Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter

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351 appearances 17 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2010 last heard Jan 2021

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Deaths at Home, Supermarket Infections and the Cobra Effect · 27 Jan 2021 podcast

And our current daily death rate is not approaching that.

I don't believe we'll get near that figure.

And so actually all those comparisons by saying, oh, we're higher than the peak of the first wave also are incorrect.

From the start of the pandemic up to January 8th in England and Wales, there are 42,000 deaths.

excess deaths registered in homes and only 4,000 of these were Covid and it actually matches very closely what happened in hospitals.

There were 42,000 fewer non-Covid deaths than normal and what this indicates is that a huge migration of deaths from hospitals to homes.

So they revealed that in Scotland in 2020, there were about 7,000 extra deaths and about 6,000 COVID deaths.

So, you know, roughly matching.

But overall in Scotland over the year, there were fewer deaths than normal in hospitals.

And so what happened?

Well, it's the same as England and Wales, a huge increase in the number of deaths at home.

But because of this data, we can see what were these extra deaths.

And in fact, in Scotland, they had 1,900 extra cancer deaths at home and about 1,200 extra heart disease and stroke deaths at home.

Yes, over the whole of Scotland, cancer and heart attack and stroke deaths are not raised very much.

So it suggests that most of these people actually would have died anyway, but they would have died in hospital rather than at home.

And so that really raises the question, what has been the quality of the end-of-life care?

I mean, those of us, including myself, who have experienced the deaths of somebody from cancer at home know that it can be as good of an experience, I think, as one could hope for.

But, as you said, heart attacks and strokes, which are much more sudden and less, in a way, planned for, could be a very different matter.

It would be very good to know much more about what's been going on in Scotland and, of course, over the whole country, because there's been a similar pattern across the whole country.

One can assume so, but this pattern occurred right over the summer when there was not a huge burden of the epidemic in the country.

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