So, coming back to post number one and the way covid had been counted, they have now reduced the total to just over 40k
Given that we know that over 20k were residents of care homes, then then true total to the general public has been around 20k.
Take off that the many fatalities that already had serious medical conditions and the risk to the fit, healthy population is really quite minimal in real terms.
It is obviously awful for anyone who has lost a loved one, but if we believe the experts who said that if we had locked down a week earlier, then 20 thousand lives would have been saved, then it stands to reason that if we had have done that, we would have had nearly zero deaths of the general population.
Blimey that's a pretty convenient interpretation of events to fit an argument. The figure being used was a nonsense but was originally chosen to make things look better. There was general agreement that excess deaths produced a fairer figure and that is higher still.
I'm not that fussed about absolute numbers but calculating that 20K fewer deaths from locking down earlier would have resulted in zero deaths in the population outside care homes is bonkers. Some of those deaths could have occurred outside, inside, anywhere. There is the glaring fact that care homes suffered so badly because we exported infection from hospitals straight into care homes, the most vulnerable setting. That might have been avoided and we certainly could have done better because comparable countries did.
Some studies have suggested that the average of lost years for male victims has been 134 and that for female victims 10 years. More importantly still it is emerging that some of the young, who had alsmost symptomless infection, are now showing signs of serious complications and after effects. This isn't a virus we can just ignore by sending the young back in and walling up the old. It's a continuing threat while ever infection is out in the community. It's a threat to the NHS, the care system, the economy and the health of all.
Hopefully we can slowly emerge into more interaction and a combination of better treatments, perhaps a vaccine and sensible precautions will allow us to live more expansively. We don't know very much at all about the virus and the winter season might bring new challenges.