Big Tea wrote: ↑20 Apr 2020, 13:07
...Back to our old bone of died OF Covid19 or died WITH Covid 19. It must be easy to dump anyone in the died of Covid 19 bucket when staff are so pushed.
(also for sosic2121)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... 0april2020
Isn't this the best approach to estimating the impact of COVID-19 - compare the number of deaths in a given period to a baseline based on past years data? In the above graph published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), you can see that deaths in week 15 (in the week ending April 10th), is 8,000 more (up from 10,000 to 18,0000) than the 5 year average. The total number of deaths isn't open to interpretation - at least if you believe in the integrity of the ONS.
And this from the BBC which explains that of the 8000 increase, only 6000 have been attributed to COVID-19 and there has been a jump in non-COVID-19 deaths for some as yet not understood reason.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52361519
The Office for National Statistics said there were 18,500 deaths in the week up to 10 April - about 8,000 more than is normal at this time of year. More than 6,200 were linked to coronavirus, a sixth of which were outside of hospital. But deaths from other causes also increased, suggesting the lockdown may be having an indirect impact on health.
Nick Stripe, head of health analysis, said they were trying to understand what had been happening with this increase in non-coronavirus deaths. He said it could be that people with other illnesses were avoiding going to hospital treatment - visits to A&E have halved since the pandemic started.
So you can estimate there is an upper bound of 8000 and a lower bound of 6000 deaths from COVID-19 in the UK in the week up to 10 April.