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by acqq 2240 days ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-52466471/page/3

"29 Apr: The death toll from the virus in the UK rises to more than 26,000 after care home deaths are included for first time"

Apart from that, luckily, we have also "all deaths" (for any reason whatsoever) statistics for participating EU countries (and, still, UK), so we can compare these too:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Even there Belgium has had quite high z-score ("computed on the de-trended and de-seasonalized series"), although there are two obviously worse at the peak: UK (much worse and without any indication of improving at the moment, according to the available statistics) and Spain, which already improved.

At the moment it seems to me that it was mostly the UK that just didn't report correctly, not that the others overreported.

2 comments

I'm not sure on the Belgium situation but there is quite the lag between death and reporting of these care home numbers. For a care home death to be counted towards the coronavirus total a death certificate is required which takes time.

There has also been a large deal of controversy over the counting of care home deaths in the UK with the government consistently being called out by care home operators for unbelievable care home death numbers.

> There has also been a large deal of controversy over the counting of care home deaths in the UK with the government consistently being called out by care home operators for unbelievable care home death numbers.

Do you have something about "unbelievable"? Per BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52284281

"There is a two-week time lag in the data collected for official statistics. The most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are for the week ending 17 April. At that point, there had been 3,096 Covid-19-related deaths in care homes in England and Wales."

"the Care Quality Commission (CQC)" "already has to be notified when there is a death in a care home. It is also now asking care providers to give daily updates on deaths and the number of confirmed and suspected coronavirus cases.

Between 10 and 25 April, their findings show that 4,343 individuals died in care homes from coronavirus."

Looking at euromomo, it appears to me that the UK did not report some deaths related to Covid-19, the question is only where exactly.

Edit: to pjc50:

> San Marino lost 1,208 people (so far) out of 30k?

No. See again: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/san-marino... Total deaths: 41 == 0.12 percent == 1,208 per million

Unbelievably high or unbelievably low?
It's worth nothing from the euromomo site that the latest data is from week 16 (it's currently week 18) and the top of the page says it was last updated in week 17.

They also note on the page:

> Week of study: 17, 2020.Must be interpreted with caution as adjustments for delayed registrations may be imprecise.