Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
You seem to have completely missed the point.
The precise number of people who actually died directly due to a covid infection is interesting for all sorts of reasons but the nature of our society means it may well not be the most vital information.
In an advanced industrial society with a universal healthcare system, the overall effect on the system by a novel infection is of great importance. Excess deaths is certainly a far better indicator of the magnitude of the crisis and the measures we might need to put in place to improve resilience, precisely because it allows us to account - for example - for cancers that went undetected because someone couldn’t get to their GP soon enough.
Calling excess deaths “at best an indicator” is a word salad that doesn’t make you look as clever as you seem to think it does.
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I am not arguing that ‘excess deaths’ doesn’t indicate a measure of the crisis, of course it does.
But it does not measure deaths that are directly connected to Covid infection. That was my point.
---------- Post added at 19:21 ---------- Previous post was at 19:13 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1andrew1
I'm afraid you're demonstrating your lack of subject knowledge. As I said, data collection is never 100% perfect. That's not unique to this particular data set. So not being 100% perfect is not a good reason to ignore it nor to not use it to make international comparisons, providing we understand how different data collection methods might impact different data sets.
Dismissing this information as "not very accurate" is simply wrong. To do so for obvious party political reasons is disappointing.
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Come on, Andrew, you are the one interpreting information to suit your argument.
Comparison of Covid deaths between countries when every country includes different criteria for producing the statistics is clearly inaccurate. And these are not small inaccuracies. If one country only records Hospital Covid deaths and another records all deaths including deaths in the community and in care homes, that’s a pretty big difference.
Similarly, if excess deaths includes people who are not having their health conditions monitored and those whose operations have been put back, this does reflect the scale of the problem, but what that figure is not showing is the number of Covid deaths.
I would have thought that all the pedants we encounter on this forum would recognise that immediately. But not when it doesn’t suit your argument, it seems.