Accepting that the stats provided on CV are at best poor, sometimes misleading, it's worth standing back and looking at what is measurable. The excess death rate is one commonly cited measure and is useful, but about to become much less useful as it is compared to a rolling five year average for the date. Come March/April it will include 2020 figures so excess numbers are going to be diluted.
Since the original lockdown I've been recording the daily UK death numbers - themselves of varying quality as some health boards seem to report promptly seven days a week, others not so promptly and many not at weekends, distorting the data flow. Plus up until some time in July all deaths following a covid diagnosis, regardless of actual cause and length of time were counted. Then it was decided that was unreasonable - it was up to a point - and only deaths occurring within 28 days were counted. The logic is that under the old measure a person diagnosed with CV and then run over on day 29 would be recorded as a covid death. I suspect that the vast majority of the over 28 day deaths (there were nearly 5,400 reset on the 13 July) were not the result of being run over or a car crash, skydiving incident or other totally unrelated cause. Many may not have died directly of Covid, agreed, but probably having had it will likely have weakened immune systems allowing other causes to be more deadly, so it's at best a semantic argument.
As the daily rate is of variable accuracy I started to record the seven day total, starting on 23 March, the day lockdown started. The thing that I'm seeing is that the seven day total for this week is 4272, and the last time we saw a number like that was w/c April 6 (2 weeks into lockdown), with a weekly total of 5678. The previous week had totalled 3706, and of course both those weeks included deaths that we're not routinely recording now. Which indicates to me that we are pretty much as bad in terms of deaths now then we were at the peak (the 5678 number was the highest total apart from the week after when the care home deaths were suddenly added, but would have been a significant drop otherwise).
I'm not convinced we've seen all of this week's numbers - Wales and NI didn't report over new year and their numbers are now filtering in - and although large parts of the UK are in tier 4 it isn't being treated like lockdown was in the first wave - the roads are busy, the shops are full and many people have ignored the stay at home and don't party instruction over Christmas and New Year. I think this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
