I do badders just putting this out before the Timnakes episode, but also I've put this at the beginning of a few episodes afterwards, just for anyone who's listened to it.

There are a couple of claims made that I wanted to clear up because it's a fairly important issue to do with COVID.

One of the claims was that 108 professional footballers have died in the past year. I've looked at this in

a little bit of detail and quite quickly you can see that this is not true in any way. The 108 people

are actually individuals linked in some capacity to sport. So the article was first broken by a

Hebrew language news site called Real Time News.

Instead of the 108 names of footballers, the names are actually a list of American footballers,

archerers, people in athletics, badminton, ballet, baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing,

canoeing, cricket, cycling, field hockey, foot volley,

wow, foot volley, handball, ice hockey, rugby league and union, soccer, table tennis, tennis,

volleyball and weightlifting.

They were a mixture of sporting levels, professionals, semi-professionals, amateurs, retired,

youth, people under 15, high school and

college. And to give you an idea of how far removed this data is from the truth, it includes

one cricket coach, one athletics trainer, a golf caddy, a marching band member and a doctor

who died out while jogging. So in essence, what the

108 footballers is turns out to be 108 people who have died linked to sport in some way, even if that says a marching band member or just out for a job so

this fact is just untrue similarly there were claims that the death rates

haven't increased globally because of COVID a quick Google on that as well

shows that the data on that is also not true there has been been a huge spike in death rates. And that's not even taking to account the fact that death rates in some respects have reduced because there have been fewer road accidents. People have been in lockdown. But if you look at the data, it's shown that at the beginning of 2020, there's a huge increase in the number

of deaths versus expected deaths based on previous model data.

That spike also happens again in April and also towards the end of the year and early January.

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