Are people dying of Covid, or with Covid?

[lightand]

As they are different things.

Does anyone actually know?

There will always be people dying with Covid, as the elderly, especially, die, and some of them, like the rest of us, will always die whilst having Covid.

So could 180 per day per winter be an average number going forward, forever now? [and the NHS should well be into the process of gearing up for that?]

[quote SilverGlitterBaubles]@leafyygreens No the solution is not to pretend it's not happening but it does need to be recognised that a Covid has caused people MH and health problems while never having had the actual virus. My DPs are shadows of themselves, previously outgoing, sociable and active now they cower inside fearing the virus is lurking everywhere. Some of the media and public health messaging especially in the early days was designed to scare people into compliance but it had a terrible effect on some people.[/quote]
This is so sad. I'm sorry to read this.

And unfortunately far too common.

Well, I'm happy to mention flu and covid in the same sentence.

Flu, covid and RSV together are likely to make a cocktail of illness over the coming winter and we would be wise to be way of that. Even if we don't directly get very ill of just getting covid, covid + flu has potential to cause substantial morbidity and mortality.

That is a major reason why I will be very carefully wearing my re-usable high grade mask all through winter in indoor enclosed spaces with crowds & etc.

On the other hand, I don't agree that you can simply equate covid with the flu season of 2008, that sounds a bit like minimising covid to me.

The age standardised mortality ratio in 2020 was the same as in 2008. Average age of covid deaths is above the average life expectancy. Currently excess non COVID deaths are high especially in younger age groups, possibly to do with effects from lockdown.
Death certification is far from fool proof and subject to bias as any other process. It has never before been common practice to test every ill patient for a respiratory virus on admission to hospital. For example it has been known for years before COVID that a heart attack or bacterial sepsis is often preceded by upper respiratory tract infection. But previously these patients would not be PCR tested and therefore no infection would appear on the death certificate. Same with frail patients who have a deterioration - there was probably a virus responsible for lots of this but we never knew before.
Bottom line covid is a nasty virus and it would be nice if it wasn’t here BUT mitigation’s do very little and have caused huge huge harms, much more than the disease itself - children’s mental health, the economy, the plastic waste we throw away, the total mess the NHS is in, the polarisation of our society and exclusion of the vulnerable by the vax pass that is already enforced in much of Europe.
I believe the government know this but cannot directly admit that COVID policy was misguided as it would be politically so toxic.
I love this post. 👏🏻

Me too!

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/10/covid-by-numbers-10-key-lessons-separating-fact-from-fiction

020 saw the highest number of deaths since 1918 in England and Wales
There have been claims that the first year of Covid-19 was not particularly lethal compared to past years. But there were only two years when total deaths registered in England and Wales exceeded 600,000: 1918, the start of a global influenza pandemic, and 2020.

We should, of course, allow for changes in the size of the population. This shows steadily falling mortality rates and then a noticeable jump in 2020, back to a level not seen since 2003. The increase from the past five-year average was the largest since 1941, when Blitz casualties mounted. When we further consider the changing age profile, 2020 saw the biggest rise in age-standardised mortality rates for 70 years, since the major flu epidemic in 1951. Put in its proper context, 2020 was a historical outlier.

This puts a slightly different prospect I've. no?

Also from the previous article linked

People who have died with Covid have on average lost about 10 years of life
Some vulnerable people who died in the first wave would otherwise only have survived a short period longer. This “mortality displacement” often shows when a cluster of deaths due to extreme heat or cold is followed by a dip in mortality rates. At the start of the first wave, one of us (DS) was quoted as saying, “many people who die of Covid would have died anyway within a short period”, while others estimated that this proportion could be more than half. We were proved wrong by the limited deficit in deaths over the following year. It’s been estimated, on average, that about 10 years of life are lost from Covid-19 deaths in the UK, and 16 years globally.

Altough they may have been people who would have died in 2021 anyway (as they were very old or sick with something else) but they just went a bit sooner. We might need 5 years of figures in due course to assess the real impact

No, on average people dying would have died in 2030, as the estimates suggest they would have lost 10 years of life.

Globally, people dying of covid would on average have died in 2036.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

@HesterShaw1

Whenever anyone mentions flu and Covid in the same sentence they're accused of conflating flu and Covid. Even if they're not.

And also when they clearly and blatantly are, like when suggesting we should have behaved in the same way in 2020 as we did during the 2008 flu season. In what way is that not conflating??? Flu still exists. Covid exists on top of this and for the vast majority of 2020, there was no covid vaccine, no pre-exisiting immunity and an obvious detrimental effect on the world’s healthcare systems, particularly in those which introduced mitigations late or not at all. India’s experience of covid was not like any experience it has had with flu; nor Brazil’s; nor the UK’s; nor China’s, Singapore’s, South Korea’s etc. It is pointless to say we should have handled covid 19 like the 2008 flu season.

There is a point in arguing we should and could have handled the pandemic differently, of course, just no point pretending it was like a normal bad flu year.

India’s experience of covid was not like any experience it has had with flu

That's incorrect. I don't want to sounds pedantic, but you should look up what happened in 1918/19, when they couldn't cremate people fast enough and the rivers were full of corpses. They threw the bodies in the rivers rather than the ashes, in the hope that they would join the Ganges. And this was when the population of India was many times smaller than it is now.

@HesterShaw1

India’s experience of covid was not like any experience it has had with flu

That's incorrect. I don't want to sounds pedantic, but you should look up what happened in 1918/19, when they couldn't cremate people fast enough and the rivers were full of corpses. They threw the bodies in the rivers rather than the ashes, in the hope that they would join the Ganges. And this was when the population of India was many times smaller than it is now.

The world’s healthcare systems were incomparably different in 1918 to now - nobody in India was scrambling to be put on oxygen for example, there were no steroid treatments and antibiotic treatments did not exist for secondary infections. So, comparing the covid pandemic to the 1918 flu is not particularly productive, therefore, imvho, except to show that it really is pointless comparing the 2008 bad flu season to a genuine pandemic of a novel virus (and pointless comparing death rates from a virus at a time pre-modern medicine with death rates post-antibiotics, steroids, etc, etc).

[quote SilverGlitterBaubles]@leafyygreens No the solution is not to pretend it's not happening but it does need to be recognised that a Covid has caused people MH and health problems while never having had the actual virus. My DPs are shadows of themselves, previously outgoing, sociable and active now they cower inside fearing the virus is lurking everywhere. Some of the media and public health messaging especially in the early days was designed to scare people into compliance but it had a terrible effect on some people.[/quote]
Exactly.

There is a lot of shades between pretending it is not happening, and what we have now.
A lot of shades.

@herecomesthsun I regret the guardian is not a reliable source. The ONS data is here and you can see the age standardised mortality rate in 2020 was very similar to that in 2008 and higher than in 2020 in many previous years. www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/adhocs/12735annualdeathsandmortalityrates1938to2020provisional/2020annualprovisionaladhoc2.xls

Regarding years of life lost due to the COVID pandemic on average, statistics can do a lot and be interpreted multiple ways. I don’t believe that statistic about average 10 years life lost - it doesn’t match with my experience. It also doesn’t make sense as average age of death of COVID was above average life expectancy? How is that possible?

Of course some people sadly lost many years of life. But it remains the majority of people who died were very old and sick and sad as it is these people do die frequently.

Few links about non COVID excess deaths as requested.

app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYmUwNmFhMjYtNGZhYS00NDk2LWFlMTAtOTg0OGNhNmFiNGM0IiwidCI6ImVlNGUxNDk5LTRhMzUtNGIyZS1hZDQ3LTVmM2NmOWRlODY2NiIsImMiOjh9

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58899460

www.imperial.ac.uk/news/198444/report-estimates-9000-non-covid-excess-deaths/

[quote Hotcoffee10]@herecomesthsun I regret the guardian is not a reliable source. The ONS data is here and you can see the age standardised mortality rate in 2020 was very similar to that in 2008 and higher than in 2020 in many previous years. www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/adhocs/12735annualdeathsandmortalityrates1938to2020provisional/2020annualprovisionaladhoc2.xls[/quote]
I regret the guardian is not a reliable source.

bollocks

I don’t believe that statistic about average 10 years life lost - it doesn’t match with my experience.

That is why scientists do research, using large amounts of data, as anecdata is generally unreliable.

Link again to report

www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19

With 146,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the UK, up to 1.5 million potential years of life have been lost, with those who died losing up to 10 years of life on average.

(As has been said elsewhere on this thread, life expectancy at, say, 80, is not zero; this can be explained further as needed)
www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-potential-years-of-life-lost-to-covid-19

Ask some of the posters on the feminism board about whether the guardian is reliable and unbiased source of information.

Scientists have agendas and bias the same as everyone else. They have to get funding and are very aware of the political line to tread. It is important to look at all the evidence and make your own conclusion. Mine is lockdown policy was woefully misguided and has caused untold harm, far more than the virus alone would have done. The saviour vaccine is looking less and less like a great bet too with the exception of the most vulnerable groups. It’s good to discuss and disagree, unfortunately public discourse is very one sided on this so good sites like this are available.

Relative to the rest of our press, it doesn't do a bad job.

Certainly, regarding covid, it has produced some excellent articles and data analysis.

Most scientists and medics are still really impressed by the speed with which vaccines were developed; they are pretty effective, compared, say, with the flu vaccine.

Covid vaccines and boosters remain a key part of our recovery from the pandemic.

Haven't read the whole thread but as a severely immunocompromised person I would say that I wouldn't take kindly to OP explaining why it is not necessary to 'cower' and how it's pathetic that I only go for walks, and gave up my job. I think that's the sort of language OP used about their family due to visit.
For some people the vaccines don't work at all, (fact not opinion) and it is completely rational to be concerned about a very high community level of a disease which is spreading with no mitigation.
I have a high chance of dying from it, say 1 in 4-5. I'm not ill or frail, just on certain medications which keep me well, and am fitter than most people.
It's not easy being isolated, but the hardest part is the people who don't understand or believe how high the risk is for some people.
I have also filled in plenty of death certificates and have good understanding of the data. It is a serious multisystem disease in its acute and chronic forms and trying to minimise it to justify allowing unchecked spread it disingenuous and dangerous.
The high level of disease is also unnecessarily straining the NHS which we all rely on.

Oops, seemed to have killed the thread

I was thinking about this when I looked at our local data today. My DH is currently in hospital with a complication of covid, but his admission PCR was negative, so he won't be counted amongst the covid positive admissions for our hospital. It is over a month since his positive test, so were he to die, I presume he wouldn't be included in the Covid deaths. But every doctor who has seen him has said that this wouldn't have happened had he not had Covid.
I'd realised that people were dying with Covid but not necessarily from it, but it hadn't previously occurred to me that the opposite was almost certainly also true.
So it does make me wonder how meaningful the data are. I don't know what the answer is, but it does seem that rather a blunt tool is being used to collect the information.