I’m a huge fan of @jburnmurdoch’s daily graphs, but I increasingly think that the individual country trajectories and not cross-country comparisons are all we can really discuss at this stage. Here’s why 1/n https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1254134874929332224">https://twitter.com/jburnmurd...

1) hospital deaths are a small proportion of all deaths, so we really don’t have good cross-country comparisons of total mortality 2/n

2) I’m also concerned that even measuring hospital deaths is not exactly comparable across country, because of very different hospital admissions practices, treatment outside hospitals etc 3/n

3) And then there’s the whole issue of whether population sizes should be taken into account. Not necessary at the beginning, but increasingly difficult to ignore, eg. when comparing NL and UK, for example

So, hospital deaths do give us good within-country trajectory patterns now, and these trajectories can be compared across countries; but I’m now of the view that between country comparisons (of levels) is questionable until we have the full mortality picture, which will take time

Maybe of interest for @ChrisGiles_ @jburnmurdoch @sarahobolt @patricksturg @kevcunningham @soccerquant @AlbertoNardelli @PippaN15 et al