Reply to post: Re: The Oxford paper doesn't say 60% is really enough

Re: The Oxford paper doesn't say 60% is really enough

Picking the w/e 3-Apr-20 could be considered evidence of confirmation bias. Looking at the ONS stats for the weeks before that one and we see the rate fairly level at around 11,000 deaths per week (down from a peak of 14k in January). The increase is alarming (and well in excess of normal variation) but such an increase on it's own needs more investigation. We can be confident that the increase is probably due to Covid-19 but I would question whether it represents such a large increase for that week - ONS have stated that death statistics take time to collate.

To take a conspiratorial view, that week was just into the lockdown so some might argue that the increase was a direct effect of the lockdown - not so much Covid-19 but increased deaths from stress, starvation, constipation (shortage of toilet rolls), domestic violence, etc. Just imagine how some extreme left-pondians (including the orange one) might love that!

"One swallow does not a summer make" - we know Covid-19 is leading to an increase in premature deaths but we don't really know by how much. Professor David Spiegelhalter did some research that suggested, overall, the main effect of Cover-19 is to compress annual deaths into a shorter period: for people with a statistical life expectancy of one year it might now be two weeks. That's where statistics isn't really helpful (or necessarily meaningful) to an individual - but it's looking at the whole population where we are each no more than a number.

Covid-19 is serious and we must take strong measures to address it. Perhaps the best outcome will be that we (and governments) will be better prepared for subsequent pandemics - which, in this age of global mobility, will be inevitable. But then, the only certainties in life are death and taxes (albeit not in that order).