Reader Clydebuilt reminded me this morning that Herald writer Mark Smith once wrote: ‘The Saltire makes me cringe.’ I searched but got Leask instead. I clicked on his link and got this: I searched again but it’s not there. Continue reading Does Mark Smith make the Herald cringe now?
I can’t watch BBC Scotland’s new cub-reporter, David Wallace Lockhart. The caricatured accent and over-elocuted mouth-stretching is just too much for me. I know, I’m being superficial. Luckily he’s writing for their website too so I can give his utterances the respect they deserve. He has clearly learned quickly from Lisa Summers on how to take a single traumatic incident, present it with melodrama, foreground angry relatives, leave key explanatory context out, or till later, and imply it must be part of a wider crisis for which the government of the day must be blamed. He’s written this: Straight-off, I … Continue reading BBC Scotland’s new boy learns how to exploit personal trauma
Smith has a theory about Scotland. As you might expect from a Herald writer, he’s not using Scottish data for evidence: Ooooh, interesting. Would it be worth having a look at Scottish data? I’ll do it for you: So more SNP supporters support the SG’s canny, stay-at-home, message than Tories do. It’s a bit narrower than the UK figures Smith prefers, above. Maybe SNP supporters tend to approve of an SNP government without it telling you that much about their deeper preferences? Wait, what’s this? The figures are exactly the same for Scottish Labour and Conservative voters. Is that a … Continue reading Scottish Tories in love with lockdown too
The Herald ‘owned by Newsquest, one of the UK’s biggest newspaper and website publishers’ is today the media arm of a pre-emptive strike by the private care home industry to try to transfer responsibility for their failures onto the Scottish Government. In this report spokespersons for the industry are able to distort the truth unchallenged by the reporter. First, the ‘damning critique’ in the sub-title, comes from Scottish Care, described quite misleadingly as ‘Scotland’s main care body’ when they are merely, as they put it themselves, ‘the voice of the independent care sector.’ Entirely unchallenged by the reporter, the group attempts to blame the Scottish Government for their own … Continue reading Covid-19 crisis: the faked story: care home industry hits out in panic as ‘chickens come home to roost’
By stewartb It is becoming very clear that we the voters in Scotland need to understand better the nature of the commercial care home industry. Just as most of us have a deep concern for the NHS and its public service ethos, we need to make the future of care for the elderly and the vulnerable in Scotland a key part of the policy debate in our politics. However, we need to be wary – whether it’s in the context of response to the pandemic or more widely on elderly care provision – of political opponents of the Scottish Government … Continue reading Why Scotland’s private care homes were all-too-keen to take hospital discharges
414 000 visits in May, up from 330 000 in April and up for the ninth month in a row. Reach: Posts with most views: Continue reading May Statistics for TuSC
In the Herald: Scotland’s coronavirus death rate is one of the worst in the world, according to a statistics expert. The situation in Scotland has been described as ‘particularly acute’, according to Jamie Jenkins, former head of analysis for the ONS. He told The Sunday Times that the excess death rate of people in Scotland, which tracks deaths above the normal level, is higher than Italy and the United States, however is lower than the UK as a whole. Here’s the situation in Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ At the peak of the infection in April, Scotland’s death rate was one of the lowest in Europe: Over the last … Continue reading Herald’s statistics expert means to say Scotland’s coronavirus death rate is by no means worst in world
From Professor Sean Danaher, Northumbria University, in Progressive Pulse on 29th May: In Fig. 4 excess z-scores for Britain and Ireland are plotted. The average z-scores from week 10-20 are: England 19.89 Scotland 7.63 Wales 7.07 Northern Ireland 3.31 http://www.progressivepulse.org/politics/covid-19-is-the-uk-response-improving Continue reading To counter today’s misleading reports, accurate measures of covid-related death levels in England are approaching THREE TIMES HIGHER than in Scotland
Talking to Arlene Foster, this morning, Marr says the deaths rates are: In N Ireland: 26 per 100 000 46 per 100 000 in England and Wales 51 in Scotland The source is not declared. Given the devolved covid-19 strategies, it’s not clear why the England & Wales figures are grouped. Anyhow the actual figures are: From worldometers in https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker/ So per 100 000 Scotland 43.3 England 61.1 Wales 42.4 N Ireland 27.8 And, of course, even these figures are unreliable compared with the excess mortality scores or Z-scores: Z-scores:England: peak 43.5 in week 15, now 31.52 in week 18Scotland: … Continue reading Andrew Marr gets the death rates all wrong to conceal England’s figures
By Brenda Steele: What the purpose of the event was remains unknown. A new product line? The upcoming Olympics (since postponed)? Who knows. I would suspect that for the participants the event passed off as these things do – and it was only in the following days that they learned that all had not been as it seemed. On Sunday March 1st an announcement in Business Insider reported on the closure of the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton Oregon for deep cleaning out of “an abundance of caution”. Mention was made of Covid19 cases in Lake Oswego Oregon which Googlemaps … Continue reading Who brought Covid-19 to the Edinburgh Nike event? Nike HQs announce deep cleaning before Scottish Government informed
