We’re publishing an original piece today by an engineer called Paul Bird in which he has tried to calculate the total loss of life due to Covid in 2020 in England and Wales. He’s done that by working out the average life expectancy within each population cohort, calculating the average loss of life among those who died ‘involving’ Covid in each cohort, and then producing a sum total: 814,264 years of life lost. He then tries to put that number in context.
It is difficult to relate to numbers like these. What do they mean?
Clearly, the overall size of the population is important. The impact of 100,000 people dying (for whatever reason) in a country of one million is rather more serious than in a country of 100 million.
The population of England and Wales in 2019 was just over 59 million, so 814,264 lost life-years is equivalent to 0.014 life-years per person, or five days.
Again, that figure is difficult to relate to. No-one wants to lose even one day of his or her life. However, the statistic does give the possibility of comparison with other things, such as the life lost to diseases and lifestyle choices we are more familiar with.
It also provides a way to gauge the proportionality of lockdown. How do the collateral harms of lockdown, which everyone is having to endure, compare to the life-time saved by lockdown? (At the time of writing it is not clear how many Covid deaths were saved by lockdown in 2020. Initial work on international comparisons suggests none at all.)
In strictly numerical terms, how does the time period five days compare to average life expectancy of 81.25 years?3 One way of visualising it would be to take a piece of string one metre long representing 81.25 years and cut off a piece representing the lifetime lost to Covid averaged over the whole population. How long would the offcut be? If you had been closely following the BBC’s coverage you might reason as follows: “Well, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives to Covid, and there are millions of people in the country, so maybe, I guess, the offcut would be a tenth? 10 centimetres?” That dedicated viewer would be wrong. The actual length of string corresponding to five days is 168 micrometres. That is, less than a fifth of a millimetre, a bit thicker than a human hair. You’d need specialist tooling to make the cut, and the string cut off would disintegrate into individual strands which would be hard to see with the naked eye.
This is an interesting way of looking at the impact of Covid and worth reading in full.
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I posted on a similar thought a number of weeks ago. This was my post
If 0.2% of the UK population have their deaths labelled as covid (with or from) over the course of this, and each such labelled death results in on average 6 months of fairly unhealthy life lost through SARS-C0V-2 having appeared on the scene.
Then on average that works out at less than half a day (or more precisely 0.4 day = 0.2% x 183 days) of fairly unhealthy life lost per member of the population.
So if the direct covid mortality effect was spread evenly over the population, it would be like someone decreeing, we are going to cut everybody’s life at the end short by half a day. So for example someone destined to die at 10pm on 5th January 2040 will actually now die at 10am on 5th January 2040 instead.
Compare that with all the misery that everyone has suffered over the past year (albeit to widely different degrees) and ask is it worth it for less than half a day of life?
Doesn’t that make you think we’ve got things completely out of proportion, even before you consider that the evidence is that lockdowns don’t prevent a single covid death but cause huge indirect loss of life?
Is this logic correct?
There was a study that I can’t locate at the moment that assessed the average number of years lost for each covid labelled death.
It banded people together into sex and age bands and co-morbidity mixes and assumed from actuarial data that the years of life lost was equal to the life expectancy of someone in each age/sex band with that comorbidity mix.
The figure was about 10 years of life lost averaged over all the groups and the study fallaciously tried to argue this was the average years of life lost for each covid labelled death.
However that calculation missed that death heavily selects for those of a certain age and co-morbidity mix towards those where the comorbidity was most severe. For example those who died of something else but who asymptomatically tested positive for covid would have a life expectancy of zero.
It is very hard to know how to adjust for such extreme selection but I came up with 0.5 to 1 year life lost on average per covid death
This was the study
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75/v1
However, although we had data for eleven common and important LTCs, we did not have markers of underlying disease severity among those who died. Severity of the underlying LTC has considerable impact on life expectancy28. Moreover, we had no data for rarer severe LTCs, which may nonetheless be common among those who die from COVID-19 at younger ages. As such, the attenuation of YLL following adjustment for LTCs may be an underestimate. However, we think that this effect is unlikely to be substantial enough to reduce YLL to the orders of magnitude suggested by some commentators
So they assert without justification at all that their overstatement of years of life lost is unlikely to be substantial. Basically they are just making it up. It has to be substantial surely
And this London hospital related paper and Scottish audit give some indication of how many deaths were with SARS-C0V-2 and not from covid.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377982/
See figure 1 which shows initially in the Spring a lot of cases were real covid cases but by as early as 22nd to 28th April most weren’t
And
https://blogs.gov.scot/statistics/2020/09/15/counting-people-in-hospital-with-covid-19/
The audit showed that 8% of patients were either receiving treatment for COVID-19, were in rehabilitation after their treatment for COVID-19 was completed, or were in hospital for COVID-19 related complications. (5% of patients could not be classified into the above categories.)
Note this percentage was during Summer 2020 so the 8% is likely an under-estimate of how many cases were true covid cases.
Is ‘freecumbria’ an aspiration or a reality?
Ah Wellcome, these people have tentacles everywhere in the Covid fear machine.
A better way of looking at things might to consider the number of QALYs lost.
Since the vast majority have seen their quality of life decrease during the past 12 months then a huge number of QALYs have been lost. Regardless of where on a scale of 0.1-1 people rated their quality of life at the begining of 2020 if the average person’s QALY is 0.2 lower now than it was then over 12,000,000 QALYs have been lost. Clearly a lot of people, e.g. those that have developed severe mental health problems, lost their job or business etc. will have lost more than 0.2 QALYs and are likely to continue to have a poorer quality of life for at least a few years. This could easily add up another 3,000,000 lost QALYs. Adding on all the people who are going to die early because of missed/cancelled medical treatments/tests and the total cost of lockdown could be as high as 20,000,000 lost QALYs.
Even if we were to take Niel Fergusons predictions of 500,000 Covid deaths at face value along with his claim that the average Covid victim would loose 5 years of life then that is only 2,500,000 lost QALYs (and this assumes that every Covid victim, including those very frail people with comorbidities asessed their quality of life as 1). Ferguson also claimed in his 2020 paper that up to 1,000,000 people would die due to the NHS being overwhelmed. Since he made no attempt to show his workings or justify this figure it’s tempting to just dismiss it (what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence), however it is probably reasonable to assume that if Covid levels became so high that 500,000 people died (mostly in Spring 2020 as claimed by Ferguson) then the NHS would’ve been forced to deny life saving treatment to some people, although it’s hard to believe that say a 30 year old with life threatning injuries from a car crash would be left to die in a ditch so that a 90 year old with Covid could go into ICU. Therefore the number of non Covid deaths are likely to have fairly low and amount to no more than 2,500,000 lost QALYs
The above figures are obviously only very rough estimates but the conclusion is stark.
Even using Ferguson’s highly discredited models the ratio of harms caused by lockdown compared to the harms that would’ve been caused by Covid is 4:1
In other words lockdown caused at least 4 times as much harm as it prevented.
If lockdown does little to reduce the spread of Covid as numerous studies have shown then obviously the harm:benefit ratio will be much higher.
If only lockdown zealots could be made to confront the reality of what this very rough estimate shows.
The idea of my post was just to put the covid labelled mortality into context, rather than do a balancing calculation of benefits and harms. With the aside that putting that mortality in context should make you realise that the potential is to cause massively more harm than good by interventions even if your unscientific belief system is that lockdowns might work.
In that context you can say the March 2020 lockdown was a major policy mistake but arguably perhaps understandable at least at some level if the concern is that hospitals would be overrun, but once you know that they won’t be overun, you need to abandon them immediately because the mortallity affect of covid is so low.
Most people just see what looks to them like big numbers of deaths and think that covid is some super significant mortality event; it isn’t in terms of its direct affect.
As the studies clearly show lockdowns save no covid lives but destroy lives through their indirect affects (or there abouts), it’s irrelevant what the impact of the covid labelled deaths per person in the population is as it’s an impact you can’t directly do anything about, a virus will do its virusing. However you can save lives and quality of life lost through the misguided lockdowns.
Excellent discussion. Of course, Lord Sumption was vilified for discussing Covid in such terms.
BBC have so much to answer for. We are being played to a particular tune. Why? Not for discussion here anymore it seems
Both Toby and Bird have lost the thread of their argument.
Suppose a brutal lockdown that kept everyone chained to their bed at home meant that no one died.Life lost in terms of length of thread would have been not even a molecule. Surely that will not have been better. You measure the cost of the lockdown, not in terms of days lost but days saved.
Also, when I last checked Covid and the kind of irrationality in your argument were contagious. That’s why the lockdown happened.
By the way, I oppose the lockdown. That’s why I also oppose silly arguments that make the case against lockdowns.
“You measure the cost of the lockdown, not in terms of days lost but days saved.”
The only thing keeping Ferguson in a job. How many days per person have been saved due to lockdown? That seems based on wild assumptions such as no seasonality, 1% IFRs etc. So it’s no easy task because you have to right at the beginning and take apart the validity of the modelling
Sorry – but this brave imaginative exercise is just another circular journey, ending up in the starting place : that we have no way of assessing the role of of Covid in mortality because the data is irretrievably buggered.
Something that should happen to most MPs and all the government!
I don’t even like the idea of comparing the costs of the disease to the costs of lockdowns. It makes it look like there’s a trade-off between them; that tightening lockdowns means less deaths, and loosening them means more.
I like this a lot and have thought so for a while. I buy it completely although I think the current sustained sequence of negative excess deaths after the recent peak (confined to the elderly by the way) suggests that COVID has shortened lives in this age group by months rather than years.
Nothing is wrong with the analysis but ultimately nothing will convince someone who has bought into the idea that hundreds of thousands of lives have been “saved” by lockdown and there is so much political capital invested in this that we haven’t a hope in hell of changing minds.
So where to now?
My MP knows he has lost my vote. I make the case to my friends. I explained calmly and rationally to the NHS caller who rang to encourage me to get vaccinated why it was immoral, illegal, illogical, a waste of scarce resources, won’t save lives and still has the possibility of going horribly, horribly wrong. I have finally come to the conclusion the only thing left is non compliance, demonstration and civil disobedience.
I meant to say that encouraging the vulnerable to take the experimental vaccine may be justified on the balance of risk but to coerce those not at risk is (all those things I said above). I hate to say it I think that minds will stay fixed until the collateral damage in terms of jobs, livelihoods missed health care becomes the news story.
A great piece. Worth noting that in the worst case of modelling using the most pessimistic assumptions imaginable (the SPI-M report) only a fraction of this number of deaths could occur again from COVID. Even if lockdown was actually reducing COVID deaths (dubious at best) these months of ongoing lockdown and endless petty restrictions like vaccine passports, masks and social distancing could only serve to prolong the average life by about a day.
A great piece. Worth pointing out that in SPI-M’s incredibly pessimistic modelling only a fraction of this number of deaths could occur again. Even if lockdown is preventing deaths (dubious at best) these extra months of lockdown and indefinite restrictions like vaccine passports, masks and social distancing could only possibly serve to prolong the average life by about one day. I think I would prefer being able to get a decent job after uni and my most basic civil liberties over an extra one day of life.
For a contrarian view of the pandemic mess in US read the bold new book Pandemic Blunder:
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A huge amount of data and information not covered by mainstream media are in Pandemic Blunder that tells the story of how over 300,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 unnecessarily because the government has blocked early home treatment and prevention. With over 500,000 COVID American deaths, learning about safe and effective early home treatment/prevention is more important than ever.
About the Book:Pandemic Blunder contains considerable medical information and data to support a number of proven safe, cheap generic medicines and protocols that knock out the coronavirus when given early. Read about the pioneering, courageous doctors who have been using innovative approaches to prevent their COVID patients from needing hospital care and facing death. The book includes many expert opinions and Real World Evidence from doctors that show 70 to 80 percent of COVID deaths could have been prevented—and still can be. Don’t be victimized by disinformation and propaganda. Learn how corrupt forces are aiming to make billions of dollars from expensive medicines and vaccines, and how hundreds of thousands of deaths could have—and should have—been prevented! Detailed information is given to help people protect their lives by using simple prevention protocols, an alternative to vaccines.
https://www.amazon.com/Pandemic-Blunder-Public-Blocked-Treatment/dp/197723822X/ref=nav_signin?dchild=1&keywords=Pandemic+Blunder&qid=1612289098&sr=8-1&&
Podcasts with author:
https://ugetube.com/watch/interview-pandemic-blunder-author_QfSXZlZFlu7dr5R.html
https://www.bitchute.com/video/pLOHlGi3PPCX/
https://youtu.be/33cI_HcG_40
https://soundcloud.com/user-694711047/the-media-and-fauci-blocked-successful-covid-19-treatments-guest-joel-hirschhorn
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/rvtheory6/episodes/2021-03-17T06_14_07-07_00
Book Review: https://heartlanddailynews.com/2021/03/author-there-is-a-solution-to-covid-but-government-wont-tell-you/
Amazon review from UK: Written without babbling and unnecessary information. It is all too easy for a lay person to get bogged down in data but this is written concisely and packed full of up to date information. A must read for anyone mistrusting of governments guidelines, misinformation and scaremongering. Excellent.
New recent articles by Joel S. Hirschhorn:
https://www.wnd.com/2021/04/covid-scandal-feds-ignored-2016-law-requiring-use-of-real-world-evidence/
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/two-new-covid-solutions-merit-government-support?utm_source=top_news&utm_campaign=standard
https://www.wnd.com/2021/03/covid-prevention-alternative-vaccines/
About the Author: Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn has a long history of working on health issues. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects and he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings. He has authored hundreds of articles in journals and on websites, plus op-ed articles in major newspapers. Dr. Hirschhorn has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.
Toby, thank you for your amazing work on this site. I appreciate every article, every word.
Please could I ask you to raise awareness of the miserable treatment of university students? My children are among the millions whose education has been blighted.
It seems incredible that this week the government confirmed arrangements for restarting visits to zoo and theme parks, but did not address when universities can welcome back their students.
Young people have missed so much during this past year. I firmly believe that the government have alienated the youngest generation, permanently.
They so badly need voices of sense and fairness like yours to draw attention to their situation.
Thank you so much.
A start by the University of Portsmouth.
The Guardian.
The UK has some of the worst Covid stats for deaths, death rates etc. The reason for this is because the UK has the most bent, fraudulent system of recording covid deaths you could possibly imagine. The British government has gone to great lengths to make this become a reality, all prepped and ready for when the green light was given to roll out the medical terrorism. They have meddled with the process of death registration to take the UK from having possibly the world’s most watertight systems of recording deaths (made that way following the horrors of Mid Staffs and Harold Shipman) to one that can be described as being blatantly setup to facilitate the forging of death certificates to maximise the amount of covid deaths to terrorise the public with. It is a shocking example of “you can’t make this shit up”. This forging of death certificates forms part of the prosecution going through at the moment against Hancock, Whitty, Vallance and Ferguson at the moment https://www.thebernician.net/r-pub-v-hancock-others-2021-public-notice-of-intended-prosecution/
Iain Davis has produced some very good articles on the issue of the fraudulent death stats, psychological warfare tactics and the overtly criminal hijacking of the law of the land to make the con a reality during the scamdemic. A new one just showed up on UK Column in the last few days but they are all worthy reads. It’s really important that people understand this stuff, because this serves as solid supporting evidence/proof that this whole agenda is a total fraud. If you can get people who still believe in the government to read these articles, they will see how corrupt it all is and how the government is clearly not acting with integrity, but as a criminal.
The UK Scamdemic Part 2
https://in-this-together.com/covid-19-the-uk-scamdemic-part-2/
Covid19 Is A Statistical Nonsense
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/05/covid-19-is-a-statistical-nonsense/
A Deceptive Construction – Why We Must Question The COVID 19 Mortality Statistics
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/deceptive-construction-why-we-must-question-covid-19-mortality-statistics
I have spoken with so many people from the very beginning who know of relatives, friends, clients, neighbours or colleagues who have been put down as Covid deaths when quite clearly they died of something else I wonder if there is anybody who does not know of such a story.