The tragic news of this Omicron death

[User135644]

Very sad news that someone has now died of Omicron. Are the media going over the top though? I always thought a death was likely at some point. Sadly they may not he the last either.

Is it just the old adage of one death a tragedy, many deaths a statistic?

@Arethechildreninbedyet

They died WITH omicron it’s been in every press release. They could have died of cancer or been hit by a bus.

Their cause of death has not been published.

Which the probably caught in hospital

If they were 94 I'd say age was realistically the main factor in the death.

@NightmareSlashDelightful

I think there's a big difference between being callous about elderly and clinically vulnerable people, and being realistic about how risk factors will vary across different population groups.

Don't forget that scared people seek to reassure themselves first and foremost, too. Sometimes that comes with clumsy language. It doesn't mean they genuinely don't care. It just means they phrased something badly in the moment.

There have been a number of callous comments about young clinically extremely vulnerable people since March 202. When I’ve called it out, I get accused of being a lockdown lover or something else to that tune. I am anti further restrictions as it’s massively affected my mental health but on a wider level, I have concerns about the impact on society. It seems very hard to bring up the topic that some posters are incredibly insensitive to CEV people. I’m not asking anyone to lockdown or do anything except consider the language they are using.

@Puzzledandpissedoff

I’m not sure what publishing more death statistics daily would achieve?

I'd have thought that was obvious, Cornettoninja, in that context gives the kind of balance so badly lacking ATM

Obvious? Not really no. Assuming the average person is fully aware of mortality and linked health issues we’re all aware that people die from other causes and have a lifetimes worth of experience that informs our own choices regarding our individual risks around those conditions. If someone is so inclined to look up the actual figures themselves then they are free to do so, there is data going back decades that they are free to peruse.

What we don’t have context of, certainly in western society, is living with a contagious and highly prevalent disease. We’ve been privileged for a very short time in the context of human history, that it hasn’t been something we’ve had to consider alongside every day life. No one has ever had to consider they have a fairly high chance of contracting TB, whooping cough, or measles just by living their ordinary lives. Comparisons to non-contagious deaths don’t really offer perspective because, well, they’re not contagious and they’re conditions that have years of research and treatments to tackle them. The same is true of flu, it’s a known quantity I suppose.

I’m not arguing against balance but I also don’t see the value in ignoring what makes covid a very real and immediate problem by making comparisons that only work if you minimise or ignore what the actual problem is - a novel virus with few and new treatments/vaccines and very little data to make future predictions with because it hasn’t been around long enough and been stable enough to see a reliable pattern.

Yesterday 1700 other people of all ages died of all sorts of causes.
The fact that this one person’s death has been used as propaganda to promote a political cause ‘to save and protect the NHS’ is deplorable.

The government could save and protect the NHS tomorrow if it really wanted to but it’s easier (and cheaper) to push the blame and responsibility back onto the public. Ironic when we’ve already paid upfront for the service that we’re now being told might be rationed.

So it does look like very good news for that age group but who knows how it will affect the elderly.

You know what's more likely to kill the elderly? A lethal mix of a covid infection, underlying conditions, and the nasty, wall to wall, psychological fear mongering of the mainstream media. I can see it grinding them down and some of them are basically dying of fright.

@baroqueandblue

So it does look like very good news for that age group but who knows how it will affect the elderly.

You know what's more likely to kill the elderly? A lethal mix of a covid infection, underlying conditions, and the nasty, wall to wall, psychological fear mongering of the mainstream media. I can see it grinding them down and some of them are basically dying of fright.

Or locking them and us down again and coping with isolation

I agree baroque.
I was very cautious last year but this fear is horrible to see.

@multivac

Please could everyone just fuck off with this 'with not of' crap? As if that's some kind of mic drop.

Whatever your feelings about the actual situation we are in, if someone with 'underlying conditions' dies 'with' Covid-19, then the likelihood is that it was Covid-19 that was the trigger for them to die at this point. Not later, with more years lived and shared. Just like my partner's brother died at 27 "of" shingles - but "with" Hodgkin Fucking Lymphoma.

This 👆 Everyone has become an armchair Medical expert / data analyst with very little understanding of the topic. Risk is a complicated topic and black and white comparisons and nitpicking "of, not with" shows quite how little understanding there is. The news & the government don't help with this and I think the 24hr news cycle really isn't helpful. I have RA, I've had it more than half my life since I was a teenager - it makes me more susceptible to other illnesses and problems, I'm not going to die from it but it's probably going to be the underlying reason that something like a virus, is going to make me ill and I end up with something like pneumonia that I can't recover from. Most people's deaths from illness are multifaceted not a singular reason. It's about reducing those risks to stop the cascade effect. People with underlying issues are not all imminently dying as lots of people seem to suggest on threads like these. Many of us are trying to just getting on with life like everyone else and range from children to pensioners in age.

The elderly people I know are becoming quite depressed. People are struggling with their mental health and some people are in actual physical danger in lockdowns and school closures. We cannot do this to the whole of our society for this reason.

We all understand that @wonkylegs but underlying conditions doesn't just cover conditions like yours. It can also mean someone was admitted to hospital for something else that was already going to kill them imminently, and they had COVID. As in, they were going to die either way.

Of course, that's entirely different than an underlying condition like yours or mine (I have asthma which I am not expecting to imminently die from but would still be listed as an underlying condition)

the variant has only just be recognised & the spread & initial positive cases have only occurred in the last couple of weeks. As of yet we know that it is highly infectious & we have yet to know how ill people may get. In S Africa it has been predominantly younger people - although it some smaller townships there does seem to be a large increase in hospital cases. The countries were the variant has previously spread from are difficult to assess as they are poorer countries with lower medical facilities - although I have read that Cairo is having problems at the moment. It is a matter of scale that worries the government - proportional massive increase in number even if less likely to give serious numbers per 1000 (say) will still lead to greater numbers needing intensive care - even if deaths are lower.
Point is we don't know yet -

@darknessandlight

So what do we do if omi spread as predicted and lots of people need medical assistance, lots of medical staff cant work if contracting omi?

Do we just carryon head in sand?
Thats without considering the impact of high absence in every ither sector.

You have no idea if omicron caused the death. It's someone who has died whilst having omicron. Doesn't mean they died from it. The way they record Covid deaths is a massive con.

They are mentioning this one death because there are loads of idiots on social media saying omicron can't kill you (don't get the booster, carry on going to night clubs etc etc). Omicron may or may not be milder than delta but it IS going to cause a lot of deaths, simply by the sheer numbers it will infect. People have to take a cautious approach as we are just at the beginning of the omicron wave. If people reduce the spread now, maybe we won't be in such a state by Christmas that we can still mix then.

Human life has a 100% mortality rate. Every death is sad but not necessarily a tragedy The media and politicians are being revoltingly ghoulish for their own means

This

We have no idea anything about this person. The only people who benefit from whipping up such fear all the time even from the deaths of People who got hit by a car amd still apparent died of covid are the politicians who can now divert the blame to us for not being the right kind of sheep as opposed to them for not funding the nhs properly . For running a country where despite 2 parents working 2 jobs they cab still barely afford to live and end up malnourished in mouldy flats and obviously very vulnerable to illnesses.

Stop being distracted.

Over 1000 people die in this country every day. This one is no more tragic than any other. Of course for the relatives of this person it is sad but nobody else really cares do they?

You are saying he died of it, you have not idea how he died, his medical history or how old he was, how utterly stupid.

@KurtWildesChristmasNamechange

WITH omicron. Not OF omicron.

Please stop scaremongering, the media does enough of that already.

People dying "of omicron" are a subset of those who die "with omicron".

Saying someone died "with omicron" doesn't mean they didn't die "of omicron".
Of course any initial reports are going to report it is a "with" in the absence of detailed medical info.

The ONS analysis of death certificates has showed that over 90% of those who have died "with Covid" died "of Covid".... so whereas that means there are many thousands of "with not of" Covid deaths, this notion that Covid infection is incidental factor in most Covid deaths is a lie spouted by those who are determined to minimise Covid.

Of course, not wanting to minimise Covid doesn't mean we have to go to extremes... It's not all or nothing!

@Getyourarseofffthequattro
Lots of people don't understand this though, you might but lots don't and regularly demonstrate this.
I think the focus on the minutiae of the daily deaths for the public isn't helpful. Yes it will include those people but doesn't cover the people who die after 28days - the longer term figures do show that broadly this balances out and Covid has had a big impact on death figures.
The figures that are more helpful are those hospitalised. This is something that will directly affect the wider population and is the issue that makes this a public health problem.
In the initial waves even countries with well funded and resourced health systems struggled because no system is set up to run a capacity for prolonged periods of time (and frankly the NHS had issues before it was hit with a pandemic). Covid patients are resource intensive too so they proportionately take up more time, staff and equipment.
Keeping those numbers down is important to all because it has as we know, a knock on impact on the ability for other services to run. That is what public health is about thinking about the overall picture not just what directly affects you right now which many people (including our politicians) forget.

The person who died had omicron at the time of death. We don't know if it was the cause of death.

That is true of all Covid death statistics though, isn't it? The figures could easily be a lot, lot lower as some of those people will have died of other conditions or even accidents. I'm not saying that means there's no need to be cautious (I'm probably more cautious than average about this, not because I'm frightened but because it feels like common sense), but the figures, including this death, may not be quite as worrying as people think.

WITH omicron. Not OF omicron.

If I got hit with a hammer and subsequently died a week or so later, it would be correct to say that I died after being hit WITH a hammer. My death could have been caused directly by the hammer or by something else that occurred later that week.

Whether the primary cause of death was the hammer or not, it doesn't change the fact that I died after being hit WITH a hammer.

People are reading far too much into the use of words here to infer that this death was incidental.

Yesterday there were 4,700 positive cases of omicron.

The human mortality rate is 9.5/1000 each year, which means approx 1 person in every 5,000 of us dies each week.

So the statistic of 1 in 4,700 people dying yesterday is encouraging, given that’s the same rate that humans die generally.

A bit crazy that it’s front page news, but I guess the government can’t afford to be optimistic and want everyone to get boosted as even a tiny increase in hospitalisations will still crash the nhs.

@Beadebaser

When did we get to a point where people think it’s acceptable that people die in ICU gasping for air? But write those people off as being old/vulnerable - so it’s not important?

People died in ICU long before covid existed and will continue to do so long after covid stops being headline news.

At this stage in the pandemic I think its completely disrespectful to stand at her podium or in parliament and off her condolences to everyone wo has lost a loved one to covid

its been nearly 2 years .. how many other people have lost loved ones to something other than covid and she never mentions them .. only covid death matter