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?

Our record is woeful, but it’s worth looking at the data from some of the other countries you mention.

Are you aware that Spain has changed how it’s announcing deaths? It’s pretty cynical tbh...

@KenDodd
You're criticising other people for being predictable?

Oh, and boris is proud of his achievements on covid.

Understanding that data is being reported differently in different countries and thinking our numbers are terrible and the government are a hopeless shower of shite are not mutually exclusive!

And as if to prove the point - today we announced 176 deaths, down from 359 yesterday. In reality, there is no way we had half the deaths on Wednesday that we had on Tuesday!

According to Worldometer, Italy announced 88 deaths, up from 71 yesterday.

Today Sweden announced 20 deaths, down from 74 yesterday.

None of it is at all meaningful on a day to day basis.

It is a snapshot of one day.

But actually for the UK. that daily figure of 359 does seem fairly typical for our current daily figures.

Whether Italy's figures are 88 or 71, they are about a quarter of our figures - Italy is not a quarter of the size of the UK.

The UK Government's approach has been disastrous and cost thousands of lives.

Yesterdays figures contained a lot of backdated deaths, due to a new source of data. Today's figures are accurate, and much lower.
But don't let facts get in the way, eh OP?

Other countries only reporting positive cases tested in hospital from the day before, not from weeks ago.

Also some dont include care homes or outside of hospital deaths

The daily figures are appalling compared to our European neighbours for example (maybe leave Sweden out for now).

But my view is they wanted herd immunity, or at least DC did, and this is what they and we are getting whether we like it or not.

UK is failing by the minute in anything they try to do. It is sad.

And Brexit is next up.

But Britain is exceptionalist. A post Colonial hangover of greatness prevails somehow. But people are dying every day from Covid. I'm not happy about that when I look at other countries achievements.

feelingverylazytoday - do you have a source for that claim?

From yesterday's New Scientist:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632853-300-why-have-there-been-so-many-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-uk/

Fundamental failings: the abandon of testing and tracing early on, locking down too late. Also being slow to make the public aware of possible symptoms and insisting on only isolating with a fever and dry cough.

There is no "typical" - the attached shows how the announced data swings wildly from day to day. FWIW, the 7 day rolling average is now 241.

Italy peaked 2 weeks before we did; 2 weeks ago they were reporting daily deaths of 150/160.

As a PP observed, believing that the UK Govt is a shitshow that couldn't wipe its own backside, and who is denial of their own incompetence, is not incompatible with a desire for some better understanding of what all the statistics actually show.

If for no other reason than to be able to call the Govt itself out on them, as the UK Statistics Authority are trying to do. (The testing stats are another black hole of incompetence).

Well, a lot of the responses on this thread are nonsense for a start.

1. The data isn't comparable, the only country that is reporting deaths like we are (and more besides) is Belgium, which has a death rate much worse than ours. Many others are still only reporting hospital deaths.

1. Pretty obvious that most of the cases are coming from the probably appallingly handled epidemics in care homes and hospitals, not from the community or from a football match, horse race or a beach, or even from the date of our lockdown.

You just have to look at the statistics on case numbers, less than 500 per day are coming from those with symptoms, the other c. 1300 are from mass testing of care home staff and residents and NHS staff - go figure. The community and the lockdown / easing are not the problem here!

PatriciaHolm - there is a clear line there that can be seen, ignoring the day to day noise. You can see that we are now plateauing, after a period of the figures coming down fairly sharply.

Basically as soon as the government eased the lockdown, the death figures stopped going down.

Because we're counting anyone with covid written on their death certificate. It may not have been the only cause of death fully but was either a factor or present at death.

This was needed to understand how it was moving through the population and infection rates.

If you are HIV positive and sadly pass away from pneumonia, you would still have HIV positive written on your death certificate and counted as a statistic for deaths of HIV.

??? Why would easing the lockdown have any effect on the daily deaths immediately? There is a 3-4 week lag, normally, between infection and death. Any increase from this week's easing won't be seen for weeks.

The 7 day rolling average is attached, again bumpy because even at that level the stats are wild, but going down. Also attached is deaths by actual date of death - last few days subject to revision, but going down.

If you're going to get exercised by anything right now, it should be hospital admissions, which do very much seem to be plateauing, which is more concerning.

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

It is disingenuous to assume that most other countries are is reporting their data.

The excess death data on Euromomo gives a picture that is independent of CV19 classification. The UK has had a much bigger spike of excess deaths than other European countries. Spain and England stand head and shoulders above all the others. Followed by Belgium, France, Netherlands and then Italy and Sweden.

There are still potential delays and errors in this data but it seems to be more complete.

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

What @Tfoot75 and @CoachBombay said.

This is from a recent Spectator article www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-way-covid-deaths-are-being-counted-is-a-national-scandal:

"We need proper information to inform our responses to the virus, both clinical and societal. Instead, we have no idea how many of the deaths attributed to Covid-19 really were due to the disease. And we have no idea how many of the excess deaths were really due to Covid-19 or to the effects of lockdown. Officials should be releasing, as a matter of urgency, detailed information on the surge in deaths, both apparent Covid and non-Covid — particularly in care homes. How many are dying of Covid acquired in hospitals? Data presumably exists on this too, but is not released.

The first rule in a pandemic should be to ensure transparency of information. Without it, errors can go undiscovered — and lives can be lost. We will never be able to find out for sure what this disease was like, or what it did in the early stages of the crisis.

One of the unappreciated tragedies of this epidemic so far is the huge lost opportunity to understand Covid-19 better. We like to beat ourselves up for having the worst Covid death toll in Europe — but we will never know, because we decided not to count properly. In a country that has always prided itself on the quality of its facts and figures, the missing Covid-19 data is a national scandal."

Daily counting is not really fair the uk is behind other countries so will be higher, However those saying that we are overcounting is simply not true. Look at the excess deaths.

Well, given how the Govt has fiddled the numbers on testing, education spending, track n trace, the app and antibody testing (supposed to have started 2 weeks ago)
Its hardly likely they have been squeakily accurate on CV deaths and our overal numbers do not include all those deaths that occured before we started testing in care homes and the community.

its just an easy get out for Tory supporters to say "oh those pesky europeans aren't counting their deaths accurately"

ONS says 8000 daily infections, thats at least 80 daily deaths as we go forward.

Look at excess deaths, over a five year average for the real numbers?

Boris Johnson

From yesterday's New Scientist

From your link-

"[David] King who last month launched an independent alternative to the government’s scientific advisory group, says that while differences in culture, demographics and data collection can make international comparisons hard, they cannot explain the gap between the UK and countries including Australia, Greece and South Korea."

I can help him out with South Korea - Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper say we should track and trace like South Korea:

"25 March SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea warned on that it will deport foreigners while its citizens could face jail if they violate self-quarantine rules after a surge in imported coronavirus cases."

"The success behind South Korea’s fast action toward containing the spread of COVID-19 is in its legal access to private information of credit card transactions, according to observers on Wednesday [April]. Despite disputes on infringing on individuals’ privacy, the method is being touted in and out of the country for its efficiency, as it can take just 10 minutes to track the movement of patients infected with the virus."

"Since the first case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed on Jan. 20, the Korean government has traced infected patients’ routes and identified who might have come into voluntary or non voluntary contact by looking into credit card records. Authorities have publicized some of the records as part of containment efforts."

Whitty, Vallance and UK government ministers have all said that the best measure is "excess mortality",
i.e. the extra number of total deaths compared to the historical average for the same period in previous years

John Burn-Murdochh@jburnmurdoch* (Financial Times stats geek)

we’ve updated our excess mortality tracker, the best measure for international comparisons of Covid death tolls

UK had 62,000 more deaths than usual through to May 22, the highest rate of excess deaths in the world

I'm not a tory supporter, doesn't mean I think other countries are reporting as completely as we are. If there are 80 covid deaths a day, it doesn't matter, as long as there aren't any excess deaths.

But as I said, less than 500 of the 8,000 are symptomatic - so 80 of those won't die every day, I don't think the death rate is 1% of all cases as most countries haven't tested whole populations. . 2 weeks ago the daily symptomatic cases was more like 1,000 per day, it has halved.

Everything that 7ofNine said plus the dithering at the beginning. If we’d locked down harder and faster I suspect we would be in a better position now.