His alleged government statistics are so far from the actual figures issued by the UK government, that I am compelled to correct them.

Deaths from Covid in 2020 were 73512, and for 2021, 75112. These were verified from the government website, coronavirus.data.gov.uk. They were not the spurious 9,400 and 7851 total deaths alleged by John Clare.

For figures of elderly deaths, in 2020 there were 49325 of people eighty or over, and for 2021, 56568 were 75 or older. These figures are from the office of national statistics, ons.gov.uk, not the figures given as 17.371 and 13.590. for persons aged 65 or older which he alleged.

There is no basis either that during the flu periods, 300 – 350 people die every day. For the whole of 2018, 1598 died from flu, and for 2019 there were 1223 deaths. Source of this data, the British Medical Journal, bmj.co.uk. Surely these epidemics last considerably more than four days each year.

There was also a claim of a 600% increase of deaths in Scotland during lockdown periods. Up to the end of 2021, 9845 people died from Covid in Scotland, 0.18% of the population, in Wales, 6556 or 0.20%, in England that figure is 129041, 0.22% of the population. These are the UK government official figures from coronavirus.data.gov.uk . This is surely proof that extra lockdowns had saved lives, not cost lives, and there was no 600% increase in figures for Scotland as alleged.

Could I therefore suggest that the correspondent obtains his figures from genuine UK government sources, and not youtube or tiktok. He has recommended that we take another look at the UK government figures, which I have, so maybe if he does what he suggested that we should do, he will be good enough to retract his ridiculously erroneous letter.

Here in Portugal we are in the midst of a major Covid infection, almost the worst in Europe. Misleading letters with totally incorrect information on this subject do not help this situation.

Tony, Albufeira,

by email.