Feeling a bit duped about the seriousness of Covid....

[mostwonderfultime]

Found out my district of 55,000 people there have been 156 confirmed covid cases since March. Now I hear there is an enquiry into the over reporting of Covid deaths in England. Average death rate has now lower than average indicating many people who died from Covid would probably died in the next month or so. No surge in Covid cases or deaths since relaxing lockdown measures (I know about Leicester, but we all know reasons why they have more cases and again they haven't had a spike in deaths).
In the meantime, the economy is screwed, Kids have been off school for months, best friends business has gone bust.

I don't understand how you can say that. At one point, 1000 people were dying every day in the UK! Where I live has a similar population size as the UK and we don't even have 300 deaths total yet because the government actually handled it instead of flapping about.

You might think that 1000 people a day is no big deal, but I'm pretty sure the people who lost someone don't feel the same.

Since there wasn't the facility to track and test, lockdown was the only thing that was going to be possible for the UK.

Huh ?

There's almost 40,000 EXCESS deaths

Some areas have got off very lightly but a lot of that will be due to the lockdown.

It’s impossible to know yet if the lockdown will have been “worth it” and the answer will surely be debatable.
Had we locked down earlier more direct deaths would have been avoided but the economic consequences could possibly have been even worse and a tanking economy definitely means deaths from other causes. I’ve lost my livelihood (self-employed) and I’m one of the lucky ones because my husband earns enough to keep us going.

I’m very critical of the government generally but I think there was no choice but to lockdown when they did (on balance they probably should have done earlier) and thus I don’t think we’ve been duped- covid is a very real threat. We were very lucky that hospitals were not quite overwhelmed but that was only because nearly everything else was cancelled. Now the government needs to give businesses proper support to get back on their feet though -guidelines mean that I can’t operate my business profitably for the forseeable and the same is the case for many many others.

Is undoubtedly a very big mess that will take years to recover from but no we were not duped.

I don't understand the logic behind inflating the figures. We are the worst affected country in Europe, this is not something we want to come top in surely! I'm not questioning that they are inflated, rather why?

This issue over mis-reporting of deaths is a red herring IMO, which hasn't yet been properly investigated. We know Covid kills people. We have had over 60,000 excess deaths during the pandemic. It is causing deaths all over the world - look at what's happening in the US where restrictions were lifted early. Virtually all scientists are in agreement that lockdown saved lives and that reasonable precautions still need to be taken in our everyday lives to keep the transmission rates low. There is also increasing evidence that there are likely to be long-term health effects and lung damage even to those who suffer the illness mildly.

Taken from the guardian article -

They concluded: “It’s time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of Covid-associated deaths.”
A Department of Health and Social Care source said: “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then be hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a Covid death.”

@feelingverylazytoday

Go and read up on Florida, Texas and Arizona. That's how it would have been here if we hadn't locked down, only with an even higher death rate because doctors didn't have the same knowledge of treatments. Our cases and death rates are tailing off now because we're coming out of lockdown in a slow controlled manner. They can very easily start rising again.

Florida are mass testing. Young people have got to be tested if they want to do sport.... If you want a test you can get one. If we were testing at the same level during our peak we would have seen the same. We were only testing severe cases. Also antibody tests in florida say 3.5 million have had it... Which is the same as the antibody screening here, 3.5 million. Yet they have had 5000 deaths and we have had 45,000. So the florida comparisons dont really work

Ps I’d be very surprised if the over inflation of figures turned out to be more than about 5%. We’re still going to be the worst affected country in Europe. Needs to be sorted though. In the early stages it was reasonable to count anyone testing positive as a “covid death” but clearly now you can’t necessarily attribute a July death to January positive case. This will be particularly the case in care homes where sadly people die of all sorts of things all the time regardless of covid.

@LaurieFairyCake

Huh ?

There's almost 40,000 EXCESS deaths

No, I think there are about 40k deaths from Covid, but excess deaths are higher, around 60,000. So one person in a thousand has died because of the crisis (whether or not directly from the virus). That's huge.

The problem with this perspective is that we cannot know how many lives lockdown saved. Governments are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

The number of COVID deaths in the U.K. has been undercounted by far more than PHE might have ‘overcounted’.

Yes the average number of deaths is now back below average and infection rates have fallen but that’s because we locked down to stop it spreading. It was on an exponential growth curve when we shut down.

The people on the lungs thread won’t necessarily have had a positive Covid test because in our wisdom we decided to stop testing once we realised that community spread was high enough that we could no longer contain the virus.

Death rates were down this year compared to the 5 year average because we had a mild flu this year. Then we locked down and traffic accidents dropped, pollution dropped and some people didnt die because the air was cleaner. This is nothing to do with "people who would have died in a few months" anyway. Of course there will have been a few in that category - but tell that to the parents of a 25 year old and I doubt any jury would convict if they punched you.

Lockdown achieved what it was meant to do by buying time to study the virus and find new treatments, so fewer people now die from the virus.

Locking down a week earlier - when sensible people were working from home and stopped travelling - would have saved thousands more lives. The economic costs would have been considerably lower because lockdown could have been released earlier.

Lockdown was done in a stupidly incompetent fashion. No reason why garden centres were kept closed as long as they were, no reason for self-catering accommodation to shut as long as it did. Public health run down for years, no spare capacity in the NHS - blame the government for being incompetent.

@FluffyKittensinabasket

Go back to March / April / May and read the posts on here...calling people murderers, “literally sobbing and shaking” at someone going to the shop to only buy chocolate, we are all going to be in lockdown forever, schools will never go back etc.

I suspect that an awful lot of people have name changed.

Agree with the above.

And I absolutely don't doubt the seriousness of covid because it is devastating to many people, but so are hundreds of other illness's and diseases.

I know a fair few people who were screaming from the hilltops at the beginning of all this, taking their children out of school and being quite vicious about people going out, even questioning if their job was essential. Now, those people are flying out to Spain on holiday....

The perfect economic storm bearing down on us at a rate of knots will be all that most of us feel in the next year or so.

The reportng of deaths always needed much closer scrutiny. "Died with Covid19" is transparently flawed.

Excess deaths could be more useful, except many people leap to the conclusion that excess deaths = directly because of Covid19, forgetting the impact that lockdown had on deaths for other reasons.

I don't think there's anything to be gained by trawling through the myriad different decisions made by many different people during the pandemic. But I think we need to quickly get a proper handle on the real risks so that we can help people out of the lockdown paralysis that's eating people up, and making them turn on each other.

@Rebelwithallthecause

Taken from the guardian article -

They concluded: “It’s time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of Covid-associated deaths.”
A Department of Health and Social Care source said: “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then be hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a Covid death.”

Dead cat.

This number will be small but it does distract nicely from the lack of inquiry into government handling and not doing enough and will convince enough people that Covid isn’t as bad as we thought because PHE inflated the numbers. They know damn well people won’t read past the headline.

After seeing a friend who was healthy, no underlying conditions be in hospital for two months, have heart attacks, dialysis, have blood clots and now, although recovered will have health problems for the rest of his life. No I don't think we've been duped.

Haven't RTFT, but "confirmed" cases of Covid will be a massive understatement compared to the real number because people only show up in the confirmed case numbers if they have had a positive test, but at the height of the pandemic, people were only being tested if they were admitted to hospital and often not even then.

many people who died of Covid would have died in a month or two anyway
So their deaths shouldn’t be counted ?
What a vile thing to say

The trouble with your viewpoint is that there is absolutely now way to know what would have happened without lockdown.

I'm slightly surprised that the overcounting issue is news, we've known all along that the criteria for counting was a positive rest rather than a death solely from covid. I'm very interested though to find out the reasons for the huge excess deaths, maybe it will be something that corrects itself over the next year, maybe there are other more complex factors in play, I think we haven't had the resources yet to devote to a full investigation.

Hmm, I disagree.

But I am working the front line so I probably have a skewed view.

Are you reading different data to me. Look at the data for average monthly deaths and then compare that to this year. We are way in excess for the beginning of this year. If it’s not Covid related then what else explains the excess deaths?

Just because you have no experience of this virus, haven’t been ill or know anyone who has died you think you have been duped! How insensitive and wrong of you to think this way.

If we hadn’t have locked down who knows what our death rates and infection rates would have been like.

I think the key thing to remember though is how easy it is to transmit and the results of exponential growth.

@mostwonderfultime

Found out my district of 55,000 people there have been 156 confirmed covid cases since March. Now I hear there is an enquiry into the over reporting of Covid deaths in England. Average death rate has now lower than average indicating many people who died from Covid would probably died in the next month or so. No surge in Covid cases or deaths since relaxing lockdown measures (I know about Leicester, but we all know reasons why they have more cases and again they haven't had a spike in deaths). In the meantime, the economy is screwed, Kids have been off school for months, best friends business has gone bust.

What we don't know is how many would have died without lockdown.

What we do know is that schools and hospital wards were closing in March due to staff shortages with unprecented numbers of staff off sick.

It's easy to lock back with the benefit of hindsight, but there is no way of knowing how bad things would have got if drastic action hadn't been taken.

So if I got this right you are saying that as we now seem to be in a stable state with COVID cases we should not have locked down? Do you not realise that the whole point of locking down was so we could be in this stable state right now. It's a bit like putting a forest fire out when it is just starting and only a couple of trees are impacted, then saying - oh we didn't need to put the fire out because look nothing has been damaged.

If we had gone through months of social isolation and we were still in the scenario where thousands were dying I would say you would have a reason to doubt the effectiveness of the lockdown, but to doubt it because it worked is a bit odd.

As for the only people that died were going to die anyway bull shit.. let me ask you this. At one point the equivalent of a few air busses full of people died every single day. If there really were plane crashes every day for a month but 90% of the people involved were over the age of 80 or had some form of underlying health condition would you just sniff and say - well they were going to die anyway. I very much doubt it. I would think you would want governments and authorities to do everything in their power to prevent it continuing.