Even this comparison is some what difficult. Scotland has fewer large high density cities then England and larger areas of low density habitations. You would expect the numbers per 100,000 to be lower regardless. A better comparison would be made between say Glasgow and a English city of a similar size.

And if you get run over by a bus on day 27 it is still counted as a COVID death. Looking at the exact numbers is not the right thing to do, but looking at the tends is and that is very clear in all the nations.

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This urban myth is an insult to all doctor in the country. Of course being run over by a bus will not count as a COVID death, because the doctor writing the death certificate will put as primary cause of death: consistent with collision with a high speed moving vehicle. Not "yeah he got run by a bus but somewhere I found a COVID positive test so I will write that as cause of death because I am part of a global conspiracy so secret that every Idiot Joe knows about it to control people by a fake pandemic".


https://assets.publishing.service.go...h-covid-19.pdf

I am afraid it was very much the case that victims of road traffic accidents in the UK were put down as COVID deaths. A search of some of the threads here will show that. In the UK, it is any death within 28 days where COVID is mentioned on the death certificate. It used to be 6 months (I think) and is one of the reasons the time limit was reduced because it was catching too many unrelated deaths. Yes it is a daft way to work out deaths, but it is what it is.

Arguing over the 28 day cut off misses the point though. It will always catch some cases that it should not and miss other that it should. So long as it is consistently applied, you can see the trends. Those are now very clear.

Let me clear this up. There are three ways we look at Covid deaths in the UK
- by deaths within 28 days of a Covid positive test
- by death certificate, which has the cause of death recorded
- by that horrible term "excess deaths", how total deaths vary from the 5 or 10 year average.
All three are problematic for different reasons, such as what do you do if someome dies of multiple problems, Covid was in there with 6 other things, but it probably just speeded up death by a day or so. There is another route, which is mass observation surveys but this is the least accurate of the lot.

The mythical bus case hasn't happened, as far as I know, but some people who committed suicide after getting a positive diagnosis when asymptomatic are definitely in the first and third category, but not the second. There is a small element of truth in the point being made here.

The problem is that many registrars of death are not working at full speed, they may be on minimum staff, largely working from home and the time restrictions on recording deaths, which is a legal duty, have been necessarily relaxed. So the second method was until recently totally hopeless as a way of monitoring this pandemic, particularly if an autopsy is needed and hospitals are overworked. It can easily take a month to find out the cause of death. The third way is even slower, and in any case thanks to flu quite trickly to analyse anyway. The CI is quite big despite large numbers.

The first route is quick and cheap to do. You look at NHS numbers for those found positive and look at hospital based records of deaths, get a link within 28 days and you are a Covid death. This is actually quite accurate since though the suicides are in there, this is counter balanced by those who clearly die of Covid more than 28 days after their final positive test (people are often repeatedly tested in hospital). I think we found that 30 days would be a bit more accurate rather than 28 days but there is a WHO recommendation in this space, hence 28 days. It is also a consistent measure, so it's kind of equally wrong every day, and that's good enough.

Because of the extreme need for speed, we do use the 28 day measure in almost stats, including the ones I put out. It gets released every day around 14 hrs by each nation, and so by 16 hrs we get a pretty good national record. There is a wider moral issue about recording this global tragedy via cold statistics but we won't get out of this crisis if we can't measure it. We can have confidence in the figures even if it is very possible to find fault in it.

I find the "excess death" approach chilling but elegant. It may not be the most useful in immediate terms, but it will provide an important overview of he broader impact of the disease and our attempts to combat it by painting a coherent picture that includes death

• caused directly by COVID
• where COVID was present as a contributary cause of death
• indirectly caused, where death (from other causes) would not have occurred had the health care system not been under pressure

It will even cover the drop in deaths in road traffic accidents due to reduced traffic on the roads and fewer pedestrians on the streets, perhaps settling the minds of those troubled by the COVID man-under-a-bus conundrum.

More importantly, schools open tomorrow so finally the lockdown is being lifted after 2 months.

technically stay at hole doesn’t lift for three more weeks. My walk an hour ago through a AW park would suggest otherwise.

You are allowed out once per day to exercise and to go shopping for supplies. I don't think there is any restriction on how long you can go out for or how many times you can go to the shop. The reality is that you can go out and will not have a problem unless you do something really stupid.

you can go out as many times a day as you wish so long as you have a valid reason that is legal to do so. The once a day thing is an urban myth I have the legislation right in front of me
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...9c93c7e498.jpg

just to note that is out of date. (d) has been removed since the start of lockdown 3 in January

I thought 'Stay at Hole' was the Government's redlist quarantine measure? :D

sorry I should have shown only the exercise part of it

one of my better autocorrects. I think I’ll let that one stand :)

5,177 cases reported today which compares with around 6,000 last Sunday. Currently zero deaths, but PHE have run out to get new batteries for their calculator.

And for vaccinations:

First dose: 22,213,112

Second dose: 1,122,402

One other bit of data, there were near enough 1M tests (995,486) for the first time on the 4th.