JeremyP
I had hoped you would comment as what you say is from a cooler, more impartial point of view I think, so thank you for doing so.
Do you think that, when post-pandemic statistics come out, will be the position of the death toll in Britain? An impossible question, I know! I suppose we'll never know which deaths have been included by European countries for instance and which have not. It seems that here anyone who died, whether directly from covid 19 or not is included if they were tested and found to have it in their systems.
It is an impossible question and perhaps the wrong statistic. "People who have died after being tested and found positive" is an easy and reliable metric to collect and thus is a useful indicator of how the epidemic is progressing. However, it doesn't tell you the "death toll". I would argue that there is no indicator that we are currently collecting that gives an accurate idea of the impact of coronavirus.
Here are some anecdotes that illustrate the problems.
The father of a friend of mine died in early April. He was about 90 years old and suffering from dementia and other health conditions, one of which got him. He was in a care home which meant the staff and doctors were unwilling to send hm to hospital for treatment because he wouldn't have been allowed back in to the home after he had recovered (if he had recovered). Instead they treated him at the home and it was mostly palliative, so, of course, he died. He was a casualty of the pandemic even though he never tested positive for coronavirus nor did his death certificate mention coronavirus (at least I think not, I didn't see it).
The husband of a friend of my parents was very sick in a care home. He had been tested several times for coronavirus and always been found negative. He had no symptoms of COVID19. He died and his death certificate had "suspected coronavirus" on it, even though there had never been any question of him having it while he was still alive. This particular issue of misreporting works both ways: I'm sure that there are lots of people who have died of things like pneumonia who should have had "coronavirus" on their death certificates but didn't. So even the "deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the death certificate" measure has errors (and the ONS publications always acknowledge that, but the error bars get ignored by the media usually).
The excess deaths measure might seem like the best measure for the overall impact, but it is problematic too. Excess deaths measures deaths brought forward. Many people who die from COVID 19 would have died anyway over the course of the year or two afterwards. This time next year we may look back at the excess deaths for March 2020 to March 2021 and find no excess deaths for the whole period. In fact, unless there is a recurrence of coronavirus, next winter, I predict we will see substantially fewer deaths than normal.
I think the best measure for the impact of coronavirus is number of years of life lost i.e. how many more years might they have expected to live for had they not died from COVID 19. For the two people I mentioned above, this would be quite a small number. For a twenty year old, it might be sixty years. It gives a better idea of the impact of coronavirus than just counting deaths.
