Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Vaccination update

Tim,

the question is how many of the 98,000 were premature deaths, people who would have died of something anyway over the next couple of years. It will be interesting to see if the overall death rate falls below the expected norm next winter.
Some of the excess deaths were down to the NHS failing to treat people with other issues, cancer, heart strokes and so on. We will never know.

I totally agree with you that improved personal hygiene is no bad thing and wearing masks in crowded places next winter is sensible. I've seen some suggestions that there is a "Flu Bomb" waiting as due to COVID and the reduction in Flu this winter they have no idea what strain mix to supply next winter.

Tim, I'm getting worried...we are agreeing with each other more than usual... COVID mellowing??

An interesting and some might consider cynical and morbid statistic is that over the same corresponding period, the number of pension claimants has fallen by over 200K.

regards

John

Now that IS depressing... Do you know the normal drop, compared with the Excess?

When my mother was in hospital a year ago, and being shuffled between Hospital and Rehab, she tested positive, and then tested negative soon after. Although she was not considered to have had Covid, after the first two weeks in hospital she came home with a chest infection, which she passed onto most of our small family group. This was a persistent cough so may well have been Covid, We'll never know.

The point is, my personal experience shows just how confusing the picture was a year ago. Testing was hardly established. People got viruses, but there was no effective collection of data at that time, so comparisons now are quite meaningless.

Be interesting to see if in next year or two, we get negative excess deaths compared to 5 year average

I think this is the first year where the number of claimants compared year on year has fallen (ignoring the impact of retirement age changes).

Well kind of, but we do have the excess death statistics, which are very well known, analysed and understood. My 20 years in the insurance industry taught me just how thoroughly actuarial analysis goes in understanding the patterns and causes of deaths year on year. Over the last year we have seen an additional 98,000 people die who would not have otherwise been expected to.

One could take the somewhat callous view that they were probably all old and would have died anyway in the next few years, but these are all people who nevertheless died before their time due to an extremely nasty disease.

Hamwich .... you seem well on top of this, so a genuine query .... there was a suggestion going about that there had been lower than expected deaths in recent years, possibly due to milder flu seasons, that had left a pool of (brutaly speaking) people who hadn't died yet, who, through being very succeptible to covid, boosted the death figures for 2020 .... can you see any plausible evidence for this?

Deaths do seem to be coming down (hard to judge day on day due to reporting stutters) .... so hopefully we can soon see a sharp drop in deaths as those older people making up most of the fatalities gain protection from their vaccinations. We can but hope.

K

One hope I have is that there is a pandemic strategy that will come out of this. Not many years ago I think Obama was pushing for such a strategy both in the US and globally. Not a lot came of it. It might have been related to the I-bola outbreak. I think that this Covid pandemic has shown how unprepared we are.
Interestingly, last week I saw figures from China describing a big reduction in benefit payments. Does this reinforce last year’s drop in mobile phone contracts being mooted as due to Covid deaths? Under statement of deaths in China?
There are also some strangely low Covid death numbers in a few countries. A case of political manipulation and face saving?
Edited to add that the China figures are unverified.

The annual flu death pattern has shown a pretty steady decrease over the last 50 years, helped enormously recently by the wide availability of vaccines, so it would anyway be expected that we would see fewer people dying of flu. It's old data, but the pattern from 1968 to 2008 shows this trend very clearly.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870877/

Se figure 1. There are good years and bad years, but note how the severity of the bad years has been steadily decreasing over the period.

It's not that the mutations have been less virulent, more that our responses to them have been more effective.

Constructing an argument that says 'more people would have died if flu was worse so they are dying of C19 instead' is pretty faulty logic in my view as it's not taking into account the efficacy of the response.