And by the way, can anyone tell me what the point is of "flattening the curve". The fewer people who contract the disease, the longer the population as a whole remains vulnerable. Meanwhile the calculation of overall harm, including deaths from untreated other illnesses and on-coming economic deprivation shows that flattening the curve saves lives at the expense of more lives than it saves. All those shouting about lockdown being eased too early need to think of what sort of future they are asking for. As President Trump said weeks ago, the "cure" that's been imposed is worse than the disease.
The mortality rate from properly treated Coronavirus looks like being 1-2%, when treatment is not available, that figure becomes 5-10%. In Italy where the lockdown came too late, their health service was overwhelmed and the mortality rate spiked. For the UK, we'd be looking at several hundred thousand deaths had lockdown measures not been imposed. Office for National Statistics figures currently puts us at nearer 50k deaths so far. A paper published in Nature last week suggests 470,000 deaths in the UK from Coronavirus have been avoided thanks to the lockdown.
So keeping the number of Coronavirus cases below the NHS capacity is essential to keeping mortality down. Even if the country has the same number of Coronavirus cases, spreading them out means fewer deaths.
And that's assuming the standard of care remains the same. Lockdown is not the cure, flattening the curve also buys time to develop one. The Coronavirus is very new, and initially how to treat patients was essentially being worked out on the fly. We're beginning to know what works, and this is augmented by the progress made in drug trials. Hydroxychloroquine has very little going for it, but Remdesivir is looking promising. Vaccine research is ongoing. All of this means that we can reduce the number of people going into hospital, and decrease mortality rates.
To return to the idea I've highlighted in bold, as yet I'm not sure that's supported by data. The Financial Times have done excellent work tracking "excess deaths" for all causes, compared to previous years. Since February, 63,700 excess deaths have been recorded, with about 50k stating Coronavirus on the death certificate according to the ONS. So about 13,000 people so far have been "killed by lockdown", Vs those extra 470,000 who would have been killed by Coronavirus without lockdown.
If you look at data from April, Coronavirus killed more people than Dementia, Alzheimer's, Heart disease, lung disease, 8 forms of cancer, and flu, combined. Only Dementia deaths were up compared to the 5 year average for April.
The longer term effects are hard to quantify, and the effects of people not having illnesses detected as quickly will take longer to play out. The effect of an economic slump is also harder to predict. But for the number to be so significant as to overcome that 470,000 lives saved so far by lockdown seems unlikely. That's more deaths than the combined military and civilian casualties the UK suffered in WW2.
If anything, the deaths in the UK caused by lockdown look likely to be far higher than most countries because at no point has our lockdown been strict enough. A harder, longer initial lockdown would have helped bring numbers down faster, and meant we could reopen safely faster. This would have aided the economic recovery too. The half-hearted lockdown we've experienced/experiencing has kept the number of cases higher than they could have been, whilst increasing the economic damage.
