Paul Taylor

The publication in February of the Francis Report into the failings of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was the worst of the many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the findings of a previous inquiry, commissioned by the Labour health minister.

In December 2013 the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology announced an inquiry into the efficacy of screening for cancer. ‘The NHS spends a significant amount of money on health screening,’ Andrew Miller, the chair of the committee, said, ‘and it is important that this is underpinned by good scientific evidence.’ But the awkward truth is that much of the evidence is contested. The argument over breast cancer screening has been going on for decades, often bad-temperedly, and concerns not just the efficacy of the screening itself but its potential to do harm as well as good.

The conventional way of writing, say, a chess program has been to identify and encode the principles underpinning sound play. That isn’t the way DeepMind’s software works. DQN doesn’t know how to repel an invasion. It doesn’t know that the electronic signals it is processing depict aliens. DeepMind searches the game data for correlations, which it interprets as significant features.

Patients​ often complain that their GP spends more time typing and looking at a computer screen than listening to them. This isn’t really new: doctors have kept records of their encounters with patients since the time of Hippocrates. But changes in record-keeping practices have both reflected and enabled the development of modern scientific medicine, which is less concerned with...

The argument between mitigation and suppression now seems to have been settled in favour of the latter. But when the lockdown ends, a calculation will still have to be made about the relative merits of unappealing alternatives. The poor public understanding of mortality rates won’t make this any easier. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that two very different numbers are reported: daily totals of confirmed cases who died in hospital and weekly totals of later registrations, including many, perhaps 18 per cent of the total, who died outside hospital. The reporting of the epidemic also fails to place deaths from the virus in the context of normal mortality rates. When you read the daily updates of the number of hospital deaths, you aren’t reminded that last year, in England, an average of 1360 people died every day, a total of 496,354 for the year. In London right now, the death rate is way above normal, but for the UK as a whole the number of deaths in March 2020 was lower than in the same month last year.