Re: Perfect example...
"You had a cumulative known total of 321."
That was a cumulative total of people who had died in hospital after confirmed diagnosis, when there were no fucking diagnostic kits available.
You can warp stats around in any number of ways if you restrict the way you express your datasets
The best overall proxy for covid19 death rate is the excess population deaths over the 5 year average deaths for this time of year and that's painting a VERY bleak picture.
It was only when the FInancial Times started weighing on how appallingly bad things are that the rest of the media started sitting up, stopped reportng the govt "official" figures as if they were gospel and started making noises to say "hospital deaths" or other footnotes to say the numbers were incomplete
https://www.ft.com/content/40fc8904-febf-4a66-8d1c-ea3e48bbc034 - currently pointing out that ONS stats show 50,979 deaths vs the govt's claimed 32,065 - the curves showing at the bottom of the page are nice, but they make it clear that this is the FIRST wave of the disease and there is worse to come(*)
At the time the UK government was saying "22,000 deaths" the figure was already PAST 45,000 and when they said 32,000 (after "Adjusting for care homes") they're still missing out around 1/3 of the recorded deaths above the baseline.
An awful lot of people are dying at home, or in care homes _without_ the benefit of a covid diagnosis and medics are afraid to put "possibly covid" on the death certificate without a test result as the health authority manglement have been making various noises about funding, etc. They know they're going to be facing corporate manslaughter investigations and the better they can make numbers look, the harder it is for prosecutors
This is going to be the Potters Bar event for public health investigations and politicians will be held to account. There have been too many deaths for the to deflect to 3rd parties.
Opening up too soon will result in things taking off like an exploding boiler. Wuhan, Singapore, South Korea(**), Germany and other places are already finding this out the hard way
(*) Every pandemic in the last 150 years has had multiple waves with the second being significantly larger than the first (even the last Ebola outbreak). looking at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/three-waves.htm should be eyeopening
Some countries actually TEACH this stuff as part of history due to the impact it had. Samoa lost almost 1/3 of its entire population in 12 days in 1918 - and the British governer behaved almost exactly like Boris - refused to allow quarantines, then to accept responsibility, running away to New Zealand as fast as he could - leaving his assistant to deal with hundreds of grieving families - then back to England when investigators tried to detain him for a commission of enquiry. Most Pacific Island countries saw 20-25% death rates - that's why they locked down tighter than a snail's arse when this one came along.
(**)Seoul: 1 carrier, one epic pub crawl to celebrate the night of the easing of lockdown. 30 confirmed infections already, another 7200 people exposed. It only takes a couple of carriers to restart the blaze
Biting the hand that feeds IT
