Telegraph doesn’t seem to have share tokens like the Times. Not sure how much I can post without someone shouting at me for copyright issues. But here’s the first bit:
“Every day the number of Covid-19 deaths reported from hospitals across the UK make headlines.
But every time they are underestimates of the true death toll, just a snapshot of what is happening in wards across the country.
For a better estimate of the scale of the pandemic in the UK, the total number of deaths, including those not linked to coronavirus, hold some clues.
Thousands of excess deaths are now being reported across the country, leading to the highest weekly death toll since records began.
And amid a meagre testing regime which has not yet passed 20,000 people a day, the number of deaths linked to Covid-19 is likely to be vastly understated.
Record number of deaths
The total number of deaths in the UK has begun to spike, on a scale which has shocked statisticians.
16,387 deaths recorded in England and Wales in the seven days to April 3 makes it the deadliest week since current records began in 2005. It was more than 6,000 higher than the five-year average for the time of year.
Only 3,475 of those deaths had Covid-19 registered on the death certificate, leaving 2,607 unexplained excess deaths.
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Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge, said the spike was "incredibly vivid".
"I don't think I've ever been as shocked when I've looked at something, particularly as just over half of that spike were death certificates with Covid written on them," he said.
"We knew there was going to be a pump in Covid-registered deaths. I hadn't expected such a huge number of deaths which didn't mention it on the death certificate."
The unexplained deaths are likely to be related to Covid-19 but have not yet been detected, such as deaths in care homes, where many residents die before a doctor can examine them, or deaths from unrelated illnesses.
Care England data recently suggested as many as 7,500 could have died from coronavirus in care homes so far.
A similar scenario is playing out in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
As death registration is a faster process in Scotland, more recent data is available. And more excess deaths are beginning to be associated with Covid-19.
In week 14 coronavirus deaths equated to around 46 per cent of all excess deaths. By week 15 it was almost 70 per cent.
Tom Dening, a professor of dementia research at the University of Nottingham, said: "It is worrying that there appears to be a sharp increase in deaths in the community that are not known to be due to Covid-19. So far, we don't have good data on the possible reasons for this, but there are a number of possibilities.
"The first is simply that many of these are in fact caused by Covid-19 that wasn't diagnosed. Testing remains extremely limited outside hospitals, so we probably won't ever know how many people had the virus during this period.
"There are probably multiple reasons for other deaths. These include people not feeling able to attend their GP surgeries, call an ambulance or attend A&E as they may have done in the past. Therefore, some serious conditions may present too late for effective treatment.”
"Another possibility is that some people with serious conditions, like cancer or chronic kidney disease, are either unable or unwilling to attend hospital on the usual regular basis, so their treatment regimes may lapse."
It follows the release of NHS figures which showed that, since the beginning of the outbreak, A&E attendance has dropped to its lowest level since modern records began.”