Think you're mixing up two sets of figures. The ones you see on the news every day are the 'deaths within 28 days of a positive test' so will include some people who didn't die of covid but with it while excluding some who died of covid but more than 28 days after their test.
There's then the ONS figures which go off cause of death listed on the death certificate.
We use the first set of figures as the second set take months to come out. Its not perfect but given the sample size is more than good enough to look at trends.
The latest ONS figures, released on 7th December, are the provisional figures for deaths up to 19th November, we can't wait that long for data before making any decisions. We've already got weeks of lag between infection > cases > hospitalisations > deaths.
Yep, and I worry that people who try to play it down are either being selfish or deliberately missing the point.
The problem is that some people don't seem to see that that even very small proportions of very big numbers, are in themselves pretty big numbers.
Even if Omicron is less deadly than other variants, it's replicating far faster. Every indication is that there will be millions infected in a fairly short space of time.
Even if a small proportion of those need hospital treatment, that will be tens of thousands of extra admissions.
The NHS, for anyone who hasn't noticed, is already on its knees.
People are waiting hours for ambulances, and then even longer in ambulances outside hospitals to be admitted.
Anything any of us can do to reduce this pressure, is has to be sensible. By definition, no one plans to need an emergency ambulance, it could happen to any of us or our families.
And all of the evidence suggests that taking simple precautions now (wearing masks, social distancing where possible, vaccination and boosters), will mean less drastic steps later. And lives saved of course, from Covid itself and the myriad other medical emergencies that people can suffer from.
To me this is so incontrovertible and relatively trivial as to need no great discussion.
Why people need to make stuff up or try to find edge-case justifications for not taking reasonable precautions is completely beyond me. Is it stupidity, or is it selfishness, I'm really not quite sure...