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.

Finally, the Guardian have a well written article on the subject:

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/uk-coronavirus-death-toll-rises-above-32000-to-highest-in-europe

And from the Telegraph:

"Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine, University of Oxford, said the potential for a larger proportion of the excess deaths to not involve Covid-19 "is a real phenomenon".

He said it is also "deeply concerning" that a high proportion (90 per cent) of excess deaths at home are not registered as involving Covid-19.

He said: "It really does concern me and I think what's happening here is that the context of the collateral damage of just focusing on a single disease that's now dominating our health services is now creating significant problems."

Finally, the Guardian have a well written article on the subject

They have included Ireland's low death toll on the map but they have deliberately excluded Ireland's relatively high number of deaths per 100,000 people from the bar chart.

@Clavinova true, but that's not the focus of the article. Belgium is the worst hit for deaths per million and Ireland is still lower than us according to Worldometer. We're 5th in the world (if you exclude San Marino as it's tiny), and they're 11th, which is why they're not on the bar chart because that only shows top 10).

Sparklfairy
they're 11th, which is why they're not on the bar chart because that only shows top 10).

Ireland are 8th if you exclude San Marino, Andorra and St Maarten - these 3 countries are not listed in the bar chart in any case. Ireland should be above the US, Germany, Iran and Brazil - who are in the chart. Ireland have been left out deliberately - it's the only country with figures on the map not in the bar chart - because the death rate doesn't look great for Ireland either. Just checked my suspicions - one of the journalists wrote an article for the Irish Times a few weeks ago; Why is the Irish death rate lower than the UK’s?

5th Vit D3 study from Belgium.

Males showed markedly higher percentage of vitamin D deficiency ..Vit D deficiency is a possible risk factor for severe infection in males. Vit D3 supplementation might be an inexpensive, accessible and safe mitigation for covid

Link :
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20079376v1

Thank you for posting this OP. From the week of 4th April, it was apparent that there was a significant increase in the total number of weekly deaths that was not being explained by Coronavirus. This discrepancy has increased each week that his being reported and must also be obvious to those seeing the total number of deaths rising.

I am glad to see more attention being drawn to this and I hope that we see more focus on all cause excess mortality figures in the weeks to come to fully understand what it happening. On top of the 24,000 people who were reported to have died due to Coronavirus in the 4 weeks to 24th April and the 42,000 who would normally have died in this period, an additional 13,000 people died.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales

It is disingenuous to suggest we need to question the reported figures of other countries before looking into the actual glaringly obvious questions raised by those in the UK:

The Euromomo.eu statistics show significant excess deaths from the UK and Spain and while the figures from Spain seem to be largely reported in the Coronavirus death figures, those from the UK do not.

www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

I was interested to make a comparison for France as I live here and it seems that Coronavirus Deaths as reported, do largely account for the excess deaths being seen in the total deaths figures.

insee.fr/fr/information/4470857

also linking
www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe-by-population/
as these are the sources of information I have been using for comparisons.

@ chateau here is some extra info for France in case you are interested, you may have already seen it.
mobile.twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1253980234669600769

This is a useful analysis and commentary on excess death data:

fullfact.org/health/covid-deaths/

Thanks for those last two links.

From the links (Insee/France and FullFact) - the French statistics only compare excess deaths for 2020 with 2018/2019 - the UK stats compare 2020 with a 5 year average. Not sure if this would favour France or the UK - it depends which years previously had higher/lower excess deaths.

@Clavinova, even if the UK was looking at the past two years, there would still be a significant difference to explain. The death rates in both countries have changed less than 5% in the last 5 years.

It is not a case of 'favouring' France or the UK, there is a significant difference in the UK, in the expected average number of deaths at this time of the year that is not explained by the Coronavirus deaths. In the case of France, the difference between expected deaths and actual deaths does largely appear to be explained by the reported CV deaths, but of course, we wait and see what comes round the corner.

According to the FullFacts article above, there are similar issues in the high number of unexpected and unexplained deaths in New York, Spain and the Netherlands that are not being reported as CV deaths.

Just seen the new ONS figures for week ending 1st May. 17,953 vs 9,941 five year average. Officially there were 4,718 Covid-19 deaths recorded that week, so excess deaths are still double, although the lower stats than last week seem to indicate that maybe we have peaked?

Worryingly, between 21st March and 1st May there were 57,139 more deaths than the five year average, although only 27,510 were recorded as Covid by this point

So that means the death toll (including indirect deaths from lockdown) could stand currently at 65,000??

We won't know the full picture until later. There are so many different factors to consider. Many elderly and frail people eventually die because of an infection like flu, in combination with underlying conditions. It may be that a proportion of those who have died with CV, may have died within months, which will eventually be reflected in the longer term excess death figures.

Whatever the reason for those extra deaths the excess death toll of 65,000 is shocking. Why is no one screaming about this???

Where did you get the 65, 000 from? Of course, any excess deaths are terrible, but these have not been hidden. They have been screamed about- they've been in the headlines, on the news and on all of the briefings.

From the ONS:

Looking at the year-to-date (using the most up-to-date data we have available), the number of deaths up to 1 May 2020 was 247,251, which is 41,627 more than the five-year average (Figure 2). Of the deaths registered by 1 May, 33,408 mentioned COVID-19 on the death certificate, this is 13.5% of all deaths.

Although the ONS data is 12 days behind @cathyandclare, the difference between the weekly deaths (from all causes) and the five year average is slightly more than double the official figures on worldometer. So, whilst we'll know for sure in two weeks, it's a fair assumption that we're looking at a total death rate of around 65,000 today. Note this includes indirect causes too.