David Spiegelhalter

twitter and everyone's been awash with people arguing about why and broadly there are three explanations i think for some of those are elderly frail people um who have an extremely mild who do have are have got the infection it's so mild they're not symptomatic but in a sense it pushes them over the edge and one of the reasons one of the supporting evidence for that the people at site is the fact that up to now over the winter we've had extremely mild weather

There's been no big seasonal flu outbreak at all.

And we have essentially 10,000 deaths in credit over the winter so far.

These are frail, mainly elderly people who normally, we don't of course know who they are, this is just a statistical number, who would normally have died in an average winter.

So we have this terrible way to describe it as a backlog of frail elderly people who might be particularly susceptible to even mild infection.

And then there's the idea that there may be many cases, and I've talked to GPs about this, the difficulty of registering, putting suspected COVID on the death certificate, the difficult decision about that when you might not have even seen the patient.

Now, under the new regulations, a death can be certified without having seen the patient recently.

And the GPs then are dependent upon some of the reports of the carer in the care homes, thinking about what symptoms they might have had,

And that will make any professional doctor rather reluctant, unless they're fairly confident, to put COVID-19 on the death certificate.

So there's the reason that maybe there are some more moderate cases with some symptoms that aren't being put on.

Then, and that will make a certain proportion, we don't know how many.

And then the really thing that people are interested in is how many of these are cases who never had COVID, but who didn't go to hospital with their chest pain.

you know, someone in the care home who might have had a minor stroke.

And rather than taking them into hospital, partly because there may be a feeling that the hospitals are very high risk places and partly because they feel they don't want to burden the NHS with more patients.

And so people aren't attending.

And we know people aren't attending hospital.

Hospitals, our local hospital, Cambridge, is actually, you know,

not empty, but it's really not dealing with any of its normal customers in the way that they used to.

Huge drop in A&E attendances, and of course, elective surgery being canceled, chemotherapy has been canceled, and so on.

And so that is the crucial.