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“But if we simply say everyone hit by a bus would still be alive if buses were removed then clearly our only option is to remove buses.”
“Does it still make sense to simply ban all buses and lose their many advantages?”Not really, there is consideration to the benefits of a public transport system in the balance and instead they try to mitigate the risks of people running or stumbling out infront of a bus rather than banning buses outright. All the railings at busy crossover points, those little bumps in the pavement to alert blind/visually impaired people thay are at the threshold of a crossover, audible traffic light alerts, traffic calming measures, speed bumps, reduced school zone speed limits, speed limits in general, reduced pedestrian access to motorways and busy A roads, closing off rat runs etc
In response to your second paragraph relating to death certificates and causes of death.
“I think you will agree that, using those guidelines, covid-19 would rarely, if ever, be given as an underlying cause of death where co-morbidities are listed.”
Not quite sure what you mean here but I think you mean covid 19 would rarely be listed as a significant co-morbidity in box II and more likely to be listed in the sequence in box I as part of the sequence leading directly to death. If so, that isn’t true. Prof Carl Heneghan looked at this with the trend increasing over time from 7.8% in the beginning to 29% (worryingly) in the last 8 weeks of reporting up to August:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/death-certificate-data-covid-19-as-the-underlying-cause-of-death/
For example, someone with significant chronic obsructive pulmonary disease (COPD) gets an exacerbation because of covid 19 and dies. It might be felt that COPD was the true underlying cause leading to cardiorespiratory collapse with covid 19 being a signficant contributory factor.You quoted
” ‘If the certificate has been completed properly, the condition on the lowest completed line of part I will have caused all of the conditions on the lines above it.’
This needs to be understood more in terms of the sequence of events/conditions.
“You are asked to start with the immediate, direct cause of death on line Ia, then to go back through the sequence of events or conditions that led to death on subsequent lines, until you reach the one that started the fatal sequence.”
“WHO defines the underlying cause of death as “a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death, or b) the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury”. From a public health point of view, preventing this first disease or injury will result in the greatest health gain.”
You gave an example of someone with cancer who also has covid. The first example they cite in that guidance document has interstitial pneumonitis as direct cause of death caused by covid then they list primary adenocarcinoma of ascending colon directly leading to Covid. I find that strange even without access to that particular patient’s records. The stage of cancer and presence (or absence) of metastatic lung disease should have been mentioned.
“It is not at all unrealistic to suppose that on many of those certificates, it was actually pneumonia that was listed at the top, and thus the ‘direct cause’ of death which terminated life.”
It is very often exactly that Steph. But if a secondary pneumonia is caused by primary covid 19 then covid 19 is the underlying cause of death. Similarly, a cachectic, immunocompromised patient with lung mets dies from a pneumonia the underlying cause will be the cancer which leads to the sequence of events which ended with pneumonia.
I think we are all, including me getting a bit bogged down wth the death cert stuff. It is good to be sceptical folks. Equally, at some point you have to work with the data we have and not what we’d like to have.
“but it is indisputable that different countries use different criteria to register covid-deaths”
In regard to death certification most countries use the WHO recommendations in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). Most have similar death certificate design.
Co-morbidities are present in nearly all deaths whether from covid or anything else. You need to be careful your prevalence of co-morbidities doesn’t just represent the prevalence of said co-morbidities in the general population.
ET: “In regard to death certification most countries use the WHO recommendations in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD).”
Perhaps so, but is Britain one of those countries? Here’s another quote from my earlier link:
“It seems that Public Health England regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community”
Is that recommended practice by the WHO?
In regard to death certification, as in the filling out of a death certificate and the actual certificate’s design, yes, the UK does follow the WHO classification system. What PHE is doing in collating their statistics has nothing to do with doctors filling out death certificates. It may be they want to collect “all fatalities in which a bus(coronavirus) was involved” from our earlier discussions and from those work out what is really going on as per Steph’s ideas. I don’t know Duck but it doesn’t relate to how death certificates are filled out by medics. As SA pointed out, PHE is not the only source for deaths related to coronavirus.
As far as I can tell, from their dash board website, they are reporting deaths within 28 days of positive test for coronavirus in their charts, two different charts one by date of registration of death and one by actual date of death (which appears to lag behind presumably because that is more difficult to collate, though why that is I don’t know because again presumably the date of death is also in the registration data). Again Carl Heneghan and CEBM have remarked on the difficulty with data back in April, so I don’t know how current that assessment remans.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/reconciling-covid-19-death-data-in-the-uk/And so our latest conspiracy theorist arrives calling itself “Duck”, and Steph wastes no time in reinforcing its message of December 9, 12:20:
– “Perhaps those Asian countries didn’t have such an all-encompassing definition of a covid-death. Obviously, if you include in the death toll all those who died with rather than of covid, you will record higher mortality rates than those countries which are more discriminating. That this factor is never included in comparisons of national covid death statistics smacks of deliberate obfuscation.”
No need for “perhaps”; just go and look at the general mortality curves, you know, the ones of death from all causes; they either have huge great humps in them, or they don’t, making the entire “of or with” meme nonsense. Obviously, misclassification of certain sorts of death cannot produce a hump in “death from all causes”.
Duck, this completely negates the argument you presented, and if you present it again I will have to assume you’re dishonest.
Steph, if you reinforce it again, I will have to assume that you are dishonest too.
Then, Duck at December 10, 11:14;
#63045:– “Please check the credentials of Professor Carl James Heneghan, then read what he said about Public Health England’s (PHE) method of compiling covid death statistics in July…”
“Check the credentials…” is argument from authority; it seems sciency but that’s misleading, because a scientific argument is based on evidence, not somebody’s say-so, not even a professor’s. Picking out that particular quote is quote-mining, obviously. But to use it as an argument that covid-19 is killing only a fraction as many as claimed by the official covid figures is also rampant cherry-picking, because the official covid figures are already broadly confirmed by the overall excess mortality.
Of course the argument that all the medical authorities, and all the general records offices, of all the towns and cities and districts and counties and states and nations, all across the world, are all coordinating diagnostic, statistical and scientific fraud to make a bad cold look like a lethal pandemic – this is pure conspiracy theory.
– – – – – – –Steph, I just pointed out an example of conspiracy theory; do you recognise it as such?
Or do you subscribe to it? The Secret Powerful Men say, incite a panic out of nothing, and all these hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers – scientific, medical and official, in different fields, jobs, departments and levels of the hierarchy from local to international, in different countries all over the world – they all change their usual ways of working to start doing just the right things to make it look as if millions of people are suffering from a new disease, when in fact everything is normal? This could be true, could it? And I have to take it seriously and not call it anything rude like “conspiracy theory”?
I say it’s a waste of time. SA and ET have written reams of rational argument yet still it continues. That’s because conspiracy theory isn’t rational. It’s the same as trying to convince religious creationists; it’s a belief rather than a position chosen by reason and evidence, so there’s no point trying to reason about it. Just call it out for what it is, be it religious fundamentalism, political ideology, conspiracy theory, propaganda, New Age hodgepodge mysticism or whatever. None of these are susceptible to reason, so there has to be a widespread understanding that it’s OK to just call them out and move on, and why such dismissal is valid.
SA, December 9, 11:16, #62998; a very clear pattern has emerged. If anyone plays down the severity of the pandemic, Steph publicly compliments them; they’re warm, polite, respectful, experienced and incredibly knowledgeable etc. If they present it as severe, Steph publicly describes them as rude, condescending, impossible to reason with etc. I myself have been described as uncaring about human rights, condescending and arrogant.
SA, this looks to me like an ego game, whether this is Steph’s conscious intention or not, and it appears to be working, on you; Steph repeatedly made personal accusations against me, but when I questioned her competitiveness, suddenly I am called to account, albeit alongside her.
Apparently, insisting upon facts is arrogant; other “visions” must be treated as equally true. This sort of false equivalence is very effective at corrupting an argument by appealing to the human sense of fairness; suddenly the “moderate” position is pulled, from accurate representation, to half way between accuracy and nonsense.
Steph, if you’re genuine, I expect you’re really pissed off with me for writing the above, and nothing I can say could make you feel any better, except if I were apologise, retract, and promise never to repeat or mention it, like Galileo under house arrest. Whatever you say boss, but do take a look for yourself through this new telescope thingy; there are definitely four objects orbiting Jupiter.
Duck, December 10, 13:53, #63048:
– “Excess death rates include those who died because of lockdown restrictions rather than covid – lack of access to routine medical care or emergency services, suicides, domestic violence, etc …”
The excess death rates are plotted as graphs over time. The excess deaths do not start and end with the restrictions. They follow the shape of the infection test results graphs, with a delay of about two weeks, and thus they fall as the restrictions continue, just as should be expected – restrictions reduce the infection rate, which reduces the death rate two weeks later. When restrictions are relaxed, infections and then deaths at least start falling more slowly, and usually they begin to rise, just as is happening now in the UK.
– “How many? Nobody knows or is making any effort to find out. Why not?”
Well that’s not true, all sorts of people have been examining statistical discrepancies and trying to account for them or improve matters eg. the various figures for the UK. But the lack of panic and suspicion is because the various graphs are all much the same shape, confirming that the various statistical sources are all broadly consistent with covid-19 being the new killer.
– “it is indisputable that different countries use different criteria to register covid-deaths, yet this factor is ignored when comparing how nations have fared.”
That’s actually why I like the following page; for each country the graph shapes are shown without any absolute numbers, thus removing such variations from the visualisation.
The message is, the steepness is the main thing to watch because it’s what we can control with social restrictions, whereas the absolute number can be misleading as it can increase very rapidly.
Clark
December 11, 2020 at 01:20#63089Yes I appreciate what you say. Initially I thought that Steph would accept some of the arguments and be more balanced but now I can see that maybe I have been taken in. When people start talking about ‘natural’ being the best option and that advance is not necessarily good, it reminds me of the many antivaxxer naturopaths.
Wow, that discussion went downhill fast! One minute we’re debating the reliability of statistics, then the next I’m a deluded conspiracy theorist, using pseudo-science and quote-mining, and I’m not just wrong, I’m deliberately lying. The metaphor has just come into my mind of a respectful discussion being interrupted by Ian Paisley barging through the door with a megaphone.
Good luck Steph. I’ve looked back through this thread and realised what you’re up against: intolerance of your right to disagree, ie bigotry. I have never encountered such self-centred arrogance in a discussion forum before and I’m not hanging around for more of it.
‘When people start talking about ‘natural’ being the best option’
As far as I’ve noticed, the only person who has mentioned anything ‘natural’ was you SA, when you snootily poo-pooed sterile lawns and well behaved bushes.
‘a very clear pattern has emerged. If anyone plays down the severity of the pandemic, Steph publicly compliments them; they’re warm, polite, respectful, experienced and incredibly knowledgeable etc.’
– And you accuse others of being conspiracy theorists?
I’m leaving this conversation now, please feel free to hurl whatever further insults give you the most satisfaction. You are stark raving bonkers.
Steph, December 11, 15:01 – “As far as I’ve noticed, the only person who has mentioned anything ‘natural’ was you SA…”
Steph, December 8, 16:41 – “Might the virus not just be ‘natures’ way of controlling the human population? As far as nature is concerned the more folk that get wiped out the better surely? Just like every other plant or animal, a successful species will eventually succumb to some limiting device of nature that restores balance.”
(cough)
– “And you accuse others of being conspiracy theorists?”
Yes, but only if they come out with a load of conspiracy theory, eg. here: “any fool can see that the covid figures are being inflated by a factor of eight and yet the media and politicians studiously ignore this glaring inconsistency. We are led to believe that our supposedly high death rate is attributable to lax measures and we demand stricter ones, like Christmas turkeys demanding the abattoir lorry gets a move on”, ie. it’s not a pandemic, it’s a conspiracy.
I find it interesting to note that conspiracy theorists refuse to admit, and sometimes even outright deny, that there’s any such thing as conspiracy theory. Their position is that there is merely a term, ‘conspiracy theory’, but no such phenomena; the term is deployed by (ahem!) supporters of the secret conspiracy, merely to discredit arguments that might expose the conspiracy.
There seems to be a parallel with New Age hippydom. New Age hippies are clearly recognisable by their talk of “healing energy”, “positive energy”, “strengthening the immune system”, “natural” things being virtuous, “western medicine”, “ancient wisdom”, and all belief systems and “world views” holding equal validity, but no New Age hippy will ever admit to being one.
Each redacts their own ideology from their own model of reality, actively maintining a blind spot about themselves. Curious.
So those objects orbiting Jupiter that I can see through binoculars; are they a conspiracy too? To not be a bigot, must I take seriously the Catholic Inquisition’s model of the solar system? Must I not say that the Inquisition’s facts were wrong, but they conspired in an attempt to enforce them? Must I suppose that every telescope and pair of binoculars ever made have secret devices in them to create illusions that merely look like four orbiting objects? Am I being intolerant of the Inquisition’s right to disagree? Is this self-centred arrogance, rude, insulting, like Ian Paisley barging through the door with a megaphone, and stark raving bonkers?
Or do some people just have difficulty admitting they’re wrong, and turn to insults as a last resort?
‘Or do some people just have difficulty admitting they’re wrong, and turn to insults as a last resort?’
Not at all, I am always willing to be proven wrong and have no problem conceding a point. I am just weary of your ‘conspiracy theorist behind every corner’ obsession. To me it is crazy.
Galileo was persecuted for his amazing discoveries which were subsequently proven to be perfectly correct. Your own amazing discoveries have been what exactly? As far as I can ascertain all you seem to have done is watch some very disturbing scenes from hospitals, read some other people’s study papers, formed an obdurate opinion (based on ‘the science’ of course) and then shouted it angrily at other people. Poor persecuted you.
And, while I am at it – SA.
‘Initially I thought that Steph would accept some of the arguments and be more balanced but now I can see that maybe I have been taken in.’
‘Taken in’??? Taken in by what exactly? Don’t tell me you are also of the opinion that there is some kind of subversive campaign trying to draw you from the path of true enlightenment.
I joined the discussion on this thread believing that some interesting debate might result. I did not realise that you viewed me as some kind of naive fool that could, with patience, be schooled into the correct way of thinking, although the politely patronising tone of your earlier posts probably should have alerted me. But rather than a lively and companionable discussion amongst equals I have found the experience really rather upsetting. What a shame.– “Don’t tell me you are also of the opinion that there is some kind of subversive campaign…”
Well there does appear to be some such campaign, but I have not written that you, Steph, are part of it. My remark concerned your personal commenting style: you heaped praise upon John Ioannidis more than once, found Yeadon ‘plausible’ and ‘interesting’, and as soon as Duck posted some conspiracy theory you described it as “a very good point”. Yet you repeatedly accused me of rudeness, and utter lack of concern for human rights.
So I see a pattern; those who play down the danger, you praise, especially their personal qualities. It looks to me like a subconscious strategy to influence the argument; people crave approval, so you give personal praise to those promoting the narrative you wish to encourage, and personal criticism to those saying that things you’d rather were overlooked. Others will see this, and preferring to be described as “plausible, interesting, warm, polite, respectful, experienced and incredibly knowledgeable” rather than “rude, condescending, arrogant, obdurate, angry, impossible to reason with and entirely uncaring about human rights” (all your own words, Steph), they modify what they say towards the outcome you’re trying to achieve. In short, it’s manipulative. Yes, I know; your hackles rise with the word “manipulative”. But like “conspiracy theory”, it’s a description rather than an insult.
I have asked you several times about conspiracy theory, but you simply ignored me – which is just as rude as using rude names and making ungrounded accusations (which you have done and I have not). We have had various commenters promoting blatant conspiracy theory on this thread, and Yeadon lapsed into conspiracy theory. Yet you have so far reserved nearly all your criticism for me. So I ask again; Steph, do you accept that there’s any such thing as conspiracy theory, and can you recognise it?
Steph
My apologies if you think my tone was patronising. My aim at starting this thread was to open fruitful discussion and perhaps some of what others write here have made my ‘tolerance’ threshold lower. I sort of agree in general terms, and without upsetting anybody that all of these discussions have to maintain a certain standard of respect for others in order to be fruitful. It applies to both sides. But it also applies in observing a certain standard of evidence, and not expecting to counter a scientific argument with personal beliefs.
What I think people like me find frustrating is that I can immediately see through the arguments of people like Mike Yeadon and perhaps as a personal failing I may then overreact when through my own fault, I find that others still believes in what he says. The reason why this is the case has to do with hope perhaps, everyone wants to believe that things are not as bad as they are and therefore look for alternative explanations. In general terms, I guess E.T. and dr Edd (although he/she has not commented recently) do so from a more dispassionate and evidence based approach.And this, Steph –
– “…schooled into the correct way of thinking”
Nature doesn’t care what we think. You can think covid-19 is just a bad cold all you like; it will still kill around 1% of the people it infects, and leave five to ten times that number badly incapacitated, possibly permanently damaged. This is simply a fact, as best determined so far by observation. It is likewise simply an observed fact that covid-19 outbreaks have overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare systems. Reality doesn’t give a damn about your, nor anyone else’s opinions.
It is up to each of us to see reality as it is rather than how we think it is or how we’d like it to be. That is the discipline reflected in the scientific method, and the principle by which science achieves its successes.
Clark & SA. Thanks for responses. Good luck with your fruitful discussion together. May ‘non-scientific’, personal or contrary opinions never them disrupt again.
Yeadon acted irresponsibly – that’s my opinion, in case anyone requires clarification. I think it was irresponsible of him to declare that the infection and mortality rates could not rise again and that concern was merely the work of a malign conspiracy, and I think it was doubly irresponsible of him to present his “scientific theory” to the general public through Delingpole’s blog rather than by publishing in the scientific literature. And I expect that Yeadon’s irresponsibility has caused increased suffering and death.
Steph, are you telling us that you reject being bound by facts?
Anyone can do science, in fact we all do science every day without realising it. When you pick up the sugar tin and shake it to estimate how much sugar is in it, you’re doing an experiment. When you look for bubbles in a saucepan to see if the water is boiling, you’re making an observation.
Of course, you can ignore the facts if you wish. The sugar tin might feel light when you shake it and you could hear no moving contents, but you could maintain an opinion that there was plenty of sugar in it anyway. But that might prove inconvenient later when there’s insufficient sugar for your visitors’ hot drinks.
I suppose that was “condescending”; I suppose another apology is expected. But I shouldn’t have to be explaining this stuff; it should be common knowledge.
Steph, you have AGAIN ignored my questions about conspiracy theory. Why?
Clark, if I start another discussion thread about covid, would you please refrain from contributing to it? I don’t mean to be provocative but I’d rather discuss the issues than what you perceive to be the character failings of other posters. Those who like arguing can post here, and those who like rational debate can post on my thread. Everyone wins! Do you agree?
Duck, are you Node?
No, I most certainly do NOT agree. You have no right to increase suffering and death by broadcasting conspiracy theory.
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