2021-01-31
A few days ago the headlines were full of the news:-
"100,000 dead in the UK from coronavirus"
The death-toll attributed to the Covid pandemic in the UK was on every masthead, and Boris was said to be "deeply sorry".
Fast forward to today and we learn that the Government has published its December assessment of the impacts of both Covid the disease and the Covid suppression measures (with exclusions).
I don't recall seeing any headlines about this report, but the figures are equally important even if Boris hasn't expressed his public contrition for them.
As we might expect it is quite complex, but in an effort to make it more digestible I summarise below some of the findings in terms of "excess deaths" (table 2 on page 8 of the main report) as follows:
| Category | Excess Deaths due to: | Mar - Sep 2020 | Oct-Feb 2021 | Long Term < 50 yrs | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Attributed to Covid | 50,000 | 70,000 | 120,000 | |
| B | Lack of NHS Critical Care | ||||
| C1 | Changes to Emergency Care | 4,000 | 10,000 | 14,000 | |
| C2 | Changes to Adult Social Care | 10,000 | 22,000 | 32,000 | |
| C3 | Changes to Elective Care | 0 | 0 | 18,200 | 18,200 |
| C4 | Changes to Primary/Community Care | 0 | |||
| D1 | Benefit to the Wider Population | -2,300 | -2,100 | -4,400 | |
| D2 | Impacts from Recession | 40,000 | 40,000 | ||
| Non-Covid Totals | 11,700 | 29,900 | 58,200 | 99,800 | |
| All Inclusive Totals | 61,700 | 99,900 | 58,200 | 219,800 |
Notes:
- Blank items were not quantified (and not necessarily zero)
- D2 includes impacts of "Mental health, musculoskeletal disorders, cardiovascular disease, disease and ‘other’" due to the economic fall-out.
Clearly there are many gaps in the above table, and in the scale of things item D1 is a rounding error, but we can see that the "non-Covid" deaths are likely to exceed those attributed to Covid by some margin once the blanks are filled in.
If the deaths primarily due to co-morbidities were to be stripped out as well, then we would likely see a very different picture.
The report maintains that the situation would have been much worse had no or minimal non-pharmaceutical interventions been brought in, but that ignores the studies that conclude that lock-downs are ineffective at suppressing Covid deaths. It notes a possible "additional 76,000 excess deaths for COVID-19 patients as a result of worsened outcomes due to lack of NHS capacity".
Given that project Cygnus concluded as long ago as 2016 that NHS capacity was completely inadequate to cope with a pandemic (they modelled influenza, but that's not dissimilar), I would suggest that this supports the view that these draconian lock-downs resulted at least in part from the total failure of the government and NHS to provide sufficient capacity to remedy the shortcomings identified by Cygnus.
