Thanks for the detailed post in reply, PatB. I’ll have a good look through a bit later. Can you tell me where the data for these charts came from? I’d like to check the source material.
Cheers
PP
PS: in the meantime, here’s something I just saw today on this very subject.
From Canada, that bastion of free speech and democracy? Sorry to sound cynical, but there is little in the article about their protocols. I don’t claim to understand their treatment protocols, but there are things that should cause one to question this “study”. For instance, “COVID-19 diagnosed clinically or epidemiologically but lab results inconclusive, unavailable, or not performed”. Or, as we know, Covid has not been identified (as with every previous viral disease), against Kock’ postulates so the whole testing procedure must be in doubt.
As for my images above, they are screen grabs from the UK Column (I think monday 8th), and they source their figures from the ONS.
Corbett has just done a very good analysis of mortality, "Questions for Corbett!
Thanks
I’ll try and find it. Is this the same ONS that has officially said 2020 was the worst per-capita mortality since 1940? I’m impressed that UKC were better able to analyse ONS figures than the ONS were themselves on their official accounts. I’m curious to see if they can explain what mistakes the ONS made in their analysis.
Interesting point. Let’s see what the article actually says about that:
We identified patients with COVID-19 based on the enhanced Canadian version of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision (ICD-10-CA) codes, namely U07.1 (“COVID-19 diagnosis confirmed by a laboratory test”) and U07.2 (“COVID-19 diagnosed clinically or epidemiologically but lab results inconclusive, unavailable, or not performed”).
So they used multiple ways of identifying Covid. A PCR where available, and clinical diagnosis where it wasn’t. What was the breakdown?
1027 admissions with COVID-19 (including 944 laboratory-confirmed diagnoses) in 972 unique patients.
944 PCR tests out of 972 individuals. Hmm… that seems pretty high to me. But I like your approach to determining Covid - if diagnosed with a PCR it is suspect; if diagnosed without PCR it is even more suspect. Again - heads you win, tails I lose. Clever.
Dismissing published, peer-reviewed articles out of hand because they are from Canada seems unlikely to get one closer to the truth in my opinion. Plus the authors of that study do point out that they have similar results to other studies done in France and the US, so presumably you doubt the similar results in all these published studies?
Anyway. If you have a link the the UKC piece I’ll have a look, otherwise I’ll try and sniff it out. Perhaps they have a good set of analysis to explain why the ONS statisticians are wrong but the ONS numbers are right.
A pretty narrow bullseye I would have thought, but I’m interested to see what they say
Cheers
PP
To make your fact-checking easy …
Here are the ONS figures for 1901 to 2000 followed by those for 2001 to 2020. Yes they were the worst for some time, however, remeber the ONS figures make no allowance for changes in population numbers. PER CAPITA, they seem to me to be in line with the UK Column’s graph!
Hi @PatB
I’m sorry for the long delay in replying to you. I’ve only just been able to have a look this morning. Thanks for the links above, although they don’t seem to include 2020. This is the best link I’ve found so far for the numbers we are talking about, in case anyone wants to look at the actual data.
I know you’re not a fan of long and detailed posts, so I’ll try and keep this one as short as possible. In fact, I’ll post the summary first and then a bit of detail below, which you can feel free to skip. This reply will focus on mortality, and I’ll save my comments on the other points you raise for later replies.
Summary:
So, looking at the raw data one can say, as UKC do, that 2020 was no bad thing. It only takes us back to where we were a decade or so ago. I find this to be a seriously misleading reading of the data, however. Much as Ivor Cummins does, UKC are not giving a full picture of what’s going on and misleading their audience with stats. Looking at either excess deaths or increases in ASMR, it becomes clear that 2020 was a huge outlier, and you have to go back to the creation of the NHS to find a comparable year. This should not be surprising as so many doctors, nurses and others have been saying exactly this. There are also factors other than ASMR that make 2020 much worse than any year for the last 5 decades, including the death rate per week during peaks etc. But I’ll leave that there.
Conclusion: Covid is definitely, positively, conclusively worse than the flu. At least 3.5x worse. There is no question about this anymore.
Cheers
PP
Graphs and discussion (skippable for those who don’t like long posts 
)
This is the age-standardised mortality rate direct from the ONS. It matches the UKC graph perfectly.
So, on average the mortality is going down, year to year. In general we don’t expect significant social or medical changes from one year to the next. Those changes happen over longer timescales. Year to year changes are most likely due to seasonal things like flu rather than long term things like cancer or child mortality. Lets take a look at year to year changes in ASMR:
We can see that some years have higher mortality than others. As mentioned above, this is likely due to something seasonal, or a wave of illness sweeping in, rather than systemic changes. Since 1970, we can see that only a handful of years registered a worse mortality than the year before, with 2020 clearly being the worst for a long time. What seasonal thing could have come in and made 2020 such a bad year for mortality? Covid is the obvious candidate.
How much worse was 2020 than the other years when mortality spiked upwards? Let’s look at the years with increased mortality.
Counting the positive years from the graphs we can see that there were only 10 years since 1970 when mortality increased, instead of decreasing in line with the trend. If we take the average of the worst years over the last 50 years we can see that 2020 was about 3.5 times worse than the average. This is exactly what researchers have found in comparing covid to the flu, as I linked to above.
So, from the data, it looks to me like covid caused a big spike in mortality, bucking a long term trend and was about 3.5 times worse than the average in other similar trend-bucking years. We have to go back to 1949/1950 - the very creation of the NHS - to find a comparable increase in excess mortality.
So - a simple question: If the 2020 all-causes death rate was 3.5 times worse than the average (and please understand that just because ONS says it, I don’t concede that it’s necessarily true, and will prove to be so when the dust has finally settled), then what actually caused the extra deaths? Definitely a novel virus? Or…?
The more I listen widely around all the speakers who are weighing in on this thing, the more I suspect that something else is going on.
Briefly, the censorship and crass, demonstrably-lying propaganda that we’re observing directly right now are unprecedented. I have literally never seen anything so blatant in a long lifetime. Why is that?
One possible reason may be that the manipulators who are behind this are panicking. They leapt precipitately onto the ‘covid’ bandwaggon, seeing it as a vehicle that would take them towards a reset global economy, which they saw as being essential - and urgent - because of the huge economo-financial crash that is now imminent, and which could tip the whole world into chaos - and their WealthPowerStatus applecart with it, with the distinct threat of ‘pitchforks and lamp-posts’ in their near future as a result.
As some of the interviewees on the ‘Vaccines Revealed: Covid’ sequence make clear, there seems to have been a sort of nod-and-a-wink drift amongst the powers that shouldn’t be towards such a shake up and power grab, through a GOF pathogen panic and a line of policies which could be foisted on us during the stampede. Not exactly a conspiracy; not as tightly coordinated as that. But an unacknowledged silent understanding drifting through the shared mind-space of the gics and their tame, dependent technocrats. A crucial component of this idea would have to be a proven-effective antidote to the prospective pandemic, to be well ready before the scam was set going: “See! We benign servants of the people, always doing the best that we can for your greater good, have the salvation from this terror that you need! Just line up precisely as we say, doing precisely as we tell you, to get your dose. And don’t get all informed-consent bolshie about demanding to know what’s in it. No time for that. Just trust us: your BENEFACTORS…!”
Then comes some sort of sudden illness out of the blue. Maybe a natural event; maybe a GOF frankenbug; maybe deliberately released from a biowar lab; or maybe an unintended escape. Who knows which? But here it is, anyway.
The gics and their servitors see an opportunity, and - terrified already about the Grand Global Crash hoving up on the horizon - they pile on willy-nilly. But - without the antidote ready which had been part of the original ‘in-the-air’ idea (that such as Fauci and Gates have been quietly floating around for ages).
Suddenly, the gics and their career-currying, fat-pay technocrat servitors are in the same position as Phaeton: unable to control his father’s rumbustious, unmanageable horses; the Great Beast of the common plebs. Too many goats, not enough sheep, and more and more sheep deserting the stampede and slinking over to the goats to boot! (Pardon the multi-species metaphor! )
By now, there have been so many unnecessary deaths, which could have been avoided by wise doctoring and wise public policy (not designed to further the gics’ villainous purposes), and there is so much gaffe-blowing information leaking out about how we’re being conned, that the manipulators realise they are now in serious danger of being arraigned for crimes against humanity, and treated accordingly.
So naturally, they double down on the hysteria, the propaganda, the astonishingly-blatant censorship and the continual goal-post-shifting. Their necks are in the halter, after all. Part of that double-down, naturally, is - lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Which is why I take - literally - every piece of information about the crisis (or ‘crisis’), and particularly any set of figures that I see right now, with a thirty-ton truck of salt.
Any of the explanations that we run up the pole may well turn out eventually to be true. But right now, we have no real certainties; literally zero.
Hi RG
The question of using ONS data or not is worth talking about for a minute before we continue. There is a trend among some covid critics to use official data sources and then twist them up to try and show something the data are not, in fact, showing. Ivor Cummins does this all the time, and UKC were doing it in this case. It was they who took the data at face value, thinking that it showed something when it showed the opposite.
They can’t have it both ways - use the ONS data if it looks like it minimises the problem, and then when it shows the opposite say “Oh well, you can’t trust ONS data anyway!”.
Let’s at least be consistent. Either we don’t use that data source, and find a more reliable alternative, or we agree that this is the best we have, and agree to follow where the data lead.
Moving on, the post I made was to look at the question of whether there have been an unusually high number of excess deaths in 2020. I’ve addressed this loads of times already, but took another stab because… well, actually I’m not sure why. I thought this was already answered but hey ho.
No matter what data source one picks from the available public sources, there has been a huge increase in mortality, consistent with a dangerous new disease sweeping through. This is confirmed in the numbers, and in direct frontline reporting from the professionals dealing with the situation. In my mind, at least, there is no argument about that anymore. Or at least to argue against that now, I would need to see credible alternative statistics, or credible whistleblowers showing that the ONS and all the frontline doctors, including those we actually know personally, have been totally faking it all along.
Absent such bombshell whistleblowing, it appears to me that the facts are clear and there is absolutely zero benefit to those who are critical of the government response to continue to pretend that water is not wet, and grass is not green. There are too many other important things to focus on.
So let’s just finally agree that a lot more excess deaths occurred in 2020, and move on.
You ask:
An excellent question, and one that I don’t have an answer to. It is undoubtedly true that a large proportion of total deaths in 2020 were caused by covid. But it doesn’t seem likely that all of the deaths were pure covid. That’s why it might be pure coincidence that I came up with the 3.5x number in my post above. I can easily believe that the government policies last year, and the crumbling state of the NHS (did you see the effect of austerity in the graph I drew above?) have caused a lot of what we used to call collateral damage in addition to the actual deaths connected to covid. A full audit or public inquiry of policy and impact would need to be done to get to the bottom of that. I don’t know whether that will ever happen, sadly.
100% agree. The gaslighting is turned up to 11. From all sides… Your points about the GICS manipulating the covid crisis to their advantage towards a Great Reset are extremely well made, in my opinion. I agree 100% and this is exactly what I have in mind when I say we have more important things to argue about than whether people died or not. I have no doubt that this policy is unfolding in front of our eyes, at speed. How far they get with their master plan or whether they run full-tilt into the Long Descent is the big question in my mind.
I, too, am very suspicious of how fast a “vaccine” was found (nearly 10 of them!) for a previously impossible problem. All in less than a year, rather than the decade or so they used to take. Is that fishy - it bloody well is! Where is the scrutiny around all this? Missing.
Basically, I’ll shorten this already long post by simply saying that I have no disagreement with you all about any of the points you raise around what the response has been to this pandemic. There are proven treatments that are ignored, there are new vaccines to previously un-vaccinatable illnesses, there are powerful billionaires jumping in to shape the response towards the Reset they want. These are all undeniable things, and are getting worse.
I would add to the charge-list the fact that Tory government of the UK has been criminally negligent in its responsibility to protect. The vast majority of the deaths in the UK were totally due to government policy. Just as clearly as if they had simply lined up 100,000 people against a wall and put a bullet into their heads. It might well not be negligence - it might have been the goal all along. But those people still died… a pandemic false flag operation.
I would like to see those Tory criminals face charges and prison. Let’s get to CULPABILITY. This is why I get so fucking annoyed with arguments that say, “mate - there was no excess mortality! It’s all a lie”. It let’s these Tory criminals off the hook they deserve to hang on.
Let’s not forget who we are fighting against. It’s not an illness, its the GICS and their servants.
Cheers
PP
Hey P! I quite agree there MAY turn out to have been a wave of excess death passing through, cause unknown. Just saying: I’ve seen no sign of it personally; I don’t trust ANYONE’S stats; and thus I’m obliged to wait and see, still. I just don’t know, and I don’t know anywhere that I can get information on which I’d trust my great-grand-children’s lives. Obdurate open-minded-scepticism seems to me the only odds-on course possible.
And if anyone thinks my post just above in this thread is OTT, take a look at what Mike Whitney says 
That’s the problem with personal anecdotes. I personally know of several people who died and others who got sick but survived.
Doubting the stats is fine, but then you have to be willing to throw out Ivor Cummins and UKC and everyone who uses stats, equally.
Where does that leave us?
Where? Gatherer-hunters on the trail: all channels wide open, taking nothing for granted, nimble and alert; all shamans with intuitive mode at full power… and always open-mindedly-sceptical… Best chance we’ve got of sussing what’s really happening! 
Lol. Ok, I can’t argue with that. I was wondering where our modern day Terrence McKenna was hiding out. Turns out he’s on 5F!
Right @PontiusPrimate here we go. Lets start with what we agree.
a) We agree I don’t like long complex posts
b) We agree that the UK column graphs I posted are correct
c) We agree that 2020 was an increase in per capita deaths after a period of decline
Here is the fundemental basis of our disagreement. We disagree on the seriousness of SARS Cov 2. More important than that is you do not address the spikes in mortality, just after the lockdowns. As I have said on many occassions, the almost straight line rise in deaths cannot (in my opinion) be natural. I fail to see how one can dismiss deaths caused by the many effects of lockdown, which include:
i) Sick elderly being pushed out of hospital into care homes
ii) Increased death caused by isolation of the old and very vunerable
iii) Increases in suicides
iv) Increases in deaths due to untreated illness beacuse people were terrified about going to hospital
v) Increases in deaths due to the final and total visceration of the NHS e.g. 2,000 cancer cases a week going undiagnosed during lockdown
I do not know what the total number of deaths is, but I cannot accept that it can just be left out of the thinking.
What we really ought to agree on is this: The manipulators are playing a very high-stakes game. In some countries - especially with the widespread smouldering anger which I sense amongst we commoners - they are at risk of life-imprisonment or death (possibly even by lynch mobs “chasing [them] down the street” as Bush the elder once said) if the truth comes out too clearly, and tout a coup. That being so, they’re going to do whatever they can get away with to keep us confused and unclear. THAT being so, how can we mere keyboard warriors sitting at home be sure that ANY statistics we can find have absolutely not been tampered with? Anything at all?
The short answer is: we can’t. Sorry folks, but waiting for the dust to settle and hindsight to be let in at last is the only reliable tactic we have; whilst maintaining high level watchfulness about everything that’s happening. Irksome, innit?
Hi @PatB
To be honest, I think we agree on a lot. Not everything, but a lot. I’ve addressed the sharp spike in mortality just after lockdown a few months back, I remember. To my mind, the lateness of the lockdowns, and the way numbers are reported, combined with exponential spread do account for it. .
As for the seriousness of Covid, I do agree with a lot of your points (i)-(v) above. But, I also note that our hospitals and ICUs were overflowing with dying people who didn’t fit into any of the (i)-(v) categories, so let’s not forget them. This was after a massive effort to increase ICU capacity, and draft in extra doctors and nurses from wherever they could.
Covid (according to the ONS) was responsible for something like 30% of the total deaths in 2020. That’s what it said on the death certificates. The suicides, deaths from other illnesses like cancer etc. most likely make up the remaining 70% of deaths.
I just don’t see what’s controversial here. Covid killed many people, and many people also died from other things. The desire to minimise covid deaths in the face of all the data, evidence and testimony of the frontline staff seems weird to me.
@RhisiartGwilym - I find testimony from frontline doctors, including the couple I know and others I trust (Pierre Kory etc) to be of high reliability. They tell a story completely consistent with the stats. The dust has already settled, my friend. It won’t get more settled over time. We already know what we need to know about the mortality of 2020. Waiting ain’t gonna get us anywhere beyond what we know now.
Cheers both
PP
Fancy a bullion-bet, P! 
haha!
If I had any bullion, I would!
Sadly I have none. And no bitcoin either…
I know there have been a lot of deaths these past two flu-seasons. Whether they’ll turn out to be a confirmed excess over recent trends may - perhaps - get settled as true over time. I’m still waiting.
But in any case, this alternative hypothesis coming into view now - that the air-plankton are in fact vital, accelerated-evolution messengers between at-risk members of a species, which only kill those whose immune systems are already shot to hell by micro-radiation, glyphosate and friends, stress, chronic shite-food, physical idleness, obesity, etc, etc, etc - is still viable, even through all the spikes.
The point is: we Westerners are already in a parlous state of chronic ill-health, through the shite lifestyles which have been foisted on us by the profit-seeking-above-all thugs, together with the tsunami of iffy for-profit drugs which have drowned the practitioners - and the users - of Western allopathic ‘medicine’.
In that predisposed condition, the exosome/virus messengers have a different effect from what they have in immune-strong recipients: in the former, the message-processing produces severe distress and even death, in the latter - such as me and mine - it produces slight discomfort at worst, asymptomia more often, plus a useful message-with-sample that results in an acquired, long-term, nicely-balanced immunity, and also an incorporated, instant-evolution addition to our inheritable DNA (!!!)
Don’t you like that picture better P? I sure do. Hope it’s right. Seems in any case that by continuing to discuss and tease at the questions with amicable civility, we-all shall arrive at an honourable consensus which stands a high chance of being real-world accurate. Good - adult and civilised - moderation rools, OK!
Agreed. In that vein, Off Guardian has a very pointed take on why the Corona “cases” started falling worldwide in late January. And one guess why that is?
" Well, on January 13th the WHO published a memo regarding the problem of asymptomatic cases being discovered by PCR tests, and suggesting any asymptomatic positive tests be repeated.
This followed up their previous memo, instructing labs around the world to use lower cycle thresholds (CT values) for PCR tests, as values over 35 could produce false positives."
Who would have thunk it?
Hi @PatB
I just checked the article, but as with just about every article by Off-G on covid, I was far from convinced.
1 - A step change in the measuring criteria seems unlikely to lead to a trend downwards.
2 - The UK was already double checking borderline results, as far as I know
3 - the UK has been using PCR to check for three distinct SC2 markers to increase confidence that a PCR positive is correlated to exposure to the virus, and not a random fluke
4 - we have had similar falls after lockdown in this country before, without any apparent changes in testing protocols. This is a familiar pattern now
Essentially the points I made in the post on some thoughts about the PCR test and false positives etc still stand, as far as I can see.
Cheers
