UK Covid death toll

[Protheroe]

You're missing the point - it matters not what age they die at - what matters is that if you have considerable excess deaths, then you also have considerable excess hospital admissions, ICU requirements and staff to man that.

As we don't even have enough staff under normal circumstance - then staff have to be taken from their normal duties to care for the excess hospital admissions and the dying. The result - younger people requiring treatment have their appointments delayed.

I'm not missing the point, I'm referring to another point; There are also considerable excess deaths at home NOT due to Covid - 28,000 in fact. That's more than in hospitals & care homes put together that ARE due to Covid (ONS).



Quantitatively these deaths are being both displaced from hospital and from conditions that could have been alleviated by hospital treatment that patients were either unwilling or unable to have. Look at this guy's face - his name is Adrian and he could be one of us on here:



Adrian had bowel cancer. He responded well to chemo - so well that his doctors scheduled a life-saving operation to remove a large part of his liver. It was due in April. Then came lockdown, then the op was cancelled. Adrian’s cancer is now terminal.

Adrian is one of thousands of cancer patients whose care has been affected by lockdown. Doctors expect a surge in cancer deaths in the coming months and years. It is another dimension of what is happening beneath the surface of the Covid 19 data.

Qualitatively, the data says nothing abut how these people died or will die - I know how lucky we were to get my Mum into a hospice, most people are not so fortunate.

Hospice's are getting referrals in later and patients are dying sooner. Most are dying at home, tended to by family with no medical training.

We need to have a serious conversation about what we're doing to ourselves. We need to have a serious conversation with all those at risk about Advanced Decisions. Unless there is stricter isolation of the aged & infirm we risk cluttering up the NHS with them at a devastating cost to the rest of society who will be picking up the pieces for decades to come.