Or if you read the Daily Mail. Shameless bastards, but very effective communicators.
There's nothing inflated about the UK's numbers. The government have been
very open about it for months. It was discussed
openly in the media when they changed from 60 days to 28 days, with arguments against the change for the same reasons as you: it'll miss a few. But the PHE did some sound analysis on why the current method is the best balance. They still count 60 days on top.
The reality is
@SiRed, we know the figures aren't inflated because of the excess death figures. Have a look at them. During the period where we had a legitimately huge number of covid deaths, so big it led you to say this yourself...
...the excess deaths figures peaked right along with it. These people dying from covid were not being misreported, we had thousands of people dying every week that wouldn't have died otherwise, regardless of what they've put on the death certificate.
Now, there are fewer deaths. That's true of excess mortality, and that's true of deaths reported by covid from PHE. There's no misreporting there, no inflating of the numbers, most people that die of covid within 28 days of contracting it would not have died in the short-term if they hadn't contracted it.
But the papers are drawing your attention to the wrong figures - it's not about how many people are dying now, which is already much worse than they're portraying, it's how many will be dying if the cases continue to spread at this rate. That number could double in a fortnight, and double again in another fortnight, so by the end of November we're within the realms of 1,000 covid deaths a day, worse than the first peak, if not for restrictions. If a national lockdown is not a plausible option this time, then it's not inconceivable more people could die than last time.
And you said yourself just this week that if that many people are dying, of course we need to lockdown! Now you're saying it's no big deal, not only do we not need a lockdown, but let's open everything up?! The virus is spreading more quickly than we can manage even when we've put the worst-hit places under conditions very similar to the first lockdown. You don't need to do complicated maths to see that if we hadn't applied any restrictions since August, more people would be dying now than they were then, and many more would be infected.
A virus that spreads this quickly can't travel freely in an open society without killing hundreds of thousands of people. More than you would have in
any given year from all risk factors combined. It just isn't true to say we're inflating the figures, it's not that big a deal, let's open her back up and work through the worst of it. The worst of it is worse than anything you've experienced in your lifetime. What you're hearing is that in some regions, at some point in time, things aren't so bad now while they were terrible in the first wave. But in other regions things are terrible now, and weren't so bad in the first wave. What you need is to look at the wider picture, and for that you can look beyond the UK to see where we might be heading:
It is an undeniable fact that if we let this thing spread uncontrollably, the best health systems in the world would collapse. And we don't have the best health system in the world. Most average health systems are struggling to keep things together even with these absolutely absurd restrictions on normal life.