Quote Originally Posted by DD View Post
The death rate per infection figures are absurdly inaccurate.

I don't know where you get 0.02% from, but that suggests that 1 in 5,000 people die from Covid. I think we have had 20,000 deaths in the second wave or there or thereabouts. That would therefore mean that 100 million people in the UK have had Covid this winter, which out of a population of 65 million, is pretty impressive. It would of course provide a spectacular herd immunity, but my fear is that your figures are completely wrong. :-)

The 3.5% death rate was also completely wrong, as the chances are that only a very small percentage of tests were being conducted, so the vast majority of cases would have gone undetected.

The smart money for overall death rate is probably about 0.5 to 1%, but this isn't a flat rate and therefore cannot be treated as such. Whilst the chances of death for children might be 0.02% and the chances for under 40s probably less than 0.1%, when we get to the 70s, it's about 5% and in some sub-groups as high as 15%.

There will come a point soon when we need to just get on with life, but now is not that time. I would suggest this summer is. If we discarded lockdown now, by February and March, the death figures could hit 3 or 4,000 per day, and then you can add on to that death figure everybody else who has a health emergency, because they simply will not be able to be receive treatment.

This policy worked last year very well and drove cases down to minimal levels by the summer. It won't be that easy this time because of the new more transmittable variant, but without lockdown, the cases would sky rocket to a level that would simply break the NHS. This cannot be allowed to happen.

The NHS may be underfunded, but as somebody who works for NHS Trusts as both a cost and, on occasion, project manager, I can assure you that the amount of money that the NHS waste is extra-ordinary, and if those at the top of the NHS tree were a bit more savvy with their allocation of their funds, half the problems wouldn't exist. When each Trust is given an amount to spend each year, and they only get the next year what they spent the previous one, then it's a system that is rife for the picking. The Trusts simply spend what they don't need to, to get the same again next year, to waste again. They are all for themselves.
You are spot on DD my typo, that should have read 0.2%.
When it hit hard in March it was estimated that the death rate was 10-15% the first 1 million deaths occurred just at 10 million confirmed infections, since then over 80 million confirmed infections with less than 1 million deaths 1.25%, present EU average is 0.23%, highlighting the anomalies in the estimates. The lockdowns were then touted to prevent the health services being overrun this has been the party line since. Over here in Ireland the infection rate is the highest in the world at the moment an average of 5500 and 10 deaths per day 0.18% this last week, with excess deaths for the time of year at an all time low, despite an increase in population.
One death is one too many but the peaks and troughs of lockdowns are not working.
I stated that the NHS has been mismanaged for years and whilst not underfunded then perhaps wrongly funded.