On Tuesday the ONS announced that there were 9,628 deaths in England and Wales in the week ending 28th May 2021. This is 232 fewer than the previous week, and 3.1% below the five-year average. Here’s the chart from the ONS:
Deaths in England and Wales have now been below the five-year average for 11 of the past 12 weeks. Over that time, there were 8,212 fewer deaths than you’d expect based on the average of the last five years. And note that, due to population ageing, the five-year average understates the expected number of deaths. So the true level of “negative excess mortality” is even greater.
The number of deaths registered in the week ending May 28th was below the five-year average in seven out of nine English regions. (Only the North East and North West saw positive excess deaths.) Compared to the five-year average, weekly deaths were 7.5% lower in the East of England, and 8.1% lower in the South West.
As I’ve noted before, the most likely explanation for persistent “negative excess mortality” in England and Wales is that deaths were “brought forward” by the pandemic.
Given these figures, and the fact that around 80% of adults now have COVID antibodies, it is difficult to see what possible grounds there could be to delay the full reopening. Indeed, the costs of remaining lockdown measures must be so vastly disproportionate to the benefits that the Government’s dithering – as Daniel Hannan has noted – is surely a function of status-quo bias.
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is that because the vaccines are making people live longer….
or
the people that should be dying of old age now were killed by the vaccines earlier in the year
Injecting people with a known clotting agent is unlikely to raise lifespan.
Yes the vaccines are so good they are stopping people dying from anything
(well that’s how it will be spun)
actually I’m with the theory that the dry tinder has now run out
It is inevitable that deaths will increase again due to the ridiculous hospital waiting lists, but they won’t be covid deaths so that’s all right then
Woeful though it was before lockdown, imagine the “negative excess mortality” if the National Covid Service at least tried to be a health service plus we were no longer under house arrest.
“the Government’s dithering – as Daniel Hannan has noted – is surely a function of status-quo bias. “
Do we really think it’s JUST that? Couldn’t it be arse-covering, lust for easy power, not wanting to tear up all those expensive contracts that waste our money with their mates, following various other hidden agenda?
Hannan is covering his own arse because of previous nonsense he has written.
Corruption? Knowing how many people have died because of their inappropriate sidelining of safe and effective treatments?
Noah and Daniel are highly intelligent idiots if that’s their genuine view.
Noah seems a bit more hard-nosed. In general the LS team sometimes seem like they really want the PM to be the person they thought/hoped he was, rather than the mad/wicked person he is behaving as.
…..the mad/wicked person he is behaving as.
And always was. Johnson has a depopulationist/eugenicist as a father and takes his orders from depopulationist/eugenicist Bill Gates. What is it that people don’t understand about that. None of this nonsense is about a virus.
He has a lot of children for a depopulationist😊
He’s a Roman Catholic when it suits him to be so condoms are a no no!
Anyone else sarcastically call ambulances ‘Corona buses’?
Police ‘Corona Cops’?
Corona Filth, come on.
Well I’m pretty sure they’re told to just drive round to try and keep people scared. It works too. The other day one went past and the woman in my corner shop said ‘so many people dying of this terrible disease’. Wtf?! How thick can you be? But there you go. We’re into the lowest mortality rates in years despite an ageing and obese population and still it’s not enough and we’ve all got to ‘stay safe’. Everyone’s gone stark raving mad (present company excepted!)
A neighbour said to me that someone in the village had tested positive and they were frightened. She doesn’t know who but she was frightened anyway. She shit herself when I said it was me but I felt fine so don’t worry (not really of course) but I’m fed up with the crass stupidity created by the fearmongers. What’s more I don’t give a dam if stupid people, neighbours or not dislike me. In fact I hope they do and leave me alone to get on with my life.
since March last year I’ve been unlucky enough to have had covid 7 times.
3 of those turned into long covid.
this morning I had a tickly throat – so that’s 8 times. If it lasts til tomorrow its long covid
You should be grateful. I’ve had it 27 times and I died twice. My friends, who are all 25 and incredibly fit and healthy have all got long covid. Except the ones who died. They’re dead. It’s a deadly virus you know.
That’s nothing.
I’ve got long covid. I’ve had it for 15 years. That’s how long my long covid is.
Still, I struggle on.
It’s the people wearing masks, and much more worryingly, taking jabs…for someone else! How did this EVER become acceptable without question? This is the depth of the applied psychology, to turn everyone into good little communitarians without them even realising.
Our neighbours are both NHS workers; the Covid “emergency” has given them some kind of green like to go virtue signalling bonkers….rushing off to work (seperately) uniformed and masked, engaging neighbours with “advice”, loudly telling anyone around that sometimes they “have” to WFH “triaging cases”.
Etc, etc.
BTW it took me about 30 seconds of this to realise that both are completely suckered by the fear-mongering, and are far too unintelligent to consider anything other than the party line, let alone the finer points of lockdown/vaccine debate.
A new nadir was reached this evening when they included their 8 year old daughter in the nightly masked-whilst-outside -in-the-fresh-air-stroll.
Just a few of many now, but ones that cannot easily be avoided…I hate living amongst people I now know are complete bell ends.
The Branch Covidians are enjoying the Faucism
This is known
The problem is though the majority of people are as stupid as the woman in your village and they are going to drag us down with them
“How thick can you be?”
You’d be surprised. 🙂
Yes, I’d often wondered.
I now know that my previous “stupidity modelling” vastly underestimated the true numbers.
The masks outside in the fresh air. God help us.
Pity the poor sods like myself who are in France. Masks are mandatory in the street. I risk getting fined/arrested/beaten-up by the gendarmes every time I go out.
Blimey!
I call them a fucking noise nuisance. Where I live, their sirens are sounding every five minutes or so, no doubt to keep the fear factor going and remind people that “there’s a pandemic”.
“the most likely explanation for persistent ‘negative excess mortality’ in England and Wales is that deaths were ‘brought forward’ by the
pandemicclearing of patients from hospitals, withholding of normal health care, shutting elderly people in their houses and in ‘care’ homes, and generally destroying the will to live with masks and lockdowns.”It’s probably the vaccines and lockdown taking out the dry tinder in December/January.
I know I’ve railed against three- and five-year averages as a baseline measure, because they are too short to provide a balanced sample, since they inevitably are biased towards a period that has been entirely anomalous from a reasonable historic perspective.
However – in this case, the baseline is pragmatically useful. If current mortality is running below that low baseline level, then the current restrictions are beyond ludicrous, and totally insupportable in terms of sane scientific analysis.
Well the more ludicrous they are, the longer they’ll be in place. At least that’s what I’m taking from the lady 16 months of pathological stupidity.
Remember that they have selectively left 2020 out of the 5 year average, so the one in use now is 2015 to 2019. It’s not clear why they use 5 years, anyway. E.g. the met office use much longer periods for comparisons like that. They use 1961 to 1990, and 1981 to 2010 for long term average comparisons re weather reports.
That said, I agree that it shows that the concept of the panic attack is ludicrous, and it demonstrates that there is no justification for the current tactics.
We must lockdown immediately
We must only open again when SAGE see a comet in the Northern sky
That would be Halley’s Comet, I take it.
Sus volans trans lunam caeruleam.
But we must be cautious. It will have to be a windy Tuesday with a full moon and a heatwave in Nebraska.
“As I’ve noted before, the most likely explanation for persistent “negative excess mortality” in England and Wales is that deaths were “brought forward” by the pandemic.”
more importantly “brought forward” by months rather than years. This is key to the QALY debate. Obvs you are going to ‘do’ more if people are losing decades. If 10 million oldies lost a few weeks it is of literally zero consequence.
I can only remember 1 paper that looked at the QALYs lost. It was bullshit, written by a student but came up with 10 years so is endlessly quoted as ‘fact’.
Additionally, the winter ‘wave’ was mainly vaccine deaths of the hyper frail – this really is going to have brought deaths forward by weeks or months
Think about the jabbing though.
One child killed by jab-clots is worth more than 80 COVID deaths of over 80 year olds in QALY terms.
more than 80 – what about the children the dead kids will never raise and their kids etc? could be millions. who can predict when a family tree will end?
as far as I am concerned a single child’s life is worth more than every care home resident in the country. they’ve had their chances – don’t sacrifice children just to eek out their tv watching a little longer
And I believe they would say the same.
Yes I very much know my father would.
My gran certainly would have. I am so thankful that she passed away (at the grand age of 94) in Nov 19 before all this bollocks. Her care home are locked down again now as they have a ‘case’ even though a subsequent test was negative and the frail resident has no symptoms.
“a single child’s life is worth more than every care home resident in the country. they’ve had their chances”
I’m with you on the use of QALYs as a measure of hard relativities. In the context of what they are meant for..
But simplistic statements like that, using false equivalence, are just as barmy as nazi Covidmaniac rantings. Keep your feet on Planet Earth.
Folks, just get on with life. What on earth are you waiting for? Ignore this ship of fools.
Exactly!
That’s the policy I have been trying to follow for the last 9 months. Trouble is it has been hard to get on with life when all the places I normally go have been forced to close. Sadly, while we can all see sense, we are all still stuck on the ship which is been sailed by the fools and will suffer just as much as them when it inevitably hits the rocks.
We have been. However, there are many things we would normally be doing that we can’t. Our business plans are on hold, husbands contract work is scarse, and we aren’t getting any younger.
My family has a genetic disposition to Alzheimers at 60ish so I tend to plan expecting it, meaning I have 10 years of useful life left, and it’s being stolen. No chance I’m sitting around waiting to get old.
It’s difficult to know what’s going on at the moment but, whatever it is, there is clearly a significant increase in cases which is now just starting to show up in hospitalisations.
The Covid Symptom study (ZOE) was indicating an uptick a few weeks ago. This is weird. On June 12th last year the ZOE estimate was 86k cases – and falling. There was no mask mandate, fewer people had been infected and there was greater freedom than now.
To-day (June 9th) the ZOE estimate is 117k cases and increasing. In theory we should be close to herd immunity – even without the vaccines, we’re still in lockdown and it’s SUMMER, FFS.
This has to be a concern surely. Is the GVB scenario now unfolding in the UK? If it has we need to get hold of stocks of Ivermectin pronto.
Fucking positive tests not cases, loads being false, who are the cunts getting tested to drive this bull shit sham.
ZOE records cases with symptoms. These indicate a clear trend. ZOE has been pretty reliable over the past 15 months. As for the ‘positive tests’ argument, this was the same BS that Yeadon and LS readers were spouting in September last year. It begins with cases but eventually we see hospital numbers rise.
The current increase might mean nothing but if 80% of the population (ONS) has antibodies – it suggests something’s wrong. Vaccine resistance is a possible explanation.
On a positive note, though, Cases in Bolton are declining so it might just be a short, sharp outbreak in a few places which will quickly blow over. BUT, note that the mutations of the variants do appear to be driven by the vaccines.
I’m shitting myself not
We know there is a spike in infections that follows the vaccines. Some of the highest infection rates in the world were only attained very recently following vaccination campaigns, in countries that previously had very low infection rates – Mongolia, Uruguay, Maldives, Seychelles, Gibraltar.
“ZOE records cases with symptoms. ” True but it’s not 100% clear that these symptoms are always covid. Isn’t there some kind of estimating/modelling involved based on symptoms and % of people with those symptoms with +ve test, and those symptoms are self-reported.
yes, everything has a false positive rate including Zoe
As ZOE is self reporting, it’s possible some reports may be embellished, especially if people are sat at home, frightened to go out, drowning in the MSM fear mongering and every little day to day life ‘ills’ is magnified. I’m sure ZOE arranges to send out test kits, depending on ‘symptoms’ reported, which will most probably boost the ‘cases’ data.
Some may just be up to mischief when reporting ‘symptoms’…
This year my hay fever has been awful compared to last year. Maybe the sheep are reporting wrongly?
Strangely last year I had zero symptoms for hayfever, yesterday they started up, mildly, but I took an antihistamine for the first time this year.
Annual variations follow the weather ones. E.g. this year it’s all late compared with last year. Then we had an unusual Spring which brought forward a lot of plant growth c.f. this year. Depends on what you’re allergic to, but at present it’s mostly grass (which affects me), and it’s later than normal. This place is reasonably useful: https://www.worcester.ac.uk/about/academic-schools/school-of-science-and-the-environment/science-and-the-environment-research/national-pollen-and-aerobiology-research-unit/pollen-forecast.aspx
From Sept last year was the very beginning of flu season, hence the rise.
This is not parallel. Newly vaccinated people getting the usual Covid like symptoms after the jab, advised by the app to take the test – it does that – old Covid fragments being found or even the vaccine expressed spike protein?
There was another push for the flu vax in March / April which I thought was somewhat late. I don’t know if this was area specific ie just North West or was throughout the U.K. That may have impacted on the rise of respiratory symptoms / general illnesses now being reported.
The annual flu new campaign starts again in September/ October.
Assuming vaccines do what manufacturers say they do, could this be a consequence of waiting 12 weeks between vaccine doses? Original recommendations said it should be 3 weeks I think but gov for clearly political reasons chose 12, does waiting so long between doses make you more susceptible to catching it in the meantime? Or could surge testing be partly responsible.
Quite possibly. Part vaccination means sub-optimal immunity. This gives the viruses a chance to ‘learn’ how to evade the immune response but according to Geert Vanden Bossche (and several others) the big mistake is to carry out a mass vaccination programme in the middle of a pandemic.
I’m not saying that this is what is happening but the sharp increase in infections is a bit unexpected given the time of year and the claimed level of immunity in the population.
Incidentally Luc Montagnier Nobel winning virologist is also saying that much the same thing. He certainly thinks vaccines are driving the mutations.
As I have said before, the vast majority of “cases” currently are teenagers, The age related profile of positive test outcomes is totally different from any earlier period and even if some people are showing symptoms it is clear from the mortality statistics that teenagers are at low risk.
There was also a very unusually cold never-ending winter until a week or so ago. Bear in mind it takes a fortnight for vit D to be converted usefully in the body. My two year old is still clearing a cold brought home before half term by my older daughter. This non standard weather will have affected seasonality. The recent micro-case bump (and it is micro) could well be a function of the same.
In terms of cases leading to a micro-increase in deaths (one to two…doubling! Two to four: exponential growth! Everybody hide!), I doubt it: apparently the age of hospitalisations is much lower than before. Plus, sunshine, vaccine-related infections etc.
“ZOE records cases with symptoms”
Which, given the vagueness of the symptom list means that its highly susceptible to natural and induced hypochondria – which in turn is significantly driven by Fear propaganda.
I have a suspicion that a lot of the symptomatic may be having vaccine reactions – even weeks on. It’s at least as likely a possibility as Covid diagnosis.
Covid is a never-ending list of vague symptoms that covers every virus known to science
People get tested for work – NHS, care homes, some offices, and schoolkids get tested, and people I know just send off for LFT kits and test themselves and their families regularly
“GVB Scenario” What’s that?
I’d assume Gert vanden bossche?
Ah, thanks
doesn’t appear to be showing up in hospitalisations
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
and they look and they’ll find. they are going to places which have higher rates and doing surge testing. of course they’ll have higher rates than just testing nhs workers over and over again
And of course the “covid hospitalisation” statistic is, like most/all govt stats around covid, largely meaningless as it doesn’t separate out people seriously ill with symptomatic covid from people in hospital for other reasons.
plus i wonder whether people who catch COVID from the sainted angels working in the blessed NHS are counted as COVID in hospital (just like the With-COVID deaths)..
I think anyone in hospital for any reason with a positive test is counted as a covid hospitalisation
“England data include people admitted to hospital who tested positive for COVID-19 in the 14 days prior to admission, and those who tested positive in hospital after admission. Inpatients diagnosed with COVID-19 after admission are reported as being admitted on the day prior to their diagnosis[?]. Admissions to all NHS acute hospitals and mental health and learning disability trusts, as well as independent service providers commissioned by the NHS are included.” (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare)
Just how bad does your CoViD have to get, before they’ll admit you into a learning disability trust?
“diagnosed with covid-19” I think again means tested positive, not necessarily ill with covid symptoms
I’m amazed at how often these basic facts about the screwed data gets forgotten – even here.
I hope that wasn’t a dig at me! I had inserted a question mark into the quotation.
I’ve always assumed the “diagnosis” was merely what Julian suggested, but I’ve never seen confirmation. If it ever gets explained ATL, it’s not being mentioned anywhere near frequently enough. Even when the retired doctor runs through his insiders’ pack of hospital statistic, I’m unclear what he’s counting as CoViD-19 in-patients.
I don’t understand this bit: “Inpatients diagnosed with COVID-19 after admission are reported as being admitted on the day prior to their diagnosis”.
If a patient has been admitted, say with a broken hip, 5 days ago and are expected to remain in hospital a few more days, then on day6 have a ‘positive’ test result – how can that episode of care be reported as being admitted on day 5? What happens to their bed occupancy/ care data for the days prior to the ‘positive’ tests? Or are such patients being recorded as 2 admissions / 2 episodes of care, running concurrently? One for the original ongoing care for the broken hip and one for their new ‘positive’ test status?
Apologies if I’ve put this across badly – demonstrates how confused I am.
You’ve put the point perfectly. I am not in a position to explain the statistics, as I’ve no connection with either the government or the health service (aside from the tax money they collect from me). However, I’ll state what I believe, and would be astounded to learn that I am wrong. Hospitals will maintain proper records of their in-patients, for which conditions they were admitted and for which they are currently being treated. These records would show how many people have been taken into hospital because they were suffering a bad case of CoViD-19, and, similarly, how many are having to be treated for CoViD-19 that developed during their stays (for other conditions). For some reason, the government / NHS chooses not to share these genuine statistics, which represent what their labels suggest. Rather, they have introduced a parallel set of surrogate statistics, purely based upon positive RT-PCR test results, and it is these that are shared, and announced, several times each day, by the BBC, using labels that lead any normal person to believe they’re the real thing. Thus, the difficulty you identified does not occur. (But you were less confused than a sadly massive percentage of our… Read more »
Seems there’s now some movement: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/06/10/nhs-told-to-differentiate-between-patients-in-hospital-for-covid-and-those-in-hospital-with-covid-and-not-before-time/
UK data only goes up to June 3rd. England is more recent – 131 for June 8th.
Yes – I’d agree if it was just the government figures that were showing an increase but ZOE started to show an upturn 3 or 4 weeks ago. ONS prevalence has also jumped.
Bolton seems to have peaked which is a good sign and it might be that this is just a short term spike but it’s not I expected to see in June.
ONS ‘prevalence’ figures have always been suspect – they are another case of modelling.
Yes mass testing, followed by mass vaccination. What do they think will happen? Just exactly what they want.
Thanks for the update.
‘Cases’. ‘Nuff said. ‘Zoe estimates’ ??? – subject to all sorts of possible biases. PCR tests – RTFL.
Now – there may be something happening re. the PCR detection of random scraps of RNA. But there is a long chain to navigate to get to panic stations, and the intervening bridge is made of dodgy data. In addition – June 2021 is not June 2020. One main difference is the active injection of genetic material into swathes of the population. Nobody knows the full extent of this fucking with the immune system.
Then there’s motivation – the government/SAGE needs apparent increases in infection to fulfil the obvious game plan, using the ‘Indian variant’ etc. We have been absolutely correct in seeing that game plan emerge at every stage –including post-June 2020, and the introduction of senseless masks at a time when the virus had disappeared.
Every single UN prediction made in the last 20 years had future deaths per capita increasing from 2020. The deaths we have seen were perfectly in line with those predictions. There was no pandemic.
It is interesting : the actual smoothed curve of all-cause mortality in the UK shows precisely this upturn – from before 2020.
“status quo bias” is a strange thing. It holds the nation in lockdown but it didn’t prevent the nation going into lockdown.
It’s almost like if they didn’t have double standards they’d have no standards at all.
Below the five-year average won’t be good enough for the Covid crazies. They will be demanding that the government adopts a Zero Death (within 28 days of being alive) policy next.
Nah: cancer death: OK; heart attack death: OK; stroke/dementia/stabbing/shooting/diabetes/influenza/renal failure deaths: OK; COVID_LINKED DEATH – arghhhh, does not compute, does not compute, …….
The vaccine resuscitates.It says so on the bottle.
It’s nothing to do with a virus, it’s Medical Marxism. At least Corbyn didn’t disguise his political leanings, unlike the spud in a wig, Johnson.
Does Mr Johnson know that the deaths have been below average, he was telling us how well he’d done with his vaccine roll out, now he’s looking like a plonker
I don’t think he bothers much with basic facts like all-cause mortality. He’s said not to be a detail man, and in any case knowing too much detail would make it harder for him to tell his Big Lies
Cleveland Clinic Study Indicates No Point in Vaccinating People Who Already Had the Coronavirus
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/09/rand-paul-cleveland-clinic-study-indicates-point-vaccinating-people-coronavirus/
… unless you’re called Boris.
There’s no point in any of their shite, but it doesn’t stop them implementing lockdowns and mask laws.
In an earlier comment, I speculated on the reasons behind the recent rise in infections. My point was that, given the seasonality and the claimed herd immunity within the population, a sharp uptick in daily infections was unexpected.
If this continues, the unvaccinated will be made the scapegoats, so I was making the case that it was probably the vaccines that were driving the variants. That’s all. I’m just making it clear for anyone who didn’t pick up on this point.
I don’t see how the unvaccinated can plausibly made to be scapegoats – though I guess that won’t stop them trying. There are simply not enough unvaccinated people to drive an epidemic, other than those age groups who have not been offered the jab yet.
As usual it’s hard to work out what’s going on – it is the jabs that are not working so they are desperate to jab everyone to try and stop the spread, or are they just desperate to jab everyone anyway, just because. Does the government have any interest in ending this and if not, why not?
It’s the vaccinated who are driving the variants. Every country where the ‘vaccine’ was tested produced a mutant.
exactly! (though this could be because they were monitoring the situation more closely in those countries….but I doubt it)
We are approaching the final iteration of the plan: Lockdown until people stop dying.That twerp interviewed by Julia H-B is already there.
Looking at the data, deaths seem to have been brought forward by between 3 and 6 months….
So, because YouTube is a bastard app. It took me to Phil Spector’s Kings College up date. Basically we are now all fucked. Because he’s talking about R 6 and 20,000 cases a day by next week. With that being likely what Whitless and Vallance claim too. The Pig Dictator will “lockdown” for at least a month. That writes off the last month of school, fucks summer holidays for families (like mine) takes us dangerously close to September and the whole thing will now never ever end politically. I always feared they would waste everything with over caution. And they did. It’s now just a case of how bad their lockdown measures are going to be. Kiss goodbye to your family again maybe. Save Christmas and as for the vaccine. Pointless.
This was always the plan. It was easy to see that a ‘variant’ would come along as the media have been seeding it for weeks and weeks. Sage predicted a summer wave also. And of course Furlough is to September, the emergency must continue to facilitate vax rollout and the get us through to autumn.
The very idea that this will all end IS the pysop. Thats what conditions everyone. The simple belief hope even that we are nearly at the end. Its a complete lie. This will never properly end but if the people were told that it might cause some of them to think.
In terms of long term stats, I saw, possibly here, and from the BMJ; the stat that all cause deaths for 2020 were up on each year from 2008 to 2019 BUT below every single year from 1943 to 2008. That, for me, is the kind of stat that’s relevant. When we get to the end of 2021 if there is a significant difference between 20 and 21 then we know it’s down to the vax and to the lockdown measures. Or is this too simplistic a view?
I think you’re broadly right and the key thing is that it shows this was never an unprecedented public health emergency. The waters for 2021 are muddied by vaccines lockdowns and by the probability that a fair few deaths were brought forward by some combination of covid, lockdowns, vaccines and withdrawal of healthcare.
“is this too simplistic a view?”
Broadly – yes. Year-to year variation is totally normal, and you need much more to pin down causation.
The grounds for keeping us locked up will now be that the Johnson part has defeated death and to continue the defeat we must remain vigilent and stay locked up.
The article talks about further adjusting for population and age structure so let’s do the sums When you adjust for population size and age structure, that is you look at age standardised mortality, you find from ONS data for England mortality compared with the 2015-2019 5 year average for that month has been January: 20.6% above the average February: 18.2% above average March: 5.4% below average April: 12.4% below average May: 11% below average (my estimate) My May estimate (the official monthly May data isn’t out until next week) is based on weekly deaths in England for the 4 weeks in May (weeks 18-21) which are 5% below average and age standardising has a further 6% affect roughly speaking (based on April data) so estimate is 5% + 6% = 11% For Wales the equivalent figures are January: 18% above the average February: 3.1% above the average March: 8.3% below the average April: 14.3% below the average May: 10% below the average (my estimate) So all cause deaths are running massively below the population/age structure adjusted average and strong evidence that a significant number of deaths in January and February 2021 were deaths that might otherwise have happened in March,… Read more »
The five year baseline is a poor metric, given the historically low mortality in that period.