Full Fact on what we do and don't know about the Coronavirus death toll
There is an extremely informative piece by the Full Fact website (a fact-checking service) about what we do and don't know about deaths from COVID-19, called
"What we know, and what we don’t, about the true coronavirus death toll"
They look at the issues involved in with comparing death rates between different countries and the evident - and different - problems with the official statistics.
Like other articles I have linked to, including work in The Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times, they conclude the least worst measure of the overall impact of the pandemic - including indirectly-caused deaths such as people who die of other conditions which could and would have been successfully treated had they not been afraid to go to hospital for fear of catching COVID-19 - is the spike in "excess deaths" compared with normal death rates for the time of year.
But they add the following:
“The figures now being published by different newspapers make it possible to see the terrible waves of mortality hitting different countries. These are the curves that the world began to talk about flattening in February, and there will be lessons in them that every country can learn. But they are not enough on their own to measure our success, let alone compare it with our neighbours. “To create crude country comparisons – who’s slightly bigger, who’s slightly less – I would see as not helpful at the current time,” says Professor Heneghan.
After all, it is true that the death toll will vary according to how well the disease is managed and treated from place to place, but also according to the quality and methods of the local data, the age and health of the populations, perhaps their genetic susceptibility, perhaps the weather, cultural and lifestyle factors, population densities, levels of air pollution, maybe even local differences that emerge in the virus itself. Nor has the pandemic even finished yet. And even then, there may still be some severe effects on public health to come.
Besides all this, there may always be other factors that you would not at first consider. The Financial Times does not publish excess mortality data for Istanbul, for example, because it believes that burials there are higher than average at least partly because people’s bodies are no longer being taken away for burial in their home towns.
It can be difficult to live with so much uncertainty, but until we know the answers, uncertainty is the truth.”
Professor Spiegelhalter, who previously wrote a good article in the Guardian which I linked to here, is one of those quoted in the article. He has asked people not to use that article to suggest that there is no value at all in international comparisons and believes that the UK will eventually have “a good idea of how many have died because of the epidemic and the measures taken”
Note that word "eventually."
When asked whether the UK’s outbreak will prove to be the worst in Europe, he replies “Ask me in December.”
You can read the Full Fact article here.
"What we know, and what we don’t, about the true coronavirus death toll"
They look at the issues involved in with comparing death rates between different countries and the evident - and different - problems with the official statistics.
Like other articles I have linked to, including work in The Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times, they conclude the least worst measure of the overall impact of the pandemic - including indirectly-caused deaths such as people who die of other conditions which could and would have been successfully treated had they not been afraid to go to hospital for fear of catching COVID-19 - is the spike in "excess deaths" compared with normal death rates for the time of year.
But they add the following:
“The figures now being published by different newspapers make it possible to see the terrible waves of mortality hitting different countries. These are the curves that the world began to talk about flattening in February, and there will be lessons in them that every country can learn. But they are not enough on their own to measure our success, let alone compare it with our neighbours. “To create crude country comparisons – who’s slightly bigger, who’s slightly less – I would see as not helpful at the current time,” says Professor Heneghan.
After all, it is true that the death toll will vary according to how well the disease is managed and treated from place to place, but also according to the quality and methods of the local data, the age and health of the populations, perhaps their genetic susceptibility, perhaps the weather, cultural and lifestyle factors, population densities, levels of air pollution, maybe even local differences that emerge in the virus itself. Nor has the pandemic even finished yet. And even then, there may still be some severe effects on public health to come.
Besides all this, there may always be other factors that you would not at first consider. The Financial Times does not publish excess mortality data for Istanbul, for example, because it believes that burials there are higher than average at least partly because people’s bodies are no longer being taken away for burial in their home towns.
It can be difficult to live with so much uncertainty, but until we know the answers, uncertainty is the truth.”
Professor Spiegelhalter, who previously wrote a good article in the Guardian which I linked to here, is one of those quoted in the article. He has asked people not to use that article to suggest that there is no value at all in international comparisons and believes that the UK will eventually have “a good idea of how many have died because of the epidemic and the measures taken”
Note that word "eventually."
When asked whether the UK’s outbreak will prove to be the worst in Europe, he replies “Ask me in December.”
You can read the Full Fact article here.
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