Having a decent following and being a doctor doesn’t necessarily make you a good analyst.
If you were digging into these numbers, anyone with any kind of credibility would be looking for data further back to check pre pandemic numbers (was one year pre pandemic representative generally? A few more years data would help) to make better sense of the supposed huge increase in the last few years and questioning whether that was a legit rise or not. Rather than essentially saying ‘here’s a very select set of data that “someone” has given me, look at the increase…hmmm’.
Then you’d sense check those numbers and think “1 in 7 of the population going to hospital for heart trouble in the last few years, does feel right”? As I said, I’m no doctor, but just thinking about the street I live on, has someone from every 3rd household been in hospital for a heart problem recently? Absolutely not. Do people go to hospital at that kind of rate for any reason at all? I really doubt it.
So you’d question those numbers…there’s so many variables in how those kind of things could be counted, collated and reported that you don’t know from that at all, that again, anyone worth their salt would be looking into much more deeply before suggesting anything, first.
I feel the grift is strong with this one.
As someone who spent part of my career as an analyst in a clinical audit and research team at an acute hospital trust, helping doctors and other clinicians design date collection tools and analyse and present data, I can confirm that a medical degree is no guarantee whatsoever of having any grasp of statistics (particularly around probability as several overturned infanticide verdicts based on expert medical testimony shows).
Public health consultants are generally lots better as they have to have some grasp of epidemiology. Hospital consultants (particularly surgeons for some reason) the worst. I think it's to do with specialising into a very narrow field of expertise.
Matey in the video has seized gleefully on something that seems to confirm a pre-conceived idea and not at any stage thought, "Hold on that looks a bit odd? Are we sure tens of thousands of people locally are arriving at hospital with heart failure each year and only a couple of hundred are getting discharged. WTF happened to the rest of them?"
A bit embarrassing for the Trust that issued the response to the FOI. The BI team want their arses kicking for not sense checking their outputs.