We need to stop comparing 2020 deaths with 2015 deaths. It's an unreasonable baseline.
Plus 'excess deaths' needs to be explained. They are not really 'excess' if it happens with every flu season. As long as we are not exceeding normal flu excesses then they are not really excess deaths.
Slovakia has just put rocket boosters under their COVID deaths. Within two weeks they've gone from virtually zero deaths to rates as high as Peru and Brazil had at their peak. So what happened?
Mass population testing was begun which resulted in 8x as many tests per day as were done at peak in Brazil. The tests were not perfect (none are) and so a percentage were labelled as positive when they did not have COVID. Some died. That's all that has happened. Slovakia is safe
Slovenia on the other hand rolled out mass testing and then decided it had been a bad idea.
Switzerland were not badly hit in spring (peak 46 deaths per day). Currently they have 75 'COVID' deaths per day. Yet their excess death graph looks exactly like 2017.
Let me tell you about a different test. The COVID antibody test. This has demonstrated that only 7% of the UK population had antibodies to COVID in May (it was 17% in London).
This is a measurement error. Let me explain. With every test there will be definite negatives, definite positives and a grey area in between. There is a choice about how to classify the grey area.
The ONS have produced a thorough piece of research into non-COVID excess deaths. It is important work. Immense harm has been caused by changes in behaviour and people have died (and are still dying) as a result.
A&E attendances fell from the beginning of March. At the end of February we were told to isolate if we, those we shared a household with had a cough or fever.
That meant people with coughs and fevers were dissuaded from attending A&E. It also meant that healthcare were understaffed. With increasing numbers of us falling ill this had a large effect. Ambulance response times tripled to an average of an hour. thetimes.co.uk/article/reveal…
Test always perform worse than hoped when used in real world situations. What's key here is that the antibody tests used pre-COVID blood as a negative control. They were designed to say anyone with prior immunity was 'negative'. They tell us who had COVID not who is immune now.
There's always a grey area between definite positives and definite negatives. If you include all the grey area you find that over 40% of the population are had immunity to COVID in May. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
But PHE went one step further. Instead of testing for just the unique spike protein antibodies they tested for all the COVID proteins. They found more than half of people who had no symptoms in spring (ie were immune) had antibodies. thelancet.com/journals/eclin…
Here is the acute respiratory outbreak from PHE. First look at winter - the peak of acute respiratory infections (diagnosed through symptoms) is about 200 per week. Then we had COVID with a massive care home spike, peaking at 1200 a week.
Now we have this:
1400 outbreaks a week. Diagnosed not by symptoms but by positive test results. And where are these outbreaks? Care homes and hospitals are being tested regularly so will have test positive outbreaks regularly.