FabSwingers.com forum: ONS stats for week ending 3rd April

By *atandasmile OP Man
over a year ago

Edinburgh

TL;DR: ONS stats back up the claim that covid-19 causes extra deaths and the reported numbers are primarily *not* those who would have died anyway.

Longer version:

Google ONS weekly deaths if you want to find the latest weekly death statistics from the Office of National Statistics (the URL is very long and I didn't want to post a shortened one because you wouldn't know where I was sending you

I bring these statistics up because they go long way to answering the question "died of, or died with?" which many people have asked in this forum.

I guess there are two camps:

1. Those who believe that most people with covid-19 mentioned on their death certificate would have died anyway because of the way that the disease more strongly affects certain vulnerable groups;

2. Those who believe that the disease is causing extra deaths over and above those who would have died anyway.

The ONS stats are a useful tool here because:

If 1. is true one would expect that the overall number of deaths in a given week would be within expected variation from the average - even if the number of reported covid-19 deaths is large.

If 2. is true one would expect the overall number of deaths to rise in line with the number of reported covid-19 deaths.

BUT the average number of deaths per week at this time of year is large - a bit over 10,000 - and one couldn't really expect to see the influence of a single cause like this until the contribution from that cause was large enough. Which it wasn't. At least until the last two weeks of reporting.

The last week of reporting (up to the 3rd of April) is particularly telling: the overall number of deaths is 16,387: 6,082 higher than the 5 year average of 10,305. The usual level of variation from the average looks to be +/- 1,000.

I would say that is strong enough evidence to call it: covid-19 *is* causing those deaths. As always, even stronger evidence to the contrary or finding a flaw in reasoning would cause me to change my mind.