Hamwich ..... wasn't really thinking about the macro picture ..... the assumption I heard was the last couple of years specifically were lower death years leaving a cohort of vulnerable people ..... not a clue if there's anything to it .... plenty of plausible corealations that don't add up to causality out there (if this even is one in the real world 🙂)
K
I think the macro picture is important because it shows we have to do any analysis against a background of steadily declining figures, otherwise it enables cherry-picking of data to support an hypothesis which really may not be valid at all. Let's take 3 obvious stats from the last 5 years:
1. Average death rate to flu = 17,000
2. Peak year (2014/15) = 28,330
3. Lowest year 2018/19 = 1,692
What can we draw from this? That there are loads of people who would have died from flu last year who are being mopped up by C19 this year? Well, it's possible, but how many given that we expect based on 50 year's worth of data to see a steadily declining pattern.
Clearly taking the average would be wrong as the distribution is so skewed, but lets be cautious and say we would have expected 15,000 excess deaths this year due to flu. Lower than the 5-year average, but not by a huge amount. This is entirely in line with the pattern since 1970. We know that this year's excess deaths are 98,000 or so, so we are now suggesting that only 83,000 people have died of C19, the rest actually dying of flu.
And let's go with Peter's estimate of only 2 million true cases of C19 rather than the 4 million the ONS claims. That gives a death rate from C19 of 4.1%. Let's go wild and say there's 2 year's worth of stored up flu deaths in the stats (very dodgy ground in my view). That gives a death rate of 3.9%. Let's go even further and claim that similar numbers would have died in the next year anyway of other causes, and their bodies were simply weakened by Covid so they died this year instead. That gives a death rate of 2.6%.
It seems to me that however one might want to 'adjust' the data to try and paint C19 as being somehow less serious than it really is, when you start analysing the actual position it doesn't really support anything other than the conclusion that C19 is a flippin' nasty disease to get.
And finally, let's not forget that analyses like these are also deeply flawed because by concentrating on deaths they support the narrative that "If you don't die, you'll be fine", which is hopelessly wide of the mark. As we are seeing, significant numbers of people are suffering limiting symptoms for very long periods following infection - 10% reporting symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. That's at least 200,000 people seriously affected.
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-long-termC19 is a very nasty disease. We really must not get complacent and we really must ensure that as many people as possible are fully vaccinated as quickly as possible.
