The Sunday Times - UK (2021-12-19)

The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 27

NEWS REVIEW

Phwoar! Look at the vital statistics on these lads

Unassuming data-crunchers

have become smoking-hot

heroes during the pandemic.

Ed Cumming is enamoured

direct way when the numbers

can kill your grandma.

During the first wave I

found myself explaining

things like the R value and

Simpson’s paradox and

Bayes’s theorem to people.

Rather than them going ‘lol

nerd’ or pretending they

were too stupid to get it, they

actually listened and tried to

understand.”

What a difference a

pandemic makes. As the

maths professor and author

Hannah Fry — a woman — put

it, replying to a tweet

questioning the hotness of

mathematicians: “I’ve never

met a person who was good

at maths that wasn’t hot in

some way.” You can’t argue

with science.

So who are these hot data

lads? Where have they come

from, and where are they

going?

Adam Kucharski, 35

Twitter followers: 139,100

A blond, blue-eyed

epidemiologist at the London

School of Hygiene and

Tropical Medicine, Kucharski

has been one of the media

stars of the pandemic. His

book The Rules of Contagion is

an accessible, wide-ranging

look at how and why some

things spread — from ideas to

STIs to fake news — and

others don’t. The gospel

according to Kucharski is

spreading nicely.

Professor Neil Ferguson, 53

Followers: 139,500

The original Sage sage, a

distinguished and

internationally respected

professor, head of the

department of infectious

disease epidemiology at

Imperial College London,

among other big jobs, whose

advice was influential on

government policy in the

early days of Covid. That was

before he had to resign when

he was caught breaking

lockdown rules to see his

lover. It displayed a startling

devil-may-care attitude and

raised the alarming

possibility that the data set

might occasionally have sex.

John Burn-Murdoch, 33

Followers: 412,500

The FT has always had a few

charts. Mostly they have

tended to be about global oil

supply or price-to-earnings

ratios, but it meant that the

data team was well

positioned to supply the

burgeoning demand for

charts and graphs. The

graphs boy-wizard Burn-

Murdoch, the paper’s chief

data reporter, has been the

captain of this ship, strapped

to the mast as it steers into

the storm of misinformation.

He hasn’t stopped innovating

either: last week he was

found hosting a Twitter

Spaces audio discussion on

the spread of Omicron. Along

with Joe Wicks and banana

bread, one of the pandemic’s

true breakout stars.

Max Roser, 38

Followers: 272,400

The founder of Our World in

Data, which collates and

displays robust statistics on

all kinds of subject, the

German-born Oxford

professor was already a pin-

up in data-land before Covid.

But the pandemic provided a

perfect showcase. He has a

winning smile and is known

to favour a leather jacket.

Tim Harford, 48

Followers: 189,900

Radio 4 listeners and FT

readers were already familiar

with Harford. His Undercover

Economist column is a fixture

in the paper’s Weekend

magazine and he has hosted

the BBC’s statistics explainer

programme More or Less

since 2007. A natural

broadcaster with an eclectic

the science news for readers

of The Times, Whipple, a

Cambridge maths graduate,

has spent a decent chunk of

the past 18 months beefing

with people who have wilfully

misunderstood the stats to

make a political point —

naming no names, Toby

Young. Whipple is under no

illusions that this “moment in

the sun” for mathematicians

won’t last. “It will pass,” he

says, “and we will once again

not be considered cool.

Fundamentally, maths

people aren’t cool. And that’s

fine, because they’re right.”

Tom Calver, 28

Followers: 5,400

With Whipple and Chivers,

part of a triumvirate of

young(ish) data experts

called Tom who have become

prominent over the

pandemic. At 28, The Sunday

Times’s data projects editor is

the youngest on the list, with

a brooding, immaculately

coiffed byline photo that

stares out over dozens of

well-informed stories about

Covid. “Before the pandemic

I was sort of a data machine,”

he says. “I think people

probably thought my job was

something dry to do with the

IT department. Now I have

friends texting me asking if

Christmas is going to be OK.

It’s quite surreal. Everyone

needs a data journalist in

their life.”

How the data set

stacks up: bottom

row from left, Tim

Harford, John

Burn-Murdoch,

Max Roser, Tom

Chivers. Middle

row, Adam

Kucharski, Tom

Calver, Neil

Ferguson. Top,

Tom Whipple

range of interests and a knack

for making complicated ideas

simple to understand. His

latest book is How to Make the

World Add Up.

Tom Chivers, 38

Followers: 55,700

The science editor of UnHerd.

In his personal life a big fan of

Warhammer, Sir Terry

Pratchett and Faith No More.

In public a patient taker-

down of unscientific takes

and an embracer of

uncertainty. His book How to

Read Numbers was pitched

before the pandemic but

found itself in favourable

tailwinds.

Tom Whipple, 39

Followers: 23,800

When not patiently laying out

The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 27

years for a vital operation, and some-

times die waiting. After an 81-hour week-

end shift, it was not uncommon for doc-

tors to fall asleep at the wheel. Several of

my colleagues crumpled under the stress

and took their lives.

I didn’t just blame the politicians and

the taxpayers. The medical establish-

ment was equally culpable, preferring to

keep doctors at a low number so consult-

ants could get a decent slice of a limited

private cake. They preferred to cover up

patient harm rather than shout if from

the rooftops. I took a contrary view.

In 1991, I followed Ian Hislop into a lav-

atory and emerged as Private Eye’s medi-

cal correspondent, “MD”. Shortly after,

junior doctors at the Bristol Royal Infir-

mary told me that so many babies were

dying after heart surgery there, they nick-

named the unit the Killing Fields. I man-

aged to get access the data showing that

Bristol was getting far worse results than

other units. Everyone knew about it apart

from the poor parents.

I wrote about it repeatedly in Private

Eye, but nobody stepped in to investi-

gate. Operations continued for another

three years. A public inquiry concluded

nine years after I had broken the story

that dozens of babies had died avoidably.

The inquiry made 198 recommendations

to make the NHS the most safe, effective,

compassionate and patient-centred

health service in the world. We would put

the welfare of babies and children first.

And yet our pandemic plan has been

children last. We have harmed their

health and education and subjected

some to unscrutinised lockdown abuse.

Childhood obesity has got even worse. I

support a public inquiry into our han-

dling of the pandemic, but I have no great

expectation it will change anything or

make us better prepared for the next pan-

demic, particularly if it arrives before the

inquiry concludes.

Today, many people can’t even access

care, never mind the quality of it. But we

don’t need to dismantle the NHS, we

need to staff it safely. We need to start

with a proper, costed workforce plan for

now and the future. If we put even more

money into healthcare, we need to prove

it’s being spent on frontline care that is

proven to work, not spaffed up against a

wall of political donors acting as dodgy

PPE middlemen.

There is good evidence that safe staff-

ing levels deliver better care, and that

continuity of care and a long-standing

relationship with your GP or nurse is

hugely beneficial to your health. It’s

much more rewarding for health profes-

sionals too. Alas, they don’t grow on trees

and there’s a global shortage. There’s a

limit to how many we can steal from

countries who may need them more. No

matter how much money we throw at the

NHS in a pandemic panic, this tanker

won’t be turned around quickly.

What we can all improve is our own

health. Reducing your risk of serious

Covid illness is important (yes, get boost-

ered) but it’s just one risk. If you’re

deconditioned by lockdown, the stairs

can be as dangerous as Sars. Clear the

house of trip hazards. Don’t cold-call the

elderly and ask them to read the meter. If

you’re getting frail, practise going to

ground and getting up again. I’ve lost

count of the lives I’ve seen ruined by falls.

Then there’s the junk food, alcohol

and cigarettes that cause far more self-

harm and burden on the NHS than Covid

ever will. Cut back on those and you

might even save yourself, your Christmas

and your NHS.

Phil Hammond is an NHS doctor and the

author of Dr Hammond’s Covid Casebook.

He will appear at the 2022 Edinburgh

Fringe in Dr Hammond’s Covid Inquiry

and 37 Years to Save the NHS

NEWS REVIEW

Even before the pandemic,

the NHS couldn’t care for us

all properly. Maybe we should

spend the taxpayers’ billions

on our education

system instead, writes

Dr Phil Hammond

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O

ne of my oldest friends has

thus far managed to escape

Covid but not Parkinson’s

disease. In October, way

before Omicron, he fell over.

He spent 12 hours on the

floor waiting for an ambu-

lance and developed pres-

sure sores. He eventually got

to hospital but was rapidly

discharged because they needed the bed.

He fell over again.

This time, he broke his arm. He waited

nine hours for an ambulance and a fur-

ther three in the back of it outside the

emergency department because there

were no beds. The delay and his tremor

made it harder for the fracture to heal. He

is now in a care home, waiting for physio-

therapy. He’s lost his independence but

kept his sense of humour. “At least I did

my bit to protect the NHS.”

“Protect the NHS” sounds like the

team name for an illegal Downing Street

quiz, but it won’t be winning any prizes

for patient safety.

The fact is, the NHS, as was the case

long before the pandemic, is woefully

understaffed. Even more billions have

been thrown at the system, but, as ever,

so little of it finds its way to the frontline

carers we all clapped for.

The NHS is, currently, a National Sick-

ness Service. It is always fighting a losing

battle. Perhaps, if money is to be thrown,

it should go, instead, to early-years edu-

cation and parenting support, helping us

to grow healthier citizens — reducing the

future burden on our health system. But

we are a long way from there at this

moment.

When the government first asked us to

protect the NHS, it may as well have said:

“Stay at home, die alone, protect the

NHS.” Thousands of people have done

just that since the pandemic started, for

reasons not fully understood. They may

have had Covid or non-Covid diseases, or

both. They didn’t ask for, or couldn’t

find, help when they were seriously ill.

They followed their “stay at home”

orders.

My wife’s uncle, an old soldier, was

bereaved shortly before the pandemic

but was coping well on his own, with

good friends who stocked up his fridge

and freezer and made sure he had access

to his favourite sport and comedy chan-

nels. He was well set up for lockdown,

until someone phoned asking him to sub-

mit a meter reading. He went into the

garage with a stepladder, fell off and

broke his hip. When a friend discovered

him, he was very reluctant to bother the

NHS, despite the pain. He eventually

went in, and had a successful fracture

repair before being transferred to a reha-

bilitation ward where he caught Covid

and died.

The comments section under this col-

umn online will be full of similar heart-

break. The NHS does some amazing

things but the truth is it has never had the

staff nor capacity — and sometimes not

the culture — to provide safe, effective

and timely care to all its citizens. In 1992,

as an angry junior doctor, I stood against

William Waldegrave, then the health

secretary, in the general election in Bris-

tol West. My message was simple: “Sort

your own shit out and staff the NHS.” I got

87 votes.

We still have fewer healthcare profes-

sionals and beds per head of the popula-

tion than most other comparable coun-

tries. Before the pandemic, a friend in

Munich was complaining about the cost

of his health insurance when so many

beds lay empty in Germany. He’s not

complaining now. We could build extra

capacity into the NHS, but as we discov-

ered with Nightingale hospitals, extra

beds are wasteful and useless if you don’t

have the staff.

WE’RE BEING ASKED TO SAVE

THE NHS AGAIN. BUT ISN’T IT

SUPPOSED TO SAVE US?

We also have appalling levels of public

health inequality. The rich live a decade

longer than the poor, and the poor suffer

20 more years of chronic disease and

NHS dependency. No health service can

cope with such high demands, many of

them avoidable. We spend a fortune on

our National Sickness Service trying to

rescue people from the river of illness,

often unsuccessfully. We need to wander

upstream and stop them falling in. If you

get antenatal care and birth right, bring a

child up with curiosity but not cruelty,

and give them access to good food and

great schools, most will be healthy for

life. This is why I would put money into

education before the NHS.

The advantages of prevention over

cure are crystal clear with Covid. My

friends working in intensive care have

spent a fortune and sacrificed their

own health trying to keep patients

with Covid alive for 50 days or more.

At the start, more than half of them

died — so not a great return on invest-

ment — but even as Covid treatment

has improved, survivors are left with

lifelong disability. And yet many now in

intensive care with Covid wouldn’t be

there if they had been vaccinated. We

have so few staffed intensive care beds in

the NHS that there is often no spare

capacity. A single patient with Covid in

intensive care for the long term can mean

dozens of cancer and cardiac operations

have to be cancelled. No wonder the staff

are angry and exasperated.

J

ust as we didn’t plan properly for

Covid, we have never had a proper

workforce plan for the NHS to esti-

mate what staff increases we need to

cope with an ageing, anxious and

increasingly isolated population chock

full of chronic diseases. How did we get in

this mess?

When I qualified as a doctor in 1987, we

were paid only a third of our hourly rate

for overtime, so it was cheaper to

employ one doctor to work 120 hours

a week than three doctors to work

40 each. The result was predicta-

ble carnage. Overworked and

unsupervised juniors caused wide-

spread avoidable harm to patients,

which in those days was easily cov-

ered up. There was no social media

and you had to be rich and healthy to

sue a doctor, because it would drag on

for years. Patients would wait for two

Britain clapped

the NHS during

lockdown but

what it really

needs is for

people to stop

becoming ill in

the first place

I

t is arguably one of the

most bewildering trends of

the pandemic: the nerds

have become cool. Data

scientists were important,

but they were fringe figures,

labouring over Excel sheets in

dark corners. In newspaper

offices the “data reporter”

was the forgotten cousin of

the foreign correspondent or

political columnist.

Occasionally they might be

summoned to pronounce on

a by-election or financial

crisis, but mostly they were

left to their own (plentiful,

electronic) devices.

These lads — and they do

tend to be lads — have

become rock stars. Some

have hundreds of thousands

of followers on social media.

They are pumping out

bestselling books, TV shows

and radio gigs, even sold-out

live tours. What’s more, it

turns out that, far from the

four-eyed abacus-monkey of

legend, the data

demographer is in most cases

clean-cut and, do you know,

not too bad-looking. What on

earth is going on?

“I would say these sorts of

role were not perceived as

particularly glamorous in the

past, but we are now moving

towards where they should

always have been,” says John

Burn-Murdoch, the Financial

Times’s chartmaker-in-chief

and figurehead of the young

maths-daddy movement. “A

couple of years ago if you told

someone you were a data

journalist you’d get

somewhere between a bad

and a neutral reaction.

“Now I have people asking

me how to get into this type

of work, and old

schoolfriends writing to me

to say their mum had sent

them one of my charts.” Last

week he had more than 3,000

retweets of his prediction

about the Omicron spike.

Tom Chivers, a science

journalist for the website

UnHerd, has also noticed

growing interest in his work.

“There’s a natural tendency

to associate numbers and

maths and science with

smelly boys with bad hair

who play Warhammer, and a

tendency to associate art and

literature with cool, good-

looking people who go to

parties,” he says. “But

numbers matter in a more