an uncompromising strain of progressivism—as culprits.

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” wrote The Times.

The editorial includes a predictable (and mostly well-deserved) condemnation of conservative attempts to legislate away uncomfortable discussions about sex and race in schools. But it stands out for directly attacking the left’s censorship impulse.

“Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” wrote The Times.

Daniel Hannan explains that “[i]dentity politics is eroding the values which set the West apart from Putin.” A slice:

Could we be returning to that older ethic? We might dismiss Putin as an outlier. But can we be certain that he is not also an augur? It might seem a trivial thing, but look at how quickly we have extended our quarrel with Putin to all Russians. An orchestra in Montreal cancels a Russian pianist, despite his opposition to the invasion; Tchaikovsky is dropped from programmes; Russian paintings are removed from exhibitions. My tribe good, your tribe bad.

These cancellations are happening in a culture newly primed to categorise and condemn. We damn institutions for some ancient benefaction. We stop publishing authors because of opinions that had nothing to do with their work. We teach identity politics, encouraging people to believe that they have grievances or obligations purely on grounds of their physiognomy.

GMU Econ alum Eli Dourado offers several excellent suggestions for raising economic productivity. A slice:

If we wanted to raise American productivity, for example, we could simplify geothermal permitting, deregulate advanced meltdown-proof nuclear reactors, make it easier to build transmission lines, figure out why high-speed rail is so expensive, fix permitting generally, abolish the Jones Act, automate our ports, allow drones to operate autonomously, legalize supersonic flight over land, reduce occupational-licensing requirements, train more medical workers, build more hospitals, revamp our pandemic-response institutions, simplify drug approvals, deregulate land use to allow denser housing and mixed-use neighborhoods, allow more immigration, cancel inefficient programs, restrict cost-plus procurement contracts in favor of more effective methods, end appropriations based on job creation, avoid political direction of scientific research, and instill urgency in grantmaking.

Some Covid Links

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 03:40 AM PDT

(Don Boudreaux)

In this Twitter thread, Alexandros Marinos exposes the misinformation being spread by the U.S. Surgeon General in a document marketed as a guide for helping Americans avoid misinformation. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

In fact, the CDC has been a source for comically bad science throughout, or more likely, papers constructed in violation of the scientific method, to provide backing for a politically expedient position.

Also justifiably dismayed by the U.S. government’s peddling of misleading information – specifically, here, misleading assertions of the alleged net benefits of vaccinating young children against Covid-19 – is el gato malo. A slice:

one fact in medical care is unarguable:

medical interventions are everywhere and always a risk/benefit calculation.

this is just bedrock reality. nothing is free. you must always compare that which a treatment will gain you to that which it will cost you. you must weigh risk as well as reward.

anyone pushing just reward is lying to you.

i could douse you in gasoline and light you on fire. it would reduce your chance of being stung by a bee.

seem like a good trade?

and the CDC is, yet again, failing to do this or even acknowledge the concept.

Using as an example the experience of Hong Kong, Ian Miller busts some myths about masking.

Other than the laughable assertion that “lockdowns structurally reinforced key sections of capitalism” – the author mistakes ‘benefits to existing big businesses’ with ‘capitalism’ – this criticism, from the far left, of zero-Covid lunacy is quite good. A slice:

The left zero-covid cultists, however, ‘knew’ they were right because they had the right politics. This superior politics told them that ‘non pharmaceutical interventions’ could eliminate the disease. It told them they did not need an understanding of the nature of respiratory disease in general and the four coronaviruses in particular. It left them clueless about the nature of transmission. They remained ignorant of the inevitability of the process of evolution that characterises the 200 or so respiratory viruses humans live with or the resulting limits of vaccines.

“MIT’s new mask policy bans groups from forcing people to wear masks.”

The Telegraph‘s Science Editor Sarah Knapton reports on the difficulty of getting an accurate measure of Covid deaths in Britain. Two slices:

The number of people who have died from Covid in Britain during the pandemic is impossible to determine because of the inconsistent definitions of what is meant by a coronavirus death, researchers have concluded.

Experts from Oxford University discovered that public health and statistics organisations across the UK are operating under 14 different definitions to classify a death from Covid.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, collated for a new report published on Saturday, show that many people who died in the first wave never tested positive for the virus, particularly older people who died in care homes.

Instead, their deaths were registered as Covid simply based on a statement of the care home provider, and because coronavirus was rife at the time.

In some care homes, more than half of the Covid deaths were registered in people without pre-existing conditions, which the report authors said was “implausible” for people who needed residential care.

The authors also point out that it is unlikely that a Covid infection on its own could cause death in the absence of contributing factors, such as other illness, or the infection leading to a more deadly condition such as pneumonia.

The report also found that in some trusts, up to 95 per cent of Covid deaths were in people with Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders.

The team said the confusion meant they were unable to separate deaths caused by Covid from those triggered by the pandemic response, and called for a proportion of deaths to be verified by post-mortem in future pandemics to determine the true reason.

Dr Tom Jefferson, of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University, said: “Every night we were given this diet of cases, admissions and deaths. But we found that even the ONS doesn’t have a standard definition for deaths. We found 14 different ways to express the cause of death.

“There are a number of death certificates where Covid-19 is the only cause of death, and that is not possible. It has to be something like Covid-19 induced pneumonia, if it goes to the kidneys and you get kidney failure.

“We found some organisations coded Covid deaths even in the absence of positive Covid tests. Some nursing homes had allocated causality to Covid-19 not on the basis of tests but when those deaths occurred, usually in the Spring of 2020. Nursing homes decide themselves what was the cause.

“All of this means that we don’t really know who has died of Covid, or how severe it is, and this continues to this day. Separating the ravages of the virus from the ravages of human stupidity is not possible.”

…..

The UK Statistics watchdog has said that excess deaths give the closest indication, but researchers said it was impossible to separate deaths from Covid and those caused by the pandemic response.

“It’s very hard to understand who is dying of Covid and who is dying from the measures put in place to tackle the virus,” added Prof Henghan.

“For example, if you’re elderly and have dementia and are left alone, you’ll be dead in two to three days. We were in panic mode.

“When you look across the devolved nations there are real problems. There are subtle variations in how the deaths were recorded, and these different interpretations have left everyone seriously confused.”