ONS.

[GotTheCityOnLockdown]

My friend made a really interesting point to me earlier.

According to ONS, in March '19 there were 42,000 deaths in England.
In the first 3 weeks of March '20 there have been 32,559 deaths (including those caused by COVID-19.)

If we are facing such a lethal disease, wouldn't the numbers be a hell of a lot higher?

We're all forced to stay at home, to only go to the supermarket.
We've been told we can exercise once a day, we can't see family/friends, to close our businesses if they're 'non-essential'
The police have been given the powers to fine/arrest people if they're caught out without (what the officers deem as) a good reason.
We're facing catastrophic effects on the economy, people reaching a point of financial destitution.
But the numbers are roughly the same as last year...

Can anyone explain it? I'm more than willing to accept I'm wrong, but I can't get my head around it!

@Bingeslayer I know right!!

@frumpety Yes, that graph is from the article linked above.
It shows chance of dying by age in males, females and the coronavirus death rate in both males and females in relation to age.

Cause of death is the problem. Old age is never used unfortunately
This is not true

You can specify old age as the underlying cause of death, but you should also mention in part one or part two, as appropriate, any medical or surgical conditions that may have contributed to the death

I suspect Covid is coming under parts one or two?

Can anyone explain how a death is recorded?

When my mum died the coroner put her cause of death down as a pulmonary embolism but they also listed alcohol intoxication (she was more than 30x over the limit)
But it wasn't the alcohol that killed her or caused the PE though, so why did they put it down?

I don't understand that.

Sorry that was meant to say 4x the drink drive limit... not 30

Surely though if we weren't in lockdown:

A) virus would have spread much more so number of covid deaths would be higher
B) all deaths prevented by lockdown (road accidents etc) would still have happened

So without the lockdown the number of deaths would have been the usual monthly average PLUS covid deaths.....right?

Without controls we're looking at cases doubling every few days. From 40,000 currently if it doubled every three days it takes less than a month to have 5 million infected.

So, say we protect the vulnerable. No-one in a vulnerable category or living with someone in a vulnerable category goes to work. Technically, I'm in the vulnerable category as a well controlled health condition which in no way limits my life expectancy increases my risk. If the virus is running rampant, my husband isn't going to work (he's a key w

Posted too soon.

No-one with asthma, diabetes or living with someone who does would be in society. Sickness absence rates would be huge. Normal economic function would be impossible.

In March the pandemic started to take hold here. We've only been in lockdown for 2 weeks and have only seen the numbers start to be significant in the past week.

I think you'll have a better comparison of Corona death rate effects if you look at April statistics (when we get to the end of it).

@gotthecityonlockdown

But the stats for ALL deaths compared to last year only go up to March 20th 2020. At this time there were only a total of 177 deaths from Covid-19 so we wouldn't see a rise compared to last 5 years.
Check again when we have deaths for April and compare.

I think you just have to trust in PH and medical profession. It doesn't make sense to say people would die anyway as they are dying of a specific infection. If it's not thought to be the cause i I f death it would be contributory rather than main cause. In any but the v elderly it would be likely to be the actual cause if an acute illness. It's not like norovirus or MRSA which more usually coexist in an unwell person in hospital and we wouldn't usually put it as the cause of death.