The 9am figures not disclosed yet?

Billy Horner said:
I've predicted for several days that we would overtake Spain, on a days since 20th death basis, today. We have actually fallen just short of them, which I have classed as being broadly level.

The reason for this, of course, is the impact of our weekend reporting issue, which sees lower numbers reported on Sundays and Mondays. Taking the trend over the past seven days into account, we are most likely already ahead of Spain.
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The figures for Spain were down quite bit today as well. Mind you there are lots of funny things going on with Spanish stats at the moment.
 
Billy, other than the uncomfirmed reports in newspapers, is there anyway to realistically check the number of deaths outside of hospitals that are attributed to covid-19? I loojked at the ONS figures, but don't understand the language used so I am not sure if I am reading the data correctly. The FT said there were 41,000 deaths outside of hospitals attributed to Covid, is that anywhere near being true?

Cheers
 
@Laughing The FT was a model extrapolating ONS figures to the day it was published and, I believe, included unexplained excess deaths. Those are the deaths that Whitty says he's worried about because they may be some Covid-19 deaths but also people not presenting to hospital with heart attacks etc.

We only have ONS figures up to 10 April, but they indicated approximately 8600 hospital Covid-19 deaths, 1650 care home and community Covid-19 deaths and about 4000 'unexplained' deaths above the 5 year average for that week. So outside hospital Covid-19 deaths were at least 16% of the total with a large number of possible indirect deaths as well. (It was also a 'short' week with about 2/3 of registrars closed on Good Friday.)

We'll see the figures for up to 17 April tomorrow.
 
Thanks Bear that explains why it didn't make a lot of sense to me. The 40,000, extrapolated or otherwise has been presented in the worst possible light by the FT. If someone is nervous about attending hospital with chest pains, and later dies of a heart attack, I can't see how you can blame anything but the situation.

It's a sad state of affairs all over.
 
Laughing said:
Thanks Bear that explains why it didn't make a lot of sense to me. The 40,000, extrapolated or otherwise has been presented in the worst possible light by the FT. If someone is nervous about attending hospital with chest pains, and later dies of a heart attack, I can't see how you can blame anything but the situation.

It's a sad state of affairs all over.
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Just one other point. The ONS also include non-Covid-19 respiratory deaths (eg. pneumonia) as these might be possible Covid-19 deaths wrongly reported. In the week to 3 April there were 500 'excess' respiratory deaths, but no 'excess' deaths in the week to 10 April.
 
Laughing said:
Thanks Bear that explains why it didn't make a lot of sense to me. The 40,000, extrapolated or otherwise has been presented in the worst possible light by the FT. If someone is nervous about attending hospital with chest pains, and later dies of a heart attack, I can't see how you can blame anything but the situation.

It's a sad state of affairs all over.
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As Bear says, the FT model looks at the relationship between hospital reported deaths reported by DHSC and the excess deaths reported by ONS. It then extrapolates this forward based on the hospital reported deaths since the date covered by the last ONS publication (10 April), to arrive at the 41,000 figure.

It’s both a sophisticated model and a tad oversimplistic. Sophisticated because it looks at how hospital deaths and all deaths are related within each of the four jurisdictions of the UK. Perhaps oversimplistic because it assumes that all excess deaths are Covid-related (which may or may not be a reasonable assumption).

However, David Spiegelhalter has described the analysis as the only unbiased comparison given the problems measuring deaths and their causes, and I’m certainly not going to disagree with him! Apparently, deaths in care homes have doubled but only 19% had Covid-19 on the death certificate, so there must be a serious under-reporting problem.

The 41,000 figure was based on deaths by last Monday, when there were 17,337 hospital reported deaths. We’re at 20,732 now, based on hospital deaths by Saturday, which would mean that we’re at nearly 50,000 now.
 
This should give some idea. Although you have to wait for the figures to come through. So this looks into the past.

Looks like the impact of the late and loose lock down in England can be seen in this article on Sky News. Look at the graph of the normalised numbers. This is a calculation of excess deaths per week. Tweaked so that you can compare countries fairly. The peak in other countries was a single week. The peak in England is at the same height for 2 weeks so far. Rather than one. In my eyes these are excess excess deaths. I feel they can be attributed to one thing. Poor management of the situation by the English government. In the short term with lock down. Over the long term due to the lack of investment in the NHS.

https://news.sky.com/…/coronavirus-englands-excess-deaths-a…

Thanks to the short term actions (or inaction) of Johnson. Plus the running down of the NHS over the last 10 years.

Here is the graph:
EuropeMortalityGraphSky27April2020.jpg
 
I looked at that graph on another thread SM and the peak lasting longer is damning, but there may be other reasons for that, than just a slow call to lockdown. I can't see one, to be honest. Thanks Billy. I do wonder if there is a fair bit of under reporting on covid deaths outside of hospitals as the number attributed at 19% seems a bit small to me.
 
Laughing said:
I looked at that graph on another thread SM and the peak lasting longer is damning, but there may be other reasons for that, than just a slow call to lockdown. I can't see one, to be honest. Thanks Billy. I do wonder if there is a fair bit of under reporting on covid deaths outside of hospitals as the number attributed at 19% seems a bit small to me.
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The thing I looked for was what was different between the lock downs of the 3 countries.

The peaks are around the same when the figures have been normalised.

The shapes of the graph from the beginning of lock down are about the same.

The delay in UK lock down is shown in the normalised graph of deaths.

Also, these figures ignore where the deaths have occurred. They are just a normalised count of excess deaths.

So the only conclusion I can draw is that there was something different about the UK lock down.

I guess that another alternative could be that more people have been left to die in care homes or at home in the UK. Without the hospitals being full. That still leads to negligence on behalf of the UK government.
 
I think the comparisons between Denmark, Norway (both have lockdowns) and Sweden (no lockdown) are very interesting. Neither Denmark or Norway appears to have seen a spike in excess deaths whereas Sweden has.

Perhaps further evidence that greater/faster government intervention = fewer deaths?
 
Billy Horner said:
I think the comparisons between Denmark, Norway (both have lockdowns) and Sweden (no lockdown) are very interesting. Neither Denmark or Norway appears to have seen a spike in excess deaths whereas Sweden has.

Perhaps further evidence that greater/faster government intervention = fewer deaths?
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I noticed the same thing when I read the article.
 
Billy Horner said:
I think the comparisons between Denmark, Norway (both have lockdowns) and Sweden (no lockdown) are very interesting. Neither Denmark or Norway appears to have seen a spike in excess deaths whereas Sweden has.

Perhaps further evidence that greater/faster government intervention = fewer deaths?
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The Swedish foreign minister on the Swedish model in the link. At least herd immunity doesn't appear to be their model. Bars and restaurants being closed for not following the rules. Also, interesting that over Easter there was a 96% reduction in people at traditional holiday centres. It's a lockdown by consent.

Link
 
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bear66 said:
The Swedish foreign minister on the Swedish model in the link. At least herd immunity doesn't appear to be their model. Bars and restaurants being closed for not following the rules. Also, interesting that over Easter there was a 96% reduction in people at traditional holiday centres. It's a lockdown by consent.

Link
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Yes, I realise it would be unfair to call Sweden's approach laissez faire or a strategy to achieve herd immunity. However, there is no doubt that it is a less strict intervention than those of its neighbours, relying on cooperation rather than coercion.

The z-scores for excess deaths in both Norway and Denmark have remained below the line, whilst Sweden has seen a spike above it. Obviously, there could be several reasons for this, but the approach to lockdown is certainly an area of interest.
 
Billy Horner said:
Yes, I realise it would be unfair to call Sweden's approach laissez faire or a strategy to achieve herd immunity. However, there is no doubt that it is a less strict intervention than those of its neighbours, relying on cooperation rather than coercion.

The z-scores for excess deaths in both Norway and Denmark have remained below the line, whilst Sweden has seen a spike above it. Obviously, there could be several reasons for this, but the approach to lockdown is certainly an area of interest.
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It's interesting her comments about care homes. Visitors were stopped from the beginning but the virus is still getting in at a level to cause about half their deaths.
 
bear66 said:
It's interesting her comments about care homes. Visitors were stopped from the beginning but the virus is still getting in at a level to cause about half their deaths.
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I think her definition of "the beginning" might be different to most people's. They didn't ban care home visits until the start of April apparently. Also, the usual tale of a lack of PPE and hand sanitiser according to this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...as-elderly-pay-price-for-coronavirus-strategy
 
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