I liked the moments of wit and humor from both Matt and Toby, in the Spectator debate, and I think both had reasonable points regarding the sloppiness of statistics at this stage of the pandemic. I did find Tony's theory of falsified death certificates (likely this is a serious felony, and therefore a serious allegation) to garner a government check for the hospital, both specious (evidence?) and quite the insult to the medical professionals who work themselves to exhaustion keeping people alive. I've seen evidence, from various medical experts, that the death certificate problem goes in the opposite direction and have posted links here on the matter. As Bo notes, many deaths were of untested persons and logged as pneumonia, heart failure, kidney failure, and so on. This is why, and this cannot be stressed too strongly, that a different method of statistical capture is needed, like excess deaths.
Finally, Toby rests a lot of his theory (one rejected by epidemiologists) on the notion that lockdowns have no measurable effect, as if epidemiologists are sorely in need of a parallel universe with no lockdowns or else they have no method of statistical analysis or modeling. This is not really how epidemiology works, and Toby should devote more study to how it actually does.
My own reading is that lockdowns aren't necessary in locations where everyone agrees on honoring social distancing and mutual masking and universal testing and contact tracing is implemented. What's sad is that we need lockdowns because our culture is so divided and so many distrust scientific common sense that any first year nursing student can grasp. If we really protected the old and diabetic and medically fragile, made sure they were placed out of harms way, then sure, certain forms of recreation and commerce would be far more safely achieved.
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