In the New European, Michael White of the Guardian writes:

The painful fact is that both administrations look unimpressive from the outside and have done much in near lockstep during the pandemic, including the latest Spanish quarantine. Strip out England’s less populated regions along with the Highlands and Borders and the Covid casualty rates in dense urban areas and care homes won’t be very different.

As I rebut the same lie day-after-day, it feels like I’m batting back balls fired at me by a tennis machine but hey, you never know, I might correct the thinking of even just one more reader, if I keep going.

This time it’s Nazi dentist lookalike, Michael White, making the above outrageous comment. He has no actual evidence to offer of course and I suspect he’s still using, like Sky News’ Adam Boulton, the data from the first phase of the outbreak in March and April before the Scottish Government strategy kicked in.

So, once more the facts:

The ‘casualty rates’ after leaving the initial lock-step are very different:

Scotland had zero deaths in the last 14 days and had only six in the previous 14. England is on a plateau with 65.7 deaths, on average every day.

The ‘casualty rates’ for the whole outbreak are now very different too:

After months of fast declining infection and deaths here, even the gap between Scotland and England’s total figures has widened too far to be ignored.

England has ten times the population so if performance was to be similar, the total number of cases and deaths would also be ten times higher but they are not, by any means.

Scotland has had 18 694 cases so if all things were equal, England would have had 186 940 but had 263 602, 41% higher.

Scotland has had 2 491 deaths so if all things were equal, England would have had 24 910 but has 41 598, 67% higher.