England/UK In-Context COVID Update – 4th Dec 2020

🔄All the latest ONS, DHSC, NHS Hospital & Tiering #COVID data kept up to date, visual and interactive on the COVID+ Insights Dashboard👇🏼

Week-on-week, this dashboard is developing. As visual in-context empirical data couched with the nuance of its accuracy limitations is so central to maintaining rationality and a clear head, dashboards such as this will play an important role.

3️⃣ It’s to serve three roles. (1) Help us (AdapNation) keep out finger on the pulse assist with our shared analysis, (2) inform the informed with go-to graphs, and (3) introduce those that have most recently grown tired of BBC etc.

❤️ What’s proving really useful is the England NHS Trusts & Tiering tables, where people can search their local area or local trust to get a sense of up-to-date local numbers.

👉🏼 Check it out: https://adapnation.io/covid-insights/

Primary Observations

🔸Non-covid Home excess deaths continue to be a real worry, and more needs to done to address the healthcare shortcomings, deteriorating illness going undetected, and no doubt hospital avoidance.

🔸More needs to be done to tease out the restriction-induced health decline leading to a sustained increase in Total Mortality from genuine COVID deaths.

🔸All COVID hospital activity, cases and positivity rates have been bending down, including similar signs in the deaths/positive tests ratio.

🔸Indicators suggest there is a turning of COVID-positive deaths too, but any dip we will see will likely be due to testing volumes/processing and the expected double hump seasonality of coronaviruses in the autumn/winter.

🔸Given the normal winter pressures on health and increased prevalence of a multitude of respiratory viruses, it would be surprising to see a sustained decline – either in COVID-positive or Excess Mortality.

🔸Irrespective of the blunt consequential tools of lockdowns, tiering, distancing, school rules, masks – we will see a sustained winter burden on health and mortality. We can also add experimental vaccines to that list.

Secondary Observations

🔹What this year is clearly showing us is that this we’ve created more susceptibility to serious illness – chronic, neurological, mental and infectious disease – into the autumn/winter due to the intrusive toll placed on people this year.

🔹For as long as there is an unwillingness to redefine COVID cases to be exclusively those with a robust expression of the clustered signs and symptoms and with a PCR test with Ct under 35, this concerned speculation and distrust in the COVID metrics will persist.

🔹We simply cannot measure with confidence the restrictions-induced extra mortality vs the genuine COVID-19 deaths. Some may see that as a convenient challenge.

🔹That said, by considering the weekly excess non-covid home deaths (856) and the increase in self-harm events (105), it’s a reasonable assumption that COVID-19 or general ILI’s are accounting for about 550 of 1500 weekly excess deaths.

🔹Does that mean that the other 1,800 weekly COVID-positive deaths did not have a SARS CoV2 infection? That’s hard to tell.

🔹When you combine old age, serious chronic conditions, declining health, and an increase in respiratory viruses at this time of the year (SARS CoV2 being only one), it’s predictable that those people are going to succumb to something…

That’s the cruel but inevitable reality.

#FactsNotFear

SOURCES:

All original govt sources are listed, linked and raw data downloadable with each graph. Link in comment below. 👇🏼

🟢 COVID+ INSIGHTS DASHBOARD: https://adapnation.io/covid-insights/

The Original Facebook Post