Mate you have'tt even gott your point correct, so how on earth do you base everything on it been true?

Just to clarify here, what was said, was not as you state regarding sky stopping this years money. No, what was said, was that Sky would reduce the amount of the rest of the contract, for this years money, i.e. over the next couple of seasons. A bit like Leeds with the season tickets if fans didnt ask for a refund.

Now, would you like to show us anything that backs this up from Sky if it is all so correct?

Lets be clear here, all the clubs had their Sky money for the year already, and since then have cut all staff payments through the pandemic by furloughing staff and players. This year was never the issue for any club, it was always about the future years.

Badly worded on my part, yes Sky agreed a reduced contract for the remainder of the deal, it was reported that that contract was agreed with the condition that the games this year were played when allowed, no one has said that its only this year thats the issue however the coming years would be worse if we didn’t resume this season as per the agreement reached with Sky.

I know they were officially on standby for this exact situation but I think Hull deserve a lot of credit for stepping up here and fulfilling the fixture when they're so poorly prepared for the greater good of the game.

Think they'll just want to play some rugby, like anybody else.
Not about results this year.....

This is a smokescreen. Covid deaths are much higher than the official figure. The current way of reporting (any death after 28 days from a positive test) does not add significant numbers to the figure. People should stop using this as a way of underplaying the death toll.

Talking of a circus, here comes our resident clown.

If we didn't complete this season Sky would pay even less than the already reduced amounts we have already accepted for playing less rounds than the contract committed to.
Leeds won't go bust but there are ten other teams in the league at least half of whom would be very much screwed. But reality and you are not comfortable bedfellows.

What’s the real death toll then?

How does putting a death down to Covid whether that was the cause of death or not, not add to the death toll?

Just to be clear I’m not in the the CV19 is nothing and we shouldn’t do anything about it camp.

You do talk some absolute poop on here you

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.

Hull Squad announced:

Joe Cator, Jordan Lane, Masi Matongo, Gareth Ellis, Albert Kelly, Ratu Naulago, Danny Houghton, Josh Jones, Scott Taylor, Adam Swift, Manu Ma’u, Kieran Buchanan and Jamie Shaul

Oh no sorry, they are all the players missing

Cmon man Gotcha isnt a clown........clowns are fun!!

I said "significant". It is not believed that recording Covid deaths in this way is adding any "significant" numbers to the death toll. It is far, far more likely that under recording of deaths is occurring, especially when you look at the mean increase in deaths compared to previous years which is significant.

Just to add, my mother officially died of lung cancer, but she actually died of pneumonia. If you didn't know she had lung cancer then you would record her death as from pneumonia. Most cancer deaths are by caused by secondary conditions, it's the same with pretty much any infectious disease. There are almost certainly people dying every day who haven't been tested for covid who are dying from complications brought on by covid infection.

There is always a certain amount of educated estimation made for a figure like this but one thing most stats people agree on is that the way we record covid deaths is not exaggerating the numbers to any significant degree.

I'd also add that if you think the disease is less harmful in terms of fatalities than before then you may be in for a surprise. And here's why.

1. We are testing more people than April (height of the death toll) - many, many more but in theory percentage positive rates should still represent the population as a whole.
2. In April the positive test rate was about 0.4- 0.5%
3. Right now the positive test rate is about 0.1% and rising.

So we shouldn't just look at number of positive tests and relate that to deaths, we need to understand that during the high death rate in April the positive test rate was 4-5 times higher than it is now. We are at what, about 60-100 deaths per day at the moment, now multiply that by 3-5 and we suddenly get to where we were in April.

This is why everyone is very nervous.

Playing devil's advocate for a minute, what do people think would be the pro's and con's of reopening society and going back to "normal"?

Clearly there would be a cost in terms of lives as a result of CV-19 (directly or indirectly) but then a balance with the economy getting a boost and reducing the future number of deaths linked to poverty etc.

Thoughts?