We had 6082 more deaths in week 14 than the five-year average, yet only 3475 deaths that week were Covid-19 deaths.
So either we’re undercounting Covid-19 cases, or extra deaths are being caused by the lockdown, (or the general situation) or a combination of both.
Update: Got some graphs in from people, will put them up when I can, very busy today. Also, if someone could look at changes in relative risks of death for various age groups that would be great, as these won’t have changed much even with the week 14 figures.
Update 2: Some people are noting that we have had similar death figures in early-mid Jan, especially in 2015, but it has to be noted that the death figures for this period are always inflated due to the numerous holidays over Christmas and New Year, which delays registration of deaths.
My own take is that we are seeing a sudden glut of deaths of people who would have died over winter if it had been a bad one, but who managed to survive because it was very mild.
60 thoughts on “6082 extra week 14 deaths, yet only 3475 Covid-19 deaths”
When you download the data spreadsheet from the ONS website, it says on the first sheet of the spreadsheet “Because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, our regular weekly deaths release now provides a separate breakdown of the numbers of deaths involving COVID-19. That is, where COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, including in combination with other health conditions”
This rather implies that Covid-19 deaths are being overcounted, not undercounted – so for week 14, the 2827 non-COVID-19 deaths more than the 5-year average is likely to be an underestimate 🙁
WC, you would think so, yes.
You need to take into account that ‘with’ not ‘of’ factor. There will be a lot of deaths which have been precipitated by COVID-19 but were in the balance in any case. That is there was an underlying condition which has been recorded as the cause of death but a mild winter may have delayed death and COVID-19 have hastened it. It is the cumulative totals in the next few weeks that will begin to show how significant COVID-19 is in the overall picture. And going into next winter, how many fewer people there will be in God’s waiting room next year.
(COVID-19 deaths in week 14 3,475, but Respiratory Deaths are 2,106, so at least 1,369 are ‘with’ not ‘of’. )
Thanks for your reply, Hector.
Just to say I’ve redone my graphs of non-Covid & non-respiratory deaths, and replaced the previous ones in dropbox with them – the only changes are to make the titles & units in a bigger font, and put week numbers instead of dates on the x axis. I hope you find them useful!
Oops, in posting the updated graphs on Dropbox I’ve broken the links 🙁 The new links are
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f2rln2urg79svqv/2020-04-14%20Non-respiratory%20deaths%20graph.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6vzfm5wqbhclu6/2020-04-14%20Non-COVID-19%20deaths%20graph.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5x6mgw2oiphu9rx/2020-04-14%20Non-12pc-COVID-19%20deaths%20graph.jpg?dl=0
That Mr Barkley on twitter is a bit of a simpleton, isn’t he?
Random thought — the ONS data is based on reported deaths, is it not?
Could one possible explanation for a sudden spike in deaths, including a spike in non-C-19 deaths, be that the process of reporting was disrupted over the last few weeks by the confusion engendered by the lock downs? Perhaps now we are seeing a catch-up in reporting?
I will check into this hypothesis when time permits.
The BBC are reporting this:
“The Office for National Statistics data showed the virus was mentioned on 3,475 death certificates in the week ending 3 April.
It helped push the total number of deaths in that week to more than 16,000 – a record high and 6,000 more than expected at this time of year.”
If that’s 6,000 more than expected then presumably 2,525 Covid associated deaths weren’t in the figures (care homes?), or there are other things causing more deaths than expected in that week, or a combination of both?
I think that recording all deaths ‘with’ C19 as C19 deaths has pushed our official statistics gathering into the realms of the third world – or any other totalitarian country.
In other words, they are totally meaningless.
The figures have finally climbed above the 5-year average which will mean mounting criticism of those who suspect this is all overblown. But even if we get 10,000 deaths over and above the norm, so what? 80,000 died as a result of the 1968 Hong Kong Fluey and everyone I have spoken to who was an adut at that time is barely aware it happened. So even if we lose 10,000 in 2020 this will only amount to a tiny fraction of one-percent. Hardly a plague and hardly a reason to shut down the economy. Madness ensues, but what a relief to find this blog! Kudos to Mr Drummond.
“So even if we lose 10,000 in 2020 this will only amount to a tiny fraction of one-percent. Hardly a plague and hardly a reason to shut down the economy”
To decide if the shutdown is/was worthwhile you need two numbers – the number of deaths that occurred with the shutdown, and the number that would have occurred without the shutdown.
You can’t just look at the first, ignore the second and conclude that the shutdown was unnecessary.
Perhaps I should point out that NHS England had attributed some 3,490 virus deaths to the week ending 3rd April as of today. Those are deaths in hospitals only. It seems highly plausible that there are more virus related deaths outside of hospital that are not recorded as being due to the virus.
Previous flu epidemics have tended to have a broad long lasting peak. Such evidence as there is form countries where a peak may be in place suggests that coronavirus probably has a sharper, narrower peak, so higher short term numbers may not translate to larger numbers overall at least for this round of the epidemic.
However it stacks up it isn’t the Black Death 2 and we have no business destroying British kids future over it.
If the haulage industry fails it will be squaddies handing out rations from the back of trucks.
The lockdown must end quickly. But we have a govt committed to King Log inaction–save for talking tripe about the sanctity of the NHS.
“However it stacks up it isn’t the Black Death 2”
Correct. It’s a slightly worse than a bad flu season.
I don’t really believe this lockdown will be end just because the virus has run it’s course. The whole mechanics of government are completely of putting the genie back in the bottle.
You have to ask why dying from a respiratory virus rather than any number of other causes is peculiarly “bad”? It’s not as if the virus is killing people indiscriminately. Apparently for under 65s there’s a greater statistical chance of perishing in a road accident on the way to work than from this virus.
Perhaps because the corona virus debate is being framed by media/officaldom not only as if *deaths* from respiratory viral infections could be prevented, but as if the infections, even the viruses themselves could somehow be eradicated. Sceptical voices in epidemiology are as likely to get airtime as their ‘denier’ counterparts in climate.
As with ‘climate’ it suits both ‘right’ and ‘left’ wing nomenklatura to blame each other for the casualties. The contender for London Mayor accuses the Mayor for the deaths of bus drivers, while the incumbent counters with the mortality tally of our NHS staff which is supposed to be the fault of his rival’s faction. The usual communist charade.
The virus has become a mob principle, mobilising the crowd into reciprocal accusation, the truths of virology dropping out of consideration. Apart from the fact that viruses actually kill people it replicates ‘climate’ in almost every respect. A win/win for media/officialdom/nomenklatura/globalists/capitalists/communists.
ONS figures:
England and Wales
Number of deaths Number of COVID-19 deaths
All deaths 166,436 4,122 2.5%
Home 40,238 136 0.3%
Hospital (acute or community, not psychiatric) 76,769 3,716 4.8%
Hospice 8,002 33 0.4%
Care Home 37,386 217 0.6%
Other communal establishment 617 3 0.5%
Elsewhere 3,424 17 0.5%
What happens next year, lockdown every year? Lockdown until there is a vacine (an effective vacine, tested, without side effects?)
Maybe we have to accept that this is here to stay, we can no longer expect ever increasing life expectancy.
There are figures in the ONS tables that give daily numbers by date of death and compare then with NHS numbers, I don’t think there is a special problem with the reporting delay. There may however be in the next two or three weeks because of the Easter weekend. You can see in the charts that there is a rise in the week before a bank holiday, a dip in the bank holiday week, and then a rise the week after. Very obvious if you look at August.
Dave, I thought we were flattening the curve, not saving lives as such – just spreading a number over a longer period to save the NHS?
Epidemiologists have warned that suppression likely leads to a second wave and more deaths. Which is why the government is being tardy at getting out of the corner they have painted themselves into.
If you want your way of accounting (and I don’t disagree with you) you also need to add in the people who are being sacrificed by the lockdown now (can’t get treatment/cancelled operations etc.)and by the reduced health service in the future (less GDP less NHS – or perhaps less vanity treatments?). NHS England already worried and investigating the former.
djc – I have been saying pretty much that for 3 weeks.
Given that C-19 looks as though it will kill no more people than the 2014/15 flu season (28,000) – not yet certain I admit.
AND
In 2014/15 217,000 died in Europe at almost 900 per million of population. The UK is at 160 at the moment.
what do we do when the next large flu season comes along??
LOCKDOWN & TRASH THE ECONOMY AGAIN
Let’s be honest; there’s still no real evidence that lockdown is particually effective at restraining this virus.
The best argument against lockdown isn’t numbers of deaths, it’s that the positive virus tests (and presumably the subset going into hospital although I’ve not been able to find this figure) before the effect of the lockdown was supposed to happen – at the end of March, only 1 week in.
Add Sweden – who have caught up from their weekend slumber and added a princely total of… 115 deaths – not exponential, not yet scary. Even if there’s a lag for other deaths, their admissions have stayed reported and haven’t gone anywhere nasty.
It’s obvious that social distancing and hand washing are useful tools in the epidemic slowdown; not so obvious that locking everyone away and destroying the economy is helpful or proportionate. If a large number of those non corvid excess deaths are due to it, it could be really harmful already.
Stone the crows! William Briggs has an interesting update and analysis of the benefit (or not) of lockdown:
https://wmbriggs.com/post/30300/
Meanwhile I note that the arcgis dashboard has been summarily withdrawn, replaced by a sign in request. Some of the data are now available here:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/#local-authorities
but publication of the spreadsheet history has been suspended – and may not return with the same detail.
Oh I quite agree David R – you definitely need to account for the people who are being killed as a side effect of the ‘lock-down medicine’, and all the rest of the damage it’s doing to people’s well-being.
Personally I’m undecided about the net value of the lock-down – but I’m not going to be swayed by the view that having taken the medicine and seen the illness lessen, you can reasonably conclude that the medicine was unnecessary. It’s not possible to say either way, and people who seize one of the two possibilities on a whim deserve, at the least, to be challenged in blog comments.
As far as ‘flattening the curve’ being separate to ‘saving lives’, that’s a falsehood. ‘Flattening the curve’ is about avoiding driving the health service into overload and thereby raising the mortality rate dramatically (i.e. killing people unnecessarily). The point being that the effective mortality rate is not a constant for the disease, and allowing a situation to arise which significantly raises it is to be avoided if possible.
As well as this dangerous inflection in the mortality rate of the illness, I think there is another non-linearity which seems little-discussed in the on-going mathematical commodification of old people but which drives government decision making.
It is that society’s feelings about death are very dependent on the rate at which it occurs. Teenagers can be expected to lose all their grandparents over the next 5-10 years and shrug that off as an inevitable fact of life. Losing them all in the next couple of months would be an entirely different form of tragedy, not captured by mere QALYs. In just the same way, a school ski-trip coach accident is a different thing to the normal slow harvest of fatal accidents to kids walking back from school.
I am not arguing against the economics at all, they’re vital, and poverty is a terrible killer in the long run. The lock-down should end (or at least start to end) as soon as possible, with the disease allowed to run its course at the maximum rate at which we can maintain a reasonably low mortality. The precise relationship between infection rates and requests to the population to ‘lock-down’ could not have been known a month ago – if it turns out the brakes have been applied rather too sharply then they should certainly be eased-off.
As well as encouraging as many people back into work as possible, we need to restore the non-CV19 functions of the health service as quickly as possible, because people dying for lack of treatment while regional hospitals stand largely empty with staff idle is an abomination.
It’s now a well known fact that the government are lying about the true number of daily deaths from COVID-19. They are already embarrassed at their poor death/recovery ratio when compared to other European countries.
So as to keep the daily death toll figure as low as possible, the government only list those that died in hospital, and ignore the vast number who are dying in rest/care homes, and those that died elsewhere, like in their home.
This is totally wrong and distorts the true picture. I am surprised the WHO have not ‘pulled up’ the UK government for doing this, as they rely on correct data from governments to get a clear/detailed picture of how the virus is spreading globally, and an accurate information regarding death/recovery ratio is essential in this type of work.
@Nigel – I don’t think there’s any mechanism for care homes to provide daily returns like the NHS does, and there’s very little testing going on outside hospitals anyway, so they wouldn’t be able to provide comparable returns (i.e. deaths after testing positive).
The ONS does include everything (or everything that’s been registered, which is most stuff), and uses different criteria for deciding ‘COVID or not’, but the data is about 11 days behind. (Much of the ‘daily’ data is also 2-3 days behind too).
I think its really down to ones politics whether you think this is a cover-up or just bureaucratic muddling.
There’s some info about the different sources of numbers here which you might find interesting if you’ve not seen it already:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/comparisonofweeklydeathoccurrencesinenglandandwales/uptoweekending3april2020
Remember the Diamond Princess cruise ship harboured in Japan back in January with infected passengers on board. 61 of those on board that cruise ship have still not recovered from COVID-19. Over 11 weeks on seems an awful long time to be recovering from this illness.
Anyone got any reasons why?
I don’t know if the data are being updated. The last time I saw changes was when the number of deaths rose to 11.
Data can be found at Worldometer. The active cases remained at 82 for some time, but dropped to 61 today
I think there might be some recent updates to the Worldometers info – it’s changed to 12 deaths and 7 “serious, critical” – I’m pretty sure I saw 11 and 15 there quite recently.
The “active cases” might well be an overestimate because it seems everyone’s pretty slow/unreliable at recording recoveries.
Good here innit, especially when you don’t have to set up an account.
Nigel, if the government is lying about the death figures, it isn’t in the way you imply. If they wanted to minimise the figures, they would be emphasising the fact that many or most of these deaths would be occurring with or without the virus.
Other interesting facts today:-
The good news is the daily number of cases was the lowest % increase since 10 Mar.
The bad news is that cases are again rising in China from a second wave of the virus. The active cases had been decreasing on a daily basis since Feb 25, and came as low as 1089 on 10 April. That number has increased each day since.
At least the Chinese data gives us a final accurate CFR for the first wave of the virus which swept China. It returns a figure of 4.13%, which is way above what the experts predicted it would be, and also way above the figure for seasonal flu.
It’s believed that the original COVID-19 virus has mutated into a more deadly, and easily spread version of the virus, and it is that version which is sweeping Europe right now. This does seem to ring true, as the virus has literally swept through Europe at an alarming rate, and also the death figures are way higher than what they were in China.
Likely explanation for the slow recovery of some of the cruise ship passengers — they were probably elderly and/or had pre-existing medical problems before C-19 came along. The demographics of cruise ship passengers definitely lean that way.
Recovery from almost any medical issue takes longer when the patient was older or in poorer health before the problem occurred.
Covid with or from? Which Coronavirus?
We’ve never ever tested every patient dying in hospital for Coronavirus or indeed any virus ever before. Papers have looked at large case numbers. It is known that 4-14% of patients in hospitals with pneumonia have always been associated with Coronavirus.
I’ve found a historical paper looking at the incidence of viruses in asymptomatic people in the community and there of course was Coronavirus. It appears there are carriers of these viruses.
It is accepted that there are asymptomatic Covid positive patients in The community and in hospitals. Hospital acquired infection is accepted. People in hospitals are usually unwell and die of various diseases. Without a p m we don’t know the wood from the trees.
The only way to truly find out If cov Sars 2 is present and caused death is to perform a post mortem with testing of samples. I believe that we don’t because of the ‘infection risk’. The p m would look at the lungs for interstitial pneumonia and the tests are called PCR for the Coronavirus.
The PCR tests used for cov SARS 2 are not 100% sensitive. The best sensitivity I’ve found on pubmed is predicted at 95%. I would suggest 85% is about right; different countries are using different PCR.
I’ve found a historical paper that showed cross reactivity between the PCR used for the original SARS infection and another far less harmful Coronavirus. The original Chinese PCR used for cov SARS 2 was derived from the original SARS PCR.
Finally if a death in the community looks like Covid 19 then it is Covid 19…
I can only conclude that there is no certainty that the reported deaths are all from Covid 19
And on the spike in ONS deaths without a Covid diagnosis; the panic and hysteria has scared the public. They’ve stopped going to A&E. Sick people are not presenting to medical services and paramedics are not taking people in.
The unintended consequences of tunnel vision politics.
Even worse – the perverse incentives are playing out on the international stage. Countries (e.g. Australia) and regions (e.g. California) who have not noticeably done anything better than anywhere else get to take credit for their “impressive” performance.
Who’s going to stop a politician, scientist, medic or ordinary citizen from basking in the glory of being great at handling coronavirus?
But sadly the truth is that there seems to be much more random variation involved. Why should the south east of England be largely spared, but Greater London be a disaster zone? Surely there was little difference in lockdown timing and observance in both?
Much more likely is that the following is true: population density, climate, and severity of recent flu seasons all contribute to statistical perceptions of what is going on.
A densely populated city in a temperate spring climate (e.g. Wuhan, Milan, Bergamo, Paris, Madrid, London, New York, Seattle) will suffer. Change any of the parameters (less urban, warmer / colder, smaller population of vulnerable elderly) and the whole thing becomes far less frightening.
But nobody is incentivised to reveal that truth because it is so damaging to the reputations of anyone who has bought into the lockdown. Which NHS medics are going to reveal that they aren’t on “the frontline”? Which politicians or advisers are going to reveal they accidentally tanked the economy for a relatively minor threat? Which citizens, having been told their own everyday heroism has saved the country, are going to attribute it to random chance?
Hi,
Leaving aside the problematic accuracy with Chinese data, what % of people with the disease do you think they actually found? I imagine about 1/8 of the actual infections; the CFR is about 8 times higher than the IFR predicted in Europe. There are loads of cases completely undetected – the more you test, the lower the CFR.
in the UK it’s been estimated by the CORVID symptom tracker that there were 1.9 million symptomatic cases on the 1st of April – this gives us a IFR in the realm of a bad flu strain.
We need to tell them to stuff any future lockdowns–absolute non-co-operation –and self defence against Plod if needs be. I doubt it will happen tho’ once people really get the economic disaster we now have. All the BS now is “V shaped bounce in economy”–well “It will all be over by Christmas ” was once a popular saying also.
How many of them are old and at death’s door anyway? See the last words of Charles the Second.
We know the figures for the former (at least the overall mortality rate) but we cannot know the figures for the latter – they can only be conjecture. A plague is a plague, killing hundreds-of-thousands no matter a lockdown or a Sweden. This isn’t a plague and our actions are utterly unprecedented. The Leftist establishment loves it of course as it takes us one step closer to their long planned and long dreamed of socialist state.
Whilst I was in the shower, a thought occurred.
Why are we suddenly assuming all COVID deaths are excess? 100% of them – I sincerely don’t think it’s likely that all COVID deaths are excess, at least some of them would have died anyway. So the 2607 non COVID excess deaths are likely to be an under count.
There are 2 possibilities; under reporting of COVID, or deaths due to the lockdown that are not attributable directly to COVID. But we know that the ONS COVID criteria for reporting is quite generous – you don’t need to be tested, just to have COVID symptoms, and that would be the case with deaths out of hospitals. So even if there is under-reporting, where is it coming from?
Something doesn’t add up here. Could there be 3000 odd extra deaths from not turning up to A&E? Looking at the NHS’s own emergency admission data, there are about 10000 admissions from A&E to hospital a day through April across the UK. How many fewer are coming because of the lockdown? How many of those are life threatening and would have died if they weren’t admitted?
Could we be seeing a serious effect from the lockdown that is almost as bad as COVID?
When I saw the ONS numbers my first thought was, those are not real – there is a systematic error. I know it’s unlikey, but the ONS are not infallible and do issue revisions from time to time. I’ve spent years looking at management accounts where outlying data points nearly always turn out to be systematic errors.
Perhaps there is a recording error. The ONS records the date of registration of death, not the date of death. I checked a couple of local Register Offices and they are closed apart from telephone registrations of deaths. Could it be there was a backlog of registrations from previous weeks because they were getting the telephone registrations up and running? That would imply the 6000 excess deaths were spread over a number of previous weeks. You might think the ONS would have mentioned that in their press release. Me too.
My second thought is that it’s an arithmetic error. Covid-19 is a new recording category so has been added to the ONS spreadsheet in a hurry. The spreadsheet adds the covid deaths to the overall deaths, but rather than subtracting them it adds them back in a second time – they’ve forgotten to include the minus sign. In week 13 there were 500 deaths and total deaths were 1000 above the average. In week 14 there were 3500 covid deaths but 6000 total deaths above the average. I know it’s highly unlikely that the ONS would have made such a simple school boy error.
The last thing I read about the EuroMomo stats is that they show nothing remarkable apart from a slight uptick in Italy. So why is the UK suddenly showing this high mortality rate when we are not seeing it in other countries? Maybe the NHS is not all it’s cracked up to be.
@Martin the EUROMOMO stats are here https://www.euromomo.eu/ – they show lots of up-ticks besides Italy.
Perhaps we need to ask them to check their workings out…
Ambulance crews are diagnosing covid on a rating system a lot of times based on symtpoms, no test
“Lockdown until there is a vacine (an effective vacine, tested, without side effects?”
Devising such a vaccine would be very difficult, costly and time-consuming. Researchers have been pursuing the will-o-the-wisp of a vaccine for the common cold (another coronavirus family) for at least 50 years without the slightest success.
But imagine a vaccine is officially endorsed and made compulsory for everyone. Among the side effects might be significantly raised mortality from… respiratory disease! Which would prove that the lockdown must continue.
Hmmmm.
There is something fishy about these numbers.
There are 6000 deaths above average. There are 3500 deaths with COVID mentions. The absolute best case for COVID is 3500 directly caused deaths. This leaves 2500 above average unexplained deaths.
This is important because it means another factor is significantly increasing the number of deaths. What could this factor be?
The 3500 deaths with COVID mentions undoubtedly means that only a portion of these deaths are *from* COVID and a portion are just *with* COVID. We can guess at, say, 1000 are just *with*, leaving 2500 *from* COVID. Even this could be very generous.
There are 2000 normal respiratory deaths. There should definitely be some overlap with COVID (as mentioned in the stats). Afterall, COVID kills by pneumonia and therefore COVID deaths should also be categorised as respiratory deaths. Let’s say the overlap was 50%, or 1000 deaths. Subtracting this from the 2500 COVID deaths would mean there were about 1500 “new” COVID deaths over and above normal respiratory deaths.
If there are really only 1500 “new” COVID deaths, this leaves 4500 above average unexplained deaths. What is causing these other deaths?
One explanation is the lockdown itself. During this time many low-risk patients have been sent home from hospital and the public in general have been avoiding hospitals so much that A&E departments are almost empty. Even the health services have been hinting their concern and saying that ill people should come into hospital. Is it that the focus on COVID at the expense of all other illnesses has caused an increase in death from other causes? Is the lockdown causing more deaths than it is supposed to be saving?
This is what I am thinking too (see my comment below). The number of excess COVID deaths is probably not that high, which leaves a very significant number of unexplained excess deaths. The only factor that I can think of is (like you) the lockdown itself. Has this upheaval of both society and the health system caused more deaths that it is purported to have saved?
This is a very useful paper on excess flu deaths in Italy. It looks like this has been an issue for some time;
https://www.ijidonline.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1201-9712(19)30328-5
Hi Rask,
Thanks for your comment above.
I’m not sure anyone knows how much overlap there is between the COVID and pneumonia categories, so it’s hard to know anything from them.
I tend to agree though – there’s something odd here.
I was given to understand that the ONS data included care homes – and it seems that they are reporting more deaths.
The overall deaths match normal mortality – there’s no spike anywhere, so people are continuing to die in normal proportions, which implies CORVID, as that’s the death profile for CORVID. If there was something else, would it so closely match the normal death profiles?
Very interesting David.Completed in August 2019, well before all this nonsense kicked off, so an unbiased view.
Yesterday, and incidentally, I had a mildly heated discussion about the current lurgy with my brother in law. He’s a believer, if I can put it like that.
He became animated over the mortality figures, so this morning I sent him a link to the Worldometer site which gives total world deaths so far of 134,000 and also a link to the Hong Kong epidemic of ’68/’69. That gives a total for world deaths of over a million.
And the “lockdown” continues……
You’re on to something…
Check out the Oxford Uni Centre for Evidence Based Medicine site, and in particular their breakdown on death reporting:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-death-data-in-england-update-15th-april/
Daily death announcements are actually the number of deaths that have been collated that day – not the number of people who died on that day. As one summary says:
‘Daily reports generally add more to the previous two days (up to a maximum 300 deaths), and can add back to the previous week’s counts’
But, of course, that doesn’t make such a sensational headline.
Yes, I’ve fallen out with my brother over this. He is one of the cloud people alas.
The thing that set me on alert when this started was that the media never, not once, put any perspective to the numbers they were using to scare people. Then came the ‘computer model’ BS, followed by the ‘trust the experts’ line. Everyone of those is a big red flag that the outcome is not going to be good.
Sorry – couldn’t resist; not a critique, simply a snort of pelasure:
https://xkcd.com/2294/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52308783
Possibly slightly more honest news. I would have thought the BBC might have given this more emphasis on the main page.
It’s almost as though they don’t want people to see it!
The US advice (from the CDC) to doctors is apparently that anybody who dies, if they also happen to test positive for Covid, should be treated as a Covid death at the doctor’s discretion, “best guess”, in fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5wn1qs_bBk
The BBC are silent on the issue that is perplexing the rest of us – where did the extra 6000 deaths come from in week 14 if there were only 3500 covid deaths? The BBC report says that 91% of covid deaths had comorbidities; the implication is they would have died anyway. Doesn’t that just deepen the mystery? If only 10% of deaths, 350 deaths, were caused by covid where did the other 5650 deaths come from in week 14?
Have the BBC been tipped off by the ONS that there is a reporting error in week 14? Or are they ignoring the obvious because it doesn’t fit the scare narrative?
I guess once again we will have to wait for next week’s data to find out if week 14 is the start of a trend or a discontinuity.
My feeling is the BBC is trying to bury this and I’d agree with you that, if true, these figures just don’t fit the scare narrative.
If the ONS numbers are correct and all previously reported deaths are similarly skewed by “underlying health problems” then, after all the preceding and misleading hysterics, any sane person must now surely be asking, “What the Hell is going on?”
An average of 2.7 underlying problems in each of the 91% of reported deaths, coupled to the apparently vague nature of diagnosis in the remaining 9%, would suggest that my previously reported odour of rodent has become noticeably stronger.
Why aren’t the BBC, let alone the ruddy government, trumpeting these figures from the rooftops?
Oh, silly me.
While reasonable people find the “data” on C-19 mortality to be confused (except for the very clear identification of At Risk people being overwhelmingly old and/or sick), the evidence of economic devastation is becoming undeniable. Current estimate is that 710 people in the US have been rendered unemployed for each reported C-19 death.
Is the economic damage from the lock downs worth while?
Here is a link to an article from the Kansas Policy Institute asserting that the 8 US States which have no or limited lock downs have a C-19 death rate of 13 per million, whereas the 42 lock down States have a death rate of 75 per million. While several different interpretations are possible, this is intriguing.
https://sentinelksmo.org/covid-cases-trending-down-states-without-lockdowns-do-better/
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