How many lives are we actually saving

[Baaaahhhhh]

An interesting read from the BBC, and a question that I have been wondering about since the ONS released figures last week.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654

Article talks about the effect of different scenarios on the number of excess deaths ie: over and above what would be expected, and versus other seasonal illnesses like normal flu.

Of course and I also don’t doubt we are heading for recession. I’m saying much suffering post 2008 could have been mitigated by different policy decisions.

The alternative is much worse. Letting the virus run rampant. NHS overwhelmed, not enough ventilators, so many dead, so many nurses and doctors dying, and then due to how overwhelmed services are, people won't / can't help, suicides up, cancer missed, other conditions not picked up on. Accident that would normally be fixed/treated, dying because no beds.

Far far worse to let it run rampant.

Such a short time in the grand scheme of things. The right thing to do. And if we'd shut down much earlier like new Zealand then we'd be OK so much faster. But we didn't.

I actually said 2008 was a banking crisis rather than only a banking crisis but anyway, I’m hiding this thread now as I don’t want to waste all my evening arguing with strangers over the internet. Ultimately we are in uncharted territory and gov have had some very difficult decisions to make. Hopefully we look back in a few months time and agree that they more or less made the right ones.

I'd like to know out of the hospital admissions with CV, roughly what percentage pull through?? All we hear is how many deaths there are..

Jelly

I read that the death rate if you get to ITU is just under 50%.

Mumlove5 You seem to be labouring under the assumption that the economy would continue to operate as normal without lockdown. That's obviously not the case, not least because the UK's key trading partners are in lockdown with only essential services operating.

The virus is the reason for the recession, not the measures introduced to manage it. The recovery will be different to the last recession too, because the whole world is in the same boat.

MumLove are you arguing for a 3 to 4 week lockdown? What would you do after this?

@jellycat globally I think the recovery rates are running behind as well as the obvious problem of not enough testing. Understandably it’s not a massive priority to follow up patients who haven’t required critical care.

Off the current data, globally the mortality rate is at 21%.(www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

I think this will significantly drop in time as resources become available to accurately compile numbers.

Oh thank you Smile and Cornetto..
An almost 50/50 split is bloody scary, but actually better then i thought.

Yes, Cornetto, there must be millions and millions globally who have had it and not been included in the figures!

That's only the intensive care survival rates. Most hospital admissions don't lead to intensive care. Depending on age mostly, the stats for needing intensive care seem to be between 20% and 40% of those hospitalised. I read once that it was about a 15% death rate overall for hospital admissions but I read that a while ago.

The original figures were 15% of cases need hospital treatment, 5% need intensive care (which is 1/3 of those in hospital) and 1% die (1/5 of those in intensive care).

Obviously those figures are going to differ according to the population and the availability of treatment space in the hospital.

If 40-50% of those admitted to ITU in the UK are dying, I wonder if that means we are admitting fewer people than the Chinese figures showed, or if we have a higher proportion dying.

We have no way of knowing what proportion of cases are being admitted to hospital, as we aren't counting community cases in any structured fashion, so the hospital figures are theoretically the only ones that can be used to approximate a severity/death rate. I don't think these are published at all though (numbers admitted to hospital/ICU with Covid)?

Iceland, although obviously a much smaller sample, are a better example of death rate. They’ve tested widely. Germany too. Both currently coming out at less than 1% of cases overall.

Soph7777 My daughter is someone that could live for many more years. She is immune suppressed and has health issues. The virus probably would kill her and if the choice between her and someone with better chances ever came up, I doubt she would be chosen for the ventilator. My point is, it’s not just killing people that would have died in a year, it’s taking what life some people have from them when they could have had a decent life for many years more.

Is it about saving lives , or helping the NHS ?

I am way more motivated by the latter

I Think It must be about making sure the bus can cope. We won't be getting a vaccine for a while and we fantasy in lockdown forever. The only way to deal with it is to do it in waves so if, for example are going to have 80% of the population catching it they do it over 6 months rather than over 6 weeks.

Not The bus the NHS!

A unconditional income would help massively at the moment

No, huge numbers of people havn't seen any reduction in income, so paying additional support to everyone would massively increase the debt we are building up, making even bigger tax rises and austerity afterwards. Why pay support to pensioners, public sector and those working from home when their income hasn't fallen? Makes no sense.

The lockdown is about saving the NHS (which of course does save lives, but it's the byproduct rather than the aim). Unfortunately the NHS management's interests, as ever, lie in obfuscating its KPIs (utilisation, capacity and so on). I'm not even sure they have standardised KPIs across its trusts.

Why pay support to pensioners, public sector and those working from home when their income hasn't fallen? Makes no sense.

As it is, the self-employed have to wait until June to get their 80% pay from the government and there are many others who have apparently fallen through the net for various reasons. If the government decided to pay everyone a basic salary, it would be far less admin and could be done very quickly. You could then reclaim the money from anyone earning over a certain amount through the tax system the following year.

You could then reclaim the money from anyone earning over a certain amount through the tax system the following year.

It took HMRC several years to get to grips with clawing back child benefit for whom only a few million were liable. Paying tens of millions of people money they don't need, only then to try to get it back again based on checking whether their income dropped due to Covid or not, would take them decades.

The majority of people AREN'T seeing any big fall in income - it's crazy to pay a fixed rate to everyone and then try to get it back from the majority of them at a later date.

On the economy:
"Economists overwhelmingly support continued lockdowns."
mobile.twitter.com/moskov/status/1246890880763641856

On the "inaccurate narrative over recent days that the majority of COVID-19 deaths were people who were “at death’s door” in any case. That they died “with” rather than “of” the disease."
mobile.twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1246866119597621248

The final figures will be interesting but I'm afraid there are too many unmeasurable figures which I suspect won't be counted. How many more cancers from stopping screwing? How many early deaths from people who are not keeping healthy habits? How may mental health related deaths?

In any event, any attempt to decide how many deaths are acceptable to save the economy is not a calculation any country should do.

This is an interesting document. There are so many factors at play, and we will never be able to enumerate them all.

Sorry - I don't think the picture attached.