Now is not the time for exploiting this crisis for political point-scoring or drawing premature conclusions based on inaccurate data. Christopher Whitty CB FRCP FFPH FMedSci, physician and epidemiologist, Chief Medical Officer for England, Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and Head of the National Institute for Health Research says the only way to compare death rates was by measuring “all-cause mortality adjusted for age” and that it was too early to do this. “Everyone agrees this is the key metric and the reason for that is every country measures its Covid cases in a slightly different way,”
He also recommends reading this ....
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...how-does-britain-compare-with-other-countries
... to better understand death rate comparisons.
Nailed it - the country by country comparisons are so variable.................the figures I think we should be primarily focused on are the actual trending numbers - no. of new positive tests, no. of people hospitalised and in ITU and confirmed deaths by actual date of death. I went to an event a few months ago where Spiegelhalter was the keynote speaker - he was brilliant. His book, The Art of Statistics, is well worth a read if you like that kind of thing. Every news bulletin, though, starts with the cumulative number ('bad news') and the number of the day ('bad news') ......................and the 'breaking' tickers are always the same.