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?

My Father died of Pneumonia, that he caught in hospital after being admitted for Leukaemia - I'm not sure what was on the death certificate though.

Genuine question, as I haven't got a clue of the answer, in your scenario of people dying from complications from untested covid, are they not retrospectively tested for Covid?

I understand people are nervous, my wife works on Covid wards.

I don't think we will se anything like 'normal' for a few years.

It's an interesting point though, I'm obviously not qualified in anyway to have anything other than an uninformed opinion, I think we need to strike a balance between the two somehow.

Shutting down again will be catastrophic in other ways and just getting on as 'normal' will have the same effect in different areas.

I don't believe they test everyone who dies for covid. It might seem that this would be a logical thing to do but that's not always what actually happens. For example, we were looking for covid positive samples to test in our serology assays and at the height of the outbreak it became obvious that blood samples from people in hospital from covid were not being stored. We, and everyone else trying to work on the virus, had to scrabble around for positive samples even though thousands were dying globally each day. We ended up collaborating (and still are) with multiple institutions world wide, each with a set of samples to test. These sample sets ranged from 30 to around 150 in size. The biggest sample set I saw was from the team at Great Ormond Street I worked with who had around 160 - all NHS confirmed positives. That data is published. The Roche diagnostic assay that the govt bought 3.5 million of only showed data for around 40 positive samples in their FDA submission.

We are working with various organisations, and I believe that larger population monitoring and data gathering is definitely the objective. For example we may see sampling done in a different way - what we call "oral fluid", which is not actually saliva. It has the same antibody profile as serum but is obviously easier to collect - you just rub a big cotton bud around your gums for a minute or two then run in a serology assay. Our tests are highly sensitive and simultaneously measure antibodies to multiple viral proteins, you can even check what subclass of immunoglobulin is being generated (antibodies have several classes, IgG, IgM, IgA and IgE, plus several IgG subclasses). For vaccine development for example it's critical to fully understand the antibody response.
What I do know is that everyone is working flat out, it's quite inspiring sometimes.

It looks like the mitigation strategy is probably about the only sensible thing to be done.

Govt will probably roll out vaccinations around Q1 2021, but target the vulnerable first (care homes, front line NHS, etc...) If you're under 50 (so not you Gotcha you probably won't get vaccinated at all - so for anyone in that bracket it's looking like herd immunity for you and take your chances, once the ones at highest risk have some protection.

I expect we'll have a rolling road block in October half term to put the brakes on in time for Xmas, which the govt will be very anxious to protect as best it can. Not just commercially but for morale too. And that's probably the right thing to do.

Is the game definitely on, Peter Smith isn't convinced?