David Craig, on November 3rd, 2020(Tuesday blog)
The importance of ‘lead’ and ‘lag’ indicators
I have to start today’s blog with a very brief explanation of ‘lead’ and ‘lag’ indicators. Apologies if you already understand this. But as our supposed ‘scientists’ and journalists and politicians don’t seem to have a clue about ‘lead’ and ‘lag’ indicators and, as understanding this is more than quite important, I feel it necessary to spend two short paragraphs on this.
In business we tend to class performance measurements into two different types – ‘lead’ and ‘lag’ indicators. A lead indicator for a business might be something like level of customer orders. This is called a ‘lead’ indicator as it gives some idea of what future results might be. Something like profits would then be a ‘lag’ indicator as it measures what has happened.
With the Chinese Covid-19 plague a ‘lead’ indicator might be the level of confirmed infections. A ‘lag’ indicator would then be something like number of hospitalisations, number of patients in ICU and number of deaths. These are all ‘lag’ indicators as they are results of the ‘lead’ indicator (level of infections).
Clear so far?
Why is this important?
Here are the latest confirmed Chinese plague infections: 27 October – 22,885; 28 October – 24,700; 29 October – 23,065; 30 October – 24,405; 31 October – 21,915; 1 November – 23,254; 2 November – 18,950.
It’s clear that throughout October the number of new infections rose rapidly:
But now infections have started to level off and possibly even begun to fall slightly. And if infections – the ‘lead’ indicator of Xi’s plague – have already started to level off and even fall slightly, then in one to two weeks, the ‘lag’ indicators – hospitalisations, ICU occupancy and deaths should also start to level off and even fall slightly.
How did they panic the useless Government into lockdown?
Yesterday, I showed some projections of the Chinese plague from a chart that appeared in the Daily Mail:
Now it has been reported that Daniel Howdon, a research fellow at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, and Carl Heneghan, professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, have�discovered�that the Cambridge-PHE graph (the most extreme line on the above chart which forecasts over 4,000 deaths a day by end-December) dates from three weeks ago. Looking at the Cambridge-PHE line for this week, deaths should be running at around 1,000 a day. In fact, the average for the past seven days is 214 deaths per day – fewer than a quarter of the Cambridge-PHE prediction.
In a nutshell, by using figures from a few weeks ago, when the ‘lead’ indicator (number of infections) was rocketing up, the supposed ‘experts’ from SAGE (Whitty and Vallance?) have produced massively exaggerated estimates of the ‘lag’ indicators – likely hospitalisations, ICU occupancy and numbers of deaths.
Our friends at the Bonking Boffin’s Imperial College – probably also using the ‘lead’ indicator of rapidly-rising infection figures from a couple of weeks ago – showed deaths peaking at just over 2,500 a day by January and over 450 a day by 1 November � more than twice as high as the 214 that have actually happened.
It is quite understandable why infections shot up in October – schools, colleges and universities reopening, people spending more time indoors as the weather worsens and the number of tests being carried out increasing.
But there are also many reasons for the recent slowing in infections – social distancing, current lockdowns in the worst-hit areas, improved hygiene, many people having natural immunity from having had previous infections and the natural lifecycle of infectious viruses.
So why on earth are we going into lockdown again?
I guess that’s the big question.
What seems to have happened is that our supposed ‘scientists’ have taken data from a period (mid-October) when the ‘lead’ indicator (confirmed infections) was shooting up as universities, schools and colleges reopened. The supposed ‘scientists’ have then extrapolated that massive rise in the ‘lead’ indicator into predicting an equally massive rise in ‘lag’ indicators like hospitalisations, ICU occupancy and deaths. The ‘scientists’ then used these predictions or projections or scenarios or whatever you want to call them to terrify the clueless government into a new lockdown.
This is truly a catastrophic mistake. But we don’t seem to have any journalists or politicians with the intellect necessary to understand how the supposed ‘experts’ have used outdated numbers to produce one of the worst data c*ck-ups in British medical history.
Oh, and it’s time to fire the (IMHO) utterly clueless, self-serving, pointless, over-paid, over-pensioned, useless wastes of skin – Vallance and Whitty – for making such a basic statistical mistake and then not having the honesty and humility to update their advice to reflect the recent levelling-off in the ‘lead’ indicator (number of infections).
It might be worth sending a link to today’s blog to your MP and to any journalists you know as it’s really quite important.
Category: 
This is not the result of incompetence or lack of numeracy David,it is the deliberate falsifying of data to justify a lockdown which will further prepare us for the
great global reset to come.It is not a conspiracy theory because they have been telling us for some time what their long term plans involve.I listened to David Ike,speaking at an anti lockdown rally in London.Everything he had to say was factual,accurate and totally summed up what is happening.No wonder he has been so vilified by the MSM,he is too close to the truth for comfort.Only mass disobedience will have any effect and I do not see much or enough evidence of that in my travels.
Hardcastle makes some interesting points and I think we all need to look less at the science and ask what is going on. I started doing this in relation to climate science which I know more about and I cannot work out why we are being lied to.
Like Hardcastle I don�t go along with conspiracy theories because it would be impossible to keep a master plan secret. There seems to be a long term change in the way people view aspects of our existence which are becoming based on emotions rather than rational, science based thinking. Concern about the environment is one of the biggest drivers of this change and it is linked with our fear of uncertainty. At a time when we have more knowledge this fear should be decreasing, but increasing knowledge seems to make people believe we have more control over events, when we haven�t, and so ridiculous policies are created in attempts to bring certainty. The result is damaging energy policies which will have no effect on the climate and economically damaging lockdowns which may have a slight effect on the virus but could result in more deaths from other causes. We seem to have returned to an age of superstition.
I also believe Hardcastle is correct to say only mass disobedience will change things and I think that is something that only happens when there is an immediate identifiable threat, say like the poll tax riots. With longer term issues which the majority don�t understand they are more inclined to wait to see what happens.
I am inclined to think that our collective knowledge is now so extensive that most people understand very little of it. Even experts in one field will not know about others. People using technology in their work will not understand how most of it works. Compare this to even 100 years ago when we didn�t even have radar, and if you saw somebody at work you would probably know what it was. We don�t have to know everything but we have to know how to assess what we are being told and this can only be through seeking evidence to support what we are being told. Today�s blog shows how difficult this is in relation to data. We should expect to be able to trust senior scientists appointed to advise the government and for the government to have ensured the validity of what they are being told. Repeatedly, we see that we cannot trust the government, we cannot trust our elected representatives to hold the government to account, and we cannot trust the media to investigate and report accurately.
On the detailed points in this blog, we are told of testing, and I believe it is the PCR test, which is not a test. It is a laboratory method to grow DNA and not a diagnostic test. All it does in my view is identify the presence of RNA which could come from any infection, even a common cold. It is useless and yet it is being used for decision making.
There is a link to climate change with the concept of lead and lag in this blog. These terms relate to dynamic systems but we tend to think in terms of steady state or predictable dynamic changes like the rotation of the earth and its rotation round the sun. With climate change the �scientific� ideas have been converted to steady state. We have the concept of an �energy budget� which has no meaning in physics and by definition is steady state. It means the energy entering and leaving the earth�s system is equal. This cannot be true either instantaneously or on a longer timescale because there would be no change in temperature. In a technical world we should be able to understand this but our education system is failing us. We should be able to understand simple concepts like this which are being used to deceive us. Brian Cox is one of the worst of the well known scientists doing this and I was pleased to see someone expressing this view a few days ago. The BBC brought him to fame. It is full circle back to asking why people we should be able to trust are lying to us.
I see some signs that it’s beginning to dawn on smaller business leaders what’s going on, as small and medium-sized businesses are driven into bankruptcy while Amazon and the big supermarket chains acquire a stupendous amount of new wealth and a commensurate increase in political power.
But from the start of Lockdown, many ordinary people I know simply took it for granted that politicians were lying and that the whole thing was about making politicians, and their mates, richer. They just knew full well that there wasn’t a damn thing that they themselves could do about it, by either voting or by protesting.
And this attitude has, in the event, been amply borne out by what I’ve said in the above paragraph, not to mention the obviously corrupt deals over the supply of PPE and the handing out of cushy jobs to deeply incompetent friends of politicians.
The blatantly obvious reasons for the latest lockdown, are 1) to delay the return of normal life until supplies are in place for compulsory vaccine programmes, resulting in unimaginable profits for Big Pharma and even more political control of us plebs via our coming ‘vaccine passports’. And 2) to continue the destruction of as many small-to-medium businesses as possible, thus handing absolute control of national economies to multinational companies.
Money. Always follow the money. That’s what Globalisation is all about.
How depressing you guys are!!
Unfortunately, you are correct.
Civil disobedience, when it comes, is the only way forward.
The existence of this virus is indisputable. That it originated in China is also indisuputable. That it is a killer for some people is undeniable. That few of us older and wiser folk actually want to contract it and will take sensible steps to avoid so doing is probable. That we can ever control it, even with vaccination, is questionable. The real problem is that the Government dare not grant us the ongoing freedom of movement which we all crave not because they are afraid of the “death toll” as such, but because were they to do so, the increase in cases requiring hospitalisation would – also indisputably – increase to such an extent that the NHS, which has suffered ever more cuts in funding by successive Governments of all political persuasions, would be unable to cope and there would literally be people dying on the streets for want of hospital admission of, indeed, of any medical care. Family
NHS staff members were telling me two decades ago that the then NHS policy was 100% bed occupancy 24/7 in hospitals, leaving absolutely no slack in the system for emergences on any scale, even less what we face now. As for today’s blog – and how uplifting it is to read both the regular blogs and the informed responses! – IF it is fact that the table on which the imminent lockdown is based was truly produced three weeks ago and has therefore already demonstrated its inherent inaccuracies, then not only should the entire UK population be made aware of the fact, but we are looking at either conspiracy on a massive scale (unlikely IMHO!) or – far more probable – incompetence by Boris et al on a similar scale.
I have just received an email notifying me of a Principia Science article which is relevant to this blog
https://principia-scientific.com/uks-govt-office-for-science-admits-no-proof-of-isolated-covid-19-virus/
It repeats a claim I have seen many times which is that the virus has not yet been isolated anywhere in the world. If this is true then how do we know what people are suffering from and how is any vaccine being developed? It repeats what I said about the PCR test.
It strengthens the points made by David in this blog.
An excellent article David which unfortunately even if the masses did have the opportunity to read your hard work in the newspapers, they would give up, bored after the third sentence, and alight on the next story such as;
” Dawn French, my battle with great big cream cakes and how I was almost harpooned in Iceland”
The fact is that if the government inflicted crippling taxes upon people who test positive for Covid-19, the rates of infection would fall drastically , especially those with �5.00 vouchers to encourage peopleto go out and eat junk food as long as it’s on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Ivor Cummings critique of the bad data and false assumptions being used to send us into the coming lockdown;
Apparently the expected figures for influenza have fallen through the floor in the USA due to the measures being taken against Covid. I looked for data on this in the UK but couldn’t find anything of much use.
If lockdown measures are preventing people from getting the seasonal flu between October and April, in spite of increased vaccination levels because the vaccine is less effective for the elderly who are the main recipients, the same should be happening for Covid, not so?
Moreover, there are around 1600 deaths a day in the UK, but we only see the daily deaths from Covid, which suggests confidence trickery to me, as so much of the other data does.