If you still think most of those dying from it were going to die soon anyway, please watch this

[PuzzledObserver]

..... and then stay home

I've just heard that an aquaintance has died of it. He was in his 40/50s not overweight and from his job and hobbies, very unlikely to have had underlying health conditions as both required a person to be in good health and pass regular medical examinations.

I live very very close to that hospital. I'm hearing way more sirens than I used to, it's chilling.

orangeblossom78 unihorn
We are in a city and whilst obviously deprived / low income areas are within catchment for the Royal Gwent, it also covers quite a large area of normal /affluent areas, so it's not as if it is deep in the ex coal mining valleys where social deprivation / poverty is higher. South Wales is a big place and there are plenty of people here living quite affluent lives, so to make a blanket statement about life expectancy of people living "in the valleys" isn't really that relevant to this news clip. Not sure if you watched it all but he talks about having a young fitness instructor in ICU, and a woman in her twenties.

Ohffs66 yes I live here too. I'm not making blanket statements, Blaenau Gwent is officially one of the most deprived parts of the UK with the lowest life expectancy in Wales. I was just thinking it's possible that the older patients haven't even made it out of their houses/nursing homes/ambulances to manage to get to ICU.

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion or testing on the vitamin D deficiency connection. The following list are people who are likely to be deficient because their skin doesn't manufacture enough from sunlight, or might not get it in their diet: BAME, elderly, obese, conservatively dressed/covered (some Muslim/Orthodox Jews). In fact, skin starts to reduce ability to manufacture vitamin D from sunlight from 50 years+. On another thread a poster pointed out that in Italy, where you would expect the general population to have good levels of vitamin D, the virus took hold in the winter when everyone's reserves are lower, elderly struggle to manufacture and retain it anyway and factory and office workers don't get much sun exposure in Northern Italy during the winter.

I have never seen the stat that average life expectancy of men in the valleys is 50s. Where is that from ? I have family in the valleys and that is not my experience of the community at all.

Average life expectation is often misleading, because often it's a combination of death from childhood diseases and accidents and if you survive those, you have a good chance of living a normally long life, except where there was also a higher risk of women dying in childbirth.

So you could say that somewhere where people died aged 3, 26 and 74 had an average life expectancy of 54, but the average doesn't reflect the age at which any of the people died.

For anyone that didn’t watch the whole thing, their youngest on a ventilator is only 22, and he said there was a fitness instructor with no underlying health conditions on a ventilator too. Nobody knows how their body will react to this virus. Remember that the death rates we are seeing just now are based on people who caught the virus weeks ago when it was thought that there was less of a chance of catching it. Lockdown will help but it’s still early days to try and assess the difference it’s making or not making. Of course domestic violence and suicides are a concern but do people who want the restrictions lifted really believe that letting this pandemic run riot over us all and our families will help that? What about the mental health of people who lose loved ones? Or the PTSD experienced by those that recover ventilation, or the mental health of the nhs workers who are overwhelmed and unable to save thousands of patients and have themselves put in even more danger?