I'm not a denier or anything but this got me thinking

Well I guess for the funeral but, there aren't really ceremonies at the moment and numbers are restricted so you wouldn't see lots of cars turning up for lots of funerals.

Exactly this. No funeral cars at the moment. When SIL died in the summer we all went in our own cars.

The UK has the highest death rate in the world right now:

According to the Guardian:
"The UK had the highest Covid death toll in the world in the week to 17 January with 16.5 deaths per 1 million people on average, according to Our World in Data."

You are wrong.

This country's death rate is shameful and disgraceful.

Well they're building temporary morgues here in London.....

I'm seeing more ambulances than usual, definitely.

To add to what pp said, whenever I've been to a crematorium, the schedule for the day always looks full.
I'm not sure they're doing 5 minute services, but surely just giving everybody the same service they did before. So your PIL are unlikely to see extra funerals happening. Minimal people attending and probably no wakes either.

OK let's run with the Covid denier narrative - that there really aren't hospitals full of people very sick with it, it's all made up. If that's true, that means a hell of a lot of people must be pretending. All the staff in every hospital must be pretending that all hell is breaking loose and they are nearly overwhelmed, in fact they have done acting lessons so that they can come out and weep into their phones and post online. And this is taking place in almost every country. They're all just play-acting.

I mean, that really isn't feasible, is it?

The deaths are spread over the country so likely to be only a few per neighbourhood even if the numbers are bad nationally so you might not notice any uptick

I couldn't tell you when I last attended a funeral in person rather than via Zoom for nearly a year.

Yes, I can. I haven't been to a non-Zoom funeral in around a year.

That's a lot of cars not going to the limited burial services and similarly for crematoria.

Plus a crematorium only ever has a set number of slots a day.

My best friend runs a private ambulance company. They are 100% seconded to the NHS, and have run themselves into the ground for the past year. She runs scores of crews, and hasn’t stopped.

My husband is friends with someone who works for a funeral director. They are finding their job incredibly distressing at the moment due to the extremely high volume of work. We are not even in an area that has been very badly affected

Death rates aren't uniform across the country. Some areas have been much harder hit, and in those areas a lot of people last year opted for direct cremation, a lower cost option where there is no ceremony or service. It's basically just safe disposal of remains. You wouldn't see an increase in services or any of the things you'd usually expect to see (flowers, mourners, processions on foot) - you'd maybe see a few more panel type vans in place of the usual glass sided hearses though.

I live very close to a huge regional hospital. I would say I have seen more ambulances recently, for definite. I have seen three visiting my own neighbours in the last week

An old friend and her partner were deniers. In the summer it was all ' shield the vulnerable and let's get back to normal , it's an over reaction' .
His now on a ventilator and been moved to another hospital 100 miles away. The one he was in has been overwhelmed and it's full.
Of course it's all a big conspiracy isn't it?
All in on it aren't they? Thousands of people covering up what and why?
Stop reading Facebook and just think why anyone would think this isn't real or why a government would wreck an economy when they didn't have to?
I know three people that have died of this too , but the deniers would say they died of something else I suppose.

I had to wait a month for DM's funeral because it was so busy and the undertaker was run off her feet, but yeah, just because you and your PIL haven't noticed OP I guess there's not much going on.

People can’t attend funerals or only a couple of people so if anything traffic and cars to a crematorium etc will be less than normal.
I imagine bodies are being delivered to the funeral directors etc in bulk eg 3-4 to a van as opposed to 1 per trip in normal times - so no increased drops off of bodies.
They are probably doing more per day as shorter ceremonies and less people to wrangle.
Some people who are nowhere near family so no-one to attend the funeral may have a basic service or a service over zoom and ashes held until they can be collected by a family member.

When DH nan died we all watched it via an online link. Apart from 5 family members who love local to her and could attend. In normal times there would have been more family plus her friends (who were shielding) plus family friends of MIL who would have wanted to pay thier respects.

Go to 'bbc covid in my area' and enter your post code. It will give you data showing the total number of covid deaths to date in your Borough. My area is showing 462 and most of them were from the first wave. That's from a population of about 235000. Our crematorium had a temporary building put up last year and sadly it is back again so a high number of deaths is again expected.

This is a very weird thread.

You haven't seen a single ambulance going into the hospital in months? Surely that's a sign that something is very deeply wrong? Or do you think heart attacks, strokes, etc. have just magically stopped happening?

I looked up some stats on pre-COVID hospital admissions via A&E (as bored), even some smaller hospital trusts in less busy areas easily see at least 10,000 admissions per month. The ambulance service handled on average a 28,000 calls per day pre-COVID.

Unless you live in a rural village and your local hospital is a tiny cottage hospital, your hospital certainly would have had ambulances in and out all day and hundreds of admissions per day prior to Covid. So if you're right and they've magically stopped, where have all those people vanished to?

Either a) you're wrong and just aren't paying attention (I live a couple of miles from a hospital and ambulance sirens are near constant) b) all the elderly/sick people who prior to this would have been taking up ambulances with heart attacks and strokes have already died/are already in hospital or c) the hospital is so overwhelmed with patients they aren't accepting ambulances and are turning patients away.

None of these options suggest Covid is less serious than it's being made out to be! In fact the opposite.

As for funerals, you can check how many funerals/cremations were held or are scheduled to be held, all this data is online. I just checked the schedule for the crematorium where my parents funeral were held and I can see that on average they've been doing six cremations a day. Have your PIL actually gone to the website of their local crematorium and found actual evidence they haven't been conducting many funerals, or are they just assuming that funerals aren't going ahead due to lack of cars, because that's just sheer ignorance.

Considering funeral information is available online it would be very easy for someone to find actual statistics and facts and figures and PROOF that crematoriums/cemeteries are not holding many funerals. The fact that no one has done so, but instead are reliant on weak second hand "well I haven't noticed any funeral cortèges on the roads lately..." says everything.

My DPs best mate spent last month doing the electrics at an old meat packaging factory. They're repurposing it as a temporary morgue.

Well they're building temporary morgues here in London.....

We have one too, in a town in West Yorkshire

Sorry ..that should read " we do too" as I don't actually know how many there are...

I find this pretty offensive.

I live in a town in Kent with the U.K’s worst death rate (and current estimates of 56% of the population having been infected). During the peaks of the two waves (May and December) ambulances were relentless. It’s been grim.

Consider yourself lucky to have lived in a part of the U.K. where this sort of denial is conceivable.