The hospital figures are very good but our progress seems to have stalled.
That's pillar 1 & 2 on the testing - which means that intervention in outbreak areas is finding more asymptomatic cases.
The death number are reporting day, not day of death, which makes them pretty much useless.
The England all settings deaths by day of death -
Note that these are the numbers that include any previously infected who recover, and are killed crossing the road, falling down stairs or by mad lawyers with baseball bats.
Worth noting that the ONS (death certificate) and PHE (Hospital Deaths) figures do deviate, but it is the ONS ones that are higher. On 3rd July the ONS recorded 48 154 compared to PHE at 39 626 for example.
(Note that ONS record date of death registration rather than date of death)
Yes - that is the excess deaths issue earlier in the epidemic.
The question is what is happening now.
No "excess deaths" is another metric. The ONS is based on death certificates, but includes nursing homes etc. As well as hospitals.
I think "excess deaths" per hundred thousand is the only relatively reliable statistic to compare the performance of our system against those in other countries. It is interesting politically because if it appears very bad (which it almost certainly will) there will be those on the left that will blame the incompetent government and those on the right will blame the incompetent bureaucracy of the NHS.
The stats support him. i just noticed that in the last two days the world reported 275-280,000 new cases.
By a margin, these are the highest daily totals. This damn virus is ACCELERATING
Any stats on the number of tests done?
Yes that's crucial, and it is hard, if not impossible, to collate the data globally.
What we can say is that
1. America's rise in case-numbers is not a by-product of rising tests
"The average number of tests conducted [in the USA] has grown by 80% since early June to 780,000 per day. Daily case counts have grown by 215% in the same period."
That's from the NY Times, yesterday
and
2. The number of global deaths is also rising, albeit slower than the number of cases. At the end of May the average daily death toll was ~4,200, now it is ~5,200
An interesting chat with one of our Covid-19 doctors at lunch. Only 26 inpatients now despite all the hype about Leicester outbreak, but seeing a different spectrum of disease. Far fewer with respiratory disease, but more vascular and intestinal disease, renal failure, strange strokes etc. Weird stuff and some bad outcomes. Has the virus mutated, at least locally?
I think the area has been flooded by swabbing, as only 1.7% of tests are coming back positive now. Track and Trace not able to contact anyone for 35% of index patients.
Interesting, and somewhat troubling. My friend who is seriously ill, with "covid-related" disease, has baffled his London doctors, they can't quite work out why he is SO ill.
The virus is a shape-shifter?
The giveaway is in the inflammatory markers in blood tests. Those seem to be very predictive of bad outcomes.
What are "inflammatory markers"?
Worth noting that my friend was a very heavy smoker. Gave up four years ago. The docs are sure that is relevant.
It is recognised that smokers are less likely to get it but get it worse when they do.
There are a variety of blood inflammatory markers, and these are part of any Covid-19 work up. They are not very specific to site of inflammation so localising the cause can be tricky.
In what context are the tests finding "1.7% positive" ??
I ask, since the Pillar 1 tests seem to be running in the order of 0.25% positive and Pillar 2 at something like 0.8%, nationally.
That is the figure for Leicester.
So in Leicester, the tests are catching north of double the rate elsewhere?
Yes, they are being done door to door in the affected areas of the city*, but the positivity rate has dropped dramatically from a few weeks ago.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
Except if some form of face covering were considered important (and it's important to remember, of course, that the mask-wearing edict does not compel people to go around in medical-grade kit) then why was Joe Public not advised to buy a cloth mask, or to make one, or to use a scarf or some similar such thing when this all kicked off in the first place?
Back in March, when ministers and senior Government advisers were telling people that masks outside clinical settings were worse than useless, either they were telling the truth (and have since changed their minds,) or they were lying because they didn't trust the public not to fly into a complete panic and try to buy up any medical grade masks they could get their hands on, as opposed to accepting a rational request to stick to cloth masks and leave medical masks for medical professionals.
If it's the latter then one feels obliged to remark that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Any conceivable good that might have been achieved by way of keeping a few boxes of N95 masks out of the hands of a handful of panic buyers on Amazon has been more than negated by the fact that the population, or a large section of it at any rate, must now feel that it cannot trust the Establishment to tell it the truth about these matters. Thus, even if masks in non-clinical settings are of some conceivable use, citizens will either refuse to wear them anyway, or only do it because it's not worth the hassle not to (in which case the masks are liable to be treated with contempt, e.g. by being worn as necklaces unless or until the wearer is cajoled into pulling them up by an authority figure, and they really will prove worse than useless as was originally claimed.)
Absolutely right.
Also, I do not buy the idea they all lied to the public to preserve masks for the NHS.
Look at the body language of Van Tam and Harries when they argued that masks are "worse than useless". They really meant it. They believed it. And they are the UK's top scientists.
I reckon it was a conceptual failure. They did not grasp the fact that masks are a barrier to transmission, more than a way of preventing infection, especially if you are asymptomatic. You wear a mask to protect others, others wear a mask to protect you.
It is amazing how many intelligent people failed to grasp this simple concept.
Here is Van Tam. He's not lying. He's just not very bright
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
The evidence in favour of mask wearing outside of clinical settings (i.e. actual evidence, as distinct from "they like wearing them in Taiwan therefore they must be magic Covid repellors") is still limited and muddy.
FWIW, before mocking Nerys too mercilessly, it might also be worth remembering that Government ministers and boffins spent quite a lot of time mithering as recently as the Spring about whether or not masks would cause wearers to develop a false sense of security and dispense with social distancing, or accidentally infect themselves by constantly fiddling with the things. So, masks-as-potential-disease-vectors isn't a completely leftfield theory that has only sprung into being within the last 24 hours.
Personally, I would've thought that there is indeed at least a theoretical risk from use of dirty masks. Disposable masks aren't cheap and not everyone is made of money, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if some users wear them until they fall apart, and I seriously doubt that 100% of cloth mask users wash their used ones every day when they get home.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
As against that, the ‘excess death rate’ was at one point 50%, which suggests precisely the opposite.
The stats support him. i just noticed that in the last two days the world reported 275-280,000 new cases.
By a margin, these are the highest daily totals. This damn virus is ACCELERATING
Any stats on the number of tests done?
Yes that's crucial, and it is hard, if not impossible, to collate the data globally.
What we can say is that
1. America's rise in case-numbers is not a by-product of rising tests
"The average number of tests conducted [in the USA] has grown by 80% since early June to 780,000 per day. Daily case counts have grown by 215% in the same period."
That's from the NY Times, yesterday
and
2. The number of global deaths is also rising, albeit slower than the number of cases. At the end of May the average daily death toll was ~4,200, now it is ~5,200
An interesting chat with one of our Covid-19 doctors at lunch. Only 26 inpatients now despite all the hype about Leicester outbreak, but seeing a different spectrum of disease. Far fewer with respiratory disease, but more vascular and intestinal disease, renal failure, strange strokes etc. Weird stuff and some bad outcomes. Has the virus mutated, at least locally?
I think the area has been flooded by swabbing, as only 1.7% of tests are coming back positive now. Track and Trace not able to contact anyone for 35% of index patients.
Interesting, and somewhat troubling. My friend who is seriously ill, with "covid-related" disease, has baffled his London doctors, they can't quite work out why he is SO ill.
The virus is a shape-shifter?
The giveaway is in the inflammatory markers in blood tests. Those seem to be very predictive of bad outcomes.
What are "inflammatory markers"?
Worth noting that my friend was a very heavy smoker. Gave up four years ago. The docs are sure that is relevant.
It is recognised that smokers are less likely to get it but get it worse when they do.
There are a variety of blood inflammatory markers, and these are part of any Covid-19 work up. They are not very specific to site of inflammation so localising the cause can be tricky.
In what context are the tests finding "1.7% positive" ??
I ask, since the Pillar 1 tests seem to be running in the order of 0.25% positive and Pillar 2 at something like 0.8%, nationally.
That is the figure for Leicester.
Out of curiosity, what is the age profile of those in hospital? Is it still heavily skewed towards those over 70?
The only Buttler has patience is when he’s playing Sevens after the close.
Its an 83 run partnership which is good. The problem is that there is so little to come that these 2 really need to get England close to 300. Long way to go yet.
There's an interesting report in this week's New Scientist about the recent surge in covid-19 cases in Australia. The country had come close to eliminating the virus, until slapdash quarantine (of returning Australians) enforcement by private security contractors in the state of Victoria resulted in them catching and spreading the disease. This has apparently been exacerbated by failure to observe limits on gatherings and a tendency to gather indoors due to it being winter there.
The stats support him. i just noticed that in the last two days the world reported 275-280,000 new cases.
By a margin, these are the highest daily totals. This damn virus is ACCELERATING
Any stats on the number of tests done?
Yes that's crucial, and it is hard, if not impossible, to collate the data globally.
What we can say is that
1. America's rise in case-numbers is not a by-product of rising tests
"The average number of tests conducted [in the USA] has grown by 80% since early June to 780,000 per day. Daily case counts have grown by 215% in the same period."
That's from the NY Times, yesterday
and
2. The number of global deaths is also rising, albeit slower than the number of cases. At the end of May the average daily death toll was ~4,200, now it is ~5,200
An interesting chat with one of our Covid-19 doctors at lunch. Only 26 inpatients now despite all the hype about Leicester outbreak, but seeing a different spectrum of disease. Far fewer with respiratory disease, but more vascular and intestinal disease, renal failure, strange strokes etc. Weird stuff and some bad outcomes. Has the virus mutated, at least locally?
I think the area has been flooded by swabbing, as only 1.7% of tests are coming back positive now. Track and Trace not able to contact anyone for 35% of index patients.
Interesting, and somewhat troubling. My friend who is seriously ill, with "covid-related" disease, has baffled his London doctors, they can't quite work out why he is SO ill.
The virus is a shape-shifter?
The giveaway is in the inflammatory markers in blood tests. Those seem to be very predictive of bad outcomes.
What are "inflammatory markers"?
Worth noting that my friend was a very heavy smoker. Gave up four years ago. The docs are sure that is relevant.
It is recognised that smokers are less likely to get it but get it worse when they do.
There are a variety of blood inflammatory markers, and these are part of any Covid-19 work up. They are not very specific to site of inflammation so localising the cause can be tricky.
In what context are the tests finding "1.7% positive" ??
I ask, since the Pillar 1 tests seem to be running in the order of 0.25% positive and Pillar 2 at something like 0.8%, nationally.
That is the figure for Leicester.
Out of curiosity, what is the age profile of those in hospital? Is it still heavily skewed towards those over 70?
The only Buttler has patience is when he’s playing Sevens after the close.
Its an 83 run partnership which is good. The problem is that there is so little to come that these 2 really need to get England close to 300. Long way to go yet.
These two couldn’t get close to 300 if the alternative was being castrated with bricks.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
Except if some form of face covering were considered important (and it's important to remember, of course, that the mask-wearing edict does not compel people to go around in medical-grade kit) then why was Joe Public not advised to buy a cloth mask, or to make one, or to use a scarf or some similar such thing when this all kicked off in the first place?
Back in March, when ministers and senior Government advisers were telling people that masks outside clinical settings were worse than useless, either they were telling the truth (and have since changed their minds,) or they were lying because they didn't trust the public not to fly into a complete panic and try to buy up any medical grade masks they could get their hands on, as opposed to accepting a rational request to stick to cloth masks and leave medical masks for medical professionals.
If it's the latter then one feels obliged to remark that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Any conceivable good that might have been achieved by way of keeping a few boxes of N95 masks out of the hands of a handful of panic buyers on Amazon has been more than negated by the fact that the population, or a large section of it at any rate, must now feel that it cannot trust the Establishment to tell it the truth about these matters. Thus, even if masks in non-clinical settings are of some conceivable use, citizens will either refuse to wear them anyway, or only do it because it's not worth the hassle not to (in which case the masks are liable to be treated with contempt, e.g. by being worn as necklaces unless or until the wearer is cajoled into pulling them up by an authority figure, and they really will prove worse than useless as was originally claimed.)
Absolutely right.
Also, I do not buy the idea they all lied to the public to preserve masks for the NHS.
Look at the body language of Van Tam and Harries when they argued that masks are "worse than useless". They really meant it. They believed it. And they are the UK's top scientists.
I reckon it was a conceptual failure. They did not grasp the fact that masks are a barrier to transmission, more than a way of preventing infection, especially if you are asymptomatic. You wear a mask to protect others, others wear a mask to protect you.
It is amazing how many intelligent people failed to grasp this simple concept.
Here is Van Tam. He's not lying. He's just not very bright
That's pretty much the way I saw it. But this has been a steep learning curve for everyone. When he was saying that I think that he also believed that pretty much everyone was going to catch this eventually. Which we have also moved on from but probably also influenced his thinking.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID aend all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
As against that, the ‘excess death rate’ was at one point 50%, which suggests precisely the opposite.
Its all about timing.
The excess death rate was high months ago when we weren't testing people.
The excess death rate now and for a long time now is negative.
So all the people tested at the peak, back in May, who have subsequently recovered and are now naturally dying are getting recorded as COVID deaths despite the fact we have negative excess deaths now.
The stats support him. i just noticed that in the last two days the world reported 275-280,000 new cases.
By a margin, these are the highest daily totals. This damn virus is ACCELERATING
Any stats on the number of tests done?
Yes that's crucial, and it is hard, if not impossible, to collate the data globally.
What we can say is that
1. America's rise in case-numbers is not a by-product of rising tests
"The average number of tests conducted [in the USA] has grown by 80% since early June to 780,000 per day. Daily case counts have grown by 215% in the same period."
That's from the NY Times, yesterday
and
2. The number of global deaths is also rising, albeit slower than the number of cases. At the end of May the average daily death toll was ~4,200, now it is ~5,200
An interesting chat with one of our Covid-19 doctors at lunch. Only 26 inpatients now despite all the hype about Leicester outbreak, but seeing a different spectrum of disease. Far fewer with respiratory disease, but more vascular and intestinal disease, renal failure, strange strokes etc. Weird stuff and some bad outcomes. Has the virus mutated, at least locally?
I think the area has been flooded by swabbing, as only 1.7% of tests are coming back positive now. Track and Trace not able to contact anyone for 35% of index patients.
Interesting, and somewhat troubling. My friend who is seriously ill, with "covid-related" disease, has baffled his London doctors, they can't quite work out why he is SO ill.
The virus is a shape-shifter?
The giveaway is in the inflammatory markers in blood tests. Those seem to be very predictive of bad outcomes.
What are "inflammatory markers"?
Worth noting that my friend was a very heavy smoker. Gave up four years ago. The docs are sure that is relevant.
It is recognised that smokers are less likely to get it but get it worse when they do.
There are a variety of blood inflammatory markers, and these are part of any Covid-19 work up. They are not very specific to site of inflammation so localising the cause can be tricky.
In what context are the tests finding "1.7% positive" ??
I ask, since the Pillar 1 tests seem to be running in the order of 0.25% positive and Pillar 2 at something like 0.8%, nationally.
That is the figure for Leicester.
So in Leicester, the tests are catching north of double the rate elsewhere?
Yes, they are being done door to door in the affected areas of the city*, but the positivity rate has dropped dramatically from a few weeks ago.
*organised locally
Is the 80% asymptomatic number we have been hearing about holding true in Leicester?
For example, in the Hereford outbreak I've heard that only 10 or so had symptoms - the rest were found in mass testing.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
Are you blind? It's clearly a conspiracy by Big Tin (or is it Big Foil) to bump sales of tinfoil hats.
The stats support him. i just noticed that in the last two days the world reported 275-280,000 new cases.
By a margin, these are the highest daily totals. This damn virus is ACCELERATING
~20% of the world gets it? ~20% became infected on the cruise ship and the US navy ship where it spread in a fairly uncontrolled manner. The other passengers seemed to have a degree of immunity.
That would mean 1.4 billion cases but I don't think it will be properly recorded. In the UK, if you are fairly sure you had it, as a relative (63) and friend (77) are, you must pay for a test. Under-recording = equally likely in most other countries?
BJO posted a belated comment two threads ago saying that sources in Islington CLP have been told Corbyn is to lose the whip.
Leaving aside the fact he is now doubling down on his mindless racism, surely he deserves expulsion for the blatant defiance of Starmer, which effectively includes calling the new Labour leader a liar?
Kicking Corbyn out the party would be a master stroke. Would send a crystal clear message to the electorate. Next target Tony Blair.
The SNP must be praying any purge doesn’t encompass Richard Leonard.
Edit - mind you, they were worried that Wendy Alexander being forced out would be bad news. Didn’t turn out that way...
Kind of right. I admit that a lot of my colleagues value Leonard because he is so utterly useless (heck, witness my own gif), but personally I would prefer to see a brighter, more competent and pro-Scottish SLab leader. My logic being that independence is going to be very demanding not just on the winning Yes team, but equally so on the losing Opposition. It is in all our interests that *all* parties are lead by intelligent, pleasant, constructive, well-meaning people. Labour and the Lib Dems are getting there. Tories are miles off.
I’m a big Wendy fan, and always have been. She was the last good SLab leader. It was Gordon Brown who bullied her out, one of his biggest mistakes. Wendy was a truly strategic Unionist thinker. Gey few of those about.
Your surely right about independence being "very demanding". The costs of a break-up will be huge and there will be zero acceptance on the part of RUK taxpayers to pay for any of it. After all, they won't have voted for it. It will be a bloody divorce with a very asymmetric cost being borne north of the border. The parallel negotiations to re-enter the EU will be fun too - wonder what price the Spanish Govt will insist on, given their pre-occupation with Catalonia?
You’re surely right about UK independence being "very demanding". The costs of a break-up are huge and there is zero acceptance on the part of rEU taxpayers to pay for any of it. After all, they didn’t voted for it. It is a bloody divorce with a very asymmetric cost being borne north of the Channel. The parallel trade negotiations are fun too - wonder what price the U.S. Govt will insist on, given their pre-occupation with self-interest?
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
Are you blind? It's clearly a conspiracy by Big Tin (or is it Big Foil) to bump sales of tinfoil hats.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
Tinfoil mask... Genius!
EDIT: For the avoidance of doubt, I am joking. This is a joke.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
Except if some form of face covering were considered important (and it's important to remember, of course, that the mask-wearing edict does not compel people to go around in medical-grade kit) then why was Joe Public not advised to buy a cloth mask, or to make one, or to use a scarf or some similar such thing when this all kicked off in the first place?
Back in March, when ministers and senior Government advisers were telling people that masks outside clinical settings were worse than useless, either they were telling the truth (and have since changed their minds,) or they were lying because they didn't trust the public not to fly into a complete panic and try to buy up any medical grade masks they could get their hands on, as opposed to accepting a rational request to stick to cloth masks and leave medical masks for medical professionals.
If it's the latter then one feels obliged to remark that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Any conceivable good that might have been achieved by way of keeping a few boxes of N95 masks out of the hands of a handful of panic buyers on Amazon has been more than negated by the fact that the population, or a large section of it at any rate, must now feel that it cannot trust the Establishment to tell it the truth about these matters. Thus, even if masks in non-clinical settings are of some conceivable use, citizens will either refuse to wear them anyway, or only do it because it's not worth the hassle not to (in which case the masks are liable to be treated with contempt, e.g. by being worn as necklaces unless or until the wearer is cajoled into pulling them up by an authority figure, and they really will prove worse than useless as was originally claimed.)
Absolutely right.
Also, I do not buy the idea they all lied to the public to preserve masks for the NHS.
Look at the body language of Van Tam and Harries when they argued that masks are "worse than useless". They really meant it. They believed it. And they are the UK's top scientists.
I reckon it was a conceptual failure. They did not grasp the fact that masks are a barrier to transmission, more than a way of preventing infection, especially if you are asymptomatic. You wear a mask to protect others, others wear a mask to protect you.
It is amazing how many intelligent people failed to grasp this simple concept.
Here is Van Tam. He's not lying. He's just not very bright
That's pretty much the way I saw it. But this has been a steep learning curve for everyone. When he was saying that I think that he also believed that pretty much everyone was going to catch this eventually. Which we have also moved on from but probably also influenced his thinking.
You are more forgiving than me!
When they have the inquiry into Covid-19 in the unbearably hot summer of 2034, in the new capital of York-by-Huawai, the scientists must be interrogated, as much as the politicians.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
I have read that statistic multiple times in the media - I think it is probably one of those statistics where it depends upon how you define average.
The term "average" generally refers to the "arithmetic mean", which has a straightforward mathematical definition. So it's far more likely that you or your source(s) simply invented the figure, or that you misremembered it.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
I have read that statistic multiple times in the media - I think it is probably one of those statistics where it depends upon how you define average.
The term "average" generally means "mean" and has a simple mathematical definition. So it's far more likely that you or your source(s) simply invented the figure, or that you misremembered it.
Mean, median and mode are all average and median can be more appropriate that mean.
If 56% die within a year then it is entirely appropriate to say on average people die within the year, even if on average mean life expectancy can be more than a year.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
In Spain mask use is widespread and mostly compulsory in most settings. It has been since lockdown. Oddly people also make widespread use of sanitisers as well. I say oddly as you seem to think once wearing a mask everyone gives up on all other common sense behaviour. And to repeat, as many have done, but you try to ignore - the vast majority of recent outbreaks are caused by family reunions, reckless youngsters in bars, clubs , etc and among mostly agricultural workers. All have the common factor of relaxed social distancing and lack of mask use.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
It makes sense that it is a strange distribution. People don't go into care homes because they're fully fit and healthy and while some can live for many years, the majority according to the source I gave earlier die within a year.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
Excuse me? Not only did I quote it, I tagged you in it.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
BJO posted a belated comment two threads ago saying that sources in Islington CLP have been told Corbyn is to lose the whip.
Leaving aside the fact he is now doubling down on his mindless racism, surely he deserves expulsion for the blatant defiance of Starmer, which effectively includes calling the new Labour leader a liar?
Kicking Corbyn out the party would be a master stroke. Would send a crystal clear message to the electorate. Next target Tony Blair.
The SNP must be praying any purge doesn’t encompass Richard Leonard.
Edit - mind you, they were worried that Wendy Alexander being forced out would be bad news. Didn’t turn out that way...
Kind of right. I admit that a lot of my colleagues value Leonard because he is so utterly useless (heck, witness my own gif), but personally I would prefer to see a brighter, more competent and pro-Scottish SLab leader. My logic being that independence is going to be very demanding not just on the winning Yes team, but equally so on the losing Opposition. It is in all our interests that *all* parties are lead by intelligent, pleasant, constructive, well-meaning people. Labour and the Lib Dems are getting there. Tories are miles off.
I’m a big Wendy fan, and always have been. She was the last good SLab leader. It was Gordon Brown who bullied her out, one of his biggest mistakes. Wendy was a truly strategic Unionist thinker. Gey few of those about.
Your surely right about independence being "very demanding". The costs of a break-up will be huge and there will be zero acceptance on the part of RUK taxpayers to pay for any of it. After all, they won't have voted for it. It will be a bloody divorce with a very asymmetric cost being borne north of the border. The parallel negotiations to re-enter the EU will be fun too - wonder what price the Spanish Govt will insist on, given their pre-occupation with Catalonia?
You’re surely right about UK independence being "very demanding". The costs of a break-up are huge and there is zero acceptance on the part of rEU taxpayers to pay for any of it. After all, they didn’t voted for it. It is a bloody divorce with a very asymmetric cost being borne north of the Channel. The parallel trade negotiations are fun too - wonder what price the U.S. Govt will insist on, given their pre-occupation with self-interest?
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
Excuse me? Not only did I quote it, I tagged you in it.
Sorry, I missed that. I note though that it refers to a sample of residences from the south-east of the UK. It is not a national statistic like the one I gave.
I'd also note again that average does generally refer to the arithmetic mean. If you are instead referring to the median, then you should explicitly say so.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
Except if some form of face covering were considered important (and it's important to remember, of course, that the mask-wearing edict does not compel people to go around in medical-grade kit) then why was Joe Public not advised to buy a cloth mask, or to make one, or to use a scarf or some similar such thing when this all kicked off in the first place?
Back in March, when ministers and senior Government advisers were telling people that masks outside clinical settings were worse than useless, either they were telling the truth (and have since changed their minds,) or they were lying because they didn't trust the public not to fly into a complete panic and try to buy up any medical grade masks they could get their hands on, as opposed to accepting a rational request to stick to cloth masks and leave medical masks for medical professionals.
If it's the latter then one feels obliged to remark that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Any conceivable good that might have been achieved by way of keeping a few boxes of N95 masks out of the hands of a handful of panic buyers on Amazon has been more than negated by the fact that the population, or a large section of it at any rate, must now feel that it cannot trust the Establishment to tell it the truth about these matters. Thus, even if masks in non-clinical settings are of some conceivable use, citizens will either refuse to wear them anyway, or only do it because it's not worth the hassle not to (in which case the masks are liable to be treated with contempt, e.g. by being worn as necklaces unless or until the wearer is cajoled into pulling them up by an authority figure, and they really will prove worse than useless as was originally claimed.)
Absolutely right.
Also, I do not buy the idea they all lied to the public to preserve masks for the NHS.
Look at the body language of Van Tam and Harries when they argued that masks are "worse than useless". They really meant it. They believed it. And they are the UK's top scientists.
I reckon it was a conceptual failure. They did not grasp the fact that masks are a barrier to transmission, more than a way of preventing infection, especially if you are asymptomatic. You wear a mask to protect others, others wear a mask to protect you.
It is amazing how many intelligent people failed to grasp this simple concept.
Here is Van Tam. He's not lying. He's just not very bright
That's pretty much the way I saw it. But this has been a steep learning curve for everyone. When he was saying that I think that he also believed that pretty much everyone was going to catch this eventually. Which we have also moved on from but probably also influenced his thinking.
You are more forgiving than me!
When they have the inquiry into Covid-19 in the unbearably hot summer of 2034, in the new capital of York-by-Huawai, the scientists must be interrogated, as much as the politicians.
Just be grateful that the ill informed keyboard warrior morons who made absurd predictions that by now billions of people would have caught the virus and in the UK alone there would be millions of dead, won’t be hauled up in front of any inquiry.
So three sources now for median death being within a year.
Considering everyone can only die once, for the sense of the logical argument I was making in my original post I think median average is more appropriate than mean.
Paradoxically, that Buttler 50 isn’t unmixed good news for England. It will give Ed Smith all the excuse he needs to keep Buttler in the side and Foakes or Bracey, both of whom are better suited to Tests than Buttler, out of it.
Paradoxically, that Buttler 50 isn’t unmixed good news for England. It will give Ed Smith all the excuse he needs to keep Buttler in the side and Foakes or Bracey, both of whom are better suited to Tests than Buttler, out of it.
Paradoxically, that Buttler 50 isn’t unmixed good news for England. It will give Ed Smith all the excuse he needs to keep Buttler in the side and Foakes or Bracey, both of whom are better suited to Tests than Buttler, out of it.
Paradoxically, that Buttler 50 isn’t unmixed good news for England. It will give Ed Smith all the excuse he needs to keep Buttler in the side and Foakes or Bracey, both of whom are better suited to Tests than Buttler, out of it.
Bring back YJB.
Why? He’s not as good as Foakes or Bracey either.
Six test hundreds say otherwise, and he's a top top keeper.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
That is, of course, correct. In a hypothetical population of ten old ladies, if nine die after six months and the tenth lives for twenty years, the average life expectancy of the whole group can be described either as two-and-a-half years (mean) or six months (median and mode.)
It would therefore be interesting to know whether or not the population dynamics in care homes really do work like that. It sounds implausible on the face of it; however, generally speaking, people really don't want to go into care facilities (would you? I know I bloody well wouldn't,) and therefore tend to leave their own homes only when they become too frail to manage on their own.
If any group aren't going to have much left in the tank, it's going to be those who have been made to live in a nursing home because they are too frail to live independently. Thus, having a great many die quickly, with the mean value being skewed by the occasional outlier, doesn't sound so very odd after all. The same thing happens, albeit in a less dramatic way, with statistics for "average" earnings. The median is typically reported in preference to the mean, because the mean figure is shifted significantly upwards by the salaries of relatively small numbers of very high earners, thus arguably giving a false impression of the prosperity of the great mass of working people.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
People were taking their masks off in store today to talk, then replacing them, then touching products. Yuk.
Meanwhile anyone who dares to question the policy of compulsory mask wearing is being subjected to appalling abuse on social media. Quelle surprise.
Paradoxically, that Buttler 50 isn’t unmixed good news for England. It will give Ed Smith all the excuse he needs to keep Buttler in the side and Foakes or Bracey, both of whom are better suited to Tests than Buttler, out of it.
Bring back YJB.
Why? He’s not as good as Foakes or Bracey either.
Six test hundreds say otherwise, and he's a top top keeper.
Six test hundreds in 123 innings, average 34.47
Foakes - one Test hundred in ten innings, average 41.
Bracey - yet to play Tests, but scored a 50 in every innings (bar one I think) he’s played for an England team.
Leave Bairstow and Buttler to the white ball stuff, where they are beyond sensational.
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
American football is padded rugby.
If I wanted to watch a watered down version of real rugby then I'd watch rugby league.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
There will be a number of dementia patients who are physically very fit when they go into care and so can last a fairly long time. They would certainly skew the statistics.
W G Grace was quite portly in his later years as well.
Gatting was quite chunky at times.
But R Cornwall is in a league of his own.
Cornwall is 6'6'' and weighs 22 stone.
Arjuna Ranatunga, when captaining Sri Lanka, was 5'8'', weighed 15 stones and is what's known in the business as an FLF.
Interesting to compare that to the pre-covid Johnson. Also 5'8" but allegedly 17.5 stones. That's hefty - but perhaps did not look as obese as one might expect because of a relatively high muscle to fat ratio. Higher than Ranatunga even, which is surprising.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
He gave a source. You just ignored it as it didn't suit your narrative.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
Excuse me? Not only did I quote it, I tagged you in it.
Sorry, I missed that. I note though that it refers to a sample of residences from the south-east of the UK. It is not a national statistic like the one I gave.
I'd also note again that average does generally refer to the arithmetic mean. If you are instead referring to the median, then you should explicitly say so.
In this case though median gives a much better picture than mean: it’s a bit like half-life for radioactive decay. Calculating the average life of a carbon 14 atom would give a very misleading number.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
On average in the UK we touch our faces between 16 and 20 times an hour (although strangely a US study has it at between 23 and 26 times an hour). Masks have been shown to reduce the number of times people touch their face.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
It's extremely unlikely that the median is less than a year if the mean is 26 months. You'd have to have a very strange distribution of life expectancies, with most of the inmates popping their clogs within a few months of arrival and a lucky few living there for many years.
There will be a number of dementia patients who are physically very fit when they go into care and so can last a fairly long time. They would certainly skew the statistics.
Yes, that makes sense. The national statistic that I quoted gives a mean of 26 months and a median of 462 days. This is still longer than the median of less than 12 months given by Philip's source, but then his source is based on a regional sample rather than a national survey. That may explain the discrepancy.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
On average in the UK we touch our faces between 16 and 20 times an hour (although strangely a US study has it at between 23 and 26 times an hour). Masks have been shown to reduce the number of times people touch their face.
The other side of the coin is that there is some evidence that mask wearers are much more relaxed about being close to others. Reminiscent of studies that suggests that drivers wearing seat belts tend to drive more recklessly.
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
American football is padded rugby.
If I wanted to watch a watered down version of real rugby then I'd watch rugby league.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
He gave a source. You just ignored it as it didn't suit your narrative.
I didn't ignore it. I missed it, and I apologised for doing so.
Also, his source refers to the south east of England. It is not a national statistic, like the source I quoted.
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
American football is padded rugby.
If I wanted to watch a watered down version of real rugby then I'd watch rugby league.
Insofar as I know anything about sport (not far), rugby league is much more of a flowing spectator game than American so-called football.
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
American football is padded rugby.
If I wanted to watch a watered down version of real rugby then I'd watch rugby league.
Insofar as I know anything about sport (not far), rugby league is much more of a flowing spectator game than American so-called football.
Nah, rugby league has the fifth rule tackle which is rubbish.
In proper rugby you have to prise the ball from our cold dead hands.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
On average in the UK we touch our faces between 16 and 20 times an hour (although strangely a US study has it at between 23 and 26 times an hour). Masks have been shown to reduce the number of times people touch their face.
The other side of the coin is that there is some evidence that mask wearers are much more relaxed about being close to others. Reminiscent of studies that suggests that drivers wearing seat belts tend to drive more recklessly.
Well, I did have someone get pretty close to me today who was wearing a mask, but it would have been pretty difficult for her to give me my immunotherapy treatment from 2m...
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
American football is padded rugby.
If I wanted to watch a watered down version of real rugby then I'd watch rugby league.
Insofar as I know anything about sport (not far), rugby league is much more of a flowing spectator game than American so-called football.
Nah, rugby league has the fifth rule tackle which is rubbish.
In proper rugby you have to prise the ball from our cold dead hands.
Will there be any rugby in a world of Covid? It's a sadly serious question
Always said Chelsea fans are arseholes, George Osborne CH being the glorious exception.
A Chelsea football fan was jailed for two years and eight months for committing an aggravated assault on the Guardian columnist Owen Jones with a “karate kick to his lower back”, motivated by hostility to the writer’s leftwing and LGBT politics.
James Healy, 40, from Portsmouth, was sentenced at Snaresbrook crown court for “a frenzied and wholly unprovoked attack” last August that took place in the street late at night after Jones had been out celebrating his birthday.
Recorder Anne Studd, the presiding judge, said there were “very significant aggravating factors” as she handed down the sentence to Healy at the high end of the range available.
The judge described Healy as “a man holding extreme rightwing opinions who attacked a victim who did no more than hold opinions on which the defendant did not agree”....
...The three men were not detained in the immediate aftermath of the fight in the street, but the court heard that they were arrested after they were recognised from CCTV footage by officers familiar with Chelsea supporters known to police.
Healy had at least nine convictions relating to football hooliganism stretching back to 1998. A search of his property after his arrest revealed a collection of far-right hooligan memorabilia, loosely connected with the Chelsea Youth Firm.
McGhee, prosecuting, said Healy possessed “a greeting card, which bore Nazi far-right extremist terror symbols, including those associated with the far-right Combat 18 group, one of whose tenets is ‘kill all queers’”.
Also discovered was a Nazi SS flag bearing a “totenkopf” death’s head skull symbol plus “a number of pins of badges”, including a circular pin badge with the “lead the way” and “whatever it takes” motto of Combat 18 and a badge that said “Chelsea FC no asylum seekers”.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
On average in the UK we touch our faces between 16 and 20 times an hour (although strangely a US study has it at between 23 and 26 times an hour). Masks have been shown to reduce the number of times people touch their face.
Anyways. Just got back from the local shop, where mask wearing has been very poor. Today all in masks. Bloke walks in without one, everyone gives him the evils, and he says "Do you sell face masks?" It appears we will wear them if told to. Quite why it took so long is another matter.
According to some NHS professionals I know the reason it has taken so long is that we didn't have the supplies in April/May to allow public use of them.
So very few people would have been able to go out and get essentials, ditto key workers, due to the mask shortage.
it's a feeble excuse. By mid February the government should have seen this virus coming, realised why masks are so important, and got manufacturers to focus on making billions of 'em.
By March, South Korea had a weekly mask ration available for every citizen.
You poor fool.
Haven't you been reading @NerysHughes posts? South Korea and other countries where masks work are irrelevant. The only place that matters is Spain, which implemented mask rules in shops (oh yeah, and opened nightclubs), and cases rose.
Therefore masks cause CV-19.
To be fair to Nerys, Sweden does NOT have widespread mask wearing, and yet cases are still declining, and deaths are down to near-zero
I believe it's better to err on the side of caution, and use masks, but the Swedish example is perplexing
Nerys has not argued that masks have no, or limited, effect. (Which would at least be something we could debate.)
He's arguing that masks *cause* Covid.
I did run across a conspiracy theorist on twitter who believed that big pharma was sending out contaminated swabs to cause coronavirus, thereby increasing sales.
Perhaps the mask manufacturers are in on it too.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?...
My concern is that the increased face touching caused by mask wearing in the environment that are now required to be worn will negate its benefit and could make the situation worse. I really don't understand why that is considered a mad idea. Its what the WHO were saying up until the end of March and the WHO have not published any medical or scientific evidence to support their change of heart. My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
On average in the UK we touch our faces between 16 and 20 times an hour (although strangely a US study has it at between 23 and 26 times an hour). Masks have been shown to reduce the number of times people touch their face.
The other side of the coin is that there is some evidence that mask wearers are much more relaxed about being close to others. Reminiscent of studies that suggests that drivers wearing seat belts tend to drive more recklessly.
Yes - but I think if you are willing to wear the mask the very act actually heightens your awareness of the risks of social intercourse. Overall I think it has a beneficial effect which far outweighs the negatives.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
Excuse me? Not only did I quote it, I tagged you in it.
Sorry, I missed that. I note though that it refers to a sample of residences from the south-east of the UK. It is not a national statistic like the one I gave.
I'd also note again that average does generally refer to the arithmetic mean. If you are instead referring to the median, then you should explicitly say so.
In this case though median gives a much better picture than mean: it’s a bit like half-life for radioactive decay. Calculating the average life of a carbon 14 atom would give a very misleading number.
Thank you. In the context of the logical (not political) argument I was trying to make regarding trying to understand the statistics I certainly think the median is more relevant.
Now that it's settled that the mean average is indeed within 12 months I wonder if anyone wants to go back to the original post that sparked that and say if it makes sense or not?
Logically to me if there are thousands or tens of thousands of care residents on PHEs database for having tested positive (even if months ago and they've recovered) then a considerable number may die of natural causes which will be a considerable factor in the non-hospital deaths getting recorded.
The fact we are not getting many hospital deaths, but lots of non hospital ones, and excess deaths are negative (on a real-time basis) to me this is the only thing I can think of that squares all those figures. Otherwise it doesn't make sense why people are dying outside of hospitals in considerable numbers but not inside.
Always said Chelsea fans are arseholes, George Osborne CH being the glorious exception.
A Chelsea football fan was jailed for two years and eight months for committing an aggravated assault on the Guardian columnist Owen Jones with a “karate kick to his lower back”, motivated by hostility to the writer’s leftwing and LGBT politics.
James Healy, 40, from Portsmouth, was sentenced at Snaresbrook crown court for “a frenzied and wholly unprovoked attack” last August that took place in the street late at night after Jones had been out celebrating his birthday.
Recorder Anne Studd, the presiding judge, said there were “very significant aggravating factors” as she handed down the sentence to Healy at the high end of the range available.
The judge described Healy as “a man holding extreme rightwing opinions who attacked a victim who did no more than hold opinions on which the defendant did not agree”....
...The three men were not detained in the immediate aftermath of the fight in the street, but the court heard that they were arrested after they were recognised from CCTV footage by officers familiar with Chelsea supporters known to police.
Healy had at least nine convictions relating to football hooliganism stretching back to 1998. A search of his property after his arrest revealed a collection of far-right hooligan memorabilia, loosely connected with the Chelsea Youth Firm.
McGhee, prosecuting, said Healy possessed “a greeting card, which bore Nazi far-right extremist terror symbols, including those associated with the far-right Combat 18 group, one of whose tenets is ‘kill all queers’”.
Also discovered was a Nazi SS flag bearing a “totenkopf” death’s head skull symbol plus “a number of pins of badges”, including a circular pin badge with the “lead the way” and “whatever it takes” motto of Combat 18 and a badge that said “Chelsea FC no asylum seekers”.
138 dead. Almost a plane crash load. 138 dead in any incident in the UK would have led the news for days if not months a mere 6 months ago.
How many of those died naturally or of other causes though? The death statistics are untrustworthy at the moment, the ONS series is better.
I suspect the overwhelming majority if not all.
I think this is care homes combining with the flaw in the date for PHE.
It is worth remembering that all care home patients have been tested for COVID and all are getting tested weekly which means any COVID patient who has had th virus since testing became widespread is known about.
And care home residents die on average within a year of admission. They don't have a long life expectancy.
So any care home resident who has tested positive, recovered, then later dies of natural causes (as they're expected to do within a year) gets recorded as a COVID death by PHE.
It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds or even thousands of care home residents a month who have recovered from COVID are dying of entirely natural causes and PHE are erroneously recording them as COVID deaths.
I see you are making up the facts to suit your case again, Philip.
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
That may be the Mean, but I think the Median is shorter.
Thank you Foxy.
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
Well stop making things up then. Or at least quote your source if you expect to be taken seriously. I gave a concrete, reliable source for the figure of 26 months. You have given no source at all for your claim of less than 12 months, other than "I read it somewhere".
Excuse me? Not only did I quote it, I tagged you in it.
Sorry, I missed that. I note though that it refers to a sample of residences from the south-east of the UK. It is not a national statistic like the one I gave.
I'd also note again that average does generally refer to the arithmetic mean. If you are instead referring to the median, then you should explicitly say so.
In this case though median gives a much better picture than mean: it’s a bit like half-life for radioactive decay. Calculating the average life of a carbon 14 atom would give a very misleading number.
Thank you. In the context of the logical (not political) argument I was trying to make regarding trying to understand the statistics I certainly think the median is more relevant.
Now that it's settled that the mean average is indeed within 12 months I wonder if anyone wants to go back to the original post that sparked that and say if it makes sense or not?
Logically to me if there are thousands or tens of thousands of care residents on PHEs database for having tested positive (even if months ago and they've recovered) then a considerable number may die of natural causes which will be a considerable factor in the non-hospital deaths getting recorded.
The fact we are not getting many hospital deaths, but lots of non hospital ones, and excess deaths are negative (on a real-time basis) to me this is the only thing I can think of that squares all those figures. Otherwise it doesn't make sense why people are dying outside of hospitals in considerable numbers but not inside.
I would try an exponential decay model, but then I’m a Physics teacher and exponential decay models is almost our default model...
In terms of Covid deaths per Million in all the major Nations of the World we are in a league of our own.
Waits for PT, Big G, Rob et al trying to convince us San Marino and Belgium are major Nations.
Not going to try. All I'd say is we don't have the figures yet. Wait until its all done and see excess deaths per million but frankly we don't have it.
I think our figures are (now) overestimating deaths and I think many other nations are underestimating them. Excess deaths are the only real metric.
Comments
PHE are the incompetent ones now, not the NHS
*organised locally
Also, I do not buy the idea they all lied to the public to preserve masks for the NHS.
Look at the body language of Van Tam and Harries when they argued that masks are "worse than useless". They really meant it. They believed it. And they are the UK's top scientists.
I reckon it was a conceptual failure. They did not grasp the fact that masks are a barrier to transmission, more than a way of preventing infection, especially if you are asymptomatic. You wear a mask to protect others, others wear a mask to protect you.
It is amazing how many intelligent people failed to grasp this simple concept.
Here is Van Tam. He's not lying. He's just not very bright
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52153145/coronavirus-we-do-not-recommend-face-masks-for-general-wearing
FWIW, before mocking Nerys too mercilessly, it might also be worth remembering that Government ministers and boffins spent quite a lot of time mithering as recently as the Spring about whether or not masks would cause wearers to develop a false sense of security and dispense with social distancing, or accidentally infect themselves by constantly fiddling with the things. So, masks-as-potential-disease-vectors isn't a completely leftfield theory that has only sprung into being within the last 24 hours.
Personally, I would've thought that there is indeed at least a theoretical risk from use of dirty masks. Disposable masks aren't cheap and not everyone is made of money, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if some users wear them until they fall apart, and I seriously doubt that 100% of cloth mask users wash their used ones every day when they get home.
There may be some lessons for us there.
My mum went in three shops today, each time she went in she put her mask on and as soon as she left she took it off. So that is six times her hands were round her face. Thats what millions of people will do.
I might be totally wrong, we will see with case numbers in 3-4 weeks time.
The excess death rate was high months ago when we weren't testing people.
The excess death rate now and for a long time now is negative.
So all the people tested at the peak, back in May, who have subsequently recovered and are now naturally dying are getting recorded as COVID deaths despite the fact we have negative excess deaths now.
For example, in the Hereford outbreak I've heard that only 10 or so had symptoms - the rest were found in mass testing.
That would mean 1.4 billion cases but I don't think it will be properly recorded. In the UK, if you are fairly sure you had it, as a relative (63) and friend (77) are, you must pay for a test. Under-recording = equally likely in most other countries?
"The statistics show that the average length of stay in a single residential care home in England that ended in a service users’ death was around 26 months, although this statistic does not include any previous stays in other homes."
https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-question/Commons/2017-09-05/8937
A good analysis of why, absent a Biden landslide, Ni ember’s election could be very messy indeed.
8 Big Reasons Election Day 2020 Could Be a Disaster
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/24/2020-election-disaster-perfect-storm-372778
When they have the inquiry into Covid-19 in the unbearably hot summer of 2034, in the new capital of York-by-Huawai, the scientists must be interrogated, as much as the politicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne_Leverock
But, Bermuda? Against Canada?
W G Grace was quite portly in his later years as well.
56% dying within a year would put the median within the year.
But R Cornwall is in a league of his own.
If 56% die within a year then it is entirely appropriate to say on average people die within the year, even if on average mean life expectancy can be more than a year.
Arjuna Ranatunga, when captaining Sri Lanka, was 5'8'', weighed 15 stones and is what's known in the business as an FLF.
Looking at the photos it's hard to say who is actually fatter, though. Laverock is bigger but Cornwall is particularly chunky.
It's good that cricket has room for lardbuckets. Also, I love spin bowling. Makes a nice change. Quickens the action.
I imagine it must be a rugby player or a US footballer?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/rugby-world-cup/rwc-2019-japan/116035578/ben-tameifuna-tops-the-scales-as-heaviest-player-at-the-rugby-world-cup
I don't appreciate being accused of making things up.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_g6b7lckX2zE/THX7D3XuBpI/AAAAAAAABVI/fk7-z20ukqo/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-08-25+at+10.25.58+PM.png
From a US study, but likely representative of the distribution in other countries - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1532-5415.2010.03005.x
I'd also note again that average does generally refer to the arithmetic mean. If you are instead referring to the median, then you should explicitly say so.
Considering everyone can only die once, for the sense of the logical argument I was making in my original post I think median average is more appropriate than mean.
It would therefore be interesting to know whether or not the population dynamics in care homes really do work like that. It sounds implausible on the face of it; however, generally speaking, people really don't want to go into care facilities (would you? I know I bloody well wouldn't,) and therefore tend to leave their own homes only when they become too frail to manage on their own.
If any group aren't going to have much left in the tank, it's going to be those who have been made to live in a nursing home because they are too frail to live independently. Thus, having a great many die quickly, with the mean value being skewed by the occasional outlier, doesn't sound so very odd after all. The same thing happens, albeit in a less dramatic way, with statistics for "average" earnings. The median is typically reported in preference to the mean, because the mean figure is shifted significantly upwards by the salaries of relatively small numbers of very high earners, thus arguably giving a false impression of the prosperity of the great mass of working people.
Meanwhile anyone who dares to question the policy of compulsory mask wearing is being subjected to appalling abuse on social media. Quelle surprise.
It's like Remain vs Leave all over again.
Foakes - one Test hundred in ten innings, average 41.
Bracey - yet to play Tests, but scored a 50 in every innings (bar one I think) he’s played for an England team.
Leave Bairstow and Buttler to the white ball stuff, where they are beyond sensational.
Was he world class? Good question. An American would say he was part of a World Championship winning team, but I’m not sure how many others would recognise the Super Bowl in that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Foulke_(footballer)
If I wanted to watch a watered down version of real rugby then I'd watch rugby league.
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1286693381620596736?s=20
What he's crap at is prepping for a pandemic
Also, his source refers to the south east of England. It is not a national statistic, like the source I quoted.
In proper rugby you have to prise the ball from our cold dead hands.
A Chelsea football fan was jailed for two years and eight months for committing an aggravated assault on the Guardian columnist Owen Jones with a “karate kick to his lower back”, motivated by hostility to the writer’s leftwing and LGBT politics.
James Healy, 40, from Portsmouth, was sentenced at Snaresbrook crown court for “a frenzied and wholly unprovoked attack” last August that took place in the street late at night after Jones had been out celebrating his birthday.
Recorder Anne Studd, the presiding judge, said there were “very significant aggravating factors” as she handed down the sentence to Healy at the high end of the range available.
The judge described Healy as “a man holding extreme rightwing opinions who attacked a victim who did no more than hold opinions on which the defendant did not agree”....
...The three men were not detained in the immediate aftermath of the fight in the street, but the court heard that they were arrested after they were recognised from CCTV footage by officers familiar with Chelsea supporters known to police.
Healy had at least nine convictions relating to football hooliganism stretching back to 1998. A search of his property after his arrest revealed a collection of far-right hooligan memorabilia, loosely connected with the Chelsea Youth Firm.
McGhee, prosecuting, said Healy possessed “a greeting card, which bore Nazi far-right extremist terror symbols, including those associated with the far-right Combat 18 group, one of whose tenets is ‘kill all queers’”.
Also discovered was a Nazi SS flag bearing a “totenkopf” death’s head skull symbol plus “a number of pins of badges”, including a circular pin badge with the “lead the way” and “whatever it takes” motto of Combat 18 and a badge that said “Chelsea FC no asylum seekers”.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/24/chelsea-fan-jailed-for-attack-on-guardian-journalist-owen-jones
Now that it's settled that the mean average is indeed within 12 months I wonder if anyone wants to go back to the original post that sparked that and say if it makes sense or not?
Logically to me if there are thousands or tens of thousands of care residents on PHEs database for having tested positive (even if months ago and they've recovered) then a considerable number may die of natural causes which will be a considerable factor in the non-hospital deaths getting recorded.
The fact we are not getting many hospital deaths, but lots of non hospital ones, and excess deaths are negative (on a real-time basis) to me this is the only thing I can think of that squares all those figures. Otherwise it doesn't make sense why people are dying outside of hospitals in considerable numbers but not inside.
One note Boris.
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1212679425629859840?s=20
In terms of Covid deaths per Million in all the major Nations of the World we are in a league of our own.
Waits for PT, Big G, Rob et al trying to convince us San Marino and Belgium are major Nations.
I think our figures are (now) overestimating deaths and I think many other nations are underestimating them. Excess deaths are the only real metric.