By doing that, cancer and cardiovascular disease are knocked off the top spots. Once you break those down into their constituent parts, the biggest killer is dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, with about 30,000 deaths a year (or, as we saw earlier, about 80 a day).
I often see charities and pressure groups saying things like “[this many] people are killed by [cause] every [period of time]”, and I wish they’d give the denominator — how many people die of other things every day? Is it a big number? I have no idea whether one person dying every two days of something is a big deal or not; there are a lot of people, after all.
Another complicating factor is talking about different types of causes. About 75,000 deaths a year, 200 or so a day, are “attributable to smoking” — but since smoking kills people by giving them, for instance, cancer, heart disease or dementia, it’s a bit meaningless to try to compare it to those things.
Now that the worst of the second Covid peak is (touch wood) behind us, we should reflect on just how much better it is than it was. We’ve been talking about how many people die on a normal day. But it hasn’t been normal: over the last 14 months, about 130,000 British people have died from Covid.
There’s been some dispute over that figure, so let’s look at it more closely. That 130,000 is the number of people who died within 28 days of a positive Covid test. Some people get annoyed about that, because they think it will include a lot of people who died of something else.
An alternative is to look at the number of deaths in which Covid was mentioned as a cause on the certificate. That’s 150,000. It wouldn’t have been the primary cause of death in every case, but more than 90% of them were, and even in the remaining 10%, the doctor who certified the death felt that the infection was relevant. I think it’s absolutely fair to say that Covid has killed somewhere in the region of 130,000 people in the UK: about 315-ish a day since the beginning of the first lockdown.
Let’s compare that to other outcomes, like the 3,880 dead of plague vs the 113 dead of “teeth” in 1665. The Covid figure is not — quite — as many as die of cancer or heart disease, but it’s very much in that ballpark. It’s four times as many as die of dementia. Depending how you want to break up the numbers, it’s either the biggest killer by miles, or one of the top three.
There’s another layer to that, of course. For much of the year, Covid hasn’t been killing anything like as many people as heart disease has, or cancer — it did all its work in a few horrible months in spring and winter. At the highest peak of both the two waves, the seven-day rolling average of Covid deaths, according to the death certificates, was a little over 1,300, compared to around 15 now. For those two periods, about 9,000 people died in a week from Covid alone. For a few weeks in March and April last year, and again in January and February this year, about 20,000 people (18,000 in England and Wales) died every week. Covid caused almost half of all deaths in the UK.
(But it’s all false positives, of course!)
There’s been a clamour in certain quarters lately to open up sooner; after all, if it really was down to one death a day (which, again, it’s not, but it will be soon) then that will be roughly at the level of fire deaths, at about 200 to 300 a year. And while we take fire safety seriously, we don’t shut down society to stop those 200 or 300 fatalities — or even the 1,500 or so on the roads. We accept those as part of the cost of doing business in society.
The difference, of course, is that if we fail to prevent one fire death, it is unlikely that it will lead to two fire deaths tomorrow. Unfortunately, the exponential nature of the pandemic means that one death from Covid isn’t something we can relax about.
The Great Plague of 1665 reached greater heights, after that August week: in September, over 6,000 were recorded a week, around 1.5% of the city’s population — and that is likely a major underestimate. But it died away over the winter and following spring, and by the time of the Great Fire, the following September, it had largely ended. (It appears to have been a myth that the fire ended the plague.)
Once the plague had gone, though, people still died of “impoſthume” and “surfeit”; they were still found dead in the Street at St Bartholomew the Leſs. I don’t know when only one plague death was recorded in a week, rather than 3,808 or 6,000; when the disease was on a par with “suddenly” and “sore legge” as a cause of death. But perhaps, when it did, the news had the same sense of sadness and optimism that we do in our own plague year.
Hopefully, London doesn’t now burn down.
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SubscribeThis period now reminds me of the ‘Phony War’, that time after Germany invaded Poland in Sept 1939, and till the invasion of France in May 1940, 8 months. A time where everything went on very tense, but pretty normal mostly, war had been declared, but the fighting had yet to come to UK.
I say this because I fear the first actual skirmish has been and gone and now the war is to come.
I could not find your normal annual total for Uk deaths, but 9000 X 52 = 468,000, and with your 130,000 covid deaths you neglected to say if the total of all deaths 2020-02021 exceeded the usual amount. I find your use of numbers in this article to be very Chivverish, or piling one onto another, tossing in all manner of secondary and tertiary numbers, and ending up with only the mood you wished to get across, and not the real data.
Daily Mail today, USA section, has let out the first actual artillery round across the borders. Inflation is here, and not Powell’s (of the Fed) 2%, which uses the CPI, but 4-10% ish, and that is right out of 1980’s recession where interest reached 20%, and inflation to 13.5%! Interest is zero now, wow! so there is not much to use to stop inflation but that going high, 10 year treasuries 1.7%, and using interest rates rise will blow it all up, but letting inflation get up will do it the same. The thing is it it ‘Transitory’ as Powell and Yellen say?
The world is massively in debt because of the insane lockdowns, where people did not work but were paid. Container ships arriving so fast they block the harbours, and then leave empty as we produce nothing, just buy. Productivity was rock bottom, but money supply doubled. Hard and soft assets have inflated from 12% – 100%. In USA Biden is raising pay, dumping 4 Trillion of Welfare in, which he calls ‘Human Infrastructure’ as gas onto the roaring fire…..The children uneducated, the businesses lost, Zombie Corporations walking blindly all over trying to devour living companies, and the stock market inflated to the highest P/E ever, and Irrational Exuberance abounding as most of the trillions went right to the top 0.1%, who have no use for it, so it did not enter the economy but merely inflated assets….. 90% of all the economic advisors on MSM say the boom and Bull run is unstoppable and we all are getting rich……But I have that ‘Uncomfortable Feeling‘, which is the word used before the 1929 crash, when it felt wrong, but everyone was making so much money they just kept buying more stock…
Please, Unherd, give us some stories on this economy, it is the REAL story, if I am right or wrong.
Thank you for that comment. This week has been a particularly disappointing one on Unherd–Is sex a right for men? and The third law of Pornodynamics. That’s light filler and every publication needs that to fill space, but let’s have articles on the big issues, and the covid economy is certainly one of those issues.
It’s strange, now that I think about it, Unherd has posted articles on every subject under the sun except how the world will deal with all the debt incurred through lockdowns and other covid containment measures.
Unherd will soon host a debate between Douglas Murray and Yanis Varoufakis on whether the EU deserves to survive. Interesting topic and I look forward to the video. Can Unherd host a similar debate between opposing experts on the viability of the monetary policy called Modern Monetary Theory relied upon by the Biden administration to support its printing of massive amounts of money to fund progressive economic policies? That would be worth watching.
I have a suggestion for a debate on another topic. (a good one for Tom Chivers perhaps).
The EU has just published it’s long term framework for how it will approach artificial intelligence and machine learning going forwards – and under all the tedious language, it is (just my opinion of course) outright bonkers – a technocratic behemoth with a strapping pair of thighs but a pin head has just taken a shotgun which it is pointing at it’s own foot, and is about to pull the trigger. Whatever UnHerd writers’ views about this, I hope they tackle this through one or more articles and a formal debate – especially about what the UK should do in response.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/proposal-regulation-laying-down-harmonised-rules-artificial-intelligence-artificial-intelligence
EDuB, thank you for the link, I will check out the podcast and respond.
Humanity has a wonderful propensity for acting like ‘Gadarene Swine’, and the impending Debt Crisis is yet another example. The only question is how high is the cliff we are about to plunge of?
Besides Santford’s apocalyptic salvo above, even UnHerd as your rightly say, will hardly touch this toxic subject.
Mr Gates doesn’t expect the crisis to be over until 2022-at the earliest- & unless he is distracted by his upcoming divorce, I fear he will get his way with a series of covid variants and the need for every man , woman & dog to be vaccinated in triplicate until we can emerge finally and see what a mess they have made of the world.
Actually what we are witnessing is the end stage of a very long period of economic policy driven by to huge misconceptions. (1) That government can and should rely on monetary policy to regulate demand. (2) That stagnating economies can be stimulated be making labour cheaper. The first mistake has resulted in exceptionally low interest rates, negative in some countries. This has stimulated growth by inflating asset price bubbles and has driven up private sector debt levels to record heights. The second mistake has removed incentive to increase labour productivity, which is the primary driver of increases in standards of living. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the issue by encouraging governments to use fiscal stimulus to increase demand. This will run the economy hot and hopefully put upward pressure of wages. The latter will stimulate investments that increase labour productivity. Wemay have some inflation in future but it will be driven by and lag wage increases, which is fine. Rapid growth with some inflation will gradually reduce debt burdens after which time interest rates can rise back to reasonable levels. All good.
Mr. Bryant–
These are the closest I could find for your listening pleasure: https://munkdebates.com/podcast/inflation
https://munkdebates.com/podcast/debts-and-deficits
Could we have another debate on the ineptitude of UK energy policy in the light of the plan for “net zero carbon.” These goals don’t add up and I fear that sometime around 2031 the economy is going to reach a point where we’ll look back on the pandemic as a minor problem.
Or we’ll just open up all our fireplaces , illegally chop down all the trees and the air will be thick with smoke , but we’ll keep warm.
I love the comments on Unherd. Like the publication they are usually intelligent without vitriol. Obviously I am including you in that group. You are one of the few individuals to mention the money flowing to zombie corporations. I heard one economist say it isn’t as bad as one thinks as Japan has been doing it for many years – but that is not pure capitalism. It’s just nonsense.
Agreed – amen to debate without heat, it makes for a much more civilized atmosphere compared to the rage machines, like twitter, or the graun btl.
The Graun have solved what they clearly felt was the irksome problem of readers comments that might express marked disagreement with some of their more annoying grievance mongerers
This easily done by simply not opening up comments on their articles.
When for example, did they last open up an article by hte insufferable Afua Hirsch or Nesrine Malik for reader comments?
Comments are free, facts are sacred??
For the Graun those days are long gone.
Exactly! Pre-covid, I considered myself left wing and read the Graun all the time. But the pro-lockdown, anti-human stance of the paper, and especially of the commenters, drove me away. I’ve been reduced to posting on the Daily Mail’s website, simply because “comment is free” there, for the most part. And to think I once gave money to the Guardian. More fool me.
Exactly the same for me, fellow spirit!
It’s pot luck on the mail online website. Ridiculously they can allow one comment on an article and then close it down without telling you so. I usually post on MSN which always post your comment except when their AI picks up specific words it does not like and tells you they are reviewing your comment.
I wish that what you say was true. Some of Tom’s excellent articles have been savaged by people with an unnecessary amount of vitriol. I guess it is a real consequence of the long lockdown that everyone is angrier and writing comments here and elsewhere is a way of letting off steam.
Hear hear. Intelligent, informative, a little tetchy on occasion but the posts and ripostes generally dont sink to ad hominem, unlike a myriad of online talking shops elsewhere. It is hard sorting the wheat from the chaff by regular “meedja” but unherd manages to keep to fact (mostly;-)
Interesting what you say about Japan, ‘we’ always seem to let them “off the hook” for some absurd reason.
This despite major scandals in recent years with, Olympus, Kobe Steel, Takata, Toshiba & Nissan to name but a few.
Then there is their Zero Immigration Policy even during the Vietnamese Boat People disaster. Also their dubious resumption of Whaling for ‘Scientific’ purposes, and off course question of the dreaded Ainu.
Do ‘we’ perhaps have a guilt complex about Japan for in the US’s case dropping two large bombs on them, or in the UK’s case ‘shafting’ them at the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1922, and the near concurrent abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty?
Perhaps it’s just an unacknowledged, grudging respect for their Japan first policy.
I think we let them off the hook because they’re ‘not-china’
“Lock & Load”! Eh Sanford?
They did, see the chart from the CEBM.
So let’s take it 130,000; Average age of a covid death 82.4.
One must ask, was it worth it? And is it still worth it?
The answer must be an unequivocal NO!
Average age for dying from living, 82.something or another
Thanks, but it still doesn’t really answer the question does it?
However perhaps it is too early to ask such a question, before we can fully asses the enormous financial and social damage that has been and continues to be caused.
I think you’re right – we don’t know. It will take a lot of working out how much was due to restrictions, how much due to the virus, how much due to the timing of restrictions, how much to ineffective testing and what the impact of not having restrictions would have been. Though India is giving us a clue as to what can happen when restrictions aren’t or can’t be put in place.
Thanks, so pragmatically this is only the beginning, I think we agree.
Impact of Long Covid too.
Yes indeed, that should run and run!
Gosh I’m glad I have no future, just the great ‘leap in the dark’ and the fabled Elysian Fields, and ambrosia for eternity.
However I do get the impression that “mine angry and defrauded young”* might be a little irritated as to how us ‘baby boomers’ have pillaged the the place in an orgy of self indulgence that almost rivals Nero himself. ( but not quite it must be said).
‘Occ est vivere’ = That is too live! As the Ancients said.**
(*thank you Mr Kipling).
(**Timgad, Forum, Algeria today).
To be fair a lot of the older generation have had much sympathy with the youngsters. I don’t think they voted for lockdown. My 86 year old mother has continued to go out shopping and walking throughout the last two lockdowns. It’s the government’s disastrous handling and lack of imagination that has caused the problems.
Given that the average nursing home resident has a year to live and that at least a third of covid victims died in nursing homes, fair to assume the average 80year covid-19 victim wouldn’t have lived till 90.
Chivverish – a good description. I stopped reading after a few paragraphs. I don’t need another article on how to lie with statistics.
Agree. I ended up scanning down the article, thinking that it doesn’t matter what the statistics say, the government will not let go of the power it’s claimed for itself.
There is an uneasy euphoria in the air. Ive heard a lot of “the Chinese economy booming”, the “UK economy recovering”,”the companies are massively undervalued”, “stock market is picking up”. And on what basis? Perhaps because people expect everything will fall into tandem very soon. There is so much liquidity in the market due to quantitative easing. The bank balances are looking healthy and the markets are being buoyed by speculation. The government will have to keep giving out stimulus for a long while till the fear it has put into peoples minds actually abates. There is a lot riding on how the people will behave now. At the moment it seems people have a lot of confidence in their governments and their ability to save us from a perceived threat.
Whatever the outcome, change seems to be forthcoming . Change can be very disruptive too .
Great expression that, “an uneasy euphoria in the air”.
Thank you.
It would be good to see some debate on the different economic views. My concern is that it would be really hard to do it justice in the Unherd format. Not saying it shouldn’t be tried but to pin down the parameters for debate would be difficult. Unherd tends to be a reactionary type of publication, in the sense that it publishes articles that are always a reaction to something that has been published or said elsewhere.
If we take your assertion ‘The world is massively in debt because of the insane lockdowns, where people did not work but were paid.’
If the world is in debt who is it in debt to? It must be to itself. How can it be in debt to itself? What’s the problem if people get paid but didn’t work? Right at the beginning we get into a discussion of what economics is and what basic concepts like ‘debt’, ‘work’ and ‘paid’ mean.
Frankly since the demise of Disqus, as you may remember, it near is impossible to have a ‘running’ debate over a few days.
Now it is really just ‘fire & ; forget’, and off into the ether goes any possibility of serious discourse.
Perhaps that is how UnHerd prefers it?
Well, a day later, an accurate assessment. A pity, I think. But we got to vent!
We’ve had debt before. Slave owners compensation, World wars, financial crashes. We appear to have survived. I’d like to think we will survive this too.
The household budget analogy is fallacious, and it is both persistent and pernicious. Until you clear your mind completely of it, understanding macroeconomics is impossible.
Annual UK deaths have chugged along at about 590,000pa over the the last five years.
And yes, the economy, and the health of the nation in five years, are the two real stories.
They’ve not been that low.
2015 602782 65110000 0.93%
2016 597206 65648100 0.91%
2017 607172 66040200 0.92%
2018 616014 66435600 0.93%
2019 615455 67530172 0.91%
2020 686000 67886011 1.01%
Afraid you are quite right. I have been looking at all those odd indicators. The gold -silver ratio. The deposit -lending ratio. Both way out of kilter. That is before we get to the inflation rate which looks to be truly as you say . Close to 10% .
The problem is really simple. The West in a state of panic thought it could defy reality by closing down our ecosystem ( our economy ) and using MMT ( which is a load of rubbish) keep social harmony and ride it out.
Insane of course but I am not in power . As usual the 1% have grabbed most of the money and used to buy up real assets.
The poor got a few crumbs just to stop them hitting the streets .The middle class will be wrecked for generations .
All shows that the time honoured way of dealing with a crisis is always the best. Think, then think again and then again and only if you have the odds on your side do you act.
Should have read the Odyssey and studied how Odysseus took back his kingdom.
Strictly speaking we must now consider the West to be in terminal decline and in a pre revolutionary state. Which way that will go is anyone’s guess.
Remember all those gold hoards that we have dug up. The people that hid them did it thinking they would come back. They rarely did.
That might be an issue of selective observation. We know about the gold hoards that people buried and didn’t come back for (because we find some of them), but we have no idea how many gold hoards people buried and did come back for, because there is no evidence left of the burial and retrieval. So we have no idea of the number of hoards which were never retrieved as a proportion of the total that were buried.
(Sorry to be picky, but it is a rather important factor to remember.)
amen brother-I have spent much time trying to get my head around how the global financial system works – and how the effects of money printing will pan out in the real world – and actually what is the real nature of a country”s debt when it is mostly owed by the country itself !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Recently read that Italy’s enormous debt burden is not actually such a big deal because it is owed internally. And if its all not such a worry then why did we not spend on crucial social areas in the past – as Bernie Sanders said. WTF is actually going on – Go UNHERD AND GET SOMEONE who can unpick all that for us – and thanks to Sanford for his great efforts !
You should allow that government indebtedness was enormous before 2020 and the trajectory was unsustainable. No one believes that most of this will be redeemed, only rolled over. Not just Greece and Italy, even US and Japan are surely insolvent in that they can not conceivably pay back what they owe. That they won’t be asked to and are not tested thus is not the point.
The use of the public purse to alleviate the immediate impact of lockdown and the QE necessary to facilitate that has greatly accelerated something that was already well established.
Like you I fear inflation and look at money supply numbers and other indicators that appear to be harbingers of that.
Who knows, even if you are quite certain of the outcome it is not clear how to prepare for it.
A good article with one major flaw in my opinion, Tom is still “assuming” lockdown measures and masks etc have reduced the severity of Covid infections and deaths. Real world evidence and comparisons of the last 14 months of countries and US States who didn’t lockdown or applied much less stringent lockdown measures against those like the UK that did, disprove that our lockdown measures and wearing of masks worked in reducing deaths from Covid19.
Why not “open up sooner”? I read Tom’s explanation with interest, as I’ve been looking for someone to offer a good reason. His answer is that the exponential nature of the virus means one covid death prevented today will likely save more covid deaths tomorrow, so we can’t “relax” about it.
Sorry Tom, if this argument is valid, it is also valid on May 17 and June 21, because there will still be covid cases and death then (quite possibly at similar levels to now). It is an argument for not opening up at all.
Tom Chivers makes his mind up and then pushes his agenda. No real analysis, he doesnt even bother answering the comments on his articles.
Covid.. like all the other respiratory viruses, isn’t going away any time soon… probably never. Humans will simply learn to live with it.. same as we do with flu and TB etc. We dont destroy the economy for those diseases do we?
I think a big problem is the media and its addiction to the gravy train of covid stories. They are not alone e though. Far worse are the otherwise insignificant “experts” who now have a prominence they never dreamed of. A more robust and confident govt would be gone with those meddlesome priests of doom.
“scientists should be on tap, but not on top” *
(* as Churchill & others have said for eons).
The current hyperspecialisation of disciplines means that experts behave like single issue fanatics. The SAGE committee, as fas as I can tell, has no economist on it. So while the medics on the committee are right in arguing their narrow perspectives about spread and prevention, there are few arguing that all actions have costs and consequences, nothing is risk free. I would like see a debate on how do you balance the competing risks between a disease that predominantly kills the elderly against a cure (lockdown) that predominantly affects the life chances and future of young people.
what risks are worth taking and when? If Boris made the remark of bodies piling high, he was expressing this very dilemma: at what cost should each COVID life be saved?
You can’t put a cost on a human life.
If the restrictions and destruction of society, livelihoods, education and people’s health save just one person from Covid then they’re worth it.
Up voting you to remove the down vote from the person who doesn’t recognise sarcasm…
Heavy sarcasm is just tedious, though.
I only hope it is sarcasm.
From me it is, from some people it’s their basic argument.
As I said weeks ago, the looniest single sentence I have heard during the pandemic was from the unnamed member of the public interviewed on BBC Radio 4. This sage declared that no cost was too high to save a life – a trillion pounds, whatever. This is seven times the annual cost of the NHS.
As an extreme case, you might spend £500 million sending someone into orbit if you thought zero gravity might extend their life – as per John Hurt’s cancer ridden billionaire in “Contact”. Otherwise you are stuck on the NICE rule of £50K max for each quality year of life extension.
That argument would carry more weight if data showed that restrictions have lowered death and hospitalisations. However, it shows the opposite. Real world data now of 14 months demonstrates that lockdown and other restrictions like masks have done nothing to reduce deaths and hospitalisation from Covid-19. Absolutely zero correlation.
that depends whether the measure you take to avoid the covid death removes or diminishes a life of somebody else….
In fact we regularly put a cost on a human life.
The NHS has being doing this for decades, what with obesity scales, no to treatments for smokers, and so on. We do it with traffic measures – each fatality is costed, and if the cost is too high (too many fatalities) they’ll see whether they can change the junction, the lights, the driving on the hard shoulder, or whatever it is. As for businesses, they do it as a matter of course, the pharmaceutical business clearly does it, as does the car industry – working along the lines of “If we make x profit, and we get y deaths, are we still making a wodge of wonga?”
That is as misanthropic a comment as someone saying “let the bodies pile high”.
It may be misanthropic but it’s true. In the 80s I contacted our local council re having a pedestrian crossing installed on a busy road near me. I pointed out that the only crossings were at either end of a road roughly half a mile long. This despite the fact that the main primary school was one side of the road, many children lived on the other side plus there was a doctor’s surgery & a bus stop. The man from the council came to see me & said, very apologetically, that he thought there should be a crossing but there hadn’t been enough accidents. Once the cost of the accidents passed the cost of installing a crossing then one would be put in place
I know what you mean. If they put a committee of dentists in charge of the country for a year all sugar would be banned, there would be compulsory weekly dental checkups and cameras in every bathroom to make sure we’re all flossing. We’d have nice teeth, but that’s not really a world I’d want to be a part of.
Sounds remarkably like the world we’re living in now.
have they engineered a smart tooth brush then?
Great analogy.
SAGE people are not even mostly qualified medics. Some are “behavourial scientists” and the like – ie not really scientists at all, but social activists.
Agree Vikram. A red team of scientists like Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan etc would also be a very good idea. Because, as I have said earlier real-world data proves that lockdown and mask wearing have not reduced deaths and hospitalisations from Covid19. So, the whole lockdown policy doesn’t even work let alone considering the other costs, financial and health related.
Dept. of Health and Social Care + ONS + the Actuarial Dept. had a go at trying to quantify the collateral damage in terms of health, social care and increasing economic deprivation way back in July of last year :
“Direct and Indirect Impacts of COVID-19 on Excess Deaths and Morbidity: Executive Summary”
It is 188 pages long but does have an executive summary. It will be very interesting to see how accurate their predictions are as time rolls on.
I thought the SAGE committee was supposed to tell about the pandemic, what might happen, what could be done about it, and what the consequences would be. For economic consequences we have the treasury. And for balancing the different considerations we have the government. You do not want SAGE to govenr Britain, do you?
” I think it’s absolutely fair to say that Covid has killed somewhere in the region of 130,000 people in the UK: about 315-ish a day since the beginning of the first lockdown.”
Sorry to bang on but this is not true.. It is “within 28 days of a :”positive test result”” not FROM Covid.. this myth must be busted if we are ever to get out of the doom news cycle.
If you had read the article, you would know that it talks about both the 28 days figure and the figure obtained from death certificates. These are not the same measure, but both roughly agree on the 130000 figure.
It doesn’t mention that the cycle rate for the PCR tests was set so that 85%+ false positives would ensue. Or that the creator of the PCR test stated clearly it was not resigned to detect specific infectious diseases. At the high cycle counts used, an old particle of Coronavirus cold would give you a positive test. What we have had is a pandemic of false positive PCR tests and mortality rates for those actually killed BY Covid, not died and had had a positive test are no worse than any other recent year. Shame about the economy and all those lives lost to “save the NHS”.
There also seems to be a tendency to quote “cases” since the deaths figure stopped being so scary, and conveniently ignoring the fact that about a third of the cases were asymptomatic.
Yes and my gp practice is still not open except for vaccinations of course! I had to pick up a form for a blood test. All business is now conducted through a tilted window in the wall of what was the waiting room. You queue up outside &, thanks to the masks & the road traffic noise, you have to shout & repeat everything 2 or 3 times. There was a young man in front of me & he told me I could go in front of him. As I was leaving he told the elderly man behind me the same. He was either extremely courteous or, more likely, he wanted to talk without the world hearing. The irony is that,in normal times, there is a sign at the receptionist’s desk asking you to keep back & respect the privacy of patients at the counter!
So what do you think the covid deaths were actually attributable to? Unless a large majority of doctors are either incapable of telling or are prejudiced in favour of attributing deaths to covid, the deaths where covid is mentioned as a factor on the death certificate seem to be a decent guide and that number is higher than – but reasonably consistent with – the ‘died within 28 days’ number. It’s fair enough to argue about the merits of lockdowns, but I can’t see any point in arguing that covid has not killed something around 130k people in the UK.
It’s certainly killed many tens of thousands I agree Michael. however, I personally know of 2 long term cancer sufferers who dies from their cancer but are recorded in the figures for Covid19. There are a lot of excess “deaths at home” from the collateral damage of a closed health service. These make up a good number of the 10% or so excess deaths the UK saw in 2020 and will see I estimate something like 7% excess deaths in 2021. however, I agree that the number of deaths is well up into the tens of thousands (probably around the CFR rate of 0.15% as calculated most recently, so around 100K.
Untreated heart problems and cancer and other serious illnesses, suicide, maybe untreated injuries, domestic violence, strokes. Most of the country is now afraid of catching covid in an NHS facility. The rest of us are so angry that we never intend to set foot in an NHS facility again. Actually, that latter group may just be me.
What is your evidence for this? Why was COVID recorded on these people’s death certicates?
(There is no good evidence that suicides have risen, for example).
Thanks for the link. I’ve seen other links saying suicides haven’t risen but the same article says that UK coroners were behind in their work. We can play duelling stats all you want. It doesn’t get rid of the basic fact that people die from things other than covid. I was simply listing some of the possibilities.
But I wasn’t denying that people die from things other than COVID. You were responding to Michael Dawson’s question “So what do you think the covid deaths were actually attributable to?” so you were claiming that these certified COVID deaths were attributable to those other things. Can you explain your evidence for this? Why are you better able to certify the cause of death than the doctors who signed the certificates?
Oh, and reading more of your linked article, I’m interested to read
Personally, my mental health has suffered during these repeated lockdowns, and certainly haven’t felt any concern emanating from the government – or anyone, for that matter – about my well-being. Community? Don’t make me laugh.
Perhaps I’m lucky that I was able to pull myself out of a tailspin during the first lockdown because I chose to become angry about what was happening, rather than simply accepted what the government has imposed.
I agree Daphne. I have also coped with the depression all the doom & gloom caused by getting really angry. The problem is this also leads to stress. I’m epileptic (sorry Leonard Cheshire I don’t give a to** what you think I should call myself) & had my first full fit in 40 years 2 weeks ago. I was advised by the paramedics to see my GP – at least that gave me a good laugh
Coroners famously do anything they can to avoid calling something a suicide, why? Because if at all possible they do not wish to upset the family left behind .
Given that the average age of those dying is 83.2, being old is almost certainly the cause of vast numbers of such deaths.
Whatever happened to good (or rather, bad) old-fashioned flu?? Maybe that’s a hefty part of your answer, Michael.
PCR tests are extremely sensitive and extremely specific. If PCR says you have COVID RNA in your bloodstream, you have COVID RNA in your bloodstream, and it could only come there if you had the virus. True positive. It may have been a while ago since you were sick, since the test is so sensitive, but that does not make it ‘False’. You just have to be clear what you are talking about.
As for the ‘died with COVID’ stuff, just read the article. The number of people who died within 28 days of a positive test is about the same as the ones where doctors gave COVID as the principal cause of death.
It doesn’t mention it because it’s false. If you look at all the positives over last summer and assume all of them were false, the FPR is at worst about 0.04% (referring to ONS’s page “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey pilot: England, 17 July 2020” where they say “For example, in our most recent six weeks of data, 50 of the 112,776 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.96%” and so the FPR 100% – 99.96% = 0.04%).
This is also false, the total mortality rates for last year and early this year are much higher than recent years, and most of the (EDIT: excess) were people with COVID on the death certificate.
Once again, the reason nobody’s listening to the UnHerd commenters’ consensus opinions on the virus/lockdown etc. isn’t because of some vast conspiracy, but because you mostly don’t know what you’re talking about. Where’d that 85% figure come from?
The death certificate figure IS the 28 day figure.
Furthermore, the government and the NHS and the ONS have admitted that their given number is about 50,000 too high.
“The death certificate figure IS the 28 day figure.”
No. See “Deaths solely from COVID-19 rather than deaths within 28-days of a positive test” ONS March 15 2021
” …their given number is about 50,000 too high.”
Where is this documented ?
I have looked high and low on the ONS website and can’t find it.
The UK excess deaths data does not support the opinion that Covid killed 130,000 people. It’s at most half that number.
You are right. The difference between ‘from’ and ‘with’ is rarely noted.
It really depends on the meaning of ‘positive test result’. If somebody has symptoms of Covid and goes for a test, and is dead 28 days later, then they probably died from Covid. If they test everyone coming into a hospital for any cause, then the connection between a positive result and death is much less firm, because there’s a good chance they had something else that could have killed them.
Presumably those responsible for producing statistics drill down into such issues.
…and then ignore said issues.
“If somebody has symptoms of Covid and goes for a test, and is dead 28 days later, then they probably died from Covid.”
Really? The only person I know who died within 28 days of a positive test was a 94 year old who died from a mixture of old age and cancer – she had nary a single symptom of the Covid, which is why the hospital sent her home whilst she was still allegedly positive for it.
What did the death certificate say ?
Were you providing her health care ? If not, how do you know what symptoms she had ?
Yes. They are called “Doctors” who are required to fill in the 1a,b,c and 2 parts of the death certificate.
There is an interesting paper in the BMJ about how deaths in 2020 compare to previous years.
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n896
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#map-of-z-scores gives the big picture on year by year deaths.
I’m an actuary. I am literally qualified in death statistics. One of the great advantages of “within 28 days” is that it’s a relatively objective measure. Yes, it’s systematically high but on the plus side there’s no need for a Doctor to make a judgement as to how the death of a cancer patient with COVID should be classified.
Except that it’s completely counter to the way that death statistics were calculated in the past. It’s like saying that if someone with cancer dies in a car wreck, they put cancer on the death cert, even if it was Stage 1 of an entirely treatable cancer.
Correct.
That is why we have death certificates and why ONS use these as their preferred method of counting deaths.
You really have to put this into more recent historical context. Rather than worry about ancient plagues, how about a look at the last 50 years, and recognising that Covid-19 testing has been, by government admission, ‘pretty rubbish’, (i.e fairly useless), the only measure that makes sense is excess mortality, averaged over one, three, five and ten year periods.
Why? well, because a very light flu year will soon be followed by a heavy one, due to the ‘dry tinder ‘ effect.
Imagine for one moment that we could prevent all deaths for the next 5 years. At that point there would be several million aged people in Gods waiting room, and most of the rest of the population would be employed looking after them.
But, over the last 50 years or so, what we see is that despite a growing and aging population, in general, even taking last year into account, people are living longer lives than ever, and that life expectancy continues to rise. The average age of death with Covid-19 was 82, which is higher than the average life expectancy.The overall effect of Covid-19 on UK population is zero.
Very true Robert. The age adjusted mortality rate for 2020 is the second highest since 2003 but is lower than all years before 2002. however, that doesn’t scare the proverbial out of the population and so has never been raised by any mainstream media outlet.
The average life expectancy thing is a canard repeated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. The figure you’re quoting refers to live expectancy at birth. As @FactsThen on Twitter writes: “Life expectancy table shows for 85 yr olds: only 9% die within 12 months and on average live another 6 yrs. A third of those live a lot longer than another 6 yrs.” (FactsThen is referring to the data from National life tables: UK from the ONS).
Apart from all the dead people, I guess?
Your argument doesn’t hold water.
The average age of dying is x.
Average age of people dying with Covid is also x.
The fact that they are x years old doesn’t mean that they should live any longer, because the average life expectancy remains x.
No. According to the Actuaries (you know, those people who deal with death and destruction every day) 80 – 89 year olds in the UK right now, with 2 long term conditions can expect to soldier on for another 5 years at least. They are the toughies.
The “average age of dying” relates to life expectancy at birth not when you reach 80.
Well said Sir.
Well, apart from what he said being factually wrong.
No. Life expectancy at birth means “if the chance of death at a particular age stays the same as it is today, how long could a child born today expect to live?” This is a different question with a different answer if we substitute “someone who is 85 today” for “a child born today” (because we already know they didn’t die in the previous 85 years).
Again, I don’t expect everyone to be able to do the maths, but I do expect those who can’t not just to make stuff up.
Won’t average age of dying go down as a result of all the Covid deaths finishing off people who might have had another ten years in them?
Easy to disprove:
Imagine that the average age of dying is 82 – and that the the government decides to kill everybody when they turn 82. The average age of those being executed is also 82, but you pretty obviously lose a lot of life years.
A few years back there was an episode or two of the Doctor Who spin off which was all about people staying alive, and then what happened when things were changed back to normal.
I believe Covid will return, at least to some extent, in the autumn/winter.
Absolutely, we are only in the foothills, the long slog to the summit has yet to begin.
You never fail to cheer me up.
“Death where is thy sting?” *
(* I Corinthians 15:55)
You mean the idea that covid will be amongst us, and thus the MSM fear factory will krank out all the death and destruction pieces again, confirming it’s presence…flu deaths will be ignored and recorded as covid, slowly increasing the number of deaths until it becomes an absolute necessity to lock us up again, keep wearing masks, keep social distancing, close “non-essential” businesses…
…In summer last year I said (not based on anything other than a complete absolute and utter mistrust of .gov) that the winter would be the time they would lock us all up again. Next winter will be the same.
A man in the ‘churches covid group’ within government said recently (probably shouldn’t have done) that restrictions will be re-imposed later this autumn.
They haven’t got the social credit and national ID Card system set up yet, so they’ll need to ramp up the fear again to remind everyone why they need to “comply”. This isn’t over until any prospect of freedom is completely and permanently exterminated.
One possible source of hope it that they may feel they have to keep us terrified until tomorrow because that will gain votes. After that their policies can become more consistent with, er, The Science.
I don’t really believe that, though. I said a year ago that they never intended to set us free and nothing has happened since to change my mind.
I think that is a good assumption, but what will the clowns in Downing Street do. The other SARS viruses seem to have vanished so we can live in hope.
That’s not exactly sticking your neck out, is it? ‘at least to some extent, in the autumn/winter’ could mean more or less anything, given how low cases are now. 3,000 cases a week on average for a month next January, or 50,000 across the winter months? Both would be covered.
I agree Fraser. However, as the disease is no longer “novel” nd there is mass immunity as a result of both previous infection and vaccination it will be just another low level endemic respiratory virus in my opinion.
Mutations are the scare story that keeps on giving at the moment and I’m sure won’t be a problem in terms of getting round our immunity sufficiently to cause serious illness or death in al but a very small proportion of the population.
However, let’s keep throwing billions at test and trace and sequencing why don’t we????
Follow the money to see why “scientists” are still largely trying to keep this juggernaut rolling on ad infinitum.
Yes, Covid and ‘climate change’ are very little more than vehicles for so-called scientists to scam governments all over the world.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve been here before. – In one short line, Tom answers his own question. No, we’ve not seen the end of Covid. Over here, there are self-aggrandizing public officials dangling the carrot of “full opening,” whatever that really means around July 1st. So, almost two months of teasing before one of those people rips the rug out from under the citizens who pay his salary.
We will never see the end of Covid until we see the end of the BBC.
It has to perpetuate the fear to survive
Rather like the Church, particularly the Roman Catholic variant.
Yes this whole Covid debacle demonstrates perfectly how religions gain traction and proliferate. As The Queen says in Alice in Wonderland “Sometimes I’ve believed 6 impossible things before breakfast”
Apparently this wretchedly appalling govt has just handed the BBC 8 million to correct ‘misinformation’! There is simply no end to the evil of it all.
I may have lost track in amongst all the humorous deaths by “fore bolokf” and “arfe “, but does Tom ever answer the question in the title?
To be fair, the Chivster was probably set an essay question “discuss COVID for 2,000 words in any way that seems interesting” – by his line editor, and someone else stuck the headline on top. So the question set may not be the one in the headline.
can a rhetorical question truly be answered?
I read somewhere that whenever an article has a question in the title, the answer is always “no”. I suspect that’s the answer Tom intends to give here.
Indeed. Where would we be without rhetorical questions? (Don’t answer that)
As CV19 is a respiratory disease it appears to be generally accepted that it is a seasonal phenomenon with the colder winter months seeing much greater prevalence and mortality in the temperate zones. The virus seems to have arisen and been identified in the late spring months of 2020 so that its first calendar year appears to have suffered two “seasons” with presumably inflated mortality.
Will it not be more informative to examine rates on an annual basis, calendar or rolling, once we have 2 full years of data available?
Might that not prove it’s just a worse variant of normal flu, of which there’s never been found a vaccine? etc. Unless there’s something they aren’t telling us or can’t tell us as they don’t know,
The “earliest” case of COVID outside China which I have heard of was the guy who was seriously ill in a Paris hospital. Samples taken on 27th Dec 2019 later tested positive. He recovered. So we can safely bet that the virus was being transmitted all over the world at that date.
“…but what are people dying of, now that they aren’t dying so much of Covid? How do those averages of 15 coronavirus deaths a day compare to the other big killers?”
They are dying of the same things that they have been dying of all through the Covid panic in spite of the fact that anything that could possibly be was blamed on Covid…next you’ll be wondering why all of a sudden people are dying of flue.
True story: one county in Colorado reported five deaths from Covid. This included two people who were gunshot victims.
Dying of “flue”?!
Have we started sending small children up chimneys again?
That’s a pretty pathetic response, Dominic. Not funny, just sad.
Susan, ffs get a life! There’s still time.
The problem with this article is that, like most of the covid articles, looks at covid through the filter of covid.
Such an article should start by looking at what is normal and what has changed in relation to causes of death. It should look at asking what the changes in rules for death certification has done to the numbers and only then can start suggesting some conclusions. One need to stand back and look what happened over the last 10 or more years: what are the trends etc. And then suddenly everything looks different and covid was a bit of a shock but maybe not as dangerous for most people as is being portrayed.
The discussion on covid should have been pluridisciplinary but sadly was run by a few scientist who look at viruses only (with blinkers on). Note that a virus is not an illness and an illness is not an epidemic: there are so many factors involved once we start thinking epidemic and what are the appropriate measures to take……so we do not cause more suffering ad death that we ty to ‘save’ and look worldwide than juts in our back garden. As far as I can see I am not sure the western governments have done a very good job, unless one holds shares in the health industry… or one is only worried about his parents and ignores the rest…
The perspective we take changes the narrative considerately.
Yes, but… In the previous nine years, there were no exceptional measures being taken against contagious diseases. Since last March, there obviously have been – a lot! You have to take this basic difference into account when looking at the seriousness of covid. Imagine a counter-factual where everyone just carried on as normal, regardless of the severity of the pandemic. That’s what happens in the other nine years. OK, you’d need a good imagination for 2020/21, because the NHS would clearly be overwhelmed and much of society would grind to a halt/collapse for a period of weeks or a few months. That would give you a more realistic idea of the potential seriousness of covid. Of course, it’s not a realistic scenario because, whether or not the government intervenes, people change their behaviours when confronted with a serious and potentially deadly disease. But it is the right benchmark to apply when comparing covid with normal flu years.
Sky did a package about whether we should be “allowed” foreign holidays . They spoke to a couple of people with masks. One was so anxious he was shaking “are you crazy” he said. That was then interpreted bySky to show that people were nervous. Sadly that is the sorry sort of nonsense thats going on and i don’t expect Tom Chivers to ignore Bayes theorem and encourage it.
Lies, damned lies etc…
Sadly I don’t believe a single number relating to covid cases or deaths, with the Government, the mainstream media and the likes of Chris Whittey being responsible.
Anecdote is a very poor substitute for data, but when I’m told I’m coming out of the back end of a ‘pandemic’ involving a deadly disease, yet out of my most immediate circle of about 500 family, friends, colleagues and neighbours, I only know one person who has died “with covid”. That individual was in their mid to late 90’s and in very poor health.
The reasons for not trusting the figures are numerous and varied, including the following, several of which impact on the others:
The official figures are therefore almost meaningless. It’s reasonable to say that covid was a major factor in the deaths of many people in the UK in the last 16 months, probably in the region of 100,000, plus or minus 50,000.
Since we’ve never tested for flu quite so obsessively, all we can therefore thinking we know is that covid may be about as dangerous as a typical flu strain, up to being the equivalent of a very nasty, but not especially rare flu-strain (eg 1958).
No offence, but the PCR test is known to *not* produce false positives. As Paul Wright writes above:
If the PCR test says you have COVID RNA in your bloodstream, you have. Which means you have had COVID at some point. The LFT test is known to have a *higher* false positive rate, by the people who make it. It also has a higher false negative rate. LFT is both less reliable and less sensitive. If you want to say that PCR counts people as positive after they are no longer seriously ill, by all means say so, but please stick to normal English instead of using words when you clearly do not understand what they mean.
No offence taken, though your final words would offend some.
To be clear though, a test such as ‘PCR’ does not have a single false positive rate. The rate in any particular situation will be dependent on a number of factors, including the prevalence of a disease in the test group (which is fundamental), the number of cycles, the quality of the swab sampling, the training of the individual(s) performing the analysis, the controls in the lab running the test, their performance on any particular day etc. ie there is not a single FPR, rather the OFPR will vary over time, from place to place.
Furthermore, I think you may be seriously underplaying the significance of a test which generates a positive result within a person who is not ill with a disease, either because they were never particularly ill, or because they have recovered, or because they simply have some viral matter in their mucous. I had norovirus a few weeks ago. Assuming I took a test today which managed to detect it and I dropped dead tomorrow, I would not have died ‘from’ norovirus. A lot of people will have fragments of covid in their systems but will not be ill from it, hence if they happen to die within 28 days of such a positive test result, it tells you nothing in itself. Furthermore the symptoms of covid are not unique – other than the loss of sense of smell/taste which is quite unusual, every other common symptom is triggered by a huge range of other diseases, ie it cannot be identified with any certainty by most symptoms alone.
I’m not denying covid exists, I’m not denying that it kills people. I’m simply pointing out that the numbers we are given are so fantastically compromised by a range of factors (of which I just gave a few), that they are not particularly useful.
If you believe the ‘true’ figure can be more precisely calculated, then that is fine, noting that determining ’cause of death’ is often more of an art than science, hence some imprecision is inevitable.
I apologise – I should have been more polite. Thanks for answering anyway.
On the technical point: The ‘false positive rate’ (FPR) of a test is defined as the fraction of positives you get if you test a group where everybody is healthy. So it does *not* depend on the prevalence of the disease in the population. The probability that you have COVID if the test says you have COVID is another matter. That *does* depend on the prevalence, and on the FPR. If COVID is very rare most of the positives may be false (and there will be very few positives to start with), but the FPR will still be the same low value. It just gets really confusing if you are using the words to mean something else, and it becomes hard to find out what you are actually saying. The other factors you list certainly do impact on the sensitivity and accuracy of the test, but in the specific case of PCR the main effect would likely be to make you miss cases. PCR is so specific that you would only get extra false positives if the samples were polluted with material that contains COVID, or if the test was badly made and picked non-COVID RNA form another source.
On the important point: The data in this article plus links give us:
Dead within 28 days of a positive test: 130 000
That is likely an overestimate, but given that COVID is a new disease and the majority have not had it (yet) there is a limit to how far out the numbers can be – especially since the majority of the population has not had a PCR test either.
Death Certificates: 135000 as principal cause of death, 15000 as contributory cause of death.
That is an independent data source. It depends on doctors’ judgement, but it could in principle be either an over- or an under-estimate.
And then, as the article points out, for brief periods at the peaks of the pandemic, half the deaths in the UK were attributed to COVID.
These data are not perfect – no data ever are – but they are consistent. And they suggest a very large number of people have died from COVID.You do not even disagree with that, apparently. Other data (independent of false PCR positives) are saying that COVID is several times as dangerous as flu, that COVID patients require much more ventilator care etc. than flu patients (flu has never overloaded intensive care units the way that COVID did this time), and that COVID aftereffects (long COVID) are much more serious than flu aftereffects. So, I do not understand why it matters so much to you that (you think) the test is flawed. If these are the consequences of COVID are they not worth avoiding?
The official figures are propaganda. As you say, most people know no-one who has died of Covid, or been desperately sick with Covid and in many parts of the world, even tested positive despite the dodgy nature of the PCR test.
I can completely understand where you are coming from. My experience is the reverse. I know a lot of people who have had the disease, been very ill with it and sadly died (although tbf I personally didn’t know the deceased but would count the people who did know them as established friends). I know two people who have been hospitalised twice in one case and 4 times in the other. By contrast in 59 years I have only ever known one person who had the flu and shook it off eventually.
And the Vaxx stats ??
big difference with the plague and first wave.
Not in the forecasters spreadshits .. will they have to get a real job soon ?
All of which misses the point that death is not the only morbidity associated with Covid.
If we really look at analysis, and we should, especially when the effect of this virus has been not only to kill people but also to severely erode the strength of our freedom both short term and attitudinally in the long term.
Between 25 and 40% of Covid illness needing hospital treatment were caught in the hospital because infection control in the NHS is a DISGRACE (C-Diff, MRSA , Sepsis as long term examples). A large number of deaths were caused by actual decisions and actions in shipping the infection to the vulnerable care home population. Further deaths were caused in the second and third waves by putting CV patients into general hospitals instead of Isolation specialist hospitals, (our predecessors knew about isolation as a tool to deal with something they couldn’t cure!)
Yes I know the old chestnut excuse “we didn’t have people to staff Nightingales” well yes IN ADDITION, but instead of…same staff different locations.
Finally after 15 months have we trained specialist single disease nurses and part trained doctors to be able to run the Nightingales (shorthand) if we had a difficult variant?
Covid should have gone as an economy and high risk disease if we had done the sensible things rather than leave it to the NHS and PHE and Political numpties. BUT..BUT..BUT
Thankyou Sarah and Kate for saving us giving the Govt a chance to make its only correct decision.
“That’s 150,000. It wouldn’t have been the primary cause of death in every case, but more than 90% of them were, and even in the remaining 10%, the doctor who certified the death felt that the infection was relevant.” Where did you get that information from I actually know this is wrong even in a local capacity. For me its shocking you use this as the basis of your argument.
Since Covid was never a threat to 99.9% of people the real question is:
Have we seen the last of the deaths from the reactions to Covid? Probably not.
Who is counting the cost of lockdowns, social distancing, masks etc.,? Surely someone must be? Suicides continue in the aftermath of the fascist response to perceived Covid threats and the poor health outcomes from mask-wearing, lack of human contact, fear, isolation, lack of exercise and fresh air will be taking a toll for years to come.
Point taken – but you will need to adjust your numbers slightly as 0.2% of the population actually died from covid-19 even with all the draconian measures etc.
Figures for suicides?
End of covid? No. Third wave coming when the seasons change.
However, everyone will have been vaccinated by then, so hospitals less full, deaths fewer, better coping.
After that, it may have passed through the vast majority of the population and will retire into the hinterland.
People will still be catching it in 100 years time, just like they catch other colds.
Why do I say it? Because I think the lockdowns have had almost no effect. The ones that seemed to have an effect were introduced as the wave was peaking, and simply tracked a natural decline in infections, and the lockdowns that didn’t work – hello Wales – were simply timed wrong.
Masks don’t work either. Social distancing had virtually no effect because people who wore the masks ignored social distancing, and in any case they were all together in shops wearing masks that didn’t work.
So the measures have been almost useless. But the vaccine research wasn’t useless, and it has saved the career of Boris Johnson. Hooray, I guess. Oh, and not a few lives.
Deleted
This is as far as I know the first article to feature the long s “ſ”. Well played.
And where do you find it on your list of fonts?
My attention was almost immediately drawn in by the sentence, “The total number of reported deaths from Covid in the UK was one.”
Even the government makes no such claim, simply saying that these are deaths within 28 days of testing positive for Covid19 – which is, as nobody can deny, an entirely different thing. Please, please, can we get things like this right.
Pity there was no mention of what I understand to be the third biggest cause of death: medical intervention.