‘We don’t ruin lives because of cancer’ – Brexiteer calls for economy to stay open over Covid-19

“If Covid hadn’t existed then a large number of those people who died, bearing in mind the average age of death is 82, many of those would have had on their death certificate [that they died of] pneumonia or flu,” he told host Ian Collins.

“You need to put it into context.

“Unfortunately, no one in government is reminding anybody that sadly 1,650 people die in the UK every day. Every death is a tragedy but here we’ve got about 40 to 50 people dying of Covid every day. That’s about three percent.

“Cancer deals with 300. We don’t shut down the economy, we don’t ruin people’s lives because of cancer deaths.”

He then slammed Downing Street, accusing it of being led by a “cabinet of cowards”.

“There is so much good news out there,” he added, “which is why the death rate is so much lower, thankfully.

“The government is continuing to scare and terrify people when really they should be giving confidence to people and say ‘yes, it’s dangerous to a tiny, tiny minority of the people, but for the vast majority of people you will have no symptoms or unpleasant flu-like symptoms’.”

He called on ministers to remind the public that the average age of people dying from coronavirus was 81 or 82, which is the same as the average life expectancy. 

“We have a cabinet of cowards at the moment who are simply not recognising that the only guarantee in life is that it will come to an end at some point,” he said.

“There are some members of the cabinet who are rather enjoying ordering people around of telling them what to do.”

J Vandenbroek tweeted: “‘Only’ 48,168 Covid deaths since January. Let’s put that in ‘context’. Easy to say if a member of your family wasn’t included in that statistic.”

Mark Newstead pointed out: “I know the death rate from Covid is currently low. But the curve of infections is steep. The real issue is HOW do we stop the daily infections currently at 17,540 getting to 200K or 400K per day. As this will trigger hospitalisations & deaths. Flattening the curve is critical.”