Expert coder sets up site to collate data on coronavirus deaths in care homes that government is obscuring – but your help is needed to ensure it succeeds
Expert coder Paul Forsdick, furloughed during the lock-down and dismayed at the government’s lack of transparency over the scale of coronavirus deaths in the UK’s care homes, has taken the matter into his own hands.
Forsdick has put his skills to use, with the support of his employer and a UK data provider, and has created the COVID-19 in Carehomes website to allow care-home owners, managers and employees to report the number of infections and deaths among those they care for.
Those with data to report can enter or update their figures safely, without risking their identity being disclosed – and data received will be reported by town or postcode, so the people of the UK can begin to uncover the reality that Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock want to keep hidden.
Those countries in Europe that do report on deaths in care homes have found that around half of all coronavirus deaths in each country take place in care homes.
The UK government’s policy of sending even known-infected elderly patients back to care homes ill-equipped to care for them or to prevent the spread of infection among those intrinsically most vulnerable to the worst effects of COVID-19, means that the UK is likely to have just as great a proportion of deaths – and probably even worse.
That reality has prompted the Financial Times this week to echo the SKWAWKBOX’s warning that the real UK death toll is more than double the official figure, well over 40,000. But data are essential to verify and expose the true scale of the hidden carnage.
Forsdick, a professional coder who is on furlough from his job with Expectations Cruises, told the SKWAWKBOX:
The figures are going to cover nationwide and local information and will be available real-time, with the option to interrogate the data by postcode or town.
There’s a 10-day lag in the Office for National Statistics numbers and there are reasons for that, but when you have exponential growth going on like we appear to have in care homes, ten days is forever and the figures are never going to catch up to reality. So we’ve got to gather data fast and make it available quickly.
Explaining how he had been able to complete the programming and set up the site ready to receive data from any care home in the UK, Forsdick said:
My boss Phil Watson has been amazing, he’s an absolute legend, in spite of the impact of the pandemic on his business.
You find your care home by putting in your postcode, but we have safeguards in place and the bigger the dataset becomes, the less vulnerable it is to distortion. I’ve also got a system almost ready that will allocate a pin number to each home so that care-home managers or owners can update their numbers if they wish and we can keep the two sets of numbers in parallel.
We’ve got a database of the UK’s care homes. It was originally from the Care Quality Commission but James at [public sector data specialists] Oscar Research Limited has been brilliant – he cleaned up the data and provided us with a database that would normally cost about £2,000, absolutely free.
That database means we have the UK’s care homes by latitude and longitude as well as address.
Forsdick explained why he needs the help of politicians, media and the public, starting with SKWAWKBOX readers:
If we send out unsolicited emails to all these care homes, it’s not going to work. So we need people to start sharing the existence of the database, so people who work in or own care homes hear about it and can start to enter their data.
That can be politicians, media figures and best of all the public – sharing the existence of the site to their social networks so as many people in the care sector as possible hear about it as quickly as possible.
We know care home staff and owners are appalled at the lack of support they’re receiving from the government in spite of so many deaths, so now they’ll have a means of raising awareness of the general situation as well as their own specific circumstances.
Without their data, we can’t do anything. But with their data we can identify current and emerging hotspots and give local and national authorities the opportunity to act accordingly, for example rushing extra PPE [personal protective equipment] to areas where it’s going to be needed – instead of the balls-up they’ve made of the logistics up to now.
We can also learn so much about the spread and the speed of the outbreak – and it can also help with putting homes with outbreaks into isolation, which is going to be essential to get ahead of this epidemic.
Those kinds of decisions are not for me to make, but I can help gather the numbers and the data to give the people making the decisions the information they need.
And we can’t do that without a lot of people helping to spread the word and then those with information putting it in.
The SKWAWKBOX asks all its readers and followers to share this information urgently through their social media networks, to get the word out to those in the sector as fast and effectively as possible.
The site for reporting data is here.
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People should just disinfect on the sunbed with some domestos
Brian, if Trump’s unique advice had been even slightly accepted by enough of the public, Cummings + his johnson would have dripped same. This is a day of grieving for tens of thousands in the UK alone. The grieving is due to GOVERNMENT FAILURE.
NHS England’s Medical Director Stephen Powis, said that if deaths were kept below 20,000 then they would have “DONE VERY WELL.”
Today, DESPITE care home deaths ➕ deaths in the community still being EXCLUDED from daily press conference MISLEADING figures, UK hospitals DEATHS have now exceeded 20,000.
R.I.P. 711 more AVOIDABLE lives lost today in England, 47 in Scotland 47 and 23 in Wales.
NHS hospital deaths now total 18,084 in England, 1,231 in Scotland and 774 in Wales. Therefore, in LESS than TWO WEEKS, UK NHS hospital deaths have DOUBLED.
A TRUE Labour government would not have failed in this tragic manner. 🌹🌹🌹
So your saying Trump is wrong? Maybe just gargle TCP.
Seriously though, thanks for this, stay well and confusion to the enemy.
Brian, most humans are decent. They cannot imagine the depths at which the 1% crawl. The public are worn down by overwork and have little strength to remain uninfected by the deceased MSM & Tories A&B sides. Not ro mention bread & circuses. Different trinkets now. Same effect. Divert attention away from the engorged pigs … and the gaunt ones like the scrounging Dick Branson.
Key workers are exhausted, then distracted with banal tripe.
But i meant it. If enough of the public showed a tiny bit of attraction to Trump’s bleach injection + heat and light cure, then Cummings, his johnson and their “science” would suggest the same.
Many years ago now, an extremely high powered scenario planner told me, “if people knew the scenarios worked on, they would not sleep.”
You stay well too. We all need to stay well as all in the end is good. If people seize this opportunity to learn. 🌹🌹🌹
COVID19 Care Home Carnage. Wouldn’t be happening if Corbyn were two and a half years into his premiership- or even 4 ‘n’ a half months. G*d damn the Labour right.
People Power – making up for Tory incompetence and dysfunction and its total lack of adequate testing.
BRILLIANT PAUL FORSDICK 🏆🏆🏆 Three trillion cheers!!! Thought!!! Determination!!! Collective Action!!! What a relief to know there are people like you whose instinct is to act, inform with facts🌹🌹🌹
Only France, Italy, Spain, and the USA, had Covid-19 deaths known to exceed 20,000. Today, under a Dominic Cummings and johnson headed Tory Government “first” eleven, our UK has now joined the tragic quartet above.
Now our Tory infected UK makes a TRAGIC quintet.
Their chorus: Rampant self-serving Neo-Liberal Capitalism. Poor ravaging Globalism. Exploitative Outsourcing to profit driven scum Tax Exiles.
That is the tune of socially toxic Tory notes. Pernicious deadly Capitalist ideology. With confidence, 24 hour well orchestrated support, every single day, the MSM and the Labour Party right wing parasites that infest our party, broadcast their dirge of lies and myths, trying to hide deadly Tory incompetence and ideology. They can hide no longer. 🌹🌹🌹
I’ve only had experience of one care home for the elderly and that was in the late 90’s before I got old.
I remember early in this pandemic talk of warmer weather reducing CV19’s infectivity, but I don’t think it can be the higher temperatures – more likely the increased UV.
The care home I used to visit was stiflingly hot with not a whiff of fresh air. After five minutes I’d be drenched in sweat, finding breathing unpleasant and have to go into the garden to cool down.
I speak as someone who’s worked 8 hour shifts in 100 degree temperatures with a face mask, naked under a Tyvek suit.
The staff said the heat was necessary for the comfort of the residents and I couldn’t think of any reason for them to lie about it at the time, although it did cross my mind much later that it might have been a ploy to get rid of visitors as quickly as possible.
At that later date I was considering whether a care home death in the very early hours of Millennium Day might have been due to staff partying and residents over-tranquillised.
Now I’m wondering if the people who are currently dying in care homes are the ones who like me need cooler air to breathe comfortably.
If these care home figures are from anonymous contributors how do we know they are giving accurate figures? Do they have any knowledge of any care home? Could be just sitting in a restaurant in Hong Kong for all we know.
Sounds like a bit of a hysterical effort to bump up the death figures and create a synthetic hullabaloo. Like the piece about 100’s of fake websites supporting govt policy on cv healthcare never heard of that one again either. Old and sick are going to die anyway. All govt is a trade off between competing parties. As Comrade Joseph said (again) ” One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
Certainly, it obviously isn’t going to be a reliable alternative source. I’ll stick to the ONS – and also not try to distinguish ‘Corona’ mortality case-by-case from other causes – an impossible task. Being a ‘coder’ is no qualification for creating meaningful information about these Care Home deaths.
Meanwhile, there is also the shocking statistic of how little attention is being paid to the extension of government executive power and the flimsy rationale for some of it.
That was a ..joint venture for collaboration between our resident Conservative and unionist party posters… Sickening really and these two cretins bring the honesty and professionalism into question. Of a decent person trying to make a difference.
The self-righteous fantasising clown once again plays the role of the shouty drunk on the street corner ‘making a difference’ by …. yelling ‘Tory’ at every passer-by whilst waving a ‘Ye’re Doomed!’ placard.
This sort of ‘making a difference’ is on a par with Trump recommending that you inject yourself with bleach … or, at best, the sort of ‘difference’ that shouting at the population of Lewes made to their bonfire tradition … i.e : fuck all.
If you don’t know what’s wrong with this as a sensible proposal to really inform, I can’t help you. Blind gullibility mixed with nonsense and a dash of self-righteousness isn’t a definition of ‘socialism’. It needs grown-ups.
Noted RH and plain subject you both identified yourselves….I suppose Tory sympathisers and collaboration lets the mask drop,….or was it Cretins?
Vile
Excellent well done that man , just goes to show that despite the utterly despicable Tory twats and their voters/supporters there are still very many good and just people in our country that want a fair and honest society to live in .
Justice and recognition of ALL CV 19 related deaths , and that means ALL those deaths that have CV 19 as the underlying reason not just the direct cause .
These Tory bastards will be held to account and no amount of disinformation and propaganda by the Army ( ffs ! deployed against our own people ) or the usual MSM will remain water tight .
The same now needs to be done for the NHS and Care workers , in fact it should be all the critically important workers .The results and numbers needs to be rammed home again and again into the public’s consciousness as the public has a great tendency to easily forget !
They are few we are MANY.
Con vid 19 hasn’t been isolated so how does it count how many deaths have resulted, especially when W.H.O advise deaths should be put on death certificate as covid19 even if they die of a heart attack or in a car crash.
This is the biggest hoax in history, next hoax will be covid 20 when the children return to school that had installed 60hertz wigig technology which incedently is oxygen molecules deprivation targeted weaponry, it’s a combination of different ways to get the population down with Bill Gates trying his damdest to get everyone to be jabbed with toxic poisons, oh the numbers rise due to above and manditory vaccination take, incedently a big stock holder in rfid included in the shot, when the f*** are we going to wakeup
Vic UK
It’ll be dismissed by the toerags as unsubstantiated, carried out by an amateur.
There’ll be no definitive attribution to covid 19, and nobody will be able to prove otherwise.
As long as the government & it’s stooges have deniability, they’ll use it – even if the evidence is slapping people in the face.
Nobody’s died from austerity.
“unsubstantiated, carried out by an amateur”
A fair summary. ‘Toerag’ as a badge of truth!
boris driven by cummings are carrying out herd immunity killing off the elderly in care homes lack of testing deliberate passing the blame on yto others hospitals fear of the virus dying at home 50% die in hospital the other 50% hve life threatening side effects requiring permanent treat ment
‘Care Homes’ aka Boris’s Charnel Houses……..50% mortality figures? Why is that no surprise? Life in death’s waiting room is bleak at best, but ‘Care’ Homes are not part of the NHS; Staff are often not expertly trained nor qualified with little or no access to PPE. Isolation & Social distancing is next to impossible as constant & continual close contact is inevitable. In Spain, some Care Home workers abandoned their posts’, but I have nothing but the utmost respect for any ‘Care’ Worker who daily does the work that politicians would refuse to do & they do it for buttons before returning home to their family..
The ground for the mass cull of the elderly has been laid by MSM in its constant reference to a generation of privilege that ‘Never had it so good!’ Dangerous words designed to eliminate an entire generation in an inter-generational war.. The old & the vulnerable are a price worth paying.
I just went on his website and data isn’t searchable yet.
Maybe care homes don’t know about it yet – I’d guess maybe there isn’t a publicly available list of UK care homes that he could access to cc them all in an email.
If there were something like an online Yellow Pages I’d be willing to use my free minutes to tell care homes in my area about the existence of his website.
Google’s a waste of space when you want a list and not links to a bunch more money-grubbing clickbait search engines full of ads.
If I could help him online I would, but I don’t even know how to stop WordPress logging me out for no reason and preventing Chrome from remembering my password.
It occurred to me that while emails to care homes from a website owner might be treated as spam by care homes, maybe requests coming from members of the public might help – I don’t have a social media network so I emailed a local group of care homes.
Couldn’t hurt, could it?
Well done ✔ David MCNi and iTs good to see that the elderly are not being ignored even though the government would prefer it
Great to see you’re still alive Joseph, where would we be without your unthinking claptrap. A fine example of simplistic socialism and spouter of slogans and stupidity. A prayer of the working class. I’ve shown you are a fool once already, let us not have to repeat the process.
Another broadcast by the conservative and unionist party
The FT repeated “SKWAWKBOX’s warning that the real UK death toll is more than double the official figure, well over 40,000”.
But once the deaths FROM Covid-19 have been separated out from the deaths WITH Covid-19, then we’ll know who’s been fibbing…