Official death toll in UK now over 40,000.

[ssd]

At last it includes care home deaths, not just hospital deaths.

What an utterly awful figure.

Worldometer and daily briefing is only hospital deaths. ONS has all registered deaths, including care homes. The death rate is fairly steady, year by year, so the excess death rate is a good indicator.

Does it make you feel better OP in thinking we are the worst country in Europe? Do you like us being first?

Statistics can be manipulated according to the viewpoint that someone holds. Let's just wait until we have all the corroborated and weighted facts for every country before writing off the UK as the cesspit of Europe!

David Spiegelhalter has written for the FT, he's definitely a statistician.

Tim Harford is an economist (and journalist, its not mutually exclusive) who writes for the financial Times

Look at it another way.

I imagine companies which sell garden equipment are doing brilliantly right now. The last two months they will have had March and April sales that are 100s of % up on the same months in the last few years.

Imagine they start projecting the rest of the year’s sales figures based on these two anomaly months? That would be lunacy. Especially when they discover that mid way through the year when people start to lose jobs, run out of money, start to worry about the future, stop buying... and the remaining months of the year swing the other way and are lower than comparable months in the previous years.

At the end of the year it turns out that their annual sales are on a par with the previous YOY figures.

Imagine they had based everything on those two months at the start of the year?

And before anyone says I am comparing deaths with garden equipment, you know fine well I’m not.

I’m talking about context and accurate projections and how you cannot possibly use a snapshot (that suits your agenda) to predict the future total.

The bottom line is we will not know until we can look back on the situation.

@BreathlessCommotion but the article is by Chris Giles. A journalist (with a background in economics).

Multiple examples of his articles being discredited.

Sadie789 you have provided false information, there are statisticians at the FT

I give you Alan Smith OBE uk.linkedin.com/in/alan-smith-obe-37385935 A statistician who used to work for ONS and now works at the Financial Times.

Any other lies you wish to tell?

It'll get worse when the second peak hits.
Kids going to school, people going to work, people travelling all over etc.
Bout a fortnight, 3 weeks, don't be surprised if the figures start rising.
100000 by October.

@Sadie789

You seem to be very dissatisfied with the number of Excess Deaths.

Apart from making-up criticisms of the people who publish the FT, do you have any objections to the actual numbers?

www.ft.com/content/40fc8904-febf-4a66-8d1c-ea3e48bbc034

"The number of UK deaths during the coronavirus pandemic over and above normal levels has exceeded 50,000, official figures confirmed on Tuesday.

The Office for National Statistics said that in the week ending May 1, there had been 17,953 deaths in England and Wales recorded, 8,012 higher than the average of the past five years in that week, as the disease killed three times the normal number of people in care homes.

This represented the seventh consecutive week that deaths exceeded normal levels and once equivalent figures from Scotland and Northern Ireland were included, takes total mortality across the UK during the pandemic to 50,979.

Nick Stripe, head of life events at the ONS, told the BBC: “[The figures are] actually the seventh-highest weekly total since this data set started in 1993 so we have had four out of the top seven weeks in the last four weeks”.

I do really hope there's a vaccine soon. The Gov have well and truly fucked up the management of CV, a vaccine is our only way out.

@MonkeyToesOfDoom

Don’t forget Eid in 10 days. The Midlands will probably as a huge hotspot in a month. Worried, helpless and preemptively annoyed for the community who will almost certainly visit each other in droves.

Without a vaccine I'm still trusting Prof Witty that 80% will get it and 1% of those will die.

So either way we can expect 550,000 in total. Spread out or condensed over a period of time. Without a vaccine and a blanket bad on all travel that seems realistic. Only 5% of the population has been infected so far.

So I guess it depends of what or who you trust to have the best estimate. I'm going with the scientists.

Only looking back on this in a few years will know. It's all unknown.

Probably emerge*

So we’re taking figures from 7 weeks out of 52, while comparing them with 52 weeks from 5 previous years? Makes no sense.

@PestymcPestFace he didn’t write the article. He’ worked at the ONS as a content creator. He turns the stats which have been worked on by statisticians into pretty graphs. His background is in cartography. Seeing as you’ve clearly spent the last hour furiously Googling for statisticians who work for the FT to try and prove your point (and that I’m “lying” which is a strangely vicious substitution for “wrong”) I hate to burst your bubble.

"We have the most populated country in Europe"

No, Russia is, then Germany

Germany pop 83 million has 7,700 deaths (hospital + care homes)
UK pop 67 million has 33,000 deaths (hospital + care homes)

The most similar country is probably:
France pop 66 million has 27,000 deaths (hospital + care homes)

sadie Govenrment ministers, e.g. Hancock, have stated several times that "excess deaths" compared to previous years are the best was to estimate the final death toll due to Coronavirus

... since many people die where Coronaviros was suspected, but they are not tested before or after death

Redolent

I actually hadn't considered that. My home town is in the Midlands, it has a large Muslim community centred around a large mosque. I'd imagine a lot of town to be similar.
It looks like there may be a storm of mini peaks brewing. 2 weeks till the celebrators of VE day. Then 2 weeks from those returning to work this week. 2 weeks after Eid. 2 weeks after the schools take more kids.

Yes but you can not compare to previous years until you have a year to compare.

Sadie The excess deaths are for exactly the same period of time compared to previous years.
It is calculated on a week by week basis

e.g. like this and also for some of the UK regions, you can see the COVID death peaks:

FT: Excess UK deaths in Covid-19 pandemic top 50,000

They calculate each week, how many more deaths there were than the same week in previous yeras, averaged

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.ft.com/content/40fc8904-febf-4a66-8d1c-ea3e48bbc034" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ft.com/content/40fc8904-febf-4a66-8d1c-ea3e48bbc034</a>

The Office for National Statistics said that in the week ending May 1, there had been 17,953 deaths in England and Wales recorded,
8,012 higher than the average of the past five years in that week,
as the disease killed three times the normal number of people in care homes.

This represented the seventh consecutive week that deaths exceeded normal levels
and once equivalent figures from Scotland and Northern Ireland were included,
takes total mortality across the UK during the pandemic to 50,979

Nick Stripe, head of life events at the ONS, told the BBC:
“[The figures are] actually the seventh-highest weekly total since this data set started in 1993
so we have had four out of the top seven weeks in the last four weeks”.

Yes but you can not compare to previous years until you have a year to compare.

Course you can.
The ONs compare week to week.

The Office for National Statistics said that in the week ending May 1, there had been 17,953 deaths in England and Wales recorded

Weekending may 1st

8,012 higher than the average of the past five years in that week

So look at the week ending may 1st in 2019 week ending may 1st in 2018, week ending may first 2017, etc etc.

Technically speaking, the year is broken into weeks anyway for a lot of things like financial and tax stuff and pay rolls etc.
Weeks 1 - 52.

You can look at any given week and company to the same week from previous years.

Why the need for projections? Because this is what stats is all about

Hear hear @effingterrified

I don't really think you understand how this all works Sadie

60,000 deaths from an estimated 3,140,000 infected (from the rough serology numbers Vallance provided a few days back — 10% of London infected at some point, 4% everywhere else on average).