Flawed data: Covid-19 death toll much lower than expected – The Wall Street Journal

In February, Covid-19 was a Chinese problem. By mid-March, Europe was starting to lock down cities and by mid-April much of the world was heading into an extended shutdown in the interests of saving lives and reducing the burden on healthcare systems. But by mid-April it is also clear that the world is facing a severe economic crisis. The British economy is expected to shrink by as much as 35% this quarter and the United Nations is warning that Covid-19 will push 29m Africans into extreme poverty. In South Africa, people are so hungry that even hardened gangsters appear to be using their usual distribution channels for drugs to get parcels of food into communities. The forecast from the South African Reserve Bank is for the domestic economy to shrink by about 6% this year, but it could easily be more. In the meantime, people are being laid off en masse and business owners are having sleepless nights wondering how their entities will survive this prolonged period of enforced idle. All governments have relied heavily on numbers produced by the World Health Organization and statistics modelling by medical experts. The Wall Street Journal raises the distinct possibility that the numbers are so flawed that lockdowns of the order we have seen have not been necessary. – Jackie Cameron

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