Some things to consider from looking at the raw data:
The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.
> there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July
Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
The death rate has plummeted not merely the infection rate. Even where "second waves" are occurring around Europe the death rate for this second wave is substantially lower.
1) covid is causing less acute problems
2) The percentage of daily tests that are positive is much lower, meaning that there are nowhere near as many uncounted cases in the wild.
I know which my money is on. Its also easy to prove.
> Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19.
Not quite. The number of recorded cases in the UK from one month ago is equal to the number of recorded cases at the height of the first wave, yet the fatalities are 10x lower.
I do expect excess mortality due to COVID-19 in the coming months, but not to the same extent as during the first wave. We need to re-evaluate the risk profile based on those numbers, not the numbers of the first wave.
> One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.
One could also draw the conclusion that the more people have already died from COVID-19, the less people are likely to die from it in the future, because fewer susceptible people remain in the pool. Unlike with Influenza, it takes many decades of lifetime to develop a serious risk of dying from COVID.
Largely because we locked down the entire country and had largely stopped community transmission by then I imagine. Now that lockdown has been lifted and what restrictions there are are increasingly being ignored we are seeing increased community transmission, a concomitant increase in hospital admissions and should start seeing an increase in deaths over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this wave of deaths will be lower because we are better prepared and have better treatments, and also because the rise in infections is being driven by young people.
Yeah but there wasn't really an increase in covid related hospital admissions until recently. Given the issues with the uks testing (and reporting) regime it's rather difficult to draw any conclusions about infection rates from the most widely cited set of figures which are numbers tested (or tests mailed out, or tests manufactured or possibly some other definition of test known only to Matt Hancock). The ONS estimates based on random sampling however show that the infection rate only started increasing again at the beginning of September, which explains why we've only seen hospital admissions rising over the last couple of weeks and deaths haven't climbed much yet. Also, so far, it seems not to have started spreading through care homes again like earlier in the year, which is one of the things which seems to have driven up the death rate so high.
Thanks, I was already browsing the data set to look at the same thing. When, as a statistician, you already observe that "In 2020 deaths due to influenza and pneumonia were consistently lower than the five-year average in all months from January to August" you need to include the total figure for deaths of Influenza+Pneumonia+Covid19 to arrive at a meaningful comparison against previous years.
The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.