Why Do People Think New Coronavirus Is A Normal Flu?

[Peater Piper]

UK coronavirus deaths more than double official figure according to FT study | Free to read

Does this read as complete nonsense to everyone else too? I can't understand where they're getting this 41,000 number from.

I downloaded the actual weekly total death statistics from ONS. UK deaths usually average about 11,000 per month. The only weeks that are higher than that are the most recent two at 16,000 and 18,000. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how they can claim more than 12,000 deaths from corona.

The ONS data is only up to April 10th, and it looks like the analysis ran up to the 21st, so that's another eleven days for deaths to accumulate. If they've hit their peak and are starting to decline, let's make it comparable to the 16k death week, that would be another 25k deaths, or about 8k above expected mortality. Add it to the 12k excess mortality above and you get 20k deaths above expected mortality for the past 25 days. Maybe add another 5k for incomplete data to get up to 25k. I don't see how it could be at 41k either unless the ONS data is woefully incomplete and death rates aren't declining at all, but 20k seems like a reasonable, conservative estimate.