David Craig, on May 11th, 2020(Monday blog)
This year over 600,000 innocent Brits will die.
That’s over 12,000 a week – more than one every single minute!
This isn’t healthcare! This is mass murder!
I’m getting more than fed up with sensationalist, scaremongering, idiotic reporting. IT DOES NOT HELP!!! It merely turns otherwise intelligent, educated people into the pitch-fork wielding mob demanding ridiculously extreme measures – like shutting down the economy for several more weeks or months – supposedly to save lives. But this is only guaranteed to make other unintended consequences of those measures far worse than the problem itself.
Yesterday, the Sunday Times’s leading story was that a too rapid exit from the lockdown could lead to 100,000 deaths. Oooooh. Pretty frightening, huh? Of course, it’s meant to be. Such sensationalist crap sells newspapers and works as excellent ‘click-bait’. Then the Sunday Times can count the number of online readers who click on the story and use that to charge more from advertisers.
The Sunday Times even had a supposed ‘reader survey’ which asked – “should the government protect lives or protect the economy?”
I absolutely guarantee that there will be more than 600,000 deaths in the UK this year. I bet you all the money I haven’t got that I am correct in this. Moreover, I don’t need a poorly conceived, poorly-developed and poorly-managed mathematical software model produced by a self-important, media-hungry bonking boffin, Professor Penis, to prove this. My 600,000 deaths, are the deaths we naturally expect to occur given our usual average annual UK deaths plus a few more – perhaps 5% more – from the Chinese Covid-19 plague.
Here’s a (hopefully readable) chart of the average number of deaths in the UK by week:
So in an average year, deaths go from about 14,000 a week in the winter to about 10,000 a week in the summer. And this year, of course, there is a rise in deaths due to the Chinese Covid-19 plague. The rise seems to have hit 6,000 a week at the highest point before starting to fall:
This year there will probably be 60,000 or so deaths attributed to Covid-19 – an increase of about 10% on the usual annual average. But of the Covid-19 deaths about 90% will have serious underlying health problems and thus limited life expectancy. Plus we must take into account that the median age of death is 80 which means that half the deaths will occur in people over 80. Life expectancy in the UK is around 81. So, while careerist journalists hyperventilate about 60,000 Covid-19 deaths, the real figure for excess deaths will probably be closer to 30,000 – a mere 5% increase on the usual average number of annual UK deaths.
But you won’t find many journalists keen to put the Covid-19 deaths into context as just a 5% increase in deaths.
Moreover, many of the UK’s Covid-19 deaths are self-inflicted and unnecessary. They were caused by the NHS turfing about 15,000 NHS patients out of hospital into self-isolation or care homes without testing them for Covid-19 in order to free up hospital beds for the expected Covid-19 victims. Many of those needing the freed-up hospital beds turned out to be the very patients who had been sent into care homes from hospitals in the first place – but only after infecting a few other people in the care homes into which they were dumped!
Of course, if somebody dared suggest – “calm down Covid-19 will only increase UK deaths by about 5% so let’s get the economy moving again” – there would be howls of froth-flecked rage from the hordes of perma-offended out there who will scream, “are you saying my granny is expendable?” and “you’re putting money before my granddad’s life and he fought in the war”.
There are an average of 200,000 abortions just in England and Wales each year:
Nobody seems to care about that! We don’t see many journalists screaming about almost 4,000 human beings being slaughtered every week in hospitals and clinics.
Of course, the Chinese Covid-19 plague is a crisis. Of course, we mustn’t end up in the situation of Italy and Spain where people were dying because the healthcare systems were overloaded. But we need to keep Covid-19 in perspective. We need to analyse the situation calmly and unemotionally. We absolutely MUST reopen the economy and very soon. Our grandparents and ancestors before that would be baffled by the degree of panic and fear that we have unleashed. After all they lived their whole lives side by side with diseases and wars with far higher death rates!
The risk for the vast majority of the population of suffering serious consequences from catching coronavirus are less than one in a million.
Time to get back to work. Time to re-open the economy.
Category: 
This is what you get from infantalising recent generations with excessive health and safety regimes and a celebrity,look at me ,culture supported by a seriously dumbed down education system.A lack of basic numeracy in a large proportion of the population makes them incapable of drawing the realistic conclusions with regard to risk you so rightly point out.I had to laugh at a piece in last week’s Sunday Times supplement about how to manage ones finances in the lockdown.They were so obvious that a primary school child would have in the past been able to have come up with the suggestions.However ,linking basic maths with real life situations has long gone out of the window I fear.Prudence,deferring instant gratification,avoiding excessive debt,saving,all very unfashionable in recent years apparently.Well we are going to see where that has led us very soon.I await the wailing of “you never told us” I need bailing out! The economy is going to hell in a handcart,with or without a virus.We are about to reap the whirlwind of our profligacy.
As I’ve written before I know, because I have relatives in the NHS who have seen patients gasping for breath or dying from multiple organ failure, that covid-19 can be a truly vile disease. Having said that, the vast majority who get it suffer no more than with a mild bout of ‘flu or may not even be aware that they have it. Regarding the emotive outpourings of indignation over the deaths of some thousands of physically decrepit octo and nonagenarians, some with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s, all with pre-existing comorbidities, as recently as 50 years ago such a situation would not have existed. There were not the medical means to preserve life in so many individuals whose natural life-span had already been exceeded. I write this as an octogenarian myself, one who profoundly hopes to go swiftly when the time comes. The notion of spending my final years at vast expense in a so-called “Care” home fills me with horror. I’ve seen too much of them at close quarters in my own professional life! If all those sons, daughters, grandchildren now emoting over their recently-deceased relatives and apportioning blame, were so desperately concerned about the welfare of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, why were they not caring for them in their own homes, as their predecessors a century or more ago would have done? As indeed many cultures still do today. But no! We live in the post 1960s world where entitlement, not responsibility, governs thought and action.There is no satisfactory resolution for this plague. As soon as we even begin to get back to anything approximating “normal life” it will rear its vile head again and yes – people will get it and some of those people will die. I might. Some of my friends might. We are in the susceptible age category. But we are made of sterner stuff! From discussing all this – phone or emails! – with friends, or in shouted conversations with neighbours at a distance of 2 metres, I’ve concluded there’s a significant difference in attitude between those of us who can remember the fear and deprivation of the War years and for whom National Service in the 1950s was obligatory, and those born later, who in the main have never known any immediate physical threat or limitations on their freedom. I didn’t rate Boris very highly yesterday. His speech, although delivered with the rhetorical style he so favours, was nothing if not vague and full of ambiguities, but the fact is that whatever the Gvt. decides will be wrong. Let us out and plague deaths will rise. Keep us in and the economy will be go into terminal decline.
Every word you’ve written is true, Hardcastle. We ain’t seen nothing yet! Interesting times ahead! And I use the word “interesting” in the context of the Chinese proverb, “May you not live in interesting times”. Well, they’ve ensured that we do!
I share your anger, well said.
Best analysis of the current fiasco I’ve seen; if only today’s blog could appear in a national newspaper like the Mail, it might wake up the country to the true facts concerning death and COVIS-19 And great ammunition for a huge barney I’m having on Facebook about the topic. It seems the current inhabitants of a country that just celebrated the 75th anniversary of VE-Day are now too scared to leave the comfort of lockdown and go back to work, oblivious to the fact that if lockdown goes on much longer, we might just as well be living in a Zimbabwe style economy. And I see the unions are demanding assurances be given as to the safety of workers when they do go back, a guarantee, they well know, that cannot possibly be adhered to. So it’s ‘back to the future’ – the 1970’s all over again.
This has to be one of your best pieces for the simple reason that we should all be able to work this out by now, especially Boris. This is what he should have said last night.
Hardcastle is right. It is partly due to a failure of education, but I think statistics and risk management is a difficult area, as we can see with the government response and the different “expert” views. We also see how the media distorts deaths in the UK by talking about totals with no reference to the population size. The government is trying to manage the risk of the virus but have ignored the risk of their policies on the economy and related deaths. I have no doubt that if and when the virus panic settles, the media will start their attack on the government for the damage to the economy, although they ignore it now.
Stillreading refers to healthcare 50 years ago. I don’t have good memories of my childhood, but I have one distinct memory from 1958 when both my maternal grandparents died. We lived with them and they rarely saw a doctor, but both suddenly became ill and died after about two weeks, and cared for at home. I remember in the case of my grandfather the doctor prepared an injection and my mother said, “Is that necessary doctor?” and he emptied the syringe down the sink. Those years were a better time. There was no postmortem, the body was prepared at home and the coffin delivered to the house. It only left to go to burial. Death had dignity which is now taken away. The NHS creates the conditions that put the elderly into care homes with no quality of life. We should have a choice, not have a choice forced on us.
With a reference to abortion, which I am opposed to, women have the mantra “My body, my choice”. It should apply in every case, but not when another life is related to it. Perhaps we should also have “My mind, my decision, my life”
The reference to patients being moved around hospitals and care homes spreading disease is almost a perpetual motion machine of disease transfer. It has a parallel in climate science where they created a perpetual heat engine in the atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N0pRpUoM0Y
Police harassment, scary!