Furlough misunderstood

Manxman_in_exile

Interestingly - statistically you are 15 times more likely to die in a car crash than from Covid and yet we are still allowed to go out of our houses and drive.

Stats really are a funny beast 

That doesn't sound right to me?  For the last month or so we've had about 800 or so deaths per day "related" (in some way -whatever that means) to covid, and a total of over 20,000 such deaths.  I'm not sure of the numbers, but surely deaths from road accidents are nowhere near anything like that in a year, let alone a few weeks?  (More than happy to be shown to be wrong though).

I do, however, wonder if the the overall response to Covid has been a bit disproportionate.   Everybody does seem to me to be far, far. far more sensitive to the relative risks posed by Covid than by other things posing a risk to health and life.  We also seem to have adopted a point of view that it is worthwhile preventing almost any death from Covid, no matter what the present and future costs in terms of compromising the economy and the NHS.  If we were to adopt this approach under "normal" conditions, there'd be no need for healthcare "rationing" or bodies like NICE because the NHS would be striving to save every life from every cause regardless of the cost, and would be funded to do so, and everybody would be paying for it.

(EDIT: and that may not be a bad thing, but the last few decades seem to have shown us that people are not willing to pay enough in tax to do this).

ToxicWomble

It may not be 15 times now and also not sure which website the missus was looking that up on this morning.
Data I am looking at now suggests worldwide in 2017 - 1.2 million people died from road injuries, 300,000 from drowning !!

There has to come a point sadly where the needs of the many exceeds that of the few - 0.04% of the country has sadly died and the other 99.96% sitting around waiting for the massive bill at the end

Either there is something we haven’t been told or someone hit the big red panic button by mistake.

Manxman_in_exile

I was thinking only about the UK - I think we have one of the lowest rates of death from road traffic collisions in the world.  (I was looking at the figures only a couple of weeks ago but now can't find them!).  I was also interested that annual deaths from smoking in the UK were circa 70,000 to 80,000.  I know that total deaths from covid will probably end up being significantly more than this, but even if they are three times as many (say eight or ten times more than the current total), does it justify the economic cost* and disruption of lockdown?

I too wonder if we've hit the panic button at too low a level of risk, or whether things are going to be a lot worse than we've been led to believe.

*I appreciate that many people will find distasteful any question of balancing saving lives against economic cost, but it's what is done every day when NICE makes decisions about what treatments to recommend, when governments make decisions about levels of NHS funding, and when Clinical Commissioning Groups make decisions about what to fund.

[EDIT:  This is a quote from a post by a doctor on another forum:  "I read another similar piece the other day, basically arguing that the £350Billion package in the UK is costing far far more per QALY than NICE would ever countenance if they were being asked to sanction a new cancer treatment for example.

If you save lives from death by coronavirus by a full economic shutdown, how many more do you lose by the ensuing recession/depression? It's a completely valid and important discussion that needs to be had at the highest levels."]

Undervalued

ToxicWomble said:

numbers are a weird thing - 20,000 deaths is a hell of a lot of people but bearing in mind that this is a tiny % of the UK population.
In reality, a large proportion of us have already had it and recovered- the percentage that actually require hospitalisation is again a fraction of that, sadly small percentages of 60million can still overwhelm our ability to deal with them and that is the only determining factor in how we move ahead. 

Interestingly - statistically you are 15 times more likely to die in a car crash than from Covid and yet we are still allowed to go out of our houses and drive.
Stats really are a funny beast 

Where do you get that figure from!

As far as I am aware there are about 3500 fatal road accidents in the UK each year. It used to be nearer 5000 but cars have got safer and medical treatment has improved.

c. 30000 have died so far from C19. Yes I know many were in poor health and would maybe have died anyway, but tonight's news was saying that the UK death rate was running at about twice the norm for this time of year.

[Deleted User]

"There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ...

ToxicWomble

As I said the missus was looking it up, so not sure on the source- but as said previously in 2017 1.2 million world wide deaths in traffic accidents, currently just over 200k due to CV.  Bearing in mind 100% of the world population doesn’t/can’t drive then 15 probably isnt that far off
That ratio will definitely change as the weeks go on, but it still puts the figures into context.

Ectophile

ToxicWomble said:

It may not be 15 times now and also not sure which website the missus was looking that up on this morning.
Data I am looking at now suggests worldwide in 2017 - 1.2 million people died from road injuries, 300,000 from drowning !!

There has to come a point sadly where the needs of the many exceeds that of the few - 0.04% of the country has sadly died and the other 99.96% sitting around waiting for the massive bill at the end

Either there is something we haven’t been told or someone hit the big red panic button by mistake.

It's all very well if you're in the under 50 and totally healthy category.  Your odds of dying even if you catch the disease are well under 1%.

But for older people and anyone with a whole raft of health conditions, it's another matter.  And there are millions of people in the UK with underlying health conditions.  For example, according to Asthma UK, there are about 5.4 million people regularly receiving asthma medication.

Most people wouldn't be daft enough to pick up a revolver and play Russian Roulette.  They also really don't want to catch a disease that has roughly the same odds of killing them.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

ToxicWomble said:

numbers are a weird thing - 20,000 deaths is a hell of a lot of people but bearing in mind that this is a tiny % of the UK population.
In reality, a large proportion of us have already had it and recovered- the percentage that actually require hospitalisation is again a fraction of that, sadly small percentages of 60million can still overwhelm our ability to deal with them and that is the only determining factor in how we move ahead. 

Interestingly - statistically you are 15 times more likely to die in a car crash than from Covid and yet we are still allowed to go out of our houses and drive.
Stats really are a funny beast 

Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.

Everything is relative, around 7 and half million people die every year from hunger, that's 21,000 today, yesterday and tomorrow. The world produces enough food for everyone yet carries on as normal because it's far away.

With nearly 8 billion of us odds are many will be dying of something, you just have to hope it isn't you.  

Manxman_in_exile

ToxicWomble said:

As I said the missus was looking it up, so not sure on the source- but as said previously in 2017 1.2 million world wide deaths in traffic accidents, currently just over 200k due to CV.  Bearing in mind 100% of the world population doesn’t/can’t drive then 15 probably isnt that far off
That ratio will definitely change as the weeks go on, but it still puts the figures into context.

Not really?  The figure for annual road deaths in the UK quoted by undervalued (c. 3500) is what I understand to be around the correct figure.

If we've had c. 24000 covid related deaths in about, what, six weeks, then I'd suggest that you're going to end up being about ten times (at least) more likely to die from covid this year than from a road accident.  But whether that's something to really worry about I don't know - I suspect that the absolute risk of dying in a road accident is very, very small, and that ten times more than that is still small.  I don't know if that justifies the extent of the current lockdown.

(I wouldn't think any global figures for road traffic deaths would be reliable and are meaningless here anyway as we have relatively very safe roads.  Because they're very safe it's very misleading to suggest - based on global figures - that you are 15 times more likely to die in a car accident than from covid).

Manxman_in_exile

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head said:

ToxicWomble said:

numbers are a weird thing - 20,000 deaths is a hell of a lot of people but bearing in mind that this is a tiny % of the UK population.
In reality, a large proportion of us have already had it and recovered- the percentage that actually require hospitalisation is again a fraction of that, sadly small percentages of 60million can still overwhelm our ability to deal with them and that is the only determining factor in how we move ahead. 

Interestingly - statistically you are 15 times more likely to die in a car crash than from Covid and yet we are still allowed to go out of our houses and drive.
Stats really are a funny beast 

Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.

Everything is relative, around 7 and half million people die every year from hunger, that's 21,000 today, yesterday and tomorrow. The world produces enough food for everyone yet carries on as normal because it's far away.

With nearly 8 billion of us odds are many will be dying of something, you just have to hope it isn't you.  

Bearing in mind the lengths we are going to to avoid deaths from covid, I'd be interested to know how many (if any) deaths in the UK can be attributed to hunger each year.  Or are there none?