‘Distorted View’ of Life and Death in the UK: IDS Calls for End of Daily Coronavirus Death Reports

OLDHAM, UNITED KINGDOM - NOVEMBER 24: A man wearing a protective face mask walks past an i
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

Iain Duncan Smith has called for the government to end the reports of daily deaths from coronavirus because they cause Britons unnecessary anxiety and create a “distorted view of life in the UK and death”.

The number of deaths by the Chinese virus has fallen dramatically since January, yet the government continues to give out the statistics of fatalities. Since around mid-March, the figures have been in the double digits and since May, often in single-digit territory.

Sir Iain, the former leader of the Conservative Party, told GB News on Wednesday that he could not see the purpose of the daily reports, calling them “very selective”.

“For example, why are we reporting the death rates when coronavirus death rates are way down compared to pneumonia or other death rates from heart disease, etc., or even cancer? There’s a whole list of them with a higher death rate, but we don’t report those. So what we’re getting is a distorted view of life in the UK and death,” Mr Duncan Smith said.

“It seems only to be the idea there’s some crisis in our area over this, and this is the only issue we need to worry about. The truth is, we need to desperately, now, get back to the concept of living with the balance of risk. We live all our lives normally by making choices that balance risks,” Mr Duncan Smith said, continuing that the figures are leading Britons to believe that rather than having a myriad of risks people balance every day, that there is only “one risk, and that is coronavirus, and that is almost endless”.

Mr Duncan Smith also criticised the media for feeding the daily fear of the threat of coronavirus, with its “constant rolling scheme that says, ‘yea-number of people have died, yea-number of people have been infected’ without all the other balancing elements”.

“I don’t run the BBC, but I would certainly say, ‘Why are you constantly doing this?’ Because it simply just feeds people perspective that there is something to be desperately scared of and feared, when in actual fact we have a way out of all this,” he said.

This is not the first time Mr Duncan Smith had been critical of the government’s management of ending lockdown and how Britons have been “frightened” into accepting restrictions.

“My biggest fear is that the more we delay, the less likely we are to come out of this. We’ve got ourselves into a spiral of fear,” Duncan Smith said after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a delay to the end of restrictions from June 21st to July 19th.

“If we don’t unlock now, we will hurtle into September and then the scientists will all be saying ‘the winter, you mustn’t unlock during the winter’,” he warned.

Fellow Tory MP Sir Charles Walker had likewise predicted after the announcement that scientists on the influential Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) would hardly be likely to argue in favour of ending lockdown this month.

“I suspect over the next four weeks, you’ll see a concerted effort from SAGE scientists led by Sir Mark Walport and others to argue that July the 19th is not the time to open up. If you can’t open up in the middle of Summer, it is very unlikely that as we enter the ‘flu season in the Autumn that we’ll be opening up then. So I’m very pessimistic,” Sir Charles said.

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