UK death toll now officially over 40,000

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...al-figures-say

Care home figures finally included but anything outside of hospital or care home still not.

Yes, when one considers less than 10% of those that have died were under 65, and of those under 65 that have died, 80% had underlying health conditions. This means that the entire economy is being run into the ground over about 600 excess deaths for healthy people under 65.

FYI, about 1600 people die every day in the UK.

I would like to remind everyone who might read the forum and is not familiar with certain discussions that have little in common with the rules we all have to follow in Switzerland, that the situation in CH is still this.


https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/covid-1...rland/45592192

Please take note and take care.

Some people find it cool to rebel and instigate here, but for those of us who actually live in Switzerland and have trust in the swiss authorities, this is what we're supposed to do. Follow the rules.

Wow, that's further callous thinking right there. Source for figures please. Not numbers you've just magicked out of your arse.

I take it none of those affected are personally known to you therefore it's a NIMBY issue.

You don't live in the UK anyway so I guess you don't really understand the impact it is all having. 32k plus ON TOP of the "usual" deaths. In around 8 weeks. Many preventable had our government reacted faster and, frankly, better.

How am I supposed to give you exact figures when even the government doesn't know themselves they have no idea what the death rate is and no idea what the R number is. My estimate is based on what we know.

We're ALL affected by the lockdown, but just wait until the recession bites. NIMBY indeed

How do we reliably identify "those most susceptible"? As an extreme example, the UK PM Boris Johnson was close to death in hospital; who knew he was in a "those most susceptible" group?
How many "Boris Johnson" types are there? Hundreds, thousands, millions? (rhetorical question).

How do we identify "those healthy allowed to return to work "; look at the cases popping up in the White House which is supposed to the safest work environment in the US.

Because of the lock-down in the U.K, not in spite of it.

Are you complaining because not enough people have died, or what?

Currently, in the absence of a vaccine, the only way to achieve herd immunity is for lots of people to be infected with SARS-COV-2, go through COVID-19 and emerge at the end.

We all know that around 1% of COVID-19 sufferers will die, although the vast majority of those will be over 65 years old, i.e. irrelevant to society in the eyes of certain people on this forum. But the remaining 99% will all recover, be happy, healed and healthy, and immune. Right?

Wrong.

Apart from nobody being sure that recovered patients are immune, recovery from COVID-19 is no walk in the park and many sufferers end up with severe lifelong problems. For those of you who think the herd immunity concept is a good one, you need to read this article written by a virologist, Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Dr Piot contracted the coronavirus, spent a week in hospital, and "recovered".

Some sobering facts from Dr Piot's personal story:

• Being put on a ventilator increases your chances of dying;
• You have a 30% chance of dying if you end up in a British hospital with COVID-19. That’s about the same overall mortality rate as for Ebola in 2014 in West Africa;
• You can test negative for the virus (after initially testing positive) while still having COVID-19. The tests are correct; the virus may be gone, but the disease continues;
• Many "recovered" patients will be left with chronic kidney and heart problems;
• COVID-19 can disrupt the neural system;
• Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, possibly more, will need treatments such as renal dialysis for the rest of their lives.

Dr Piot concludes that "the only real exit strategy from this crisis is a vaccine that can be rolled out worldwide. That means producing billions of doses of it, which, in itself, is a huge challenge in terms of manufacturing logistics. And despite the efforts, it is still not even certain that developing a COVID-19 vaccine is possible."

And then there's the idiot anti-vaxxers to contend with.

Sobering stuff.

I hope nobody believes anymore that the Swedish (or former UK) model of striving for herd immunity is smart.

The idea of the lockdown was to stop the hospitals from being overloaded so your statistics on deaths are not relevant.
The question is how many hospital beds would be needed without the lockdown and if not enough then how many untreated people would die? For your particular interest, many people under 65 needed hospital treatment (cf Boris is 55), and without proper treatment how many of them would die?

This. All the data is too fresh at this point to make rational conclusions about what "should" have been done instead. Aside from Sweden, which did shut schools, there's no control group country that just let the virus run amok and infect or kill however many it would. We can only estimate "how bad it would have been" without various lockdowns and social distancing measures.

Sure, many young, "healthy" people have to work - including those who work in care homes or take care of elderly/sick relatives in their own home. That's how the virus got there in the first place. Aunt Mildred didn't catch Covid-19 by wandering the garden of the care home with her walker. A young, seemingly healthy relative or employee of the facility brought the virus in.

Governors, regardless of political party, are caught in a tough spot. A Wild West free-for-all reopening could be disastrous for more populated areas in terms of deaths and again overwhelming the healthcare system. A careful, phased in reopening is best for them. Then there are sparsely populated areas like South Dakota or Wyoming, which didn't need much of a lockdown in the first place.

I agree on the first part, and the first sentence of the second part. Where I disagree is your last sentence. I don't think such a lockdown was/is realistic in terms of actually protecting the elderly or vulnerable. It's easy and oversimplified for you as a "younger, healthy person" to say someone who is over a certain age should be locked away in a home even if they're healthy. Or that someone who has underlying health conditions should never leave the house. Millions of people have underlying health conditions that are managed well with medications and lifestyle choices and can lead normal, productive lives.

Isolate/lock up elderly or vulnerable? They're people too, with human rights. There has to be a balance.

These guys have been debunked for using fuzzy math. FYI they own for-profit walk-in clinics where people who think they are sick can be tested.

Also an unprecedented statement from the American College of Emergency Physicians condemning the two doctors and their statements, and which explains why the math is so wrong:
https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19...isinformation/

Brief analysis here, including links to sources. You can also Google search and find numerous debunks:
https://www.politifact.com/factcheck...sputed-calcul/

Please no!!!! One is more than enough.

Sadly, there's at least one: Belarus. See this report. Well OK, they haven't let the virus just run rampant, but precious little is being done at a national level to protect citizens there.

So you did just entirely make those figures up. Good to know.

You don't know any more than the rest of us. You just like making doom noises whilst trying to sound knowledgable and superior. Which part of the UK are you from again? How much understanding of the UK do you actually have.

The recession is coming, absolutely, on top of a decade of austerity for the UK. It's utterly shit. But it'll be significantly less shit if fewer folk die from this bloody virus.

You appear to be the embodiment of NIMBY. I assume you fit quite neatly into the VENN twatbadger demographic.

You seem to assume that people with underlying health conditions would have died soon anyway.

Do I really need to explain how ignorant that thought is?

From a purely heartless economic point of view, wouldn't less people require less social payments/state pensions/unemployment benefits as well as having a higher percentage of people employed in whatever jobs there are?

There is a misconception here that only the people over 65 get sick.
Many younger people also get sick but respond better to hospitalization so do not die, without the availability of hospital beds many younger people will get dead.
Here is a sobering graph from the US CDC

Absolutely. Let's open up all the stadia and any other huge enclosed spaces we have and shove everyone inside for 3 weeks. Anyone left alive after 21 -23 days can resume their lives. Everyone else... meh... dead weight. Their own fault for being the wrong age etc.


In all seriousness, Ato, it feels very much like this is what the UK Govt is doing: culling from the bottom 99% so the top 1% are ok. Some weird horrid Battle Royale.

Have you considered that the stay at home long term unemployed are the most likely to avoid infection so survive and are the least likely to get employed

Statistically speaking (in the US at least) those who reside in retirement facilities and nursing homes appear to be at the most risk. And those who have underlying health conditions: obesity, diabetes, hypertension etc... are also at great risk.

As far as Johnson is concerned, his weight was deemed a contributing factor to his complicated recovery from Covid according to what I have read. I am actually surprised that Trump has tested negative given his lousy diet and weight issues.

I'm not waiting until the recession bites. I'm doing all I can do to keep my job during the next 2 years and increase my cash stash.

Hope all the worries about the economy become actions and not self-pity or a useless "the government got it wrong".