Me again, could the 'scary spike' in Czech republic just be because this is the first big wave of cases and deaths, not even a second spike? See this graph comparing deaths with Spain from March 2020 until now. Any opinions gratefully received.

Hi, a friend of mine just shared this graph showing huge spike in cases in Czech republic. He talks of huge amounts of people dying (100 per day) all because of the relaxed measures there. See the graph , does anyone have any comment or thoughts. I could not find anything other than it being due to relaxed lockdown. Thanks!

Most peculiar. Looking at the statistics on worldometers, both 'cases' and deaths are going up at the same times. One would expect an average lag of 21 days between cases and death.
It seems to me that this may be more due to attribution of both 'cases' and deaths. Looking at average deaths over previous years may show whether there is a problem or not.

Yes I think so. Many of those central European countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary) had high excess mortality for the 12 months before the pandemic, and the resulting mortality displacement, rather than government policy, seems to be the main explanation for the low pandemic death toll in those countries in the spring. See here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281170193708806144.html for an analysis that doesn't include Czech Republic, although if you look at this viewer https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/ which uses data from the same database you will see that Czech Republic also had quite a high excess mortality rate in 2018 and 2019, rather higher in both those years than so far this year. Of course, nobody cared about that excess mortality, because it wasn't COVID.

So the Czechs got off quite lightly in the spring but like flu, COVID is somewhat seasonal and as we head into winter their second wave is likely to be worse than the second wave will be in countries that were badly hit in the spring, again because of mortality displacement. They are currently at around 60 COVID deaths per day. I've not seen influenza and pneumonia death figures for Czech Republic but they are probably rather higher than that in a normal year; again, nobody cares about those deaths, and they wouldn't care about the COVID deaths either were it not for the obsessive media coverage.

And the spike in Czech positive PCR tests is likely just that they are going all out on testing just now. The Czechs are talking about testing everybody in the country.