Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

sorry, I had to shear

Fixed.

I was a little shocked and frightened to go any further so I just nodded for the rest of the time.

To be fair, you were in a vulnerable position at the time.

And indeed ignores the fact that there's what, 20k excess deaths? out there that weren't officially registered as Covid.

she defended the government by saying that one customer came in saying that someone in her family had died in a car crash and it was recorded that they had C19

This is the case isn't it? Isn't there a footnote on all the statistics along the lines of "all deaths where a positive test for Covid 19 was recorded in the past 28 days"?

This is the case isn't it?

Yes, a small percentage of covid deaths are incorrectly attributed. Beyond 28 days Covid has to be mentioned on the death certificate.

Given how few people die in accidents in the UK every year its probably not a reason to totally discredit the death toll. We should be looking at excess deaths anyway.

aggi, i'm sure you are right but the idea that this was conspiracy and explains away our high death toll?

but the idea that this was conspiracy and explains away our high death toll

At tops the directly related to Covid death toll is about 7% too high according to the info I can find. Probably quite a bit lower than 7%.

Obviously that's bollocks but when one element of these conspiracy theories is correct some people will leap on it to validate the whole thing.

https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/12/behind-the-headlines-counting-covid-19-deaths/

I think everyone agrees that some people die 'with Covid' rather than 'of Covid'.

Our excess death figures[1] are still shockingly poor though. Some of those excess deaths didn't have Covid at all which just goes to show how badly the UK has managed the situation.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 - 67,500

Does anyone have a chart of how other countries count the deaths? I’m just interested now in the variance of method.

No, but I read earlier (can't remember where) that England opted to change to the "death within 28 days of + covid test" model partly to bring itself in line with other European countries.

Great chart on that page, I've been keen to see the data presented in this way for ages. It's the only way to get close to a like for like comparison, although there must be some variance in how even total death figures are collected and reported.

Shows that we are level pegging as worst of the developed countries along with Spain and Italy. USA meanwhile, by the excess deaths metric, is actually doing a fair bit better overall, though, it looks like they have never got it under control, suggesting its going to keep getting worse for them.

Poor Peru and Equador - they have had it real bad. I think I read that altitude can make it worse, which may partly explain the huge excess deaths there, compared to other countries with similar working / healthcare conditions.

I’m aware of this. It used to be 60d.
The change meant 5000 deaths were no longer attributed to Covid.
It was changed in August.
As per my link above.

That was my thought: either that or importing some massive data dump in csv format.

you were in a vulnerable position at the time

Sweeney Todds place ?
http://knowledgeoflondon.com/sweeny.html

I think it's something to do with PowerBI. I think.

so I just nodded for the rest of the time.

Did you end up with a dodgy fringe?

Radio just had that it was an older Excel format that meant that more than 1 thousand something tests imported in one go would fail.

So nothing to do with the 2^14 (XFD) column limit.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54422505

"
The problem is that the PHE developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.

As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.

And since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.
"

@Sam_w wins.

I only guessed this as I still run into it loads, its amazing how many systems spit out xls

It's amazing how much IT stuff that may be presented as a very swishy iPhone app (e.g. phone banking apps) are actually backended by layers and layers of increasingly old and crufty goblinry.

Somewhere there's probably a pair of ancient Tandem mainframes lurking in a basement that the bank is just praying will continue to work without problems, and things like transaction IDs are actually screen scraped from TN3270 sessions by hardware that is older than every bank employee.

Or stuff like the SABRE airline reservation system.

*shudder*

oh yes, I did some work with a well known high street bank and their systems were truly a thing to behold.

Or people that give me 10mil rows in CSV format. But open it first in Excel to check it. Then save it and send it to me. And wonder where the data went.....

Ha! excellent! I get standardised reports from a well known search company beginning with G... they used to send one CSV file, with around 1.5m rows, apparently they got so many people messing up the reports they now break them up into smaller files, but to be extreme have decided that the right number to break it up into is 251 files, which seems a little bit odd to me, but oh well Batch append works..

I don't mind, but the 3rd or 4th time you have to explain it to the same person does make the process tedious.