I’m sure your overall numbers are right, but what do you mean by ‘deaths aided by the virus’? Are you attributing all of the ‘excess deaths’ to the virus? Just curious, I think it’s probably valid to do that, but some of these deaths will be indirectly linked to COVID19 rather than directly caused by having it. I would class people who decide not to go to A&E because of fear of the virus or being a ‘burden’ and subsequently die, cancellation of planned treatments including for cancer, suicides from lockdown/economic stress etc etc as COVID19 deaths because they wouldn’t have happened without it. Does the ONS provide a breakdown of deaths by cause (ie what’s on the death certificate)? We need to compare that to the ‘average’ causes of the 10,500 ‘expected’ deaths for a deeper understanding. I am absolutely convinced that ‘protecting the NHS’ by turning it almost exclusively into a COVID19 service is a huge contributor to the death rate. Apparently if you go into hospital with the virus you have a 33% chance of dying, and well over 50% if you end up on a ventilator, so I’m far from convinced that ‘protecting the NHS’ has done the health of the nation any good, though it does enable a suit behind a lectern to say ‘the NHS is coping well because it has spare beds’.
Gilead bouncing back.....some better news on remdesivir. Not as good as hoped, but seems it definitely helps. Japan is already putting it through regulatory approval and I reckon the US will follow fast. As far as I know the UK is still part of the EU regulatory process.
I note that we have seen plenty of pictures on the news of body bags and refrigerated lorries for corpses in France, Italy, Spain and the US, and very sad pictures of mass graves etc, but none that I can recall from the UK. Odd given that we have the roughly the same numbers of deaths as Italy, Spain and France, and actually many more per head of population than the US. Perhaps we planned for this aspect of the virus better.............or perhaps the media have signed up to the propaganda machine.
SB - based upon what you have said about the number of deaths in Europe and the USA, do you not find it particularly strange that China have only reported 3500........and that figure had to be increased. I believe that there have been many many more deaths there than have been reported.
I think we have discussed this earlier in the thread. The Chinese government is quite obviously lying, with the support of the WHO. Won’t get fooled again my arse. But it doesn’t really matter now, I get exercised about lots of things to do with the Chinese government, but best to move on and concentrate on our own problems.
I choose my phraseology very carefully sb. The virus itself is not actually a potent killer. What it does though is it weakens internal organs (particularly the lungs) and this allows other symptons to develop and attack the weakened areas. I dont know this for certain but I would imagine the major causes of death brought on by the virus would be pneumonia and lung failure. The cause of death on most certificates being issued will state a first cause and a secondary cause. The secondary cause will often be covid-19. I would guess that GP's attending "in the field" are being discouraged to use covid-19 as a cause unless a positive had already been taken. That is one place where the numbers will be being massively skewed. Care home deaths will be another. One other oddity in all this is the apparent increase in overall health due to there being less air pollution. There are many factors at work here. Suicides are up for one and a lot more people are dying at home of heart attacks. This could be in part due to a reluctance to go to hospital. The fear factor in all this is really shocking and images of health workers in PPE only serves to scare people from doing the right thing when they are seriously unwell. In my personal experience there is no lack of willingness on the part of paramedics to attend homes and hospitalise when deemed necessary. A huge burden has been placed on these people who effectively are having to make a devils choice and decide where people are better off.
A makeshift morgue was constructed in Oxfordshire at RAF Upper Heyford to take a surplus of 5000 extra bodies.
Sorry not quite clear to me - do you reckon then that the vast majority of excess deaths are directly related to COVID19, but they are not being recorded as such? That’s quite a serious allegation, not that I’m in a position to contest it. Apparently the Germans are only recording COVID19 as cause of death if there has been a positive test for it. Outstanding.
Sorry mate. COVID-19 can only appear on a death certificate if someone has been tested and the test come back positive. It isnt a lie that they are creating it is just that you cannot state it unless it is proven. I stand by my figure that so far we have probably had 42-43 thousand deaths in the UK due in some part to people having been infected with the virus. As we all know only a small percentage of the population has been tested. (we are not all daughters of cabinet ministers are we)
My daughter told me that Gove’s daughter was boasting about her weed consumption on some social media platform, until her account was closed.....like father etc etc
Yeah she had a tik tok account which referred to it. If the above sentence means nothing to you you’re urged to take extra self-isolation precautions.
I thought GPs could make the call that a person was likely to have had it even if not tested. The sheer scale of excess deaths versus official Covid deaths will be due to a lot of things but a big one, logically, is an under reporting of the reality.
Now, I am not a scientist (biology ‘o’ level 1977 was my peak) though I have worked with scientists and doctors for decades and have to be able to at least get the sense of data from charts etc, otherwise they laugh at me and hurt my feelings. I knew there was something dodgy with this chart prepared by Public Health England and shown by Yvonne Doyle yesterday. Now, we all now get that these charts are bollocks and pure propaganda, but this one disturbed me for some reason. I have now tracked it down. In this context it doesn’t really matter which line represents which country. Look at the scale on the left. Unless you know how to read a graph you probably (and quite fairly) wouldn’t even look at this, the lines tell the story, you would think. But the scale massively distorts the distance between the lines and the relative performance of the different countries. Japan’s deaths per million is 3, Germany’s is 77 and Belgium’s is 655. Yet this chart makes it look like Germany is closer to Belgium than it is to Japan. Why? I can only assume because it makes us look slightly better. If I presented data on a drug like this I would be kicked out and fined. I suspect you would fail in a public examination if you drew a similar scale to illustrate something. Yet our ‘top’ public health doctors think it’s ok to present stuff to the public, which relies on them to be honest brokers, in this way. At the very least Doyle should have referred to the scale when she presented the data - it is also possible to put a break line in the chart to show there is a big jump between elements. These experts have been colonised by the politicians. if you are interested the countries at the top - us, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, would be way way higher than the US, Germany and Japan if the scale were accurate and even - it would be a very tall graph indeed, and rather embarrassing. Out of interest Sweden would be a bit above the US, but way lower than the rest. Really quite cross.
Adding in the care home deaths has meant the curves are started at 5000 deaths rather than 20 previously apparently which hugely makes ours look better relative to others.
My workmate as just had a week off . He rang 111 and told them he had a temperature a cough and a wheezy chest! They told him he didnt have it and contact his doctor ! He couldn't get through to docs and couldn't get a test via online .
They can, you are correct. They can also sign death certificates without attending. All this is due to law changes to deal with the increases during the pandemic. However, the virus will not be the main cause so I am pretty sure the recording will be filed under the main cause. The ONS statistics will make interesting reading for this whole period. Pneumonia, lung failure and heart attacks will have gone through the roof.
