Those who died with Covid 19 rather than of it.

[Strangerthanstrange]

Are there any countries publishing this data? The numbers would be different. Would they count someone who died from an accident but who tested positive as dying with the disease? Or someone who died of other preventable reason, eg burst appendix but tested positive as dying with it?

You'd need to test every person that died. And at the moment it seems were are struggling to test the living.

I think this is the key piece of information we need to decide how long this shut down should last.

Around 550 - 600,000 people die in the UK every year - which works out at around 15000 people a day ( though deaths are not evenly distributed). How many corona deaths are of people who would have died anyway within the next few weeks?

No journalists seem to be looking at this. Presumably because a headline that reads “x hundred deaths from corona today” attracts more attention than one which says “x hundred people with terminal illnesses died today, corona being the thing that tipped them over the edge”

Presumably they'd have to do an autopsy or similar to determine excat cause of death and there just isn't the time/resources for that at the moment.

The daily stats released by the UK government are for people who tested positive for COVID-19 who have died. Not people who died as a result of COVID-19. There may be a difference.

But re. someone dying in an accident. I don't think if you have coronavirus but get hit by a bus they count you as having died from coronavirus.

It's more complex if you have underlying conditions, but are also being treated for coronavirus.

There was a good piece on this the other day - I believe it was the BBC or Guardian. Gist of it was that if you took out the people that would have died anyway the death rate could potentially be very small

@SugarSugarShimmy that's called speculation. Others will speculate the opposite. We do not know until we have more widespread data!

I think this is the key piece of information we need to decide how long this shut down should last.

Around 550 - 600,000 people die in the UK every year - which works out at around 15000 people a day ( though deaths are not evenly distributed). How many corona deaths are of people who would have died anyway within the next few weeks?

An awful lot of assumptions in there. And looking at where we are, and how we got here, I would respectfully suggest assumptions thus far haven't really helped.

There's still no real understanding of why some people appear to shrug C-19 off, while it kills others. So testing non C-19 deaths might simply pick up the people that are unaffected with no real more data on why some are so susceptible.

Humans and viruses are in a perpetual arms race ... it may be that C-19 has developed a new tactic we need to work to combat. If the SOP to a virus outbreak up until now has been massive quarantine precautions, it would not really surprise me that a virus arises which uses that fact to spread itself further. For something that isn't alive, viruses are pretty smart ...

@tegucigalpa13 Your maths is off (or a typo?) 600,000 divided by 365 is 1644 deaths a day.

Overall death rates are released weekly online. It runs two weeks behind so in a few weeks/a month or so we will be able to see if the overall death rate is a lot higher or not. Average weekly deaths for this time of year is around 11,000.

These kind of threads, which try to minimise it, with zero scientific basis other than some random speculation, really frustrate me. It's not a conspiracy, if it turns out it's not as bad as we thought the data will eventually show that and measures will be adjusted accordingly. But that won't be figured out by the posters on MN!

@Sparkle

Whoops! Thanks - I am not that bad at maths it was a typo!

But the point still stands. In assessing the overall impact of Covid19 on the death rate we need to know how many are “extra” deaths.

@tegucigalpa13 who is this we? That's what people are working on right now. Its not your responsibility.

@tegucigalpa13 I thought it was a typo!

@esjee it's not about responsibility. Different people have different personalities and react differently to stressful situations. Some take comfort in handing over to the experts, others (like me) feel better with a handle on the knowledge and numbers, even if they can't do anything about it. Neither approach is wrong.

@esjee it's not about minimising it's about understanding the information that is out there. Reports of people dying with the virus is quickly changed in discourse to saying they died of it. Which is not the case. The numbers are important, as is, the language and context.