Quote: Lprhino "There is no real way to record the number of deaths due to covid in real time. There
will always be a lag on the data from death certificates. There are issues in that not everybody who dies has a covid test, not all covid tests are 100% accurate and it is reliant upon the doctor who fills in the death certificate. Further issues the other way, not everybody who dies and has covid has died because of covid, they may have it but die from something else like a heart attack.
The objective way to look at the overall impact is excess mortality over a period of time. There are normally a certain number of deaths per period of each year, much higher in the winter. You can compare this years data to other years data once the data is collected to say the excess mortality over this winter or this year or this period has been much higher and say what the figure is.
A simple example, 14,000 have covid and a certain number attend hospital, because they attend hospital the other procedures, clinics and appointments don’t take place. This can be due to infection control, staff issues, equipment or a variety of other things.
In turn due to that lack of screening or treatment some of those patients may die or become very ill. That death or illness is due to covid, because without covid and 14,000 covid infections a day the screening, treatment and appointments would go ahead and things would be caught early and treated.
We are talking about wide ranging public health policy and issues. Just saying oh 14,000 have it today but not many people died is just overly simplistic, if it was that easy you wouldn’t need to study and train to specialise in public health you could just look at data and use your common sense. Interpretation of data and in particular health data is in itself a specialism.
Back to point on RL I think attempting games is a good idea although a full league seems silly as it isn’t going to be fair given different teams schedules, infections etc at different times. As long as there is some live sport I think Sky would be fine with it. Attempting to fit in so many games just doesn’t make sense. Asking people to return to stadiums when there are rising infection rates also seems silly. It is fairly much agreed large social gatherings significant increase the risk of infection spreading. I mean honestly how many people want to watch certain SL games on a midweek night? It’s limited numbers in the grand scheme of what is available on Sky.'"
Not a bad assessment. However, your "simple example" is nonsense. Their deaths would not be "due to covid", it would be due to government & health institutions' reactions to covid. A totally different thing. According to that thinking, my wife contracts covid, I drive her to the hospital having had three large glasses of wine. I lose control of the vehicle, crash & kill her & me. I only made that journey because my wife had covid. Therefore covid deaths: add 2.
