If you see the claim that this is no worse than the 1999-2000 winter flu*, with a graph like this, it's rubbish even by its own logic. I've used the same ONS data they claim, and time-shifted the peaks & 2020 is worse. Also note the effect of winter.
*The worst in >40 years
And if you look at the difference from the median death rate for those 20 years, so a type of measure of excess deaths you get this
Meanwhile this graph is simply plotting the weekly deaths against week number for every year starting wk 31 1999 to wk 24 2020. This shows the seasonal effect and how unusual April-May 2020 was
I have worked out how to get a graph similar to Alistair's but not why he thinks it's remotely sensible to do that.
Basically replace week 46 onwards with 2020 week 11 data onwards. Note how the underlying numbers continue to increase underneath the curve in this...
And if you see people saying that the excess deaths in England and Wales were due to the lockdown... it's very suspicious that they track the COVID-19 deaths, and at a time when we know there was undercounting due to testing being overwhelmed.
If you look at excess deaths, so avoiding the supperposition (looks like Boolean OR) of raw spring 2020 data onto winter, you see that the epidemics have a very different shape. I just arranged these data so the peaks coincided.
The author of this graph blocked me when I pointed this out, which also gives an indication of how robust he thinks this analysis is
And this is how the author of that graph reacts to robust but polite questioning of his methodology, which makes a mockery of his twitter Handle "Nullius in verba"
And as for the claim that people would have died soon anyway? @BBCMoreOrLess looked investigated that. And it wasn't the case
Israel relaxed its lockdown on 28th May. This is what its cumulative cases look like
And Sweden's economy gained nothing from its relaxed approach to lockdown, and now has more stringent social distancing requirements than Denmark, Norway, or Finland
theweek.com/speedreads/924…
Israel's lockdown was complex lots of increasing & decreasing levels. I've plotted these dates against their 7-day average cases and deaths. Relaxing lockdown has given a second wave: The average 3 days each side of listed date
Data from ecdc.europa.eu/en/publication…
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