We also didn’t have sites like “Worldometer” that kept a daily score on all the people that got infected or that died.
Watching that thing has taken the place of the sports scoreboard. And the ease of access to and constant monitoring of those numbers has put this virus at a high level of consciousness of everyone’s mind and increased the collective paranoia.
16 Jul: The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine: Why no-one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England – a statistical anomaly
by Yoon K Loke, Carl Heneghan
People living in England have become increasingly concerned in the face of Public Health England’s (PHE) figures demonstrating a relentless daily toll of more than a hundred COVID-associated deaths several days a week (see Figure 1).
This is in stark contrast to the more reassuring recovery in neighbouring regions (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), where there are days with no COVID-associated deaths whatsoever.
One reason for this due is a statistical flaw in the way that PHE compiles ‘out of hospital’ deaths data, rather than any genuine difference between the regions of the UK...
Anyone who has tested COVID positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE COVID death figures.
By this PHE definition, no one with COVID in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a COVID death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later...
PHE data also confirm that more than 125 000 patients have been admitted to NHS hospitals for COVID, the majority being successfully treated and discharged. There are now less than 1900 patients in hospital. So, roughly 80 000 recovered patients in the community will continue being monitored by PHE for the daily death statistics. More and more people (who are mainly in the older age group) are being discharged to the community, but they clearly may die of other illnesses.
This is why ‘out of hospital setting’ deaths remain constantly high (Figure 1), even though the Office of National Statistics data shows there have been fewer deaths than the five year average in the last three weeks, and NHS England data shows a moving average of 19 deaths per day in hospital...
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/