But, for the third time, the drop-off in the death rate that I'm talking about is recent - much more recent than last autumn, so a cessation of hospital testing at that time can't explain it. In fact it's happened since the summer just gone. The forum won't let me post the screenshot for some reason, but you can see for yourself.
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United Kingdom COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer
United Kingdom Coronavirus update with statistics and graphs: total and new cases, deaths per day, mortality and recovery rates, current active cases, recoveries, trends and timeline.www.worldometers.info
They're giving a bit over 30,000 covid deaths in the UK since the start of June 2022. But 28,000 of them occurred in the 12 months up to the start of June this year. If that trend had continued, you'd expect nearly 12,000 covid deaths in the five months since then, whereas the true (or at least recorded) number is under 3,000.
So there has been a step change in the death rate, but it can't have been caused by any change in policy on testing or recording that happened a year ago, because it was much more recent than that.
There were 172,927 official covid deaths in the UK up to Dec 22. There are now 231,000 official covid deaths, so I was mistaken, its actually 60,000 since last December. In Ireland, Nearly 3500 people have died since the all mitigations were dropped in Feb 2022, thats a third of all total deaths.
The drop off in deaths you are referring to happened around June 23 and was replicated around much of Europe and seems to have been caused by the eye watering levels of infections and deaths at the end of 22/Spring 23, leaving the survivors with some level of immunity, but we can see deaths rising again from about mid-August, which fits into waning immunity at 3-6 months after infection and the spread of new variants. It wasn't a step change due to reduced virulence, the virus had simply killed everyone it could kill, until the next wave which started about 6 weeks ago.
You just have to look at the global numbers to see how fucked this is. The official WHO estimate of deaths is about 7 million, though they have informally acknowledged its probably closer to 14 million. The economist excess deaths tally puts it between 18-31 million. The generally accepted figure is about 27 million. Additionally, the number of people who have of have had long covid is now between 2-300 million. There is a massive and deliberate undercounting, and its working.