FOI request reveals data of deaths from (ie: not with) covid
Posted by Ian M on January 23, 2022, 12:20 pm
From the ONS back in December, the number is 17,371 deaths (though they only provide the data broken down by year and quarter - hoping we don't notice?). This compares to excess deaths of 127,704 above the 5 year average for 2020-2022 and the 'with' covid figures of 152,872 deaths within 28 days of a positive test and 174,233 deaths where covid is listed on the death certificate as a contributing factor (see John Campbell below).
So drastically lower, indicating the importance of co-morbidities in the likelihood of dying from (or with) this thing. Also important to note is the age of deaths: out of the 17,371 - 13,597 were 65 or over, 3,774 were under 65 and the combined average was 82.5 years in 2021 (Campbell again, noting this is above the average UK life expectancy).
Draw your own conclusions from this but mine are that that yes, this disease has killed a lot of people, but you're much less likely to die from it if you're young and/or reasonably fit & healthy. Not that this is a reason not to care about those who aren't so lucky (or privileged) or that no efforts should be made to protect the elderly & vulnerable, but that it should lead to a deeper discussion about the root causes of ill health in the supposedly wealthy western 'democracies' and also to a re-evaluation of lockdown and vaccination policies which arguably have the most detrimental effects on the young when they have the least to gain from them. Oh, and considering whether we've been lied to about the severity of this disease, by whom and for what reasons.
Deaths from COVID-19 with no other underlying causes
Release date: 16 December 2021
FOI Ref: FOI/2021/3240 You asked
Please can you advise on deaths purely from covid with no other underlying causes.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is derived from death certificates in the process of death registration.
For mortality figures where COVID-19 was the sole cause of death, please see: Pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19 [ https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/preexistingconditionsofpeoplewhodiedduetocovid19englandandwales ], this dataset can be found in section 8 of the Monthly mortality analysis bulletin. This dataset provides a greater insight into the leading pre-existing cause of death groups, for deaths occurring in England and Wales, in 2020 and the first two quarters of 2021 that were due to COVID-19.
Please see 'table 1a, row 28' (2020) and 'table 1, row 29 (2021)' for deaths where COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, but had no other pre-existing conditions recorded on the death certificate, England and Wales. Table 1b represents these figures for England and table 1c figures are for Wales.
This publication will be updated quarterly. COVID-19 deaths involving pre-existing conditions is split by broad age groups between 1-64 and 65+.
Please see below for death registrations for 2020 and 2021 (provisional) that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions, England and Wales.
2020: 9400 (0-64: 1549 / 65 and over: 7851)
2021 Q1: 6483 (0-64: 1560/ 65 and over: 4923)
2021 Q2: 346 (0-64: 153/ 65 and over: 193)
2021 Q3: 1142 (0-64: 512/ 65 and over: 630)
If you would like to discuss this query further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.
*****
notes for the episode:
13 March 2020 to 7 January 2022, England and Wales
Had a brief search on the BBC website to see how they were presenting the stats. Couldn't find anything about this latest FOI but found this Jan 8th article talking about the UK crossing the threshold of 150,000 deaths, at least making clear that they were looking at the figures for 'within 28 days of a positive test' and careful to refer to them as deaths 'with' covid:
It notes that 'Official figures count coronavirus deaths in different ways' but only mentions the higher figure:
'The Office for National Statistics records the number of deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned as a cause on the death certificate, even if the person had not been tested for the virus, with a total of 173,248 deaths recorded up to 24 December.
In January 2021, the UK was the first European nation and fifth country to pass 100,000 reported Covid deaths.
Six weeks later the UK had seen another 25,000 deaths.
But the combined effect of vaccine rollout and lockdown slowed the growth of the death toll throughout the rest of the year.'
This was over three weeks after the FOI request was answered by the ONS, yet I've not been able to find the 17K 'from' covid figure mentioned anywhere on their website, correct me if I'm wrong... If they wanted to provide that context then this milestone was the perfect time to do it, but nada. Plenty of room meanwhile in the article to sing the vaccine's praises, provide quotes from both party leaders encouraging further vaccinations & boosters, a tug-the-heartstrings story of a woman who lost a grandmother and her dad in short succession ('Camilla Claridge, from Oxfordshire, lost her grandmother to Covid in February last year and on the night of her funeral, she learned that her father was also dying with the virus') and fearmongering about 'a surge in infections' from Omicron without noting the low-lethality of the variant, which I think was already well-established by that point. Trust Auntie Beeb to keep us hiding under the covers...
Anyway, I should probably acknowledge that others were pointing this out a long time ago and got royally abused for their troubles. It shouldn't really take ONS confirmation before we have the courage to start asking questions and making these pretty simple points. I guess the feeling was that the stakes were too high in the moment and the danger was of minimising the harm being done when it looked like the libertarian right might be about to 'let it rip'. Also, it fits that the most hyper-capitalist, neoliberal economies would have the highest death tolls and be least capable of weathering a storm like this - which is probably still the case to be fair. Anyway, mea culpa for not speaking up before or defending those who did, fwiw.
Posted by Sir Michael Mouse on January 24, 2022, 11:13 am, in reply to "BBC"
Not only did they completely mischaracterise the outbreak, but attributed the slowing of the death rate to the vaccine and lockdown, while neglecting to mention the quashing of treatment.
Fortuitous errors for pharma shareholders and statists.
True. Somewhat more humorous take from across the pond
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't the spreadsheet from ONS just distinguishing between people who had or didn't;t have an underlying condition as well, not saying only the ones with no underlying conditions were actually caused by covid? Eg the table below (pasted just for the titles - formatting will be lost) shows 'deaths due to covid' - then breaks them down to with or without underlying conditions, with 16% being without underlying conditions. They're still all due to covid (according to ONS). It doesn't seem to be saying that the deaths were caused by the underlying conditions (but that they contributed) - also, a large section of the population would be classed as having one underlying condition or other if we looked (I've probably got some), and many like this just wouldn't have died without getting covid - do we just forget about them?
The better request might have been 'all deaths where covid was noted as the primary cause on the death certificate compared with when the other condition is listed as such and covid was a secondary cause (or whatever) (ie deaths with covid vs deaths of covid). I think I have seen this data on the ONS before (in their fortnightly summary I think), and it was lower than the overall figure (with covid), but not 16 % (more like 80% from memory). Please correct me where I'm wrong I did skim-read a little bit
Geography Deaths due to COVID-19 of which, number of deaths with no pre-existing conditions Percentage with no pre-existing conditions England and Wales 9,135 1,536 16.8% England 8,346 1,387 16.6% Wales 758 140 18.5%
Re: FOI request reveals data of deaths from (ie: not with) covid
"The proportion of deaths involving COVID-19, where COVID-19 was the underlying cause decreased between November and December 2021 in both England (from 84.9% to 83.8%) and Wales (from 83.9% to 79.6%).
These proportions generally correspond with periods of high or low numbers of deaths. In England, the proportion of deaths involving COVID-19 that were also due to COVID-19 was highest in April 2020 (95.2%) and lowest in May 2021 (68.8%). In Wales, this proportion was highest in April 2020 (94.1%) and lowest in June 2021 (42.9%).
The doctor certifying a death can list all causes in the chain of events that led to the death, and pre-existing conditions that may have contributed to the death. Deaths with COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate are defined as deaths involving COVID-19. Deaths where COVID-19 is also the underlying cause of death are defined as deaths due to COVID-19.
Last updated: 21/01/2022"
Massive hyperbole. Very few people over the age of 65 have no other co morbidities
This guy is always full of specious minimising rubbish.
It kills older people who often have another chronic illness. If that's a revelation to you 2 years in, I'm at a loss.
The excess mortality is the excess mortality whether in people with other diseases or not.
An FOI to count the death's of patients with no other co morbidity is just a new regurgitation of the same old with/from bullshit. 17000 deaths of people who are fit and well is 17000 people who would not have died if we hadn't completely mismanaged the pandemic. Does that number appear small to you? The other 125,000 people also would not have died but because they have other illness we can forget about them?
Nobody has lied to you about the severity of the disease. It kills 5 to ten times more people than the flu and is far more contagious. When all those older people with other illnesses get it they fill hospitals so that no usual care is available to anyone else - we had no elective surgery for 6 months. This is eye witness testimony.
The deaths of any cancer patients are immediately trivialised by the interpretation that a covid death is not actually a covid death worth worrying about unless the person was fully well. Therefore, the addenda from Sikora, who wants to sell the NHS, is especially nauseating. It's not possible to treat folks with cancer safely in a hospital when there are other patients with covid. It's not lockdowns that caused an excess cancer mortality but an inability to provide usual care.
There is also no doubt that the excess mortality from this disease would have been far higher, not only, but especially, in older people with comorbidity without vaccination.
In the last month I've still been seeing people from deprived and minority communities who are unvaccinated, in intensive care. Pregnant women in their 30s often have diabetes. No doubt we should worry about preventative medicine and redistributing wealth but that's whataboutery when trying to come up with solutions on how to manage a severe respiratory/vascular illness.
Re: Massive hyperbole. Very few people over the age of 65 have no other co morbidities
Thanks SB & Dan, will consider your points & try to respond tomorrow. In the meantime I'll add this ONS data from 2020 breaking down the pre-existing conditions by type and percentage contribution to the over all death toll for that year:
Dementia and Alzheimer's disease - 25.0% Diabetes - 19.9% Hyertensive diseases - 17.8 % Symptoms signs and ill-defined conditions - 16.3% Chronic lower respiratory diseases - 16.0% Ischaemic heart diseases - 13.2% Diseases of the urinary system - 13.2%
(from the xlsx file '2020 (Final) edition of this dataset', table 1a )
Just to be clear, it's not my intent to dismiss or trivialise the harm done by the disease to people, young or old, healthy or chronically ill - a peril of looking at stats and drawing conclusions from numbers being that you look callous. The 17K number helps me put things into better perspective and I find it revealing that it's not something that appears to be part of media discussion or broader, terrified public awareness.
At first, it was quite simple. We had a spike of excess deaths about March 2020 odd mark. I remember it was before the lockdowns started to happen in earnest. Ken W produced an ONS graph to show this quite clearly (sorry, I am useless at searching the archives). In other words, all this granularity we are discussing now didn't come into play. I wasn't quite sure why Dr Campbell didn't mention that situation when he started going into data. An omission to my mind .. possibly.
"...unclear how it helps." claimed Willem. My reply:
"Deaths caused by an annual flu are usually estimated from that years excess death statistics when compared to a mean of past averages: there are various ways this is done all with slightly differing parameters & results, but to see the real difference between whats happening now and any annual flu death toll from the previous nine years its enough to go back to this raw data because each years excess deaths in total include any and all caused by an annual flu mortality. You can visually compare any proposed seasonal flu spikes in the previous nine years with whats happening presently.
-As can be seen, there's no real comparison in terms of scale from any event in any of these years."
It blows the current granularity discussion out of the water methinks. A single event. Obviously things have changed since then with lockdowns etc. and one can speculate, but in essence it proves that covid has caused the spike like no other at *that* time.
Now if we had the same graph extended to now, it just might tell us more ...
I do think it's a bit weird how excess deaths figures as a general measure have seemingly changed in trustworthiness for some - used to be enough for us to use to point out overall cost of war in Iraq etc. Maybe we should have written off a load of iraqi dead as having underlying conditions, so would have died anyway? (that's what the media were doing then anyway)
"I do think it's a bit weird how excess deaths figures as a general measure have seemingly changed in trustworthiness for some..."
I think it reached the stage of absurdity a while back when a number of our departed friends started questioning actual mortality figures. When you have to start questioning death certification then intellectually you are in the land of the undead...far beyond the plains of the absurd.
the methodology for assessing Covid mortality is the same as that for assessing Seasonal flu mortality. Nearly everyone who dies of Seasonal flu also have other underlying health issues, ergo the ahemmm, "logic" dictates that seasonal flu doesn't really kill anybody...
I don't understand why people reaching such absurd contradictions can't stop and see that the problem lies not with the information but with their approach, and indeed often with their own "emotional investment" but hey ho...as Kenneth Galbraith astutely pointed out, when people set their minds in a particular direction:
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof..."
Seasonal flu is identified by PCR which as anyone with a passing knowledge of big pharma will tell you can't be used to diagnose viral illness which doesn't even exist.
So you're comparing excess mortality from two imaginary illnesses.
I don't understand your point - Ken is smart enough to see that the the two imaginary illnesses you mention have zero impact on the argument he is making. Why are you doing this?
The fact is that we have very clear spikes of excess deaths seems pertinent. In fact, extremely unusual. Funny it coincides with covid the outbreak etc. I think the point I am making is that granularity is irrelevant. You disagree and why?
dan's emulating the response of our dearly departed 5-chan folks! (nm)
My bad, I am not always switched on to sudden change in narrative. Sashimi was there with a helping hand though, bless him. I'll keep those figments close to my chest in future
Then no wonder your figure of 17,000 people is low compared with the total. If you exclude people with common chronic health conditions then the numbers look better? That's just playing with numbers which is exactly why the FOI request was made in the first place.
Why is the death rate in people who have absolutely no illness important to you, other than it minimises the scale of the problem.
14 million people in the UK have high blood pressure. If they die of covid do they not count in your estimate of severity? Your figure excludes them in order to fiddle the stats.
5 million have diabetes. The reason it's not a talking point in the media is because it's unimportant unless you are trying to minimise the problem.
"Terrified" is just a slur. One that RhG was wont to use. People who come to alternative conclusions from you must have a thought disorder?
Re: But if you are including high blood pressure in your list of co morbidities
Okay, I won't do a point-by-point as this has mushroomed and I can't address all of it. Here's my revised understanding:
There have been over 100K excess deaths in the UK since the virus emerged, this seems undeniable and there's no other likely cause for this other than from covid. The ONS counts 17K of these deaths as 'from' covid, ie: with no other underlying medical conditions. Most of these deaths occurred in the over-65s. The rest of the 83K+ deaths occurred alongside co-morbidities of varying severity. However, it's important to take into account that lack of co-morbidities, ie: good general health is a rarity in the UK population, and even moreso among the over-65s. (This is cause for concern in itself, and something that covid has shone a spotlight on.) Also that a high percentage of the co-morbidities recorded were not lethal by themselves, at least not in the short term, but an infection with covid tipped them over the edge, so a strong argument can be made for the disease being the proximate cause of death even when officially listed as 'with' rather than 'from' covid.
All of which is to affirm that the disease poses a severe threat, especially to the over-65s and those with underlying conditions that increase their risk factor.
The question remains on what this information means for the under-65s and those without co-morbidities - surely not a minority of the population, unless things have gotten much worse without my noticing. If they're not only looking at broad figures like 150K touted by the media, but are allowed to see the context of the drastically lower figures of 17K for those without co-morbidities, of which 3,774 were under-65 (I don't know how much higher the total under-65 death rate has been) - then that will effect how they perceive and respond to the disease, from the level of fear they carry around with them on a daily basis to what policies they will support and which they'll oppose.
Anyway, I appreciate the critiques and am sorry if this is a re-hash of old debates and something I should have gotten my head around already, but there it is. Hopefully I'm not the only one who has learned something.
The problem with your cut off of "no comorbidities" for under 65s is - if it includes high blood pressure, the definition of co morbidity is so loose that the filtering becomes a clinically unjustifiable haircut of the true numbers of dead.
Most people with high blood pressure live completely normal lives and will do so for 30 or 40 years - it's not a disease which we see killing people in icu. Why exclude them other than to be shocked at how few healthy people have died. This is just fiddling stats.
Minority populations are especially affected. Whether genetics deprivation/diet or lack of vitamin D - "Western" lifestyles disproportionately cause diabetes and hypertension for those who have moved to this country from the global South. These diseases are extremely common even in people in their 40's.
The most deprived 20% are 3x as likely to die as the richest 20%. This Health inequality is true of most disease but covid amplifies the effect of inequality.
We could say when you look at rich white people under the age of 50 no one died. What's all the fuss about. It's probably what most Tory MPs are thinking when they aren't counting the reduction in pension payments accrued from killing the elderly. See multiple Telegraph headlines.
The final part of the story that we can't provide anything other than emergency care to prevent loss of life or limb for young fit people when hospitals are full of patients with covid. Though we seem to have weathered the storm this winter we now have an almost insurmountable backlog of investigations and treatments. No doubt many otherwise well people are going to die on waiting lists.
Cheers Dan
Re: But if you are including high blood pressure in your list of co morbidities
'The problem with your cut off of "no comorbidities" for under 65s is - if it includes high blood pressure, the definition of co morbidity is so loose that the filtering becomes a clinically unjustifiable haircut of the true numbers of dead.'
Well it's not my cut off, that's what the ONS listed as their number 3 pre-existing condition for deaths 'due to' covid in 2020, considered a contributing factor in 13,092 deaths (1,426 under-65; 11,666 over-65). They mention ICD-10 codes of I10-I15 which I see refer to: I10 - Essential (primary) hypertension I11 - Hypertensive heart disease I12 - Hypertensive chronic kidney disease I13 - Hypertensive heart and chronic kidney disease I15 - Secondary hypertension - https://icd.codes/icd10cm/chapter9/I10-I15
which I guess indicates some additional complications to simple high blood pressure. The codes for diabetes don't specify beyond these:
E08 - Diabetes mellitus due to underlying condition E09 - Drug or chemical induced diabetes mellitus E10 - Type 1 diabetes mellitus E11 - Type 2 diabetes mellitus E13 - Other specified diabetes mellitus - https://icd.codes/icd10cm/chapter4/E08-E13
Not saying they should (what do I know?) but that it doesn't indicate what stage of the disease they were at - feeling a bit light-headed between meals or full-on feet falling off, going blind, organ damage etc. Otherwise the diseases/conditions mentioned all sound pretty serious to me:
Fair point about their prevalence in the population, I guess - feel free to take it up with the ONS!
Thanks for the further info on ethnic minorities and the poor. I think we talked about the greater vaccine hesitancy among those demographics before, often through (understandable) lack of trust in government but also for other reasons. I disagree with the vaccines being forced on anybody and still think there are big unknowns about the long-term potential side effects, but I don't deny their effectiveness in lessening hospitalisations & deaths esp in the elderly & vulnerable groups we've been discussing, and it's tragic if this then disproportionately effects minorities & the poor, as you've noted.
'We could say when you look at rich white people under the age of 50 no one died. What's all the fuss about. It's probably what most Tory MPs are thinking when they aren't counting the reduction in pension payments accrued from killing the elderly.' - no doubt they are. I hope you don't think I was trying to put that message across... I did acknowledge the 'privilege' of good health in my original post, and admittedly that is the perspective I bring to this as a young(ish) middle-class(ish) man with few medical complaints, but I've known enough people felled by chronic disease or mental illnesses to have a sense of 'there but for the grace of god go I' and that good health can't be taken for granted (or worse, viewed as a reflection of moral virtue and good life choices).
'The final part of the story that we can't provide anything other than emergency care to prevent loss of life or limb for young fit people when hospitals are full of patients with covid. Though we seem to have weathered the storm this winter we now have an almost insurmountable backlog of investigations and treatments. No doubt many otherwise well people are going to die on waiting lists.' - you have my sympathies, fwiw, as do those waiting for treatment - I know one from back in leafy Surrey who was lucky to catch throat cancer before it got too advanced, had chemo & surgery and now seems to be recovering ok, touch wood. But for many it'll be too late... For me the issue is 'why was the health service not adequately prepared for a pandemic?' as opposed to 'who can we blame for selfishly overcrowding the hospitals?' (not your stance, I know, but it gets said plenty). Any suggestions of things we can do to help? (You're going to say 'get vaccinated' now, I know it )
For me the issue is 'why was the health service not adequately prepared for a pandemic?'
Because the JIT system pushed by the government isn't geared for a pandemic: its priorities are antithetical to such an event.
To deal with both a pandemic and maintain an efficient functioning hospital you need spare capacity at the very least. When you are actually judging the efficiency of hospitals on pared parameters such as how few intensive care beds they have and that "perceived efficiency" predicates the amount of future funding, then you are driving the system in the opposite direction.
(Of course the promotion of JIT systems was not limited to the NHS: its shortcomings have now hit the gas supplies in this country too, resulting in massive price rises in heating peoples homes: another shitstorm but one essentially caused by the same economic "philosophy" )
Re: But if you are including high blood pressure in your list of co morbidities
Well, quite - hollowing the service out and getting rid of spare capacity or slack looks good on the balance sheet but leaves it prone to the slightest unexpected event. As we have seen. Then there was Exercise Cygnus in 2016 which highlighted the vulnerability of the NHS to a 'flu-like pandemic and recommended:
'Meet demand for services
A lack of resources and limited ability to increase supply in face of demand was identified in health disciplines.[5] This affects how emergency plans can be operationalised at a local level, implicating the revision of the "Pandemic Concept of Operations".
Little tactical coordination was observed when the need for services outweighed the capacity of local responders, particularly in communities with excess death, social care facilities and amongst National Health Service staff.[5] The need for more precise protocols was identified to guide health care providers at an operational level should there be a need to drastically step up local response. A suggestion was to implement planning at a regional level as opposed to through local resilience forums for crucial aspects of pandemic influenza response (e.g., excess death). This improves coordination across multiple agencies locally.
Logistically, more health workers and resources such as ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE) and hospital beds are required to face a large pandemic. Investigation also showed that the reverse triage strategy proposed by the NHS, whereby patients are moved from hospitals to social care, may not be well supported by the current social care system.[5] This requires a high level of teamwork across several corporations, which was detailed through a provided framework but may not be viable under the pressure and widespread impact of a pandemic. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus#Meet_demand_for_services
Oh well, that was never going to happen was it! (Facepalm)
Whoever made the FOI request made hypertension the issue not the ONS. It is used in this instance to make smaller the number of people who have died, by excluding those with a secondary illness, which may have contributed to death, but which under normal circumstances would not have led to any life threatening harm for many years.
I11,12,13 are what happens after 30 years of hypertension in white people or 15-20 in minority populations.
Again, I agree it doesn't say what stage of diabetes the patients were at - but that I rather the point. The filter is being made on unqualified grounds. Any mention of any other contributing factor no matter the unknown severity of the pre existing illness is being used to exclude those deaths from the number of people we can count as being genuine covid deaths.
In any event the number of people dying by this artificial metric is still massive by comparison with the number of deaths from suicide c.2000 or road traffic accidents c.4000 p.a.
Regarding the size of the health service provision. Regardless of the provision of services Health systems have been overwhelmed if there were not ancillary measures to control rate of spread. Compare Germany and US. Both have massive ICU bed bases US system has been overwhelmed, Germany not.
I'm not arguing against more provision - of course we should have more healthcare beds. We've had half the European average during my whole career , better during the new Labour years - on the back of crippling pfi bills. We are even further behind on emergency/ICU beds but an interesting thing. Northern Italy has more than twice the ICU beds that we do in the UK but had 50 year olds dying in corridors and we didn't.
We think the reason - 80 year olds routinely get put on ventilators in Italy but not in the UK. We ration our ventilator beds informally on the basis of age. Probably reasonably because 80 year olds have very bad outcomes following ICU care with many suffering permanent cognitive impairment. In Italy and in other affluent Western countries especially America if you and your family want (and your insurance covers it) then you will receive probably harmful care. So in the first stages of the pandemic in Italy a large wave of 80 year old folks came in first, were put on ventilators as per usual practice, used up the resource so that there were non left when the under 65s came in 10 days later.
The message there - whatever your level of provision - the pandemic would have overwhelmed services and effectively forces triage. ICU teams in the UK in the first month of the pandemic tried to have an open discussion about how / on what basis we should triage patients to not receiving ventilation and the debate was squashed from on high. Triage likely happened but on an ad hoc basis rather than equitably.
The solution - as the pandemic planning session suggested is to stockpile equipment so that expansion can happen rapidly. There is no solution to staffing other than to make nurses work intolerable conditions. 30 per cent of our staff have left. Most London ICUs have traditionally been staffed with European nurses all of whom were in demand in their own countries which compounded the problem.
Finally, whatever your bed provision, it is not possible to provide 100% safe cancer service in this pandemic. Treatment destroys immunity, vaccine or previous exposure. Emergency surgery outcomes were similarly poor if patients were exposed to covid.
Healthcare in the UK is a mess and it's going to get worse.
In answer to your final question which is clearly really important.
If you could be bothered to look back to spring 2020 sometime I posted that I didn't think vaccines are the answer. I was arguing the case for testing and isolation as the solution to minimising the rate of spread and the need for lockdown. I still think this is the case.
From memory I wrote smthg like - unlike flu, usual corona virus resistance is not maintained, it moves round schools so that one school year gets it spreads around classes circulates round the school and then comes back to the original class who get it again a year later. It's not seasonal it just circulates in the reservoir.
Therefore vaccines are a temporary crutch and herd immunity is not a thing with coronaviruses.
More or less what I wrote.
Seems like that has been borne out at least in part by events with the need for boosters. Vaccines have massively reduced the need for admission and ventilation but as you have seen at an individual level you may not benefit because of prior low risk. You are benefiting indirectly from others vaccination because we have not been crushed this winter - that is the prisoners dilemma (of game theory) at a population level.
What happens next is going to determine our lives for the next decade. Either persistent non antibody resistance means that the dying has more or less been done we have some minor waves in susceptible people with no prior antigen exposure - less than 10% of the population - and we get on with being oppressed by fascists in myriad other ways or.....
Covid evolves to out do our immunity and we are stuck with this mess. I don't think it will be huge waves every year but given it's predilection for neuronal, vascular and immune tissue there is the chance that chronic recurrent 'mild' infection is going to lead to degenerative brain disease, renal and cardiac failure and cancer. It is very likely that the long term consequences of covid are worse than the long term consequences of inoculation which you are worried about.
Whilst extrapolation from animal models is no good basis for prediction about population health in humans - there have been experiments in which repeated exposure to covid-19 eventually kills all the healthy animals. Bad science but food for thought.
This is written from the perspective of someone who has suffered with cognitive impairment for two years following initial "mild" infection, which was made worse following vaccination and who is now about to have a second episode of the illness because my wife and children currently have covid. This time around the effect on the children is noticeably worse.
In the future, if it hasn't now gone, we as a family will remain dedicated to spending as much time socialising out doors in pandemic fallow periods, wearing face masks on public transport etc and reducing exposing ourselves and others during times of high transmission. Again, I think if there is potentiation of chronic effects over time everyone else will catch up with that standard. All is speculation, the next year will tell.
Cheers, Dan
Re: On what to do
Posted by Ian M on January 30, 2022, 8:07 pm, in reply to "On what to do "
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the further detailed responses.
re: hypertension - I agree it's important context to look at the secondary, non-lethal illnesses and factor that into estimates of mortality 'from' as opposed to 'with' covid. Nonetheless the ONS puts them all together in the co-morbidities category without further differentiation. I imagine it would be quite hard to make a firm distinction between pre-existing conditions that were a significant factor in a death 'with' covid and those that weren't, indicating 'of'. You're probably right that whoever made the FOI request was looking for a 'gotcha' that didn't go into these details. Still, forgive me for saying it but the 17K figure is still interesting & important to know in its own right, though without the added context I would agree it is misleading and potentially damaging.
'We distinguish between deaths that are “due to COVID-19” and those “involving COVID-19” to provide the most comprehensive information on the impact of the disease on mortality. More than 140,000 deaths have been due to COVID-19, meaning that it has been determined as the underlying cause. To exclude individuals with any pre-existing conditions from this figure greatly understates the number of people who died from COVID-19 and who might well still be alive had the pandemic not occurred.'
Ironically I found it via another John Campbell vid where he responds to a BBC 'fact check' that suggested he was saying that only 17K ppl have died of covid, when he clearly pointed to the 100K+ excess death and after-positive-test figures. Here it is if you can stomach watching the guy again:
He seems fair-minded and genuine to me but I haven't watched lots of his stuff so can't say if he has a tendency to downplay the disease. The masked toy dog in the background would suggest otherwise! He says he's done lots of stuff looking at co-morbidities in the past fwiw.
Thanks for the info on ventilators and (informal) triage in the UK vs. Italy and other countries. A useful reminder that even with a good level of resources available health services can still get swamped if the wrong decisions are made, or even if things get bad enough fast enough.
'Healthcare in the UK is a mess and it's going to get worse.' - certainly sounds like it from your description! Stockpiling equipment and securing adequate nursing staff through good pay and limited hours would seem to be sensible things to do, but then it runs into a perfect storm of hindrances and the underlying dogma of market fundamentalism that ensures a race to the bottom in work conditions and equipment supply for those most needed if society is going to even pretend to function.
Moving on to the question of what to do (actually I was more asking what practical measures we could be pushing for to make your life easier, but part of that would be a good medical response to the pandemic) - you write:
'If you could be bothered to look back to spring 2020 sometime I posted that I didn't think vaccines are the answer. I was arguing the case for testing and isolation as the solution to minimising the rate of spread and the need for lockdown. I still think this is the case.'
I remember you stressing the need for testing & tracing, as well as acknowledging the harms of lockdown but that it was the only option left given the govt's prior mismanagement (yes?) Interesting to hear you don't consider vaccines are a lasting solution. The scenario you describe of the virus circulating and re-infecting in schools and other 'reservoirs', coupled with possible cumulative effects of the disease is disturbing and not something I'd considered. I mean, I knew that was part of the argument about the disease becoming endemic and less deadly, ie: something that's going to be around forever, mutating like the 'flu and staying ahead of any potential 'sterilising' vaccine in a similar way. But if it's going to be doing long-term damage to the next generation then that is cause for concern. Is there much evidence of cumulative effects from the disease in the way you describe?
Sorry to hear the long covid effects are still affecting you. I can see now why you jumped on me for my Rhisiartian use of the adjective 'terrified'. It's subjective in every case but it sounds like you have plenty of good reasons for your fears - something I don't see playing around with my vegetables out in the sticks. So, sorry about that too... Are you sure you don't want to get out of the city, if that's possible? The air is clearer out here, I find, in more ways than one... Or do you feel obligated to stay and make the best of the god-awful situation? No judgement either way.
I also believe we were lied to about the origins of the disease, the agenda behind the covid response, the financial arrangements linking big pharma, big tech, the media and medical academia, and the vaccines.
Back in 2000, opponents of GM crops were accused of not caring about all the starving people who could be saved with the new technology. In 2001 opponents of the Afghanistan war were indifferent to the plight of Afghan women.
In 2003 opposing the Iraq war was a sure sign that you were fine with the plight of Kurds in Saddam's torture chambers. Similar for Libya and Syria.
Now in 2022, well into another massive upward transfer of wealth and power, this time under the banner of covid, questioning the rationale once again identifies you as a heartless brute who doesn't care about the victims.
The timeline for 'the iraq war' did not begin in 2003. The timeline for 'the covid pandemic' did not start in spring 2020. There is a reason that the media want to conceal the context in which these events took place.
Re: were we lied to..
Posted by Sinister Burt on January 25, 2022, 1:19 pm, in reply to "Re: were we lied to.."
"In 2003 opposing the Iraq war was a sure sign that you were fine with the plight of Kurds in Saddam's torture chambers. Similar for Libya and Syria. "
As I said above, we used excess death to calculate the overall cost in lives of the Iraq war - why isn't this valid for covid too? (especially as it's broken down to show in how many covid was the primary cause of death (unless you think all the doctors are making it up)).
I'll leave dan give his frontline experience of the severity of the disease if he wants.
The disease being actually as severe as the scientific consensus (stretching across countries such as USA, china Cuba etc incidentally) doesn't preclude our capitalist leaders from squeezing any pecuniary advantage they can out of it - whether that's the elite who agree it's real, doing that, or the substantial part of the elite that want to deny it, or fund people who will (also for obvious capitalist reasons).
Re: were we lied to..
Posted by Sir Michael Mouse on January 26, 2022, 3:03 pm, in reply to "Re: were we lied to.."
Thanks SB,
It's a good point that iraq war opponents considered excess deaths the surest measure of the wars toll. As I remember the UK public when polled had the figure at around 75,000, less than 10 percent of the excess deaths figure.
Fast forward to 2020 and suddenly the public seem to be overestimating the toll from covid by 100 times. In the former case many of us are convinced that the media were responsible for the massive discrepancy and that it served hidden agenda.
In the latter case we are encouraged to shrug if we consider it at all. In terms of the agenda, I would draw a parallel between big pharma profits now and BP profits on seizure of Iraqs oil fields in 2003. In other words, graft was grease for the wheels but not the key policy driver.
The iraq war could be seen as part of a wider project of global financial control via the petrodollar system and blockade of rising economic rival china.
At the moment the furious drive for vaccine passports, sold as part of the covid response suggests a significant curtailing of political freedoms in the works, perhaps in preparation for the much predicted economic shock and dollar devaluation.
We are also being asked to politely ignore leak after leak which places covid 19 into the context of a longstanding us military bio warfare program rather than a natural disaster.
For the record, the 100 times figure has been contested. This source, while setting the figure much lower would still indicate a massive overestimate.
Re: were we lied to..
Posted by Sinister Burt on January 27, 2022, 7:24 am, in reply to "Re: were we lied to.."
No probs, ta for the response. I'm not too bothered by what the public think about it really (similarly they believe 35% of benefits is lost in fraud when it's less than 1%), I was more talking about maybe the 'left' or at least the anti-war people's view of the excess deaths then, compared to some similar people's views on the method now.
" leak after leak which places covid 19 into the context of a longstanding us military bio warfare program rather than a natural disaster. "
I wouldn't rule such a thing out, but I haven't seen anything that convincing myself so far, it all seemed a bit tenuous (I probably missed some - open to new info if you want to post). This was the last I heard from the 'science' which was tipping more to the natural origin side (but there are still questions). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 Talking about geopolitical efforts to do over china, some of the lab leak theories blaming china seemed to have that very quality to me (the fort Detrick/us version notwithstanding). Here's a grauniad article which had something about that https://www.dumptheguardian.com/world/2021/dec/31/why-hunt-for-covid-origins-still-wrapped-in-politics-impasse-china-west
"At the moment the furious drive for vaccine passports, " they've just ditched them here (in England anyway) so not that furious.
Re: Thanks SB, interesting points.nm
Posted by Sir Michael Mouse on January 27, 2022, 11:22 am, in reply to "Re: were we lied to.."
on January 23, 2022, 12:20 pm
. There is not much to argue with. 
