Right, some recent personal experience as well as news articles have me seriously doubting official UK COVID19 figures, and in turn all the analysis based on them.
I had a bit of a health scare over the weekend, where I was feeling extremely fatigued, with a persistent strong headache and a sour throat.
It felt like the flu, only many times worse, which had me worried given the current climate.
However, the British NHS self service website was a joke, consisting of a bare bones two question survey which diagnosed you as probably not having COVID19 if you do not have both of the primary symptoms of a persistent cough and high fever.
Now, that ridiculously basic check (I would not consider that as anything remotely worthy of being called a test) would simply fail to diagnose a significant proportion of infected, especially those who have mild symptoms. So these infected would not even be told to self isolate.
Even if you do tick both boxes, you will only be told to stay at home and self isolate for 7 days. No tests or medical assistance unless you are really really sick. In which case you have to call the non-emergency number and need to pass a questionnaire before you are deemed to be worth the time of an actual trained medical professional.
Then you have stories like this.
The official UK infected and death figuresare currently 29,474 and 2,352, giving a whopping death rate of 8.0%.
It is important to note that these 2,352 deaths are only those recorded at hospitals. Deaths at home and care homes are not included as far as I am aware.
The official line is that this death rate is so high because there are many many more mild cases who are simply not being tested.
However, one really also have to wonder how many similar cases as Luca there are where people died needlessly because the official policy is that everyone should self isolate at home and medical assistance would only be granted as a last resort, by which time it might be too late.
In addition, given the likely scale of under-diagnosing and reporting of infected, I have grave reservations about the usefulness of Uk government figures on COVID19, and in turn any analysis one does with them. As anyone who has done any data analysis will tell you, the very first rule is: trash in trash out. If your underlying data is trash, no conclusions you draw from that data can be trusted.
You can already see examples of this, it was only yesterday UK officials were boasting of ‘green shoots’ of signs of recovery, and today we have a new daily death record that simply smashed the old record by quite some margin.
