Off Topic Covid 19 restrictions have done one

None of that matters at all. You and I do not need to be worrying about the use of covid death statistics. Clearly something has made you want to scrutinise them and that's the real issue.

Who is this "they" who are pushing covid positives as a death sentence? The government have been saying precisely the opposite. All they care about is an open economy making lots of money. There are certainly some media sources who love to report the latest figures in a doom and gloom way, but they have no authority to do anything with that information.

 

“They” is the media. My apologies. But the gov push the same mantra

 

Don't just look at the percentages, look at the absolute numbers too. if 5% of cases DO require treatment, and we're running at 40K new cases a day, then that is 2,000 new patients per day requiring treatment. There's 4293 beds for thoracic medicine across the whole of NHS England, another 20k for general medicine (https://www.england.nhs.uk/statisti...vailability-and-occupancy/bed-data-overnight/ ). the median stay in hospital for a Covid patient is 7 days. We don't have enough beds to cope with the numbers of Covid patients requiring treatment as it is, and that is before we start the flu season

 

most? More detail please

 

I try not to look at COVID stuff etc as it's just depressing so sorry if it's obvious...but why do they use death within 28days as the time frame? Is there a specific reason?

 

Its a standard pharmacovigilance rule to record all applicable factors ahead of a safety event in healthcare. For example, if you are on a clinical trial for a new hay-fever drug, but fall off your push-bike and break your leg, that broken leg will be recorded in the list of "adverse events" that happened during that clinical trial. On the face of it, it seems unconnected to your hay-fever, but the data is gathered because eventually the data may show that more people break bones when taking the drug, or maybe have accidents involving loss of balance.

So that's the principle behind recording whether a patient tested COVID positive in the 28 days before their death. It's to go towards the huge data set to be analysed to find answers to questions we haven't thought of yet. Yes it's a crude figure to use to report on the daily news, but its not a conspiracy or to make the numbers look bad. The figures with Covid as the primary cause of death are out there if you look: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...icles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/deaths

 

plenty of studies have looked into asymptomatic infection. The high end in this study was 78%

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987199/
If the 28 day rule is such a red herring, why is it there? Why not ditch it?

 

Cheers for that

 

Some media push it as worse than it is, some push it as less. Same with most topics.

When you find yourself believing that the entire media is lying to you as part of some grand plan, you're in conspiracy territory. And this gets dangerous when it turns into the "media scum" narrative.

I can only repeat that you must've gone down some sort of rabbit hole to have come to believe that this government wants you to take covid more seriously. Their actions and words have consistently encouraged the opposite, for better or worse.

 

I just can’t get my head around why the gov would publish 2 sets of death numbers

 

There's liable to be more than two, and each will have differing degrees of accuracy. It's often because the left hand of the civil service doesn't always know what the left hand is doing, never mind the right hand.

 

Why does it matter? Do you scrutinise everything you encounter with such vigour? If not, why particularly this? What makes you so suspicious that there's a plan to make covid sound worse than it is?

 

Given the actions are based on the data, I'd hardly call it an irrelevance.

 

it matters hugely - this data was used to justify the lockdowns that brought misery to millions

 

I don't know how you could possibly think the previous lockdowns were anything less than necessary. That's firmly in wacko territory. People were dying in their thousands whichever figures you use, and hospitals, including particularly in Hull around January this year, were on their knees.