Back a few weeks there was that interesting sight, the trialling of a meme, in the leftish parts of the national press. The numbers for Covid-19 for England were looking worse than those for Wales and Scotland. The trial was to see whether this could be blamed on the structure of the health care services in the three countries.

NHS England is more market based, has more subcontracting (“privatisation” in the horror stories) and is generally less centrally Stalinist than the other two. It was possible to see chins being rubbed, possibilities considered, could this actually be built up into a story that would reverse this distressing tendency for NHS England to be run on the basis of what worked rather than what was ideologically pure.

We now have more information:

As Britain eyes an end to lockdown, one area is creating a particular headache for public health officials, scientists and politicians: Wales, and especially the old mining communities.

The country has proportionally almost twice the number of cases as the rest of the UK while mortality rates in and around the Rhondda Valley have also been among the very highest in the country.

Across Wales, the latest figures show 409 cases per 100,000 population compared to 262 in England, 273 in Scotland and 247 in Northern Ireland.

As of Sunday, Wales had lost 1,267 people to Covid-19 out of a population of just over three million.

One of the explanations we’re not going to be offered in that leftish press is that the greater centralisation, the lower impact of subcontracting, of NHS Wales has led to this underperformance relative to NHS England.

Odd that, isn’t it? Almost as if some people would prefer to ignore reality and pursue ideological purity at all costs.