If people had waited before forecasting future deaths there would have been no lockdowns.
I think it’s fair enough for me to predict fewer deaths when higher deaths were bandied around unquestioned.
Finley predicted no excess deaths for 2020 and was plain wrong, I’ll just remind you
Wait till the end of the year to assess the situation accurately. It’s now early April .
The lockdown thing is something else entirely that’s not comparable at all.
He predicted no significant increase in excess deaths, IIRC.
I’ll continue to make predictions regardless of the effect it has on you, thanks. The entire response to the pandemic has been based on predictions, so finger in the air stuff doesn’t go one way only. Feel free to ignore any of my predictions.
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He.said that deaths would actuallly decrease and totally.poo pooed the idea of excess.deaths.
Then made up.some stuff about a giant conspiracy blah blah .
So far, though, there were no “excess deaths” unless you zoom in with a statistical magnifying glass, entirely discounting the bigger picture
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I don’t care lol.
I’m going to continue to point out it’s ridiculous at this point.
Meanwhile in Canada, the impact of the new variants—long predicted—is leading to some very unhappy doctors.
This CBC interview of an ICU doctor in Toronto is incredibly moving—it nearly brought the newscaster to tears on air. Watch at your own risk.
Guy
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Keep on listening to Neil Ferguson’s predictions, then.
Good grief. Do we really have to do this again? Here are the historical death rates and official (albeit preliminary) numbers from the ONS:
Deaths England & Wales 2020: 603077.
Population England & Wales 2020: 60.4m.
→ Unadjusted death rate 9.98 per thousand.
You only have to scan back to the dark days of 2005 to find a death rate of 9.86. Step back to the 1990s - when dinosaurs roamed the earth and existence was truly perilous - and you’ll find the death rate consistently well above 10.
Oooh, ooh, but it was a lot more than last year. So it was. So what? The ONS have declared 80,000 deaths “with COVID-19” for 2020 in England and Wales. Excess deaths compared to 2019 is 603077-530841 = 72236. The implication is that all of the excess deaths were COVID-19 deaths. Hmm. OK. Let’s pretend that that’s realistic. The ONS quite regularly declares excess deaths in the 30-40,000 ballpark during the winter. Nobody panics. Nobody says “it’s the worst thing that happened since WW1”. Shit happens and life goes on. The fact is that 80,000 people is 0.13% of the population, where 1% of the population dying is a perfectly normal occurrence. Does that really merit the term “excess”?
What the hell is going to happen to the UK if a genuine epidemic hits?
That’s my hunch. Several factors will be involved, but undeniably one of them is going to be that a large number of the victims lost a year of their lives, if that.
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That’s 72239/530841= 13.6%
A significant jump in deaths. And that’s with a lot of mitigation factors.
The ONS says it’s 80k so possibly higher .
What you did there is a classic trick used in pharma papers to magnify the supposed therapeutic effect of drugs, when in reality the effect is barely even noticeable. The absolute numbers tell the true story.
The UK also had a bad end of Winter and Spring with covid deaths.
The running total is 125k. Absolute numbers not enough ?
Maybe like a bit of the Brazilian variant to spike it up more ?
I quoted you lol.
That’s YOUR quote from last year . 
So far, though, there were no “excess deaths” unless you zoom in with a statistical magnifying glass, entirely discounting the bigger picture
Yes. I know. I was making the point again: you’re manipulating the statistics in a way that’s fundamentally dishonest.
I can’t find ONS figures for the UK. Only England and Wales. The 95%CI for total deaths is 597000-610000. However E&W accounts for about 89% of the UK, so you could scale that up to 677000 for the UK. Likewise with the “with COVID-19” deaths, which would be about 90,000 for the UK to end of 2020.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what actually happens to “excess deaths” now that all of the supposedly vulnerable population of the UK has been vaccinated. Presumably the registered COVID-19 deaths will fall to zero within weeks (assuming the vaccines actually work). Raw deaths, I’m guessing, will not track that fall in any predictable manner.
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Where did you get this? It doest match the ONS data here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/adhocs/12735annualdeathsandmortalityrates1938to2020provisional
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It’s from macrotrends. I just scanned through your spreadsheet and it looks pretty close. As I said, 2004/2005 has a raw death rate comparable to 2020, and the 1990s was considerably higher. Go back to 1980 - when, as far as I can recall, all was right with the world - and it looks a lot more apocalyptic than 2020.
I originally pulled up the year-by-year numbers from the ONS and put them into Excel as a sanity check. Not identical but very close. There is always a certain small margin of error in these things, which is why the ONS quotes a 95%CI.
Its quite different I would say, its misleading to quote data from Macrotrends (wtf is this) and attribute it to ONS. Why don’t you plot the ONS data?
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Fair enough. Here’s the data from your spreadsheet:
| 2020 | 1,016.2 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 893.1 | ||
| 2018 | 916.1 | ||
| 2017 | 907.7 | ||
| 2016 | 899.3 | ||
| 2015 | 915.0 | ||
| 2014 | 873.4 | ||
| 2013 | 889.9 | ||
| 2012 | 882.7 | ||
| 2011 | 862.3 | ||
| 2010 | 885.7 | ||
| 2009 | 889.6 | ||
| 2008 | 928.3 | ||
| 2007 | 926.8 | ||
| 2006 | 931.6 | ||
| 2005 | 957.5 | ||
| 2004 | 967.5 | ||
| 2003 | 1,019.9 | ||
| 2002 | 1,017.7 | ||
| 2001 | 1,017.0 | ||
| 2000 | 1,031.6 |
Is it different enough to invalidate my point? I don’t think so.
I should add that there is a large margin of error on the 2020 figure. The ONS state that the official figure will be released in June. My ‘9.98’ was the midpoint of the preliminary numbers.
Its very different, what percentage increase 2019 to 2020 in macrotrends vs. this?
Why are you comparing 2003 and 2020 and mot 2019 with 2020.
This also excludes the deaths from 2021, UK is now sitting at 20% increase in excess deaths year on year, why are you trying to trivialise this?
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Why not? What’s special about 2019? That chart encompasses barely half of my life history, and I don’t recall anything about those years being so uniquely bad that we had to dismantle 300 years of constitutional progress and impose a police State. Is that history really irrelevant, or do you just dislike the fact that it disrupts your narrative?
Incidentally, here’s the age-standardized chart:
ASMR is an attempt to capture “unexpected” deaths.
Excess deaths?
I’m not trying to trivialise it. I’m trying to offer some perspective, which is sadly lacking in the woe-is-us political discourse.
I can’t help wondering if life wouldn’t be a lot better if it were impossible to instantly collect and disseminate all these numbers. If people weren’t being constantly bombarded with catastrophizing news reports, they probably wouldn’t even notice anything was amiss from their own ground-level view.
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