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The numbers in Portugal (the one I am more familiar with) say otherwise. First health officials when they saw the numbers decreasing said : 'This only proves th

The numbers in Portugal (the one I am more familiar with) say otherwise. First health officials when they saw the numbers decreasing said : 'This only proves that indeed what we have been saying for years, people visit the ER for non serious cases' (which to be fair, having an ex-wife that was a paramedic, 1/2 of her calls were non-urgent). Then after the numbers of deaths increased, they changed they words to 'People need to go to the hospital, we can't be afraid of the virus' and now latest thing is 'We will be resuming to normal in hospitals/clinics and people should come for non-urgent related issues'. But interesting Belgium and Sweden didn't have this discrepancy in number of deaths (COVID vs non COVID). So either our numbers are wrong and more people are dying of COVID than what they tell us, or the lockdown + stoping pretty much every non urgent procedures + telling people to stay at home actually caused more excess deaths than covid itself. But whatever is right, we need to pick one and not keep letting politicians not even admit they may not know/be wrong and keep changing the goal posts when confronted with new information.

thu2111 7y ago
I'd expect the amount of critical stay-away to vary between countries; as above, I expect the UK to be an extreme case due to both the government's messaging and the NHS's general position in society. In Sweden people were not told to avoid hospitals, as far as I know, so that doesn't show much. Certainly some people did out of fear if they weren't too sick, but hopefully they'll avoid the UK situation. For Belgium I don't know what they did, I haven't looked, but if all excess death is really being reported as COVID related then I suspect over-counting of COVID cases rather than undercounting; something that is already clearly happening in many places e.g. New York and Germany.

thu2111 7y ago

I'd expect the amount of critical stay-away to vary between countries; as above, I expect the UK to be an extreme case due to both the government's messaging and the NHS's general position in society. In Sweden people were not told to avoid hospitals, as far as I know, so that doesn't show much. Certainly some people did out of fear if they weren't too sick, but hopefully they'll avoid the UK situation. For Belgium I don't know what they did, I haven't looked, but if all excess death is really being reported as COVID related then I suspect over-counting of COVID cases rather than undercounting; something that is already clearly happening in many places e.g. New York and Germany.