There are so many different ways of looking at what's being said/written about death rate andthe R rate. I asked some time ago what the difference would be if they excluded Care homes from it. Now. There are so many different ways of looking at what's being said/written about death rate and the R rate. I asked some time ago what the difference would be if they excluded Care homes from it. Now apparently it would be significantly lower. Given that care homes can be fairly tightly monitored (Even though the government and the operators failed to do it originally) will the government use the lower figure? Another point is the average age of mortality. As they have told older people all the time to be more careful because they are at greater risk, and if these people listen (not that they do apparently if you witness comments by TOBW and TLG) then that should help to keep it down too. Because now the bundle all deaths together we don't know on a day to day basis how many of the current deaths are care home related.

And care home deaths raise another question for me. Deaths in hospital are deaths of people who had the symptoms bad enough to be taken in, the deteriorated and died. That is straight forward enough. Now if a person was in a care home and had a similar level of symptoms they would be taken to hospital.
But Covid 19 is an officially "Notifiable Disease" which means that if it is present or reasonably thought to be present then the certifying doctor must put it on the death certificate. So an older person with serious life threatening condition dies in his/her bed and the staff tell the doctor the symptoms. If he forms the opinion that Covid 19 was present he is obliged to put it on the death certificate even if those symptoms were never severe enough for the person to have been taken to hospital, and the persons underlying conditions were life threatening anyway. So how will we ever know the true numbers odfdeaths actually attributable to the disease?
Another point about average mortality rates and the current figure being higher than average has been referred to. It was said by I think one of the clinicians on the daily briefing that we might have to wait a full year to know the full difference in average deaths, and the reason he gave was this: So very many of the people who have died are old or had severe underlying conditions that were life threatening anyway that we will have to see if, following the above average death rate now, there is a below average death rate in the following months. He said this would indicate that the people who died from this may well have died within the 12 month period anyway and it only hastened their demise. It seems a bit of a callous way of looking at it but I see his point.

My last point was a question asked by a member of the public on one of the briefings at the weekend. If we have been self isolating for 10 weeks, and to be fair most have been keeping to the rules or at least taking reasonable precautions how come there are still several thousand new cases appearing every day given that we are told the incubation period is 7 - 21 days depending what you read? JYT was asked and he said hey didn't know. The new cases are not coming from a particular sector of society or from particular 'essential' occupations os where are they coming from? It really is weird.
End of eulogy!!