England is worse than Scotland because England has done summat or other to the NHS. Had more private provision. Perhaps it’s not integrated with the care home sector. But, summat, less government anyway:
That is not a definition of success.
And it is a sure sign that the UK (or rather, England) remains an outlier on this issue, largely because unlike Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland it does not have an integrated care system.
As assertion and one that might even be true:
Meanwhile, the academics said that Scotland so far appears to be suffering a proportionally higher number of confirmed Covid-19 fatalities than the rest of the UK, with 9.4 per cent of confirmed coronavirus deaths in Scotland, home to just 8.2 per cent of the overall population….
Oh, Scotland is performing worse then. Thus whatever the system is in England is preferable to the one in Scotland. Well, using the initial logic from Spud it would be. But we’re never going to hear him say that, are we?
Am fast losing interest in the subject (Covid-19). Perhaps the article is suggesting we pulled the plug on the economy to save ‘old folks’ (and the sainted NHS), but that the OFs are dying anyway and we could have saved ourselves the trouble. Nice idea, didn’t work, move on. I don’t doubt more OF are dying ‘at home’ because, being old and on their way out, would prefer to expire in their own bed. Others, consigned to a care home for their final couple of years, are of a similar disposition – largely anywhere but an NHS factory surrounded by foreign-looking Johnnies in masks. Given the Scots are even more curmudgeonly than we are it probably counts double. Things have dragged on for so long everyone is reduced to nitpicking about the figures.
You have to consider the case of the fake statistician Spiegelhalter. In his Guardian article, he said to the effect that you can’t really and directly compare UK death rates with other European countries because the basis for reporting is different. How this cannot be true, I don’t know. Taken to a silly limit if one country counts all deaths and another counts none, then they aren’t comparable. Now scale back, and say that one country compares all deaths with Covid-19 tests positive, and one country compares deaths with people displaying the symptoms, then the two should be approximately comparable, but not really a true comparison.
Now, we already know that he’s a Lefty, because why else would he write an article for the Guardian? (Or why would they publish it?) So, understandably, he took umbrage when the Government quoted him. Incidentally, Spiegelhalter, a Guardian article isn’t science, or mathematics, it’s politics. When you claim anything else, you’re a tosser.
What he said we should compare is excess mortality.
Fair enough, let’s compare that. Now, if it is worse in the UK than in other countries, who is to blame? Surely not private healthcare. It has to be the NHS. That’s shafted the base-turd.
Headline: The UK has higher excess mortality in this crisis because the NHS isn’t working. Holy shite!
And if the devolved governments have less private healthcare and more excess mortality …..
Until you can demonstrate how many of the ‘excess’ deaths were due to the virus, and how many due to the lockdown, the exercise is futile, even dangerous.
So what deaths can be attributable to the lockdown? Well, suicides are an obvious class; deaths of people whose treatment was cancelled, and of those deterred from seeking medical help; deaths of those elderly inpatients who were moved from hospitals to care homes to clear capacity for an anticipated surge in cases of younger people.
Dangerous? If we count all ‘excess’ deaths how do we know when the outbreak has ended? We could end up counting deaths as virus related when the actual number of deaths caused by the virus has dropped to a handful per month.
As for ‘excess’ deaths, it is obviously those more than the average for the week/month over a number of previous years, five I think. Clearly there are a large number this year. What happens next year? The average for the previous five years next year will include this year, so the ‘average’ will rise significantly. ‘Average’ does not mean ‘normal’. Below average numbers for previous years can themselves create above average years, because people get older, and get more infirm at an accelerating rate as they get older. Eh make it through two mild years and succumb in the next, even though there is nothing particularly bad going around that year.
I am getting so bored with all the cherry-picked statistics claiming to prove that the UK and USA are doing badly. It is all so tedious. Why do Lefties have to be so keen to diss their country? Why are they so statistically illiterate?
NHS is racist. They don’t like Scots.
I’m not a leftist, but it is apparent that the UK is not coming out of this too well in terms of deaths/million. Lessons will be learned.
I take it by ‘integrated’ the idiot means ‘nationalised’. For it is quite obvious that there is indeed an ‘integrated’ heath care and care system in the UK. It’s just that some bits of it are not nationalsed. A Very Good Thing in my view – considering all the ‘evidence’.
It was reported yesterday that 57% of Covid-19 deaths in Scotland were in Care Homes, in England 40%. So BBC etc are attacking BoJo, but not Nicola Sturgeon, for*his* failure to protect those in Care Homes despite the ratio of Care Home deaths to non-Care home deaths from Covid-19 being *twice* as high in Scotland.
“As for ‘excess’ deaths, it is obviously those more than the average for the week/month over a number of previous years, five I think. Clearly there are a large number this year. What happens next year? The average for the previous five years next year will include this year, so the ‘average’ will rise significantly. ‘Average’ does not mean ‘normal’. Below average numbers for previous years can themselves create above average years, because people get older, and get more infirm at an accelerating rate as they get older. Eh make it through two mild years and succumb in the next, even though there is nothing particularly bad going around that year.”
What p&sses me off is that the current level of deaths is being compared to just the last 5 years, as if that was somehow representative of the long term situation. When in fact we know that high excess death years occur regularly over time, and the correct comparison should be ‘How does this bad year compare to other bad years’, not ‘How does this bad year compare to the average and below average years immediately preceding it?’ And if we make that comparison we see that the number of deaths is less than some flu epidemics within the last 30 years, and considerably less than the flu epidemic of 1968/69. None of which times were any special measures taken to control the spread of the virus.
We clearly need a national health service that much more closely resembles the more successful German model.
Why do I not expect to read this as a headline in the Guardian or on the BBC, I wonder?
“ I’m not a leftist, but it is apparent that the UK is not coming out of this too well in terms of deaths/million. Lessons will be learned.L
Lessons will be identified, whether they re leaned and implemented is a different matter and we won’t know until the next pandemic. My guess is they will have been conveniently been forgotten in the public sector because of the costs.
One category of excess deaths caused by the lockdown will be cancer. Unfortunately it will be years before it will be possible to disentangle the data, by which time it will only be of interest to academics and a few political nerds who want ro say “we told you so.
@Jim
UK Flu 2014/15 – Daily deaths Higher than 2020 and No Lockdown, panic
H/T Peter Hitchens:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8303715/PETER-HITCHENS-mad-mass-house-arrest-Covid-19-saved-single-life.html
Figures:
ONS: UK average daily deaths is 1,680, but until now we accepted peeps die
‘Deaths peaked on 1 January last winter when daily deaths were 35% higher than the five-year average.’
Just wait til Net Zero. Daily deaths in winter will be 800,000% higher.
My quibble is that “integrated care” is doing a lot of work here. Quite possible to have integrated systems of care without NHS-style public monopolies. Also, New York and New Jersey, via formal state directives, “integrated” COVID-infected elderly right back into nursing homes, with tragic but predictable results. Sometimes less planning is better.
Slightly related:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/498406-texas-north-carolina-arizona-see-rising-cases-as-they-reopen
Media trying to keep us skeert. Article makes no attempt to discern what’s happening in the many states, just trumpets what’s happening in 3.
Deep down it’s revealed that this may be an artifact of increased testing.
More testing will give you more cases (!).
Only slightly O/T
Welsh NHS contrasted unfavourably with NHS England as well as Human Rights Act
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-52738526