UK economy down 9.9%, will this kill more people than Covid?

[tttigress]

www.bbc.com/news/business-56037123

The last Labour opposition kept highlighting "Austerity has killed X thousand people"

So with the economy taking such a hit will this economic contraction cause more people (in particular younger people) to die than actual Covid?

For example:
-someone not able to fulfill their potential due to the economy then committing suicide.
-young person not able to get a job then committing suicide.
-someone becoming homeless due the the effect the Covid response had on their mental health, homelessness shortens you life.
-tax revenues being down, therefore meaning the NHS cannot invest in services like advanced cancer detection. So people die of easy to treat cancers.
-people can't get a job, give up on living and eat/smoke/drink themselves to death.

Totally. Covid + Brexit = Rude awaking for the UK

It all depends on the government really. If they: control the virus properly so that we can reopen rather than stop/start cycles of lockdown; invest in mental health services; invest is education; don't have a re-run of austerity; stimulate the economy - then we should be able to minimise the effects. Vote wisely.

It will yeah. Not only just from a mental health perspective, but also other diseases. Just as an example, cancer is being missed because people can't get screenings quick enough. If you don't get screenings quick enough, that can be the end unfortunately. And it will be for a lot of people.

People will starve through no money for food. They'll freeze because of no money for heating. They'll commit suicide because of nothing to live for. It's a crap future ahead of us.

Maybe not absolutely, but I'd imagine it will kill more of the working age population.

The draconian restrictions, this extended lockdown will for sure kill more people than COVID ever could. Unpopular opinion but many generations will pay the price because the state does not have the backbone to enforce shielding for the clinically vulnerable. And of course because the hysterical shriekers and the economically illiterate would scream blue murder if an attempt was made to keep the economy going for the young, fit and healthy.

More people? Will the effects of Covid kill more people through suicide and lost potential than 100,000+?
I don't believe so. The inequality is stark though. The papers are reporting than Brits have saved billions and will go on a massive spending spree after this. Nobody I know is better off. Clearly, some people are.

I think the current government have worked out that they will use the full duration of the Coronavirus Act 2020 til March when it automatically runs out, to keep us under some form of restriction. Then no-one will be able to blame them for causing excess deaths. That leaves plenty of time for the inevitable economic bounce back (inevitable when things are opened up because its from such a low base) for prosperity to improve and things to look good in time for the next GE.

Do I think the economic downturn will kill many more than covid? Of course it will. Excess deaths for this year arent' up that much but we know many people will die sooner due to cancelled operations and loss of human rights, job losses, etc are always linked to increased poverty and deaths. But the government won't be blamed for that, because covid will be blamed.

Its all rather nicely sown up.

The economy shrinking doesn't have to kill anyone. If we ensured resources were shared more fairly, we could ensure everyone has enough.

Instead, we'll allow the rich to keep on accumulating wealth, and this will cause deaths among the poorest in society.

But deaths from covid were initially unavoidable. Deaths from poverty are avoidable.

And wonderfully, Boris etc can blame it all on Covid.

@DianaT1969

More people? Will the effects of Covid kill more people through suicide and lost potential than 100,000+? I don't believe so. The inequality is stark though. The papers are reporting than Brits have saved billions and will go on a massive spending spree after this. Nobody I know is better off. Clearly, some people are.

I am better off simply because we were lucky and kept working from home. Saved a lot of money. But I won't be spending it that's for sure. Its being saved for our own reasons and I'll keep saving as much as I can til I have to go back into the office and our old life returns.

@DianaT1969

More people? Will the effects of Covid kill more people through suicide and lost potential than 100,000+? I don't believe so. The inequality is stark though. The papers are reporting than Brits have saved billions and will go on a massive spending spree after this. Nobody I know is better off. Clearly, some people are.

The problem is the after effects of the economic disaster will be felt for decades. For example, if a young person does not get a good entry into the job market, they are literally behind for decades (this has been shown to have happened in the early 80s).

I think the government is focused on Covid deaths , because deaths caused by economic decline are not so easily measured (for example, if someone commits suicide due to no job due to Covid restrictions, this isn't so easily proven and their is no column for it in the national statistics table)

It might, but it likely will not do so in a short time period that leads to the health systems being totally overloaded and collapsing.

I am not sure, but the impacts of the slow response to Covid 19 at every stage by this government has meant more treatments postponed and a greater economic impact than would have happened had there been a competent government.

It's too late to debate whether the lockdown was a good idea or it was done in the correct way we have gone all the way down that path.

The government won't release a budget and sooner or later the taps will have to be turned off. The economy will come back but the missed chances, failed business, mass redundancies and lower tax revenue will ah e a huge impact for decades.

Did we get it right going for a lockdown ? For the economy, the health and well-being of the public, mental health and the change of relationship between state and the individual ?

No I don't think we did - it's too "hard" to tell people to shield whilst letting others continue to live thier lives. The reason I believe it's too hard is political - old people vote whereas children can't and younger people don't tend to bother.

If you start off with a panicked situation (remember the scenes in Italy) as we did, lurch into a lockdown and closing of the economy pump huge amounts of fear into the population to ensure compliance how do you reverse it? You can't so best to look at your political base - the old and make sure they don't feel alienated and therefore likely to vote for someone else.
More broadly all countries decided to follow the example of China ? That well know man bastion of human rights. There was no balance only fear driving the decisions.

Maybe I'm cynical but governments of the world have found a wonderful solution on the basis of doing something rather than nothing.

Scream all you want about people dying - but it doesn't answer the question as to whether we used a giant sledgehammer composed of the young and healthy and children's education to crack a nut with a survival rate of over 99%

Too late now anyway so whatever we say we will have to live with the consequences and find the best path forward for the economy and society

Will the effects of Covid kill more people through suicide and lost potential than 100,000+

I think it's entirely possible. A whole generation growing up poorer could mean them dying twenty or thirty years earlier than they otherwise would have. People dying at 55 of a stroke or heart attack rather than at 85 of dementia.

I think after the 2007/2008 recession was worse than it is now for jobs, the only money being printed then was for the banks, none for Joe public unlike today with furlough and various loans/grants. I know loads of people could not get graduate jobs after leaving uni and got stuck in minimum wage service jobs with degrees, eventually after many years they managed to get a foot in the door, but no one killed themselves because of it, it all works out in the end.

Well the link between life expectancy and GDP is very well-documented, so it would make sense. And there’s been a spike in non-Covid deaths during every lockdown.

I don’t think it’ll be as stark as that though, or as measurable. But I think it would be naive to deny that the after-effects of Covid and Brexit are going to affect the population’s quality of life negatively, with a consequential impact on its wellbeing and health. And therefore life expectancy.

Well even if that were true there's nothing we can do about it since we didn't choose to have covid. I expect those same people would have been depressed when their families and friends died. They'd have lost their jobs anyway when the economy collapsed through so many being sick.

And look on the bright side. The claims about people committing suicide currently have been debunked so maybe people are tougher than they seem.

Will the effects of Covid kill more people through suicide and lost potential than 100,000+
Quite possibly. But it won't be over a short time scale, rather over a period of 50 years or more. It is well documented that lack of education, poverty and mental health conditions are associated with lower life expectancy.
Obviously they won't be publishing a daily tally of "X many people died due to lockdown related consequences today" and extracting it from the data will be next to impossible, but I've no doubt there will be many deaths as an indirect consequence of

We locked down to save NHS and its cancelling all treatments anyway
Economy screwed
Homes, jobs, livelihoods lost
Mental health in tatters
Education and young people's futures eliminated
Hospitality and travel obliterated
For a virus

There was a story today in the Guardian about the massive rise in eating disorders, and their severity, something like 80% are now emergencies. It actually attributed it to lockdown.

Now the article has disappeared. Did anybody else see it?

Who of the life-saving lockdown-lovers is shrieking about this? Anybody?

All too "selfish" to give a damn. I thought so.

Bored of hearing anyone not having a tantrum about lockdown described as lockdown lovers. You can hate something and still think it is necessary. You can see the pain something causes and still think not having it would cause greater pain. It is possible to recognise that lockdown itself is taking a terrible toll and at the same time feel that without one things would have been worse.

You're blaming lockdown for things that couldn't be avoided as we couldn't avoid covid. (Well maybe if we'd closed/controlled the borders a lot quicker, locked down earlier, got good track and trace quickly, tested faster and more - but too late for that). If we had let it run rampant and let the 1.5 million estimated people die do you think we would all have been happier? That the NHS would have been able to cope with cancer patients better? That the mental health of everyone would be better knowing there was this disease circulating and that we could be spreading it to vulnerable people but not doing anything to stop it's spread (and we often don't know who it is going to go for). That we should let it circulate knowing that the more it circulates the more opportunity there is for it to mutate leading to potentially more and more variants and deaths?

Even for people living in South Sudan a country with huge problems, civil war, drought, huge displacement of people, dire food shortages, violent crime, the average age of life expectancy is 56 so to suggest thousands of people in the Uk are going to die at 55 because of the impact of covid is completely ridiculous and self indulgent.

Also suicides went down in the first lockdown according to the BMJ, maybe from the 'eveyone pulling together' mentality. You can't say there are going to be loads of suicides because of covid - it's just conjecture.

I'm not saying there will be no impact or negative affects from covid, just that letting it run rampant was not a better option. The average age of death isn't going to be falling to 55, suicides are not through the roof (although the rates have been increasing by 10 or 11% for the last few years prior to 2020), the economy is likely to see a huge boost the minute we can all get back to normal life and jobs will start to open up again and the vaccines are going to mean that can happen in the not too distant future. If it doesn't happen even with vaccines, THEN we have a problem, until then I'm happy to hold out.

@Tal45

That's the point though lockdown has been sold as the only variable option but is it ?

The WHO had a comprehensive plan for dealing with pandemics, it didn't involve lockdowns - never in history have the healthy been confined only the infected people.

We didn't need a lockdown earlier we needed a test and trace and isolate system that worked. The lockdown was a indicative of the failure of the nhs and the government to do this.

The impact of lockdowns has not reached everyone equally like nothing ever does.

www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-million-extreme-poor-by-2021

The death toll at the moment is around 2 million worldwide who died "with" covid up to this point. Is that a decent trade off ?

What do we do when the next pandemic hits ? Which it obviously will it might be much worse and we have expended so much resource on this one which has a survival rate of 99%

A good analogy to draw is the 9/11 attack effect on civil liberties - who is going to be the politician responsible for relaxing the rules and then a terror attack happens ? Ok so we accept our new more restricted way of life in that regard under the guise of keeping us safe. why is this any different?

It sets a precedent - nhs under strain from any source ? let's put in a tier system until they can cope again - why not ? Why is covid so special.

That's what annoys me the most - people think that governments just give back liberty when history shows this is rarely ever true.

But the economy shrinking and austerity aren’t the same thing are they, Labour say austerity killed people....not the actual shrinking of the global economy after the banking crisis. It totally depends how the government choose to deal with the costs of the pandemic....and I just can’t see how they can choose austerity again. George Osbourne has been on the record several times saying they went too far and too deep, so I don’t another Tory Government would want to follow in their footsteps so soon. So no.

In fact austerity and the poverty it created is one of the reasons why we’ve had such a high number of deaths in the UK.