Why is UK death rate so high

No!
And that’s not what I posted
You can’t compare our ‘death rate’ to anywhere else’s death rate because the measure is different.
Our real death rate currently (if there was a comparable measure) would be low, because we are comfortably dealing with a small number of cases, that will change dramatically in the coming weeks.

but just to reiterate, you can’t compare our stats to anywhere else because everyone is measuring different things.

 

It could be the two countries you've selected to compare. You say other countries but name two, add Spain, Italy, France, Iran into the mix and it's a bit different.

 

This should go at the top of the BBS. Actually, it should be given to journalists and politicians too.

 

I had read a sensible press article on the anomaly of the German figures. It stated the Germans don't bother testing people who have died, if not already tested, this skews the death toll, producing a misleading low figure. presumably if they have a co-morbidity that's what goes on the death certificate. We have posters in Germany I think, perhaps they know more?

 

I think it's because we are not testing, we probably have a much lower ratio of confirmed cases to unconfirmed cases.

 

Correct - even those who called 111 and the ‘unconfirmed’ phone diagnosis was that they probably had it weren’t tested - they were just asked to stay home and self isolate. It’s also clear from all the anecdotal stuff where footballers have tested positive and had no symptoms that a huge proportion of cases (not just in the UK like) have been missed in the denominator.

 

Like others have already pointed out, It’s just a lower overall infection rate. The healthcare system is well prepared but the main reason why we have lower rates of infection here is that we’ve been testing, tracing and isolating over 100,000 people a week here since beg of Feb, 160,000 in recent weeks. The number of confirmed cases here is much closer to the actual number than in other countries (like the UK) where either they don’t have capacity to test as many or chose not to. And there are less actual cases because so many of the early cases were traced and isolated quickly and social distancing measures came in very early for number of cases we had at the time.

It also true that if somebody dies at home, potentially from covid-19, they aren’t always tested for it post-mortem. In most cases they are however and the number of these types of victims is thought to be low anyway.

 

I read something at the weekend using the sampling technique used for opinion polls, and he had 4 infections from his 1300 followers which implied over 100,000 infections with 95% confidence (or 200,000 infections with 65% confidence). That was 3 days ago, so you are now looking at around 200,000 infections at 95% confidence.

The other factor is the death rate of 335 from a population of 66 million (~5 per 1million) . South Korea (50m) has had 120 deaths (~2.4 per million), Japan (125m) has had 42 deaths (~0.36/million) and Taiwan (25m) has had 2 deaths (~0.1/million). These three countries have had less than half the deaths of the UK, from 3 times the population and less warning than we had (and 3x the positive cases). These countries are generally now only seeing new infections from people entering the country rather than a community infection.

If these trends continue, then you are significantly more likely to die in the UK than you are in those Asian countries. They followed the WHO advice and had previous experience of the SARS epidemic in recent memory. We ignored the WHO advice (and still aren't following it fully) and have no recent experiences of human epidemics. Were we and our government too complacent? Thought we were special? To tight to pay for the tests? Prioritizing the economy?

 

I think he's mixing the 2 virus's up.
We have had the Tory virus since 2010.

 

One other factor - South Korea (and other countires, I can remember which) were able to send everyone an text message straight to their phone, telling them about what to do. Here the government spent money on designing a system, tested it and despite it apparently working well didnt follow through with it. As a result they lack the ability to text people directly in an emergency which is especially useful to vulnerable groups. (There was an article about this yesterday but i cant find it at the moment)

 

Cheers mate, that all seems logical. So effectively there is a statistical abberation caused by more testing of (live) people and quite possibly a better response by their Government. I had also read somewhere that it is more ingrained in the German ethos to follow rules, whereas some parts of our society have been (and continue to be) woeful in this regard

 

Less testing. Poor governance. The daft idea about herd immunity. Not isolating early enough. All of the above.

 

There was a programme on the other night that suggested Korea can do the test in 10 mins...apparently that isn't correct, they can do the swab in 10 mins, take your mobile number and text you the following day. They have a private company who have been developing this for some time to combat Sars type epidemics, it was a relatively easy switch to convert to Covid19...hence the fantastic results.

 

We're only testing people who are so ill they turn up at hospital. So the number of actual cases vs reported cases is a massive variance by country, we've probably got way more infected people then Germany. Also, is everyone marking all their Covid-19 deaths correcty? Heart attack - person may or not get tested, they may or may not get registered as having died from Covid-19 - after all, Covid-19 doesn't actually kill anyone directly.

 

I got a text about 10 minutes ago from the government. About f&&king time.