Amanda Pritchard, the new NHS England chief executive, has had quite a week. She wrote an article for the Health Service Journal about the pressures on the NHS and followed up with a Sky News interview where she had this to say:
Where did she get that 14 times figure from? By using statistics in a strange way, highlighted by Kate Andrews fairly shortly afterwards. By ‘have had’ she was technically correct insofar as this was the peak ratio. But comparing a wave to a non-wave, and presenting a peak value as somehow representing the current situation is fundamentally misleading. The actual picture for Covid hospitalisations is here. I won’t republish the graphs as this blog is about a broader point.
Brief history of the ‘porkie’
What Pritchard said was technically true but fundamentally misleading. Until fairly recently, this combo was a standard and successful tactic in public debate: cook up a dramatic sounding figure, release it on broadcast and it’s repeated.
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