[katieHaylor (OP)]

Philip says:

I am sceptical about the number of deaths reported, as a retired investigator of deaths for a county coroners office, my experience is that less than 5% of diagnosed causes of death by doctors are confirmed by post mortem examinations, what percentage of the 46,000 have been confirmed by post mortems?

What do you think?

[Bored chemist]

Probably few, maybe none.
But something is suddenly killing lots people, and it seems to correlate with the kind of people who catch covid.

[Petrochemicals]

No ones ever been killed by anything other than their own body failing have they? I imagine a heart attack goes down in examiner sircles as poisoning of the cells due to lack of oxygen?

[Bored chemist]

No ones ever been killed by anything other than their own body failing have they?

That is one of the few things that would make war even more stupid.

[alancalverd]

Three cheers for Philip - a voice of experience in a hubbub of drivel. As he says, cause of death is an opinion that is rarely confirmed by postmortem. That doesn't mean that the opinions are 95% wrong: according to the ONS, only about 12% of deaths are investigated postmortem and most of those are on coroner's request - presumably because there is uncertainty about the initially recorded cause.

The official UK designation of a COVID death is death within 28 days of a COVID diagnosis, presumably excluding obvious trauma or poisoning. So anyone who hangs on longer than a month or was never actually diagnosed with COVID, isn't counted. And there's no great desire to conduct postmortems on bodies that are probably infected with COVID if there are no suspicious circumstances and the recorded cause of death was pneumonia.

Thus the most reliable indicator of the effect of an epidemic is seasonally adjusted excess deaths.