Millhouse

That's right. Only history will give us the facts on this. We have no idea the number of people shoved into poverty and early death etc. as a result of the covid response vs. actual directly related covid deaths.

If you take the UK definition of a death, it's anyone who died within 28 days of a positive test result. So, you could be completely cured and free of covid on day 14, hit by a bus on day 27 and be reported as a covid death. Even some of my car crash deaths might be covid deaths... or you may be dead twice under both numbers. It is naïve to assume the data is right. Same for the US with the additional payments to private hospitals for COVID patients, very tempting to classify everyone dying from covid, when they died with covid. We just don't know.

I'm being objective on the data. I cannot help this as my job is to be a professional sceptic and not believe numbers without questioning - especially fast growing ones. Pretty sure Trump didn't win though as I'm not a complete bell-end.

Millhouse

Spot on. Imagine you are the head of an NHS trust: You have been underfunded and ignored for years and this is the first time anyone has shown any interest in you. If that was me, I would be reporting the absolute worst.

I don't understand why the UK government are not putting people in the field hospitals. This would be my first place to put them to make it look worse. There is just so much conflicting strategies, incompetence and politics all over it.

weasel decentral

Anyone with a functioning brain has become more sceptical as the pandemic continued, unless you were a direct front line worker most of us don't have enough first hand experience - so the ongoing warnings have become the boy calling wolf.
It's the people who have fully formed unchanging opinions that I have an issue with - be it on not wearing a mask or to the other extreme of anti-vaxxers or similar. The changing guidance of governments are generally portrayed as incompetence rather than an evolution of the knowledge they have, though obviously there is incompetence also. Everybody is analyzing from a told you so perspective, that's what gets to me.
On the positive side, this chaos is bringing change - to the extreme we could see the death of city high streets and business districts, or perhaps the revival of high streets if lack of traffic lead to pedestrianisation. Work from home has had a huge personal benefit for me, so little wasted travel time and flights for business meetings that could have been a phone call. So many businesses have realized how much unnecessary bullshit is wrapped around the average working day, I see some pretty savage corporate slashing coming down the pipeline - especially from companies where managers are not trying to look busy.

csdf

Excess deaths in the UK are the highest since 1940. Are you saying that there has coincidentally been a massive increase in car accidents that has caused this excess death figure? If not, what else is causing all these excess deaths?

Trailing_Hubby

[QUOTE=Millhouse;12958614If you take the UK definition of a death, it's anyone who died within 28 days of a positive test result. [/QUOTE]

UK government figures are now deaths within 60 days of a positive test.

csdf

It doesn't really matter. A death is a death, no-one (I think) is claiming that fake death data is being issued. So these people really died. And more people really died in 2020, compared to the average, than any time since 1940. If your position is that these people didn't die of covid then you have to explain what they did die of. And then explain why whatever that thing is, is at record-breaking levels in 2020. And also wonder why that thing hasn't been mentioned at all by anyone, even though it has caused record-breaking deaths.

weasel decentral

What's the 2020 rate compared to the typical average?

captainflack

Absolutely this. All the conspiracy theories "if you get hit by a bus, it's logged as covid" are generally backed up by nothing other than anecdotal evidence. I've lost count of the number of people who claim that someone they knew had a car accident etc. and it was logged as covid, and immediately back away when you ask for the name of the deceased so you can check (since death certificates are public documents). Suddenly they cannot tell you this to protect the privacy of the person, etc. etc. Normally there is something about doctors doing this to get a kickback or whatever.

The bottom line is that the death rate in total has gone way up over the last year. There are a whole bunch of excess deaths. If it is not covid, then something else is killing lots of people.

captainflack

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...wales-says-ons

"Excess deaths, the number of fatalities above the five-year average, rose to almost 91,000 across the UK in 2020 – the highest on record since the second world war."

This figure does tally pretty closely with the number of deaths attributed to covid during that period.

Comparisons with the spanish flu aren't particularly apt because the population was smaller then (a point it does make at the end). But it's worth considering that covid deaths tended to come in waves. So at peak, in many areas, covid was accounting for 50%+ of all the deaths occurring.

Millhouse

what happened in 1940?

In absolute or percentage terms? There’s a lot more people now, so hope that’s in percentage terms.

weasel decentral

Extreme planking was a thing

Millhouse

if there are 90 k excess deaths, and 84k covid deaths. The implied conclusion is that 100pct of excess deaths are due to covid. If we unpack that, the first question needs to be what is average variation in the background death rate. The standard deviation if you will. I’m not saying people don’t die from it, but we shouldn’t forget that almost everyone doesn’t.

weasel decentral

A five year average is going to pretty much cover any standard deviation

Millhouse

Fair enough. So let's assume the background number is perfectly down the middle. Interesting that if we were to remove COVID from the numbers we would otherwise have had a perfectly average year. Clearly that makes no sense given that we know there is a change in the death rate due to the covid measures that are not covid related.

weasel decentral

The deviation you should consider is the deviation in the 2020 numbers versus the five year average, that's potentially where those numbers are. But also you are only considering that deaths classified as COVID could be by other causes, on the other hand there may be deaths caused by COVID that have been classified as other causes. The reverse situation - though it's probably less likely.