I am referencing the ONS when I say 1100 people a day, why? because the ONS stats can be compared to many years previous. PHE ones are collected by some consultancy company and are trash.
The average daily death rate is found here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
> In reality the stats are measuring what's easy to measure. It leads to huge over-reaction to what is in reality an extremely mild virus.
The stats are measuring how many deaths are occurring above the normal average death rate for that period. _something_ caused an extra 1100 deaths a day.
Sure you can say covid is a _very_ mild virus. It might be for some, but out of my friends that have had it (as in tested positive) 1 desaturated to 88% every night. 1 had a fever for 14 days(as in bedbound) 3 had a week long fever, 5 were asymptomatic 3 had epic shits for a weeks. All of these people are < 40. of the people that were > 40 and tested positive, all 3 died. However that's because at the time they were only testing inpatients.
So, with the greatest of respect, you can take your "mild virus" and "its really not 1100 extra deaths a day" and shove it up your arse.
Excess deaths is an entirely different statistic. We can assume total mortality is correct, but that says nothing about what causes it. For example, many excess deaths are clearly not caused by COVID because COVID isn't mentioned on the death certificate, but rather some other problem, even with the ultra-lax reporting and suddenly changed death certificate standards that the UK has introduced.
In reality lock down has caused some deaths. The virus has caused some - or slightly accelerated some, it's not really clear how much life-years reduction has really taken place given the absolutely on-average mortality profile.
I'm very sorry to hear about your friends, but bear in mind "epic shits" aren't even a recognised symptom of COVID. It's a respiratory disease. There's a lot of conflation going on where people are reporting things that aren't COVID as if it was some new but hitherto unknown side effect of the virus. In reality, other kinds of illness didn't stop because a new virus turned up and people can still get sick with the flu or many other diseases - as they do every year - even though COVID is more well known by this point.
http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/stomach-compla...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7172493/
And thats just two, there are many more. Bear in mind they were _all_ covid positive. It wasn't someone saying "I had the snuffles". Lab confirmed covid cases. They are also medical, either nurses or doctors.
> In reality lock down has caused some deaths. The virus has caused some - or slightly accelerated some, it's not really clear how much life-years reduction has really taken place given the absolutely on-average mortality profile.
excess mortality in april was ~880(with smoothing) people a day. but sure, its all just a conspiracy.
Given that the normal causes of excess death have been significantly truncated: driving, drinking and sports, its fairly reasonable to assume that standard causes of death have dropped. We can expect significant spike in deaths from chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes and copd, but that takes time.
> ultra-lax reporting and suddenly changed death certificate standards that the UK has introduced.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
actually its been tightened up, and been told to be more specific. Normally an old person dying in a home is put down to "old age", or, if they fall down the stairs: "terminal event" (falls are a massive killer) before you start talking about attending doctors, none of that happens in practice. Its whoever needs the ash cash that certifies the death.(it depends on the consultant. I know of one who managed to buy a porche with the ash cash. Although I think the payments have stopped now) Or if its outside hospital, who ever answers the phone.
Look, I'm never going to change your mind, but just look at those stats. Something caused a huge spike. That spike started dropping before lockdown ended. That looks like a standard epidemic curve to me. I don't see how it can be reasonably read differently
Gosh, where did you get this idea from? Is this a new talking point from somewhere?
Taking the UK again as an example, road deaths are rare and stable at about 1700 per year or about 32 per week:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
Overall weekly deaths are 10,000 or so (outside of spike times). Even if the roads became totally empty tomorrow you wouldn't be able to see the difference, it'd be lost in the noise. And obviously lockdown doesn't lead to empty roads: people must still drive to deliver goods, engage in urgent business and so on, so reduction in weekly deaths due to less driving would in reality be less than 32.
As for drink - do you really think people drink less when locked up on their own for months on end? They don't, they drink far more:
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/bored-br...
Finally, deaths due to sport?! In an average year in the UK between 15-25 people "die accidentally in athletic/sporting areas" according to the ONS. Deaths due to sport aren't relevant on the scales we're talking about.
Look, I'm never going to change your mind, but just look at those stats. Something caused a huge spike
I am looking at the stats. That's why I consider COVID to be mass hysteria.
Yes, there's a spike in some countries. It's not in any way describable as huge. UK spike matches the famous plague years of 1998/1999/2000. I don't remember any particular special disease in those years:
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/uk-flu-comparison....
In other countries like Switzerland literally nothing happened different to previous years:
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/schweiz-todesfaell...
Staggeringly, in Germany this supposedly deadly disease killed nobody at all when measured using excess deaths:
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/sterbefallzahlen-d...
Yet according to the official stats 10,000 people died of COVID. Clearly this claim can't be true. Where are all these excess deaths?
What's happening here is a highly infectious but virtually harmless virus has been labelling an ever increasing segment of the population as COVID positive. A tiny number of these people really do get hurt by the virus, but that's not important in the grand scheme of things: apparently even the common cold can kill 8% of the elderly. With basically any virus, and especially flu, you can get alarming stories of battles with death by people who were apparently healthy - just search for them and you'll find them. It doesn't by itself mean the virus is dangerous, which is always a relative term.
What happens if you randomly label a huge and ever-increasing section of the population, then measure their health? You get "COVID associated deaths" (which means nothing, it's just a statistical artifact) and you get an ever-widening array of "associated symptoms", because you're measuring normal health activity but re-assigning the cause. So I admit defeat on the "epic shits" point - I should know by now not to say COVID is a respiratory disease and thus can't cause $RANDOM_SYMPTOM, because public health has lost its mind and is publishing papers on random correlations all over the place. The fact that correlation doesn't imply causation has been totally lost.
How can you convert a not very dangerous virus into an excess death spike? Well, it'd cause a small spike by itself anyway, but if you want to make it bigger doing things that increase the spread of every virus sounds good to me: things like flushing all the sick people out of hospitals into care homes, creating panic in said care homes that leads to abandonment (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023), locking people indoors where they're coughing all over each other, putting people into depressions etc.
In about 60 years or so.
>> In the UK, we were loosing 1100 people a day entirely through covid
> which is not true and has never been true.
Excess death stats (all cause deaths over and above the average for the time of year) are available[1] and peak at 12000 in a week or about 1700 a day. I'd say you deserve your downvotes in this case.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/htgq14/oc_...
Excess deaths is not the same thing as "deaths caused by COVID". This conflation relies on the assumption that you can virtually empty hospitals out and have no effect on mortality at all, which is absurd. What are all those surgeons doing, exactly?
If COVID is so deadly, why do some countries show no difference in excess deaths vs previous years?
I know that excess deaths aren't the same as deaths caused by COVID. The idea that you can lockdown in week 13 and have 12,000 excess deaths per week 3 weeks later because hospitals were "virtually empty" also seems absurd. Emergency healthcare remained available and the messaging was that people should still go to hospital if they were ill. I do expect deaths because routine healthcare was limited during lockdown, including people who died during the period of lockdown because they couldn't get hospital treatment (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/08/more-people-...), but without further evidence, I'd be sceptical that this was the dominant effect.
I'm not sure what you're claiming here: are you saying that deaths because people couldn't access healthcare are almost entirely the cause of the UK's excess death peak? What is your evidence for that claim?
> If COVID is so deadly, why do some countries show no difference in excess deaths vs previous years?
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... has Germany's recorded COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths as 8,538 and 7,549 respectively, and Switzerland's at 1,668 and 1,567. Your question seems to boil down to "why did some countries do so much better at containing the epidemic than others?" I don't know, although Germany and Switzerland seem better organised than the UK so that might have something to do with it.
The problem is lots of things that sound absurd related to COVID end up being true. Our intuitions are not a good guide to an event that's never happened before. So we rely on data, but it's hard to interpret and can be wildly misleading.
For instance, here you express an intuition that people would have continued going to the hospital because "the messaging was people should still go". In the UK? Definitely that wasn't the case. People were told they had to "save the NHS" and that there was a massive programme of field hospital construction because the government was certain they were going to run out of beds. They were told there was a deadly virus and they shouldn't leave their homes. The government ran advertising campaigns that looked like a promo for a zombie movie.
This slaughtered hospital admissions:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Total attendance dropped from about 18,000 a day to more like 9,000 per day. It halved overnight. Your intuition about what people did was quite wrong. Even today admissions have not fully recovered.
We don't know how many of those people really needed to be there or else they'd die. But it seems the halving was independent of people's medical needs: cardiac admissions also halved. They went from around 500 per day to more like 250 per day. So that's 1750 missing cardiac ER admissions per week. Some of those people certainly will have died.
And hospitals not only emptied themselves, flushing sick people (with many viruses) into care homes where they then spread them around. But they also refused to take sick people from care homes, so deaths in care homes tripled but deaths linked to the virus only account for half of the increase (and "linked to" is very vague, there are many incorrect classifications there):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/27/care-homes-see-r...
We agree that there's absolutely a critical question about why some countries saw an increase in excess deaths and others saw nothing happen. Clearly if this is genuinely the same virus, and it's the same tests that are detecting it so it must be, then the differences are likely be explained by differing actions taken by governments.
When put in context, Germany didn't actually see any excess deaths, look at the graphs:
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Socie...
If you showed the top three lines to someone who didn't read the news and asked them to pick the year with the scary epidemic, they'd say 2018. There's just no evidence of anything happening in these graphs - the slightly elevated above average number during the "epidemic" is identical in size to the slightly under-average death rates before it started. Sadly you do see people cite figures like "deaths were elevated by X% compared to the same week last year", which is misleading. We'd expect these numbers to wander up and down around the average over time. Yet they supposedly have 200,000 confirmed cases. The most reasonable explanation is that COVID is essentially re-labelling people, and when they die they're labelled as COVID deaths instead of other causes.
In Switzerland excess mortality looked pretty much the same as in 2017 (e.g. peaked at the same levels):
https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/health/state...
Again, there's just no evidence of anything unusual happening here. If you showed the graphs to someone who didn't know about COVID they'd never imagine anything was happening. The "spike" is relative only to a smoothed rolling average, but such "spikes" are common and happen in many years, so it's not unusual when compared in a more granular way. If COVID had never been discovered we'd have seen these excess death rates and simply assigned them to the flu, as happens every year.
In the UK the excess death rate was higher, but still no cause for alarm. It matches the famously deadly winters of 1998/1999/2000. Hmm, I don't remember any such deadly winters. People were saying the world would end because of the millennium bug, not any other kind of bug :) Clearly there's a loss of proportion here. When I pointed this fact out to a friend, he was confused for a moment and then tried to argue that maybe we are just much more caring than people were in 1999, so death rates and reactions are incomparable! How silly!
The question is not whether people died because of COVID induced panic. There is abundant evidence they did, especially in care homes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52014023
https://swprs.org/covid-19-a-report-from-italy/
https://samnytt.se/aldreboendets-personal-kan-inte-svenska-a...
The question is merely what proportion of it was due to that.
> Again, there's just no evidence of anything unusual happening here.
In Switzerland, something unusual certainly happened compared to 2017, namely a peak outside winter flu season (https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/health/state...). What caused that, in your view?
In Sweden, where the government stopped short of a full lockdown but messed up care homes by refusing to hospitalise people with COVID19 symptoms (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52704836), excess deaths also peaked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#Ex...). Were the Swedes also panicked into not going to hospital? What did the care home deaths die of?
To return to the question which started the thread, the PHE stats in the UK overestimate by including people who died for other reasons after a positive test, but this effect cannot have caused anything like the error in the statistics that you claim: a back of the envelope calculation based on typical lifespans (http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2020/07/mountains-and-mole...) gives 20 wrongly-counted deaths per day. If you're claiming that the panic lessened that life expactancy by keeping people out of hospitals, I'd note that even if every single missing cardiac case dropped dead, that's 250 people per day, no where near the 1700 we were seeing at the peak. If PHE continues to count old positive tests now, it will matter, because there are many fewer deaths in total.
Under this definition COVID-19 is a terminal disease from which nobody ever recovers. If it hadn't been noticed, the English death toll would eventually have matched the case count.
Matt Hancock was apparently furious when he found out, now a review of PHE has been triggered as they've been serving the UK with bogus stats for months. Notethe coviddata site says PHE wasn't even deduplicating tests until 2nd July. So "case count" before then was also misleading. 30,000 positive cases vanished overnight and that assumes they did the deduplication correctly, but the government is so bad at data handling that at this point it's unclear if any stats can be trusted.
This stuff is really important and it's clear a lot of people on HN are in denial about it, because each time it gets brought up a torrent of downvotes follows. The COVID stats are wrong. They're not even just useless, they're actively misleading. They lead to beliefs like this one:
In the UK, we were loosing 1100 people a day entirely through covid
which is not true and has never been true. It's a belief based on assuming the stats are measuring what actually matters/what people want to know. In reality the stats are measuring what's easy to measure. It leads to huge over-reaction to what is in reality an extremely mild virus.