ONS reporting deaths week ending 25th Sept

[Statto1]

Statto, whilst I agree that covid deaths are probably under-reported, a lot of excess deaths were because the health service had to shut down and elective treatments were cancelled. We do know that Suicides are up, on average, which is likely due to lockdown having a negative impact on people who were borderline suicidal, and lockdown pushed them over the edge. Cancer treatments were cancelled also, probably leading to a spike in cancer related deaths. People were not attending the GP when they were suffering from undiagnosed heart attacks. There is quite a list. Does it add up to 20,000? I don't know but I think it is unlikely and we will not know those figures until next year.

Where is the proof of this though?
Elective treatments by definition, are not urgent, if they were urgent they would have likely still been going ahead.

The NHS will have prioritised the most life threatening first, so that probably means you could still get a heart bypass if you needed it, just not the pimple on your ar$e cut off. If you couldn't breathe because of covid, you got a ventilator, if you were not struggling as much then you were told not to go to hospital etc.

I didn't know suicides were up, but certainly think it's possible of course. Do you have a link to any data on this? This has probably been caused by workplaces having to shut/ people losing their jobs, which has been forced, otherwise there would have been more deaths/ spread at the peak. The excess death rate was exponential, and would have went up, had the lock down not happened. Suicides could be up form people losing loved ones to covid too.

I've not seen any statistics on life threatening cancer treatments being cancelled, do you have any data on this?

People were specifically told to still call 999 or the GP if they were having problems, ignoring advice from the health service is never wise.

Like I was on about before, all of that could have been off-set by the lack of injuries and deaths that people succumb to from going to work and putting themselves under physical strain.

This isn't meant to be flippant, it's just an example:So we could be -10k from people doing nothing/ not workign etc, not traveling to work +5k suicides/ missed life threatening treatments, +25k undiagnosed covid (or covid outside 28 days), +40k diagnosed covid. That's still 60k excess deaths, but could be 65k covid or covid related etc.

 

[Statto1]

It's as if you're completely ignoring the shutdown of our health services @Statto1 .. oh wait.. you are.

Look at the excess deaths of people dying at home, it's eye opening. You won't of course.

The reality is fear and lack of access are causing at least as many deaths as people 'with' covid.

I'm not ignoring it, but where are the stats on it? How many life threatening treatments were cancelled? How many died? IS this more than if we had not stopped covid spread, that was rising exponentially. If we had left lock down another week we could have been on 100k excess deaths and doubled the covid number.

How many of those excess deaths at home could be covid, where people were not tested, you know, like when we had no tests and people couldn't get through to 111. There's a boat load of old people that probably idea not even really knowing what was going.

How are we meant to treat fear? The advice is to still get treatment if you're ill/ dying, it always was, always will be.
Lack of access is because resources were taken up by a load of people not being able to breathe. Do we just say "make your won ventilator mate"?
If it had continued even more resources would have had to be diverted to covid, as that was the imminent threat. You can only treat what comes through the door.

 

[Laughing]

Report in the papers today talking about exactly this Statto linked in another thread.

 

[Sheriff_John_Bunnell_ret]

Here is an article from Lancet.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30180-8/fulltext

And from the British Medical Journal - note the responses to the original article.

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1607

I think the intelligent position to take is I don't know. But then I usually think that.

 

[Statto1]

It will be interesting to see when the full truth comes out, if it ever does, it's probably not going to come out under the current government though, that's for sure. Everyone knows they were late, soft and slow, but they won't go admitting that in full.

It should be possible to compare our excess death numbers and covid numbers to other similarly developed nations though, it's likely those that handled it better would probably be more honest about it.

My estimation is the excess deaths are equal to or eclipsed by covid or covid caused deaths, mainly due to those that were not tested early days and this silly 28 day limit. Although there will have been increases in some other areas too and some wrongly reported as covid from people who were cured/ recovered, but this number could easily have been off set by people being less active etc.

One thing is for sure though, if we had to stop life saving treatments or cancer treatments which may impact the future, then we could have had to stop more, had we let covid continue further. The people who couldn't breathe would have still got treatment, and likely got it first. Covid is still the cause, and not admitting that cause would not have made things better, it would have made it worse.