4 ms·

> I feel like I would have a much higher threshold before looking for (Covid-unrelated) medical help. In fact, our health authorities have insisted for people

• thu2111 6y ago
  To put that in context, in the UK it appears about half the excess mortality doesn't mention COVID-19 on the death certificate at all. Of the half that does, this is basically a grep over the contents, so "not COVID-19 related" would fall into that bucket. Of the certificates where the disease is definitely implicated, that still doesn't mean someone died because of the virus, only that the person might have been infected at the time of death. Might, because no test is required to merely mention it on a death certificate. At time of death, because this disease targets the old and weak so much, that very often it's unclear how a cause of death should be classified - in a way it was just someone's time to go. However, the UK made COVID-19 a notifiable disease, so it gets reported to the government in every case over and above other causes of death. Thus for the UK we can safely say that more people are being killed because of the lockdown than because of COVID, which is pretty shocking. This can be hard to see because UK excess mortality has gone far above the flu seasons of the past 5 years. But this is a bit misleading. It appears that the UK basically didn't have a flu season in 2017: excess mortality didn't go outside normal variance. Whereas in the rest of Europe 2017 saw a bad-ish flu season, which COVID so far has merely matched in terms of deaths.