Is there a reason we are the country that's been worst hit economically and had the worst death rates

[velveteenrabbittales]

Trying to work out why, do we have a more elderly and unhealthy population? Has the whole thing been managed badly? Should we have resisted lockdown? We've ended up with the double whammy why is it?

Listen to the radio 4 programme More or Less. It clearly explains that with the economic situation it's more a case of how you count it, Britain calculates public sector output differently therefore it appears to be worse, in reality most of Europe is similarly affected. Total cases and deaths are also partly down to how they are counted but if you look at the figures adjusted for population there isn't a lot of difference between many countries, Germany being the outlier among those who are comparable. Each country is slightly different but overall it's bad for everyone despite different rules and approaches

@EvelynBeatrice

Very true, just what the experts were saying on radio 4.

Tories.
11 years of Austerity that stripped our public services back so far that we have the lowest number of ICU beds per capita in developed Europe.
Classrooms full to bursting in non ventilated rooms in schools that are falling apart.
Public transport not fit for purpose.
Low Police numbers.

Chippy people who don't follow the rules (the wedding last weekend with 150 guests), lots of fat people, lots of unhealthy people, lots of old people, lots of people who are deficient in vitamin C, lots of people who don't wash their hands, a cold, damp climate, a media determined to upset and confuse people if it means they'll sell papers, a government that was too slow to react and a useless opposition.

*vitamin D

And I agree with the honesty of our reporting as well, which is a huge factor.

@RosesAndHellebores

We have yet to count the cost of mental health and higher rates of death from heart disease and cancer arising from lock downs. In my view we should have shielded those at high risk from Covid and those at low risk should have carried on for the sake of the economy.

And there should have been greater clarity about the statistical risks for those at low risk. As a 60 year old woman I would have no objection to going to work but I am working from home. DH has to go in for some things as a keyworker and has no concerns about doing so. My organisation employs 1000 people in London. The highest number of staff with Covid has been 6.

As a 60 year old woman you have an 8-10% chance of being hospitalised with coronavirus (Lancet study). So no, we can’t have that age group go about completely as normal. It would decimate the health services.

'Lockdown is not determined by the date on the calender. It is calculated by the stages of virus spread. So while Italy was ahead of us in spread and so locked down earlier by date, we actually locked down around the same stage at numbers of infections and deaths. This was repeated across Europe. There wasn't much difference between the stages countries locked down'

Exactly.

'Fat people who vote badly?'

Well if we're going to be childish and offensive how about fat people who won't follow the rules? Mn is full of people who have decided they'll do what tf they like. Then they get so very confused when the numbers remain high as many other people are also doing what they like. Compliance is and always has been the UK's problem.

@Circumlocutious - an 8% to 10% chance if I catch it so you are not quoting an absolute figure.

Last week I read that 1 in 10 hospitals had no critical care beds - that meant 9 in 10 did.

I was having a look at the stats again yesterday. People are saying with horror that we are approaching 100,000 deaths. In 2019 530,841 people died. 2018 541,589. Over two thirds of these deaths were elderly people. We are recording deaths with covid, not of covid which makes a big difference to how other countries are recording. I think that when we get through to the summer and look back over 18 months, the excess deaths will not be as huge as most people think. All these figures need to be taken in the context of normal figures. It is also worth noting that many of the excess deaths were not covid deaths but deaths caused by the current situation, untreated cancers, people not going to A&E soon enough with chest pain, stroke symptoms.
I actually think it is very easy for people retrospectively to say we should have done this and that but you cannot just simply compare us to other places unless they have the same demographics. By the time people were shouting for lockdown, Covid was widespread in our population. Probably too widespread for track and trace to be possible at that point, even if it had been set up. We are overly reliant on food coming from the continant and via air freight and although people were shouting for us to close all our borders, they would soon have been shouting about all the food stuffs they could not get. London is a massively busy hub with more people coming in and out in a few days than the entire population of New Zealand, so comparisons to there are laughable.
I am sure that with hindsight there will be lots we could have done better but I am very very glad I am not having to make these decisions because whatever is done there will always be some people saying the opposite should have happened.

These are the reasons

We didn’t lock down earlier enough on any occasion. The first lockdown needed to be 3 weeks earlier, and this second lockdown needed to start in November

We have not locked down hard enough at any time

We haven’t closed our borders. They should have been closed last March.

We have a hyper entitled population with many individuals who are thick as pig shit but actually believe they have superpowers of critical thinking and , with no prior training in disease control what-so-ever, are qualified to make their own judgments about what should and shouldn’t be allowed

None of that can be undone

What we need now is the lockdown and quarantine procedures properly enforced, by the army, because the police simply are not big enough, and proper consequences for rule breakers that will make even those pathetic ‘critical thinkers’ toe the line and stop spreading Covid around constantly

@User133847

Just sheer bad luck. The government have done their very best.

My friend who's a trainee ophthalmologist has just been redeployed - for a second time - to ICU because of rising covid patients. That's even more pf her eye patients who will not get the necessary help they need, and whose vision will deteriorate further, thus worsening their outcomes in the long run. The same for multiple other conditions and diseases that are being neglected, because you can't leave covid sufferers to suffocate to death at home (no no the elderly, who tend to die quickly from the disease and aren't admitted, but people in their 50s and 60s who have a good chance of recovery but need to spend more time in hospital).

@vdbfamily perfectly put

@velveteenrabbittales

Trying to work out why, do we have a more elderly and unhealthy population? Has the whole thing been managed badly? Should we have resisted lockdown? We've ended up with the double whammy why is it?

So you think fewer people would have died if we hadn't had lockdowns?? How does that work?

[quote RosesAndHellebores]@Circumlocutious - an 8% to 10% chance if I catch it so you are not quoting an absolute figure.

Last week I read that 1 in 10 hospitals had no critical care beds - that meant 9 in 10 did.[/quote]
Yes, because we're literally constructing new ICU units, creating capacity and redeploying doctors and nurses from multiple other hospitals in order to keep up with that demand (e.g. Moorfields in London - I know this first hand). I feel sorry for the eye patients there whose care and surgical needs have basically been screwed over in order to keep up with the rising number of covid patients in hospital.

I think people not isolating has been a big contributing factor. Partly it's that people still don't understand the rules (10 months in!). There was a thread last night where lots of people thought you only need to isolate if someone in your household has had a positive test, not if they are displaying symptoms.

Add in the difficulties that people have with not going into work, either because they won't get paid or employers will make their lives difficult, and you get the result that only around 20% or so of those who are supposed to be isolating actually do it. Test and trace relies largely on the App, which is not compulsory to use. I don't use it personally because I have an old crappy phone and don't have enough memory to install it. There are lots of stories of employers telling their employees not to use the app.

At the moment, isolating contacts is one of the only tools we have for controlling transmission.

“At the moment, isolating contacts is one of the only tools we have for controlling transmission”

Agree, which is why sick pay needs to be more realistic.

Europe as a whole is not where I'd look to for inspiration on how to manage a pandemic.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing though and where would you think was best to look? The WHO? If you want to blame a governing body, take a look at how they handled it. People were obviously passing the virus around person to person across Europe for weeks, while the WHO were still buggering about trying to arrange sending their fawning, doff capping delegates to China to take a look at the situation, sometime whenever. They didn't declare a pandemic until the 11th of March! As much as I dislike him, Trump was right about them back then

Lockdown is not determined by the date on the calender. It is calculated by the stages of virus spread. So while Italy was ahead of us in spread and so locked down earlier by date, we actually locked down around the same stage at numbers of infections and deaths. This was repeated across Europe. There wasn't much difference between the stages countries locked down.

This is simply not true. The majority of European countries had imposed a lockdown by the 12th of March. Most of those countries did not yet have a high number of covid cases, they took action as a preventative measure. While this was happening, the UK was briefing about a herd immunity strategy and refusing to lockdown.

It took a further 11 days for the UK govt to see sense and impose a lockdown, which came on 23rd March. By then the horse had bolted and the UK went on to report huge case numbers and deaths in the months that followed.

[quote TornadoOfSouls]@ConfusedcomMum me too. Even Jeremy Hunt [/quote]
Yes! Omg even him as PM would have been way better and I NEVER ever thought I'd say that about him (ex NHS staff here).

Very slow to mandate masks and even then people still able to order a lanyard from Amazon and claim they’re asthmatic because a mask ruins their foundation or street cred

Schools going back in September should never have happened, but that was part of the learning curve. Won’t happen again I expect.

Old population

High numbers of obese people

Low levels of vitamin D in darker months

Flip flopping policies by inept politicians. The lesser of two evils though, JC would have been as bad if not worse.

Communities with multigenerational households

Eat out to help out

Low incomes with very poor diets

Boris Fucking Johnson in short.

We seem to have been behind the curve in every single area - agree with the wise one...

We didn’t lock down earlier enough on any occasion. The first lockdown needed to be 3 weeks earlier, and this second lockdown needed to start in November

No coutry in Europe locked down 3 weeks before the 23rd of March (UK). The virus took time to spread across Europe, it didn't hit every country all at once

By rate of infection and deaths, which is what matters, we locked down earlier than most countries in Europe, even Italy I think (all Italy, not just Lombardy)

9th March - Italy (whole coutry)
15th March - Spain
17th March- France
23rd March- UK
26th March- Ireland