Like I said, difficult and controversial subject. Good point regarding footballers and not all the population are in care homes. I have no wish to upset people so will leave it there.
Sorry, not upset, just trying to counter that argument. For balance, I looked at the current numbers on : https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Looking at the 'per million' numbers, we have 3667 cases pm & 536 deaths pm, which works out at about a 14% death rate in the UK. Frightening. So much for the 3% that headlined at the beginning.
Bloody hell. Thought it was a lot less than that. Think I'm going lockdown stir crazy. I was basing it on number per population of the country.
Shook me too. Hoping I've worked it out correctly. Don't want to be guilty of spreading needless alarm.
Russia 2,972 deaths, 308,705 cases, which I think is just less than 1%. Or look it at a world level and you get 6.5%. Basically I still don't think we really know or can even trust the figures enough to make any big conclusions.
You don't have to work it out. I have been following this site for weeks. Just scroll to closed cases and it give a worldwide death rate of yes 14%.
Testing, I believe. The protocol for declaring a recovery in the UK is apparently to be negative twice in 24 hours. We've struggled with testing capability, so we've prioritised them elsewhere, believing that if your feeling better, you're over it. The hospitals have been quite mercenary with this & it's been a critical factor (but not the only one) in the horrible infection rates in care homes. Having done that for so long, they can't start to record these numbers as they'll be wildly out (assuming they're following the protocol now, but someone in the NHS would need to tell us that).
I don't often comment here. Mostly just a reader. Don't let those numbers scare you too much. In late March the UK's testing capacity was low, and became wholly focused on NHS workers and chronically ill hospital patients with obvious COVID-19 symptoms. Because we were only testing high risk groups or people with symptoms of the disease at that time, the figures look bad. I get the feeling that the UK's handling of this has been less than ideal. We're likely to be among the worst affected countries in the world, but a 14% fatality rate seems unrealistic. A member of my extended family died as a result of complications arising from COVID-19 infection last month. I understand that it's killing people, but it isn't 14% in the general population.
Sorry for your loss, MC. Please accept my condolences. I think I see what you're aiming at here, but forgive me if I'm wrong as I'm really knackered tonight & should have been in bed ages ago, so far from being on the ball. I think you're saying that we've effectively only tested people with the virus, or with a high likelihood of catching it, so it's very biased numbers that we've produced to date. Had we tested much more widely, we might have found a whole lot more people testing positive, but with little or no symptoms, hence seriously reducing the 14% number we've been discussing. Does that sound right? And it's a very fair point if I have understood it. I was just using the numbers provided by the government, but tbh, I don't think we've ever had consistently reliable reporting on this epidemic.
Not sure how true to life it is. I don’t remember ever waking up beside Deirdre O’Kane and fairly sure I’d remember that
For a long time we weren't even testing the vast majority of the people who probably had the virus. We were only testing those who were unwell enough to be admitted to hospital, unless you needed oxygen there was no chance of you being tested and added to the stats. The advice for the overwhelming majority of people during the peak was just to stay home and let it pass. Even now I bet the majority of people who have a bit of a cough aren't going to bother getting tested unless they need to for work reasons. There's also plenty of cases of false negatives. Not just with Covid-19 it's a quite common problem with the PCR tests that it can be difficult to find the source of infection. It's not uncommon to have two or three negative test and then a positive one. Doctors are pretty good at knowing when an infection is likely covid from a chest xray. Quite often they diagnose a patient as likely covid even after a negative test and then a couple of days later another test will come back as positive. Crucially though, if a patient tests negative then they are not counted in the death stats (which is understandable) even if the clinician is pretty certain that it is covid. All of that will make it incredibly hard to find a meaningful fatality percentage. I'm not a doctor I but do work closely with them and personally I expect that the % of people dying from the infection is lower than most people expect for most age groups but overall will depend on how well protected the vulnerable are, as it is clearly having a big impact on those with conditions or in care homes.
