gbnz wrote: ↑18 Oct 2021, 1:29pm
Should Covid now be ignored? Or time to start taking it seriously again?
Have to admit that whilst I've never been in a panic about Covid, I'd always taken "precautions". But aware that as a Radio 4 listener, there was a good chance that I'd still be under the impression the world was coming to an end due to Covid, months after everyone else had forgotten about it. Is it time to forget about it?
No - it is still a pandemic - there are more people dying each day this year than the same day last year (at least recent months, I looked at the figures earlier this month, and there is necessarily a 28 day lag in the count of 'people dying within 28 days').
(That might not be true for much longer, because there was a huge uptick about this time last year, but the infection rate is still very high indeed).
What I haven't looked at recently is the excess deaths (i.e. those deaths over and above the 5 year average, which of course will have been skewed upwards by last year's omnishambles). I might compare with the average 2014-2019 instead.
Very brief look at the ONS:
In Week 39, 10,510 deaths were registered in England and Wales; this was 174 fewer deaths than the previous week (Week 38) and 12.1% above the five-year average (1,133 more deaths).
They are including last year in the 5 year average, since that is the 5 year average, so that excess is probably fractionally understated - I'm therefore not going to shift it at all.
We are still having 12% more people a week (that's >1000 people a week) dying than we would normally expect at this time of year.