Please stop giving us bogus figures

[Sparklfairy]

I'm sorry if this annoys or upsets anyone but I'm getting thoroughly pissed off with the messing about with death statistics.

Sky news have just said:

"The number of coronavirus deaths in the UK has risen sharply to 26,097 as those in care homes and the community were included in the government's figures for the first time.

The total is up from 21,678 coronavirus deaths in UK hospitals announced on Tuesday."

Sorry, but between 21st March and 17th April, there have been around 27,000 more deaths than the five year average.

Five year average was 41,452 - this year was 68,395.*

Every year, and even this year until the pandemic, we have been roughly in line with the five year average (within a few hundred).

12 days later and they're still only saying 26,000.

They're dicking about with stats from different places, some UK, some England and Wales, some just England, it's impossible to get a clear picture.

And really, I don't care what anyone says, even if some of those 'extra deaths' are people not seeking help for a heart attack/stroke etc, domestic violence incidents, suicides etc, every one of those deaths is caused directly or indirectly by this bastard virus.

For anyone that says this is ghoulish, some people cope with stress by getting a handle on the facts, and feeling like facts are being played around with is adding to stress levels.

*Data taken from Office of National Statistics.

@LucyLocketsPocket
Hi Lucy, thanks for your reply.

I know the z score takes the standard deviation of the data into account so it's not saying deaths are 40% above average in your example. It's more like ' this number of deaths is unlikely to be seen just as a random event' so it will be affected by the size of the population (a 40% increase in deaths just as a random fluctuation is much less likely for UK, say, than San Marino!). So I'm still struggling a bit to know exactly what the chart is telling me about how bad the outbreak is.

[https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/z-score/]
Couple of good videos on how Z score is calculated.

Statistical analysis is pointless over a such a short period of time. The first three months of this year show a consistently lower than average death rate probably the result of a mild winter and accurately predicted flu vaccines among many factors.
The care home system is privately run and at the start of the outbreak there was a mass movement of chronically ill elderly patients from hospital into the care home system ( financing restrictions were lifted) where prompt resuscitation is not as easily available. We may just be seeing the acute effect of this. The patients moved may well have lingered on in hospital with medical intervention only to die later in the year. In effect the chronic bed blocking problem that has plagued the NHS for many years was solved radically by the need to prepare hospitals for COVID-19 patients.
In the long term the figures will be available but I suspect that the current non COVID peak will reflect the unblocking of beds.
My father died of Lewy Body Parkinson and was in a carehome for the last 12 months. He chose to stop eating and drinking ( he had talked about suicide before he lost the ability to communicate) and we refused permission for the home to move him into hospital for tube feeding/ fluids, they were not happy but complied. Had he been moved he would have probably lived on for years in a “locked in “ state. He had made it quite clear that he did not want this.
I learnt early on in my career that carehomes are not full of jolly old people playing bingo and having a sing song. Reality is far more depressing. I have the utmost respect for care workers they do an amazing job in light of the type of care they have to give.

The Government need to be held to account for the complete ineptitude of their early response. There was a chance to shut this down early on and that opportunity was lost. Never let anyone forget that this government openly admitted to a herd immunity policy where they were willing to kill 1% of the population. 1% of millions of people.

We are far too early in this situation to judge the governments response and the long term outcomes. War always results in collateral damage, it is inevitable. By trying to save lives you inevitably lose some. Many lives will be lost indirectly because of the worldwide collapse of global economy.
Harsh facts but when you see other threads moaning about their cancelled holidays, ultimately the blame lies with those who put their own needs above those of the population as a whole. Much as I hate the girl, Greta was right we have ruined her future, global warming apart our obsession with air travel is the reason we are in this state.

There have been a number of threads on here recently trying to influence opinion and normalise the belief that lockdown needs to be relaxed soon. All cropped up end of last week.

I thought the same @BertoldBrecht. Many of the older generation on my Facebook are sharing "memes" that remind me of the Leave campaign propaganda. One is purporting to have been written by Jennifer Saunders. We are being "nudged" by the government nudge Unit in my opinion.

@Pasghetti
Hi can you provide a source for the claim that the government admitted to being willing to kill 1% of the population. I've not seen any politician or civil servant say that.

There's propaganda in my auntie's Facebook crochet group so I assume it's here too.

There was a post about "three weeks to plateau then reopen the schools" or something and it started with a phrase like "The figures are looking promising" on April 7th when the podium daily death toll that day was 938. That thread smells whiffy to me propaganda wise. I asked what figures were looking promising but I don't think I got a reply.

@Pasghetti
Hi can you provide a source for the claim that the government admitted to being willing to kill 1% of the population. I've not seen any politician or civil servant say that.

At the very first press briefing on March 3rd Chris Whitty said the expected 80% of us to get it and 1% to die.

I just want transparency in the figures at the very least. I have no interest in influencing lockdown or propaganda. I very much take exception to being lied to and the goverment not being transparent. It is an absolute scandal what they are doing.

@JackChaffinch
Does saying you expect someone to die mean you're willing to kill them? Or are they actually completely different things?

@Plbrookes @oralengineer

Thanks both for the extra info.

Maths is obviously not my strong point! I see what you mean now.

Here is the original article that the chart is from. It explains a bit more about how the z score was calculated.

I don't completely understand what this means in terms of numbers. But does it make more sense to you?

news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-englands-excess-deaths-among-the-highest-in-europe-11977394

@Plbrookes @oralengineer

Specifically:

"To compare how many more people have died than expected in each country, EuroMOMO uses an algorithm to standardise each country's data and take into account factors such as population size and mortality patterns.

This produces a measure called a z-score, which tells us how many standard deviations the amount of deaths in each country is from the mean value of all countries.

The larger a country's z-score the higher the number of excess deaths."

I don't think they specifically said they were willing to kill a certain percentage but more that some of our loved ones will die.
@JackChaffinch I agree re some kind of subliminal manipulation, the more the possiblity of a relaxation is broached, the more people discuss it, it then gathers momentum and becomes mainstream.Same happened with no deal - first it was out of the question then suddenly every tom dick and harry was demanding it !

@Plbrookes
Does saying you expect someone to die mean you're willing to kill them? Or are they actually completely different things?
If you expect people to die from a killer virus and do nothing to prevent that happening for months as the infection level spreads exponentially and in fact actually tell the public that going to mass events like Cheltenham is safe - then the end result is the same innit.

Anyone interested in numbers, stats, graphs & discussions about them should check out the the threads called something like 'daily stats, graphs, numbers'

@JackChaffinch
Ah so they didn't say they were willing to kill 1% of the population then, that was just a lie. Glad we've cleared that up.

Worldometer has now updated the stats to include carehome/community deaths. Between 21st March and 17th April the figure is now 16,685.

This still leaves a discrepancy of ~11,000 vs the 5 year average 'unaccounted' for (sorry for the blunt way of putting it). I still don't get why nothing adds up

These are the FT charts showing "excess mortality" spikes up to mid-April in different countries from official statistics (ONS for the UK)
They compare to the 5-year average for each country.

The epidemic started later in the UK and US, so the peak extra deaths would be later

Some deaths, even in hospital, can take up to 4 weeks to be registered (there was a chart showing number of weeks for the UK)
so the ONS excess deaths around 8 April can be more fully seen in a future release to 30 April or so.

For the last week of ONS data released

There were 7,316 deaths registered in care homes.
That same week on average over the last few years, there were 2,154 deaths

That FT infographic is really interesting (and concerning) @BigChocFrenzy

People on SM are just annoying me now so I've had to step back from it. More and more posts spreading the idea that Covid is just being chucked on death certificates for no reason whatsoever I understand people are frustrated with lockdown but circulating that the media/government are OTT scaremongering is simply reckless.

I am so angry that they are only counting deaths in care homes for those tested when little testing has been done up to very recently. The ons figures appear much higher than the government figures. How are fhey getting away with this?

@Humphriescushion I honestly have no idea! This is publicly accessible information, albeit published 2ish weeks behind. But every Tuesday the truth comes out about how much we are being deceived, yet no one seems to be holding the government to account.

I know @sparklefairy. When the goverment addressed this a few weeks ago in the briefing and said they were going to out the ons figures on the daily graphs i thought great some transparency and i started to have some faith in the figures. However they decided to abandon that in favour of going with the those tested figure, very strange!

The head of the ONS said on the Andrew Marr show this weekend (sorry no link as I'm in my phone), that it would be a mistake to compare these figures between countries

Different countries have very different reporting standards and processes and the UK's was one of the best of the world.

He said that, once population size and density is accounted for, and once reporting had caught up in every country, that there was currently no reason to think that uk was doing badly compared to other countries.