Poor health made UK worse

[Orangeblossom7777]

Dame Sally Davies on poor health in the UK and covid.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55134496

@WoolyMammoth55

Hi all, at risk of being a lone dissenting voice I think this is BS. We have elected leaders who were supposed to act appropriately at when the novel virus emerged and keep us safe, i.e. follow the protocols that had been created for this exact scenario, at significant cost to the UK taxpayer: www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-pandemic-preparedness/uk-pandemic-preparedness

It's a very cynical and shitty PR strategy that now that the virus is endemic in every part of the UK, lots of Tory supporters can come out and blame individuals - for their lack of health, for not following the rules, etc etc. But it's not right or fair to do this.

My sister lives in Brunei where there is NO covid. No masks, no lockdowns, no rules - zero risk. Same in NZ, same in areas of Aus where they have succeeded with elimination strategies. Singapore, Taiwan etc.
These countries have governments (of all stripes) that followed their Pandemic plans - closed the borders; created government funded quarantines with police enforcement for those that HAD to enter; had track and trace working effectively in days/weeks. They also made it easy for people to comply - we had friends quarantining in Singapore with meals delivered to them 3x daily so thy didn't have any need to leave...

Compare this to our inept lot, who were bibbling about their (based on non-existent evidence) "herd immunity" strategy MONTHS into the crisis, without having acquired sufficient tests for all the symptomatic people who hadn't 'recently travelled to China'.

There is only one reason we've had such terrible outcomes, and it's not obesity or vitamin D or pesky ravers breaking the rules. It's GOVERNMENT FAILURE and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been paying attention.

[Also just to say that the economies of the countries with zero Covid are doing pretty well too - where life is going on as normal, no one has been fired and the restaurants are all safely open! So the other big lie to watch out for is that we had to 'either' save the economy or save Grandma/lives. The choice was always to save both or save neither, and we have got the worst of both worlds here...]

(Rant over - sorry! :) )

This post is one of the best posts I've read on here since the start of this whole bloody thing.

But we have more obesity than more comparable countries like Germany and France and we have higher mortality.
Brunei and NZ are not really comparable imv.

The population of Brunei is 437,000 ie the population of Newcastle.
The population of NZ is 5 million.
You make good points but these facts make a big difference.

@WoolyMammoth55 great post. Add to that, here in NZ we have eliminated COVID so far. And yet we have the second highest obesity rate in the world! More than the UK. Disproportionate rates in the Maori and Pacifica community who also live disproportionately in poorer areas of higher population density.

Given we can exclude these two variables we are back to government, leadership, clear and meaningful communication and solid decision making that makes the most significant impact.

You still aren't comparing like with like - a high density area in Wellington , population 108,000 is not the same as a high density area in London, population 9+million.
You need to get your maths heads on to do comparisons.

Population density per km2 in the UK is 275 in NZ it is 15 .............

But the article solely blamed poor health and specifically obesity. Of course density makes a difference but you would have thought that in that case the number of cases would have been proportionate to density? They arent. Scaling down to NZ sizes and density from UK figures would have seen us with 3000 deaths and 80,000 total cases. We've had 25 deaths and 2000 cases (a quarter imported and quarantined at the border).

Also 4 million of the 5 million people in the country live in cities. We use public transport we mingle in restaurants and bars, we live in flats and flat shares, we work in offices and our children go to school. I have as much chance of catching it in Auckland as I did when in lived in Brixton.

I want to talk about being locked indoors as mentioned on page one.

Yes to the poster who said we were all locked indoors, but some of us have been locked up repeatedly now.

My one healthy teen has had to spend eight weeks in self isolation since September, the other, 4 weeks.

This is a boy who loves outside, does cross country. His fitness has slipped, as has his motivation due to constant isolations. Now he's caught Covid at school and was quite ill. When he tried some gentle exercise this exhausted him.

All this has lead me to drink and over eat.

It's a disease of national wealth, not poverty. Low vitamin D (indoors a lot - rather than labouring outside), obesity and T2 diabetes from abundant food and a large elderly population due to our ability and efforts to keep frail and very aged people alive longer than most.

There will always be outliers, but that's the broad brush of it.

You have never been locked indoors
The one thing this government got right was everyone has been allowed outside for exercise with only (England) recommended time limits

And I hardly think we can blame the countries wealth for T2 diabetes either given it predominantly an illness of the poorer in society

Shielding group was most definitely locked indoors with no exercise for several months.
And later many felt too unsafe to venture outdoors due to the messaging they were given ( "catch this and die") and the large numbers of other people out and about.

If we're going to address poor health then there needs to be an upheaval of seismic proportions, from the top down.

The medical profession needs retraining with an emphasis on nutrition, and listening to people's health problems and not brush them off as 'depression'. Symptoms need to be joined up and not treated separately, as happens with chronic diseases. Less drugs, better nutrition.

The public needs educating in nutrition and health from childhood so they are more in control of health outcomes. We can't just blame people, after all, if they're not educated they're not to know what their food choices are doing to their bodies.

The govt needs to crack down on allowing promotions of empty calorie foods that are full of additives. Stop turning to Big Pharma for the answers to health problems. Drugs are not the answer, they're part of the problem.

Agriculture needs to change to more organic and natural practices. Soils have become depleted and the knock on effect is that foods are also depleted, then we humans develop illnesses as a result.

Society needs to become more caring and poverty tackled.

I could go on. You get the drift.

I hope the Government level up the funding to these communities.

'Levelling up' funding now does not redress ten years of austerity. At best it maintains the vast inequality we currently have. Then once the government start increases taxes to pay for this, you can bet that the greatest impact will be on those on lower incomes.

Regarding locking people away, those in the shielding group, and those who have had repeated periods of self isolating, are again far more likely to be from lower income households.

Pandemics are not a great leveller, in fact they expose inequality and poverty even more.

The best thing the gov could do is concentrate on education and make children repeat a year they don't pass and provide separate schooling for difficult/ sen/ disadvantaged / whatever the problem is children then at 18 everyone is on a level playing field. They know early years are important but still don't put in the money - free school meals panders to headlines and does not sort society.

We can blame the government and they seem to have got themselves in the position of pissing everyone off....those who wanted more Restrictions and those who wanted fewer restrictions. But anyway, there are lots of factors that exist in the UK to explain the death rate, it’s always multiple factors! In no particular order, these include:

• age of population. Especially the high numbers in care homes

• latitude

• levels of Vitamin D

• metabolic disease levels in the population (e.g. obesity)

• we had a ‘good’ flu season the year before so more people in the vulnerable population

• the capacity of the NHS

• fewer people with T Cell immunity. The East Asian countries had a stronger starting position because of community immunity built up from SARS in 2003

• high population density

@Ritasueandbobtoo9

Totally agree. A society where eating and drinking unhealthily is constantly encouraged and bike riding and other forms of safe, free, low cost exercise are not invested in and people are working all hours in the gig/care economy to pay for poor often hugely expensive housing is a recipe for this disaster.

Agreed. Let's not forget this government voting against a law to make landlords ensure their properties are fit to live in.

If you're not wealthy in the UK, it's a pretty hard place to live well.

Excellent post @WoolyMammoth55. This has been the strategy all along. Every time there has been a rise in cases, death toll etc the blame has been placed squarely on the public, never on the government's chaotic management of the situation.

I hope the Government level up the funding to these communities.

There is no way this bunch of criminals are going to do anything but (further) level up their bank accounts and the bank accounts of their families and friends.

They are nothing short of thieves.

Just scrolling through this article about people who've died of Covid in Scotland, the one thing that jumped out at me was that the majority of them are overweight! Admittedly a lot were very old and had underlying health conditions but the younger ones who were declared "fit & healthy" are mostly tipping the scales.
www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-52441285

There should have been better campaigns about how lifestyle changes could have protected you against serious Covid outcomes.

But what is new? 63% of the population are overweight or obese and nothing has been done up until now? 24,000 people die every year from T2 diabetes, and it's rising. That is an epidemic right there. Young children getting T2 is a national disgrace.

But go over onto any weightloss thread and you will see the problem. Apparently people need chocolate and pizza to have any joy in their lives and a no junk food life is essentially not worth living. That irony is not lost on me, but it definitely is on a lot of the UK population

Interesting thread. Diets now are not only more fattening but also lacking in vitamins. How many people actually get their 5 a day?

Totally agree with you carrot and hamster & others.

Will add on the vitamin D side, we could be like Finland... they have had a total number of deaths of 400, give or take 1. If you extrapolate that up to the population of the UK, that would mean 5,200 deaths for 65 million people. Instead the number of deaths from covid in the UK is 58,000... per capita, the UK's deaths are ~ 10 times greater.

Finland is much more northerly, but they key difference is they fortify their food with vitamin D. Think of how the graphs for the UK covid cases dropped rapidly over the summer... vitamin D from sunshine. Again how surprising it is that Africa hasn't been ravaged by covid like the UK, US, Belgium etc have, despite its grinding absolute poverty and lack of health infrastructure. In the high sunshine tropical belt. Rich countries like Saudi have high cases because everyone is indoors in the middle of the day in air-conditioned homes/offices/malls etc. Plus they have sky high numbers of T2 diabetes, as because alcohol is completely banned they drink large volumes of sugary fizzy drinks instead as their "vice".

Whilst obviously the underlying causative agent is the sars-cov-2 virus, the thing that's driving the fast and dynamic spread is immuno-deficiency caused by hypovitaminosis D... vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency. If we as a population could raise our levels to the sufficient or replete serum levels, (75+ nmol/l and 100+ nmol/l) we could drop the R number to below one and quell the spread and the severity of the disease (and mitigate a whole host of non-communicable diseases at the same time, such as some types of cancers, depressions, auto-immune conditions, T2 diabetes etc). Win win & saves billions for a £10 per person per year intervention. Trillions if you count the economic impacts of lockdowns on businesses, economic output, government borrowing, health service costs, testing facilities, mental health impact of forthcoming recession/economic depression from unemployment/interrupted schooling/poverty.

We need to stop thinking of vitamin D as a vitamin, we need to think of it as a crucial pro-hormone that's essential for over 1000 genetic processes, not just the old-fashioned view of it for solely warding off rickets/osteomalacia/osteoporosis. It's an essential immuno-modulatory component and is essential for T cell development for a fully optimised immune system. Metabolic health = immunological health.

"Another reason vitamin D is important: It gets T cells going":

blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/another-reason-vitamin-d-is-important-it-gets-t-cells-going/

Low down on Finland stats

blog.gruffdavies.com/2020/08/02/are-we-having-a-second-wave-of-stupidity-yes/

Bottom line: "If everyone is vitamin D sufficient, we will not have a second wave." (written in August)

Evidence Supports a Causal Role for Vitamin D Status in COVID-19 Outcomes:

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20087965v3

Results: Our analysis confirmed a striking correlation between COVID-19 severity and latitude, and ruled out the temporal spread of infection as an explanation.

Conclusions: Our novel causal inference analysis of global data verifies that vitamin D status plays a key role in COVID-19 outcomes. The data set size, supporting historical, biomolecular, and emerging clinical research evidence altogether suggest that a very high level of confidence is justified. Vitamin D prophylaxis potentially offers a widely available, low-risk, highly-scalable, and cost-effective pandemic management strategy including the mitigation of local outbreaks and a second wave. Timely implementation of vitamin D supplementation programmes worldwide is critical with initial priority given to those who are at the highest risk, including the elderly, immobile, homebound, BAME and healthcare professionals. Population-wide vitamin D sufficiency could also prevent seasonal respiratory epidemics, decrease our dependence on pharmaceutical solutions, reduce hospitalisations, and thus greatly lower healthcare costs while significantly increasing quality of life.

After Hancock arrogantly ASSERTED in parliament a few months ago that they "had done new research on Vitamin D and decided it didn't work" they have now, with hardly any press coverage, started a programme of vitamin D supplements to the elderly and vulnerable.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55108613

This could have been done months and months and months ago. The data has been there for many years.

Their dosage is way too low. But gotta start somewhere I guess!

400 iu won't even touch the sides, the bones get first dibs on vitamin D in the body. I am so peeved by this, it's almost as if they've set it so low to fail from the start. That's the dose where rickets diminishes. Needs to be in the ballpark of 2000 - 4000 iu. 4000 is the upper recommended amount from the NHS for almost all adults and a level that will take most people to a replete serum status, and people more vulnerable to D deficiency such as overweight, elderly and BAME to a reasonably decent status. It's like giving someone doing a Sahara crossing an egg cup full of water. Then claim "water doesn't prevent dehydration".

@AlizarinRed

But we have more obesity than more comparable countries like Germany and France and we have higher mortality. Brunei and NZ are not really comparable imv.

The population of Brunei is 437,000 ie the population of Newcastle.
The population of NZ is 5 million.
You make good points but these facts make a big difference.

If you see the rubbish food that people get in food parcels - not food banks fault - then it isn't surprising people are obese. People are given cheap carbohydrates.