SCIENCE

Yes, the UK’s weekly death toll during Covid-19 is high. But it’s been worse in the past and we didn’t shut down the economy then

Published

5 years ago

April 27, 2020

The death statistics being used by supporters of a prolonged lockdown, whatever the costs to our jobs, businesses and health, need careful and sober analysis. They raise more questions than they answer.

Coronavirus is being touted as the worst pandemic of modern times, and we are told that excess deaths are reaching record highs. While technically accurate, one week’s statistics demonstrate that this is not the whole picture.

Sky TV economics editor Ed Conway recently produced a chart entitled: ‘The Worst Week Ever? Not quite, but not far off’.’ He is referring to the fact that the total number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending April 10 -–18,516 deaths – remains lower than some weeks in previous flu seasons. These weeks include those in January 1970 (20,006 deaths), December 1989 (19,104 deaths) and January 2000 (18,646 deaths).

Conway rightly points out that those previous highs came at the peak of those years’ flu seasons, and we are now in April. Conway claims that there has never been a week at this time of year as deadly as this. He may be right, but weekly figures from the Office of National Statistics only go back to 1970, and so do not include earlier pandemics such as the 1951 flu outbreak, the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-58, or, of course, the Spanish flu of 1918.

And there are other holes in Conway’s analysis. Although there have been an abnormally high number of deaths this April, there have been certain demographic changes over the years that may have contributed to the overall picture. Let us look into what some of those could be.

Demographic shifts

The most obvious demographic change that happens over time is the changing size of the population. In the UK, the population has been growing –fast– ever since the Second World War, and in 1970, when the data began, it stood at about 56 million. Today, it is close to 66 million – a 15 percent increase.

It is important to note that the UK includes Scotland and Northern Ireland, and Mr Conway’s data only focuses on England and Wales; therefore, the difference may have been slightly less than 10 million. But the proportional increase since 1970 would have been roughly the same. And when there are more people in your country –say 15 percent more– there are more people dying every week. Population increase, then, is a mitigating factor as regards to whether we are seeing a record number of deaths.

But healthcare has improved over that time, and people generally have healthier lifestyles now. Doesn’t this suppress mortality? Yes, it does. But that also leads directly to a greying population. And the UK now has an elderly population the likes of which few societies have ever dealt with. Almost 8 million people in England and Wales are over the age of 70. This puts a large swathe of the population in the risk category for Covid-19.

The non-Covid-19 excess deaths

There is one more major factor to consider when comparing this pandemic to previous ones, which did not involve economic shutdowns. There were 18,516 deaths in the week ending April 10, representing about 8,000 extra deaths above the number that would normally be expected for this week of the year. But interestingly, almost 2,000 of those could not be directly attributed to Covid-19 – almost a quarter. The week before that, more than half of the deaths – between 3,000 and 4,000 – were unexplained “excess” deaths.

So what explains these thousands of “missing deaths” in the figures? The numbers are too high to be down to random variation. According to Dr Jason Oke, a senior statistician in the Oxford University Medical Statistics Group, there are only two possible explanations.

The first is that the missing deaths were indeed directly caused by Covid-19, and the victims simply did not match up to the symptoms or test positive for reasons as yet unascertained. This underreporting would be despite the fact that any death certificate that had a mention of Covid-19 is included among the deaths attributed to the virus, even if there was no positive test and it was not marked down as the primary cause of death.

The second explanation is the missing deaths have been indirectly caused by the lockdown in some way. Right now we can only speculate as to how the lockdown may be killing people, and some of the likeliest ways, from lack of regular healthcare to suicides, are touched-on here. Dr Oke says: “It’s going to be one of those two causes … There’s not enough information to know whether this is under-reporting of Covid or whether this is, not a term I particularly like, but one that has been bandied around, ‘collateral damage’ as a result of the lockdown.”

Collateral damage is a phrase that will probably become more familiar before this is over. Economic shutdowns have been presented by some as a trade-off between “money versus lives.” But what is becoming increasingly apparent is they, in fact, pit “lives versus lives.”

The UK’s Office for National Statistics say that they are conducting “further investigation” of the missing deaths, and it will certainly be interesting to see what they conclude. But their head of health analysis, Nick Stripe, has said that it may take months or even years to get to the bottom of it. All that we can say for now is that more people are dying than usual. Exactly why that is, we will have to wait to find out.

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SCIENCE

Ohio chemical disaster may hold long-term health risks – experts

Published

2 years ago

March 2, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

East Palestine residents remain “in constant contact” with toxic pollutants, a US scientist says

The pollutants in the air of East Palestine, Ohio, may pose long-term health risks, scientists from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon University claimed on Wednesday. Their assessment contrasts the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) assurance that the pollution does not pose an immediate health risk.

Dr. Albert Presto, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told CNN on Wednesday that the situation in East Palestine was not an “immediate health concern” but that it could still pose long-term risks as the researchers had no way of telling how long the hazardous chemical concentration would persist. He added that the residents of the city were in “constant contact” with the pollutants and there was no clear understanding of what that level of exposure would mean for the population’s health.

The air in the Ohio city was contaminated in early February, after 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed and spilled out the hazardous materials they were carrying. The accident caused a fire that went on for multiple days and intensified the airborne spread of the chemical pollution, causing a mandatory evacuation of the nearby residents. The EPA has been conducting various tests and measurements in the affected area, claiming there was no immediate risk to the local population.

Another train derails after Ohio chemical spill

Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon presented their independent assessment in a Twitter post last week. The scientists claim to have used data compiled by the EPA and found that nine of the 50 chemicals found in East Palestine’s air were above the norm for the region. In particular, the report singles out acrolein, a toxic substance used to control plants, algae, rodents and microorganisms.

The EPA responded to the claims in the report from the two universities by dismissing the perceived risks. A spokesperson for the agency told CNN on Monday that the report assumed “a lifetime of exposure, which is constant exposure over approximately 70 years” for the harmful effects to manifest. They added: “EPA does not anticipate levels of these chemicals will stay high for anywhere near that.”

Dr. Ivan Rusyn, the director of the Texas A&M University Superfund Research Center and part of the team that did the analysis, told CNN on Wednesday that “all sides were right” as both parties simply needed to keep monitoring the situation and “do a better job communicating the results.”

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SCIENCE

Seismologist behind Türkiye quake prediction issues another warning

Published

2 years ago

March 1, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

Dutch seismologist Frank Hoogerbeets, who rose to international prominence after predicting the devastating earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria last month, has said that the world could be hit with another major quake in the coming days.

Hoogerbeets, who makes his forecasts based on the motions of celestial bodies, published a video on YouTube on Monday in which he warned that “the first week of March is going to be extremely critical.”

“A convergence of critical planetary geometry around March 2 and 5 may result in large to very large seismic activity, possibly even a mega-thrust earthquake around March 3 and 4 and/or March 6 and 7,” the description to the clip read.

In the video itself, the seismologist claimed that the power of the supposed impending quake “may be well over 8 magnitude.”

The affected area could stretch thousands of kilometers, from the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands in Russia’s Far East, all the way down to the Philippines and Indonesia, Hoogerbeets said.

Costs from Türkiye’s massive quake rising

“I’m not exaggerating. I’m not trying to create fear. This is a warning,” insisted the scientist, who works at the Solar System Geometry Survey (SSGEOS).

The head of the Kamchatka branch of the Geophysical Survey of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, Danila Chebrov, has questioned Hoogerbeets’ predictions and described him as an “amateur.” The connection between the movements of the planets in the solar system and seismic activity on Earth “is rather weak, and it’s problematic to use it as the main prognostic tool,” Chebrov explained.

On February 3, Hoogerbeets issued a tweet that read: “Sooner or later there will be a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon).”

Three days later, a 7.8 magnitude quake struck Türkiye and Syria. The disaster has caused the deaths of more than 50,000 people, with powerful aftershocks continuing in the region to this day.

Dutch seismologist Hoogerbeets has made predictions down the years which didn’t come true. Commenting on his work earlier this month, Susan Hough of the US Geological Survey insisted that no scientist has “ever predicted a major earthquake.” Hough told NPR that the spot-on forecast for the quakes in Türkiye and Syria was just a coincidence. “It’s the stopped clock that’s right twice a day, basically,” she said.

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SCIENCE

Turkish quakes may be ‘rehearsal’ for big one in Istanbul – scientists

Published

2 years ago

February 17, 2023

The San Francisco Telegraph

A local newspaper cites experts warning of a potential catastrophe if an earthquake hits the country’s biggest city

Istanbul should prepare itself for a powerful quake, scientists and public figures have warned. This month’s disaster in southern Turkey, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, is a “rehearsal” for what could come next, they argued in the newspaper Hurriyet on Friday.

When the next Istanbul earthquake happens, the damage “will swallow everyone,” unless people drop their differences and work on improving the seismic resilience of the city, Turkish author Nedim Sener wrote.

He cited a risk assessment by Bogazici University’s quake research lab, which counted how many buildings would be impacted by an earthquake of 7.5+ magnitude in Türkiye’s most populous and economically vital hub. With almost 13,500 structures expected to be heavily damaged, and hundreds of thousands of others affected to a smaller degree, the loss of life would be greater than what the country has just experienced, Sener predicted.

Some Turkish officials, including Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, have voiced similar concerns. The head of the city administration said 90,000 structures were at risk of total collapse in case of a major earthquake, citing a fresh survey by his municipality.

Cost of Türkiye quake damage estimated

Speaking in a TV interview this week, Imamoglu criticized the central government for issuing an amnesty to some 317,000 buildings which failed to meet earthquake resilience codes. It meant that the owners were allowed to pay a fine rather than demolish their properties.

Istanbul is located near a tectonic fault line that passes under the Marmara Sea. The 1999 quake in Izmit, which killed over 17,000 people, struck some 80 kilometers east of the city center, and half that distance from its easternmost suburbs.

Turkish Seismologist Naci Gorur, from Istanbul Technical University, warned that the risk of a major quake hitting Istanbul in the near future was growing. The probability of a tremor measuring over 7 magnitude occurring near the city within 30 years has increased from 62% in the aftermath of the 1999 disaster to 80% now, he said during a TV appearance. The scientists cited calculations by Tom Parsons, a fellow researcher at the US Geological Survey.

The twin quakes on February 6 caused massive devastation in Türkiye and northern Syria. Their combined death toll is estimated at around 44,000, including over 38,000 on the Turkish side.

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