Dave, I saw that comment of yours and replied to it, but my reply vanished upon posting because yours had been deleted.
It looked to me as though the April figures you found were probably incomplete. As best I remember, on the spreadsheet charts available from the page you linked, there was no data for April 2020; the most recent was March 2020. From memory, March 2019 deaths from all causes were 4700 or so, and March 2020 was over 5000 – maybe 5300 or something? Anyway, it was a clear rise, whereas February 2020 was about the same as February 2019, so a sharp, anomalous rise clearly started in March 2020.
Here’s the latest graph for Scotland:
https://squonk.tk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/dscot19.png
That’s from this document:
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/covid19/covid-deaths-report-week-19.pdf
I think the spreadsheets from the page you linked were hospital records. The graph above is “Deaths by week of registration”. There’s probably an administrative delay from hospital records to registration.
It’s good to see the death rate coming down at last. The governments of the UK acted far too late. I’ve been watching this coming since the third week in January; China doesn’t just shut down its entire economy for nothing. 760 million people were under some form of quarantine at one point; that’s 10% of the entire global population! The effect was so big that reduction in air pollution over China was recorded from satellites. China’s electricity production was 60% of normal.
The UK government had over two months to prepare but took precisely fuck all preventative action, though they did set up emergency hospitals and morgues! Fucking cynical tossers. I’m furious. Test manufacture could have been set up. We could have had millions of masks at the ready. The care homes could have been reorganised ready to quarantine infected residents. Local food distribution could have been implemented to keep people from infecting each other in supermarkets. A universal basic income could have been implemented ready so that ill people could miss work and so not infect their colleagues, and because so many businesses would need to be closed. A national infection map could have been set up so that people knew where to avoid. We could have made the UK a very hostile environment for SARS-CoV-2.
We’re now over seven weeks past the “lockdown” ie. the stay-at-home order, and still there has been no intelligent response. What the hell are they all doing; snorting coke with Boris? I have never seen such utter, wilful incompetence in my life.