You seem to be responding to a point I haven’t made? I don’t think I’ve said anything about national data in months. That’s perfectly valid. I’m talking about him constantly hunting down the conspiracy theorist stuff on twitter, posting that as fact, and ignoring the rest.
2 Likes
To what end? I’ve tried doing that with him before on the vaccine stuff, as you saw, but he doesn’t appear have the ability and/or willingness to have an actual discussion on it. Just ignores that and posts more cherry-picked stuff a day or two later.
Well, yeah, that’s what cake does. But in his links he quotes government papers, genuine experts, and raw data. They at least deserve to be looked at, rather than just dismissed because it’s cake posting them.
1 Like
Here associated with diabetes. Yellow are the deaths attributes to covid which correlates well with excess deaths .
Click on all causes (blue button at the top) and look at the horizontally-oriented bargraph in the bottom left. That’s probably the best summary of what O’Connor is on about.
I don’t think the correct figure is “99%”. But it appears that a majority of “COVID-19 deaths” have been (properly) ascribed to some other primary cause on death certificates.
You don’t ‘cherry pick’ yourself?
Interesting that you choose not to call out others here. Only those whom you disagree with.
And ‘from the start’. Er no. I was aware about a year ago things didn’t seem as they were perceived. And it looks like I was correct with that or it could just be a ‘conspiracy’.
Excess deaths look closely correlated to covid.!
We see docs aren’t ascribing deaths continually to covid (one would assume they would continue in error to do that if that was the case), instead covid attributed deaths are correlated with the pandemic waves and peaks in weekly death rates .
Of course they are. That doesn’t mean COVID-19 caused those deaths. Look at the breakdowns. This is the ‘all causes’ chart. Notice how small those orange peaks are. In particular, most people who died of cancer died of … uh, cancer. We know why this is: due to COVID-19 restrictions on medical treatment, cancer patients were denied lifesaving care. There’s no secret about this. It was stated government policy to simply let these people die.
It isn’t clear here whether ‘ARI’ includes COVID-19 or its complications.
I think the PHE stats support quite strongly that covid is the cause of the excess mortality.
Fair enough. I don’t think you’ve understood them then.
That’s not an answer. I think the stats are very clear, they show which deaths attributed to covid and which aren’t. They also do it for chronic disease sufferers across the board.
They show the covid attributed deaths dropped to a tiny amount when the pandemic was under control.
Then when the case number surged, overall deaths also surged.
You probably won’t find a better and clearer collection of stats than this .
PS I clicked through all the chronic diseases.
Cancer and Covid deaths were few.
For diabetes and ischaemic heart disease we see it affected them very badly with huge spikes at the peak of the last wave.
**This image is important to show the baseline of diabetes deaths and then the covid bump in deaths. **
Why would diabetes sufferers suddenly start dying in larger numbers at the same time as covid pandemic peaks?
I agree.
Look, let’s zoom in a bit. Why do you think there are 40,000 excess deaths attributed to “other circulatory diseases”, but only ~20% of people who died in that condition had COVID-19 mentioned as the primary cause of death?
I’m not expecting you to pinpoint the reason since the short answer is “nobody knows”, but there’s a fairly short list of possible explanations, isn’t there?
No, I don’t think so. When do you think I’ve done that?
It’s pretty rare that I post links or studies etc. on this topic at all (I don’t remember the last time I did, actually - 6 months ago, maybe?). And I haven’t gotten involved in the long recent discussion between @Brianjones and @finley because of lack of time and interest to try to understand the data properly (for what it’s worth, I don’t really trust governments and I tend to lean more towards @finley’s point of view that it might not make sense for countries to have never-ending lockdowns, especially poorly enforced and partial ones now that the virus is everywhere, to mitigate what appears to be a relatively small risk for most people - but again, I don’t feel I know enough about the data for my opinion to count for much).
So I don’t think I cherry pick, no. I honestly care more about the truth of the issue than promoting a particular point. If it turns out tomorrow that masks have zero efficacy or vaccines cause 5 people per million to die of blood clots - fair enough, that’s just what the data says. I’m not personally invested in a particular viewpoint on either of those things. 
3 Likes
I cant follow your point at all.
I tried but I don’t know what point you are trying to make
OK, this could get complicated. Bear with me. I’ll do it in two parts.
First let’s clarify the concept of “expected deaths”, because without that nothing else makes sense. This is drawn as a line on the charts, which is objectively wrong. Expected deaths is a probability function. If you’re drawing it on a graph, then, it should be fuzzy: it does not, at any point in time, have a definite value. Worse, what might-have-been is inherently unknowable, so all you can do is try to put the best possible assumptions into your probabilities. Otherwise, your line (or fuzzy smear) isn’t even approximately in the right place.
Since the “expected deaths” line is not a line, you can’t treat points upon it as scalar values: you can’t subtract this from that and say, aha, excess deaths in week 13 was 3,452. The operation itself is invalid. So let’s just note for now that “excess deaths” for any given week must be a distribution, not a scalar.
Then you have to look at your model assumptions. One that PHE have got terribly wrong, IMO, is the idea that 2015-2019 represents a plausible baseline for 2020. Lots of stuff happened in 2020 apart from COVID-19: Brexit, recession, unemployment, stress, fear, loss of purpose, and (relative) poverty all have a profound impact on health. In particular they affect the risk factors for COVID-19 (heart disease, diabetes, etc). A 14% drop in GDP is one hell of a recession: it’s something that hasn’t been seen since 1919-21. The figures suggesting unemployment is at an all-time low is, IMO, unmitigated bollocks - it cannot possibly be true. A lot of people are genuinely wondering what their future holds.
So how do you factor in something that hasn’t occurred in living memory? You can’t, except with a lot of hand-waving. The best you can do is admit that your fuzzy expected-deaths line is even fuzzier than you thought it was. It could easily encompass the death rate for (say) 1990-1991, or 2008-2009.
Now, you’ll assert that unemployment, stress etc. are a direct consequence of the virus itself, whereas to me these things are a consequence of government ineptitude and interference from vested interests: it need not have happened. You will presumably discount my assertion that “expected deaths” has a wider variance in 2020 than it might have done in previous, boring years. I hope we can at least agree that the variance is not zero. So here, again, are the age-standardized mortality rates from the ONS, encompassing the last two recessions:
The ASMR figures for 1990, 1991, 2008 and 2009 were 14.6, 14.6, 10.9 and 10.3. The ASMR for 2020 was 10.4. So, there’s that.
But let’s play this the PHE way, and pretend that the “expected deaths” line isn’t very fuzzy at all. Nevermind that the death rate for 2020 was about the same as for 2009-2010: we’ll consider only the average ASMR for 2015-2019, which is 9.63 with a s.d. of 0.133. Since we’re looking at a flattish, wiggly line over that period, it’s reasonable to conclude that we’re looking at Gaussian noise overlaid on the average. An ASMR greater than 9.8 might be considered “remarkable”. And in 2020 it was 10.4. So we had some “excess deaths”. Where are they and where did that happen? I think the PHE visualisations give a hint. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Note: some people will complain about my use of ASMR rate instead of crude death rate. The reason I’ve done this is that the UK median age has increased from 36 to 41 during 1990-2020. When comparing over long time periods, you need to factor this in because of the naturally higher mortality rate of older people.
If the ‘excess’ was being induced by the stress of lockdowns, why would the rates be dropping as the lockdowns endure? Surely the longer the lockdown persisted the greater the stress would be and the higher the excess death rate? Did you think to check the correlation between the case rate and the death rate? Surely that could be a reliable indicator of the relationship.
Caused by Brexit?? I don’t think the rest of the world cares that much! Every time Bojo has a gaffe on air a Peruvian has a heart attack?
Some discussion and links to the data. Not a fan of Cummins but the data does tend to speak for itself, “excess” deaths
I’ve been waiting 12 months to hear from an honest public health official.
Hardly cherry picking at all, but a testament to the sad and dangerous times we live in.
Kudos to the Mayo coroner, and hope he doesn’t get fired, raked over the coals, or burned at the stake for telling it like it is.
And thanks to Cake, for also being brave enough to face the pitchforks and torches mob with simple facts.
3 Likes
One can question the accuracy of statistics…One must actually provide some evidence though as to why the statistics are all wrong and how badly they are wrong ?
From PHE (public health England ) stats above I see a very very good set of stats that speaks to a clear picture, excess deaths were highly likely to be caused by covid and they were mainly associated with people who had diabetes and ischaemic heart disease.
I thought Finley would be happy to have this link strengthened with heart disease ?
The excess deaths are clearly there in the UK data and associated with covid pandemic peaks.
1 Like