> But death numbers and hospitalization numbers don't lie.
They most certainly do lie. I know people who work in a particular police department, and they have been exercising a policy of not testing people they find dead. Situations like somebody found dead at home in bed, perhaps some blood that looks like it’s been coughed onto a pillow. Whoever’s in charge of policy wants the numbers lower, so they don’t do a test, and the death is recorded as something non-Covid related. Conversely you have NY who recently decided to declare all cases of death where Covid could have been a plausible cause as Covid-19 deaths. Not only are death statistics reliant on methodology and testing policies, but they are equally as open to manipulation by political actors as the infection statistics are.
This isn’t unique to this situation either. These kinds of statistics are manipulated all the time in lots of different situations. For example you could never smoke a cigarette in your life, but if you manage to die of lung cancer, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ll be recorded in smoking statistics. Then you have things that are even more nebulous, like trying to figure out how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. Lots of different people will try to answer that one for you, and the gap between the lower estimates and the higher estimates is enormous.
you'll see a spike in the overall mortality for a region.
If you look at the mortality figures from the UK (published by the ONS) you can clearly see a peak, compared to the average range for that week over the last (10?) years.
That peak matches the shape of the numbers of victims of covid (the number is higher because nursing homes are horribly affected)
They most certainly do lie. I know people who work in a particular police department, and they have been exercising a policy of not testing people they find dead. Situations like somebody found dead at home in bed, perhaps some blood that looks like it’s been coughed onto a pillow. Whoever’s in charge of policy wants the numbers lower, so they don’t do a test, and the death is recorded as something non-Covid related. Conversely you have NY who recently decided to declare all cases of death where Covid could have been a plausible cause as Covid-19 deaths. Not only are death statistics reliant on methodology and testing policies, but they are equally as open to manipulation by political actors as the infection statistics are.
This isn’t unique to this situation either. These kinds of statistics are manipulated all the time in lots of different situations. For example you could never smoke a cigarette in your life, but if you manage to die of lung cancer, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ll be recorded in smoking statistics. Then you have things that are even more nebulous, like trying to figure out how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. Lots of different people will try to answer that one for you, and the gap between the lower estimates and the higher estimates is enormous.