Continuing the discussion from AdapNation Podcast #143 - Reflections on Covid mania w/ Ivor Cummings:
Is this the kind of thing you’re talking about? (The image is taken from an animated graphic in the BBC article Coronavirus: England highest level of excess deaths - BBC News [Thu 30 Jul 2020].)
Simple answer is hmmm, because I don’t believe a word the BBC says. However, this is from the ONS. This year versus last 5 years (my graph from their figures)
The lockdown started on 23rd March. Look at the spike. Very soon after. If one believes the ONS figures, then there has to be some explanation for this.
Thanks for the thoughts and the graphs, @Twirlip and @PatB.
So, I have a couple of thoughts on the excess deaths biz. There seem to be three questions around the shape of the graphs that are coming out (correct me if I’ve got this wrong!). This is a little bit mathsy - so please forgive that.
I’m going to leave point (1) alone for a different post. I’m interested in what it would take to fake tens of thousands of deaths that didn’t happen and I haven’t finished thinking about that yet, so my working assumption here is that a large number of deaths did in fact occur. That (obvs) could be wrong. Anyway.
I’ve put together a couple of pics from an open-source data source which may (hopefully!) shed some light on the dynamics.
As you show in your graph PB - the excess death curve rises very sharply to a peak, and gradually tails off. What makes the curve so steep? As far as I know, ONS data is a weekly measure of data (is that right?). I don’t think that these are daily numbers… Please tell me if that’s wrong.
Let’s look at daily vs weekly charts of the covid data:
In the early part of the outbreak in the UK, the number of cases, and the number of deaths followed an exponential rise. This is exactly what is predicted by any model I’ve seen of how a disease spreads in the early days of the outbreak. You can see the daily counts as red dots (smoothed somewhat in the blue line) and the weekly counts as black circles. The vertical black line is roughly where lockdown kicked in.
The extra steepness we are seeing here is what happens if we take a weekly aggregate of a daily exponential curve. The weekly curve is a lot steeper than the daily one, and has a very similar profile to the ONS data - a very steep rise, and a gradual tail-off. The steepness or cliff-like nature of the rise looks to me like an artifact of aggregating an exponential curve.
From what I can see from the ONS picture you show, the peak looks to happen just around mid-end of April. Let’s check the covid data (this is the 7-day averaged data, so not exactly what is shown in the graph above, but the trends should still be clear):
That does seem to line up. What else can we say about timing? We know that:
So, does the timing make sense? Consider:
So, to my mind we take a week of slow-down before lockdown was really in full flow, add in a 1-2 week incubation time for people to realise that they even had the illness, and we would expect to see a peak in cases about 2-3 weeks after the lockdown started. That is exactly what we see in the graph above.
Ok, what about death counts?
We are told that deaths lag cases by about 20 days (maybe 15-25 ish). It takes some time from someone being recorded as a case to them ultimately dying of covid. So, given the argument above, if the lockdown worked as it was supposed to, we should see a peak in deaths about 20 days after the peak in cases, which in turn should be 2-3 weeks after lockdown was initiated.
So, we expect to see a peak in death rates at (2-3 weeks + another 2-3 weeks) around 4-6 weeks after lockdown started.
That is exactly what we see.
Well, so far I looked at 2 things - the apparent steepness of the excess death curves and the proximity to the lockdown, and in both cases what we see is exactly what we would expect to see if Covid were infecting and killing a whole bunch of people. The dynamics seem completely consistent to me.
We also see a rise, peak and decline in cases (and deaths) exactly as we would expect to see if the lockdown did its job and stopped the virus from spreading. The timing looks completely consistent to me.
That is not to say I’m right - just that it looks reasonable to me. I could have got my graphs wrong - if you spot any errors of logic or charting, let me know.
Finally, that is not to say that there are no questions or weirdness - there are. One big one that I have no answer to is why are cases rising again, but deaths are flatlining near zero? I don’t know. But as to the two questions we discussed I hope I’ve been able to make things a bit clearer.
Cheers
PP
On point 1 (in the third paragraph):
Even assuming it to be possible (and supposing there to be a credible motive for doing it), if deaths were faked, why would they have stopped faking them?
That’s an excellent question actually, and one I had not thought of. If someone was faking death certs, why would they not start the death cert printing press now as cases start to rise again…
Why do we have the mystery of rising cases but falling deaths? We should just be able to fake up whatever number of deaths we need to keep the scare tactics going…
A good question.
“Why do we have the mystery of rising cases but falling deaths?”
This is just in. I mean, out 
From a CEBM professor, no less, none of your David Icke stuff here (actually he said it about six months ago, which raises an interesting point about sources):
Covid-19 tests may be detecting DEAD virus cells, giving ‘false positives’ and EXAGGERATING pandemic – research
Careful about those capitals man! We don’t want people thinking we’re CRAZY!!! 
Did you see the link to the last Chris Martensen video? He talks about exactly that.
It’s an interesting and tricky issue, but not one we should ignore…
Also, in the case of detecting “dead” virus, that still means they were infected (and infectious) at one time…
Cheers
Are infected and infectious the same? That leads on to another key uncertainty - I’m drawing on what I think I have read…Unlimited testing of an individual (‘amplification’ might be the word) can show up some sars2 RNA in someone who may have very little viral load; possibly fragments of an earlier infection, even one for which they were asymptomatic.
There is no quantity or concentration reported on Covid-19 tests, just that you have ‘the virus’, ( 
) or you don’t have it. Another thing thy don’t tell you is how many magnifications there were before getting a positive (or negative) result.
This is where I think the world of science has failed. Many basic and relevant questions, and no answers. If only we had a trustworthy world body and government that wasn’t on the make in some way…
These are all excellent points, as far as I know.
I think it’s impossible to know after the fact how big a viral load a person may have had. Every 10 cycles of the PCR test “amplifies” by a thousand, so 30 cycles is amplified by a billion, 40 cycles amplifies by a trillion.
That’s enough to amplify a signal no matter how tiny initially…
It’s a mess
Cheers
PP
This looks good to me Pontius. It is exactly how I would interpret those graphs too based on patterns of exponential case growth, incubation period and deaths occurring ~20 days after case identification. Good clear explanation of your thought process too. Thanks.
