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Be v careful with this
-UK does NOT have more daily #COVID19 deaths than whole of EU
-What u see here are different reporting standards
-UK lumps together deaths from previous weeks lately confirmed as COVID
-Other countries do it v differently: eg Spain ft.com/content/77eb7a…
Don't get me wrong.
UK daily death toll is v high. But it's not THAT high.
In past few days UK has reported a lot of deaths from previous weeks - even more than usual - in an effort to reconcile the gap between COVID deaths and excess deaths
That's pushed up reported deaths a lot
In reality UK daily deaths are running at 100-200 a day and falling.
Still highest in Europe (though not in per capita terms - Sweden takes that unfortunate accolade).
But suggesting UK is a massive outlier as that chart does is not right (oh and the EU total is plain wrong)
There's a serious point here
In face of #COVID19 officials are really struggling to put together data
Any conception of normal reporting standards has mostly evaporated
We are in the statistical wild west (cf the testing debacle I've been banging on abt this week)…
…and given #COVID19 is both a public health and a data story (the data informs decisions on lockdown etc) this is REALLY worrying.
Best we can all do is to scrutinise the numbers, interrogate them, try not to take them at face value, and understand sometimes mistakes happen
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Ed Conway
@EdConwaySky
Earlier today the @UKStatsAuth gave @MattHancock a rap on the knuckles over the testing statistics produced each day by the @DHSCgovuk. In an effort to try to get my head round the numbers I took a deep dive into the spreadsheets. I ended up with a bit of a headache (thread):
This is a mess. A real mess. For all sorts of obvious reasons, testing is incredibly important when it comes to saving lives, understanding the spread of the disease, stopping a second wave, track & trace etc. Yet our data on this is not just poor: it's actively misleading.
Let's start with the overall numbers the government produces each day. You've prob seen charts like this. Look! We're WAY past the government's 100k target. Great news, right! Esp if you care about arbitrary targets!
Read 15 tweets
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Ed Conway
@EdConwaySky
It's official: the UK has overtaken Italy to have the highest #COVID19 death toll in Europe - at least on the basis of the daily figures we get from govts each day. But is this as significant as it really sounds? And can these numbers really be relied upon? A thread:
First tho, how helpful are these comparisons? There was def value early on comparing trajectories of different countries. Why? They gave a hint of where we may be heading. Recall how sceptical many were early on that UK cld follow Italy. These charts showed us heading that way
But trying to measure up countries against each other - who has the "worst" outbreak?? - is both difficult & not altogether helpful. Let me explain why: there are three main ways of measuring the public health toll of COVID19:
1. Death tolls we get each day from govt, eg:
Read 14 tweets
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Ed Conway
@EdConwaySky
A 🧵 abt the question we're going to have to confront at some point but no one wants to talk about: how on earth are we going to pay for the economic response to #COVID19? We are stacking up war-time levels of public debt RIGHT NOW that will define economics for decades...
The story starts with this chart. The bar on the far right here is how much the government is planning to issue in debt this year. More than any other year in history. And note the bottom bit is only four months' worth of debt. There's a v v high chance the bar gets a LOT higher
You thought the cost of the financial crisis was high? You thought austerity was bad? We will end #COVID19 with a HIGHER level of debt. This is depressing & unpalatable, esp for countries like UK which has literally just emerged from a decade of austerity. But there we have it.
Read 15 tweets

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