Yesterday deaths in hospital’s

[Alex50]

For Coronvirus was only 6, it hasn’t been that number since March. At the peak it was nearly 900 in one day.

www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-25-June-2020.xlsx

And as if to make my point...78 uk hospital deaths announced today. 36% actually happened over a week ago!

Someone is doing some retrospective digging out of cases this week I think; over 20% of the hospital deaths on Friday were over a week old as well. Really doesn't help as it means the daily numbers are even more unrepresentative.

Someone is doing some retrospective digging out of cases this week I think; over 20% of the hospital deaths on Friday were over a week old as well. Really doesn't help as it means the daily numbers are even more unrepresentative.

I agree - I used to be really focused on the daily death rates but they don’t mean anything anymore as the deaths included could be from weeks ago. The daily number isn’t a true representation of how things currently are.

They have had a large proportion from previous weeks all along, though. It’s nothing new this week.

The last 3-4 weeks have been much better for that, though, it's been about 10/15% older than a week. Today was definitely an outlier with 36% that older.

This website tracks it really well.

www.cebm.net/oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/

These figures don't seem right. There were 186 deaths of people who had had a positive test in the uk on 25th June. Which are the latest published.

The CEBM data is just hospital deaths in England, so smaller than the total announced number which is all settings deaths for the UK.(186 isn't the latest - today's was 100.)

Yes, just the England numbers, sorry.

And you’re right, @PatriciaHolm, there do seem to be more deaths from further back, more like some of the reporting from a month ago.

@PatriciaHolm why do they include deaths from weeks ago?

The daily figures from hospitals are unreliable until at least a week after the date. It says that on the data with a 5 day period.

But it does illustrate a lot of deaths outside of hospital. Previously it was attributed to a lot of people dying, having Covid put on their death certificate with no positive test but that has been tightened up on now..has to be a positive test.

What you have with deaths outside hospital is people dying, some of Covid, but a lot dying for various reasons but being Covid positive. The data didn't say Covid caused the death, but they were positive (remember 80% of people are asymptomatic)

Hence the poor chap that died in a road accident, and tested positive for Covid was shown as a Covid death!! It didn't cause his death though.

What is probably likely to happen is the number of excess deaths will drop below what is the norm as a fair number of people have now died who would have died in the next few months or year but we will never know properly until afterwards and when the inquiry is undertaken

@MarieG10 thank you for the explanation, it’s so confusing.

Excess deaths is the most reliable number measuring the extent of the outbreak. The number of UK excess deaths since the outbreak began is now above 65,000.

www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/number-uk-excess-deaths-outbreak-18470626

@HannahStern but is it? With the NHS 10 million back log of appointments. Also people were staying away from hospital when they should’ve gone in sooner.

I don’t get how they get the figures at all. I know this says hospitals but last week in our nursing home there were eight deaths directly linked to COVID (not including non Covid ones)

The data I referred to below is just from hospitals, and there are various reasons for death numbers coming out over time.

For one, the reporting systems used are not designed to report deaths like this on a daily basis. It's a manual process, which doesn't always happen for each hospital trust every day, and quite often not at weekends. Hence numbers for Sunday and Monday (reported by trusts on Sat and Sun) are often super low.

Secondly, deaths aren't reported without a positive test, which sometimes comes in after death.

There is also sometimes an issue in reporting between a care home and a hospital, which can led to delays or double counting, if say a resident is transferred between settings and dies quickly afterwards.

Basically, we don't have a system that is set up to report deaths so quickly; normally we wait for the death certificate, which can take up to 5 days. Now we are demanding daily data, and the system just can't do that reliably. Care home deaths suffer from the same delay issues.

Hence why data gets revised constantly, and the " daily deaths" are actually "deaths that happened mostly over the last week, sometimes a bit older"!

@rosehip345 because the daily deaths and deaths that happened that day, they were recorded that day. I'm not sure why this hasnt been made clearer from the outset and suspect media spin. The one day that they made a fuss because the UK had more deaths than the rest of Europe put together, the UK deaths actually stretched back a couple of weeks. It was a meaningless comparison to stir up fear and anger (particularly as some European countries don't count community deaths in figures)

Also was reading an article by a statistician called Karl friston a few weeks back that said we can't actually prove the lockdown is what caused the fall in deaths at all as the numbers don't actually fit the dates. It was really interesting and I'll try to find it again as post it. It would mean that all this doom mongering from people saying it will come back now lockdown is eased is fairly meaningless. It doesn't surprise me too much because every easing step that has been taken appears to have had zero effect on numbers. Many people were up in arms about schools opening on 1st June and there has been no noticeable increase at all and no cases reported in schools (prepared to be corrected on that but I haven't read about any)

When was it that we were allowed to meet one other person outside? Was that back in May? Because that was when lockdown effectively ended here. Parks full of people, kids playing together, neighbours having barbecues and going inside each other's houses. Cases have continued to fall and our local hospital has had no cases for weeks now (back in May there was plenty of the virus about and 20 people died in the neighbourhood a mile away from me)

no cases reported in schools (prepared to be corrected on that but I haven't read about any)

PHE report that in week 25 this year (15-21 June)

223 new acute respiratory outbreaks have been reported in week 25 (Figure 11):
• 106 outbreaks were from care homes where 75 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2
• 28 outbreaks were from hospitals where 24 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2
• 44 outbreaks were from schools where 23 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2
• 2 outbreaks were from prisons where 1 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2
• 43 outbreaks were from the Other Settings category where 28 tested positive

An outbreak being 2 or more suspected cases from the same setting. Here it appears just over half of schools suspected outbreaks were actually positively tested as being COVID.

So yes, there are some outbreaks in schools, though at present they are small and limited. It will happen though, the thing will be to make sure they are quickly identified, just like any other localised outbreak.

I stand corrected @patriciaholm. If 23 people have tested positive in schools, how did that count as 44 outbreaks?

Actually surprised the 23 people in schools haven't been front page of daily mail but maybe they have and I haven't been paying attention!

@upthewolves because they count as a outbreak is there is 2 or more suspected cases, not just confirmed. So in half of those cases, no-one actually tested positive. It still counts as an "outbreak" for statical purposes though.

It's not been covered really I suspect because there isn't much of a story in most of them. Most will be one person testing positive, school/bubble closes, no more infection. Frustrating for all concerned, but very contained, which is what needs to happen. No widespread decimation of communities that the tabloids would love to splash!

@patriciaholm I see. Thanks!