Indications from excess mortality monitoring in Europe are that at the height of the epidemic a lot of cases went undetected, i.e. deaths tested positive for the virus in some areas--those most heavily hit--only accounted for half the actual excess mortality. Numbers for the UK are more likely around 50,000. The only European country taking part in EUROMOMO (European Mortality Monitoring) where deaths from coronavirus closely mirror the excess mortality is Belgium, incidently the country with the highest death-rate in Europe and the only country that has counted deaths even without testing all suspect cases.ZIMDOGGY wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 6:57 amI initiially suspected that hunters might be inflated. For example what about all those people that died from pneumonia before, sousing they still die during Covid times and be pronounced to be killed from Covid ?
But my research to that thought led me to understand you can only be a coronavirus statistic if you have been tested positive for the virus.
Undoubtably a small number of people die with the virus rather than of it; but many more die of it undetected and uncounted--and that is before you start to look at countries where governments are actively "encouraging" their doctors not to record coronavirus-related deaths. There are also strong indications that the lockdown and better hygiene plus social distancing has reduced deaths from other infectious diseases as well. If you can keep nursing homes free from viruses whatever their name, fewer people will die. In Germany the flu season immediately collapsed with the first lockdown measures, a month earlier than normal.
All that is not to say that the effects of the various lockdowns should be beyond scientific scrutiny; and of course they are not. As everything else in this epidemic it's unprecedented and an ongoing situation. We learn something new every day. There are studies from Norway and Denmark which suggest that the effect of lockdown measures has been overestimated; yet both countries are also very aware of the situation in Sweden where the situation is on the one hand far from spiralling out of control but the death toll is much higher. Btw, the economic consequences in Sweden are expected to be on par with the European average because a) Sweden depends as much on trade as everyone else in Europe and b) business has slowed down within the country as well as people keep their distance.
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But hunters can indeed be inflated if you put too much oxygen into them ...