The Express leads with the number of healthcare workers who’ve lost their lives to the virus, a story that’s been getting a fair amount of attention over the last few days because it seems to show the price they’re paying for the PPE shortage. On BBC Breakfast yesterday it was claimed that 43 NHS workers have died, and the presenter took if for granted that these deaths came about because of their exposure to patients infected with COVID-19. But tragic though any death is, it is worth pausing to consider whether NHS workers really are more likely to die from COVID-19 than other members of the working population. One of the commentators on this site, Guy de la Bédoyère, has crunched the numbers. The NHS employs roughly 1.5 million people across the UK, which is about 1/43 of the UK population. That figure is also about 1/25 of the population of working age (20-65). To date 1,272 people aged 20-59 have died of COVID-19 in the UK, 1/25th of which is 50 – or slightly more than the actual number of NHS workers who have died, at least according to BBC Breakfast. In other words, just as a function of the general risk to which the whole UK population is subject we would expect at least 50 NHS workers to have died anyway this year, regardless of any higher risk they might face from their jobs. Having said that, 53% of NHS employee are 44 or younger – under-45s are at a lower risk of dying from coronavirus than over-45s – and it’s a safe bet the majority don’t have underlying health conditions. So in all likelihood NHS workers are more vulnerable. Nonetheless, taken by themselves, the raw figures suggest they are less likely to die of coronavirus than the general population. To mean anything, the headline figures need to be put into context, something few journalists seem willing to do.
In other news, the ONS released some data this morning about the number of deaths in Week 15 (April 4th to April 10th). The total number in England and Wales in the week ending April 10th was 18,516, an increase of 2,129 compared to the previous week and 7,996 higher than the five-year average for Week 15. It’s also the highest weekly total since Week 1 in 2000. But let’s contextualise these figures. The most important comparison is not between the total number of deaths in Week 15 this year with the five-year average for Week 15, but the cumulative total compared with the five-year average. That gives us 184,960 deaths up to the end of Week 15, compared to a five-year average of 174,693. Admittedly, that’s an excess of 10,267, but as Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at Cambridge University, has pointed out: “Many people who die of COVID would have died anyway within a short period.” Incidentally, the total by the end of Week 15 in 2018 was 187, 720, higher than it is this year. The truth is, we won’t know how many more deaths there have been in 2020 compared to the previous five years until the end of Week 52. (There’s a good analysis of the latest ONS data here.)
Another point about these figures. Yesterday’s COVID-19 death toll was 449, which amounts to a 47% decrease in the 12 days since April 8th, according to the Telegraph. If April 8th was the peak, given the three-week lag time between infection and death, that suggests infection peaked before the lockdown was introduced on March 23rd. (If April 8th was the peak, the ONS data should show fewer people dying from COVID-19 in Week 16 than in Week 15.) That’s the conclusion of Carl Heneghan, Oxford Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, who says infection rates halved as a result of hand-washing and keeping two metres apart, which were urged on the British public on March 16th, a week before the lockdown. Maintaining the severe restrictions isn’t necessary, according to Professor Heneghan. “In fact, the damaging effect now of lockdown is going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus,” he told the Today programme yesterday.
According to this morning’s Guardian, the Government has been warned by its advisors on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that any relaxation of lockdown measures could trigger an exponential rise in coronavirus cases, and it notes that two of the Cabinet hawks – Gavin Williamson and Alok Sharma – have begun to wobble since the news leaked that Boris is leaning towards the doves. Has BoJo lost his mojo? That’s the question James Delingpole and I discuss on our weekly London Calling podcast that you can listen to here.
But it’s possible his aides are briefing the papers that he won’t ease the lockdown until he’s satisfied there’s no risk of a second wave overwhelming the NHS so that when he returns to Downing Street – rumoured to be next week – he can announce he’s now assured of this and, like Moses, lead us out of Egypt into the Promised Land. The rationale would be there’s no point in ending the lockdown if the British public still think the virus is stalking the land because they won’t then send their children back to school or return to work. But if Boris, the great communicator, is able to tell them he’s looked into it and now thinks it’s safe to leave their homes, they’ll begin to venture outside again. Is that the plan? James Delingpole thinks I’m clutching at straws and another person who isn’t optimistic is Stephen Hazell-Smith (otherwise known as the City Grump). You can read his blog post about why he thinks politicians are being led by the nose by crystal-ball-gazing scientific experts here.
One reason to think there won’t be a second wave when the lockdown is lifted is the work of Isaac Ben-Israel, Chairman of the Israeli Space Agency and the National Council for Research and Development. As I reported a couple of days ago, he’s crunched the numbers and concluded infections decline to almost zero 70 days after the first outbreak in each country, regardless of the measures imposed to try to thwart it. You can read a transcript of his talk on the subject here.
In case you haven’t been lectured enough about just how important it is to stay home and protect the NHS, Apple’s digital assistant has now joined the ranks of the finger waggers. If you say to Siri, “Where are you?” you get the following reply: “I’m wherever you need me to be. And I hope you’re staying in as much as you can.” Are liberal democracies on the cusp of becoming totalitarian states, aided by the tech giants? Yes, according to a piece by Jim Fedako published by the Mises Institute. And one worrying sign is this story in the Independent. It says NHS staff have been ordered by their bureaucratic overlords not to tweet about “political issues”, including lack of PPE. Sounds like a case for the Free Speech Union. (For those readers who don’t know, I helped set up the FSU at the end of February.) If any NHS workers have been sanctioned for exercising their lawful right to free speech on social media – or are being put through a disciplinary process – please email the FSU’s Case Management Director Peter Ainsworth and he’ll look into it.
I get daily messages from readers telling me about the heavy-handed behaviour of the police, but this one stood out:
My sister (50 years old, works full time) was pulled over tonight by the police on her way home from shopping for groceries. The police pulled over every car on the A4 between Newbury and Hungerford to ask where they were going/where they had been. She was driving alone so could not be accused of breaching the lockdown rule with regard to congregating with more than one other person. She advised she had been shopping for food (after working all day at home), asked the officer why she had been stopped given she was not committing any crime and inquired whether the police had any real crimes to investigate. (FYI she has been mugged at knifepoint and burgled twice in London and there was no response from the police.) The officer then accused her of “not being very polite”, called over her superior and informed my sister they were taking a note of her number plate. Clearly this was supposed to intimidate her. She has since received a call from the police telling her they have the right to stop motorists and they are enforcing the law. She is now concerned she could lose her job.
Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative and UKIP MP, tells me he never leaves his home in West London without a copy of the Coronavirus Act in his back pocket. If he’s ever button-holed by our boys in blue, his plan is to whip it out and draw their attention to which rules the police are expected to enforce and which they aren’t.
A big thank you to all those readers who made a donation yesterday to pay for the upkeep of this website. If you’d like to make a donation to Lockdown Sceptics, please click here. Incidentally, we passed 100,000 page views yesterday. Help me grow this to 250,000 by the end of the week by spreading the word. Let’s keep the pressure up on the Government.
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Toby, another very informative update. Many thanks. From today’s ONS data, I re-drew the weekly and cumulative weekly death registrations where the underlying cause was respiratory disease. There is a lag of up to three weeks, but these numbers *must* include deaths actually caused by Covid-19, as opposed to those “associated with”, which is, as we know, increasingly meaningless as more and more people are infected. The results show that, YTD, any excess mortality caused by Covid-19 is less than the normal annual variation in mortality. https://twitter.com/enjayaitch/status/1252554954977525761?s=20
So what you are suggesting is that the swamped intensive care wards across the UK and Europe are ….. curing everyone. The whole thing is an illusion and your spreadsheet proves not many people have died from the virus compared with a normal first 3 months of any year.
As for “associated with” not counting. HIV virus kills nobody directly. It is always something else that gets you when your immune system is destroyed. Try again.
Intensive care wards across Britain are not swamped.
‘The facility in east London was built to provide intensive care to around 3600 Covid positive patients. But it has remained largely empty since it opened as London trusts have been able to absorb the demand within their own expanded critical care capacity.’
Health Service Journal 21 April
The distinction between dying ‘with’ and dying ‘from’ is an important one in working out how deadly Covid 19 really is.
‘There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes.’
Dr John Lee (Recently-retired Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist)
I don’t think it is accurate to use the 1.5 million million number as the starting point for your analysis. Alot of these number are management and back office which it does not look like are being included in the numbers of NHS deaths being reported though it is difficult to tell. The number on this website seem to indicate that frontline staff are around 50% of the total dependingon how you work it out. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/general-election-2010/how-many-managers
I’ve just posted on this too. There is so much wrong with the back of a fag packet calculation. What infuriates me is the purpose for the calculation – proving that NHS deaths are nothing special.
Any death is a tragedy, particularly for family and colleagues, right across Britain.
‘There is also a remarkable correlation between the cumulative UK deaths from covid-19 in the UK population and among health and social care workers.’
‘Anaesthetists, intensive care doctors and by association nurses and physiotherapists who work in similar settings are believed to be among the highest risk groups of all healthcare workers……It is therefore notable that all of these groups are completely absent from the data set.’
Health Service Journal 22 April 2020
A daily very big thank you Toby for your brilliant work.
I’m sorry to say that I agree with James Dellingpole. Boris is a busted flush. Spineless, blows with the wind and incapable of true leadership. As you both seemed to suggest on last night’s podcast, leadership isn’t about simply listening to one set of ‘experts’ and doing as they dictate verbatim. True leadership is about taking inputs from a wide range of people and then making a rational/balanced decision on how to act for the best overall.
For the first time in my life, I spoilt my ballot paper in December 2019 as I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the Tories. This was due to their unquestioning worship of the NHS Church and the Ecoloons. So glad that I did that now.
We need a new UKIP style party to give the Tories a much-needed kick up the proverbial.
I am hoping Toby and James might do just that (in my dreams) ‘The Liberty Party’ perhaps, or ‘Freedom Party’
Like it. I’m in!
As someone who used to be for the Lib Dems, until COVID came along they cared about liberty, then suddenly they’re all for lockdowns, I’d be with this party on the condition that its only policies were for standing against surveillance, against intrusive health and safety and against overpowered states and corporations. It mustn’t waste its time on silly issues and can’t bother with arguing about left vs right economics, can’t bother with arguments about immigration (remember that they’re saving our lives by picking our harvest and driving the trucks, as well as nursing the very few cases where the disease is harmful), can’t pledge allegiance to any existing party (although can co-operate on specific anti-nanny-state and anti-police-state policies). It must not condemn experts either, just say that we are intersted in experts who tell us how to maximise liberty, not those who try to maximise life expectancy. Needs to focus solely on individual liberty against the police state, because that will get support from all over the previous political spectrum, folks from left-right remain-brexit will all be rushing up to join.
You’ve been very fair to compare annual mortality for England and Wales up to the end of Week 15 with the 10 year average. It sounds even less alarming when people are reminded that 2018’s Wk 1-15 cumulative total was 187,720. “2020 death rate approaching that of the year before last” doesn’t sound nearly so frightening does it?.
The fact that the figures are controversial suggests (tautologically) that they are not overwhelmingly clear and the decision to continue with lockdown needs to have a far, far higher threshold than ‘not overwhelmingly clear’. The big challenge now is how to reverse the psychological and emotional over-investment of the UK population into this misplaced national endeavour. Statistics are there to be tortured as we know from the Brexit debate. Nor is the government likely to be of much help, since lockdown is political cover (aided by the NHS as the wide-eyed orphan) for a lack of preparation and a faltering conviction in the original ‘flexible management’ approach. Another concern is that the PM may have now ‘found religion’ after his own personal experience. As such, I suspect exit from all this will take far longer than necessary in the UK and our recession will be deeper and more costly in lives and treasure than it needed to be. When it is all over, prominent among the many victims to be counted will be UK journalism (which has been supine) and the British sense of proportionality at both the public and political levels, if indeed it ever existed.
The fact that a reasonably fit man in his mid-50’s with the world’s best care nearly dies might be a clue that this narrative of “nothing to see here” is the invented story.
He is 5 ft 9 inches tall, weight circa 16.5 stone, quite possibly obese; a significant health risk factor.
No-one ever died from BSE, bovine-human transmission was never established. There has always been some mortality from the similar human condition, Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease, CJD, eg last year there were 133 deaths from it: https://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/figsapr2020_0.pdf
Thanks for the great article.
“Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative and UKIP MP, tells me he never leaves his home in West London without a copy of the Coronavirus Act in his back pocket. If he’s ever button-holed by our boys in blue, his plan is to whip it out and draw their attention to which rules the police are expected to enforce and which they aren’t.”
Is there any TL;DR of what one can or can not do according to this act? What can I be fined/arrested for? How are they checking whether or not I’m still within my allowed daily 30 minutes when I’m outside?
On a frivolous note, a friend confided this morning that she’d sneaked out for a second walk last night ; she took her dog! Stir craziness is now spreading.
Secondly, the findings of Mr Ben Israel and Professor Spiegelhalter should give us sceptics hope: that the pattern revealing the steady reduction in infections is replicating in every nation studied, regardless of measures approved by various governments.
My fear is that the emotional incontinence, so prevalent in recent years, combined with point scoring by the media, has relegated rational discussion and dissent to limbo.
So, we read constantly, that lives are being sacrificed, of genocide, that the elderly and the overweight are being stigmatised and written off, whereas the truth of the matter is, as Professor Spiegelhalter has pointed out, many of those deaths would have occurred within a short time anyway, and it is not feasible nor always desirable to prolong the lives of all who fall ill, for whatever cause.
Professionals are obliged to ration treatments in most settings, and to choose what is most appropriate for differing individuals.
Much has also been made of the PPE supply conundrum, with some unhelpful spin being produced by devolved administrations. This too, has become a point scoring fest, with the facts buried under accusations and spin.
I truly hope that the young and healthy will be able to resume their lives, that the UK will soon follow the exit strategies now being adopted by many European nations, that the hysteria will abate, and that we, as supposedly rational responsible citizens, will come to acknowledge that life can never be entirely free of risk.
I’ve been doing 2 walks a day since the start. The tower for me!
The local authorities in the french alps have passed a law whereby you’re not allowed to venture more than 100m higher than where you live. Properly hardcore authoritarianism.
I’d starve to death under a law like that, no shops for more than a kilometre from me where I am in the UK.
Very good point. I just wish people would start to see sense!
“many of those deaths would have occurred within a short time anyway” We’ve just had a very mild winter, leading to less deaths from flu pneumonia, etc. so presumably in a typical year a lot of the deaths would have happened a few months earlier and the CV death toll would be a lot lower.
Just wanted to say thank you – I discovered your work a couple of days ago and I feel a deep sense of relief. So glad to have found a place of rationality and common sense. Donation incoming.
Amy – I felt the same when I found it!
Typically in England and Wales around 1,500 15-65 year olds die each week. Assuming around 35 million people are in that age bracket, then each week we would normally expect around 60 NHS workers to die. So over say four weeks, that’s 240. From COVID, if all COVID deaths in that age bracket are excess, we should expect around 64 deaths amongst NHS staff so far.
I remain extremely sceptical on the reliability of government data, particularly on Covid-19 being the direct cause of patient deaths. To illustrate my point, in Italy for example, “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.” – The Telegraph, 23/03/20
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/have-many-coronavirus-patients-died-italy/
I suspect we are not being told the full truth by world governments, especially with anecdotal evidence suggesting doctors are writing “Covid-19” on death certificates with or without patients displaying symptoms, and WITHOUT testing them to confirm the correct diagnosis. Another death? Must be Covid-19! (face palms).
Thanks for this Toby. I dont know how else to message you. Signed up today. Are you able to mention the effect lockdown is having on our pubs? Metro ran a story today about landlords saying they dont think they will be able to survive. Britons want their local pub to come back to after all this is done!
The pubs could very safely be opened for take-away service, you wouldn’t get the nice atmosphere any more, but you’d get some food and drink and the landlords would keep afloat. But government has been interfering with this. I can fully support social distancing of having pubs operate without a seating area and request customers take the food elsewhere and keep spread out, basic social distancing slows the viral spread. But full closure is a step too far, and gives no significant epidemiological benefit above that got from take-away service.
The Government is keep saying that they do what people want. For me the statistics are very scary. Many of them says that 2/3 of the society want even longer lockdown. My question is this? Does the society actually know what is going on? Do they know what the facts are or their only news sources are social media and sensation seeker media. I think the government should educate people objectively if they want to listen them. Otherwise we will follow fake news ratgery than the reality.
Among people I know in the UK there is scarily high support for this stupid lockdown, but nowhere near as high as the media would suggest. I’m finding about 50-50 for-against, I’m finding 100% support for non-intrusive anti-viral measures like: minor social distancing, simple sensible precautions, hand washing, gloves, masks, more NHS funding. The virus is bad but can be managed well enough by basic precuations to let normal life largely continue whilst not overwhelming hospitals, the lockdown will cause more casualties (and these casualties will be the poor and lower middle classes of all ages, as opposed to the most infirm of the elderly, across all classes, as the main casualty group without lockdown) due to depression, economic chaos, job losses, price rises, reduced future NHS funding, higher taxes to pay off debts, less public services and overbearing policing. Among the people I’ve spoken to the ones who oppose lockdown are the oens who are able to undestand the ripple effects of the damage it is doing and the sheer interdependence of the modern world and how no man can be an island for long despite what some epidemiologists wish to believe. My sample of those I know may be biased, most of them have degrees in physical sciences (maths, physics, engineering, computing…) so may be better placed to judge stats and the severity of risks than the general tabloid reading population.
I note that the latest Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC) audit of patients with Covid-19 in UK intensive or critical care units (excluding Scotland, paediatric & neonatal intensive care units) reports on pages 14 & 16 that up to 4pm on 16 April only 1499 people have died of Covid-19 in these ICUs. https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports
The mortality data to 10 April/ week 15 indicates that c90% of the cumulative Covid-19 deaths occurred in hospital. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/tracking-mortality-over-time/
But why would most critically ill ‘Covid-19’ patients die without being moved to an ICU, unless they already had significant health issues and were by that time on palliative care only?
Here is the other site that helps me with unbiased reporting of the pandemic: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
I’ve been sharing that link with MPs and other (good) journalists in my frustration. Maybe if others did the same it could get the message out that not only do we know we’re being lied to but that we’re also against a longer lockdown. I just feel at a loss for what to do.
Watch this… Really important analysis on statistically significant population with Covid-19 antibodies in California…
https://youtu.be/k7v2F3usNVA
By April 10th, the number of deaths due to flu and pneumonia was 3 times higher than deaths due to (or with) COVID-19. I wonder what the ratio is now. Meaningless of course with the liberal/generous approach to ascribing deaths with Covid-19 as deaths due to Covid-19. How many of these deaths were due to the lockdown itself and corresponding diversion of NHS resources towards what is no more than a flu bug? Professor Johan Giesecke, the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and an advisor to the World Health Organisation’s director general, describes Covid 19 as a “mild disease”, similar to the flu with a case fatality rate of around 0.1%. He, like a growing number, is puzzled by the response to the disease. In regard to the Imperial College modelling, he said he had never seen an unpublished non-peer-reviewed paper have so much impact on government policy.
Pneumonia is the result of being infected with the COVID-19 virus. So many of the pneumonia deaths are probably COVID-19 related. It isn’t the virus that kills you, it is the body’s over reaction to it that causes the immune system to go into overdrive and causes pneumonia, that leads to shortage of oxygen, that leads to organ failure.
Pneumonia can also be the result of being infected with a normal flu virus, of which there are many more than the novel Covid-19. Otherwise how did people die of pneumonia last year? Your body can overreact to any flu virus or even the common cold.
Toby – great work and please keep up the efforts to keep us sane.
Regarding the endless analysis of the deaths data everywhere in the press & TV, and always without balance and context, I was shocked to find (thanks to a posted response to my comment on the “Excess Deaths” section) that the NHS numbers touted as daily deaths are in fact daily released numbers (announced deaths) covering the period back to 1st March – far different to how these are being represented.
I built my own collated version of the data, using the publicly available NHS England stats https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ adding up each actual day to get an actual NHS reported deaths for that day, and by looking at how many days of “announced deaths” needed to be cumulated to reach a final total it became clear that the peak was 8th April.
I tracked the changes for the last 3 days to prove my initial thoughts, but my anger bubble was burst this morning as I see now in the Telegraph that scientists have come clean and state the peak was the 8th April – a full 2 weeks ago.
How can this not make major headlines this morning, especially as for the last 10 days we have endured the waffle stating the peak is not yet here, or is almost here. Rubbish, and easily visible in the available data.
The graphs and data are still being manipulated to suport the narrative, and indeed the narrative itself is now swinging to discussing a 2nd peak. It is high time the press and TV stopped the sensationalist way of reporting, and then terrifying the population, and just be honest. It cannot be right that in the modern world that I as a citizen need to faff about with the NHS data in order to get my own truth.
The data does not support the lockdown.
Oh dear, have you thought that the data is a result of the lockdown? All this cod-analysis concludes “I’ve no idea why I am taking this medicine. I’m not ill.” The other problem here is that the raw data is highly problematic in terms of when deaths get recorded & cause of death. The FT says today that the death toll is probably twice that recorded, Are they right? I don’t know. What I do there know is there a lot uncertainty that you cannot hope to capture.
Precisely the point. If no-one has reliable data, how can the lockdown be justified? The example of Sweden indicates that the lockdown in Britain was pointless; a political decision, as elsewhere, based on a very public panic driven by broadcast, social and other media; a very poor show.
Toby, you should be ashamed of yourself. It is blindingly obvious that NHS workers are putting themselves at risk with this outbreak. Indeed, they do with many other communicable disease they come across. To imply in your opening that they are not and to use some half-baked back-of-a-fag-packet calcualtion to demonstrate this is dispicable.
You want an attention grabbling opening to your article which is fair enough. To do so at the expense of the bravery and commitment of NHS worker is disgusting. I am not a member of the Our NHS is Sacred brigade either. But on a personal level the individual men and women are doing a fantastic job in extreme circumstances.
So you can quibble about how many would die in the NHS workforce and conclude totally wrongly it’s not as bad as portrayed. For starters, 1.5 million are not in the frontline and as you admit the age profile and health state is entirely different from the infected population. There are doubtless many, many other problems with my analysis and yours.
Until today, I had some time for you as an educated person who meant well. I agree with some of your views and found you entertaining and throughtful when on the media. Your opening paragraph today has changed all that. Really awful. You knew what you were writing and why. You knew the analysis was rubbish and you know that NHS staff are dying disproportionately. You are a disgrace.
43 NHS workers have died. It has not been established that they died due to or even with Covid-19. Nor has it been established how many of these were on the frontline. If only half the 1.5 million are on the frontline – that is 43 out of 750,000 = 0.0057% have died. Obviously a bloodbath for NHS workers. This is their job. They have massively cut back on treating everything else other than this flu. You obviously are a fully-paid up “Our NHS is Sacred” brigade member” despite what you say. It is also clear that you have never had time for well-meaning educated people.
Dylan, let’s not bother with percentages and 43 versus 112 or whatever. The idea that NHS workers are not dying from Covid is ridiculous. Nobody is claiming a bloodbath. Cheack out the FT article todayon total deaths. And no, it’s still not a bloodbath & I too think there is probably not much you can do wtih carehopme residents who get it.
Someone who glibly says, “This is their job” as if that means it’s OK to die while working is not to me a well-meaning educated person.
Our NHS is sacred, which means they deserve better PPE, more pay, and a government which doesn’t strip their funding to the bone. The doctors, nurses, specialists and other heroic staff know full well that calm and considered precautions could limit the harm the virus does without ruining the quality of life for the whole country, but they also know that without a panic laden atmosphere they won’t be listened to at all by a government that really doesn’t care about anything ( not quality of lives, not quantiiy of lives, not liberties, not businesses…) but its own power. If government were more capable of reason then the NHS heroes would be able to confidently tell everyone to take sensible non-intrusive pre-cuations, and not have to resort to supporting barbaric lockdowns in the fear that nothing else would get enough attention. We need to help our heroes get back to a comfortable life by ending this lockdown so that they are able to shop easily after a hard-days work, not be harassed by cops demanding ID, not be reported on by stasi neighbours, and be able to take a weekedn walk somewhere nice to take their minds off their tough work.
It is precisely because you don’t bother with percentages that signals you out as an uneducated person. Nobody is saying that no NHS staff have died with/of Covid 19. And it IS their job- those Doctors took an oath, and they are in no more danger than they have always been – On average 17,000 people in the UK die of influenza every year and that is bound to include some NHS staff because, like us they get ill and die. And now treatment is being withheld from the old and cancer victims -Professor Karol Sikora, Chief Medical Officer, Rutherford Cancer Centres estimates that 60,000 cancer patients alone could die due to these insane measures. He puts the upper range of Covid 19 deaths/deaths with Covid 19 as 30,000. That is twice the number – 200% – there is another percentage for you. To press forward with this policy with open eyes amounts to institutionalized murder.
NHS staff most at risk do not feature in NHS mortality from Covid 19
‘Anaesthetists, intensive care doctors and by association nurses and physiotherapists who work in similar settings are believed to be among the highest risk groups of all healthcare workers……It is therefore notable that all of these groups are completely absent from the data set.’
NHS staff mortality rates are the same as those for the general public.
‘There is also a remarkable correlation between the cumulative UK deaths from covid-19 in the UK population and among health and social care workers.’
https://www.hsj.co.uk/exclusive-deaths-of-nhs-staff-from-covid-19-analysed/7027471.article
Mortality numbers have been, in any case, unreliable regarding dying ‘with’ or ‘from’ Covid 19 since Covid 19 became a notifiable disease on 05 March 2020.
As an aside, Covid 19 was removed from the list of high consequence infectious diseases on March 19th 2020
As far as I’m aware NHS staff cases are higher than in the general public, as in hospitals the chance of exposure is very great indeed, while it is relatively in shops and parks and would be low in our workplaces too if they would ****ing re-open. Infected NHS staff also seem mroe likely to die than the infected general public, from the figures I’ve seen. This might suggest that the amount of virus one is exposed to, much higher on a ward full of COVID-19 patients than in chance interactions with shoppers, walkers and non-medical setting colleagues, may have some effect on the severity of the disease suffered. If it should turn out that viral load is of important effect then it becomes very much easier to end the lockdown, a lot easier to maintain good anti-contamination procedures (surfaces are of dangerous levels of infection for less time after being coughed on), and feasible to achieve herd immunity with even lower levels of risk than the fairly small ones currently suspected (providing the virus does give immunity after infection, all anecdotal evidence suggests this is true, and most viruses behave like this, but there is definitely a fear among some doctors than naturallly induced immunity might be time limited, may last long enough to let us go on with normal life until there is a vaccine though).
We have indeed seen that even in worst case estimates of the not quite determined fatality rate COVID-19 isn’t so terrible, I can see full well why it was removed from the HCID list, especially as that list is designed for tracking rare diseases and not those which are all over the place. We could manage this nasty, but by no means world threatening, virus without extremist lockdown measures.
For the discussion about ventilators take a look at this input from an NYC Doctor. He is very sceptical about the suitability of ventilators in the fight against this virus.
Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell Gives Thoughts On Current Global Pandemic
https://youtu.be/Ykp0H8DenqQ
Toby, another great read. Something I have yet to see done is for a site like this get a genuine number cruncher to check out Prof Ferguson’s model. It is available on GIthub. I have downloaded it and though no expert could not believe how crude it is. I showed it to someone who has worked as an actuary and he was gobsmacked. Please get a qualified person to explain just how rubbish the information was that prompted this. Boris deserves the sack for letting such poor analysis drive poicy