Johns Hopkins Medical Centre - World Coronavirus infection Map by Country.

[Macca]

Back to the "hiding" of the death toll, surely (for the government) it is better to be accused of including every possible contributory factor rather than making the figures artificially low

Yes, it's much better to have people thinking 'It's not as bad as the Government say it is' than 'It's much worse than the Government say it is.'

For the first one you just think they are erring too far on the side of caution, but for the second one that's 'They're lying to us.'

[Marco]

Yes it's inflating the death toll so they can't be criticised for massaging the death toll numbers down. It's picking the worst case figures and using them. It makes it impossible for someone to claim that it's actually worse than they are portraying.


Although as I said it's only a guess as to why they use the counting method they do.

Well, the first bit is only your opinion and what you believe is true. I believe something else is true, and also have a different 'guess' for the last bit!

Marco.

[Marco]

Another thing to consider is that there are only so many pathologists in the country, and to perform sufficiently thorough post mortems on all of the cases when hundreds are dying every day would be a mammoth task. So what do you do? Not mention Covid, even though it's there, and let it's presence disappear from our records forever?

You do as I've outlined above (see second last paragraph of post 9089).

Marco.

[Marco]

Yes, it's much better to have people thinking 'It's not as bad as the Government say it is' than 'It's much worse than the Government say it is.'

For the first one you just think they are erring too far on the side of caution, but for the second one that's 'They're lying to us.'

And of course BJ-boy and his hapless cronies have told the whole truth throughout this pandemic and never lied one teensy bit??



Are you saying that the Tories (or any other government in power) always tell the truth? If not, then your point above is moot!

Marco.

[Pigmy Pony]

You do as I've outlined above (see second last paragraph of post 9089).

Marco.

Yes i know, I hadn't seen that when I started typing, that's how slow I type

[Macca]

Well, the first bit is only your opinion

Marco.

It really isn't necessary to point that out. I already said more than once that it was just a guess, a possibility.

[Marco]

Yes i know, I hadn't seen that when I started typing, that's how slow I type

No worries. So do you agree that if they'd done that instead, and filed cases like that under 'not proven', rather than simply lumping them in with the much more provable Covid deaths (as outlined), we'd likely have a more accurate figure for deaths from Covid, instead of (for whatever reason) a falsely inflated one?

Marco.

[Marco]

It really isn't necessary to point that out. I already said more than once that it was just a guess, a possibility.

That's fine, but I fundamentally disagree, so am equally just saying so!

Marco.

[Macca]

Okay I bothered to search and this is the official government line as to why they do it how they do: (This is from August 2020)

Professor John Newton, Director of Health Improvement at Public Health England, said:

The way we count deaths in people with COVID-19 in England was originally chosen to avoid underestimating deaths caused by the virus in the early stages of the pandemic.

Our analysis of the long-term impact of the infection now allows us to move to new methods, which will give us crucial information about both recent trends and overall mortality burden due to COVID-19.

and also

This follows concerns raised by academics from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine about the original measure, which counted anyone who had ever tested positive as a COVID-associated death. They called for the introduction of a 21-day measure in order to accurately assess the impact of the virus on mortality rates.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/n...ovid-19-deaths

[Pigmy Pony]

How are the Covid death figures worked out in Europe? Have they gone down the "Not proven" route? If so, and their death figures were comparably similar to ours, their death rates would then clearly be much greater than ours. There needs to be a global standard for this, otherwise it all means jack shit.