23 ms·

Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

230 points by danboarder 4y ago

bvoq 4y ago
London exagerates this. I work on 6 figures and can't afford any savings. I've moved into a boat to pay less rent, can you believe! I don't know how the rest of the population does it on a fourth of my salary.
lettergram 4y ago
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- kergonath 4y ago
  This bullshit does not resist the most superficial analysis. There were million deaths before vaccines were rolled out and death rates haven’t stopped declining since then. Also, there are plenty of countries to compare to, with similar vaccination rates as the UK.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    UK keeps one of the best public records of deaths. That said, I also provided a link to the US (has similar excess deaths to the UK). Taiwan also keeps very good records in is seeing a spike in death rates (and dramatic drop in birth rates) - https://www.economy.com/taiwan-china/death-rate https://www.economy.com/taiwan-china/death-rate Different vaccines / drugs / lockdowns / treatments rolled out in different regions. I’m not claiming they’re exactly causing anything, but there are / is a correlation; based on multiple public records
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  The vast majority of myocarditis symptoms in young men resolve in 14 days. There are always other mRNA vaccines too.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    Yes that does indeed. However myocarditis often indicates heart damage. Which is often long lasting, also the CDC just removed the claims the vaccine only lasts a few days. We don’t know how long that spike protein lasts.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      Sorry I meant to type “vaccines other than mRNA ones”.
funstuff007 4y ago
Of course this is real problem, but like most things COVID related the public discourse has been 90% culture war, and 10% search for understanding.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I’ve really been amazed at the lack of curiosity and ability/willingness to hold multiple probability-weighted points of view at once and examine questions like “what would have to be true/false in order for us to commit to X?”, “once we’ve started to do Y, what would be the signals for us to stop doing Y?” I had thought that people were often impatient and disinterested in hard thinking, but the extent of it surprised me, from people of all backgrounds and abilities.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I think one issue, at least from an online experience, is that a multi weighted view just means that you get yelled at by everyone as people seem to look for points of view they don’t like and engage with them from that angle. They will often entirely miss what you agree on, or worse assume any common ground was some ruse to slowly introduce more extreme points of view.
  - trailingComma 4y ago
  - trashtester 4y ago
    It seems to me that most people are able to think in terms of probabilities (or degrees, more generally) most of the time. Those people need to split the world into safe/dangerous, good/bad, likely/impossible. Also, they tend to not gradually update beliefs based on data the way Bayes' Theorem would dictate, but will often go directly from one extreme to the other. Some will tend to add an additional level of "unknown", but even in that case, they tend to go for "as likely as not" 50/50 odds, not 80/20, 90/10 or 99.9/0.1, based on evidence. Maybe doubt/uncertainty is too much of a cognitive and emotional load? For topics that are also seen as essential symbols of some social group (religion, culture war side, nation), the number who will admit shades of gray fall even further, of course.
ogogmad 4y ago
It's still difficult for a lot of people to get a physical exam by their GP. My own mother had her breast cancer diagnosed pre-pandemic only after she came in with an unrelated problem. Many health problems are not being caught while GPs are working from home. Related complaint: My mum was nearly deaf for six months. She got a few remote appointments with her GP surgery. One recommended she get psychotherapy. Another said she had a "foreign body" in her ear. After six months, she finally physically met a specialist who said she had too much earwax, and after vacuuming, she now hears better than she has for years. My parents are dual citizens, so they'll be leaving so that they can get better healthcare.
rtpg 4y ago
Are there still major pandemic restrictions in Britain? Lots of quotes in this piece seem to imply there’s ongoing issues here but everything I see in Europe or the US from abroad seems to heavily imply that people are “back to normal” (at least in terms of movement). The idea here (treatment delays lead to excess deaths) seems ok, but is it really the restrictions? Isn’t it more that hospitals are still extremely full? Or is that no longer the case. The main claim of this article feel a bit… odd to me. There’s a heavy implication about this being from the lockdowns, but in the middle there are 3 lines with a much simpler explanation: Covid infections increase risk of other health issues.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  There are no longer any pandemic restrictions in Britain. But there is still a huge backlog for health treatment, which was largely caused by access to non-urgent healthcare being partially shutdown over the pandemic.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Our healthcare system was in a very big mess before the pandemic. Now it’s in even more of a mess. So it was a case of restrictions tipping it over the edge.
  - binbinbinbin 4y ago
    It's bitterly ironic that everything we as the populace sacrificed since March 2020 has been to "Save the NHS".
- jajahusjsna 4y ago
  All restrictions ended in April I think. And prior to that the last “lockdown” was first half of 2021 when we were hit with Delta mid-vaccination campaign.
- detaro 4y ago
  > Are there still major pandemic restrictions in Britain? No. My impression is that in the UK (just as in other countries to a degree) the healthcare system hasn't really gotten out of the overload-state ever since the COVID waves. So while delays due to lockdowns certainly happened, it's also an ongoing crisis independent from that. (and if I'm being cynical, advocating for fixing those issues doesn't fit various pundits' agendas because that would mean spending more resources on the healthcare system, so it gets ignored - certainly the silence about this here in Germany has been interesting)
scrlk 4y ago
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  This was always a QALY negative treatment. One might even conclude the reason it happened is governments seeking power (lockdowns, propaganda and censorship, travel restrictions, etc) rather than genuine public health.
  - heurisko 4y ago
    I think the government and the media had a negative feedback loop. I've noticed the media prefers to saturate news with one topic. For years it was brexit, then that stopped completely and it was Covid, then Ukraine, now energy price rises. The Conservative government originally were keen on personal responsibility. But once the headlines started of older people in carehomes dying, there was no hope of doing nothing any more. Lockdowns were the "something that has to be done".
- jajahusjsna 4y ago
  People were repeatedly told to seek treatment when they needed it and not to be put off from going to A&E. It was a pretty regular topic on the daily press conferences.
  - scrlk 4y ago
    That advice to seek treatment was drowned out by the "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" slogan that was repeated everywhere, along with use of death/infection numbers that were spun out of proportion by the media. It is no surprise that people decided that the risk of seeking treatment was not worth it.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Yeah my local doctors' surgery had massive posters in its windows during the lockdown that basically said 'go away'. If you braved leaving your house and going to them, you'd be put off again before you got to the doors.
jajahusjsna 4y ago
Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for tests you can be waiting 6-12 months for the most simple things if they’re not life threatening (even if they are life limiting in the meantime). I personally have gotten to the point where I would not want to live in this country without access to private healthcare. I’ve had a number of treatments privately and they’ve saved me months of pain, anxiety, and in one case outright refusal for treatment by the NHS until the issue became dangerous (which was inevitable). In the UK we treat the NHS like a sacred cow. Even people who have experienced appalling treatment feel the need to exonerate the NHS when complaining about their experience. While the people that work there are not the problem (the failures of the government are) we need to start calling a spade a spade. The current condition of the NHS is atrocious. It’s not “great/the best health system in the world” and we’re no longer “so lucky to live here with the NHS”. It’s shit and it needs massive changes. Unfortunately without a change in government we’re not going to get those and people are seemingly more concerned about refugees arriving by dinghy than health care.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  The Tory government are doing it on purpose to get the people to want to move to private healthcare. Amazingly it isn’t working, even tho they have basically destroyed the NHS. The silent resilience of British people has backfired on them. Truth is that many old Brits would literally rather die than kick up a fuss
- Biologist123 4y ago
  Price inelastic healthcare is a private equity dream. The project to leave NHS funding unreformed in order to buy acquiescence to its sell off, all the whilst leaving people to rot, is to my eyes scandalous. But somehow unremarked in the twilight zone that the UK has become.
  - 4y ago
verytrivial 4y ago
The word "funding" does not appear in this article. The NHS has been systematically underfunded since the Conservative entered power more than a decade ago. The crisis is real, but it is a political choice.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
- rob_c 4y ago
  But let's ignore the blairite solution to sell the land and get further into debt and refuse to take more money from the populace or detach NHS funding from state pensions...
  - acallaghan 4y ago
    I mean blaming the PM that was last in power over 15 years ago seems a stretch?
    - rob_c 4y ago
      Yes citing counter example of how the problem is not on one side of the political divide is clearly wrong...
  - kergonath 4y ago
    Two wrongs do not make a right. I’d wager the people upset about the Tories are not by and large enamoured with Tony Blair’s New Labour either.
    - rob_c 4y ago
      You would think that but a lot of people can't see beyond its the Tories in power. We'd be better off with proportional representation but the beeb did an excellent job at mis-selling that to the masses
octoberfranklin 4y ago
- pabs3 4y ago
  Here is an archive that doesn't require clicking through that: https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/silent-crisis-soaring-excess-deaths-203000290.html https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/...
  - octoberfranklin 4y ago
pabs3 4y ago
https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/silent-crisis-soaring-excess-deaths-203000290.html https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/...
upsidesinclude 4y ago
Much like the real vaccine safety data, this data will be ever so slow and convoluted to torture out. The excuses already piling up to place the blame largely on individuals for their "consumption/sedentary behavior" etc. At least it is unavoidable to make the connection between failed public policy and these deaths
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
Wouldn’t a reasonable hypothesis try to rule out the vaccine? I’m not anti vaccine, I received the vaccine. But if excess death is creeping and it’s not Covid, would t that be one of the first things to rule out? They don’t even indicate that was ruled out, just completely ignored.
- lolbutwhatno 4y ago
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- julianlam 4y ago
  Why jump to it when simpler explanations exist? Delays in diagnosis or no diagnosis at all is likely a more fitting explanation.
  - zbdngkhab 4y ago
    Mass inoculation with a new type of vaccine that behaved very differently than the science hypothesized is also a very simple explanation. I don't really think anyone here has the ability or expertise to judge which is more fitting. For what it's worth, the fact circulatory issues is mentioned in the article should ring alarm bells for COVID vaccines being a potential cause. We just found out recently the prevalence of myocarditis among teenage boys that get the vaccine is extremely high compared to what was expected.
    - tchalla 4y ago
      It’s not a “simple” explanation if you take some time to understand how vaccine works. Just because there’s a side effect form vaccine doesn’t mean that the vaccine isn’t the best option. Your thought process is classic example of zero risk bias.
      - zbdngkhab 4y ago
        If it's not a simple explanation why did vaccine companies need absolving of any liability by govts? So safe they need to avoid liability? So safe many of the vaccines had complication rates far higher than any flu vaccine in history? Look I'm glad we had the vaccines so quickly. Trump pushing them through regulation was extremely good for man kind and we have all benefited. But stop acting like there is no risk.
rob_c 4y ago
- rob_c 4y ago
neverrroot 4y ago
The Great Barrington Declaration, unfortunately cancelled by mass media and the people in power.
- kurthr 4y ago
  So, if they don't die in the first wave of COVID, they need to die of underfunding? I mean sterilizing immunity through infection is now known (through many thousands of documented re-infections and likely hundreds of millions) to be both irresponsible and a failure. However, if the goal was to reduce the long term cost of the British medical system through the death of it's oldest and most expensive, then perhaps there is still hope by simply reducing funds?
  - naasking 4y ago
    > I mean sterilizing immunity through infection is now known (through many thousands of documented re-infections and likely hundreds of millions) to be both irresponsible and a failure. Infection is documented at being more effective at protecting you from reinfection and from having serious complications from a subsequent infection. Let's not pretend that the Great Barrington Declaration was necessarily wrong, given the suffering supply chain disruptions are now causing, not to mention the excess deaths from untreated conditions and increases in substance abuse. Only hindsight will give us a proper understanding of which choices were better.
  - rob_c 4y ago
- rob_c 4y ago
  Don't worry, in 5 years we will likely read how those in charge then spoke out but we're silenced and how they knew all along and fought the good fight for us in their ivory towers... It was a simple mathematic close airports not schools of you're so concerned but the past is now behind us. Oh and did you know the GBD was secretly funded by evil big right wing oil against the family friendly big pharma with asbestos in the talc and roundup in your food... (Sorry I think I got a bit cynical even for this topic)
vjuvva 4y ago
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- selimthegrim 4y ago
  This site is the polar opposite of commies, it’s libertarian heaven
  - weberer 4y ago
    Do a ctrl+F of "tories" and look at the comments here.
mirekrusin 4y ago
What if it's related to vaccination? Do other countries that implemented same the measures see the same pattern? Do other countries which did not implement those measures are free from this problem? Seems like relatively easy questions to answer, no?
- kurthr 4y ago
  Yes, luckily we have a completely controlled economy with no COVID. They only used to most ineffective (thus safe) vaccine! It's called China. Also the chairman has declared that there have been no deaths this year. (except you, if you contradict him)
  - mirekrusin 4y ago
    > They only used to most ineffective (thus safe) vaccine! There are so many things wrong with this sentence: - placebo is more ineffective, so to say the most ineffective has been used is an absurd statement - ineffectiveness doesn't imply safety, cyanide is likely ineffective, yet not safe - they didn't use one vaccine etc.
    - kurthr 4y ago
      You are correct! I was responding to the comedic parent. However, both the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are very equivalent inactivated virus vaccines with comparable (low) effectiveness against any of the proliferating post Delta vaccines, and vaccination rates in the elderly are quite low. Which makes my point that there really isn't a good controlled environment where all of this data is easily collected. Even the developing world has received significant vaccination at this point, while politics have made gathering and interpreting the causes of excess deaths challenging EVERYWHERE. Sweden? UK? US? France? Singapore? German? Russia? China? India? Africa?
mensetmanusman 4y ago
How has brexit affected the nhs?
- heisenbit 4y ago
  Here in Germany the health care system is severely stressed particular nurses are hard to come by. Nurses and young doctors were often coming from other EU countries but Covid slowed this migration. I could imagine the situation in Britain much worse due to Brexit and quite possibly and even higher reliance on foreign skilled health care labour.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > reliance on foreign skilled health care labour. I think it is more accurate to say cheap labor.
    - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
      No, we really did import a lot of skilled labour and did not train enough of our own people.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Domestic people were not discriminated against from training. Birthrates went down, so supply of labor decreases, so prices have to increase to attract more people to do the desired type of labor. Or if the country is desirable enough, the country can open up immigration to increase supply of labor and keep prices lower than if they had kept immigration closed. Domestic labor can keep moving onto more desirable jobs while immigrants keep doing the less desirable work in exchange for being able to immigrate. Works well, until birthrates drop too low and/or immigrants stop coming for whatever reason.
        MattPalmer1086 4y ago
        Yes, that's a fair point.
itsthemmrvax 4y ago
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open-source-ux 4y ago
From the article: > "Prof Robert Dingwall, of Nottingham Trent University, a former government adviser during the pandemic, said...“We are beginning to see the deaths that result from delay and deferment of treatment for other conditions, like cancer and heart disease, and from those associated with poverty and deprivation." Behind the statistics, here's one person's tragic story: "A woman with fast-growing stage-four breast cancer says the NHS has let her down, with delays at every stage of her treatment." 'I've been let down - I shouldn't have stage-4 cancer' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62483323 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62483323
Inu 4y ago
According to Eurostat Portugal "recorded an excess mortality rate of 23.9 %" in June 2022. "Other countries with rates over 15 % were Spain (16.7 %) and Estonia (16.2 %)." Overall: "Following a peak of 26.5 % in November 2021, in June 2022 excess mortality in the EU decreased slightly compared to the previous month, to 6.2 %." Bulgaria, Czechia, Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia recorded little or no excess deaths. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Excess_mortality_-_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- paganel 4y ago
  Romania (from where I’m from) recorded the least number of monthly deaths in June 2022 since at least 4 or 5 years (I’m on my phone, I have the Excel file with the stats themselves on my computer at home), and, comparing June 2022 to the average of June months for the 5 years before the pandemic, we had 15% less deaths (so you could say we had 15% “less” excess deaths, if that’s even a term). The explanation is simple, most of our excess deaths happened during the pandemic itself, October 2021 had close to 100% more excess deaths compared to previous pre-pandemic October months, and while that was the worst month for us in terms of extra deaths there were still others with 30-40-50% excess deaths. In other words it looks like, to put it bluntly, many of the people who would have died in June 2022 out of non-Covid causes had the pandemic not existed actually died in 2020 or 2021 because of said pandemic. In countries like Spain or Portugal not that many people died during the pandemic, hence those countries are now getting “out of it” with a weakened populace, a populace who dies “more” because of that “weakness” generated by the societal effects of the pandemic (less access to face-to-face doctor consultations, for example). A true science-based society will try to look at all these numbers in 5 years’ time with a neutral mind, so that when the next pandemic comes we will be better prepared to make decisions about lockdowns (“is it really worth it to close everything down if people will die nevertheless when the pandemic ends?”), but I have a feeling that won’t happen.
roydivision 4y ago
Unfortunately not mentioned in the article, how do these numbers compare to other countries?
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Here's the officially reported excess mortality from the UK and its neighbours: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?country=NLD~GBR~FRA~IRL~BEL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... I'd say pretty similar overall, though the UK had a massive peak and then a sudden deficit in excess mortality where other countries didn't. France and Ireland haven't reported an uptick in excess mortality but their data hasn't been included from right around the most recent sudden rise. The pattern seems to be that there's an increase in excess mortality, with peaks following drops a few months later coinciding with COVID spread. Sadly, this website doesn't show any data prior to January of 2020, but excess mortality rates were down right up to the spread of COVID.
- thebruce87m 4y ago
  There are excess mortality graphs for multiple countries here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
- ls612 4y ago
  The US preliminary numbers suggest that since the end of the Omicron wave excess deaths have hovered between 0-5% (compared to 30% or more during major waves). A couple percent is likely still Covid suggesting that the underlying trend hasn’t changed much.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Excess death is higher in Europe in general. you can see the stats here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality What I find strange is the increase in excess death among children since April 2021.
- moistly 4y ago
  I don’t find that strange at all: vaccination/deaths of the elderly meant the virus needed t9 find a new susceptible population. Spanish Flu did the same: started out hurting adults, ended up killing kids.
  - moistly 4y ago
    State a fact about the Spanish Flu, get downvoted by an anti-vax moron. Classic!
- drno123 4y ago
  Someone could say that maybe we started giving something to people around that time?
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    You're right, it's curious how the death rate increased right around the time COVID measures started being lifted all around Europe.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The increase in excess deaths follows an uncharacteristic decrease from the start of the pandemic. I'm not sure how much of it is a real increase rather than the inevitable being postponed by enforcing very strict disease-preventing measures (social distancing, washing hands, shutting down busy places, etc.). The weekly numbers for the excess in mortality very much suggests that the death rates for 0-14 year olds were significantly lower in the last quarter of 2020, and significantly higher starting in the middle of 2021, when COVID measures were (starting to be) lifted in large parts of Europe. I hope the cause behind the rise in death toll amongst children isn't the same as that during the Spanish Flu, mainly that the virus mutated to be mild for adults but deadly for children.
deleted 4y ago
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mellosouls 4y ago
Note that while this article is listed as being from Yahoo it's actually sourced from The Telegraph, a right-leaning paper that appears to be on a bit of a crusade at the moment to "right the wrongs of lockdowns" or something. That's not to say there isn't a story here, or even that they are wrong; just be aware there appears to be an agenda.
- binbinbinbin 4y ago
  It's fantastic that it's now even acceptable to talk about the downsides of our collective responses to Covid, something we can thank those trailblazers for.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> If the current trajectory continues, the number of non-Covid excess deaths will soon outstrip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more deadly than the omicron wave. I have friends in the UK and the USA who all during the pandemic were asking, what about the unintended consequences? Where are the models for the impact of these decisions? What are the numbers of collateral damage? There were no answers. Anywhere. That simply doesn't make rational sense.
- tremon 4y ago
  What unintended consequences are we talking about here? The problems in the article don't stem from lockdowns, they stem from delays caused by capacity problems in the healthcare system. So, if anything, the article describes the unintended consequences of those who deliberately kept fighting all measures to curb the spread of COVID.
  - jl6 4y ago
    It seems pretty obvious that there are multiple contributing factors, including both long-standing capacity issues, the long-standing obesity issue, and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    > So what is going on? Experts believe decisions taken by the Government in the earliest stages of the pandemic may now be coming back to bite. Policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment and primary care are finally taking their toll. That's in the first couple of lines. Those sounds unintended. Those are resulting in collateral damage.
  - cameronh90 4y ago
    I can't speak for the nation as a whole, but during the third lockdown, my mental health went through the floor. I stopped exercising, became agoraphobic and developed panic disorder. It's about a year later now and after a ton of therapy and medication, I'm just about able to go outside again. I still can't really travel far but I managed to drive 2 miles yesterday and am really happy about that - though I did vomit afterwards. Unsurprisingly, my physical health is a lot worse now. I feel like I've aged a decade.
zeryx 4y ago
We have the same issues in Canada with our public health system. No one wants to talk about this, but my unpopular opinion is the real problem is our retirement program and lack of fertility - we're way too generous, and without a tax base there's only so much we can do. Unless a politician actually makes the unpopular move to cut retirement benefits or massively increase fertility this is only going to get worse.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  Increasing fertility won't do much for the next ~20 years. It takes a long time to raise a taxpayer. Automation is the way.
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  > Unless a politician actually makes the unpopular move to... massively increase fertility There is no magic political move to increase fertility. If there was Japan would have done it decades ago.
  - snidane 4y ago
    Solving the unaffordability of housing crisis is the step needed to unblock fertility. The solution exist, yet it cannot be pushed forward in a democratic system as it creates a generational conflict. Hint: LVT
    - koshergweilo 4y ago
      Although I agree solving the housing problem will help fertility (personally I'm waiting to have kids until I get more permanent housing) it's definitely not the only thing stopping people from having kids. Rich people famously have low fertility and they don't have any trouble getting housing. Fertility, like homelessness, is a multivariable function that requires a multitude of policies and approaches. It's not a simple dial that one can move back and fourth.
K_W_McCairn_PhD 4y ago
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addicted 4y ago
I’ve noticed a resistance in the U.S. and UK to look outside. Both countries appear to believe they are unique or special and are simply unwilling to look at how the rest of the world is doing things. Almost all the questions and unknowns posed in this article can be answered by simply looking at neighboring European countries and seeing if they’re seeing the same levels of non COVID excess deaths.
- loldk 4y ago
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
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- throwyawayyyy 4y ago
  Many others predicted excess deaths owing to people skipping regular checkups/missing out on cancer treatments, etc etc. This was widely reported and debated as a cost of lockdowns. It's implausible that there would not be excess deaths owing to this effect. In which case, the question shouldn't be: "what is causing these excess deaths?", but "are there _excess_ excess deaths?". I.e. are there deaths which _can't_ be explained by several years of significant numbers of people not seeing their GPs? Added: I do agree that we shouldn't assume that mRNA vaccines are safe just because we want them to be, and large scale studies are required. But then large scale studies are, of course, happening. There'll be NHS reports on the long term effects of these vaccines for decades.
karol 4y ago
- beeboop 4y ago
daenz 4y ago
- sdenton4 4y ago
  From the article: '“We are beginning to see the deaths that result from delay and deferment of treatment for other conditions, like cancer and heart disease, and from those associated with poverty and deprivation. '“These come through more slowly – if cancer is not treated promptly, patients don't die immediately but do die in greater numbers more quickly than would otherwise be the case.” 'The Government has admitted that the majority of the excess deaths appear to be from circulatory issues and diabetes – long-term, chronic conditions that can be fatal without adequate care.' These deaths are attributable to specific causes - chronic conditions not receiving proper ongoing care - which have nothing to do with the vaccines. Hell, vaccines /should/ be increasing the amount of ongoing treatment for these conditions, and helping people get back to regular checkups and the associated preventative / early-stage treatment. (noting of course that the current excess deaths are an extremely laggy indicator. the 'vaccines help' hypothesis should then be apparent in a year or two as the excess deaths come back down.)
  - daenz 4y ago
    Yes, the article does a fantastic job of claiming their hypotheses as the only possibilities, while dishonestly ignoring others that would more severely undermine confidence in the state. I'm honestly surprised they're attributing deaths to lockdowns at all! That's a huge shift in the overton window. If you remember, that was also taboo. But I assume now it's ok to talk about because it can be framed in the louder, "not enough funding for healthcare" context.
    - malteof 4y ago
      It sounds like you really want it to be vaccines even though not much seems to be pointing towards that conclusion, be careful to avoid a bias. The article mentions cancer and cardiovascular chronic diseases.
regularfry 4y ago
Oh, for heaven's sake. It's not that patients delayed treatment. It's not the sodding vaccine. It's emergency medicine collapsing because A&E departments can't discharge. They can't discharge because there aren't enough social care workers. There aren't enough social care workers because a) Brexit, b) vaccine hesitancy, c) shit pay, and d) chronic underfunding of public services in general. Given that this is an article from the Telegraph, exactly how honest do you think they're likely to be about any of those factors?
- regularfry 4y ago
  As if by magic... https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172873728 https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172...
Guthur 4y ago
I think we can probably mostly agree this is the national government's fault one way or another. But for me it is complete irrationality to assume we just need to give more money to them and have the government fix it. The government has been siphoning money from the UK population at an ever greater rate while redistributing it to very large private organisations. It won't change by voting in some other bunch of cronies, they're all in the pockets of a great unelected one way or another. We need to wake up to the fact we all live in a facist oligarchy which is impossible to avoid when we let governments get this large.
Marazan 4y ago
The two main causes of excess excess death that Britian is seeing seeing are vascular issues and diabetes. Guess what two of the main long term effects we have seen with Covid are?
- binbinbinbin 4y ago
  Then why is the UK in particular doing so badly with this? A more-likely scenario is that this is the outcome of prioritising Covid (and avoiding Covid) over all other healthcare since March 2020, which has been a relatively unique factor with how our NHS has handled the pandemic.
  - Marazan 4y ago
    Scotland isn't seeing the same excess death surge (there's a rise but no where near England and Wales levels).
jeroenhd 4y ago
Some insights from the Netherlands, the country right to the east of the UK: the healthcare system is still under extreme pressure and everyone important is pretending the pandemic is over. Nurses and other healthcare professionals have been quitting and are not planning to come back because there is no chance of increased pay (which only drives up the pressure to those still working in healthcare). Hospitals are working through their backlogs. Care that could be postponed has been postponed for two years and now with fewer healthcare professionals and medical issues left untreated for a while (even people starting on chemo got told to wait at some point) the recovery process is slow. This, of course, isn't great for the relatively large elderly population as they're very reliant on lots of healthcare. I don't know what the state of the NHS is these days, but I've heard distressing signals from all over the UK about people being unable to get a GP appointment in time and the entire hospital system being overworked. I don't know if it's politicians trying to cut more healthcare costs, the pandemic, Brexit, or everything at once, but the NHS doesn't seem to be doing well. Over here, we have all but stopped testing for COVID. It's seemingly presumed to be endemic by the government, much like other governments seem to do. In every sector sick leave has also been on the rise, as the government told us to expect; the consensus seems to be that the current variants of COVID aren't that much of a risk and we should just go back to normal and let the disease run its course. With reports of long COVID symptoms on the rise [0] I very much doubt that, but the government doesn't seem to care about sick people, so I'm not surprised. Excess mortality in the Netherlands has been high ever since the start of the pandemic [1]. Every time the virus spreads, excess mortality rises. The covid death rate [2] is claimed to be extremely low but at the same time COVID testing has also pretty much stopped, whereas previously anyone dying with COVID was also written up to have died with COVID. Based on the mortality graphs I'd say we've passed another COVID peak but nobody (I know, at least) takes an official tests so the statistics are very much flawed; wastewater analysis [3] seems to suggest a "hidden" endemic that coincides with the rise in excess mortality, though. My personal conclusion: we're in (or have just passed) yet another mass COVID spread event but everyone has grown tired of taking any anti-COVID measures, so they stopped caring. I dread to think what the winter is going to look like if the summer death toll is this high. The UK's COVID numbers seem to agree with a similar peak in positive tests but I don't know how well the reporting is done over the pond. There is also another factor at play: the extreme heat due to climate change we're facing in Europe. In (previously) unusually warm summers or cold winters, old and sick people have always had a tendency to die more often. The heat of the past few weeks definitely isn't the only cause, but I doubt it's not a factor this year with record heat reported all across England. As an aside: the amount of people here immediately jumping to the conclusion that vaccines are the cause is... quite depressing. We're still very much in a pandemic but everyone just seems to _want_ to blame vaccines while we, as a society, try our best to stuff our fingers into our ears and pretend we can't hear anything. Do whatever you want to feel better, blame the vaccine, blame Bill Gates, blame the lizard people running the Illuminati, but it won't solve the problem. [0]: https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/nearly-twice-as-many-cases-involving-long-term-symptoms-after-covid-19 https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/nearly-twice-as-many-cases-invol... [1]: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/31/excess-mortality-in-all-weeks-of-july https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/31/excess-mortality-in-al... [2]: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/sterfte https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/sterfte [3]: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/rioolwater https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/rioolwater [4]: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

230 points by danboarder 4y ago

bvoq 4y ago

London exagerates this. I work on 6 figures and can't afford any savings. I've moved into a boat to pay less rent, can you believe! I don't know how the rest of the population does it on a fourth of my salary.

lettergram 4y ago

[flagged]

kergonath 4y ago
This bullshit does not resist the most superficial analysis. There were million deaths before vaccines were rolled out and death rates haven’t stopped declining since then. Also, there are plenty of countries to compare to, with similar vaccination rates as the UK.
- lettergram 4y ago
  UK keeps one of the best public records of deaths. That said, I also provided a link to the US (has similar excess deaths to the UK). Taiwan also keeps very good records in is seeing a spike in death rates (and dramatic drop in birth rates) - https://www.economy.com/taiwan-china/death-rate https://www.economy.com/taiwan-china/death-rate Different vaccines / drugs / lockdowns / treatments rolled out in different regions. I’m not claiming they’re exactly causing anything, but there are / is a correlation; based on multiple public records
selimthegrim 4y ago
The vast majority of myocarditis symptoms in young men resolve in 14 days. There are always other mRNA vaccines too.
- lettergram 4y ago
  Yes that does indeed. However myocarditis often indicates heart damage. Which is often long lasting, also the CDC just removed the claims the vaccine only lasts a few days. We don’t know how long that spike protein lasts.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    Sorry I meant to type “vaccines other than mRNA ones”.

funstuff007 4y ago

Of course this is real problem, but like most things COVID related the public discourse has been 90% culture war, and 10% search for understanding.

sokoloff 4y ago
I’ve really been amazed at the lack of curiosity and ability/willingness to hold multiple probability-weighted points of view at once and examine questions like “what would have to be true/false in order for us to commit to X?”, “once we’ve started to do Y, what would be the signals for us to stop doing Y?” I had thought that people were often impatient and disinterested in hard thinking, but the extent of it surprised me, from people of all backgrounds and abilities.
- duxup 4y ago
  I think one issue, at least from an online experience, is that a multi weighted view just means that you get yelled at by everyone as people seem to look for points of view they don’t like and engage with them from that angle. They will often entirely miss what you agree on, or worse assume any common ground was some ruse to slowly introduce more extreme points of view.
- trailingComma 4y ago
- trashtester 4y ago
  It seems to me that most people are able to think in terms of probabilities (or degrees, more generally) most of the time. Those people need to split the world into safe/dangerous, good/bad, likely/impossible. Also, they tend to not gradually update beliefs based on data the way Bayes' Theorem would dictate, but will often go directly from one extreme to the other. Some will tend to add an additional level of "unknown", but even in that case, they tend to go for "as likely as not" 50/50 odds, not 80/20, 90/10 or 99.9/0.1, based on evidence. Maybe doubt/uncertainty is too much of a cognitive and emotional load? For topics that are also seen as essential symbols of some social group (religion, culture war side, nation), the number who will admit shades of gray fall even further, of course.

ogogmad 4y ago

It's still difficult for a lot of people to get a physical exam by their GP. My own mother had her breast cancer diagnosed pre-pandemic only after she came in with an unrelated problem. Many health problems are not being caught while GPs are working from home. Related complaint: My mum was nearly deaf for six months. She got a few remote appointments with her GP surgery. One recommended she get psychotherapy. Another said she had a "foreign body" in her ear. After six months, she finally physically met a specialist who said she had too much earwax, and after vacuuming, she now hears better than she has for years. My parents are dual citizens, so they'll be leaving so that they can get better healthcare.

rtpg 4y ago

Are there still major pandemic restrictions in Britain? Lots of quotes in this piece seem to imply there’s ongoing issues here but everything I see in Europe or the US from abroad seems to heavily imply that people are “back to normal” (at least in terms of movement). The idea here (treatment delays lead to excess deaths) seems ok, but is it really the restrictions? Isn’t it more that hospitals are still extremely full? Or is that no longer the case. The main claim of this article feel a bit… odd to me. There’s a heavy implication about this being from the lockdowns, but in the middle there are 3 lines with a much simpler explanation: Covid infections increase risk of other health issues.

nicoburns 4y ago
There are no longer any pandemic restrictions in Britain. But there is still a huge backlog for health treatment, which was largely caused by access to non-urgent healthcare being partially shutdown over the pandemic.
chrisseaton 4y ago
Our healthcare system was in a very big mess before the pandemic. Now it’s in even more of a mess. So it was a case of restrictions tipping it over the edge.
- binbinbinbin 4y ago
  It's bitterly ironic that everything we as the populace sacrificed since March 2020 has been to "Save the NHS".
jajahusjsna 4y ago
All restrictions ended in April I think. And prior to that the last “lockdown” was first half of 2021 when we were hit with Delta mid-vaccination campaign.
detaro 4y ago
> Are there still major pandemic restrictions in Britain? No. My impression is that in the UK (just as in other countries to a degree) the healthcare system hasn't really gotten out of the overload-state ever since the COVID waves. So while delays due to lockdowns certainly happened, it's also an ongoing crisis independent from that. (and if I'm being cynical, advocating for fixing those issues doesn't fit various pundits' agendas because that would mean spending more resources on the healthcare system, so it gets ignored - certainly the silence about this here in Germany has been interesting)

scrlk 4y ago

zmgsabst 4y ago
This was always a QALY negative treatment. One might even conclude the reason it happened is governments seeking power (lockdowns, propaganda and censorship, travel restrictions, etc) rather than genuine public health.
- heurisko 4y ago
  I think the government and the media had a negative feedback loop. I've noticed the media prefers to saturate news with one topic. For years it was brexit, then that stopped completely and it was Covid, then Ukraine, now energy price rises. The Conservative government originally were keen on personal responsibility. But once the headlines started of older people in carehomes dying, there was no hope of doing nothing any more. Lockdowns were the "something that has to be done".
jajahusjsna 4y ago
People were repeatedly told to seek treatment when they needed it and not to be put off from going to A&E. It was a pretty regular topic on the daily press conferences.
- scrlk 4y ago
  That advice to seek treatment was drowned out by the "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" slogan that was repeated everywhere, along with use of death/infection numbers that were spun out of proportion by the media. It is no surprise that people decided that the risk of seeking treatment was not worth it.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Yeah my local doctors' surgery had massive posters in its windows during the lockdown that basically said 'go away'. If you braved leaving your house and going to them, you'd be put off again before you got to the doors.

jajahusjsna 4y ago

Covid is one aspect of this. Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade. This has become much more evident post-covid thanks to the backlogs. - Getting a GP to see you in person is now quite difficult (they want to do everything via phone). - Seeing your GP (depending on your area) can involve a 2-3 week wait and waiting in an hours long phone queue. - When you are referred to hospital for tests you can be waiting 6-12 months for the most simple things if they’re not life threatening (even if they are life limiting in the meantime). I personally have gotten to the point where I would not want to live in this country without access to private healthcare. I’ve had a number of treatments privately and they’ve saved me months of pain, anxiety, and in one case outright refusal for treatment by the NHS until the issue became dangerous (which was inevitable). In the UK we treat the NHS like a sacred cow. Even people who have experienced appalling treatment feel the need to exonerate the NHS when complaining about their experience. While the people that work there are not the problem (the failures of the government are) we need to start calling a spade a spade. The current condition of the NHS is atrocious. It’s not “great/the best health system in the world” and we’re no longer “so lucky to live here with the NHS”. It’s shit and it needs massive changes. Unfortunately without a change in government we’re not going to get those and people are seemingly more concerned about refugees arriving by dinghy than health care.

bowsamic 4y ago
The Tory government are doing it on purpose to get the people to want to move to private healthcare. Amazingly it isn’t working, even tho they have basically destroyed the NHS. The silent resilience of British people has backfired on them. Truth is that many old Brits would literally rather die than kick up a fuss
Biologist123 4y ago
Price inelastic healthcare is a private equity dream. The project to leave NHS funding unreformed in order to buy acquiescence to its sell off, all the whilst leaving people to rot, is to my eyes scandalous. But somehow unremarked in the twilight zone that the UK has become.
- 4y ago

verytrivial 4y ago

The word "funding" does not appear in this article. The NHS has been systematically underfunded since the Conservative entered power more than a decade ago. The crisis is real, but it is a political choice.

upsidesinclude 4y ago
rob_c 4y ago
But let's ignore the blairite solution to sell the land and get further into debt and refuse to take more money from the populace or detach NHS funding from state pensions...
- acallaghan 4y ago
  I mean blaming the PM that was last in power over 15 years ago seems a stretch?
  - rob_c 4y ago
    Yes citing counter example of how the problem is not on one side of the political divide is clearly wrong...
- kergonath 4y ago
  Two wrongs do not make a right. I’d wager the people upset about the Tories are not by and large enamoured with Tony Blair’s New Labour either.
  - rob_c 4y ago
    You would think that but a lot of people can't see beyond its the Tories in power. We'd be better off with proportional representation but the beeb did an excellent job at mis-selling that to the masses

octoberfranklin 4y ago

pabs3 4y ago
Here is an archive that doesn't require clicking through that: https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/silent-crisis-soaring-excess-deaths-203000290.html https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/...
- octoberfranklin 4y ago

pabs3 4y ago

https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/silent-crisis-soaring-excess-deaths-203000290.html https://archive.ph/20220819154059/https://uk.news.yahoo.com/...

upsidesinclude 4y ago

Much like the real vaccine safety data, this data will be ever so slow and convoluted to torture out. The excuses already piling up to place the blame largely on individuals for their "consumption/sedentary behavior" etc. At least it is unavoidable to make the connection between failed public policy and these deaths

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

Wouldn’t a reasonable hypothesis try to rule out the vaccine? I’m not anti vaccine, I received the vaccine. But if excess death is creeping and it’s not Covid, would t that be one of the first things to rule out? They don’t even indicate that was ruled out, just completely ignored.

lolbutwhatno 4y ago
[dead]
julianlam 4y ago
Why jump to it when simpler explanations exist? Delays in diagnosis or no diagnosis at all is likely a more fitting explanation.
- zbdngkhab 4y ago
  Mass inoculation with a new type of vaccine that behaved very differently than the science hypothesized is also a very simple explanation. I don't really think anyone here has the ability or expertise to judge which is more fitting. For what it's worth, the fact circulatory issues is mentioned in the article should ring alarm bells for COVID vaccines being a potential cause. We just found out recently the prevalence of myocarditis among teenage boys that get the vaccine is extremely high compared to what was expected.
  - tchalla 4y ago
    It’s not a “simple” explanation if you take some time to understand how vaccine works. Just because there’s a side effect form vaccine doesn’t mean that the vaccine isn’t the best option. Your thought process is classic example of zero risk bias.
    - zbdngkhab 4y ago
      If it's not a simple explanation why did vaccine companies need absolving of any liability by govts? So safe they need to avoid liability? So safe many of the vaccines had complication rates far higher than any flu vaccine in history? Look I'm glad we had the vaccines so quickly. Trump pushing them through regulation was extremely good for man kind and we have all benefited. But stop acting like there is no risk.

rob_c 4y ago

rob_c 4y ago

neverrroot 4y ago

The Great Barrington Declaration, unfortunately cancelled by mass media and the people in power.

kurthr 4y ago
So, if they don't die in the first wave of COVID, they need to die of underfunding? I mean sterilizing immunity through infection is now known (through many thousands of documented re-infections and likely hundreds of millions) to be both irresponsible and a failure. However, if the goal was to reduce the long term cost of the British medical system through the death of it's oldest and most expensive, then perhaps there is still hope by simply reducing funds?
- naasking 4y ago
  > I mean sterilizing immunity through infection is now known (through many thousands of documented re-infections and likely hundreds of millions) to be both irresponsible and a failure. Infection is documented at being more effective at protecting you from reinfection and from having serious complications from a subsequent infection. Let's not pretend that the Great Barrington Declaration was necessarily wrong, given the suffering supply chain disruptions are now causing, not to mention the excess deaths from untreated conditions and increases in substance abuse. Only hindsight will give us a proper understanding of which choices were better.
- rob_c 4y ago
rob_c 4y ago
Don't worry, in 5 years we will likely read how those in charge then spoke out but we're silenced and how they knew all along and fought the good fight for us in their ivory towers... It was a simple mathematic close airports not schools of you're so concerned but the past is now behind us. Oh and did you know the GBD was secretly funded by evil big right wing oil against the family friendly big pharma with asbestos in the talc and roundup in your food... (Sorry I think I got a bit cynical even for this topic)

vjuvva 4y ago

[flagged]

selimthegrim 4y ago
This site is the polar opposite of commies, it’s libertarian heaven
- weberer 4y ago
  Do a ctrl+F of "tories" and look at the comments here.

mirekrusin 4y ago

What if it's related to vaccination? Do other countries that implemented same the measures see the same pattern? Do other countries which did not implement those measures are free from this problem? Seems like relatively easy questions to answer, no?

kurthr 4y ago
Yes, luckily we have a completely controlled economy with no COVID. They only used to most ineffective (thus safe) vaccine! It's called China. Also the chairman has declared that there have been no deaths this year. (except you, if you contradict him)
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  > They only used to most ineffective (thus safe) vaccine! There are so many things wrong with this sentence: - placebo is more ineffective, so to say the most ineffective has been used is an absurd statement - ineffectiveness doesn't imply safety, cyanide is likely ineffective, yet not safe - they didn't use one vaccine etc.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    You are correct! I was responding to the comedic parent. However, both the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are very equivalent inactivated virus vaccines with comparable (low) effectiveness against any of the proliferating post Delta vaccines, and vaccination rates in the elderly are quite low. Which makes my point that there really isn't a good controlled environment where all of this data is easily collected. Even the developing world has received significant vaccination at this point, while politics have made gathering and interpreting the causes of excess deaths challenging EVERYWHERE. Sweden? UK? US? France? Singapore? German? Russia? China? India? Africa?

mensetmanusman 4y ago

How has brexit affected the nhs?

heisenbit 4y ago
Here in Germany the health care system is severely stressed particular nurses are hard to come by. Nurses and young doctors were often coming from other EU countries but Covid slowed this migration. I could imagine the situation in Britain much worse due to Brexit and quite possibly and even higher reliance on foreign skilled health care labour.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > reliance on foreign skilled health care labour. I think it is more accurate to say cheap labor.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    No, we really did import a lot of skilled labour and did not train enough of our own people.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Domestic people were not discriminated against from training. Birthrates went down, so supply of labor decreases, so prices have to increase to attract more people to do the desired type of labor. Or if the country is desirable enough, the country can open up immigration to increase supply of labor and keep prices lower than if they had kept immigration closed. Domestic labor can keep moving onto more desirable jobs while immigrants keep doing the less desirable work in exchange for being able to immigrate. Works well, until birthrates drop too low and/or immigrants stop coming for whatever reason.
      - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
        Yes, that's a fair point.

itsthemmrvax 4y ago

[flagged]

open-source-ux 4y ago

From the article: > "Prof Robert Dingwall, of Nottingham Trent University, a former government adviser during the pandemic, said...“We are beginning to see the deaths that result from delay and deferment of treatment for other conditions, like cancer and heart disease, and from those associated with poverty and deprivation." Behind the statistics, here's one person's tragic story: "A woman with fast-growing stage-four breast cancer says the NHS has let her down, with delays at every stage of her treatment." 'I've been let down - I shouldn't have stage-4 cancer' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62483323 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62483323

Inu 4y ago

According to Eurostat Portugal "recorded an excess mortality rate of 23.9 %" in June 2022. "Other countries with rates over 15 % were Spain (16.7 %) and Estonia (16.2 %)." Overall: "Following a peak of 26.5 % in November 2021, in June 2022 excess mortality in the EU decreased slightly compared to the previous month, to 6.2 %." Bulgaria, Czechia, Italy, Hungary, and Slovakia recorded little or no excess deaths. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Excess_mortality_-_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

paganel 4y ago
Romania (from where I’m from) recorded the least number of monthly deaths in June 2022 since at least 4 or 5 years (I’m on my phone, I have the Excel file with the stats themselves on my computer at home), and, comparing June 2022 to the average of June months for the 5 years before the pandemic, we had 15% less deaths (so you could say we had 15% “less” excess deaths, if that’s even a term). The explanation is simple, most of our excess deaths happened during the pandemic itself, October 2021 had close to 100% more excess deaths compared to previous pre-pandemic October months, and while that was the worst month for us in terms of extra deaths there were still others with 30-40-50% excess deaths. In other words it looks like, to put it bluntly, many of the people who would have died in June 2022 out of non-Covid causes had the pandemic not existed actually died in 2020 or 2021 because of said pandemic. In countries like Spain or Portugal not that many people died during the pandemic, hence those countries are now getting “out of it” with a weakened populace, a populace who dies “more” because of that “weakness” generated by the societal effects of the pandemic (less access to face-to-face doctor consultations, for example). A true science-based society will try to look at all these numbers in 5 years’ time with a neutral mind, so that when the next pandemic comes we will be better prepared to make decisions about lockdowns (“is it really worth it to close everything down if people will die nevertheless when the pandemic ends?”), but I have a feeling that won’t happen.

roydivision 4y ago

Unfortunately not mentioned in the article, how do these numbers compare to other countries?

jeroenhd 4y ago
Here's the officially reported excess mortality from the UK and its neighbours: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?country=NLD~GBR~FRA~IRL~BEL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... I'd say pretty similar overall, though the UK had a massive peak and then a sudden deficit in excess mortality where other countries didn't. France and Ireland haven't reported an uptick in excess mortality but their data hasn't been included from right around the most recent sudden rise. The pattern seems to be that there's an increase in excess mortality, with peaks following drops a few months later coinciding with COVID spread. Sadly, this website doesn't show any data prior to January of 2020, but excess mortality rates were down right up to the spread of COVID.
thebruce87m 4y ago
There are excess mortality graphs for multiple countries here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
ls612 4y ago
The US preliminary numbers suggest that since the end of the Omicron wave excess deaths have hovered between 0-5% (compared to 30% or more during major waves). A couple percent is likely still Covid suggesting that the underlying trend hasn’t changed much.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Excess death is higher in Europe in general. you can see the stats here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality What I find strange is the increase in excess death among children since April 2021.

moistly 4y ago
I don’t find that strange at all: vaccination/deaths of the elderly meant the virus needed t9 find a new susceptible population. Spanish Flu did the same: started out hurting adults, ended up killing kids.
- moistly 4y ago
  State a fact about the Spanish Flu, get downvoted by an anti-vax moron. Classic!
drno123 4y ago
Someone could say that maybe we started giving something to people around that time?
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  You're right, it's curious how the death rate increased right around the time COVID measures started being lifted all around Europe.
jeroenhd 4y ago
The increase in excess deaths follows an uncharacteristic decrease from the start of the pandemic. I'm not sure how much of it is a real increase rather than the inevitable being postponed by enforcing very strict disease-preventing measures (social distancing, washing hands, shutting down busy places, etc.). The weekly numbers for the excess in mortality very much suggests that the death rates for 0-14 year olds were significantly lower in the last quarter of 2020, and significantly higher starting in the middle of 2021, when COVID measures were (starting to be) lifted in large parts of Europe. I hope the cause behind the rise in death toll amongst children isn't the same as that during the Spanish Flu, mainly that the virus mutated to be mild for adults but deadly for children.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 4y ago

Note that while this article is listed as being from Yahoo it's actually sourced from The Telegraph, a right-leaning paper that appears to be on a bit of a crusade at the moment to "right the wrongs of lockdowns" or something. That's not to say there isn't a story here, or even that they are wrong; just be aware there appears to be an agenda.

binbinbinbin 4y ago
It's fantastic that it's now even acceptable to talk about the downsides of our collective responses to Covid, something we can thank those trailblazers for.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> If the current trajectory continues, the number of non-Covid excess deaths will soon outstrip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more deadly than the omicron wave. I have friends in the UK and the USA who all during the pandemic were asking, what about the unintended consequences? Where are the models for the impact of these decisions? What are the numbers of collateral damage? There were no answers. Anywhere. That simply doesn't make rational sense.

tremon 4y ago
What unintended consequences are we talking about here? The problems in the article don't stem from lockdowns, they stem from delays caused by capacity problems in the healthcare system. So, if anything, the article describes the unintended consequences of those who deliberately kept fighting all measures to curb the spread of COVID.
- jl6 4y ago
  It seems pretty obvious that there are multiple contributing factors, including both long-standing capacity issues, the long-standing obesity issue, and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  > So what is going on? Experts believe decisions taken by the Government in the earliest stages of the pandemic may now be coming back to bite. Policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment and primary care are finally taking their toll. That's in the first couple of lines. Those sounds unintended. Those are resulting in collateral damage.
- cameronh90 4y ago
  I can't speak for the nation as a whole, but during the third lockdown, my mental health went through the floor. I stopped exercising, became agoraphobic and developed panic disorder. It's about a year later now and after a ton of therapy and medication, I'm just about able to go outside again. I still can't really travel far but I managed to drive 2 miles yesterday and am really happy about that - though I did vomit afterwards. Unsurprisingly, my physical health is a lot worse now. I feel like I've aged a decade.

zeryx 4y ago

We have the same issues in Canada with our public health system. No one wants to talk about this, but my unpopular opinion is the real problem is our retirement program and lack of fertility - we're way too generous, and without a tax base there's only so much we can do. Unless a politician actually makes the unpopular move to cut retirement benefits or massively increase fertility this is only going to get worse.

bufferoverflow 4y ago
Increasing fertility won't do much for the next ~20 years. It takes a long time to raise a taxpayer. Automation is the way.
koshergweilo 4y ago
> Unless a politician actually makes the unpopular move to... massively increase fertility There is no magic political move to increase fertility. If there was Japan would have done it decades ago.
- snidane 4y ago
  Solving the unaffordability of housing crisis is the step needed to unblock fertility. The solution exist, yet it cannot be pushed forward in a democratic system as it creates a generational conflict. Hint: LVT
  - koshergweilo 4y ago
    Although I agree solving the housing problem will help fertility (personally I'm waiting to have kids until I get more permanent housing) it's definitely not the only thing stopping people from having kids. Rich people famously have low fertility and they don't have any trouble getting housing. Fertility, like homelessness, is a multivariable function that requires a multitude of policies and approaches. It's not a simple dial that one can move back and fourth.

K_W_McCairn_PhD 4y ago

[dead]

addicted 4y ago

I’ve noticed a resistance in the U.S. and UK to look outside. Both countries appear to believe they are unique or special and are simply unwilling to look at how the rest of the world is doing things. Almost all the questions and unknowns posed in this article can be answered by simply looking at neighboring European countries and seeing if they’re seeing the same levels of non COVID excess deaths.

loldk 4y ago

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

[flagged]

throwyawayyyy 4y ago
Many others predicted excess deaths owing to people skipping regular checkups/missing out on cancer treatments, etc etc. This was widely reported and debated as a cost of lockdowns. It's implausible that there would not be excess deaths owing to this effect. In which case, the question shouldn't be: "what is causing these excess deaths?", but "are there _excess_ excess deaths?". I.e. are there deaths which _can't_ be explained by several years of significant numbers of people not seeing their GPs? Added: I do agree that we shouldn't assume that mRNA vaccines are safe just because we want them to be, and large scale studies are required. But then large scale studies are, of course, happening. There'll be NHS reports on the long term effects of these vaccines for decades.

karol 4y ago

beeboop 4y ago

daenz 4y ago

sdenton4 4y ago
From the article: '“We are beginning to see the deaths that result from delay and deferment of treatment for other conditions, like cancer and heart disease, and from those associated with poverty and deprivation. '“These come through more slowly – if cancer is not treated promptly, patients don't die immediately but do die in greater numbers more quickly than would otherwise be the case.” 'The Government has admitted that the majority of the excess deaths appear to be from circulatory issues and diabetes – long-term, chronic conditions that can be fatal without adequate care.' These deaths are attributable to specific causes - chronic conditions not receiving proper ongoing care - which have nothing to do with the vaccines. Hell, vaccines /should/ be increasing the amount of ongoing treatment for these conditions, and helping people get back to regular checkups and the associated preventative / early-stage treatment. (noting of course that the current excess deaths are an extremely laggy indicator. the 'vaccines help' hypothesis should then be apparent in a year or two as the excess deaths come back down.)
- daenz 4y ago
  Yes, the article does a fantastic job of claiming their hypotheses as the only possibilities, while dishonestly ignoring others that would more severely undermine confidence in the state. I'm honestly surprised they're attributing deaths to lockdowns at all! That's a huge shift in the overton window. If you remember, that was also taboo. But I assume now it's ok to talk about because it can be framed in the louder, "not enough funding for healthcare" context.
  - malteof 4y ago
    It sounds like you really want it to be vaccines even though not much seems to be pointing towards that conclusion, be careful to avoid a bias. The article mentions cancer and cardiovascular chronic diseases.

regularfry 4y ago

Oh, for heaven's sake. It's not that patients delayed treatment. It's not the sodding vaccine. It's emergency medicine collapsing because A&E departments can't discharge. They can't discharge because there aren't enough social care workers. There aren't enough social care workers because a) Brexit, b) vaccine hesitancy, c) shit pay, and d) chronic underfunding of public services in general. Given that this is an article from the Telegraph, exactly how honest do you think they're likely to be about any of those factors?

regularfry 4y ago
As if by magic... https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172873728 https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172...

Guthur 4y ago

I think we can probably mostly agree this is the national government's fault one way or another. But for me it is complete irrationality to assume we just need to give more money to them and have the government fix it. The government has been siphoning money from the UK population at an ever greater rate while redistributing it to very large private organisations. It won't change by voting in some other bunch of cronies, they're all in the pockets of a great unelected one way or another. We need to wake up to the fact we all live in a facist oligarchy which is impossible to avoid when we let governments get this large.

Marazan 4y ago

The two main causes of excess excess death that Britian is seeing seeing are vascular issues and diabetes. Guess what two of the main long term effects we have seen with Covid are?

binbinbinbin 4y ago
Then why is the UK in particular doing so badly with this? A more-likely scenario is that this is the outcome of prioritising Covid (and avoiding Covid) over all other healthcare since March 2020, which has been a relatively unique factor with how our NHS has handled the pandemic.
- Marazan 4y ago
  Scotland isn't seeing the same excess death surge (there's a rise but no where near England and Wales levels).

jeroenhd 4y ago

Some insights from the Netherlands, the country right to the east of the UK: the healthcare system is still under extreme pressure and everyone important is pretending the pandemic is over. Nurses and other healthcare professionals have been quitting and are not planning to come back because there is no chance of increased pay (which only drives up the pressure to those still working in healthcare). Hospitals are working through their backlogs. Care that could be postponed has been postponed for two years and now with fewer healthcare professionals and medical issues left untreated for a while (even people starting on chemo got told to wait at some point) the recovery process is slow. This, of course, isn't great for the relatively large elderly population as they're very reliant on lots of healthcare. I don't know what the state of the NHS is these days, but I've heard distressing signals from all over the UK about people being unable to get a GP appointment in time and the entire hospital system being overworked. I don't know if it's politicians trying to cut more healthcare costs, the pandemic, Brexit, or everything at once, but the NHS doesn't seem to be doing well. Over here, we have all but stopped testing for COVID. It's seemingly presumed to be endemic by the government, much like other governments seem to do. In every sector sick leave has also been on the rise, as the government told us to expect; the consensus seems to be that the current variants of COVID aren't that much of a risk and we should just go back to normal and let the disease run its course. With reports of long COVID symptoms on the rise [0] I very much doubt that, but the government doesn't seem to care about sick people, so I'm not surprised. Excess mortality in the Netherlands has been high ever since the start of the pandemic [1]. Every time the virus spreads, excess mortality rises. The covid death rate [2] is claimed to be extremely low but at the same time COVID testing has also pretty much stopped, whereas previously anyone dying with COVID was also written up to have died with COVID. Based on the mortality graphs I'd say we've passed another COVID peak but nobody (I know, at least) takes an official tests so the statistics are very much flawed; wastewater analysis [3] seems to suggest a "hidden" endemic that coincides with the rise in excess mortality, though. My personal conclusion: we're in (or have just passed) yet another mass COVID spread event but everyone has grown tired of taking any anti-COVID measures, so they stopped caring. I dread to think what the winter is going to look like if the summer death toll is this high. The UK's COVID numbers seem to agree with a similar peak in positive tests but I don't know how well the reporting is done over the pond. There is also another factor at play: the extreme heat due to climate change we're facing in Europe. In (previously) unusually warm summers or cold winters, old and sick people have always had a tendency to die more often. The heat of the past few weeks definitely isn't the only cause, but I doubt it's not a factor this year with record heat reported all across England. As an aside: the amount of people here immediately jumping to the conclusion that vaccines are the cause is... quite depressing. We're still very much in a pandemic but everyone just seems to _want_ to blame vaccines while we, as a society, try our best to stuff our fingers into our ears and pretend we can't hear anything. Do whatever you want to feel better, blame the vaccine, blame Bill Gates, blame the lizard people running the Illuminati, but it won't solve the problem. [0]: https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/nearly-twice-as-many-cases-involving-long-term-symptoms-after-covid-19 https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/nearly-twice-as-many-cases-invol... [1]: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/31/excess-mortality-in-all-weeks-of-july https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/31/excess-mortality-in-al... [2]: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/sterfte https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/sterfte [3]: https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/rioolwater https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk/rioolwater [4]: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/