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Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

"Better" is doing a lot of work here.

The UK (in particular, England) is currently reporting the second highest new death rate per capita in the world, still higher than it was at any point in 2020. It continues to report 1000+ unnecessary deaths per day.

And, is it still the case that the UK has 50% more excess deaths than it is reporting in the daily coronavirus figures? A mystery...

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Note that deaths are very lagging. It can be a couple months between being exposed to COVID and death, maybe even more as medical science has learned about treating COVID over time. It is reasonable to assume that everyone dieing today got COVID before there was a vaccine, though there have been a few deaths by now that could have been prevented if the first vaccines were not given to someone else (if that person who got it would have got COVID and died instead is not something we can answer)

Deaths will start to stop soon, COVID infections are already dropping in many countries, with vaccines being part of the reason (but only part - again we cannot know how much)

The UK only treats deaths within 28 days of a positive test as a 'COVID death'.

Interesting. I know that in my community the spike in covid deaths lags the new positive count by almost 2 months. I'm not sure how they decide something is a COVID death, I just watch the daily new positive and daily deaths numbers.

Agreed, important to keep in mind the UK has highest per capita mortality of any large country. But this is good news for the government’s gamble to increase spacing between doses to 3 months

It's worth looking here : https://github.com/dkobak/excess-mortality for clear statistics. There is a big difference between what is reported and what the actual numbers work out to be.

The UK is still pretty near the top there. What happened to Bulgaria recently?!

As best as I can tell, the timeline of these data is lagging and inconsistent...

I believe it's (now) listing UK up to 2020 Week 51, and Bulgaria to 2021 Week 3.

That's a 5 week difference in which Bulgaria was hit pretty hard. We don't see the effect in this data set of the British variant yet.

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