Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!

[Wizard]

It takes quite a bit longer for figures to be released (because you need to get the information from the death certificate) and so it isn’t as useful as a real time flag but statistics are collected about deaths that are related to covid and reported regularly.

https://www.actuaries.org.uk/system/files/field/document/Mortality%20summary%20pandemic%20monitor%20Week%2040%202021%20v01%202021-10-19.pdf

Overall I think it a really quite difficult thing to measure, for instance ONS have just done an analysis of UK
data from the start to mid this year and I thought this was an important point.

Excess mortality and mortality displacement in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

Deaths registered in England and Wales by week, from 28 December 2019 to 2 July 2021. Breakdowns include country, sex, age group, region, place of death, and leading cause. Includes analysis of excess deaths and relative cumulative age-standardised mortality rates.

www.ons.gov.uk

Diabetes was the most common underlying cause of death that involved COVID-19, with 3.7% of all deaths due to the cause mentioning COVID-19 on the death certificate (see Table 3). This could explain why deaths due to diabetes have increased above average; although the underlying cause of death is diabetes, COVID-19 contributed towards the death.

This isn’t a particularly new thing though is it? Pre covid many people with serious illnesses that suppressed their immune system would often eventually die due to pneumonia for example. Pneumonia alone is unlikely to kill you (age dependent) but can often be the final cause for seriously ill people. Same thing with covid now.

 

[Tubey]

This isn’t a particularly new thing though is it? Pre covid many people with serious illnesses that suppressed their immune system would often eventually die due to pneumonia for example. Pneumonia alone is unlikely to kill you (age dependent) but can often be the final cause for seriously ill people. Same thing with covid now.

It's about how obvious the causation is that's important.

For example, if you're bitten by a venomous snake, you don't technically die of 'snakebite'; the cause of death is usually asphyxiation.

So for COVID, if the evidence is that the infection is consistently so severe that the secondary cause of death is all-but exacerbated by the COVID infection, then fair enough.

However, the problem is twofold - the date range of 28 days, and the age of those most likely to die 'from' COVID. To put it bluntly, generally everyone and anyone who dies 28 days after a positive COVID test have been put in the COVID stats as a COVID death, whether they get hit by a bus or their lungs turn into glass. So obviously, there's going to be a severe accuracy issue with that approach when you're talking about a disease that kills the elderly, because even if it doesn't kill them, it's disproportionately likely that something else will do anyway.

 

[LinekersLegs]

This isn’t a particularly new thing though is it? Pre covid many people with serious illnesses that suppressed their immune system would often eventually die due to pneumonia for example. Pneumonia alone is unlikely to kill you (age dependent) but can often be the final cause for seriously ill people. Same thing with covid now.

Yeah, just trying to convey that it a lot more complicated picture with lots of moving parts that are very hard to express with raw data, especially with real time signals that help impact day to day policy.

 

[Tubey]

Or to give a direct analogy, imagine every soldier who caught the 1918 Spanish Flu who was then shot and killed in the trenches was marked down as a death from the flu. Obviously, that would skew the mortality rate of Spanish Flu.

 

[JLW]

Absolutely it is. I mean, that's just an absolute fact really. The only question is by how much, and the problem is that the way the data has been recorded we may actually never know.

But as said, it's for largely understandable reasons, or at least it was.

Still the biggest question mark for me and always has been is why its stated everywhere that’s x amount have died within 28 days of testing positive! Why can’t they put it down as a Covid death? Like any other death be it Cancer, heart attack, dementia etc…
That tells me that Covid hasn’t killed them they’ve just died with it but for other reasons.
I Always have been and always will be very sceptical on the numbers published.

 

[Tin-Tin]

Rollout has been poor to date unfortunately.


Thankfully uncle has an apt for his on Monday

That may help explain the increase in over 80's who have been double jabbed ending up in hospital with Covid.

 

[Wizard]

Yeah, just trying to convey that it a lot more complicated picture with lots of moving parts that are very hard to express with raw data, especially with real time signals that help impact day to day policy.

I know, I’m was agreeing with you. Because pneumonia has become so ingrained in our lives we don’t think about that being on death certificates as much anymore. We understand that might be the final cause but will still say the person died of cancer. Pneumonia doesn’t dictate public health policy.

Currently covid does, and should given we are still in a pandemic and it is a new virus. So it is important to try and track how much of an impact it is having so we can try and plan going forward. Our government are largely rubbish at that but it’s important information for the scientists.

 

[Tubey]

Still the biggest question mark for me and always has been is why its stated everywhere that’s x amount have died within 28 days of testing positive! Why can’t they put it down as a Covid death? Like any other death be it Cancer, heart attack, dementia etc…
That tells me that Covid hasn’t killed them they’ve just died with it but for other reasons.
I Always have been and always will be very sceptical on the numbers published.

Well with dementia you answered your own question - because it's difficult.

Dementia only relatively recently has been a 'cause of death' really; instead, the 'direct' cause of death was recorded and the patient merely died with dementia. So that's an example of a mortality rate being under reported.

But the mad thing is that, with COVID, if someone with dementia dies, COVID is listed as the main cause of death over dementia. So bizarrely, the dementia death rate will be shown to have artificially fallen over the course of the pandemic. Again, another reason why statistical accuracy wherever possible is important.

 

[LinekersLegs]

Still the biggest question mark for me and always has been is why its stated everywhere that’s x amount have died within 28 days of testing positive! Why can’t they put it down as a Covid death? Like any other death be it Cancer, heart attack, dementia etc…
That tells me that Covid hasn’t killed them they’ve just died with it but for other reasons.
I Always have been and always will be very sceptical on the numbers published.

ONS have looked at a version of that though

 

[Tubey]

ONS have looked at a version of that though

Nobody suggested 'most' though, that would just be mad and be akin to saying COVID doesn't exist/doesn't harm anyone; the suggestion is that a sizeable amount would have. And of course all we can do is guess at what that amount would have been, but if I had to guess I'd go for around 15-20%.

 

[LinekersLegs]

Well with dementia you answered your own question - because it's difficult.

Dementia only relatively recently has been a 'cause of death' really; instead, the 'direct' cause of death was recorded and the patient merely died with dementia. So that's an example of a mortality rate being under reported.

But the mad thing is that, with COVID, if someone with dementia dies, COVID is listed as the main cause of death over dementia. So bizarrely, the dementia death rate will be shown to have artificially fallen over the course of the pandemic. Again, another reason why statistical accuracy wherever possible is important.

Where have you seen that Tubey? Did some looking into that claim from antivaxers regarding the US and it didn’t seem to hold water.

 

[Tubey]

Where have you seen that Tubey? Did some looking into that claim from antivaxers regarding the US and it didn’t seem to hold water.

Dementia is one of the biggest killers in the UK

Statistics report dementia the biggest killer in the UK, moving dementia to second for the first time since 2015. But deaths from dementia remain high compared with other major diseases. We explore why.

www.alzheimers.org.uk

 

[JLW]

Well with dementia you answered your own question - because it's difficult.

Dementia only relatively recently has been a 'cause of death' really; instead, the 'direct' cause of death was recorded and the patient merely died with dementia. So that's an example of a mortality rate being under reported.

But the mad thing is that, with COVID, if someone with dementia dies, COVID is listed as the main cause of death over dementia. So bizarrely, the dementia death rate will be shown to have artificially fallen over the course of the pandemic. Again, another reason why statistical accuracy wherever possible is important.

Yes but surely the doctors and nurses can define what has killed the patient. Would the patient still be alive if it wasn’t for Covid? If no then regardless of testing positive that shouldn’t be a Covid death. A lot of patients are getting Covid in hospital so they were already ill before or they wouldn’t be there.

Does testing positive trump every other death scenario if you test positive?
Let’s say your getting chest pains and have an issue with ye heart and get admitted to hospital You get Covid after a couple of days then have heart attack and die what’s on the death certificate? Does this go on the Covid death statistics?

 

[LinekersLegs]

Dementia is one of the biggest killers in the UK

Statistics report dementia the biggest killer in the UK, moving dementia to second for the first time since 2015. But deaths from dementia remain high compared with other major diseases. We explore why.

www.alzheimers.org.uk

View attachment 143225

Thanks, informative and hadn’t seen the equivalent here in the US.

Although your statement “But the mad thing is that, with COVID, if someone with dementia dies, COVID is listed as the main cause of death over dementia.” seems a bit of an overstatement.

My understanding of that article was that it was very dependent on whether someone had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s prior to their death and that diagnosis had been reduced over the pandemic resulting in an undercount.

However, if say someone had been diagnosed in 2018 with the disease and died with Covid, there would still be no barrier to putting the main cause of death as dementia rather than Covid.

 

[Tubey]

Yes but surely the doctors and nurses can define what has killed the patient. Would the patient still be alive if it wasn’t for Covid? If no then regardless of testing positive that shouldn’t be a Covid death. A lot of patients are getting Covid in hospital so they were already ill before or they wouldn’t be there.

Does testing positive trump every other death scenario if you test positive?
Let’s say your getting chest pains and have an issue with ye heart and get admitted to hospital You get Covid after a couple of days then have heart attack and die what’s on the death certificate? Does this go on the Covid death statistics?

Yes, and to use that example to highlight why it's so difficult, the COVID-19 infection may have caused myocarditis which then directly led to the heart failure. So in that instance, what has caused the death - COVID-19 or heart failure? Can you see why it's difficult to draw the line, especially with a new disease and an emergency situation?

I agree with you that now we should be striving for much greater accuracy, but the medley of symptoms caused by COVID made definitive pathology extremely difficult and still does.

For now, what we can say for sure is that figures should be treated with extreme caution, and unfortunately they're being weaponised by everyone, including the government and even their own top scientists like Whitty/Valance who have quite literally lied to the nation in TV briefings with exacerbated statistics.