One man and his spreadsheet.
Meet Joel Smalley
Meet @RealJoelSmalley. Joel variously describes himself as “a Blockchain architect and early stage, polymath data-driven technologist, specializing in fintech, healthtech and IoT” and, more recently, as an “expert quantitative analyst.” I think we may safely assume that he does not suffer from low self-esteem.
Personally, what I would describe Joel as is an angry man on the internet with a spreadsheet. If you know me personally then the words “pot, kettle and black” will be pursed on your lips. But bear with me, because here is Joel’s most egregious “quantitative analysis” to date:
So let’s take the features of this chart one by one:
Exhibit A: “Benchmark slope derived from 5-year average”
Derived. As in it’s not the five year average. Which is fine. But Joel doesn’t seem to want to explain exactly how he’s derived it. Or even approximately how he’s derived it. He has, after all, “more important things to do than argue the toss with bedwetters”.
All we know about Joel’s benchmark is that it higher than the actual five year average, and that it doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to it in terms of shape. I note that it starts in the first week the UK recorded a COVID death which presumably is significant. But I cannot even begin to image what sort of magic adjustments to the “benchmark” would need involve actual COVID deaths.
Exhibit B: “Displaced/Misdiagnosed COVID”
Yes, you read that right. Joel says 27% of COVID deaths aren’t actually COVID deaths at all. Let’s be clear, these data — before be they were “processed” by Joel — where derived from death certificates. They are not the Public Health England definition of COVID deaths. The death of someone that had COVID19 and recovered, but then got run over by a bus 27 days after a positive test, would not be included. These are data from death certificates, filled out by attending physicians based on their assessment of the symptoms and any additional diagnostic information available to them; i.e. test results.
I am guessing Joel’s Yeadonism — i.e. sincerely held (but mistaken) belief that PCR-based testing is massively inflating COVID infection figures — comes into play in here. But, again, we are left without explanation. So we must just take Joel’s word for the fact that 27% of COVID deaths are “doubtful”.
My response to that would be that if it walks like COVID, quacks like COVID, has COVID genetic material, and — in the opinion of the attending physician (who admittedly probably doesn’t have as much experience in Joel in the field of Blockchain) — was COVID, then it probably was.
Exhibit C: “COVID that causes real excess”
Joel is prepared to admit that some people do actually die of COVID. But in order that the effect doesn’t stand out to much on his chart he has plotted them at the bottom of his stacked column chart; otherwise we might notice that — despite Joel’s inflating of the baseline and dismissing of a quarter of all COVID deaths (“because reasons”) — even his “data” shows COVID deaths are still numerous enough to account for almost all of the excess deaths in England this autumn.
Maybe I am being too cynical. Maybe the chart just came out that way. Maybe an “expert quantitative analyst” doesn’t know how to re-order a series in an Excel chart.
In reality…
I don’t happen to have England-only data in my spreadsheet, and I haven’t the energy to filter out Wales for the purposes of this post. So you’ll excuse me if I post England + Wales data in response to Joel’s “true picture” of England.
In each week in November (for which we currently have data) excess death were 8–11% higher not just than the five year average, but than the corresponding week in any of the preceding five years. That’s an average of over 1,100 extra dead people a week over and above the worst number of dead people we’ve seen in half a decade.
Now, I’ll freely admit that I have removed spring from the above chart to drive home a point. Because compared to spring autumn might look normal. But it isn’t normal. Not in any sense of the word. And don’t let charlatan’s like @RealJoelSmalley tell you that it is.
