Also I take issue with his statement twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1255056329275834370
"The ONS chart shows this is no flu and much more prevalent than the hospital death figures suggest. "
"The care home deaths are particlarly bad.
There were 7,316 registrations in week ending 17 April, compared with a normal number of about 2,400."
The point about flu deaths is we expect them to appear mostly in care homes.
That's WHY we don't worry about the flu, because a care home resident stays on average for 26 months before dying.
E.g., over the last 3 weeks of 2014 and first 6 of 2015, there were 14,678 deaths of people aged under 65. Over the next 9 weeks, there were 13,926 deaths of the same age group
Meanwhile those over 75 died in total 80,856 in weeks 50-6, and then 47,593 in weeks 7-12.
We can see that there were 33,000 (+70%) excess dead 75+ year olds for two reasons when comparing December - January to February - March:
- normal winter = more deaths
- a known bad flu season (2014-2015) = even more deaths
But the deaths of working age people was only 5% higher.
The point about 'flu' is NOT that it doesn't result in lots of excess deaths - it does. The point about flu is that it kills people who, to be blunt, typically haven't got long left to live.
So saying 'lots of people are dying in care homes' doesn't tell you it's not flu.
Looking at specifically the age group 45-64 is where we see that this is not flu.
Here we see 1689 deaths in the most recent 2 registered weeks, as opposed to around 1050 pre-covid-19. That is an increase of 60%
For January 2015 the average weekly deaths in this age group was 1390, and in the summer it dropped to 1100, i.e. 26% higher in the peak than the trough.
We DO have record deaths of the elderly, but it's the deaths across middle age and up that are the bigger issue in that in the sense that we clearly DON'T shut down the economy to save 30,000+ old people over winter, but we are doing it now to save a quite specific demographic - NOT any number of people in care homes, who if this WAS a flu would plainly (and rightly so) be allowed to die, but rather in view of:
perhaps 3000 extra deaths aged 40-64
another 4000 deaths in the 65-75 group
(the under 40 group are at reduced risk of mortality at the moment due to not behaving as foolishly as normal)
So the numbers dead so far in the demographics that society can be seen to actively sacrifice itself to defer death are relatively much smaller, but clearly if we did nothing at all they would be much larger.
This is the original Dominic Cummings point - if this WAS flu, then the care homes would have emptied by 10% or whatever, and we would have carried on as we do each and every winter. This only proved to be wrong when it was found that it didn't behave as flu (which kills people who are OLDER than average than the average mortality), and is thus fully ignorable in that it's plainly insane to shutdown life to save, say, 10% of care home population where in 2.5 years the entire population of that care home population has died anyway.
It was Boris getting ill, rather than Stanley, that was the key to covid-19, not any number of deaths in care homes....
And we need to consider this in context:
- for example if we stop people driving like cunts, by putting black boxes etc. in all cars, then we might save 500 lives of people aged 20-30 in a year (say), which is 30,000 years of life saved.
- meanwhile if we shutdown the country over winter, let's say we save 30,000 care home deaths, each with one year on average left to live.
The former looks a lot more sane than the latter, does it not?
So we mustn't obsess TOO much about raw numbers in that '30,000 deaths' (of which 15,000 were in care homes) are not comparable in terms of lost years of life with 30,000 deaths in China, where the population trends younger.
And we can't exactly use respiratory virus care home deaths as a stick to beat the government with, because realistically we don't attempt extreme measures to stop them any other year.
We CAN attack the government on the basis of the thousands of avoidable deaths of younger (i.e. middle aged) people and observe, incidentally, that we also saved 10,000 people in care homes, but the latter is not our goal!