Also explains the below normal death rate now.
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Here you go @mikehunt, CDC burden of influenza data for the past decade. The average hospitalizations is ~400k per season, or roughly 120 per 100,000. Covid hospitalizations were at 68 per 100,000 as of May 22.
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Seems high
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Yes, yes it is, 120 per 100,000
68 with lockdown in place. Hence the need for a lockdown which you knew anyway.
I asked you earlier if you would trust the word of an expert on the causes and effects of diseases. Here is an article, published today, by a retired clinical professor of pathology and consultant histopathologist.
I can think of no time in my medical career when it has been more important to have accurate diagnosis of a disease, and understanding of precisely why patients have died of it. Yet very early on in the epidemic, rules surrounding death certification were changed — in ways that make the statistics unreliable. Guidance was issued which tends to reduce, rather than increase, referrals for autopsy.
Normally, two doctors are needed to certify a death, one of whom has been treating the patient or who knows them and has seen them recently. That has changed. For Covid-19 only, the certification can be made by a single doctor, and there is no requirement for them to have examined, or even met, the patient. A video-link consultation in the four weeks prior to death is now felt to be sufficient for death to be attributed to Covid-19. For deaths in care homes the situation is even more extraordinary. Care home providers, most of whom are not medically trained, may make a statement to the effect that a patient has died of Covid-19. In the words of the Office for National Statistics, this ‘may or may not correspond to a medical diagnosis or test result, or be reflected in the death certification’. From 29 March the numbers of ‘Covid deaths’ have included all cases where Covid-19 was simply mentioned on the death certificate — irrespective of positive testing and whether or not it may have been incidental to, or directly responsible for, death. From 29 April the numbers include the care home cases simply considered likely to be Covid-19.
So at a time when accurate death statistics are more important than ever, the rules have been changed in ways that make them less reliable than ever. In what proportion of Covid-19 ‘mentions’ was the disease actually present? And in how many cases, if actually present, was Covid-19 responsible for death? Despite what you may have understood from the daily briefings, the shocking truth is that we just don’t know. How many of the excess deaths during the epidemic are due to Covid-19, and how many are due to our societal responses of healthcare reorganisation, lockdown and social distancing? Again, we don’t know. Despite claims that they’re all due to Covid-19, there’s strong evidence that many, perhaps even a majority, are the result of our responses rather than the disease itself.
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Are we really still posting articles from the Spectator?
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Its almost like they think they can slip them in past us.
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A retired reality tv doctor.
We are, you narky old cunt. I know the usual suspects go apeshit at the very notion that someone might be interested in a magazine that’s supportive of conservatism, but until such time as @Rocko decides to stop promoting freedom of speech and ideas on TFK, I’ll post whatever I like.
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That’s fine. Just don’t expect to be taken seriously.
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Thanks for the concern, but in the words of Hank, if you mind your own business, you’ll stay busy all the time.
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Data that attributes cause of death to Covid-19 is not reliable.
So it could actually be higher?
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What would you attribute all the extra deaths in comparison to the last 5 years to? I’d say it can never be an exact figure but is very reliable.
How could the number of deaths recorded as being due to/attributable to Covid-19 be any higher? I thought it was fairly obvious that, due to the death certification practices whereby doctors only need to suspect Covid-19 was a factor, there’s strong evidence that the numbers are artificially high. Are you suggesting that people are dying and the deaths are being hidden?
Let’s wait until we have data for the full year before commenting on that. @EstebanSexface, kindly pulled data on Ireland, Italy, and Sweden earlier this week and sensationally announced “Sweden has gone above Italy”, when in fact the correct interpretation was that Sweden’s daily confirmed Covid-19 cases have gone back up to a number that Italy was well in excess of from early March to late May (almost 3 months).
As shown below, Sweden (no lockdown) has tracked quite closely around this number since early April, whereas Italy (lockdown) spiked several orders of magnitude above it for a sustained period of time.
Also, the area underneath the plots is telling. The areas for Ireland (lockdown) and Sweden (no lockdown) are broadly similar, which tells a story in itself, especially when you consider Sweden has more than double the population of Ireland.
Nothing in the plot above suggests that Ireland’s approach has outperformed Sweden’s. I still maintain that the lockdown was ill-advised and my concerns about the long-term damage remain.
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What are you talking about? The data is per month. The year to date? Why measure the first 5 months of this year against an entire year? You’ve tried to pull in Sweden and Esteban but the above has nothing to do with that. If England has only 40 thousand covid deaths so far (and that includes ones you think are being falsely attributed to covid), then there is something else extraordinary happening this year that has killed and extra 20,000 people. What are the chances of a worldwide pandemic colliding with an unnamed, unseen, unreferenced (by anyone other than tfk experts) killer disease?
I’m away off under the bed if that’s the case.
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