Why does the UK have more daily deaths from Covid than all the EU 27 countries have added together??

[noostrich]

The UK currently has 359 daily deaths - ALL of the other EU 27 states ADDED TOGETHER have only 314.

twitter.com/WritesBright/status/1268313583579885569/photo/1

Why on earth is the UK doing so badly?

How can people be so complacent about how badly the UK government has mishandled the crisis?

I think there are different reporting methods used in different countries which accounts for some of it.

Some of it, conceivably.

But there is no way that differences in reporting differences account for the main point.

And let's not forget that the UK's own figures appear to be under-reported, so I'm not sure that more accurate reporting figures would necessarily improve the balance in the UK's favour.

1. Most other countries do not report deaths in the community and some countries exclude (or underestimate) care home deaths.

1. The number of deaths reported yesterday included quite a few cases going back to earlier months. If you look at the trend based on the date of occurrence, UK numbers have been consistently going down. Hospital deaths clearly peaked on April 8.

It says 140 on BBC including over a hundred that actually happened weeks ago.

As MakeLemonade points out, different reporting methods make it difficult to do a comparison.

All of the Government's responses to CV have come from the UK's Science and Medical experts. If you don't like it I suggest you have a chat to them and tell them you know better and where they've gone wrong.

This Twitter thread explains the difference in data capture better than I can.

twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450749614358528?s=21

Also our lockdown wasn’t as severe or as long as most other places, we also arguably locked down too late. Not sure if we have higher numbers of people in care homes?

Because we didn't go into a proper lockdown when we still had time.

We're fat (on average), we're unhealthy, we eat over processed foods, we think masks are useless (unlike Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, China etc obviously they're all deluded ), we think we're special so social distancing, staying home when we have symptoms, avoiding others don't apply to us, we have a higher BME population than many other countries which have been more severely affected (but I think that's down to poverty, workplaces, or over-exposure to the virus rather than physiological differences), government reactions have been slow, testing took a long time to get underway, PPE wasn't available readily for frontline workers at the beginning of the crisis, so there were many contracting it at work.
The British population is highly mobile- look at the skiing contingent passing the virus around in the community before the government even realised UK had a problem.
Sure there's more reasons...

Because the UK’s response has been woeful. Look at the guidelines and restrictions compared to the other countries’. Tells you all you need to know.

You elect a clown, you get a circus.

We locked down too late, and then it took weeks for an assessment of mask-wearing to be done and the momentum for that was lost. Nobody wanted to shut down businesses and schools so they looked for any way to avoid doing those things. The delay in hindsight looks pathetic.

Hospitals were discharging patients back home early on in order to free up space in hospitals (sensible) it's just that back home meant into care homes as well, meaning that the virus got a head start by killing and infecting elderly and carers. This was negligence in my view, and did not happen in other countries in anything like the same way.

We also had something like half a million people travel basically to hotspots for skiing etc at half term in March, milling around in close proximity in airports. That was so stupid but there it is. If nobody tells you not to go, you just go, you booked your holiday. I know someone who went to Switzerland because there were relatively few cases and it was remote, mountain air etc. Coming back through the airport and watching the news, she realised it had been a stupid decision because it's the airports that mattered, not the mountainsides. D'oh.

And then you have Johnson and his handshaking, Cummings and whatever that was, Rees-Mogg forcing physical voting although the virtual system works ok, Sharma visibly not self-isolating despite symptoms, hardly anybody wears a mask so there is no visual cue at all that we take this seriously beyond a queue outside a supermarket.

It did seem to hit some other countries before us such as Italy... there did seem to be a lag of a few weeks...

I read that the delay of one week for the lockdown when you have already exponential growth in the community causes thousands and thousands more cases . We had all those large gatherings (Cheltenham, football matches, concerts) when other countries were either beginning to lockdown and ban groups of more than 5 or had gone in to complete lockdown.

That week of indecision and delay really cost us. Therefore we already had so many more cases that other countries. Also they closed their borders. That was very effective despite the crappy WHO saying no need to.

Add in to that a policy of turning people away from hospital until they are on death’s door. Of not testing care homes residents and sending them back from hospital in to the care homes et voila!

Lots of other reasons too. Massive shit show and no this isn’t hindsight. Many people were staying this at the time.....

1. Late lock down. This is the biggest one.
2. Lack of PPE, particularly all the start (those people who caught it then, passed it to person x, person x passed it to y, y passed it to z and so it continues today with high numbers).
3. People ignoring the guidelines.
4. People going about normal life e.g. queueing for 3 hours to get in IKEA.
5. Overcrowded country.
6. Not many people wear masks in the UK.
7. Herd immunity plan
8. Lack of trust in the government.
9. Lack of direction from the government and vague guidance.

10. Huge key worker list and even during lockdown millions were working. 11. Unhealthy population. 12. Boris flippin Johnson!

Short answer - because we are comparing apples with oranges.

That's not to say we aren't doing terribly, and we do have pretty much the worst rate overall, but that data is looking at lots of different ways of reporting data. Which is not helpful, and detracts from the argument - people end up arguing about the minutae of the data, rather than the important issues. We should be raging about why we are doing so badly, not about memes created to get people frothing...

It also focuses people, again unhelpfully on our announced daily number, which is hugely misleading when it comes to the actual situation at this moment.

For example, our data as reported each day is, essentially "deaths with COVID that have come to our attention in the last day or so". Some 40% of the hospital deaths reported yesterday happened over a week ago.

For example, the daily announced number last Friday afternoon was 324, but so far less than 200 deaths have actually been registered for the Thursday.

It works both ways too - so far, data shows that on Sunday, approx. 175 deaths from COVID actually occurred, but the daily announced number of deaths on Monday was 111.

Spain is recorded as having zero daily deaths in 2 days this week;. However, two regions alone reported 17 deaths in that period. This is at least partly because the Spanish are now only reporting deaths that happened in the past week, and only adding yesterdays deaths to the daily reported numbers and then adding everything else as a lump sum once a week. It's incomparable to our numbers (and a change on how they used to do it, so incomparable to how they used to do it too!)

The attached graph (courtesy of @rp131 on Twitter) shows the folly of looking at the daily announced deaths (orange) versus the actual deaths.

Saying not staying

Look, whichever way you slice it, our death rate is noticeably higher and our lockdown definitely less strict than some other European countries. The stats will all become clearer for sure but we still have a high infection rate and high death rate.

Why?
Boris fucking Johnson and his inept government.
The country with the largest number of deaths has Trump in charge.

What more is there to be said?

It's not logical to suggest it's all down to some of our data being reported late.

Because if that is the case, then these figures won't include all the current deaths, some if which will in turn be reported late.

I think it's because British people are really into poor data if that data allows themselves to perform self-flagellation whilst slagging off their neighbours for being stupid/lazy/incontinent/selfish.

It's also simply untrue to suggest that EU countries don't include deaths in care homes or the community. Most do.

Again, even if the odd one doesn't, there is no way this accounts for the hugely outsize number of UK deaths compared to the total EU deaths.

What about daily new cases, though?

I assume they are fairly timely and ours are still close to 2,000 whereas in most of the rest of the EU, they are in the low 100s.

I think we locked down too late and unlocked too early. Anecdotally, I am hearing of quite a few new cases.

Boris may get lucky that the partial unlocking still allows cases to decline, but I definitely would not count on it.

Yeah - but according to Boris our figures are right and all those 'jolly foreigners' just can't add up.

Don't forget, in addition to our 'world beating' health service and 'world beating' track and test system we also have a 'world beating' Office of National Statistics.

That would be the same ONS that just ticked the Government off for misrepresenting the statistics every day (but we'll gloss over that).

Wonder what 'Instructions for 5 year olds' will be presented to us tonight?

From my earlier link:

“9/ To give an idea of what Spain’s "method" does: if England adopted the same approach, yesterday NHS would have reported 20 new deaths, not 179. A nice little reduction of 90%.

England would have reported deaths in the teens and 20s all week. 152 for the week, instead of 995.”

There is also a good FT article explaining the difference between UK and Spanish data capture.

It certainly doesn’t mean we are doing well, our numbers are still atrocious, but they aren’t quite as out of step with other places as they look at first glance. It’s also quite typical for the UK to gold plate reporting, see most EU legislation!