I have just looked at the death data from the ONS for England and Wales for the week to 1 May. This is the plot:
Deaths are down. That's good.
But the fall is most heavily in hospital (22%). At home it is 12% and in care homes 19%.
The NHS is being protected but people are dying elsewhere instead.
And that does not look like a healthcare policy to me.
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My analysis suggests 1st May circa 47,000 deaths and as of today around 60,000 (based on all deaths per week and subtracting the weekly average over 5 years). The daily death rate seems to have fallen from 1600 (late April) to around 1100 (1st May). Of course the gov pretends the death toll is lower. The horribleness of it all becomes clear when one looks at other countries. The conclusion to draw is that Johnson & Co have a low regard for UK lives, but I doubt much of the population will see it like that.
I think they are
The truly startling statistic is 50,000 excess deaths this year up to 1 May. As there has been no other major epidemic in this period, the deaths must be a direct (underreported) and indirect result of the Covid19 pandemic. The healthcare policy is to protect the rich and let the poor , the aged and the infirm die.
There is some unfortunate evidence that this is happening
Doubtless the same people who deny that austerity has affected the poor, minorities, women the most will be lining up to deny that COVID has had a similarly disproportionate impact
Step forward Daniel Hannan, CapX et al
Just to be clear, that graph above shows only excess deaths each week above the 5 year average. There were 8,000 excess deaths in the week to 1 May, but total deaths in that week were just under 18,000, versus a usual rate of about 10,000. Good that it is coming down, but still shockingly nearly double the usual amount. If this carries on falling, and we don’t get a second peak, are we looking at around 50,000 excess deaths? That was 10 days ago, but is this really the time to start relaxing the restrictions?
In more detail, excess COVID-related deaths in the week to 1 May were down from about 9,000 in the previous week to “only” 6,000 (about 850 per day; versus the official statistics of around 4,700 that week, or around 670 per day) and other (non-COVID-related) excess deaths were down from 3,000 to “only” 2,000 (so, creating the hospital capacity to deal with Coronavirus patients at the expense of capacity to deal with other medical conditions, and people staying at home too long with other illnesses such as cancer and heart conditions, was killing around 300 people per day on top of the 900 or so Coronavirus deaths per day; that that is even after taking account that some categories of deaths, such as road accidents, will be down substantially; but the cure is clearly not worse than the disease). The official Government graphs were showing daily deaths around 700 or 800, when the real number of excess deaths from all causes was still around 50% worse.
The decreases you mention above (22%, 12%, 19%) are for all deaths, I think. The numbers of people dying of COVID at home (as opposed to hospitals or care homes) remains quite low – “only” 20 or so per day, versus over 4,000 deaths from other causes “at home”. Some of those people would have died in hospitals in normal times – I think the usual weekly rate of deaths at home is somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000.
Figure 8 shows the problem in care homes, becoming more prominent as the deaths in hospitals fall away. Daily COVID deaths in hospital peaked around 8 April and have been falling steadily since then, from 475 on 24 April to 289 on 1 May (down about 40%), but COVID deaths in care homes peaked at 425 on 17 April, falling from 351 on 24 April to 218 on 1 May (also down about 40% over the week). But each day, deaths in care homes are about 2/3 or 3/4 of those in hospitals. Carnage.
I think we can say that staying at home to protect the NHS has worked – initially the main concern was that the NHS might be overwhelmed, and deaths might be considerably higher – but perhaps that led everyone to take their eye off other balls, such as care homes? This is going to give epidemiologists material to write papers for decades to come.
But what we now need is the NHS working properly again
And still managing Covid 19
That has to be the requirement and we are a long way from that
And thinking about this and country-by-country reporting at the OECD simultaneously is a challenge!
The 5 year average for the same week is 9,941.
That is 8,000 EXCESS deaths , 80% more than expected for that week.
It’s good news – because it isn’t as bad as the previous weeks 12.000 (120%) excess deaths.
I make that some 47k excess deaths between March 20 and May 1 – so as of today 11 days later, certainly over 50k.
It could have been a lot fewer with a better response like say Germany or South Korea or others.
It reflects the self quarantine measures from around the 20th March that 6 weeks later are seen in the excess deaths peak and reduction.
The numbers for w/e 8/5 will already be in at the Cabinet Office (you can bet they get them daily/hourly!) we must have dropped to well below a thousand a day – probably even fewer than 100’s. Too FEW!
The spread had to be encouraged otherwise herd immunity stops growing! Because eradication is not an option for little Britain. Hence the fuzzy messaging – its a lurch forward push on the accelerator pedal.
Yet we still don’t have any reliable wide scale tests for the virus or the antigens.
What we do have is the governments clown bus still wanting to head off the cliff as Bozo made clear back in February knowing that he was condemning 10’s of thousands to a unnecessary and cruel early death.
Speaking ahead of post-Brexit trade talks on 3 February 2020, Greenwich, London
https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2020/18/april/the-coronavirus-video-boris-johnson-doesnt-want-you-to-see
I know the ONS data is produced much more often than once a week