Place your bets now.

From the BBC:

The UK has benefited from both fast [vaccine] rollout and good uptake. Currently, a third of the adult population is fully vaccinated, with another third having had one dose. Among those at most risk - the over-50s and younger adults with health conditions, where 99% of Covid deaths have occurred - uptake for the first dose has been 95%.

Which is all good stuff. I'm not sure why they think it's better to give people in their 40s and younger a first jab rather than giving the over-50s their second jab, but hey. Sometimes the government does the right thing.

On the topic of death stats, I assumed that excess deaths in 2020 would be offset by lower than average deaths in the next couple of years i.e. the people who died from it would have died from something else in the next couple of years anyway.

It looks like this effect is starting to kick in - the black line for 2021 is dipping below the dotted line for 2015-19 average - but who knows? Most predictions about all this have been very wrong (including, I hasten to add, most of my own), so that's the question - how much lower will 2021 deaths be compared to the 2015-19 average? Just a bit? A lot?

Here's a chart to summarise data from the ONS: What's odd is that the January 2021 peak is a noticeably lower than the April 2020 peak. Worldometers shows it the other way round:

Weekly deaths - England and Wales - that was the year that was

Data from the ONS.


See also @Dr_RohenKapur. Total deaths in 2020 were about the same as in the 1990s. Yearly deaths fell to a low in 2011, and since then they have crept up again (2020 deaths were about 5% higher than in the previous three years). Presumably due to Catastrophic Tory Underinvestment In The NHS or something.

Daily Mail on top form

From The Daily Mail:

Two grandparents known as the 'heart of the community' were killed in a fire at their farmhouse alongside their dog just hours after wishing their family happy Christmas.

Frank, 90 and Madeleine Dougharty, 86, were found alongside their dog Flash on Boxing Day morning at their farmhouse in the Sussex village of West Chiltington.

Emergency services were called to their £760,000 home at 9.10am after reports of a significant fire which has gutted their remote farmhouse.

E&W - weekly deaths up to Week 44

Data from the ONS:


What "second wave?", you might ask.

Week 46 will be a special week, as that week's deaths will include the bastard who terrorised West Yorkshire for half a decade and ruined countless lives. May he rot in Hell.

Daily Mail on top form

From The Daily Mail:

When police arrived they found [Hancock] covered in blood as he told them 'I'm hardly going to deny it; look at me'.

Hancock, of Etwall, Derbys, had already pleaded guilty at Derby Crown Court in July to two counts of murder via video link.

PE teacher Ms Almey and [her new partner], a company director of a marketing firm, were discovered in a pool of blood at the £400,000 property on New Zealand Lane just after 4am.

"Police call for witnesses regarding second walker killed by cows"

Spotted by James Higham, Julia M and Tim Almond in The Guardian:

A second fatality caused by cows has been made public by police, meaning there have been two such deaths within a fortnight in the north of England. Malcolm Flynn, 72, from Carlisle, died after being charged by cows, police said on Friday.

Police asked for witnesses after Flynn was fatally injured in what they said was a tragic incident while he was walking on land near Thirlwall Castle and Gisland, Northumberland, at around 11.45am on Friday 11 September. Police said he died at the location, which is on the Pennine Way.

No mention of dogs in that article, or in the BBC's version.

"Richmond School teacher Dave Clark killed by cows"

Spotted by James Higham and Julia M at the BBC:

A spokesperson for North Yorkshire Police said the force had been called to a report of a man in his 50s being injured by cows in a field north of Richmond.

He was treated by paramedics, but sadly he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Very sparse on detail. There's no mention of a dog or young calves, but that doesn't mean they weren't there, and we aren't told how many cows* were seen attacking him, or indeed why he was in the field.

* Please, no jokes involving 'five'.

Update - AK Haart in the comments points out that he was walking his dogs. Thought so.

Don't panic

Good article at the BBC explaining why recent rise in Covid-19 cases might not be as worrying as it first seems.

For once, they are not doom mongering. Although they don't mention that the daily deaths figure has been around 10 a day for the past month, that's less than one percent of all death. In April, there were 1,000 Covd-19 related deaths a day, which doubled the number of daily deaths. That was panic territory; ten a day isn't.

It's not just cows

From the BBC:

A well-known South African conservationist has died after he was mauled by two white lions as he was taking them for a walk. The wife of West Mathewson, who followed in a car, tried to distract the lions but it was too late.

The lionesses have since been moved to another game lodge and are expected to be released into the wild at a later stage.

Also from the BBC:

A polar bear has killed a man in Norway's Arctic Spitsbergen island, local officials say. The attack occurred at a campsite near Longyearbyen, the main town of the island in the Svalbard archipelago.

The bear was then shot and found dead at the local airport.

The polar bear is shot and the lionesses are released into the wild? Seems a bit inconsistent.

Coronavirus - daily new cases v daily new deaths

From worldometers.info:



There are lots of ways you can interpret that. I'm quite sure that some countries under-report and others over-report, but let's assume it cancels out and charts are a good guide to actual trends. There's a pessimistic and and optimistic way of interpreting anything, even something as grim as this.

1. Is the number of new cases really rising, as you would expect if R is greater than 1, or is the number of infections fairly stable, and the apparent increase is because they are testing more people?

2. Is this the start of the 'second wave' of deaths, or just the inevitable result of lockdowns being eased?

My slightly rosier view is to observe that the number of deaths in any week, while fairly stable, is falling as a fraction of new cases reported three weeks previously*. This might be because the virus is becoming less virulent, which is what such viruses tend to do (some faster than others); or it might be because hospitals are getting better at treating people; or it might be a bit of both. Whichever way, that's got to be A Good Thing.

* Assuming three weeks to be a typical lag between diagnosis and death. For example:

New cases March 28 - 51,000; deaths April 18 - 7,000; death rate = 13.7%

New cases June 20 - 180,000; deaths July 27 - 5,600; death rate = 3.1%

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - up to week 29

Data from the ONS.



I assume/hope that this will be pretty much the picture for the rest of the year i.e. a slight undershoot.

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - up to week 27

Data from the ONS:



Looks like we're pretty much back to normal.
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In related news, from the BBC:

Back in March we knew so little about this virus. We assumed that it was a respiratory illness, only to find out that it affects almost every organ in the body. We assumed that we would rely on invasive ventilation and ICU only to find out that early CPAP (non-invasive ventilation with oxygen) on the medical wards was more effective.

This doesn't surprise me. Several doctors started pointing out months ago that invasive ventilation made things worse. See also the pioneering work done by this chap in March and April of this year. He might have made a lucky - or desperate - guess, but so what? He did it for real.

And, by half-arsing the whole thing and dragging their heels, with the benefit of hindsight, the NHS have saved a fortune on really expensive ICU ventilators and can use the much cheaper - and better - sleep apnoea masks instead.

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - up to week 25

Data from the ONS.



By that metric, we're not quite at undershoot yet, but pretty close. The BBC reckons we are, by a slightly different metric.

When Animals Attack: Texas Mayor Killed In Donkey Attack

Cow attacks? Those crazy Texans have gone one better. From Bossip:

Hollywood Park Mayor William “Bill” Bohlke was killed by his 500-pound donkey in an apparent attack Monday, said Chief Deputy David Soward of the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office. Soward said the donkey remains on the ranch and an exact cause of death is pending.

“They [donkeys] can become very aggressive, very mean, sometimes triggered by a female in heat,” Soward told the San Antonio Express-News. “We’ll probably never know what triggered it, but it was evident that this particular donkey was involved, based on the evidence at the scene and what we saw on this donkey.”

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - up to week 22

Data from the ONS.



We're not quite at 'undershoot' yet, but watch this space.

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - 2020 - up to week 19

Data from the ONS.

My assumption is that at some stage later in the year, the red line will be undershooting the other two. But we shall see.

Weekly deaths, England & Wales, all causes, week 1 to 17

Duly updated. It does look as if the headline 30,000 coronavirus-related deaths are all incremental additional deaths, not (as I was expecting) overlapping with deaths that would have occurred anyway.

Yes, that's nineteen individual tragedies, but,,,

From the BBC:

Thousands of people in the UK have now died with coronavirus, including doctors, nurses, surgeons and other NHS workers.

The government has said 19 NHS workers have died so far, with doctors who came out of retirement among those who have lost their lives...
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In the general spirit of being factually correct yet controversial...

Total coronavirus-related deaths in the UK so far, 9,875.

About ninety per cent of deaths were people over retirement age, and ten per cent were people of working age (from here, other sources say much the same thing).

So we'd expect to have had about 988 deaths among working age population.

Total working age population (18 to 67) 42 million

988 deaths ÷ 42 million = 24 deaths per million.

Total number employed by NHS = 1.5 million

1.5 million x 23/million = 36.

We could adjust that up or down for various things, for example:

- Just because somebody in the NHS catches it, it doesn't mean they caught it "in the line of duty". They might have been infected by family or friends, caught it on public transport or from a colleague.

- We could refine the exercise if we could split the 24 deaths/million into three categories by relative risk (highest to lowest)
a. "people with underlying health conditions who are too unwell to be in work anyway"
b. "people who are healthy enough to go to work and are still working"
c. "people who are healthy enough to go to work and are staying at home"

- Not all NHS staff are frontline (don't come into contact with patients or general public), so perhaps we should multiply by 1 million, not 1.5 million.

But this would all be guesswork, so let's leave our prediction at 36, which is twice as much as actual 19. I doubt whether the death rate for NHS workers is significantly higher than for everybody else in the category "people who are healthy enough to go to work and are still working". One thing we do know is that the death rate for NHS workers is a lot lower than for London bus drivers.
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Clearly, the NHS senior people have failed their front line staff (and the general public) very badly. It appears that they never bothered with a contingency plan for such diseases, which come along every ten years or so. And every health minister for the past twenty years should be grilled on why they never thought to ask whether the NHS had such plans. The lot of them should be sent into exile. You can't just blame it all on the current incumbent.

The front line staff have my every sympathy and I do not envy them. But, they should be aware that the number of NHS people who have died with coronavirus (so far) is not surprisingly large and appears to be half that of the general working age population.

Weekly deaths, England & Wales, 2018 to 2020 (weeks 1 to 13)

Statistics from ons.gov.uk

I will update this monthly.

"Coronavirus deaths: What we don't know"

An excellent article at the BBC, which has saved me the bother of writing something like this myself.

Worth reading in full, the upshot seems to be this:

... given that the old and frail are the most vulnerable, would these people be dying anyway?

Every year more than 500,000 people die in England and Wales: factor in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the figure tops 600,000.

The coronavirus deaths will not be on top of this. Many would be within this "normal" number of expected deaths. In short, they would have died anyway.

One of the charts in that article says that about 9% of people over 80 who contract coronavirus die as a direct result. But the point is, at that age, you'd expect approx. one person in ten to die in the next twelve months anyway.

If you compare the coronavirus deaths table with the 'chance of dying anyway' table, they are pretty much exactly the same. I would assume that the overlap is very high, so additional deaths will be negligible. Worst case, there is no overlap whatsoever (highly unlikely), in which case your chance of dying in the next 12 months has doubled. That sounds worse than it is - if you are in your 30s with a 1-in-1000 chance of dying, that's now gone up to 1-in-500.