Not a miracle tomo, just the effect of hands, face and space. Plus much reduced travel. ILIs are bumping rock bottom here too. ILIs don't include covid 19. Imagine how bad covid would be if ILIs were at normal levels because everyone was behaving normally.

Russia just bumped its death figures from covid, 3 times what it had been. The Rosstat statistics agency said that the number of deaths from all causes recorded between January and November had risen by 229,700 compared with the previous year. “More than 81% of this increase in mortality over this period is due to Covid,” said the deputy prime minister, Tatiana Golikova, meaning that more than 186,000 Russians have died from Covid-19.

Sweden has thrown in the towel on the herd immunity plan.

Our last ILI report.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/947881/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w52.pdf

Our latest excess death report.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/947877/Weekly_report_mortality__w52.pdf

Our excess winter deaths are not confined to flu or pneumonia. Heart attacks, strokes and accidents go up too. Until this week, cold hadn't really been severe, so we can expect an additional spike in deaths unrelated to covid in the coming few weeks.

As I've written before, there is room to debate what we do about the pandemic but the cases and deaths are real and growing.

stewgreen, those things go up every winter due to the cold but the levels care available is also reduced in winter because of busy hospitals. Covid had a double effect on treatable conditions because care was harder to access but also because people were genuinely scared of catching the disease. Those barriers would have got worse if covid had been allowed to explode.

Blighting the lives of young people comes under the heading of how we should have responded to covid and nothing to do with whether covid causes deaths in the elderly and those with underlying conditions or what pressures it puts on the NHS. As for 'life years lost' the young will experience more than any generation before them. One of the major things blighting their lives is their over expectations of how much they can cram in or afford. Their support for cutting CO2 and allowing mass immigration will have far more impact over their lives than 1 year of covid.

Tomo you seem to be confusing number of deaths with increased numbers of COVID-19 deaths. It has been well publicised that lockdowns have significantly reduced cases of influenza, and thus presumably influenza deaths, but that there is little evidence that lockdowns have influenced COVID-19 occurrences (unless the fall in the number of infections in London and the South East reflects a product of the post-Christmas tier 4 imposition).

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/950313/Weekly_report_mortality__w1.pdf

tomo, the report above records all deaths per week. It's easy to read. At this time of year there are normally 10-11,000 deaths a week of all causes. Anything above that is considered excess. Winter 2017/2018 was deemed to be a bad winter, back to 70s style deaths, albeit with a smaller population. No flu vaccines back then. There was a flu vaccine in 2017/2018 although it wasn't well matched to the strain circulating. Not all winter deaths are due to flu or pneumonia but heart attacks and strokes rise too. Cold winters are bad winters, warm ones good.

Ignore the last data point it is short due to late reporting over Christmas. Last week's last data point was on the blue baseline too but has now been adjusted upwards to the first grey dotted line. The current value is short due to New Year holidays. Next week it will shoot up. Look how high the excess deaths were last week. Those that were due to covid would have contracted the disease on average 3-4 weeks ago. There were about 2000 extra deaths. Not unusual in a cold winter but doesn't always happen. On average people take 5 days for covid symptoms to deveop, and about another 21 days to be admitted to hospital and die. So deaths tend to follow case rises about 3 weeks later.

What do you think the majority of excess deaths are from if not from covid?

Normally at this time of year flu is killing a significant percentage of people, but this year's flu levels are lower than normal summer levels. Lock downs, masks, etc are the cause of this plunge. Covid cases and deaths are being kept artificially low due to those same measures. No, they don't 'work' in that they can't stop it altogether but imagine what they would be without them.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8925427/Official-data-exaggerating-risk-Covid-500-academics-tell-Boris-Johnson.html

Remember these graphs when everyone was outraged that the figures were too high? Well they were... except we had a lock down and yet soon we will excede the deaths per day in the spring. So those predictions weren't that far off after all.

Can you grasp these points?

PHE has been ineffective, innacurate and slow but not corrupt. Usually these sorts of departments err on the side of caution. They think that they're on the side of good. PHE created the plans made by Labour and the SNP I mention but under a different department name. That's what happens every time a new government takes over or the department screws up. Very few of the people who mess up get sacked or 'retire'. By and large the information has been ok but in many ways there is too much of it, so useful reports like the one above are lost in a pile of others. I only know about it because I've been looking at data like this for years. PHE are not trying to hide it, they just produce too much stuff at the behest of too many minister and even too many health professionals. Now and historically. The public tend to be left with the fudge the media make of the data and they're selective in what they show to the point of deception.

PHE were onto a loser with climate sceptics because models were mentioned but they're really not necessary for a broad brush picture. If you have a cfr and a likely herd immunity figure (derived from history) then you have a potential final number of deaths, barring any medical interference. The cfr is a very hard figure to determine in the early stages of a pandemic. Covid was especially difficult because it causes so many silent cases. Deaths are hard to corellate with cases because they lag by 2-3 weeks. Only seroprevalence testing can give you an idea of how many have had the disease and from that you can estimate the cfr. From that research it's likely that the early death rate was 1.2% in the UK. Some of that was caused by mistakes sending old people to care homes and putting people on ventilation too soon. I stress the 'UK' because each country has its own value based on the percentage of vulnerable people, health care, multi generational households etc. Using an international cfr is pointless. cfr also changes over time. We now have medical interventions so more of those who get seriously ill survive. Had we let the disease have its head back in spring, fewer people would have survived than now.

Sceptics have made much of 'died with covid' and 'died of covid' but that's a smoke screen. That's why I look at excess deaths. Those figures might not be 100% up to date but they're ultimately very accurate. We count the dead. It's quite clear that a lot of extra people died in the spring and contrary to early claims, there wasn't a sharp dip in the summer because all the people who died 'would have died this year anyway'. Also despite claims in the beginning of winter, the second wave has reached the same peak and is likely to surpass it. Those deaths assigned to covid are about 80,000 but the figure for excess deaths is higher. About 10,000 were knocked off the spring wave but that means that there were still excess deaths that weren't attributed to the disease. If someone dies of a heart attack because they don't go into hospital fast enough, they didn't die of covid but they did die because of it. If the hospitals fill up with covid patients then care for all other conditions is impacted. The reason why some hospitals were empty and the Nightingale hospitals were never used was because those actions were part of the original plan with no lock down. They were for a plan where more age groups would be affected. It makes sense to move old people off precious ventilation if a teenager needs it. If beds are full it's better to have a ventillation team looking after 10 patients than the 1 they would normally but if those 10 don't materialise then the care team go back to their normal location and the 1 patient. If the Nightingale hospitals are used, the care in them will be sub optimal. The staff who can look after intensive care patients is limited. The government couldn't plug that gap by throwing cash at it.

The Great Barrington Declaration claimed that herd immunity was very low, with maybe 25% of the population catching it but only about 10% of the UK population had had it at the time, so even under low cfr, deaths would have more than doubled. Herd immunity might be lower than the 60-80% but who in charge was prepared to risk it? At the end of the first wave we had seen about 50,000 covid deaths, was 125,000 ok? Would the public co-operate? Had lock down not happened then those treatments that have 'halved' covid deaths would not have been available. Fewer people would have had urgent treatment and those that did would have been more likely to catch covid. Testing for covid was still limited. Chaos and shortages kill people too.

Sweden was the much vaunted outlier with its herd immunity strategy but as very late seroprevalence testing showed, the public hadn't co-operated and they were no further through the pandemic than the UK was. We're all seeing that second winter wave that wasn't supposed to happen. While it's right and proper to question government predictions and note how many times they're wrong, the same has to happen with their detractors. On both sides we need to examine why they were wrong. Too many sceptics used the fall caused by the first lockdown as proof the pandemic was over. Even the government was attracted to the idea. I saw people in the first few weeks of the pandemic claim that even 20,000 UK dead was an exaggeration and sneer at anyone who suggested otherwise.

Ultimately half a million people won't die of this pandemic here but who can say how many would have died if we'd done nothing back in March. The UK clearly isn't as naturally good at infection reduction as the Swedes. I keep thinking that we've reached a peak of the spread and I'm disapointed. At any point the virus could mutate into something worse (or better). It can already spread faster. A comforting myth the media keeps repeating is that disease become less deadly as it adapts - despite examples of that not being true. H5N1 bird flu mutated from a low pathogenic version into one that killed swathes of wild birds.See lake Qinghai in China. Ultimately we can't stop mutations but we can slow them down.

Faced with all those variables, what were the scientists supposed to advise and what should ignorant ministers do? I'd have preferred it if lockdowns had not been necessary but it would have required the public to have been scrupulous. Those pooh poohing the scope of the problem, encouraged rule breaking and ironically increased costs.

Don’t hold back Tomo, what do you really think about PHE? Break them up and allocate their tasks to other bodies. Which other bodies? Presumably those other bodies should not be contaminated by ex-PHE personnel.

I don't disagree with any of that you write about PHE (and I thought they were useless in 2007) but now is not the time to sort them as it takes time to replace a department. The company I worked for sacked my direct boss without warning and didn't tell me, so I couldn't make sure that I had access to all the systems he was in charge of. The country was in that situation in March and dare I say still is in that situation. Who is going to come in and do a better job? Pandemics were off the agenda since the 2009 Swine Flu damp squib. Loads of people crowed that being ready for a pandemic was a waste of money. Our modern health services could easily handle them, so they should concentrate on something 'more important', like drinking too much. We always suffer in this country for having too many priorities. Can we really blame the Civil Service for chopping and changing with each government and minister? Not to mention Civil Services bosses with their own agendas. As a public we constantly demand things be acted upon but also don't consider the cost or other priorities.

Empire building is normal for any government department and most people. As you say, the Civil Service is full of Sir Humphreys. I wanted out of the EU because it was another layer of opinions and targets. I also resented that our Civil Service both gold plated what came from Brussels and claimed that their hands were tied by the EU. Sorting them out is the long game. To do it, the Tories need to be in power long enough.

You may not like it but a lot of voters wanted action instantly over covid. The anti covid lock down Right has formed an unsustainable relationship with the hard Left young, who will never consider supporting the Right until they have enough money to lose in tax. Which might take a while. Their determination to be free from restrictions has prolonged this. If Boris had caved into the lock down sceptics the Tories would be masacred at the polls. The media that has both demanded harsher lockdowns and a functioning economy would never let the public forget that they let granny die. Not the 'nasty party' but the 'muderous party'. Boris couldn't not have acted.

The question is - how much? Trump clearly got it wrong, even for the US. With only a modicum of concerned looks and fewer howlers about the disease and how to treat it, he could have done exactly as he did in terms of spending, but won the election comfortably.

Rome wasn't built in a day and never gets built if they throw you off the building site early. By denying the dangerous nature of an emergent pandemic and whinging on about models, the lock down sceptics lost credibility. They should have got behind masks, anything that might have slowed numbers and even supporting the first lock down as we clearly weren't ready. They could have then argued that it should have ended sooner. Shutting businesses for so long so that people could have their Spanish holiday was nuts. Ditto the pre Christmas lock down so that people could spread covid for the holidays. They should have left it a few more weeks and then had a long lock down over Christmas and New Year. They could even have announced a replacement Christmas in April. All the spending gets done and we have a big meal with the family.

But with the wave of grumbling, eventually the government stopped listening. Boris turned instead to those who encouraged him to do more. I've yet to see a decent plan on how to keep numbers of deaths as low as possible or even what figure would be justifiable as collateral damage to the public and media.

My curiosity was piqued yesterday evening by an almost throwaway comment on a news bulletin I was watching, to the effect that it is estimated that around 3 million people in the UK have now tested positive for Covid-19. That's tested positive, rather than "have had" Covid-19. It set me off wondering how many people in the UK have actually had Covid-19.

Sadly, deaths attributed to it (within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test) exceed 80,000 now. If IFR is around 1%, it might suggest perhaps 8 million people, or more than 10% of the population, have already had it. On the other hand, if IFR overall is, say 0.3%, then that starts to look like 24 million people (or more than 1/3 of the population) have already had it.

It seems to me that these are the sorts of questions that those in authority should be asking - and answering.

The best I can find on IFR, that's reasonably up to date, is this:

Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications

The problem is that it breaks down IFR by age, but doesn't provide a figure for the population as a whole, averaged out (unless it does, and I should have kept on reading):

Our analysis finds a exponential relationship between age and IFR for COVID-19. The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.

Does anyone have any useful information on this subject, please?