[OLD BOY]

Originally Posted by jfman

You are the one who incorrectly interpreted my post and questioned the 250,000 Government figure. That needed pointed out.

People literally don’t notice when seasonal flu causes more deaths because it’s over more months. Uncontrolled Coronavirus could achieve those figures in less than six weeks and continue to do so until it’s a quarter of a million.

Yes, that's kind of what I was saying. Except that the media has bolstered this into a much bigger thing to fear than it actually is.

I did not incorrectly interpret your post - I was correcting your interpretation of mine. No matter.

These ridiculously high figures that have been banded about recently should be put into context. First, there was a study made projecting that the UK was facing an extraordinary number of deaths. That report was found to be grossly inaccurate and much more realistic corrections have been made.

The comparisons that are being made with other countries are naive to say the least. These comparisons do not always explain adequately the varying population size of each country (for example, Italy has a smaller population than the UK, so why wouldn't our number of deaths be higher? Even more important is population density. That is why London's figures stand out on our national graphs.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...ering-numbers/

[EXTRACT]

Apocalyptic predictions that Britain’s coronavirus death toll will be the largest in Europe have abounded over the past week.

The “scaremongering” began after a report from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), based at the University of Washington in Seattle, suggested the UK could reach 66,000 deaths by August, peaking at nearly 3,000 a day, and accounting for more than 40 per cent of total deaths across the Continent.

The figures were gleefully seized upon by the Left-wing press and emblazoned over front pages as evidence that the Government’s strategy has failed.

Yet, within hours, British experts had branded the modelling as “absurd”, and by this weekend the IHME had revised down its estimate to 37,494 – and admitted it could be as low as 26,000 which is not hugely dissimilar to Imperial College’s figure of around 20,000.

For anyone following the trajectory of deaths it was clear that something extraordinary would have to happen for our daily death rate to shoot up to 3,000. All other countries have exhibited a smooth upward trend followed by gradual leveling off, so the UK would have needed to experience a trend-defying upward kick to get anywhere close to the IHME figures.

Keith Neal, emeritus professor in the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, said: "Redoing their prediction in under a week strongly suggests major flaws in their models. This is not the first model to be shown to have got their projections seriously wrong. Although this is a pandemic, the epidemiology in each country is different and different within countries.”

Explaining the updated figures, the IHME said the new data had taken into account the effect of social distancing and included four more days of data.

But epidemiologists at Imperial also pointed out that the model showed Britain had already exceeded its intensive care capacity by three times, even though the NHS currently has plenty of spare critical care beds.

Prof James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute and Professor of structural biology at Oxford University, said: “I note the IHME updated their forecasts and they have substantially lowered the worst-case and central scenarios for deaths.

“It is to be greatly regretted that too much online and media coverage of the earlier IHME predictions focused on worst-case scenarios without making absolutely clear the very large ranges that the IHME clearly stated for their UK predictions. When these ranges are deliberately omitted (or obscured) by others, who then choose to focus on worst-case scenarios, this is little more than reckless scaremongering.”

It is also unfair to compare countries that have vastly different population densities, social mixing, demographics and family structures. Take Ireland as an example. As of lunchtime yesterday, the country had recorded 8,928 cases and 320 deaths. Which is 65 deaths per million people. In contrast, Britain had 78,991 cases and 9,875 deaths, 145 deaths per million. However, the population density of Ireland is lower than in Britain, approximately 186 people per square mile compared to 727 people in the UK. And while 83 per cent of Britons live in urban areas, just 63 per cent of Irish people do.