1/42 Good to see yesterday’s @thetimes editorial attacking the pandemic of covid misinformation. Here’s my twitter contribution to fighting it, as suggested. Lockdown and covid sceptics continue to consistently misuse cherry picked data to argue NHS not unusually busy.

2/42 NHS trust leaders believe this disinformation is profoundly disrespectful to staff and risks reducing vital compliance with restrictions on social contact. Below is a long two part thread answering the main "NHS not unusually busy" and other NHS related disinformation.

3/42 Much of the disinformation comes from simplistic year on year percentage comparisons of data. Some types of NHS demand are flat or lower year on year. But it’s a huge distortion to argue that these individual statistics mean the NHS is not unusually busy.

4/42 For example, there ARE much lower levels of winter flu year - a global phenomenon. There ARE fewer elective operations - because of covid pressures. And there are many other examples. But there are five problems with cherry-picking/using these individual datasets.

5/42 1. They do not capture anything like the current total level of NHS demand which is very differently shaped due to COVID-19. Traditional, existing, NHS datasets were built to reflect “normal” levels of demand, “normal” operations and "normal" capacity. This isn’t normal.

1/13 Doubt anyone who should read this will, but here goes-We had @FOXnews on 24/7 every day for years.
Recorded so many great shows to watch when we had time at night.
Then BOOM
-They fired Glenn Beck
-Then the Meghan Kelly fiasco
-Then Brett Baier's show died
-Then they fired

@davewiner, https://t.co/LXMj1pRHP8:
"The epitaph of the United States may be that the idea of the rugged individualist was a lie, there never were any, and in the age of air travel and medicine we’re all very connected, our well-being depends on other people’s well-being."

John Wesley Powell tried to expose the lie in the late 1870s. Wallace Stegner wrote about it, at length, in "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian". Recommended.

"...individual initiative and individual labor and individual capital were inadequate to develop the irrigation works needed on an arid-belt farm unless the farm were located high on the headwaters of a small stream..."

"The inflexible fact of aridity lay like a fence along the 100th meridian. From approximately that line on, more than individual initiative was needed to break the wilderness."

"Powell’s way was a way tested by New England barn raisings and corn huskings ... tested even more fully by the Mormon experience of thirty years and the New Mexican experience of ten generations."

For some non-Covid news, and as a bit of recent political history, I’ve been released more than 100 pages of internal press office communications relating to the Home Office’s fried chicken box saga.

You may remember back in heady 2019 that there was an uproar after the government provided takeaway boxes with anti-knife crime messages to chicken shops around the country.

The campaign faced an immediate backlash, with critics questioning why fried chicken shops — stereotypically associated with young black communities — were being targeted by the Home Office for this campaign against knife crime.

The emails I’ve been released show that privately, officials admitted that the outcry risked angering the communities the campaign was trying to reach out to.

A briefing prepared by a Home Office official highlighted that they were “unsure what could be done publicly” to rebuff the criticism, and that the campaign’s focus on chicken boxes had created a perception that the campaign had “publicised racist stereotypes”.

1. - Gator Comms Post Election
11/11/2020 Minnesota deer hunter bags 10-point buck — and an alligator
"odd chain of the events from Saturday’s firearm hunting opener"
https://t.co/aorxJ8hYib
Hunting Opener.