COVID-19 : Part 3 Pandemic ?

It's now September 2021, some 18 months after the start of the "pandemic" (see below), and over 15 months since my last post. I had hoped something approaching normality would have returned by now along with an understanding of the SARS CoV2 virus, the associated disease COVID-19 and how best to treat /contain it from a medical and public health policy perspective. Alas that is not the case and while many aspects of the virus and associated disease are now relatively well understood many remain contentious e.g. the extent of asymptomatic spread, the level of transmission by touch, the effectiveness of social distancing and so called "lockdowns", the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing the spread of COVID-19, concerns over vaccine side effects and many more. Since my first post many of the polices adopted in early 2020 to try and deal with COVID-19 e.g. masks, restrictions on travel, work at home orders, forced isolation etc remain in place to some extent while others, compulsory testing, forced vaccination (for some), quarantines for travellers have been introduced. 

What is however clear is that governments, many scientists and medical professionals and the majority of the mainstream media have not provided the public with clear, accurate and balanced information on the situation. The mainstream media have largely acted as both an uncritical and supportive mouthpiece for the prevailing government narrative and as click-bait alarmists providing endless highly emotive stories of individual suffering, ever rising death tolls", "spikes" "surging", highly deadly variants of the virus etc etc . 

I consider that it is self evident that Governments and their uncritical supporters remain firmly in the grip of "groupthink" whereby they are so convinced of their own "rightness" they refuse to consider, and in many cases try to suppress and discredit, anyone and anything that questions or challenges the position they hold and policies they are implementing. A key element of groupthink is an "end justifies the means" mentality whereby those stuck in groupthink believe that any negative consequence of their actions however terrible are both morally and practically justified i.e. a price worth paying.

My aim remains to try and provide a more accurate and balanced view of what has happened over the last 18 months by analysing the main elements of the mainstream position and in some cases the counter narratives e.g. it’s all a fake "scamdemic". To start however it is essential to try and characterise the true extent of COVID-19 crisis - a term I will use as, whatever the true causes, there has been and remains a crisis - to help assess to what extent the polices imposed to deal with it were and remain justified. 

Pandemic or Scamdemic? - Definitions 

If asked last last year what I considered a pandemic I would have said something like the medieval black death or the Spanish flu of the early 1900s that killed 10's of millions of otherwise healthy people world-wide. This understanding would probably be held by many others. A typical dictionary definition:

Definition of pandemic (Entry 1 of 2)

: occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population

with an examples of usage being;

"The 1918 flu was pandemic and claimed millions of lives".

The definition of a flu pandemic used by the WHO until 2009 was: .

“An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.”

This definition was altered in 2009 by WHO to: 

“An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity.”

The current COVID-19 crisis does meet the first criterion of the 2009 onwards WHO definition of a pandemic i.e there is a consensus [see later posts on disputes about this] that SARS CoV2 is a new (corona) virus. However, as immunity to any given disease is in reality a complex and variable phenomenon and I can't see how a total lack the immunity of the "human population" could ever be proven, meeting the second criterion of the WHO definition can never be determined in practise. 

Taking the earlier WHO definition and generic dictionary definition of a pandemic in addition to having to be novel and for no prior human immunity to exist, to be considered a pandemic COVID-19 has to affect a "significant proportion" of the population and/or cause "enormous deaths and illness" - to what extent is this true?

Pandemic or Scamdemic? - The numbers 

If we ignore for the moment concerns over the reliability of COVID-19 deaths statistics from Our World in Data site the numbers of people who died in UK during 2020 were :

 All causes: 604,045 

 Confirmed COVID-19 73,622 

So, from a UK population of 66.65 million 73,622 deaths represent just over 1 in 900 people with COVID deaths accounting for about 12% of the deaths on 2020.

Looking at worldwide statistics: 

 All causes 58.32 Million 

 COVID-19 1.88 Million 

From a world population of 7.674 billion the 1.88 million attributed to COVID-19 represents 0.02% or about 1 in 4000 people and about 3% of all deaths in 2020. Before considering these numbers, one must also consider to what extent COVID-19 affects the "human population” i.e affects everyone equally. 

It was established early on in 2020 from Italy that the distribution of COVID-19 deaths was massively unequal. The vast majority of deaths being in the elderly and those with one or more existing serious conditions (comorbidities). According to the ONS for England and Wales the average age of people dying from COVID-19 was 80.3 years whereas the average of people dying from all causes was actually two years younger i.e 78.2 years. The number of people under 24 who died in 2020 whose death involved i.e some may not have been caused by, COVID was some 55 out of a total of 4579 deaths whereas the number of 65 year olds and over whose deaths involved COVID was 77,987 which is 1400 times greater. 

Pandemic or Scamdemic? - Analysis 

From the above :

• It is arguable whether COVID-19 is truly a pandemic in the sense of the term generally understood and the definition by the WHO, prior to 2009

• Given that most people know less than 900 people it is actually unlikely that the average individual in the UK - a country with one of the highest level of infections and deaths due to COVID-19 - will personally know someone who has died from COVID-19. If they do it is highly likely that person will have been “elderly” and /or with other comorbidities 

Given the above some have concluded, perhaps not that unreasonably, that as they and possibly many of their friends' and family don't know anyone who has died of COVID this is somehow all a “scam” or fake issue - this is not a valid conclusion to draw. Despite the true impact of COVID-19 being deliberately exaggerated and serious questions about the accuracy of the official statistics regarding deaths attributed to COVID (see post on PCR tests) excess mortality statistics confirm that many hundreds of thousands of people around the world have died due to some new cause and SARS COV2 is the only credible cause I am aware of. Attempting to claim therefore this is all "fake", a "scamdemic" is simply not true. 

European published excess mortality clearly show the impact across Europe of the “first wave” of SARS COV2. The first wave was largely over by week 20 of 2020 yet resulted in an increase in excess mortality across Europe relative to 2018 of some 50 thousand deaths. 

Source https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

I must be noted that, particularly for the second wave, it is impossible to accurately determine from excess mortality statistics alone how much of the increase was caused directly by COVID-19 and how much was due to other factors e.g the policies implemented in early 2020 to deal with it e.g massive cancellation of operations, vastly reduced GP and A&E services, curtailment of screening for diseases like cancer, shortages of medical staff due to enforced isolation, reluctance to visit hospitals and GPs due to fear of infection. Even some mainstream news outlets (but of course not the BBC) reported on a UK ONS public health modelling study carried out in 2020 where the percentage of excess mortality due to the lockdown policies themselves rather than the virus could be as high as 40%.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-lockdown-may-have-indirectly-caused-16-000-excess-deaths-study-12044923 

 

Even assuming 40% of excess deaths resulted from government policies rather than the virus by the end of 2020 COVID-19 would have been the cause of 150,000 excess deaths across Europe relative to 2018. [i.e 60% of the 250,000 difference at week 52 - see graph above]

Conclusion 

The use of the terms pandemic and scamdemic are both to some extent flawed and to differing extents misleading characterizations of the true situation and continue to have serious consequences. Future posts will take a critical look at the consequences of these flawed characterisations. 

Notes / References

Groupthink https://www.britannica.com/science/groupthink

Our World in Data Example Plot

The 2020 Coronovirus Crisis - Part 2 of 3

Lock-down Policies - Some Comparisons

Initially in March 2020 the UK government appeared to be intending to take what was called a mitigation strategy for COVID-19 relying on building up herd immunity. Opponents of this strategy claimed that recent “modelling by scientists” showed such a strategy would result in a huge number of deaths in the UK. Additionally there would be massive overloading of the NHS caused by the rapid spread of COVID-19 which would result in additional deaths due to lack of  both ICU capacity and of the medical staff and facilities to deal with the normal non-COVID medical care required.

As reported by the BBC on 17th March https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51915302 the modelling projections were :

Do nothing - 81% of people would be infected 510,000 would die from COVID-19 by August.
Mitigation - 250,000 deaths and completely overwhelm intensive care in the NHS.

The experience of Italy's severe problems in dealing with the rapid spread of COVID-19 was used as supporting evidence for the projections - by March 17th the official Italian COVID-19 death toll was 2,185 and rising rapidly by over 300 a day and still rate accelerating. The UK government therefore  decided to change tack and on 23rd of March moved to suppression rather than mitigation and implemented a “lock down” i.e. closing all schools and non-essential businesses, banning all non-essential travel, all public events etc. This was similar to the policy implemented by Italy a couple of weeks earlier, by China in February and being adopted by many, but not all countries world wide. 

It was hoped that the lockdown could reduce the number of UK deaths caused by COVID-19 and “a very good result" would be limiting the deaths to 20,000. As it has turned out the impact of COVID-19 on the UK compared to on Italy has been worse, both in terms of deaths per million and total UK deaths now reported as over 42,000.

I should point out that for the comparisons I'm using,despite their limitations covered in Part 1, the figures for officially reported COVID-19 deaths. I consider that as they are consistent with the available excess mortality statistics they are suitable for drawing relative comparisons i.e countries with higher EM also have higher reported COVID-19 deaths. They also provide a more detailed picture of how events have unfolded over time (and also the data on excess mortality is simply not readily available for one of the countries I compare the UK  with).  

Note:    All graphs shown are from the excellent Oxford University Site, "Our World in Data", where you can select the specif data you want to plot.  Example as per link. 

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?country=BLR~ITA~SWE~GBR

 COVID-19 Reported Deaths per Million - UK vs. Italy

However some EU countries have had vastly lower levels of deaths than those experienced in the most severely affected countries i.e UK, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In particular Greece has fared remarkably well as shown below :

 COVID-19 Reported Deaths per Million - UK vs. Greece 

So why the huge difference? A possible often cited and certainly, given experience on how previous epidemics have been controlled, credible explanation is that it was because Greece had implemented a lock-down faster than the UK and Italy. Greece closed schools as soon as the 3rd death in Greece from COVID-19 was confirmed, non-essential shops the day after and banned non-essential movement 9 days later. The UK took two weeks from the 3rd confirmed UK death before banning non-essential movement and closing schools. For details of the various lock downs and when they were implemented see here:

https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-coronavirus-lockdown-measures-compared/

However, some European countries did not implement a lock-down. Sweden in particular came and still comes under heavy criticism for not doing so and it was widely claimed they were recklessly ignoring "the science". A comparison with the UK however shows that the outcome to date in terms of deaths per million has been lower in Sweden than the UK .

 COVID-19 Reported Deaths per Million - UK vs. Sweden

Even more surprising is a comparison with Belarus with a population of 9.45 Million similar to Sweden. Belarus did not implement any form of lockdown and has received wider and harsher media criticism and claims of virus "denialism". As it has turned out the reported situation in Belarus is actually much more comparable to that of Greece and vastly better than the UK and Sweden

 COVID-19 Reported Deaths per Million - UK vs. Belarus

Comparison with Modelling

If we simply scale, to allow for their smaller populations, the early March UK modelling projections of UK COVID-19 deaths to the strategies applied by Sweden and Belarus we get.

Projected Deaths - note 1	Sweden	Belarus	UK
Do Nothing	n/a	69,690	500,000
Mitigation only -note 2	37,000	n/a	250,000
Suppression (lock down)	n/a	n/a	20,000 - note 3
Total reported to date	5,053	331	42,000

note 1 The modelling projections always acknowledged they were based on a number of uncertainties
note 2 The Swedish strategy implemented was not as severe as the UK proposed mitigation strategy 
note 3 As above the 20,000 figure was essentially only ever a hope

We will never know what would have happened in UK if we had not implemented or only implemented a less severe lockdown strategy.

If we reverse the logic and scale the Belarus experience to the UK then doing nothing hypothetically should have resulted in only 2375 UK deaths. Despite my significant misgivings about the accuracy of officially reported COVID-19 deaths (see Part 1) a death toll of only 2375 in no way aligns with the reality of the huge increase in UK excess mortality that has occurred and there is no credible argument available to explain how the suppression tactics adopted in the UK could have resulted in a much higher COVID-19 death toll relative to doing nothing  

However see Part 3 for further discussion on this point since excess mortality that is not directly due to COVID has increased substantially - 12,900 above the the 5 year UK average by 1 May 2020 - as reported and discussed in the official UK statistics published by the ONS where it is clear, albeit not stated as such, that this increase may be due to both direct and indirect consequences of the "lock down" itself rather than COVID-19.  

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/analysisofdeathregistrationsnotinvolvingcoronaviruscovid19englandandwales28december2019to1may2020/technicalannex

Conclusions 

The vastly differing experiences of countries in dealing with COVID-19 are still not properly understood and no convincing (see Part 3) explanations have been put forward as to why the lack/limited level of lock-downs in Belarus and Sweden did not result in a much higher death toll. 

note:  I hope it goes without saying that i don't consider it credible that it's due to "drinking vodka having saunas and driving tractors"  https://www.politico.eu/article/belarus-lukashenko-is-defying-the-coronavirus-and-putin/

We still don’t properly understand the new virus nor how COVID-19 will affect a given population.

Part 3  .....

The 2020 Coronovirus Crisis - Part 1 of 3

Why this post?

This set of three posts aim to give a different and more balanced perspective to that being presented in the mainstream media on the current crisis resulting from the the emergence of the new virus, SARS-CoV-2 and the new disease it causes, COVID-19. At the time of writing, June 2020, there are still major gaps in our understanding of how the virus spreads - how many people have been infected by it and how many have died from COVID-19. The various policies implemented by Governments around the world to deal with the impact of this new virus were and continue to be made in a fog of uncertainty and confusion resulting in some very poor decision making that has and will continue to have grave and lasting consequences for huge numbers of people.

You don't know what you don't know

Attempting to understand what's happening using any analysis based solely on official published numbers of COVID-19 related deaths or cases is beset with difficulties since where a death has been recorded as a COVID-19 death i.e. the person who died had tested positive it is uncertain whether COVID-19 was:

• the primary cause of death
• a contributory factor
• not a factor

Also the limited testing and varying approaches to reporting of COVID-19 deaths across countries means we don't know how many people actually have or have had COVID-19, nor how many deaths that were due or partially due to COVID-19 have not been accounted for. However, there is a well understood and established measurement that is not influenced by the uncertainty associated with published COVID-19 statistics. That measure is Excess Mortality (EM) which is simply the number of recorded deaths above the average for a particular time of year. This measure has been gathered by an independent European body of epidemiologists for many across 20 European Union countries. It is also monitored at a UK level as published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The statistics and details of the 20 countries involved and methods used are freely available at :

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Excess Mortality - Overall Statistics across twenty European Countries 

The graph below how shows how excess mortality EM varies year to year and week to week due primarily to seasonal flu and excess winter mortality i.e. more people die in winter than summer. The impact of COVID-19 is shown by the sharp spike in EM starting March.

Excess Mortality - 2016 to June 2020

 
You can see from the graph that currently (week 23 - June) there is now NO significant overall excess mortality albeit there still is in some individual countries notably England.  So, to get these numbers into context we need to consider the total number of excess deaths in 2020 to date, the cumulative EM, relative to the total population of the twenty countries involved . This 2020 cumulative excess mortality up till week 23 June is 194,284. 

Annual Cumulative Excess Mortality 2018,2019,2020 

The population of the twenty countries is 435 Million. So, making for the moment the incorrect assumption (see later posts) that COVID-19 was the sole cause of all excess mortality in 2020:

EM (all ages)           = 194,284

Total Population      = 435,010,967

As a percentage 

        Excess deaths             = 194,284 / 435,010,967 
                                           = 0.045% or  1 in 2239

However, COVID-19 affects elderly people much more severely than younger people with 91% of all excess deaths being in the 65 and over age group. Breaking down the figures for excess mortality by age group, in percentage terms they are:

Age 0 to 14   = 0.00001% or 1 in 7,131,327

Age 15 to 64 = 0.00399% or 1 in 25,063

Over 65         = 0.04046% or 1 in 2,472

A comparison that might help to get these numbers into context is to compare these figures with the risk of dying in a car accident. Assuming you travel in a car regularly your annual risk in the UK is roughly 1 in 25,000 or over a lifetime 1 in 500.

Comparison with Seasonal Flu / Previous years

The cumulative EM graph for the twenty EU countries shows clearly the higher number of excess deaths in 2020 than in 2018 and 2019. So again, making for now the (false) assumption that all 2020 excess mortality is due solely to COVID-19 then in percentage terms the increase in EM across the 20 countries that can be attributed to COVID-19 is at most. 

85% above 2018  and 239% above 2019

These are of course very significant increases.

 At a world wide level however the total COVID death figures published on Worldometer are approximately 450,000 (still rising). By comparison the number of deaths worldwide due to seasonal flu is typically as described below: 

“According to new estimates published today, between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year, higher than a previous estimate of 250,000 to 500,000 and based on a robust, multinational survey.”  

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-estimate.html 

So at a worldwide level the current figure of 450,000 deaths officially recorded as COVID-19 deaths, albeit still rising, is pretty much in the middle of the range. So in terms of number of deaths worldwide COVID-19 so far is directly comparable to seasonal flu.

Conclusions /Comment

See COVID-19 Parts 2 and 3 

BBC - The New Puritans Alcohol & Smoking & Yet More ALARMISM

The BBC and temperance campaigners and those who just love ever more regressive taxation - ie taxes that hit the poorest hardest are yet again pushing ALARM about alcohol based on studies in the Lancet headlining with any amount of alcohol, however small, being damaging and conflating smoking and alcohol.

The ALARMIST type headlines from the BBC articles are :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47723704

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47817650

Note Lancet Report title is actually :

"Risk thresholds for alcohol consumption: combined analysis of individual-participant data for 599 912 current drinkers in 83 prospective studies"

but that's nowhere near as ALARMIST headline grabbing  ...

#Before rushing off to take the pledge I recommend you read this as an antidote :

https://health.spectator.co.uk/a-glass-of-wine-wont-shorten-your-life-moderate-drinking-is-still-good-for-you/

If you're short of time the summary is :

• NO - the evidence doesn't support the implied argument that if you're a light drinker stopping drinking will further reduce your risk of drink related diseases 
• Their own data (but hidden in an Appendix that you have to have a subscription to the Lancet or a copy of full article to read) still shows that moderate drinking -one or two units per day (= 56g to 112g per week) is "statistically" better than being teetotal ..

So here are some figure - firstly from the main report :

The figure on the left above shows that among those who drink  the ones that drink the least <100g a week are less likely to die from drink associated diseases and that as you drink more the risk goes up. WOW that's a Surprise!. The graph on the right above even still shows that benefits of drinking about 100g a week on reducing the relative risk of cardiovascular disease.

The trick used by temperance campaigners (my so called New Puritans) to undermining sensible public health advice on alcohol is hidden away in an appendix in the Lancet report and is to exclude teetotallers (and ex drinkers) from the results shown above in the main report.

When these are included you get these two graphs below (annoyingly the are swapped around relative to the ones above) but I'm sure you see the point that teetotallers and ex-drinker have much higher mortality rates  until you get to at least 300g/week or to make that easier for some that's 16.3 pints of London Pride a week !

Science & Belief

The current debate and concerns over climate change and the highly politicised and bitterly polarised debate usually involve both sides invoking in some sense "science" as providing support for their  position. The article below by Dr Judith Curry however provides a very clear exposition of why you really do need to start listening very carefully and switch into skeptical mode whenever you hear anyone using the phrase "I believe in science"  .. as support for their position .

https://judithcurry.com/2019/03/26/why-i-dont-believe-in-science/

When did Offical Double-think start

The first time I became aware of this was was the sell-off i.e Tory Government invoked privatisation of British Telecom in November in 1984. Most people would acknowledge that if you sell e.g a bike for £100 and the next day the person you sold the bike to immediately sells it for £135 then basically you sold it for a lot less than it was worth i.e a pretty bad piece of work. If you tried to argue seriously that selling it at £100 was fine and you had not made any sort of  mistake, I personally doubt you would get much support except perhaps from sympathetic friends and even they may suspect you were perhaps a bit in denial..

However that's one aspect of what happened with the public BT shares sell off but in on a scale of £Billions and with the extra absurdity of pretty much everyone knowing before the sell off that BT was being sold off at a fraction of what it was worth. The Orwellian double think aspect was compounded by the government calling those who bought the undervalued shares as Shareholders with the associated positive connotations of investment when in fact pretty much everyone knew the majority of private individual purchasers had no intention whatsoever of holding long term shares but would sell them quickly as a "nice little earner" - nothing to do with investment and very much to with short term speculation.

This happened under Mrs "where there is discord may we bring harmony."Thatcher and her Conservative and Unionist party. It was followed by a series of privatisations all of which sold off state assets for substantially less then they could have been as evidenced by in most cases rapid large increases in their share price, but still presented by the government as "successes". Not alas that dissimilar a story to that of the ongoing debacle of PFIs and PPPs instigated under New Labour by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to avoid being publicly perceived as raising taxes - now that's another story.

Anatomy of a Smear Part 2

Smear 2 - Corbyn Allegedly Supports a Terrorist Funding Fraudster

The smear narrative (same culprits as before) in this case is that Corbyn ‘intervened’ to ‘plead the case’ of an ISIL supporting, fraudster Mohamed Dahir living in the UK. A typical example from another of those UK bastions of bigotry - the Daily Telegraph and written in Dec. 2015 i.e after Dahir had been found guilty.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/12044641/Jeremy-Corbyn-writes-letter-pleading-for-fraudster-Mohamed-Dahir-to-be-freed-for-Christmas.html

In considering the claims in the article be very, very careful to note the way in which the Daily Telegraph is continually chopping and changing between statements made around the time of Dahir's bail application in May 2015, when he was entitled by UK law to be presumed innocent and those made after he was found guilty in December 2015. The motivation or which should be obvious as supoported via a Q&A analysis of the incident which I will hope will illuminate the distortions of the truth made by the Telegraph and many others ..

• Did, as claimed by the DT, Jeremy Corbyn write a letter 'pleading' for a convicted fraudster Mohamed Dahir, one of his constituents to "to be freed for Christmas"
• NO - Jeremy Corbyn wrote a letter in May 2015 supporting bail for Dahir before his trial and subsequent conviction
• In their own article the Telegraph state it was Dahir’s lawyer 'who again attempted' to use Corbyn’s supporting letter from May 2015 and written when Dahir was presumed innocent, as support for further bail after Dahir had been found guilty - an argument rejected by the Judge.
• Is it in any way reasonable to expect that in May 2015  before the case had come to court that Jeremy Corbyn should somehow be capable of knowing and /or responsible for assessing whether his accused constituent would later be found guilty?
• NO - there is no reasonable basis (* but see footnote) on which to expect him to do so and the presumption of innocence and adherence to due process of law are key tenets of the UK legal system

• Was it actually Jeremy Corbyn's place to ‘intervene’ by writing a  letter on behalf of one of his constituents?
• YES - It is fully in accord with the official government description of an MP duties see below - relevant extracts being  :

“ Your MP will generally do everything he or she can to help constituents “

“ ..can write letters on your behalf to officials”

https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-information-office/fymp/yaympenglish.pdf

• Was bail granted because of Jeremy Corbyn’s claimed Intervention?
• We don't know  - that was a decision taken by the magistrates involved who would have assessed his bail application in accordance with legal guidelines as below.
• It is important to note that except for certain categories of offence the general right to bail applies i,e bail will be automatically be granted unless an exception applies. An exception being when there is (see below) a Real Risk - as assessed by the court - of the accused absconding or being involved in further crimes or criminal activities prior to their trial.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/legal_guidance/OD_000042.doc

• Also note the complete lack of criticism by the Telegraph and the three Tory MP cited of the magistrates actually responsible for approving the bail application 

• In supporting the initial case for bail in May 2015 did Corbyn make any statement about his views on his constituent's innocence or character.  
• NO  - according to the DT article the grounds were that he had "roots in the area" and was 'unlikely /could not abscond ' 

• Did Dahir commit any crimes or abscond before his trial
• NO (Apparently) and there are no claims even by the Telegraph that he did so

• Did Jeremy Corbyn participate in the trial itself or help ‘plead the case’ for Mohamed Dahir
• NO  

• When Dahir was found guilty in December 2015 did Jeremy Corbyn in any way condone his actions
• NO - He rightly and unequivocally condemned them as quoted in the article: "Jeremy Corbyn condemns the actions of his constituent as appalling acts against vulnerable people and wholly unacceptable."

• Were any terrorist related charges eventually brought against Mohamed Dahir and his co-conspirators  
• NOT to my knowledge
  
• So Jeremy Corbyn did absolutely nothing other than fulfil his duties and obligations as an MP representing a constituent and actually has if anything been shown to exercise good judgement  when supporting the bail application given the accused did not abscond or commit further crimes when on bail.  
• YES 

Summary

A  wholly malicious smear against Jeremy Corbyn simply doing his job - directly supported by three Tory MPs.

Just some concluding thoughts. What would the Telegraph Headlines been in May 2015 if Jeremy Corbyn had refused to write on behalf of Dahir? I think something along these lines...

Corbyn‘s pathetic HYPOCRISY EXPOSED as he callously REFUSES to write letter on behalf of constituent  

Only in the collective mind of the BBC is there a world where a Telegraph headline might have reflected the truth and read :

Mr Jeremy Corbyn MP for Islington North diligently performs public duties supporting constituent.

*Note -  Except bigotry and racism - look at the pics of Mohamed Dahir ?